Week 10: The End

Well, this is the end of my time at Game CoLab, and my first real experience working with a startup (especially more interesting because Game CoLab is relatively small).

Before I add my final thoughts, I just want to talk about where we got with the work I did at Game CoLab.

In terms of the booklet, I was able to get a basic layout done, but we have decided that it may not be best to print it out at this time. I have the PDF version of the booklet to turn in as my deliverable.

We ended up with a total of 28 responses out of 54 on the surveys. That is about a 52% turnaround, which is awesome! I initially thought I had emailed more people, but I then quickly realized that some of contacts on my list were not actually in the Arizona gaming industry, so my survey did NOT apply to them.

Moving onto my thoughts on my experience at Game CoLab..

This was more than just an "internship" for me. For those that are more aware of the personal changes in my life over the past ~six months or so, the experience at Game CoLab was just a little peek into the entrepreneurial world and getting some experience with different tasks at a startup, things that I had never done before. I have never done an actual survey nor an actual booklet, so it was a real experience in lateral thinking. There is a long way to go on this journey but I am glad that I was able to provide some value to a startup in the area and again, just get a little exposure in this realm.

I am glad that BASIS has allowed seniors the opportunity to get out of school the last trimester of senior year to go work on projects that they are interested in. It gave me time to do a lot of learning, reading, watching videos, and real exposure with Game CoLab.

I had a lot of fun being here!

With that said, that is the end of this blog. If you are interested in seeing my presentation, you are welcome to come on May 7th at BASIS Chandler!

Keep Swimming,

--
Anirudh Ravichandran

Week 9: Last Stretch

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week nine!

During the ninth week, we discussed more about the Phoenix Comicon as usual, and getting people that mentioned wanting to sign up on the survey to actually signing up.

It appears we will not get to the video in the week we have left. I spent pretty much all of this week working on the booklet. The booklet is actually coming out a lot better than I had expected. The booklet will also contain the relevant survey responses. Here's a couple more pages to peek at.

To build the booklet, I am using a free and open-source tool called scribus (https://www.scribus.net/). It has worked well with no hitches up to this point. The booklet dimensions are actually not letter (8.5 x 11) but are actually A5 (basically half of A4). We want to get it printed on quality A5 paper, but I am not sure if I will have a print of it by the day of my presentation, so I will probably just have a printed copy on normal letter paper so you can see what the booklet looks like. It is just not feasible in terms of cost to print out a bunch of A5 booklets without thinking through the cost and number we need. We are considering having advertising in the booklet if possible.

We have gotten to 28 responses on the surveys. It is not as much as I had hoped, but it is more than last year's survey! The most important thing to remember with surveys and information in general is not to make any assumptions; the data shows you the actual numbers behind what you think is the case. I stopped the survey a couple days ago so I could start compiling the results together. Although I'd like to booklet to have polished survey results, it appears I will not have time to make the survey results look good in the booklet so I am just making sure that I have a rudimentary layout of the survey results in the booklet and making sure that everything else in the booklet looks on point.

My time with Game CoLab is almost up, and it is time to wrap up the booklet and get started on my presentation.

With that said, that's it for week nine, come back for more for my final week! Thanks!

Week 8: #AskGaryVee

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week eight!

During the eighth week, we discussed more about the Phoenix Comicon as usual, but there was more focus on the booklet that I am doing. The showcase is in early June.

I am not sure we will be able to get to doing our short video (hopefully we will but it seems unlikely). I spent pretty much all of this week working on the booklet, because that will be my focus in the short time I have left here at Game CoLab. The booklet will also contain the relevant survey responses. In the interest of not showing you the entire booklet, here's just a couple mockups I've been working on!

To build the booklet, I am using a free and open-source tool called scribus (https://www.scribus.net/). It has worked well with no hitches up to this point, so as long as I get everything together, this booklet is going to be pretty awesome!

We have gotten to 23 responses on the surveys. It is not as much as I had hoped (we still have a little time before I have to stop the survey and put the results together), but it is more than last year's survey and still has information that is useful to us. The most important thing to remember with surveys and information in general is not to make any assumptions; the data shows you the actual numbers behind what you think is the case.

Early skims over the data show that there is some varied data across the board, so it is not just skewed in one direction (aka the questions relating to revenue or things of that nature). As a result (no pun intended), the data in itself is more interesting and relevant because it is not just the same across the board.

