Ben Horowitz recounts investing in a company (tinyspec) founded by the creator of Flickr, who later built a game called Glitch. Glitch failed due to reliance on Flash and poor retention, leaving the founder with $6 million and three options: finish the game, shut down, or productize an internal communication tool used by the engineering team. They launched the tool as Slack, which became a rapidly growing enterprise software company. Horowitz emphasizes that deep, hard work on difficult problems reveals valuable, underappreciated insights that enable breakthroughs.
Chapters
So I invested in this company called tinyspec. It was founded by this guy. He's really a great guy. He had founded a company called Flickr. Any of you guys still know what Flickr is? And Flickr actually started out as a massive multiplayer online game that he was trying to build in 2001. And it was him and his wife, and they were in Canada, and he didn't have the resources to do it. So the Avatar uploader thing was all that they really got working well. And so, like. And that was Flickr. And so they sold that company to Yahoo for like, whatever, $30 million. And so then here we were 10 years later, and he was going to make the game again. And this game was called Glitch. And so he builds Glitch. And I love Glitch. It was like a marvelous game. He builds Glitch. But Glitch had two major problems. One is he started it in 2006 and built on Flash before Steve Jobs declared war on Flash. So it wasn't going to work on the iPhone. And then the other problem was people would finish the game in two days. That's not very good for retention. He's at that point, and he's got $6 million left. And he calls me, he says, Ben, I've got $6 million left. I have no way to raise money because I've made really no progress because of these issues. It's going to cost me more than $6 million to finish the game. So I've got three choices. I can pray for Rain and try and finish it. I can shut down the company and give you your $6 million back. Or we built this tool that we use in our engineering team to communicate with each other and make engineering work a little better. And I could just put that out as a product. And I'm like, what? You just built some tool to talk to each other and you want to put that as a product and you're a consumer guy and you want to become an enterprise softw. He's like, yeah, I think it'd be a pretty good idea. I was like, well, I was like, $6 million. It's not going to make any difference in my life. If you really think it's a good idea and you really want to do that, go ahead. So he puts the game out, the tool out. It's called Slack, and it grows like, fastest growing enterprise software company of all time. Big mistake. A lot of the processes. Do you have a secret? Do you know something that nobody else knows? And because he was pulling his hair out, like literally smoking like eight packs of cigarettes a day, trying to get Glitch out the door. Like he was doing everything to optimize that development. And so he learned where software development was sub optimal. He discovered a secret in the process of trying to build the game. And it's that secret that led to the company. And that's a really big key, is you have to go do something really hard. And if you want to learn something about the world that nobody, it's not that nobody else knows it, but almost nobody else knows it and nobody else who does know it is acting on it. And that's when you have a breakthrough. But it kind of starts with hard work. Hard work is like super important in life. Keep that lesson that work is what's important. It's that effort where you learn the secrets that are super valuable and can change people's lives and change the world.
