Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I needed for none of that to happen. I just needed to be able to, like, mourn the loss of Blizzard- … and create on my own so it was great. And at that time, like as soon as it was announced that I was leaving Blizzard, I had like 60 people reach out to me. It was, this was April of 2021 and investment money was nuts. Both like the VC money and the strategic money was crazy, like the, especially the Chinese companies, because apparently they weren’t getting publishing numbers in China or something. The whole economy was crazy, and so just everybody was trying to throw money at me, which was a very good position to sort of be at to start a company. So what Tim and I did was say, “We’re not doing this for money, but here’s the game we wanna make, and it’s gonna take this many developers, and we think it’s gonna take this length of time, and that means the budget is this. And we need, for any of these people who wanna invest in us, we gotta hit that number, but after that, we’re not gonna go for more money. It’s not an auction to raise as high as we can go. We’re gonna optimize for control.” I don’t know if this is something that you can talk about, but I got a chance to see the game for a few hours, and I have to say it’s incredible, Jeff. Like, it’s incredible. But I almost immediately fell in love with the world and everything I saw. See, I’m tempted to say some of the things I saw but it’s just an incredible game. So how much can you talk about it? Do you know what it’s going to be called? Can you talk about that? Do you know about the company? Are you allowed to say any of that? Sure. The most unconventional way to talk about this stuff for the first time. So, our company name is Kintsugiyama, which most people will struggle to pronounce.…

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