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Netsquared likes Village and I'm in LA now.

On March 13th, Village the Game received a great response from the NetSquared NetTuesday meeting in San Francisco. It's really encouraging to meet so many people who want to help Village succeed. Now I'm off to LA to work with buddies in "the industry" for creating some promo videos for Village the Game. Most recent epiphany I've had: Sharing the vision of Village is a lot more effective in a visual format rather than as a casual conversation at a bar. :) If you're in LA let me know. I'd love to catch up.

Being Productive with God

“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”- 2 Peter 1:5-8 I forgot there was a formula for being productive with God. I'm definitely seeing the need for more self-control. I have too many desires to pursue at once and it's taking a lot of self-control to just pursue Village and not a whole lot of other hobbies. I'm not sure what godliness is or how that is different from love. Brotherly kindness.... hmm it's hard to think of acts of kindness while so focused on Village.

Lessons Learned while building Village

Since May 2006, I have been designing a game, designing a company, building a game, and building a company all at the same time. It's been fun and hell at the same time too. I thank God for all the cool people that I have met along the way and for the advisors cheering me on. Ironically these veterans of gaming and social enterprise are the same people who never expected Village to get as far as it has. Most first-timers would have long since given up on a game of this magnitude. In a way I'm glad I didn't know how hard this would be. I've learned a lot about game production over the last 10 months and I'm sure there's plenty more to learn in the next 10 months: 1. Don't waste time with dev studios that can't show prior work because it's "cloaked behind NDA's". If they don't have what it takes to make some sample work for their portfolio, then they don't have what it takes period. 2. Managing a remote development team s...

That was a lot of Founders

I just attended this talk "Finding the next Google".  Great panel of entrepreneurs who now pretty much own their own venture capital firms. Peter Thiel co-founder of Paypal, Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn, Sean Parker co-founder of Plaxo and Napster and Facebook, and Matt Cohler VP of Facebook.  Top Lessons: It's all about distribution.  You must solve your distribution problem first for consumer internet applications. If you aren't embarrassed by your product launch, you waited too long to launch. Don't perfect your product before shipping.  Put it out in the market, find out who's using and respond to requested changes fast. In another VC talk this week Ron Conway said that VC's are still interested in funding more social networking sites and more video sharing sites.  Apparently the market is still huge and they expect there will be plenty of quality social networking sites that can co-exist with Myspace and Youtube being the ...

Knowing what to say 'yes' to.

Proverbs 21: 21 "He who pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity [ a ] and honor." I love verses like these. One stereotype of the Bible is that it's a rule book designed to tell you what not to do. Verses like these instead remind me what I am supposed to say 'yes' to. In Stephen Covey's book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" he calls it the 'burning yes'. Although Covey is coming at it from a time management perspective: I have to know what my 'burning yes' is because otherwise my schedule will get filled up with things I should have said 'no' to. Right now my 'burning yes' is Village the Game and the things I have to say 'no' to are often things that are worth doing be it taking classes, tutoring, or going on retreats with other Christians. From the Bible's perspective our 'burning yes' is righteousness and love, and sin is what we have to say 'no' too. And...