The reason I titled my post #AskGaryVee is because I finally got around to purchasing Gary Vaynerchuk's new book (http://www.amazon.com/AskGaryVee-Entrepreneurs-Leadership-Social-Self-Awareness/dp/0062273124). I am unsure of whether I will get it in time to read it and blog about it but I have no doubt that I will get around to reading it.

My time with Game CoLab is almost up; although this post is about week 8, I mentioned that I would be blogging a week behind so we are at week 9 today and I have one more week left to finish everything I need to finish and get working on my presentation.

With that said, that's it for week eight, come back for more next week! Thanks!

Week 7: Rise and Grind

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week seven!

Uncharacteristic of my other blog posts, this one is going to be quite short.

During the seventh week, we discussed more about what was going to happen at the Phoenix Comicon in terms of getting volunteers, sponsors, working out a budget, etc (this is Game CoLab's largest upcoming event, so this is a common recurring theme you will probably hear every week). We are inching closer to the showcase in June!

My mentors are back from GDC and we have been on fire.

The video is still on hold; we are busy with other things at the moment. My deliverable has changed. I will be producing a booklet for them, and I'm looking to just highlight our 2015-2016 year and what we have been doing with Game CoLabs. Pretty much all of my work for the next two weeks will be attempting to design and produce a nice booklet! I'm not a designer by any means, but it will be an interesting experience nonetheless.

I have finally gotten to send out the surveys. We've gotten ten responses so far and it looks like this information is going to be extremely useful to us and to the developers in the area. The goal now is to get a lot more people to answer the surveys so we can add it to the booklet and have a good amount of useful information!

With that said, that's it for week seven, come back for more next week! Thanks!

Week Six: Innovation Nation

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week six!

This week, I read FAST COMPANY's The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies magazine. Although I am not going to be talking about all 50, I just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of them.

First off, Buzzfeed. I'm sure at some point on the Internet, you have seen something or another related to Buzzfeed. Although sometimes you wonder why in the world you read Buzzfeed (as a consumer), looking at it from a business perspective, you can see that they are completely geniuses. Buzzfeed has disrupted media and their operation is extremely data-driven. They have understood how to capitalize on people's escapism. You shouldn't judge people's escapism; people enjoy what the enjoy, and you need to understand the market/people and approach them as necessary. Buzzfeed is on a ton of social media platforms, and they use data-driven metrics to understand a whole slew of details, from what happens to a post when they post on Twitter, to the kind of revenue they can generate for people by doing advertisements on Pinterest. They have an ability to create stories and ads that go viral. They produced an enormous amount of content; but they pay attention to the data because it tells them what works and what doesn't. That's part of the reason they are so successful today.

Second, Riot Games. The Multiplayer online game League of Legends has absolutely exploded, with its 2015 World Championship Final garnering 36 million viewers online (nearly twice the audience of last year's NBA Finals). When League of Legends was first introduced, it was simply a cool opportunity for fans to come together. However today, they have their own e-sports channel, award scholarships, and attract corporate sponsors. They generated an estimated $1.5 billion in 2015 revenue.

Although there are a lot more innovative and interesting companies, I chose to highlight these two because it was interesting for me to see just how far they had come since their conception.

Now I'm just going to address a different topic, albeit in a shorter manner than I'd like. This topic is more than worthy of its own post or book.

The entrepreneurial journey is not a simple or easy one. Everyone that looks at it from the outside talks about it as though it is some glorified venture and that it's easy. Don't get me wrong, it is exciting. But what you see on the outside is either the success (or failure) and not how much it took to get there. I think problem is, people think entrepreneurs are those that build businesses; but don't understand why. Building a business or being in startup mode is simply just a product of being in the entrepreneurial mindset. It's just a tool in our arsenal. Being in the entrepreneurial mindset, we have a crazy desire to learn, do things, and solve problems. Our entire personality, the things we do, the people we want to be around, the problems we want to solve, and how we want to change the world are all defined by us being in that mindset. We as entrepreneurs intuitively realize that the most powerful way to make a change is to build an impactful business. So it's more that the business is a product of the mindset, not that mindset being a product of the business. I've always resisted trying to explain it, because again, there is no concise way to explain it, and quite frankly, if you're not in the mindset, you can never truly understand it. There are a lot of posers in the entrepreneurial world, and you also hear stories about how kids are deterred from entrepreneurship just because of how much they have to know. Honestly, if you are deterred from entrepreneurship because it's too much to process, then you were never meant to be one in the first place. It takes talent to do anything. Hard work simply allows you to bring out the best version of yourself. Let me give an example. I could work extremely hard playing basketball, but I would never be as good as Lebron James. I could get better at basketball; but I can only reach the level I was meant to reach. Same with entrepreneurship. Hustling makes you the best entrepreneur that you can be, but it doesn't guarantee that you're going to become the Lebron James of entrepreneurs. Finally, we do it cause we love what we do and do what we love.

