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BIZ/DEV
David Baxter has over fifteen years of experience in designing, building, and advising startups and businesses, drawing crucial insights from interactions with leaders across the greater Raleigh area. His deep passion, knowledge, and uncompromising honesty have been instrumental in launching numerous companies. In the podcast BIZ/DEV, David, along with Gary Voigt, an award-winning Creative Director, explore current tech trends and their influence on startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture, integrating perspectives gained from local business leaders to enrich their discussions.
BIZ/DEV
The Metaversal Truth w/ David A. Smith | Ep. 73
In this episode David and Gary chat with David A. Smith, CTO of Croquet Corporation, about the history of the universe- well maybe at least the metaverse…
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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.
In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.
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Hi, everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, and I'm joined today by the latest in the victims of the tech layoffs. Gary Boyd, how's it going, man?
Gary:This this the first time hearing of this?
David:It's this this the first time I've told you, oh, I'm sorry. This is our last year we've been
Gary:doing this podcast or do I need to like an interview? What do I mean?
David:It's, you know, this is your exit interview. It's been we'll have a go. See you later, guys. I'm just kidding. I love Gary. He's not going anywhere. We are also joined by a special guest, David a Smith, he is the CTO of the croquet Corporation. We're gonna dive into all that good stuff. It's gonna be really cool episode. But first, I want to dive in continue our series on time management, there's something we've been talking about people who are in leadership roles, time management kind of is different. It's not quite the same as most people because your job often is to give away your job. And therefore your time is managed differently, because you've got to fill that sometimes. But also you don't have deliverables like a lot of people do when you're in a leadership role, because your job is to lead people rather than to deliver the widgets and dudettes. So how does time management work for you, David,
David S.:taught me terribly, I find my day. Mondays are the worst, obviously, because I meet with my entire team is literally wall to wall, while meetings. But you know, the thing, the most valuable thing I find is having time to not do anything.
David:So I believe very strongly in the concept of It actually is the one place where I think by not doing anything, I get the most work done. It's the things like planning, solving problems. So really, that sort of taking time for yourself. It's weird. But if you don't do that, you you what's margins were called margins where it's if I have a really Squandering a huge opportunity. I think that's one meeting, I don't like to go back to back, I like to leave some wiggle room, either for the meeting to go over, or more importantly, to allow what I would call the serendipity of of the most essential aspects of the way I need to work. And I life to get in the way, when you're the leader. Some of the best I have found the best times the most productive times are don't do it enough, I think. And I think as a whole, the business when I had nothing planned, and something falls in my lap, someone Hey, man, I'm having a bad day, I need to need you to talk to me, or a client calls out of nowhere. And if I had had suffers, I don't think anybody does it enough. a meeting, I would have had to miss that call. Do you find that to be a similar thing?
David S.:Oh, absolutely. In fact, it's a good idea. And when I, I tried to do not, I can't always do it, but try to schedule a half hour meeting with an hour. That gives you that extra flexibility, but also gives you that break if it happens to go shorter. So you really, on the one hand, able to get some time for yourself and also prep for the next meeting. Which is always always good to do you know, and sort of thinking about this is it's always a context shift. Right? I'm going from talking about this idea to another. So I think that's been that that that is a very useful rule of thumb.
