I don’t know for certain, but this is where my strengths lie, and this is where I have experience and connections. If the right opportunity presented itself, I would gladly start another company that promised to be as profitable.
However, this will not be the only company I start, and starting a company in the same field (i.e. games) will increase my chances of success. If I start a company in another field, I’d have to stick to that field to keep this kind of advantage.
It sounds that your goal is to make money to donate to efficient causes, like existential risk prevention. If that is so, I suspect that you aren’t being strategic about it, because it doesn’t seem like you explored enough other startup options aside from games.
What is the expected value of you exploring other options? I suspect that it’s greater than you working on games now, but that the returns diminish somewhat quickly. Here are some ideas that I thought of if you’re interested: https://medium.com/on-startups/6ecc143afe65.
I just read it, and I think my point still stands. To be more concrete, here’s what I would, and did, do: spend some time coming up with startup ideas (following Paul Graham’s advice), after some time, look through them all, come up with their expected values, and choose.
I think that there are a lot of ideas that Alexei has the technical skills to build, and the insightfulness to discover. And I think that a lot of these ideas are orders of magnitude more profitable than the game startup. At the very least, I think that the chances of these two above statements being true are high enough where it’s worth thinking hard about, instead of saying “I’m good at game development.… I’ll do game development.”
Wow, I’m surprised you commented on a post that’s so old. I’ve left the game industry completely since then and have now been at Google for 7 months. I agree with you that startups are great and very high EV (measured in $), quiet likely higher than any salaried job. However, for various reasons that I mentioned in my job search post that Unnnamed linked above, I chose to pursue immediate donation from salary. If you want to discuss this further, I’d be happy to PM you my email address.
I don’t know for certain, but this is where my strengths lie, and this is where I have experience and connections. If the right opportunity presented itself, I would gladly start another company that promised to be as profitable.
However, this will not be the only company I start, and starting a company in the same field (i.e. games) will increase my chances of success. If I start a company in another field, I’d have to stick to that field to keep this kind of advantage.
It sounds that your goal is to make money to donate to efficient causes, like existential risk prevention. If that is so, I suspect that you aren’t being strategic about it, because it doesn’t seem like you explored enough other startup options aside from games.
What is the expected value of you exploring other options? I suspect that it’s greater than you working on games now, but that the returns diminish somewhat quickly. Here are some ideas that I thought of if you’re interested: https://medium.com/on-startups/6ecc143afe65.
Note that Alexei (the author of this post) later wrote this post.
I just read it, and I think my point still stands. To be more concrete, here’s what I would, and did, do: spend some time coming up with startup ideas (following Paul Graham’s advice), after some time, look through them all, come up with their expected values, and choose.
I think that there are a lot of ideas that Alexei has the technical skills to build, and the insightfulness to discover. And I think that a lot of these ideas are orders of magnitude more profitable than the game startup. At the very least, I think that the chances of these two above statements being true are high enough where it’s worth thinking hard about, instead of saying “I’m good at game development.… I’ll do game development.”
Hey adamzerner,
Wow, I’m surprised you commented on a post that’s so old. I’ve left the game industry completely since then and have now been at Google for 7 months. I agree with you that startups are great and very high EV (measured in $), quiet likely higher than any salaried job. However, for various reasons that I mentioned in my job search post that Unnnamed linked above, I chose to pursue immediate donation from salary. If you want to discuss this further, I’d be happy to PM you my email address.