That's it for week six, come back for more details on what I'm doing at Game CoLab next week!

Week Five: Shattering Reality

Too often.. we scapegoat and gossip about people instead of fixing the actual problems.

Too often.. we let our fear of the unknown and uncertainty to keep us from doing great things, and from being creative.

This week, I read Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration By Edwin "Ed" Catmull and Amy Wallace (Edwin is the voice of the book). I am actually struggling to put my thoughts about this book into words because it was mind-blowingly phenomenal. Although the book's overall target is related to creative organizational leadership in companies, it is so much more. His stories and his meticulous approach to all the thoughts in this book made it resonate with me on so many levels. The ideas he talks about are applicable to so much more than just creative organizational leadership.

To give you some more background on Edwin.. He is a founding member of Pixar. As a young child, he was inspired by Disney and wanted to become an animator. However, by the time he got to college, he realized his talents lay elsewhere. Instead of going into the movie industry, he chose to study physics and computer science. Keep in mind that these were the times when using computers for animation was not really a "thing" yet. However, when he went back to graduate school at the University of Utah, (long story short) he realized the potential of computer graphics and decided to combine his love for technology and art to start a revolution (we all know where that went, look at how movies are made now). He had a vision to make the first entirely computer-generated feature film (which did happen, meet Toy Story) For those of you that do any kind of computer modeling, I'm sure you are familiar with texture mapping and subdivision surfaces, ideas that were pioneered by him while in graduate school, among other things.

As I look at many companies today, they are filled with hierarchies (that are also communication hierarchies, not just organizational ones) that utterly destroy creativity. Reading this book gave me some incredible insight as to how we can build a creative company culture that allows for it to be safe to be creative and experiment/take risks, as well as solve actual problems, instead of pointing the blame at people (let's be real, companies do this ALL the time, and so do people in their regular lives, it's human nature).

One of the things I was excitedly shocked to see was an idea that I mention myself, actually in this book. On one of my famously (not really) long posts on social media about how I want to "learn everything about everything," I mention the idea that as kids, we have an intrinsic curiosity to learn, from the world around us (especially since we are young, we kind of have to). As we grow up, the "reality" hits us and we seem to lose that curiosity to learn. This same idea was also in this book!

For the sake of not making this blog post as long as the book itself, rather than trying to address the many points in this book (for which I will direct you to actually go read the book), I will talk about three of them BRIEFLY (again, much more detail in the book): Balance, Failure, and Creativity.

Balance: In terms of balance, there's just one point I want to make. When people think balance, they often think of stability. Stability is not the same thing is balancing, and it should not be a goal. Stability implies being comfortable and being stagnant. However, that is not how the world works. Eventually, you will not be able to keep up with the times, because the world is always changing. Instead, balance should be the goal. Balancing is when things are moving and you are constantly growing and adapting to needs and agendas, making sure that one part is not "winning" over another. If one part "wins" over the other parts that need to be balanced, you lose.

Failure: This is my absolute favorite thing to talk about, especially as an aspiring entrepreneur. There are a lot of different ways to look at failure, but I will make a point about it in the context of this book, since that is what this blog post is about. People often look at failure as an evil thing. Society looks down upon failure as though you should never fail. Let's look at school as an example. Although this is a topic to go into more detail to for another time, I will briefly introduce a thought here. We are so trained in school to aim simply to get good grades and "failing" is seen as a bad thing. Sometimes, the actual learning aspect withers away as we worry about acing the next test. This follows people as they grow up, and people fail (no pun intended) to recognize how important failure is, on the path of success. People often think that we should make every effort to avoid failure, when the reality is, they fail more because they try to avoid it. It is important to understand (in this context) that failure is just a consequence of trying something new. It is an opportunity to learn and do something better. If you're going to fail, then fail fast.

