Daniel Gross: belief

Transcript context

…How much do you think the gamification in exercise and the personalized, customized version of exercises help you or form the way you think about running? Definitely, it’s formed the way our product is built. I think everyone who works on our team is either a want-to-be competitive athlete or a want-to-be competitive chess player. Everyone is, in a way, getting scores in their hobbies all the time and want to improve. That obviously drives product ideation forward. I think Peloton was an interesting case study. It’s an ongoing case study that’s being evaluated every day in the market, not positively, but it’s an interesting case study in how much gamification matters at all. It does seem people are actually quite motivated by whatever leaderboard and power mechanics they have out there. On the contrary side, they’ve released this thing that totally flopped. I thought it was fascinating that it didn’t work. A priori, if I were to describe to you here some type of thing you can use on an exercise bike, what it does is, it responds to the music that you are listening to. As the tempo of the music increases, you pedal faster, and as the tempo of the music decreases — whatever, it’s all synchronized, and it’s fun. If I was pitching that at a venture firm, I think people would say, “Wow, sounds great.” Peloton built this, and they launched it. This particular thing totally flopped. I think people tend to really overcomplicate it. I think there are psychometric personalities — I imagine mine — that are relentlessly interested in improving, and for that, getting a tight feedback loop with any type of numerical score is very good and very simple. I think there are people that don’t really care about that, and want to watch YouTube and get the work in and move on. Ultimately, yes, I think it probably helps a certain type of personality. Tyler, do you think this kind of gamification would have made you a different chess player when you were young?…

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