He dropped out of Harvard. He got scolded at Microsoft. And then Built a platform that owns 75% of all PC gaming. π€―
>Meet Gabe Newell.
> Born in Colorado. Grew up in Davis, California.
> Got into Harvard. One of the hardest things to do on earth.
> Dropped out anyway.
> Was just hanging around his brother's Microsoft office one day.
> Steve Ballmer caught him doing nothing.
> Said "Be useful or leave."
> He stayed. Got a job on the spot. π
> Became producer of the first two versions of Windows.
> Sat at the centre of the biggest tech revolution in history.
> Spent 13 years at Microsoft. Became a millionaire.
> Then noticed something that broke his brain.
> Doom β a video game β was installed on more computers than Windows 95.
> The thing he had spent years of his life building.
> A game was beating his operating system.
> Realized the future wasn't software. It was games.
> On his wedding day in 1996 β co-founded Valve. π
> Poured his own Microsoft millions into it.
> No safety net. Just belief.
> First game β Half-Life. 1998.
> Critics called it a masterpiece. Changed gaming forever.
> Then came Counter-Strike. Portal. Left 4 Dead. DOTA 2.
> But the real weapon was still coming.
> In 2003 β launched Steam.
> Gamers hated it at first. Called it DRM. Bloatware. Forced install.
> He didn't budge. Kept building. π
> Added automatic updates. Cloud saves. Friends lists.
> Then launched the Steam Sale.
> The internet went insane. Every single time.
> By 2011 β Steam controlled most of the downloaded PC games market.
> Today β 132 million active users.
> 50,000+ games in the library.
> Takes 30% cut from every sale.
> Valve has never gone public. Never raised funding. Never answered to anyone.
> Net worth estimated at $9.5 billion.
> Still refuses a corporate title. No CEO energy. Just "Gabe."
> Employees pick their own projects. No managers. No hierarchy.
> And Half-Life 3?
> Still not out. Probably never will be. That's just how he rolls. π
> Said "I was willing to put my money where my mouth was."
> Harvard rejected. Microsoft trained him. Gaming bowed to him.
Absolute GOAT π₯π
The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.
And he said it without being anti-AI.
Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.
Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.
The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.
And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.
Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.
The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.
What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.
Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.
Those are different jobs.
I got the 43x coa and just added a hogue grip itβs pretty sweet, havenβt tried th afterburner yet I have that on a 19 and love it though. If I already have a G17 gen5 with some stipple and a P2 do you think itβs worth the upgrade to gen6 or not much difference? Curious if the window is any better on the COA vs P2? My 43x coa definitely seems like a cleaner window than the p2
a founder has three jobs. everything else is serious amounts of noise.
1. you have to tell the story. roughly in three registers. first investors need inevitability. customers need to *feel* what you do/stand for. & your team needs a mission worth their best years.
2. you must secure the capital before you need it. running out of money is running out of options. you have to be relentless about it.
3. you must obsess over the product. product is the story made accessible for everyone. every shipped detail is a sentence back into the narrative in point number one.
this is the entire job.
everything else you either delegate or kill. early on with a really small team, delegation is a huge tax so you have to learn to kill more than you delegate.
@wholemars They have no idea how hard FSD is. Only path to success imo is hardcore real-world AI software with dedicated NN inference acceleration ASICs in car, multibillion dollar NN training supercluster and 10+ billion miles of vehicle data. Good luck.