While this is one approach that seems to be working well (I expect a number of teams to follow/innovate on it) I do think there are other places we’ll see big hits emerge. Where? To answer that one might imagine what else is uniquely possible with crypto infrastructure (as opposed to traditional game infrastructure) in these games.

Many of the projects I’ve seen that purport to be building “the metaverse” focus on the assets that will be purchased in the game and not what will be done with them in game. While this focus makes sense for an NFT presale (which is a novel way to fund such a game) it does little to attract an audience of gamers who care about things like the actual gameplay loop out of the gate.

Historically in gaming the strongest and stickiest product loops have been built on gameplay. What are some examples of this and what can we learn about what these projects have in common?

Defense of the Ancients emerged as a Warcraft 3 mod back in 2003 (predated by Aeon of Strife, a similar Starcraft mod) - it exclusively used heroes and map assets from the game and was built in the game’s map editor. The early DotA team tapped into Warcraft 3’s existing mod community and matchmaking to grow the game into something of a cult hit. Fast forward a few years and several clones were spawned, including Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, and DOTA2. To this day there is still only one map in DOTA2 and many of the assets look and feel similar to the way they were in the early days. The International (DOTA2’s annual top tournament) regularly draws enormous viewership and has a purse of over $40M.

There are other examples where mods of a particular game become the basis for a new genre or standalone game. The original Counterstrike was borne as a Half-life mod pitting terrorists against counter terrorists in a struggle to diffuse/set a bomb off. This mod serves as the basis for Riot’s Valorant and the modern incarnation of CS:GO.

DayZ: Battle Royale was one of the first “battle royale” games and was created as a mod for Arma 2 (a military simulation game with a large modding community). The mod was ported to Arma 3 and became the basis for PUBG, which in turn spawned Fortnite and the whole Battle Royale genre.

DOTA2’s Auto Chess mod led to a new genre of auto-battler game which has since morphed into massive hits like Teamfight Tactics and DOTA Underlords. The list of examples goes on and on.

It is no accident that each of these games are some of the most popular on the planet. They all share several things in common:

1. Small initial development teams with limited resources
2. Very little investment in assets, maps, engine, and networking components of the game stack. In most cases these mods piggyback on these existing pieces of distribution and infrastructure.
3. All leveraged a robust modding community around a particular game (and with it a group of existing sticky users willing to try out new mods).
4. Almost all development investment goes into in gameplay loop which is then refined by the early community.

This leads to games that have the following characteristics:

1. Easy to learn (new players see a lot of the same things over and over - the same maps and objectives help them make sense of the new game) but very difficult to master (the subtleties of the gameplay loop are deep and complex).
2. Highly replayable because players return not for “new content” in the game, but for the unpredictability and dynamic experience that comes with the multiplayer nature of the game. Constraints in environment design encourage creativity and play (think of chess and how many moves are possible given only one chess board layout!). Every single experience in a game like this is different and leaves you wanting more.

So what does all of this look like in the context of crypto and gaming?

To date, projects like Loot and Dark Forest seem to embody some of these mod-oriented game characteristics. Both hearken back to the aesthetic of early 1980s video games. Both embody the beginnings of something newly possible in blockchain gaming: composable games. These seem to be the early beginnings of a “modding community” and I would bet that we start to see new gameplay loops emerge within these ecosystems as they mature.

I’ll write more about some ideas about what these games might actually evolve into or look like under the hood. If you’re building in these ecosystems, send me a note for an invite into the Definitely Crypto Discord where you can join some other folks who are doing the same in jamming on these ideas.

With this shift in behavior has come a shift in how I experience consuming social content on the Internet.

Many feed based social products hijack a users’ desire for more content by training them to keep scrolling to “get to the bottom” of the feed. This desire to consume all the information has led me to be fairly careful about not following too many people and limiting my time on social media sites.

Discord has been different - there’s no “algorithm” to be tuned. There is only the activity of the Discord, which carries on like a river whether you are there or not. This can be overwhelming in a crowded Discord and has led me to rethink some of my assumptions about consuming content and social experiences online.

I live in New York City - a city that is alive and electric with energy whether I am sitting at home in my apartment or out experiencing all it has to offer. There are too many interesting things happening in New York to be part of them all. So I have to choose.

Hanging out in an active Discord feels like being in New York. No matter how hard I try, there’s simply no way to be part of every conversation going on at any given time - I just have be happy with the place and people I am hanging with at any given moment. Trying to keep up with every message in every channel all the time is impossible.

After feeling overwhelmed with keeping up with the 100+ Discords I have joined, I decided the only way to stay sane was shift my mindset toward one of presence, immersion and participation, not one of distraction and consumption. This approach mirrors how I think about living in NYC.

So why has this been obvious to me about living NYC but so hard to apply to my Discord behavior? Discord at its core is a text based chat product. The primary the medium of social products on the internet has been asynchronous text and pictures - this is a limitation that I think contributes to a feeling of scattered distraction because it’s so easy to be in multiple places at once while you’re participating in this way. Contrast this with spatial environments and 3D mediums - these feel like more like the real world where presence and immersion is baked in. It’s hard to be in multiple places at once - ever tried playing two video games at a time?

My shift in mindset has been healthier for my relationship to the internet. I’m much happier as a citizen in a digital city than I was voraciously vacuuming up as much internet content as I could fit in my brain (and not participating). I’m glad Discord helped me hit the breaking point and caused me to rethink my assumptions here.

As our digital cities (Discords or otherwise) continue to grow and evolve, I hope we think more about the relationships we have to our real cities and try to emulate the best parts of these as we design our digital cities. I think the result will be more meaningful communities, authentic relationships, and happier participants.

Some very smart people have debated whether or not human life is just a simulation. It’s fun to joke on the internet about how everything we experience in life might all just be a simulation. But underneath every joke is some truth. Even if life is not a simulation itself, we’re still living in simulations.

Per Merriam Webster: Simulation a: the imitative representation of the functioning of one system or process by means of the functioning of another b : examination of a problem often not subject to direct experimentation by means of a simulating device

I thought a bit more about this idea of a simulation and realized that while it may be a bit of a stretch, but I think most video games are all simulations (some accurate, some not so accurate) in some form or another. People play a lot of video games and I think one could argue they already spend a huge amount of their time in simulations. But why? Why do humans choose to play games when they can live real life? To answer that, we can find some clues in a specific genre of games called (drum roll) “simulation games.” These are games that often simulate menial real world tasks such as truck driving, flying and even things like surgery. Many have been wildly successful. Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bus Driver Simulator, Surgeon Simulator, even SimRefinery (arguably the most obscure of all Sim games). The list goes on and on.