David:Do you use anything? Are you old school and you're using hand calendars use an app? How do you manage your physical time,
David S.:it's almost all Google Calendar these days. Which is, it's nice, because everybody else can see my calendar. That's one of the big challenges that any organization has is finding time on somebody else's, you know, very scarce resource, and Google Docs or Google Calendar, actually, it's very useful for that. It's not great. And there's nothing out there that I've seen that it's great. But the fact that I can see where everybody else is, and I can see and a more importantly, you can see where I am. That's really, really valuable. I wish, I know, there's some tools like Calendly that give you kind of a global perspective. So you can have people invite and choose a time that's free. Those are scary, though, because they also fill up every bit of time that you have so much better to have kind of a little more control of it and a little more thought to about whether you want to have that meeting at a particular time. I love
David:finding out how people manage their time, because I find everybody has struggles with it. And but it's it's not talked about a lot. So that's why we've been kind of doing a series. You are the fourth in a row that we have asked this question too. And almost everyone admits they're not great at it, and they wish they could be better. So we had this one guest previously that was talking about they would schedule their whole week during the weekend and they would go the whole week and pencil it all out, of course they would be changes. But they were super, super organized. And I do not have that bone in my body that just does not work. My wife could do it. But not me. But I was super impressed by that.
Gary:David, I have a question for you. Besides just big meetings and things on Mondays throughout the week, you said it's kind of flexible, but I'm sure there's still small tasks that you have to take care of during those days. So do you have anything besides Google calendar that you use? Like I know, I, I use like a little field notes book that just pen and paper and draw little checkboxes for like three main things that I got to get done that day? Do you use any kind of analog tools as well? Or is it just strictly Google Calendar,
David S.:or meetings, it's if it isn't on Google Calendar, I'll I'll lose it. Honestly, I do have a checkbox thing. Just kind of a regular update on Mondays of things I have to get done during the week. But those are, those are just have to get done. By the end of the week. That's, by the way, sometimes why weekends for exists were invented, so that you can finish all the stuff you can get done. But in there, yeah, I do a little bit of that. Because I mean, there's always we're all multitaskers especially with high tech, I mean, everything from solving some technical problem to engaging with a lot of it slightly writing papers, documents, white papers, that sort of thing. And those kind of the the way that marketing works today is you write the, you write the document for the press, and then they take it and slice it up into the way they want. So you have to constantly be doing as much writing more writing in a sense than other people writing about you. That's a And so somehow I got that job.
Gary:Nice. Now, David, you're the CTO of croquet Corporation. And we did a quick little dive into LinkedIn and see what the business is about. But why don't you tell us a little bit about your business? And give us an overview of what you do?
David S.:Yeah, croquet is this dream, in a sense that we've had, um, give me a little bit history context, because I think that's important. Many, many years ago. I'll go back even further, because it's kind of interesting. I wrote the first real time 3d Adventure shooter game many, many years ago called the colony, that that was actually interesting. I actually did it because I was very interested in idea of what 3d could be, you know, this is actually before Castle Wolfenstein. You know, it goes back that far. And it demonstrates a 3d is really quite powerful. That led to a couple of things. One is Jim Cameron was working on the movie The Abyss at the time, and got a pirated version of the game and asked me to do a layout the set so they could actually see what the set would look like, is obviously way before avatar, the sets they do today are pretty amazing. So he could actually walk around on the set and see what was going to show up on the camera and what the what the layout kind of what the camera angles would be. So you
Gary:created like a virtual environment for James Cameron. Yeah.
David S.:Right. So that's so cool. That was like my second little gig with this 3d stuff. And that led to the first real time 3d design tool for PCs and Macs that won the first breakthrough product of the year for a Mac user magazine when they were still around. But that became the standard in Hollywood for set design. I mean, literally everybody, every director and every set designer started using it. Tom Clancy got very interested in my game, this is going back in time a little bit. But then he said, I want to work with you. So he's my first outside investor. And he was also on my board for Virtus when I did first walkthrough, but he said I want to do something with you. So he introduced me to the FBI hostage rescue team and I started working with them. They took me on one of their training missions on what they call battle towns, big cinderblock town. Nobody lives there, of course, and we were up on this platform, looking down on this thing and next thing you know, a big black helicopters fly over our heads. Black clad ninjas come out to the top of these buildings and they start blowing stuff up. And we're like, Oh, I've never seen anything like this. So I called up Tom and said hey, we got to do a game world these guys there's I've never seen anything like this. Tom. So you do a game I'll do the book. And that was Rainbow Six.
