I suck at Starcraft. But I win a lot.

​Let's be honest—I suck at Starcraft. I have played ~7-10 hours a week for almost two years now, and I don't have any superpowers. I wasn't the one who figured out that Zerg could get away making a third base in ZvP before 5:00. I never even considered forge fast expanding before I saw someone else do it. And the recent shift away from marine/tank to marine/marauder/hellion pushes in the early game in TvZ? Caught me flat-footed.

​There are people who figure out these things, and I am not one of them. Most likely, you aren't either. It's not that big of a deal. I still win quite a lot.

I am a top-ranked Diamond player, which means that I'm probably around top 5%(-ish) of players in North America. What that means in terms of core skills:

• I have really good pattern recognition—I can recognize what I'm seeing and determine what it means. ​If there is an army approaching, I can quickly assess its strength and determine whether my army can beat it or not.
• I have a pretty good gut. RTS games are complex, and mid-game decisions must weigh many criteria. Your brain is too busy in mid-game to do a thorough analysis of possible choices—it's important to make snap decisions on gut.​
• ​I have reasonable, but not perfect, mechanics. Mechanics, in RTS, refers to your mechanical ability to perform tasks. Having good mechanics is akin to typing at 100 WPM, or being really efficient at your core tool of choice, whether Excel, Gmail, or XCode. In Starcraft, this refers to my APM (# of actions my hands/brain can perform per minute) and my ability to stay on top of repetitive tasks like building probes and pylons.
• I suck—suuuuuuuuuck—at strategic innovation. I do not come up with brilliant new approaches to problems. I am good at understanding strategy when it is laid out in front of me, but when asked to chart my own course at the highest level, I don't have a great compass.

Here's the thing. It turns out that innovative strategic thinking—having a brilliant "new idea"—doesn't count for all that much. Sure, if you're a pro player and you roll out a new strategy at a major tournament you might get some wins to your name that you wouldn't have had before. But ​there is an incredibly rich Starcraft community, and as soon as players see something new and cool, they immediately dissect it. Within a few days, every noob on the ladder (that would be me) will be executing that strategy that took you two weeks and 60 hours to perfect.

Sound familiar? It should.​

In startups, as in Starcraft, execution counts for far more than strategic brilliance. Oddly, people obsess over the strategic, and gloss over the fundamentals. But whether you're a professional gamer or a total noob, your ability to win games is primarily dependent on skills that come with practice—pattern recognition, gut instinct, and mechanics. Especially mechanics. Mastering core skills for your race is the most important thing you can do to improve your win percentage.

So play a lot of games. Build probes and pylons.​ Study your replays and look for mechanical breakdowns. Eliminate them. You will start to win a lot. Stop pondering, pontificating. Don't make a single post on the TeamLiquid forums (or Hacker News). Just go out and Do.

You will always ​suck. You will always be awash in a sea of uncertainty, questions about paths not taken and strategies untried. That's a given. But that matters less than you'd think. Keep pushing ahead, one game at a time.

Dear Steve,

Thanks for everything.

Sincerely,

Tristan

Patience

Patience is not one of my virtues. Personally and professionally, I get very edgy when the lifecycle of an idea from conception to construction is too long. I work in software because I can’t handle the seemingly neverending product cycles of physical goods. When I worked at GE for a summer and when I realized that it took a two-year R&D project just to add 8% on to the the length of a wind turbine blade, I resolved to never work in a company that produced physical products again. Two years is a lifetime.

I now find myself working in what is really the very early stages of an industry. Things are moving very rapidly from both a competitive and a product landscape. But the things that the industry is doing right now are really baby steps towards the end goals of true social marketing.

The end state is pretty clear: 

• Cookies will increasingly be associated with CRM records (already happening).
• URL shorteners and on-site analytics will converge. Marketers will be able to merge on-site clickstream data with off-site touchpoints.
• Multi-touch conversion pathways will be standard. NoSQL and map-reduce back-ends will allow analytics users to slice audiences in ways never before imaginable. Tracking Facebook Ad > Like > Interactions > Conversion as a conversion pathway will be common. And it will all happen within one tool.
• Word-of-mouth purchase influence will be algorithmically assigned to individual social posts, and aggregated to social properties.

I want to go there now, but there’s so much to build in the meantime.

Patience.

Great Designers are Worth Their Weight in Gold

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this conversation:

Our designer, Josh, has made every aspect of Argyle look good ever since he started last year. Site, app, marketing collateral—everything that is associated with the Argyle Social brand sparkles. This is somewhat uncommon in the b2b space: conventional wisdom within b2b SaaS is that product and sales come before design and marketing. And yet Josh was the second salaried employee at Argyle.

I think that’s one of the best decisions that Eric and Adam have made. Our interface, our website, and our marketing stand out visually in our crowded market and have become a major competitive advantage for us. Business users care just as much about usability as consumers do, because with usability comes efficiency and results.

In case you’re curious, the whitepaper Thomas was referring to can be found here. Make sure to admire the question mark.

Starcraft and Startups

Starcraft is popular within tech startup circles for good reason. It’s a an cold, heartless meritocracy. It values investment in yourself. It requires hardcore analytical thinking. It makes you divorce yourself from the emotional rollercoaster that is day-to-day success and failure. In fact, it teaches you to love the good kind of failure and to learn everything you can from it. And it reminds us that real communities based in shared goals and common experiences can thrive across geographic, cultural, and lingual barriers.

I know this, in part, because I spend a non-trivial amount of my free time playing. I’m good enough to know that I’m not truly good. I also know it because of this guy. I’ve seen every episode of his show since I discovered it in June of last year. He’s brilliant, and surprisingly wise for his age.

I haven’t been excited by sports for probably ten years, but I now watch every major Starcraft professional tournament. I’ll take this over football any day. With it, I get to participate 1-on-1 with great people from around the world, and I get to be on the edge of something new.

Technology is disrupting sports, too, and as usual, the geeks got there first.