Why do people love simulation games? What is it about virtual simulations of things that is preferable to just…doing the real thing? Shouldn’t they be more fun in real life if they’re accurate portrays of behavior there? Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of simulations as we seek answers to these questions.

Simulations broaden access and increase basic understanding of complex tasks

Young people in America often hear “you can be anything when you grow up” from their parents. Many live in places that they don’t have access to see what that “anything” looks like. But increasingly, they do have access to the internet, which brings with it video games and social media. Social media can be helpful in providing access to anyone on the planet, but if you want to be an astronaut, there are only so many YouTube videos you can watch about space before you realize that you need more hands on experience in some form to become an astronaut. Thankfully, there are games like Kerbal Space Program, which features a realistic orbital space physics system (though is far from a 100% accurate space simulator). I don’t think we’ve seen any actual astronauts who grew up playing Kerbal (though NASA does play it!), but it is clear that simulations like KSP provide access and opportunity to experiment with complex things that could otherwise be inaccessible. Assuming they have a decent computer and the internet, kids can explore doing that thing they’re curious about without the permission or huge up front investment required instead of just watching YouTube videos about it.

Another net effect of simulation games around complex tasks is that we end up with more people interested AND proficient in a given thing. Popular simulation games can broaden the lowest common understanding of a particular topic. For example, a game like SimCity or Cities: Skylines breeds interest in city planning and increases knowledge and fluency of conversation around what city planning actually entails to those that have never experienced it in any form. This effectively increases the “potential” of the market for a particular job.

Simulations lower the cost of failure

Simulation games are commonly built around high risk jobs like flying and medicine and greatly reduce the cost of failure associated with such activities.

One of the original simulation games, Microsoft Flight Simulator, recently celebrated 35 years of development (it is Microsoft’s longest running active software product line!). Flight Simulator is so old it even has its own history page separate from its main Wikipedia page.

In the 80’s the cost of getting access to planes and learning how to fly was pretty prohibitive for the average person. It’s come down since but relatively speaking it’s still expensive. Even if one has access to a plane, the cost of failing at flying is expensive (both in terms of risk to human life and actual dollars of lost equipment).

In Microsoft Flight Simulator (a $59 piece of software), you can log thousands of hours (and failures) behind the cockpit of almost any aircraft on earth before you ever get into the seat of a real plane. This increases safety of real flying and can help users gain confidence that they otherwise wouldn’t have gained logging only real hours in a plane. Again, this dynamic helps to increase the number of people who have an interest in a particular skill and is a good thing. It is not to say it is a pure substitute for flying a real plane, but that paired with flying real planes it can be an effective tool (that is also just fun).

Many simulations are useful as a precursor to or supplement for real world tasks. But not all need to be paired with reality.

In extreme cases, one might even go so far as to say that some FPS games like Arma 3 are “military simulations” - they give us the ability to experience what it’s like to be in the military with relatively low downside (we’re not going to actually die). However, many of the players of these games won’t even shoot a gun in real life and such a simulator lets them experience this without having to put themselves in a situation that is truly life-threatening.

Simulations are vehicles for flow states and mastery

What about more…mundane simulations? Why do gamers love something like Bus Simulator or Power Wash Simulator? I would venture to say that one reason these simulation games are popular is because relative to something like Kerbal Space Program where the learning curve is high, they are relatively easy to learn or understand from the start. As a result, these games can be easier to achieve a flow state in and therefore to get better at. This can provide a user with a sense of mastery over a task that may be lacking in their real world circumstances. There are several examples of people in the real world making games out of their tasks - take, for example, a factory worker making a game out of his/her repetitive task as a way to get better and continue improvement (Amazon does this, and yes it’s somewhat dystopian). Simulation games play on this even further but add measurement and progression where the game itself can help engineer these flow states precisely. There is probably an entire category of software that could take cues from this genre of games to help users be more effective, creative, and fulfilled.

Simulations are a canvas for creativity and fun

Simulation games often revolve around something that is inherently predictable or rigid in some way. That predictability is somewhat of a constraint, but it also provides a canvas for creativity. Job Simulator makes a game out of menial and boring tasks (in theory) but uses these task constraints to come up with creative and fun mechanisms to keep the task itself fresh. Even Kerbal Space Program has some constraints and limitations that provide provide the user some canvas on which to experiment - knowing what is a constant makes experimentation easier. This translates into real world creativity: knowing you’re going to get up every day and write for an hour makes it easier to not worry about what you “have” to write - you can just let your writing flow and be free of expectation. This becomes much more possible with the correct set of constraints. And simulations, with their rigid rules, can provide those constraints as grounds for experimentation.

So where are simulations headed in the future and why are they even more exciting now?

So what’s the point of writing about all this? As we continue to push what our definition of a “game” is, I think we’ll an increasing number of games that incorporate these aspects which will become more than just toys.

Simulations will be use to improve human performance. The Statespace team has built an FPS aim training simulation called AimLab using cutting edge cognitive science and AI under the hood. The game effectively simulates other FPS games and their weapons, physics, and more and makes it easy for players to “practice” in the context of those other games. AimLab incorporates a lot of the design principles that make simulation games fun and represents a real opportunity to advance human performance in the brain. When combined with hardware, simulations like Zwift also act as simulations designed to help humans maximize their performance physically.

Simulations will increasingly leverage human input for difficult or complex computational problems. Given humans’ love of games and simulations, more games could be used to outsource elements of complex computation and rely on human input to solve complex problems (these are calledhuman based computation games). This could have useful applications in robotics or in complex economic systems. This type of behavior exists today - Facebook has effectively built an “attention simulation game” used to capture human attention and uses human inputs from the game to power their advertising engine. While some might debate whether this is predatory behavior on behalf of Facebook (there are certainly elements of the product that lack empathy for the user) the user is getting something (content!) in exchange for the data Facebook collects.

With the increasing fidelity of graphics and input devices (via VR, etc), simulations are poised for a host of other interesting uses. One potential implementation of such a human based computation game might be in training real world AI models and robots with human input. This tweet shows an augmented workforce technology, but it would probably be more fun for the human if it were a game. A simulation game that uses human VR input could thus be used to train robots at scale. Several companies have been exploring these use cases but no one has built a mass market game that leverages human input at scale. I suspect we will see one at some point, especially as immersive computing takes off.

