Brent Bushnell shares how he got Intel's attention by sending a marble-etched letter and game token to a CEO, then walks through creative brainstorming methods like John Cleese's "intermediate impossibles" and Disney's three-room process. He stresses rapid prototyping, gathering real feedback fast, and building a diverse board of mentors.
Chapters
We had an early time, when in the early days, a client that wasn't paying us. We were a really small company, right? And that was really problematic, 'cause we were really hand-to-mouth. And we were trying to figure out, God, how do we, it's a huge company, billion-dollar company, how are we gonna get their attention? They're not paying us. And so we thought and thought and thought and thought, and we were like, well, I went to this advisor friend of mine, which by the way, all of you should have a really awesome deep bench of advisors. I'm sure you've been told that. But I have one who's like a military strategist. He went to West Point, and he's like my military advisor. And I was like, dude, I think I have an idea for how this is gonna go, but it's like a pretty, like, we're going to war. And he was like, hey, that's a great idea, but that's like step 4. First thing, you gotta reach out to this CEO. He doesn't even know this is happening. And so I was like, oh wow, great, okay, that's a good idea. And so we were like, well, why is the CEO gonna read my email? So we wrote a really nice, respectable letter, didn't CC any lawyers or anything, very nice letter, and we etched it on a slab of marble. And then we FedExed it to him with a little game token and a few things, and we got paid in 4 days. So that was awesome. So at any rate, it was just one way to sort of stand out. We actually got to the CEO of Intel that way with a special little box we made for him, hacking together some of his gear, and they invested in us. So I highly recommend sort of thinking outside the box. How can you stand out of the crowd in interesting ways? Brainstorming. So this one is one thing I recommend you all do, and even if you've already done this, do it again. John Cleese's talk on creativity is so good. So freaking awesome. And literally, in classic John Cleese format, it's like he's giving 2 talks that have been shuffled together like a deck of cards. And so it's— but he talks one thing that I love called intermediate impossibles. And intermediate impossibles are like brainstorming fodder. And so the idea is that if you are building a— you're brainstorming on some new concept. And we might be talking about medical devices. And the first thing I say is pirates. And you're like, pirates? What the frick does that have to do with medical devices? But for you, that starts you thinking like, oh yeah, Captain Hook, like maybe we can use a hook to do the receptor, you know, whatever, right? Like it's about something that's like more brainstorming fodder, more creative fodder that gets you thinking at the final thing. And so Disney had a very specific method in the way that he would brainstorm. He would start in— it was actually one of 3 rooms. And there was the dreamer room, where there's no cynics allowed, right? In the dreamer room, there's no wrong answers. Throw everything you can against the wall. And this is where things like intermediate impossibles are awesome, because surely pirates is not gonna make it to the final round. But it is gonna be— it's gonna help us to have that Cambrian explosion, real top big funnel. So dreamer mode. Then he would move to another room, the realist mode. This is when, okay, cynics are allowed. What are the things that obey the laws of physics and economics and could actually possibly work? And then finally, the last room, the realest room, of everything that survived, what are we actually going to work on? What do we love enough to do? So highly recommend that. The other one, and even just experiment with your approaches to brainstorming, sometimes this format really empowers the loudmouth, and sometimes the best ideas come out of the person who's more shy. And so this one is more about everybody brainstorm tons of stuff on paper, and then we're going to go through them all together and start to clump them up. And you'll see patterns that start to emerge as you start to have lots of the same ideas. You can kind of chunk them into one place. OK, once you're done brainstorming— yeah, go. You mentioned that John what talked about that? John Cleese. John Cleese, Monty Python. Your entire weekend, if you don't know John Cleese, your whole weekend should be spent watching Monty Python. You really— yeah, he's an incredible comedian. British comedian, just really great. Okay, real favorite quote of mine, inspiration comes during work, not before it. The second you've got some ideas, some leads on where you're gonna go first, iterate fast. Get it in front of people as fast as possible. This is invaluable. You learn so much putting it in front of people. We try to iterate just as quickly as we possibly can. Because you go into it with an assumption and you're not, you don't know, you're not sure. Like, you, and you need real-time feedback in order to be able to figure it out. So I really highly recommend that. And then the last one is mentorship. You guys should all be mentors. How many are mentors right now of some kid? Wow, not enough. All of you gotta be mentors. So it's really important because for a lot of levels, right? Our current school system, is terrible, and it's terrible by design, right? Like, it was not the most efficient version, right? 1 to 30 broadcast is not the most efficient, but it was sort of the most economical. It was the one that kind of was possible at the time. Yeah, go for it. Actually, that's what I'm working on, is the Broken Education System. Great. XR marketplace for education. Wicked, so cool. So how do you go about finding a high-level mentor? Oh no, I'm encouraging you to be a mentor. You already are a mentor. Who do you go to when you're looking for somebody? So I go, for me it's a lot of that board of advisors, right? Different from your board of directors, right? Board of directors is a very important corporate function. I'm talking about a board of advisors, a group of people that you cultivate, who you respect, and have expertise in a domain that you care about. For me, it's 10 or 12 people across music and film and just raw business and that military guy, so a lot of different folks. So that depending on— and some of them are way more valuable than others, right? Some I have a standing call with every other week and we dive in. Others, it's an ad hoc thing. I reach out just when there's a special thing. But you nailed it, to both Have a bench of mentors as well as be a mentor to others. It is, you know, our school system blows and, you know, you, you know, and if you're not convinced, you get, you know, a kid obviously is going to benefit from being mentored. You benefit a lot, right? We talked about cultivating creativity. Kids are awesome and they come up with all sorts of crazy stuff that you would never think of. I mean, it's amazing how their brains work and are even less jaded by current situations. So that's totally rad. And then, but if you still aren't convinced, just be in the room when mentorship happens. You actually get oxytocin just from watching it happen. So that's freaking awesome, and our brains are really built in awesome ways that that even happens. It's super easy to find places to mentor. There's lots of nonprofits that do it and facilitate you getting into schools. You can be an entrepreneurship mentor, you can be an engineering mentor, you can be whatever. So I highly recommend you do that. 73 slides. I hope that— I think we still have time for questions.