Creativity: The point I want to make is that creativity doesn't come from being stagnant. Creativity doesn't come from feeling safe and comfortable. True creativity comes from taking a step into the unknown, and taking risks. I like the way that Peter Thiel introduces the concept of idea creation in his book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Manifesting an idea into a real thing is going from 0 to 1, and growing the idea is 1 to n. In this context, 1 to n is just building on what already exists. It's not something "new." It's not venturing into the unknown and finding something. You're just sitting comfortably on what already exists and doing something with it. However, going from 0 to 1 is the real kicker. Keep one foot in the world of what you know, and one foot in the unknown.

If you want to predict the future, build it yourself.

It's important to recognize that you shouldn't expect things to always run smoothly, or initial ideas to be perfect. For things to be great, they had to start in a place that was not-so-great. If you always want things to run smoothly, you're going to go back to the initial problem I mentioned, which was judging people by the mistakes they make rather than their actual ability to solve problems.

There is a lot more I want to talk about, but I will leave it to you to read the book.

I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone that wants a great read on managing creativity, unique company culture, and creative inspiration.

Aside from all of the aforementioned things, this book gave me huge appreciation for Pixar and its company culture, as well as an interesting perspective on Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs was an early investor, part of the reason that Pixar actually exists today, and didn't just flop back in the 90s). Steve Jobs is always portrayed as the rough-and-tough guy, but that is not the entire story.

This book has successfully shattered the realities (that I already have been trying to break myself) placed on me by my surroundings. People like me are often called "naive" or "unrealistic" because these concepts/ideas are not considered "realistic" when you "grow up." There's no secret as to why the most impactful and life-changing ideas come from the people who embrace the naivety and curiosity to learn, coupled with the maturity as well as the attitude toward hard work they gain over time. Age is not a barrier. It never was, and it never will be.

Truthfully, you are the barrier to your own success.

Week Four: Content is King, Context is God

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week four!

During the fourth week, we discussed more about what was going to happen at the Phoenix Comicon in terms of getting volunteers and just more updates on the event (this is Game CoLab's largest upcoming event, so this is a common recurring theme you will probably hear every week). We also worked on emailing info out to our contacts.

My mentors are planning on going to GDC (Game Developers Conference) which is arguably the biggest conference in the world for game developers and the like. I am sure it will be an awesome experience! (If interested, check out their website here http://www.gdconf.com/)

The video is still on hold at the moment; we decided that we may take a completely different approach to the video. The new goal will probably be to keep it straightforward and to the point, to give you an immediate idea of what Game CoLab does. Previously, I had planned a "skit" of sorts, that kind of tells you what Game CoLab does in a quirky way (admittedly was longer and didn't say much about Game CoLab) but my mentor preferred the straightforward approach.

So let me talk about the title of this blog post.

It comes from an entrepreneur named Gary Vaynerchuk, whom most would consider a master at social media marketing. He is an extremely successful serial entrepreneur who's hustle and drive will literally motivate you to get up and do something just because of how much he works, and how much he enjoys it. For those that are interested in his story, check it out here: (https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/biography/)

I started watching some of his videos and they are fantastic. Need some motivation to hustle? Check this video out: (https://www.facebook.com/gary/videos/vb.51535068349/10153734143123350, be warned, there is language) He has built a loyal audience and has millions of followers on various social media platforms. He is constantly in tune with not just his companies, but the people out there that are commenting and watching his content. He just released a book yesterday and I hope to get my hands on it so I can read it! But first, maybe I should read his other three books.. Speaking of which, here's a link to his new book! (http://www.amazon.com/AskGaryVee-Entrepreneurs-Leadership-Social-Self-Awareness-ebook/dp/B00Z71HW8A) The title says it all!

The thing I love most about him is that he tells it like he sees it. The title of this blog post is one of his sayings. It is pretty self-explanatory. It is great to have a lot of content to put out there, but there has to be context. Why should people care, about you and the content?

With that said, that's it for week four, come back for more next week! Thanks!