Ninantic is effectively building a human powered computation game via their AR platform. Pokemon Go can be thought of as a “Capture Pokemon!” simulation of sorts. The game is based on a fairly simple, repeatable (constrained) premise, and the complexity in the game revolves around the real world locations one visits. Ninantic is likely capturing a host of important mapping data from users who play these games and can leverage this in a bunch of interesting ways in the future.

Simulations built around virtual economies will inform real economies. In 2007, CCP Games (the studio that makes EVE Online) hired Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson to study the in-game economy of EVE Online. In 2012, Valve hired Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economic theorist (who later became the Greek Minister of Finance) to study the CounterStrike skins market. There is no denying that even in their current basic form, game economies embody some of the qualities of real world economies. In 2021, Web 3.0 and crypto networks are fertile grounds for experimentation - automated market making and smart contracts are already being deployed into economic models in games. These coming in-game economies will be more complex simulations of real world economies than ever and there will be much we can learn from them to advance our understanding of real-world economics.

There are probably a host of other things that simulations can do for us in the future (or that they are doing for us already). I will keep adding them here but for now (in case it isn’t obvious) let me just say that I am very excited by all of this and if you are building a game/simulation or have thoughts about any of this I’d love to talk with you!

Prior to Zoom, I spent a lot of time taking meetings in NYC walking around. I’d meet a friend in a park, or at a busy coffee shop. It was nice to take in the scenery and there was always a small chance that I’d bump into another person I knew and introduce them to the person I was meeting. It was also likely we’d see something weird and wonderfully NYC along the way.

The serendipity of these real world experiences is mostly gone from the Zoom meeting world. Every meeting is sterile and follows the same progression. Rarely are there points of connection beyond what each attendee has as a virtual background or what is hanging on the wall in the background.

At one point during the beginning of the pandemic I tried to make a virtual background that was reminiscent of Central Park (using this free city park asset in the Unreal Engine) so I could feel like I was going on walks in the park during my Zoom meeting. I’ve even taken some meetings in Fortnite and enjoyed just running around together on audio chat (though sometimes conversation around the game takes over the meeting).

I wrote recently about some of the “shared experiences” and memories that are possible inside digital worlds like Valheim. So why we haven’t seen a product yet that incorporates some of the “shared experience” components from virtual worlds and video games into a more business friendly meeting environment? And what might a product look like? Well, I’d love to see a product built natively in a game engine that is focused on meetings. It might center around a neutral meeting space (not the turf of either attendee). It might incorporate external factors aside from the attendees themselves into a meeting interaction. This could be via “programmed serendipity” (via interacting with systems in a game engine) or external social factors (overhearing other people nearby in the game environment, pulling in live events from the real world, etc.). An experience like this might also allow participants to bring more of their own identity into the space (not just your video identity) via avatar customization or emotes. The ideal “meeting game” might also give you something to do to fill small talk and keep fatigue low and fun higher - has to be low cognitive effort (you want to still focus on the meeting) like moving around a space together. Finally, the whole experience would need to be joinable via a URL from an email or a DM (perhaps via cloud streaming the game), not by having to download a separate standalone game application.

It’s entirely possible this is a bad idea, but I have been thinking about it enough that I thought I would write something down. I think a product like this could recreate the serendipity of NYC but at global, internet scale. If you’re building or playing around with something like this for your own use, I’d love to chat!

So why is Valheim a hit? Some thoughts:

Valheim is beautiful, HUGE and meditative to explore. The exploration mechanic also mimics real world exploration: you have a map, but not much else and so there is a huge sense of uncertainty and risk that comes with exploration. The world is procedurally generated and absolutely HUGE. Don’t die too far from home or the path back to recover the gear from your dead body will be long and annoying. This mechanic encourages building small camps as you explore (but this takes time and there’s risk in doing this as well as enemies can destroy your camps). Portals can be built for fast travel but these too require materials to build and should only be built when it’s clear there is a reason for it. Follow the coastline to chart out the land mass you’re on, or hop onto a boat and stay close to shore. Heading into the open ocean without a clear visual destination can be extremely risky as there are sea monsters and changing winds that can blow you off course. There’s enough depth here in the exploration component of the game to satisfy many players with this alone.

But aside from exploration, there are a host of other jobs to do in the game. Everything you do has value, so it’s easy to progress doing whatever you feel like doing. This gives players agency over what jobs they want to do in the game and is compounded in a multiplayer setting. You can focus on building, gathering materials, crafting, attacking enemies, or exploring the map. Each player can explore these roles for a little bit of time and switch to another role because other players can fill in for them. This allows for constant progress on ALL fronts and faster progress together via teamwork.

Given all these jobs that can be done, multiple systems in the game interacting with one another leads to real “experiences” and serendipity inside the game (not the first instance of this in a game, for those that remember the original World of Warcraft corrupted blood pandemic). For example, in this instance from /r/valheim, a group of players tamed some wolves and they inadvertently introduced a new species (wolves) to a biome where they were not native. The wolves took over the entire population of other animals in that biome. The way that building mechanics can collide with other mechanics in the game like Trolls raiding your village, etc leaves for a variety of interesting situtations to find yourself in. Add friends and the social component to the mix and these become shared, in-game memories.

Overall, social is a core part of the Valheim experience. Playing with friends is much more fun, as is playing over voice chat in Discord. Small mechanics like crafting signs in the game are functional but also allow for silly naming conventions and jokes on friends to arise. When you know people from your Discord are in the shared game server (especially privately hosted ones), there’s an element of “what am I missing right now” and you want to log in and play to see what’s going on in the world. But at the same time, if you miss a few days and the group progresses or does new things, it’s a delight to log in and see what has transpired. Your friends can share items with you and you can get back up to speed pretty easily - this rewards both the casual users as well as people who spend tons of time in the game with complementary experiences. Logging in after a while also brings surprises - what happened to the boars we tamed or that house we built? Did trolls smash the house and eat the boars (yes, this happens)?

These are a few of the reasons I think Valheim has really captured the zeitgeist in gaming right now - while none of these mechanics are particularly novel on their own (Minecraft has done a lot of these things as well), it is the specific flavor and execution around them that makes them compelling and fresh in Valheim.

Valheim has a small dev team (only 5 as far as I can tell at the time of this writing) but is also building a thriving community and I expect will make for a great mod community. We are already starting to see some mods take shape and I will be keeping a close eye on them.

The game is still early access but as you can see from some of the above examples it is baked enough that it facilitates a lot of interesting experiences. It will be really exciting to see how the team evolves the game going forward to continue building on the hype.