David:Oh, wow. Dude, that's one of my favorite books of all time. And the original game was one of my favorite games of all
David S.:Brian up then who's my partner at croquet was the game designer for that he also did Ghost Recon. But the reason I'm bringing it up is multiplayer was one of the key items that we wanted to do with that and multiplayer in games is really really hard. Most people don't do it. and there's good reason is like you have to have an expertise in backend infrastructure, you have to know how to set up that. And, and the other part that's really hard as a Colin, the netcode of the system, which is basically every game has to be wired together. And it's like, you kind of like, well, if I do this, and then then this wire goes to you, and you do this, and then you have the thing comes back to me. And you have to worry about race conditions. And it's very brittle. Systems break, right there always I mean, it's just the worst programming that people can do and why one of the reasons. One of the reasons multiplayer isn't on every single application, it's very, very hard. And the other part is, of course, it's expensive to manage your back end infrastructure. It's expensive to do all that. So what I was interested still is, hey, how do we make this real analysis? Hey, let's do the real thing. So we, I started this project, I inherited Alan's lab. Alan was his team was prior part of Y Combinator research. They were a peer group to open AI. And so when Sam Altman took a punt open AI out as a salt freestanding business, he was CEO of Weiss Y Combinator and became CEO open AI, then he had been funding this group, and so they want to join me. So we started a croquet Corporation. And, and we decided to build the real thing. And that's what we've been working on. We kind of went into a room for a number of years to build it, because it's really an operating system. And we solved it, we figured it out. And we made it really, really robust. And we're now they're just beginning to roll it out in a lot of ways. But we see this as a foundation, a foundational element where people are calling the metaverse today. To me the metaverse is primary communication technology communication platform. And that means that if I do something as essential, you see me do it. And if you do something, I see that and any kind of simulation that we're sharing has to evolve in exactly the same way. Think of it as a shared truth. It's like, if if what I say to you doesn't get communicated, you misunderstand it, then it's not working. And so when you're talking about particular virtual interactions like this, for me to do something, and then you to see that as I do, it means that we're communicating, I got you, I know that you see what I'm doing. I know you understand what I'm talking about. In particular, what you want. And this is obviously very timely, is you really want an AI as part of that conversation. So when you say something that AI says, Oh, I'll get that I'll make one of those for you. And generates that, that simulation between us. And now we can poke at it and say, Oh, we didn't mean that. Try this. And so it's a sort of a three way conversation human to computer to human. So that's kind of the story of how we got to here. And why we created croquet, because we want people to be able to actually have much higher quality interactions, engagements and what's possible today. You know, you've probably heard of things like CRD T, and operational transform, which are things like Google Docs uses. Drama, those are, those are eventual consistency models. They're like, you have a database and use a shared database. And at some point, there'll be the same, and that's okay, when you're typing a letter, but and you're running at 60 or 120 hertz, ain't Okay, anymore, has to be instantaneously updated. And I have to know and see what happened with you. And it can't be those rollback things where it kind of happened, but no, no, it really didn't happen has to always be moving forward. And it's it's kind of the, we call it virtual reality. One of the things keep in mind is virtual reality and physical reality are going to emerge over the next few years. So it's just reality. And so the virtual has to be as live and engaging and as perfect as the physical. So that's why we built this system. And that's kind of why we started Okay, So long answer, but I have fun.
Gary:That's an incredible backstory.
David:Yeah, you when I can't say anything more interesting than what you just said. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. I mean, I'm a gamer been a gamer my whole life. So you are right in my wheelhouse in terms of the things I enjoy, but you're explaining croquet, and I'm imagining fortnight, right when me and you were playing, we're not in the same room or across the country. I move you see me move in real time. You see me pick this thing up. You see me shoot it? What is the difference between that which has been around for a while? Well, yeah, that's what you're describing as the next generation.
