Drew Houston: preference

Transcript context

…Military. Yeah, it's like you can only do so much or think about so much, your attention, but that's actually not the big lesson. In StarCraft and other games, there's this concept of there's a micro and macro, and I would add to that, there's also the meta game. Okay, so what's that? Micro in these games, something like StarCraft is like, all right, can you click really fast and move your people and build things really quickly? And it's like the mechanics. Every second, how many hundreds of things are you doing per minute or how many things are you doing per second? And that's like a conditioning and practice and one kind of thing. Then, there's the macro game. Well, could come back to the micro, in a product context or in a startup context, that might be things like, all right, how do I, often the stuff around product design and technology and distribution. So early founders especially are going to be totally fixated on here's how I make this great design and here's how the engineering works and here's how we get users and here's how our sales motion works, or here's how our viral loop works or things like that. And it's very in the details. And then, there's the macro game. In StarCraft, that might be things like, well, clicking a lot is important, but overall you're really managing your economy. So do you have more expansions and resources than the other player? Are you building up your military? Are you getting your balance of the investment in economy and military? Are you scouting? Do you know what the other person's doing? It's more strategic and conceptual. So things in the startup realm that would feel more like that are more like, all right, not just the mechanics of how does this feature work, but more like, all right, what's the business model? What's the market? Who are my competitors? How do I differentiate myself? How's this all going to evolve over time as the category goes from super high growth to more mature, things like that? And you respond, okay, we got to go from one product to multiple products, so then we have to reorganize the company that way and we blah, blah, blah. And then I'd say there's also this, the meta game, which in gaming is a pretty specific thing. It's like some combination of the game itself gets updated so that as the creators, they make this unit stronger and this area unit is stronger, and this ground unit weaker and try to keep this big system in balance. And then, also as this community of players figures out new strategies and this big repeated game of rock paper, scissors, people figure out, okay, this one strategy is now categorically better. And it's always this adversarial thing that's always shifting. And so, playing StarCraft in 2020 is pretty different from playing StarCraft in 2015 or 2010 because everything, both the players are shifting and the game itself is shifting. And the game, it's usually not shifting a lot. So it's really more of an ecological effect. StarCraft in 2015 or 2010 because everything, both the players are shifting and the game itself is shifting. And the game, it's usually not shifting a lot. So it's really more of an ecological effect. So I think it's super important. And then, in a startup context, what's the meta game? Well, I'd say some of it is just business cycles. So I think you'll have, as you see, there's this boom in the late teens in SaaS and in tech. There's a bit of an AI boom happening right now. It's not that different from what, or parts of it are not that different from what happened with the dotcom era in '99, 2000 or the web 2.0 era in 2007 or others. And then, you have these bust times like 2008 and 2000, 2001, et cetera. So there's a market cycle thing that often creates similar dynamics where it's like five years ago every tech company was hiring the maximal number of people that it could. And then, that created one talent dynamic. Now, it's a lot of companies are keeping high comp flat or negative, so that's just a very different thing. But even those are cyclical. Then, you want to identify how is this game of business actually fundamentally permanently changing? So for example, we launched Dash, we usually do a press thing, conventional press, tech press, we got almost no coverage for it. And yet all the stuff we did on social or going direct was way, way, way more impactful. And it's not just Dropbox or in tech, but it's also presidential election. All the candidates are on podcasts. Yes, they're on CNN too, but not really. So that's just a new thing. How do you manage the brand of your company or launch products, things like that. The nature of marketing is changing. And that changed when, in 2007 too, instead of hiring PR firms and buying AdWords and stuff, we were creating these viral videos and we were using math from epidemiology to create these viral loops. In a lot of ways, Dropbox took that, transplanted that consumer internet playbook into business software. But the thing is you need to understand what game you're playing and you need to get good at the micro. It's not that the meta is more important than the micro, it's like you need to do all three at the same time. And so, that's really the hard part. And then, when things are shifting. And the way you know what game you're playing is to be systematic about training yourself and probably the single most useful, or at least important to me piece of advice I could give is you have to figure out how to keep your personal growth curve ahead of the company's growth curve. The single most important impactful thing for me has been reading because talk about this micro, macro, meta games or abstractions, this is the kind of stuff you can learn from history. Learning what happened in Netscape ended up being pretty important to what happened at Dropbox in 2014. Learning what happened to Procter & Gamble and selling makeup ended up actually being pretty relevant. So I think having a broad information diet is really important. And I've collated a list of books that were really impactful to me. You can find a way to share that. All right, I'd be happy to share that. Absolutely.…

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