Early in the Web 2.0 era, products like Tumblr were built with support for RSS. If you weren’t a Tumblr user or didn’t want to consume blogs in your Tumblr account dashboard, you could still subscribe to blogs via RSS (I did, and still do interact with several Tumblrs this way).

There are still some interesting products being built around RSS today. The podcasting ecosystem has largely grown up built on RSS. But these days, even in podcasts, companies like Spotify are moving away from building on RSS as a standard and towards their own proprietary methods of publishing and subscribing to content. Power has coalesced around recommendation algorithms.

Why has RSS languished?

There are a few reasons I think RSS had trouble surviving in web 2.0 era.

1. RSS was hard to monetize effectively. One reason podcasts have survived so long built on RSS is they commonly monetize by in-podcast ads and that approach is compatible with using RSS (vs a targeted ad that is personalized and programmatically delivered to a specific user). This type of monetization is replicated in other RSS publications like Daring Fireball which still monetize via promoted posts that are delivered via RSS.
2. RSS made it hard for publishers to really understand their users’ behavior and interaction patterns via RSS feeds. You see some of this manifested in the lack of analytics and tooling in the podcasting ecosystem, and that this is part of the value proposition Spotify and Apple are trying to communicate to podcasters who enter their respective ecosystems.
3. Quality of personalization mattered more than control of personalization. Generating a personalized feed for an individual user would require a truly unique RSS feed (even if the user never went back to interact with the feed). This was probably pretty untenable for most publishers to take on the work of doing on the server side (from a cost and complexity perspective), especially without monetization or analytics. As a result, most publishers opened their whole feed or allowed simple keyword sorting and left any sort of personalization logic to tools like Yahoo Pipes or other end-user/client applications. Publishing personalized feeds ultimately became centralized (to align with the business model around that publishing - ads in most cases) and algorithms like FB’s, Twitter’s and more gained popularity among users, moving control over personalization out of their control.

The net result of all this was an average user experience that (compared to Web 2.0 social networks) was more complicated than clicking a “follow” button and letting someone else do the ranking and personalization. It required more complex knowledge of underlying standard and how it works in order to build something truly personalized and “custom” for a user.

What can we learn from RSS for the next gen of web experiences?

The promise of these more open and standardized technologies still remains - that users might get more control of the information they consume and be able to craft their own experiences on top. As no-code continues to proliferate and consumer awareness around control of data increases, I think the time is right for a new set of web tools built on standards like RSS. I say “like RSS” because I am fairly certain there are new approaches here (vs resurrecting old technologies) that would yield more successful results in today’s world - things that take into account the shortcomings I outline above.

There are a host of new crypto-centric technologies that could be used for something like this that could enable content syndication alongside better access control, personalization (client side and privacy preserving!) payment mechanisms, and more. If you’re building this I’d love to hear what you think!

Next time you’re wondering whether your MVP is good enough, here’s Roblox’s website from 2006: pic.twitter.com/m1nFcaUv8H

— Chris Kurdziel 🎮🤘🏻 (@ckurdziel) November 27, 2020

Games serve a variety of purposes in my life. I have learned new vocabulary and concepts from them. I have met new people because of them (some of them who I have still not met IRL). I learned how to be persistent in pursuit of a goal without feeling too bad about failing because of games (…though From Software games are still a bit overkill for me).

I also was inspired to make things because of video games. I grew up playing Myst and upon learning that the game was made with Apple’s HyperCard, I spent hours trying to make my own games in HyperCard. I experimented with Doom level editing tools in high school to try and build my house inside the game engine. I ultimately studied computer science in college in large part because I wanted to understand how games (and software in general) worked under the hood. As an adult, games are still a part of my life. I’ve played several games that felt like art and challenged my sense of what a game can be. I’ve learned to appreciate the skills of esports pros, especially in complex games like DOTA2, and I’ve met a number of amazing entrepreneurs inspired in similar ways by the potential of games. I have even started to introduce games to my kids.

Thirty years after my first taste of Super Mario Bros. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what the future of gaming holds. I can’t possibly unpack this all in a single post but suffice to say I believe (like many others) that our definition of “game” is going to broaden tremendously over the next 5-10 years. It is already being challenged as games like Fortnite and others start to experiment with becoming “third places” that users hang out in. Gaming is also becoming more inclusive and while the hardcore aspects of the industry used to appeal primarily to the “nerdy white male” persona, that is changing for the better as a new generation of diverse gamers and developers move their ideas into the spotlight.

If the history and evolution of books, music and movies as mediums are any indication, we are still in the early innings of games as a medium. With the rise of cross-platform engines like Unity and Unreal Engine and the massive deployment of mobile phones, the possibility to reach a huge audience via a game is bigger than ever.

Not all of these games or gaming concepts will be “venture backable” in the traditional sense. But as many smart people have articulated, the next big thing often starts out looking like a toy. Super Mario Bros. certainly did, and it has inspired a slew of incredible new games that have continued to push the boundaries of what a game can be. I can think of no more popular nor fertile ground for experimentation or the next big thing than gaming and game engines. Here’s to the next 35 years.

I am deeply appreciative of the Founders that took a chance on working with me at Samsung. I am still relatively new to VC and choosing to work me was a decision I do not take lightly (nor one that I will forget).

It is common for people who announce they are leaving a job to drum up excitement and mystery around their next endeavor. I can safely say that this point that is not my intention here - I am headed into unexplored territory. I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I’m enjoying being deep in the thick of figuring out what the next chapter holds for me. The pandemic has been at times a brutal daily reminder of what matters, and that there is a finite time each of us has on this earth. I plan to spend mine as wisely as I can.

Despite many uncertainties, I do know that I am hopeful about what next phase of the internet will hold. I remain enthralled at the power of the internet and technology to provide creators of all types with new sources of creative and economic power. The crypto landscape is moving at a breakneck pace with the explosion of DeFi companies. The future of gaming has never been more exciting (for players and game developers). There is an incredible new generation of founders cutting their teeth in the middle of this pandemic. Even VC as a business is fundamentally shifting toward something that I think will yield better alignment between founders, employees, investors, and LPs. Opportunity abounds.

Whatever I do end up doing next, I will be spending my time in the areas above. If you are a friend (via URL or IRL) or someone who is spending their time in similar ways, please reach out as I explore what is next for me.

While I think cloud streaming technology is promising for a number of reasons and we have made investments in this space at Samsung NEXT Ventures, I think Stadia likely has a difficult road ahead of it.