David S.:I think it's, I describe it as sort of the vocabulary of Have gameplay, traditional games, it's kind of a very limited vocabulary or vocabulary, you can move, you can shoot, you can kill, or you can die. Depending on how good you are, it's a little bit more than that maybe, but not a whole lot more than as what you usually get. And that's actually pretty easy to manage with, like a server infrastructure where truth exists up there. But when you want to increase the vocabulary, when I'd say we want interactive physics, where the physics actually I see this block comes down, or actually 1000 blocks are coming in, they're all coming perfectly synchronized, I see exactly all those same things that you see where you pick up something and throw it in, it spins in exactly the same way. That's not doable in traditional architectures. Usually, when we have multi user physics, it's really kind of sugar to the scene, it isn't something you may steal, but you blow up and you're dead. But it's kind of that's how to think about you don't have very fine interactions. And when we start talking about like, imagine wearing glasses like this, and I'm talking to you, and I've got this simulation of a wing, and I'm modifying the Reynolds numbers, and I got the wind tunnels going through here, it's like that requires a much higher quality of engagement than what you're going to get with a traditional model of gameplay gameplay. And not to say there's anything wrong with that, because it's very, very fun. But there's a reason. There's actually many reasons, we focus on shooters in multiplayer games. First of all, the fun, that's most important thing about a game. But the second is, we know how to do that we going into much more rich interactions tends to be far more complicated, especially when you're doing real time interactions. So that's kind of the big difference is I see is the vocabulary of a replicated computation model, like we did, is infinite, you know, anything you can imagine you can have and modify and engage with. And I think that's a crucial part of what the future needs. You know, as I said, I go back to what I said earlier, so idea of, I'm communicating complexity to you. And that's essential for the future, we're going to be using these technologies to solve very, very hard problems, you can't solve very, very hard problems, you can't simulate those with a gate with traditional game engines. So that's what it's about.
David:So if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, you are such an interesting way to look at video games, the verbs that you're talking about, you can shoot, die, jump, whatever, you might have 20, you're saying something like emergent gameplay where I am setting, this is physics, and I'm putting real physics in my game. And if you push that box, I'm not telling you what's going to happen, physics is going to, and we'd have to respond to that in real time.
Gary:And it's gonna happen to every player in that environment the same way. Exactly right.
David:And you don't necessarily know what I'm gonna do with that, I might decide to break the box. But that's not a verb that you calculated. It's just It's physics, they pushed enough force on set box that it broke the stuff is that,
David S.:in fact, a demo, not a breaking of the box. But all of that. Here's another weird part. So imagine you have a fountain of cubes or something or cubes and spheres. So one of the things we also have is replicated random. So when you do these things, is random. We use random and games all the time, right everywhere, because that makes it feel real. But if you have a replicated random, that means I say, Oh, is it gonna be a cube or a sphere, regenerate? It doesn't matter. It's gonna be random. It's one or the other. And what color is it? Again, it's random. But the randoms are that identical replicated, I don't know what it's going to be you don't either. But when it gets generated, I'm going to have the same color sphere, same color cube without having to communicate any of that information. So if you were to do that with a traditional approach, so the server does all this stuff and says, Hey, I did all this, then you're spending all your time streaming huge amounts of bandwidth to update. Remember, you're trying to do this at 60 hertz or whatever. Good luck, you know, that's not going to happen. So, so really, when, since you have this replicated computation model, then all of a sudden, all the complexity of things of emergent complexity goes way up. And things get very, very interesting. And the fact that they're fully interactive, even though, you know, it's running as like this physics engine with 1000 boxes and things flying all around, and I can push out the more kind of or they'll run away from me or whatever, all of them. That's, that is what we're talking about. And I don't have to tell you, all I'm telling you is hey, I I moved over here. And that event, then triggers all the bots are going to run away from me from this location, but not on just my machine but on yours. And so every one of the, one of the demos we have is 5000 bots running around inside of it all perfectly synchronized. They're doing the same a star AI. And so they're all doing the exact same thing. And then when I walk and start following them, they run away in exactly the same way. And so for example, I have two PCs side by side, and you see them exactly the same location, but no communication outside of the fact that I moved from here to here. That's talking about
