Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
42 published records
01 / belief
“I think so. I think the way that you build in Rec Room is just so unique. It lets a group of people that otherwise can’t create, create.”
02 / belief
“I think the B- scenario for us is we get really content with patting ourselves on the back and being so proud of what we’ve done.”
03 / belief
“I would say if you come into Rec Room you’ll see a mix of here is an algorithmically generated list and then here is an editorial list that’s selected by staff.”
04 / belief
“Look, I think the math makes a lot of sense. If you feel like you're going to be subject to that law of averages and you're going to score in the middle—like Microsoft's a great spot—if you do think you're in the top 25 or the top 10%, your upsides really capped at Microsoft.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that I can assign it to one variable. All these variables kind of clicked at once.”
06 / belief
“I think there's so many people at Microsoft, or at Amazon, or Google, or Facebook that would enjoy their life more.”
07 / belief
“We have a lot more leverage to try and shift the game, or the economy, or the ranking algorithms that favor activities or actions we care about.”
08 / uncertainty
“Mine is someone sent me “Invent and Wander” which was a collection of writing from Bezos and it was organized by Walter Isaacson. It's Bezos over—I don't know—two decades.”
09 / belief
“I think the learning curve was sharp. We just started at zero. Our first couple of interactions with ventures did not go very well.”
10 / belief
“I think when most people are calculating, like what is going to happen at a start-up or what is going to happen to me at Microsoft, they're using the law of averages.”
11 / commitment
“Now, it’s achievable for me to chart if I wait a while—maybe I won’t—and the value in the future will be so much greater.”
12 / belief
“You’ve seen more consumer apps shift away from the advertising model. I think the advertising model really was there will be one.”
13 / belief
“There are certain dollar amounts, there are certain valuation amounts where you’re like, well, I’m not joining a startup that might not be here in a year, which I think is definitely a fear that many people in Seattle have.”
14 / belief
“The regret minimization function that he uses which is like, hey, when I'm looking at any decision and I think about what am I going to feel in five years when I look back on this choice, people tend to regret the decisions that they didn't jump at, not the ones that they let pass.”
15 / commitment
“The real value is this is a much more scalable way of growing your revenue. It’s hard to grow your revenue by being, I am going to continually come up with new services and items, and every time I want to have a new hat or more hats, I need to hire more people over here.”
16 / belief
“When you come in, we want to help direct you towards the content that we think is most likely to light up your interests.”
17 / belief
“Honestly, all of us thought, oh, Microsoft will eventually get back in the consumer AR space and we'll just go back there, but in the interim will do this. I would say there was not a ton of intentionality there.”
18 / commitment
“Once we looked, the really bright spot for us was the user-generated content. This is gonna take a long time to make it click, but eventually if we can take these VR creators, if we can scale their creations and we can get them monetizing a user base that's at a mobile scale, they will be happy, we will be happy, this will be a really strong business with great network effects, very scalable.”
19 / belief
“I think you're going to see more of them in the games. They are fairly complicated to set up.”
20 / belief
“To give a recap—I think of the previous episode—we raised a seed round in 2016. We had launched the app and it was doing pretty well for a VR app.”
21 / belief
“Just understand that if you have specific ambitions, venture can be right for you or it can be wrong for you, depending on what your goals are. We realized pretty quickly we don't have a two-year plan.”
22 / belief
“We don't get too attached to ideas because there wasn't ever one early on that I think we were really, really attached to.”
23 / belief
“I would say that there were many, many people on the team that contributed a lot of tiny choices that helped build where it is.”
24 / belief
“I think we were maybe only monetizing on Steam but not on PlayStation and other stuff.”
25 / uncertainty
“Shortly after this reorg, maybe 30–50 people left Microsoft and we're just like, I don't know what's next, but it's not going to be Groove music or it's not going to be the Calendar app.”
26 / belief
“You should never shift one to the other. I think we just had this idea of this is where we want to get to.”
27 / evaluation
“I was working on HoloLens team at Microsoft, and I've been working on it for maybe four or five years, and it was right before the first headset launched.”
28 / belief
“I think that there’s really, really interesting dynamics from the user-generated content side just because the revenue can grow really nicely without much input from us.”
29 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if there’s anything we’re doing that necessarily precludes them from doing that.”
30 / commitment
“We have an in-game currency that users can charge currency inside their rooms, and if they amass enough of a currency, we will actually pay them out for the currency.”
31 / belief
“I think other people were like, well this is a refreshing level of honesty because I ’ve been in enough board meetings to know that none of these plans survive contact with reality.”
32 / uncertainty
“I think there are a lot of people that are like, I don’t know that this is the right move.”
33 / evaluation
“The two things I wanted highlight here that you just did is one, the beauty of this model is you don’t really need to spend too much of anything on user acquisition because, as you said, your creator led growth, the two creators that are creating amazing things, that are spreading the word about it, that are bringing in users, right?”
34 / preference
“One thing we like to do when Ben and me analyze companies is we decide to go through the seven different powers that companies can have according to Hamilton, and identify which powers companies have.”
35 / preference
“If we were to move and we’re done with podcasting, we’re going to be YouTubers now, we would never do that because we’ve sunked so much into this.”
36 / evaluation
“The way to think about network effects, network economies is as more users get added to the system, it grows value for all the other users in the system—great—but the thing about it is, there’s a multiplier.”
37 / preference
“I'm cheating a little bit because you and I went in and played, and you showed me the maker pen, and I got to build my own little world.”
38 / evaluation
“It was so heavy, they were called Gravity A units, Gravity B units. We don't know what we're doing.”
39 / observation
“You have Epic and Fortnite’s growth. they're currently rumored to be raising at a $28 billion valuation, and Roblox's blockbuster IPO that they pulled last December because there was too much demand, and instead raised private capital and then did their direct listing this month and are now valued at $40 billion.”
40 / prediction
“For something like Rec Room, the coefficient I think is actually really quite high because you have such a high conversion rate from user to creator.”
41 / recommendation
“Even if you think things can work in the future, you don’t have to ever sell because you can raise money in the private markets.”
42 / evaluation
“Those are less interesting because lots of numbers could go to zero, and anything multiplied by zero is bad.”