Who is Stadia really for?

At its core, Stadia feels like a solution in search of a problem. Cloud streaming is certainly compelling technology, but what problem does it solve for the consumer? Perhaps cost of owning a gaming PC? It turns out building a reasonably performant gaming PC that can last for a few years is not all that different than purchasing cloud streaming. For many gamers, building a PC (and customizing it with LEDs, liquid cooling and more are all part of “being a gamer.” So maybe Stadia is for a different demographic? A new gamer who is discovering gaming for the first time? Perhaps, but these gamers are unlikely to care about graphics performance and probably have a persona that is most similar to a casual mobile gamer. As a result they are more likely to play games in a social setting and care more about them being accessible and easy to “snack” on. These types of games don’t seem like the type that Google is marketing for Stadia’s launch nor are they the type that benefit from cloud streaming.

Content is still king in gaming and Stadia doesn’t have much to differentiate.

Cloud streaming is a bit like video streaming in that it is ultimately a technology that enables distribution of gaming in new ways. Just as on-demand video streaming gave rise to a new crop of winners (most notably Netflix) what ultimately differentiates these video services is the content they provide to their users. Right now, the Stadia content offering is pretty limited (especially relative to other cloud streaming options such as GeForce Now). That could change over time, but my hunch is that even if Google makes content investments and keeps them exclusive to Stadia, this will require multiple years of continued investment (given the development timeline of many AAA titles) and thus not be something Google is prepared to sustain given any hiccups they encounter along the way.

So where is the opportunity in cloud streaming?

So if I’m bearish on Stadia, then why do I think cloud streaming i an interesting technology? Well for one, I think there is an interesting opportunity in developing new games that couldn’t exist prior to the advent of cloud streaming. This could be because they require the underlying compute power of the cloud or because they require a single instance of the game running on a server somewhere (something that a massively multiplayer game might require). Cloud streaming games could also reduce things like cheating in games (many first person shooters for example rely on the client to perform certain game logic, which can be “faked” or exploited more easily).

Ultimately, cloud streaming is also a new distribution mechanism and therefore has the ability to act as a portal to new experiences inside games from anywhere on the internet. For example, it could be leveraged in livestream situations to hop into a game instance with a streamer you’re watching. This has been touted as a part of the Stadia/YouTube integration, but we haven’t seen it in the wild yet and it’s been employed as a pretty sterile way of reinforcing Google’s view of the world.

Ultimately I do believe there is a large scale startup opportunity in the area of cloud streaming, but any successful company probably needs to both nail the content piece of the equation as well as the distribution piece of the equation to deliver something more novel to consumers than just “get the same games you play today but via a different mechanism.” Or simply start by offering a compelling tool to game developers building new experiences (similar to what Parsec does).

That’s about it for my thoughts today on Stadia and cloud streaming - it will be fun to revisit this post in years to come to see whether I was right or not!

I’m joining Samsung NEXT Ventures to lead our early stage software investments focused on immersive technology, esports and gaming.

My first taste of the venture capital world came in grad school when I spent time working with Cornell’s BR Venture Fund looking at early stage investments. At the time (and probably due to the fact that I wore a blazer and jeans at one point to a pitch meeting) being a VC felt inauthentic to me. Fortunately, I ended up meeting Reece and the rest of the Techstars 2011 class here in NYC and decided my time would be better spent jumping into the trenches of building early stage companies.

8 years, 4 companies and 2 acquisitions later, I’m excited to be returning full time to the VC world where I’ve jettisoned blazers in favor of t-shirts. Aside from my undying optimism about where the future of technology might take us as a society, I’m excited to support founders and both old and new faces in the New York ecosystem that I’ve built a relationship with over the past years.

I’m a native New Yorker, and I’ve been excited to see NYC grow from a fledgling tech economy to a powerhouse over the past 8 years. When I met with Gus Warren at Samsung NEXT, it became immediately clear that my beliefs about what would give rise to the next big wave of billion dollars businesses were shared by the team at Samsung NEXT.

If you are a founder building a business in NYC and looking to learn more about Samsung NEXT Ventures, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at [c.kurdziel@samsungnext.com].

Finally, I’d just love to take a quick second and thank everyone at Vimeo who made the last few years so much fun. In particular, working with Casey and Jamie for the past few years to grow VHX into Vimeo OTT has been one of my memorable career experiences. Thanks to everyone at VHX and Vimeo who taught me that building products is fun, but building real businesses is even more fun. Onward!

“No brown M&Ms” is an old joke in the music business that originates with Van Halen. Many people know that Van Halen’s tour rider included a line about “no brown M&Ms” in their dressing room. This required staff at the venue to pick through the M&Ms and remove brown ones before the show. I can only assume it was a huge pain in the ass and something that garnered Van Halen something of a reputation among venues.

But contrary to popular belief, Van Halen didn’t institute this rider policy because they were a bunch of pompous rock musicians (that point is certainly up for debate). Instead, they did it for a different reason: it was the easiest way of figuring out whether or not a venue would abide by the rest of the tour rider. You know, the important stuff like making sure stage could support the massive weight of their set (and egos) without collapsing. Ultimately, the lack of brown M&Ms was just an indicator of whether a venue had done their job (and a rather brilliant one at that).

So how does this apply to startups and technology?

It applies to building products. Debating about whether your users will actually use that password manager integration you’re building into your sign in flow or not? It may not matter - you have a great opportunity to send a signal that users should trust your product when they first sign in and implementing an integration like this could be a great way to signal that, even if not everyone takes advantage of it. Pay attention to little stuff - typos, design issues, etc. - that could send a signal to your users that you’re not building with their best interests in mind. All software is ultimately flawed, but where you choose to invest time, energy, and attention to detail is an important signal to your users about which of their problems you value.

It applies to raising money. Investors and founders often pay attention to small signals each group gives them in the process of investing in a company. Sending calendar invites, responsiveness, even that email newsletter you’re writing are all signals that investors pay attention to in to help them form data points about how they might interact with you. Similarly, as a founder you can look at these signals from your investors.

It applies to getting a job. The question “how do I get a job as a PM?” Is often met with the advice “go build a product!” Not everyone I know who got their first job in product built a product beforehand - often times they did that for the first time on the job! So then why do people give this advice? It turns out it’s a bit like the brown M&Ms on Van Halen’s tour rider.

People care if you built a product or not because it’s an indicator of other things. Can you work with dev/engineering to ship something? Can you talk about design tradeoffs? Can you collect a huge amount of input from customers/users and synthesize it into a coherent thesis about what problem you’re going to solve?