David:so at the end of the day is croquet, a research company or you a gaming company? What is it that you're you're ultimately trying to make,
David S.:we're back to what I said earlier, which is, I think true, sort of a missing protocol, the internet. And in this case, what we did was, we have a kind of server that is uses. So when I'm interacting with you, it doesn't go to rec, it goes via what we call reflector. reflector doesn't have any application state, all it does is it it forwards the message to all the other participants and back to you. So adds a timestamp to that, which is basically so you're kind of moving the clock of the system into these reflectors, and they're worldwide, but they have no state. So that means you can have as many as you want. And that also means you can have a very, very close, our goal is to have sub 50 millisecond latency, and the kind of application you can build. So far, we've been focusing on web apps. And we have a new product called Web showcase, which allows you to embed a 3d world into your own into your own website, but includes things like Dolby Spatial Sound, but you know, there's things like PDFs, you can view and scroll through and playing, synchronize videos, that sort of thing. But that's just the start. One of the things that you'll see later this year, which we're pretty excited about, is fixing our big problem in the game space. And I'm kind of going full circle, we've actually figured out finally how to get games, game engines like Unity, to be able to do this kind of thing in a game. And that's probably the most exciting thing I've seen in a while because it you know this lives are talking about unlocking the way you can create applications of any sort. But I think games are probably going to be the first place where it really makes a big difference.
Gary:So it's more of the advanced technology. That's the actual product. Speaker to
David S.:act, actually one is, as I said earlier, you go to app store. And there's very, very few games or multiplayer, even those 70% of people want multiplayer games is like it's where the center of mass of gaming is. But the problem is, is very, very hard to write multiplayer games is the going back and you have to do the back end infrastructure. And then you have to wire it up people my opinion is 99% of developers should not be doing that wiring, they should not be doing that back end. It's very specialized is very complex. So what we do is when you write a croquet app, it's like writing a single user app, let's just say this is a what's called a model view architecture, the model is that replicated state, and that we guarantee that whoever get is inside their computer is exactly the same on everybody system. So when you write that and you share it, then everybody has that same experience and have the same interaction, the same view. But it's like writing a single user application, you don't have to worry about the wiring anymore. And that's such a huge win. Yeah, rule of thumb is multiplayer apps, particularly multiplayer games are three times the level of effort and cost, which is one of the reasons you don't see him on the app store much over a single user app. So if you can make a multi user app the same level of complex the same level of complexity in terms of the writing as a single user app, but get all this additional benefit, the really deep collaboration is very deep complexity. But without having to kill yourself trying to do it without having to you know raise the cost of the development time and price cost by three times the new you change the paradigm so that's why it right now that so what we do is that we sell time on our network no our stuff would that I mean, years of technology in there, there's no way we nor would you want to replace this. It's actually pretty good. I like by the way, we also love web technologies. Three Jas is our favorite rendering on And that's odd.
David:Okay, so you're not building like the next Unity or Unreal? No our stuff, okay? I mean, so Okay, so it's a late because of technology
David S.:in there, there's no way we are would you want to replace is it's actually pretty good. I like, by the way, we also love web technologies. Three Jas is our favorite rendering on that slide.
David:So like Unreal in those I know, in particular epic, who's another local company, they have been giving away if you use unreal, you get fortnight's network code, which, of course, is the most battle tested network code on the planet. So I mean, they're giving a lot of that away as part of their engines. Now you're saying, hey, they should use you instead? Well, it
David S.:depends on what the game is, if you want to play Minecraft fortnight, clone, use that.
