Start-up Diaries


laundry room with several cardboard boxes
Sometimes AI works quickly and that's awesome. I'm even giving a paper on uses of AI at the SRAI conference in Hawaii and another the AISES conference in Portland, Oregon, both in October. It's called "Uses of Generative AI in research administration: The good, the bad and the ugly." I'm talking about the good, so I am not an AI hater. However, when AI doesn't give the correct answer on the first or second shot, I have found it to invariably be faster to forget AI and solve the issue without it. As far as the claim that generative AI has "Ph.D. level intelligence". If you measure that by whether a person has an actual Ph.D. , I have Ph.D. level intelligence and the score today is: Me: 1 , AI: 0

Me vs. AI Debugging Challenge





Create Studio app on two monitors and lunch on my messy desk
"If you could be profitable, even if it’s just barely profitable, then it allows you to live forever.  And then it allows you to grow and crescendo upon something very real." Matt Dalio Since 7 Generation Games is now profitable, hearing this just made my day, and it is totally true. So much of what is broadcast by founders is having that $1 million contract or raising that $500,000 seed round. We have been there and that is very cool to be able to tell people. The fact is, though, no matter how much revenue you have or the size of your Series A, if at some point your income doesn't exceed your expenses, your company is going to die.

Paying technical (and other) debt: Non-sexy but happy times


Page from a wiki showing a game path
Before I started my first company, before I earned a Ph.D. , I was a judo champion. I competed for 14 years - and I was pretty good at it. I won international competitions on every continent except for Antartica and Australia, and culminated by winning the world championships. Then I went off and did something completely different - was a professor teaching statistics, then a consultant doing statistical programming. Now I'm running a company, making educational games and, more importantly, creating a platform so anyone can make educational games.

3 Ways Becoming a World Champion is Like Making a ...