If the answer is yes to these questions other questions and you haven’t built a product, you may have what it takes. So the key is to represent the experience you do have in such a way so that an investor, product manager or recruiter can really quickly with almost no work see that you have the skills necessary to ship things.

Getting started: choose your own adventure.

After opening the app, I’m greeted with two choices: Get Started or Login. If I’m a first-time Shelby user, I choose “Get started.” The title screen animates away, revealing an introduction, a selection of video to watch, and channels to follow. I’m also able to connect Facebook here or hold off until I’ve had a chance to use the app further. This experience feels a bit like a “choose your own adventure” — I need to add video to my stream, but there are a few ways to do it. A lot of times user onboarding in apps feels very heavy handed—Flipboard requires an email address before they let you see any content—like I’m being pushed through a funnel toward something I’m not sure if I want, instead of letting me explore a magical world with a few helpful tips along the way. The approach we took here is much lighter weight and in keeping with more modern mobile approaches.

Shelby.tv, an iPad app to help you discover new videos, no longer requires signups: http://t.co/MEwrhElpNe

— Mashable (@mashable) March 21, 2014

I checked out a few of the publishers in the channels section and followed the ones I tend to keep up with on a regular basis, like Vice and the NY Times. There’s a pretty good mixture of stuff in fashion, food, tech, news and more, but I’d love to see more here and also be able to search for other providers.

Here are a few examples of Channels in the app:

The fastest video player on iOS I’ve ever experienced.

At this point, I watched a few videos and tried out the swipe-able video player, which we’ve put a lot of time into. It’s really fast — swipe up or down over the player, and the video changes to the corresponding one in the stream. On my home wifi connection (standard Time Warner Cable) I don’t experience any delays due to buffering, so changing videos here is way faster than even changing the channel on my TV. So far I’ve had a pretty cool experience but I haven’t yet formally registered for Shelby. The experience is somewhat personalized (I’ve followed channels I’m interested in) and I’m still seeing recommendations in my stream. I still want a little more personalization, and I think it’s pretty clear I can get that by connecting Facebook or signing up. I’ve seen a few “sign up” banners in different parts of the app and I clicked one and signed up with my Facebook account. After confirming a few quick profile details and my bio, I’m back to watching video. Pretty simple and painless, and all of my prior work (following channels, etc) has been brought over to my account, so I don’t need to start again.

I really wish more apps took this approach with signup.

Relevant content every day.

I use the app every day over coffee in the morning and after dinner in the evening. Each time I open it, I find interesting video. These videos are from a different place each time: sometimes I find the community sharing interesting stuff (found in Explore), sometimes I find the recommendations from Shelby particularly impressive (mostly because they were things I would never search for or come across), and other times I just enjoy the vanilla stuff from TED and the other channels I follow.

Straightforward, beautiful design.

I’m really glad we kept the design simple. I can focus more on video and less on how the hell I’m supposed to work the app.

What’s Next

Overall, the app feels simple and fun to use whether I’m on the couch connected to AppleTV catching up on the day’s video or showing a friend a video that I’ve discovered lately. So what is the app missing?

I want even more context around videos. What haven’t my friends seen yet? What’s trending nearby? If I’m on the couch, I want videos that are longer. If I’m on my phone in the elevator, I want quick 1 minute videos to watch. We’re thinking a lot about what information is relevant and how/when to present it to people.

Better controls for improving the quality of my stream and facilitating discovery. Provided you have a strong social graph and like the video sources we’ve integrated into the app so far, Shelby is a pretty strong video experience. The problem is that everyone has a unique taste fingerprint and while our recommendations do a good job of surfacing new and interesting videos, they take some time to work. I’d love to see more options to build a stream that’s relevant to my interests even before I sign up.

While I can’t completely give away our roadmap, I can say that the stuff in the list above is part of how we’re thinking about where to take Shelby next. If you’re interested in learning more, shoot me an email at chris[at]shelby.tv. I’d love to chat.

Mobile ecosystem maths show that we’re living in an Android and iOS world. The numbers here are huge, and there’s no question these two platforms are going to dominate for the foreseeable future.

But on TV, we’re in the “pre-iPhone world” — this fragmented ecosystem looks/feels a lot like mobile before iOS/Android. But that doesn’t mean “create an totally new App Store” is the best way forward (others agree).

People expect all their services on multiple devices, and they’re choosing mobile before other devices in overwhelming numbers. Expecting that every type of device should have its own separate app platform is kind of crazy. Two of my devices already share the same app store (my tablet and my Phone).

I get it. You can’t just be a “glass manufacturer” lest your margins become as thin as your displays. So you build Apps for your TV or invest in putting Palm OS on TVs, and claim TVs as “smart!” But, what really makes a device smart? Is it the fact that you can run apps on it, or the fact that it has sensors and all kinds of other stuff in it that let it interact with the world around it?

####You can learn from what happened in the mobile ecosystem here: the phone isn’t just a phone with an App Store, it’s a collection of sensors and different pieces of hardware that Apple and Google give people access to through their developer ecosytems. Your screens have to appeal to the same developer ecosystem.

AppleTV will keep updating — it will play very nicely with iOS (and probably less nicely with Android). Google already has Chromecast and just released an open SDK that works nicely with iOS and Android. These are companies that know how to create and foster developer ecosystems around their products already, and they’re starting to do it with TVs.

Yes, TV manufacturers, you and Apple are different companies, as Ben Thompson has pointed out. You’ve attempted to achieve software differentiation with software based “App Store” approach, but part of what makes an App Store compelling is access to hardware and freedom for developers to build interesting things. Right now, TV App Stores don’t have this, so they’re nothing more than a facade for apps that have all been built for other types of screens and ported to TV.

Successful app stores are the result of robust developer tools and strong access to hardware components, not the other way around. Instead of focusing on ramming “Apps” for TV down our throats, focus on building tools that let mobile developers take advantage of your screens to do really neat things, and provide a simple and clean user experience on TV. You’re better at making TVs than both Google and Apple. Don’t just build stuff into TVs that make the picture better — think outside the box and make the experience better. Add some sensors, cameras and other hardware that make your products stand out!