David:Sure. But if you're wanting something with more realistic physics, and that kind of thing, yeah, that's where you're gonna be, be stronger.
David S.:That's right. And by the way, you still have to pay back for the backend infrastructure. And we are there anyway. So. So I, so I think that's really probably the, the the right answer to me is like, you know, expand the scope of what's possible. And it's still cheaper. Yeah, even if you decided to take the fort Fortnite engine, and you want to add anything to it. This is where I get to the brittle part, this stuff is really hard to extend. It's like added new feature that's going to take days and months to get right. And be nice if you didn't have to worry about that, particularly when you want to add lots and lots of interactive capabilities, a lot of kinds of complexity to that.
David:So are there any games or applications on the market that are using you guys behind the scenes are you guys still, in the early days,
David S.:we're getting ready to it's probably a month or two before, you'll see the very, very first version available to developers. thing, it's, it's pretty new, we tried to do it a while back and just we just couldn't figure it out. And this time, number of technology changes have occurred, everything from the way the web infrastructure is built, and a few other things that met went made it very, very complicated for us to actually quite doable. And what that means, by the way, is for developers perspective, they're not gonna see any of the complexity we had to deal with. It's all all taken care of. And that was kind of the key thing. And it was really just, it was very, very exciting to see this come to life. But in our sites on the web side of things, we are completely out there. We've we've we've we've got 1000 developers, I think now who are building applications, web based apps on top of our platform, a number of deployed it, we're working with some very large companies working on digital twin infrastructure, because the other thing that you can do with a system is pipe live data into it and graph it, visualize it. For example, live data centers, big power systems, there's a number of applications out there, were having this live data and live interaction. And particular having a shared view of that information is essential. And the web browser is pretty nice, because there's no friction. So if I need to join you, I just open up my phone and go to a URL, I'm instantly there without any downloads.
David:So the real question I have for you is can you give horizon world's legs? That's because that seems to be I mean, Facebook or excuse me, meta has spent 10s of billions of dollars and they can't put feet on these people cannot if they were using you guys, would they have feet?
David S.:Although it was interesting, we I won't say too much. But let's just say we've hired a few people from that direction. And for a very good reason. I think that what we're doing doesn't solve that problem, but solve some of the others that I think are
Gary:yet there might be some people available from the tech space. And so yeah,
David:I mean, they just they just laid off a few maybe you guys can pick up some bargains. Why it's so interesting, too, because, I mean, I don't want to downplay I mean, I have dabbled in game development. So I know, like the word you know, a star pathfinding, I get that term, but I am certainly not a game dev. But I have always wanted to be. But clearly, there's something really difficult because I mean, I met a and those people, they're smart people. They're running the one of the most complicated websites in the world. They've been doing it for a long time they do it well. So clearly, there's something very hard about Metaverse and a world that you can live in that can react the way that they want because there's almost unlimited amounts of money at it, and yet you go into horizon worlds, if you've ever put on a quest and gone into that, it looks like something from 10 years ago, if that you're like, you go, Oh, you're the pro nice. I'm actually I'm gonna,
David S.:I'll tell you what the problem is. And it's interesting, given another historical context, so the team at Xerox PARC, that created alto increment kind of defined the entire scope of the work the future we live in, when you look at overlapping windows, Alan Vanda in the shower, popup menus, Dan Ingalls, that was a group of 25 people, the initial group that created almost everything you use on your phone or your PC, when you look at icons, it came out that 25 people, the original Macintosh team was 25 people. So either way, it has to be the right 25 People, and, of course, a bunch of people. When you create a big infrastructure, you spend billions of dollars to do it. The problem is, you don't have a center. You don't have the group that owns it. I mean, Carmax just left for very good reason. Can you imagine Kamek being frustrated? Why? Because he couldn't get done what needed to get done.
David:That's a huge blow, because he's like the guy. Yeah.
