It might feel good, it might sound a lil' somethin'
But fuck the game if it ain't sayin nuttin’.
After 12 years I have decided to leave Google and join Singularity 6, a gaming startup based here in Los Angeles.
S6 (as sixers call it) is 4 years old and has strong venture capital backing. The aspirations of the company are high, but starting point is a “community simulation” online massive online role playing game (MMORPG) called Palia.
First off, Palia is beautiful.
But what attracted me to S6 is the people and the idea of capturing a niche of the video game market which I believe is still shockingly untapped: non-rival cooperative gaming.
I didn’t expect I would fit at Google, honestly, when Metaweb got acquired. I didn’t see myself as a “giant corporation” kind of guy and still don’t. I stayed because it made sense: it afforded me to stand on the shoulders of giants and reach way further than I could have in any other environment. I did a lot and learned a lot and I’m proud of the choices I made.
But the pandemic opened my eyes to the fact that Google’s core values and dynamcs are often not aligned with my own and they are now so load-bearing that they feel impossible to change. Google still thinks of itself as an “engineering-driven research lab with a money printer” but it has not been that for a while. The tension between what is and what should be is creating a lot of friction and much of it is not being properly dissipated.
I wanted to explore the space of “social collaborative substrates” to teach and grow and heal people because I realize during the pandemic how primitive our tools in that space still are (one example for all: cocktail hour on Zoom). I became convinced Google is uncapable of doing well in that space because it would require a more balanced and multi-faceted sense-making ability. It doesn’t have it and there are no incentives for changing that. What it does and how it does it has been massively successful, why change it?
Joining S6 feels like an opportunity to learn how a more balanced and multi-faceted creative environment works. It feels like going to school and getting paid for it and challenge myself by trying to help around. If it ultimately becomes financially successful, excellent, but it’s not a necessary condition for this move to feel good and be useful to me. I recognize this is a fantastic privilege and I feel very lucky, but it also felt liberating to gain some space between my needs and my environment and being able to realize all that. I am also lucky my entire family understood and supported me in this move.
So, here I go in my next chapter, keeping these wise words in mind:
Don't let a win get to your head, or a loss to your heart.