What kind of sensors? Here are some ideas:

• Microphone — Voice input is the remote that most people have. Not an ideal solution for all use cases, but nice to have as an option. Could also be used for automatic volume control, communication apps, etc.
• Infrared Camera — to be used as a proximity sensor (a-la Kinect). And don’t just give me access to the raw data, how about a well documented SDK that developers can actually use in interesting ways?
• Camera — obvious applications are video conferencing, but my guess is that this could open up other cool possibilities too.
• Bluetooth 4.0/LE — Don’t want to sound too much like my friend Steve Cheney here, but iBeacon and Bluetooth LE are a big deal, and not just in local commerce. Let developers play with this stuff in the household, too. Imagine a TV that turns on intelligently when mobile devices are nearby and that plays content related to the person/people nearby (based on mobile device(s)). Add another person/device to the mix, and your content lineup changes accordingly. Change rooms and the TV changes in the next room as you move around.
• WiFi Router/Repeater — Integrating this with a TV eliminates the need to enter your WiFi password or connect a bunch of cords. It’s clean and it all works out of the box!
• Digital Antennae — there’s no reason over the air content should require you to buy add-on antennas, and there’s tons of free content available over the air you can unlock for people so that TVs become truly “Plug and Play.”

And at the software level, access to the following would be cool:

• Onscreen notifications — push from mobile OR push from TV apps. Any mobile app company would want to experiment with this.
• A “queue” of “video objects” or “collections of video objects” to watch. Work with Netflix, Hulu, Shelby (shameless plug!) and others to let users send their content to this queue so you have the one true Instapaper for video.
• Ask developers what they want! Get out there and build a relationship with the developer ecosystem and listen to their feedback. There are tons of interesting startups. Work with them to find the components they want access to.

So, Samsung, LG, Vizio and Sony, do you have what it takes to invest in this stuff? It’s not too late, but it might be if you wait any longer. Be bold. Start now. By the time Apple and Google figure out how to launch integrated TV hardware themselves, you’ll have a fighting chance. And as consumers, we’ll all be better off.

PS — I don’t have all the answers, so if you agree or disagree, leave a comment and let me know what you think! I would love for this to be an open discussion.

As Shelby’s product guy, I was responsible for making sure that the team shipped a quality product on a date that made sense for the company. There was only one problem — during our optimal launch week I was supposed to be on my honeymoon. It turns out that didn’t matter, though.

I went on my honeymoon and we still had a great launch (you can read more about it here). And the team didn’t really miss me because we were proactive about preparing in the right ways from the beginning. After some reflection, here are the reasons why I think this is the case:

###Everyone is an owner Everyone on our team is good at something different. We each had a unique role to play in launch and as a result could each own different pieces of making launch a success. Trusting each team member to execute and own their respective pieces of launch was important. Had all the pieces had the same person owning them, we would have had a single point of failure during launch week.

###Time spent staying organized = less time spent executing Trello is a fantastic piece of software. We use it everyday for staying on top of product work and planning what’s next. Sometimes, as we learned, a good old fashioned spreadsheet does a great job, too.

For our launch, we kept a spreadsheet detailing what needed to happen at virtually every part of the company for each week prior to launch. Every Monday AM and Friday PM, we’d review the spreadsheet as a team to make sure we were leaving no stone unturned (much like we also review Trello).

A few days before launch, the team built an even more detailed spreadsheet that acted as an hour-by-hour script for launch day. Everyone contributed and cranked through it together on launch day to make sure everything was done in the right order and on time.

###Practice like you play Ultimately, we instituted a lot of good practices shipping product prior to our iOS launch by slowly transitioning from our closed beta on the web to an open beta on the web. Carrying over these habits toward launch wasn’t much more than a natural extension of our day-to-day work. As a result, we didn’t put launch on a pedestal and were able to trust the rhythm we had already developed.

##Lessons for Product Managers I have a natural tendency to be a kind of self-deprecating guy,so at first I was a little bummed that the team had such a great launch without me. How much difference do I make at Shelby if the team doesn’t miss me when I’m gone for our most critical event in the past year?

After thinking about it a little more,I think this might be an indication that I’m actually pretty good at my job. Yes, a good product leader needs to be there to drive things forward, but product managers can only do so much (we’re not “managers” in the traditional HR sense). The manager in the “product manager” moniker refers to managing the product, not people, and I think it’s really important for PMs to remember this as they do their job.

As a PM, you are a leader who tries to set the course for product direction. With the right communication and organization tools in place, the team will move towards a common goal without you micromanaging them or cracking a whip. The hard work to do that happens well before any big launch event, so set your course early, and focus on building something sustainable.

I’m still learning and I’d love to know what you think of this post and my approach, so if you’re a product person, let me know what you think. I’ll keep this post updated with comments and questions, so feel free to chime in.

Don’t try and be something you’re not (unless you actually want to learn how to code). Instead, use the skills you have/are good at and put them to good use. Think you’ve got a great idea for a product but can’t build it with code? Build it with PowerPoint or Keynote.

Clickable prototypes save a ton of time in the design process and you can get your ideas in front of people quickly to test whether or not they’re valid. Keynote works on iPads too, so if you’re looking to build a mobile app, you can do it in Keynote AND test it on iPads with real users.  I’ve been doing this lately and I love it.

No more excuses. JFBI, even if it is in Keynote.

• It’s an awesome show (though I haven’t seen it yet)
• All episodes were delivered at the same time (to satisfy binge viewers)
• It’s another major step for Netflix in delivering unique content to keep viewers locked into their model

Why is this model smart?

Content providers can use exclusive content to be valuable & differentiate themselves from competitors. Netflix has already done this with Lilyhammer.  They’ve also continued tapping into ”binge viewing” behavior in an organized way.  Although it’s unclear what the biggest benefits of that behavior will be quite yet, they’re learning something valuable by being a first mover here.

People want access to content without restrictions and aside from being the only place to access it, Netflix’s distribution models is working for consumers with a “watch where you want, when you want” mindset.

What are the downsides of this model?

It’s really expensive and only works for top-quality content. Because its so expensive to do it this way (and therefore the costs of failure are high), it only works for top caliber content and therefore isn’t something that will be the only way things are done. It’s why “pilots” exist in TV - see if the audience likes it and then sink more money into it. Episodic content that follows this model also has a benefit of giving viewers a reason to come back to a service. In that sense I think we’ll see these models mix.

Piracy is still going to be a big issue. If you don’t subscribe to Netflix or the service, there’s no way to get the content except pirating it. That’s part of the reason Game of Thrones was pirated a ton (and consequently was so successful). Many of the dynamics in this post on the music industry could also apply to video content. We still haven’t seen a producer of content fully embrace the piracy engine to positive effect yet.

What does this all mean for the people playing this “game of thrones” in the content landscape?