David S.:And he was the right guy. So when when you have a situation where you're trying to farm out the parts to lots and lots of people, and you have middle management job to sort of like, oh, yeah, we're doing this, we're doing this. And it's all competitive, without trying to find that, that center. This is, I think, a big problem of big organizations today, that's how they do everything, I have a friend add, let's just say, people building operating systems, it usually fails unless you have a center. to that. You have somebody who owns it completely. This is written about about, by the way, by Fred Brooks, in a book called mythical man month, Fred was the architect of the IBM 360, not just the hardware, but the software too. And so he describes this problem, where where you have to have a, somebody owns that all the way, owns every aspect of it, and is able to manage that and ensure that everything flows in the right way. Having big organizations throw lots of people at a system without having clarity and understanding of what the final goal is, and making it too big. And it's like, oh, we'll just hire another person to do that, you get you flatten out the VA system, and you don't have that intensity of the center gets lost. So, so the there have been hugely successful projects that changed the world, for they're almost always small. And, you know, like, now the Macintosh grew from that kernel, right? It grew fast, because they had marketing and all those other things, you have to build apps. But they all started in that way. And they all made kind of the the a final working system up and down. They solve those hard, hard problems. So So yeah, and that's one of the reasons I think we've been successful in doing this for a very small team. And so somebody's gonna say, Oh, well, we could do that. Maybe they could. But it chances are that they'll they won't succeed. And by the way, this is I think, you know, these organizations don't know how to do this anymore. But the value of small startups is why we do those things. We're the ones that build these very, very, very hard things to accomplish. Remember, Google started out in a closet?
Gary:Yeah, it seems like startups, smaller startups paved the way for, you know, more groundbreaking tech and, and but they haven't
David S.:changed much. Right? They got the PageRank thing. And now they've made it smarter. Of course, they're adding AI today. But the reality is still pretty much the same thing. The big transition was when they said, Oh, we're an ads business. But even that they bought a small company that had started out as tiny and then they double click. So yeah, that's the that's the right model. And that's why they'll never have legs.
David:too big, too many people too many. I love that. So I'm going to take a hard turn because it for the sake of time, I want to be respectful of your time. We have done this podcast very differently than normal, because I am just totally nerding out here. And so I haven't asked any of my normal questions because this is just so fascinated me. But I'm going to finish up with the way that we always finish which is to ask you if you were running into someone, whether they're in your industry or not, and they had big ideas What would be your top three pieces of advice for those for that new founder, slash? technologist, whatever you want, however you want to categorize them?
David S.:That's a good question. And obviously, I'll probably give you a little bit of a different kind of answer. First thing is, if your idea is important, not just to you, but to others, you sort of, I always say, if you have an ability to achieve something, and you have an opportunity to do it, then you have an obligation to make it real. And I think that somebody with a big idea, and by definition, valuable, has an obligation to make it happen. And thing I've learned over time is that you're not done until you say you're done. In other words, you don't give up. And there's no reason to give up if the thing is real and important, then there's always a path forward. And so I think that's the, that's probably the most important thing I've learned. The another thing, though, is, I kind of think there's two kinds of businesses. Peter Thiel talks about the zero to one, which I really love the idea of, but unfortunately, I think that that's not how the real world works. Most people take point nine, five to one. In other words, they take a technology that's pretty much complete, and they say, oh, let's vector it slightly into this market. We see that all the time. And it's like, I sort of think that's why combinators thesis, right? Do something like this over here. And so there's no technological implications, no, moving the world forward. It's just like, it makes money I don't I want to take away from that. Their job is to invest in people were pretty close to a sure thing. The other kinds of businesses are the true zeros to one. Examples are Google, where they went, there's a you have a search engine, there wasn't really a search engine we had, if you remember, Yahoo, was actually using Google for a while. And that's how Google got their search. But this idea of a true search. And in fact that how I discovered Google was I had a site Well, you could use everybody who links to you as the value of the page, and made and so I literally started looking for this, anybody do this already, because this is a big idea. And then I found Google, and no one was using Google, which is amazing. I said, Oh, you got to check this out. Because I felt two things when one of us elation that it worked to as depression, because they got there before me. But that's a true, that's a true zero to one. And I think the zero or ones, there's not enough of those. I think we're a zero to one because it's like, you know, when you're talking about missing protocol, the internet, it's pretty big balls.
