This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Tom Conrad: Look for Opportunities to 'Go Deep'" created on December 16, 2010. It features Tom Conrad discussing his experiences at Apple and Berkeley Systems, emphasizing the importance of being great at something and investing deeply in it.
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Apple is a place that cherishes kind of renaissance thinkers, people that are good at lots of things. The people that are most celebrated in the company culture can write software and design user interfaces and have brilliant marketing insights and have a great eye for design. And. And so in the four years that I was at Apple, I wrote about 500 lines of code and dabbled in a million things. I was miles wide and about a quarter of an inch deep. When I finished my time at Apple and decided to move on to something else, I wasn't great at anything. I went to Berkeley Systems and together there worked with the team that created this video game, you Don't Know Jack, which was a little bit of a phenomenon in the late 90s. It was kind of this irreverent quiz show party game. Berkeley Systems was completely different than Apple from the standpoint that everybody knew exactly what their job was and your job was to be great at it. In my case, it was to run the, the little development team that wrote all the software for you. Don't inject so the sound mixers and the gameplay and the graphics engine. But it was not my job to design the gameplay or to design the look and feel of the game, or to write the questions or to figure out what the packaging should be like or what the go to market. I was welcome to occasionally chime in with a suggestion or a thought, but it was very, very clear that the thing that was going to make me successful and at Berkeley Systems was being the best software engineer that I could possibly be and to lead that team really effectively. So I really focused on that for my years there and thank goodness, because I wouldn't have been a software engineer, not really, if it hadn't been for that experience. So I think the lesson for me of that period is it's really important to be great at something and to know what that thing is and to really invest in it. You're going to have all kinds of opportunities to go wide, but look for opportunities to go deep. At least for me it made all the difference.