The implications of all of this are good for startups - Americans watch over 5 hours a day of content and not all of it is that “top notch” stuff like House of Cards or Game of Thrones. Startups don’t need to unseat that “top value” content quite yet - they can let this game of thrones happen and focus more on the Torso of TV (read Suster’s post if you haven’t) and create a ton of value around providing meaningful context and discovery for the rest of the video landscape.

I use a few different apps/sites to keep up with the news. Here they are:

• Google Reader
• Reeder (Google Reader interface for iOS)
• Instapaper
• Zite
• News.Me Daily Email
• Twitter
• Techmeme
• Hacker News

I use each of these services for different reasons, and though I’ve developed a pretty good flow of how they each fit into my day, I’ve been longing for a better solution. I really wish that there was a product that tied these things together in one or two apps. What would that product look like? Here’s a quick stab and what I’d love to see for my two common use cases (daily “must reads” & weekly “discovery” reading):

Must Read: My Daily Use Case

• Keep/read a curated list of the stuff I absolutely want to see on a regular basis anytime there are updates. This is the stuff I want to read no matter what and it’s mostly blogs of people who I engage with on a regular basis. (It’s what Google Reader became for me.)
• Give me an idea of top posts in my social network. The news.me email from the Digg team does a good job of giving me stuff that I may have missed or not seen that’s highly relevant. Generally only 3-5 of these articles are really necessary to get an idea of what’s relevant in my network.
• If there isn’t enough content on a daily basis, then don’t show me more. Let me get a few minutes of my day back.  This is a problem a lot of apps don’t consider because they’re looking for more engagement (which often times = shoving more content in front of you).

Discover: My Weekly/When I Have Time Use Case

• Once I’m done with the daily read, open the floodgates and give me some variety. This could be seeded with content, topics and things I’ve shown an interest in (like Zite) or it could be powered by people I’m connected to socially. Ideally it’s a mix of all of the above.
• If I’ve saved articles for later, show me these articles before letting me run wild exploring the ends of the internet.

The hard part here is figuring out how to combine these use cases in an app. Part of the power is in keeping them separate: the problem with apps like Zite is that I never know if I missed an article from a “must read” site and I don’t have an interest in discovering new tangental content unless I’ve finished the stuff that I know is relevant.

However, one of the big problems with these weekly apps is that I often forget to go back to them on a regular basis, and they often have content in them that I’ve already seen or seen elsewhere.  There’s a strong case for a reading app that unifies these two use cases or at least is aware of what’s been consumed in the other app so that the probability of duplicates is reduced.

The closest thing I’ve found to this approach is called Fever. It combines “kindling” (your daily must-reads) with “sparks” (the rest of the content you are interested in) to give you a smart reading experience.  The only problem? No iOS apps and it’s self-hosted. :/

Anyone else have other ideas out there? Seems that there are a ton of companies tackling this problem but no one has really hit the nail on the head yet (for me).  I’ve tried Prismatic and while I think the content it surfaces is pretty solid, I find the UX, scrolling and lack of Instapaper support absolutely maddening. Hopefully Digg (or someone else) does it right.

Note: I also realize this problem is completely non-trivial to solve, that my usage pattern is probably pretty niche and that this is not something I can really pretend to solve in a blog post. Flame away. :)

Over the past week I’ve been playing with Mailbox, so I figured it might be a good candidate for my first product review on product thursday.

The main assumption behind Mailbox is that most people tend to view their inbox as a to-do list.  Though I’ve tried to shed that assumption in my own use of Gmail, it’s been hard. Mailbox is a welcome addition and really reduces the need for me to spend time on actively managing an inbox of actionable email.  Every part of the app is designed to get you to inbox zero, so those who want more functionality in their email might feel a bit limited, but Mailbox is awesome for staying on top of email and following up.

Some of my favorite details in the app (barring the obvious ones)

• When you’ve cleared your inbox each day, you get a beautiful, relaxing image that is different every day. It’s a nice little touch that feels like a little ”reward” each time you hit inbox zero.
• Changing send-from address popup is easier to use than Apple Mail. It’s a list of email addresses to pick from that requires a simple tap instead of a swipe and a tap like Apple’s wheel selector does. I imagine Apple’s solution works better for those who have a ton of addresses, but I only have 3 I actively check so it’s a nice change.
• Threading of messages is handled really elegantly. Gone are the days of tapping into a thread on Apple Mail and then choosing which message you want to see. Instead, messages all load inline and appear collapsed and greyed out if they’re already read (much like Gmail’s web interface)
• Inline/focused replies.  I find the design of the reply/new message box to be limiting in a really good way.  Because the box doesn’t give me the entire screen to write a lengthy response, my emails are becoming shorter and more to the point.
• Tasteful use of gestures. There’s a lot of debate about whether or not Clear’s UX is ideal, but I love it.  Mailbox’s gestures are built around very quick/easy actions for each email: archive (short swipe right), view later (short swipe left), add to list (long swipe left), and delete (long swipe right).  These have been really easy to pick up and the UI does a great job of making sure you don’t make any mistakes and accidentally delete things when you wanted to archive them.

And my least favorite parts:

• Can’t change reply-from address like you can in Apple Mail (I do this a lot for mail that people send to my Cornell or Shelby addresses that I want to be directed to my Gmail account).
• No easy way to find/search filters in Gmail. At this point I don’t really find myself missing this a ton, but it’d be a nice to have.
• Push notifications are a bit wonky. If you have filters in Gmail which are set up to move mail out of your inbox, Mailbox may still badge the app that you have mail. This “false positive” can be a little frustrating especially if you’re compulsive about keeping notifications to a minimum on iOS, but I imagine it will get better with time. This is likely one of the reasons they’re letting people into the app on a rolling basis.
• No iPad experience. Desktop Gmail works pretty well in conjunction with Mailbox, but I’ve found managing email on my iPad just isn’t fun anymore. Gimme that iPad app!

Well, that’s about it - not sure how helpful/comprehensive this review is, but hopefully it’s useful to those that are wondering whether Mailbox is worth the wait (I think it is)!

While my obsessive tendencies often encourage me to consider every design option presented, I’ve had to remember that too much attention to design can often get in the way of moving a product forward.

If you’re a startup trying to iterate quickly, understand your customer base and think about things as an MVP, there are times when it’s smart to eschew design for shipping product (provided it doesn’t cripple functionality). That extra bit of design/attention to detail can be helpful, for sure, but a good product person should understand when that matters and when it doesn’t.