Gary:It's a big claim.
David S.:So So those are the things I if you have a 01 you have to go and do it. That's where the obligation comes. I had another question. I don't remember what it was,
David:was number three. So you've given two would you have a third?
David S.:A third in my life? You need friends, you know that? Anybody? There's no self made men. You know, there's, there's people, there's people out there who are willing to help you. It might be advice, it might be money, it might be all kinds of things. But you need friends and you need them as soon as you have that. That idea. If no other reason for somebody tell you stop. That's not a good idea. I mean, you start to make up your own mind about it. But you know, but But you need other people. Always there's a there's a truth there that has to be found. And other people are often the places where you find that truth. And the other thing is, no one knows how to do any of this stuff. But all of us do.
David:Man, I love that. I love that I could talk to you for days.
Gary:Yeah, kind of. I know you don't have much more time because I still had a bunch of questions. This has been such an interesting interview. I have to say it's it's been amazing to listen to you. I just put
David:our playbook down because I've just I'm just gonna listen. This is just
Gary:I gotta say this is for real. For David Smith, our guests to understand this. This is the first time I saw David our host leaning in. To listen to you talk about what you were what you said is
David:not mean that our other guests are not interesting. Let me let me be clear. They're all very, very great. But no, he was this is right in my nerd house. Yeah, this was great. I mean, you're you're bringing up all the names and all the people that I've admired for so long that this is it. It's very cool to talk to you. Um, if there's some way that someone wants to learn about croquet, what would they do? Where would they go?
David S.:croquet.io is our website. And in fact, when you go there, there's actually our working 3d worlds, you can walk around inside there, and you can actually invite other people into that world to share with you, it's got Dolby sound is got a bunch of stuff in there. That's a very simple little world. But it demonstrates what's possible, right now. If you go into, there's a number of more interesting spaces for you to explore. It's a, it's a full development system. So the documentation, you can try things out. Also, we've got a number of video demonstrations and things like that. But it's, it's worth, it's worth checking it out. And more importantly, if you're a developer playing with it, I think you'd have a lot, a lot of fun with that. And it's been quite a journey, it's been exciting to see people pick these things up, it's early days. But you know, that we this is the way the world's going to work. This is the way computers were meant to be. And it's really very nice to be able to see at least some of these ideas get out there.
Gary:Very cool. Now I know I went to the website, and I only briefly kind of moved around inside that little virtual world right there on the homepage. And it is very cool. It's very smooth. In fact, I didn't think it was, I thought it was just kind of like a demo that you were sliding around. I didn't think it was active just because it was very smooth. But I'm gonna have to spend some more time in there.
David S.:Yeah, invite other people. And what's so cool is everything synchronized inside there. We're gonna add more toys and things to that. But you can actually take that there's a way to put one of those worlds onto your own website, put your own content in there, your own PDF, videos, whatever you like. It's gonna be cool.
Gary:So that's really brocade.io to reach out. And if you want to reach out to David, he's also on LinkedIn. We'll put both of those links in our show notes. And you could find those underneath this. Okay, on Twitter. All right. Okay, there we go. And if anybody has any questions or comments for us, you can drop them right below this video in the comments area, or you can send us an email at Hello at the big pixel dotnet or reach out to us on any of our social media channels.
David:Alright, fun. Thank you so much. I really had a good time. This was last I love this so much. Thank you. I appreciate your time very much and we will we'll be done for this week. But we will see y'all everybody next week.
David S.:Thanks again you guys.
