Yu-kai Chou

Our company is attending the Virtual World Expo. Just the exhibit hall pass is close to $200 per person. Jun and I planned to spend $400 of company money to get in. Luckily, we found a promo code that got us in for free. There are only a few left, so you should take advantage of it if you want to check out everything that is associated with virtual worlds.

The promo code is : sivan4

This is such a classic.

This is hilarious. I’m glad we have heros in our country who want to help out poverty!

A lot of organizations and companies I have seen hire people to fulfill a certain role, and when the company grows, these people get promoted, and they manage others. However, they might be bad managers and it completely ruins the culture of the company. Therefore, Future Delivery is applying an interesting hiring philosophy:

Only hire those who you feel comfortable working under.

This way we will make sure that, as the company grows, we will still be able to attract and hire people like ourselves, thus preserving the culture. Afterall, a huge amount of whether one likes her job or not, is the people she is working with.

The other philosophy regarding firing is a lot more common in theory but a lot harder to execute:

If the company becomes very successful, and this person leaves the company and wants to come back, would you rehire him? If not, fire him now.

This philosophy is good in the sense that, the only mistake bigger than hiring the wrong person is keeping the wrong person on board for too long. However, team morale is an incredibly important issue, and if you suddenly get rid of people with less-than-justified reasons, morale will be low and productivity will decrease. The only time this works out is if the person was dragging down the team, and everyone would cheer if he is gone. After all, having a person not pull his weight without consequences would only discourage those who do pull their weights. So our concluding philosophy on this issue is:

Fire those who wouldn’t be rehired by anyone else in the company when the company becomes successful.

That is the FD way of human capital.

We just had our first screen shots from our 3D Models for FD World. Unlike the concept arts on our site, these are the real 3D files we are using. Hopefully plugging it into our 3D Engine will not make us suffer a big loss of quality.

Our CMO Jun Loayza and his great buddies Steven Chen and Chris Lew is starting an awesome video project recording what goes on in our lives within the startup. We have a few weeks of footage but are not 100% sure it this is something that people actually want to watch. Let us know if you would like us to make more and get to know our team better!

FDCareer.com is doing awesome, and we’re excited to show the world how your career path could be a fun RPG game! Stay tuned for more FD.

I was reading the blog by Alex Nesbitt, a guy that I met in one of the Digital/Tech events, and he pointed out that Dan Olsen made an excellent presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference regarding Web Analytics and Product Management:
I was reading the blog by Alex Nesbitt, a guy that I met in one of the Digital/Tech events, and he pointed out that Dan Olsen made an excellent presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference regarding Web Analytics and Product Management:

This is the origin of the FD Lifestyle, living real life like a hardcore gamer, and I want to share it with people around to see if anyone wants to join in me in the passionate path of leveling up and completing cool quests that make a difference in this world.

So in 10th grade, I was a hardcore Diablo II player. I would spend a lot of time figuring out how would I build my character, assign the right skill points, assemble a team, and conquer difficult quests. Then it came to a time where my friends started quitting the game and move on, so I quit too. I was in that transition phase between quitting a game and moving on to the next one, and I felt extremely empty.
I spent thousands upon thousands of hours getting more experience, leveling up, getting more money, getting better gear, and now I have nothing. My account will be deleted after 3 months of inactivity, and a big part of my life is just gone.

So I started to think, what kind of game can I play that a lot of people are playing, and people can’t just quit when they are bored? The conclusion I reached was: it’s pretty much the game of life.

So, if I was my own RPG character, I wouldn’t stay in town all day, be idle, and walk back and forth back and forth. NO, I would go out and kill monsters, get more experience, level up, and conquer cool quests of course. So everyone is playing this game, but not everyone knows it and when they are still in town just being idle,(watching TV, partying, not doing much with life) I am already out there getting more experience, assigning important skill points, and leveling up. Then one day they will realize(out of college), they are playing this game too, and they need experience to level up, and by then I would probably be at level 16 or so.

Ultimately, my goal is to be the strongest player in my field on my server.

And you know how a high level player can help lower level people level up faster? That’s what I like to do too, get people that realize they are playing this game to level up to my level or even higher, and so we can help each other out in life(in FD, we call this Vertical Networking).

So I want to be the strongest in my field, and team up with all the strongest in the other fields. together we can complete cool quests to solve problems that the real world face(global labor shortage of talent, inefficient market, global warming).

In FD, we also call people who just want stability and comfort NPCs. NPCs become the environment instead of living passionately. They live everyday to support their existence and buying some cool stuff on the side. But why do you make money? You make money to increase the quality of life. But you spend so many hours in your life working anyway, that IS your quality of life, and it does not make sense for people to pay you a lot of money to suffer your entire life. It makes more sense to get paid a bit less, but to have your whole life do what you’re passionate about play for a living.

So this is what I do. I work over 90 hours a week. I also play over 90 hours a week. People I have FDtized also spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to become a stronger player while accomplishing amazing things for their age. Because I feel like I have a better life than most people without necessarily being better in person, I want to bring the philosophy of combining work and play to people, whether through myself, my company culture, or the services/products that it provides. I want people to have fun when productive by doing what they are passionate about. I want those who are extreme in what they do(like hardcore gamers) to be extreme in what truly matters in this world. So for those who want to play their entire life and possibly become wealthy on the way, I welcome you to join my FD Lifestyle.