Hello from a brief trip to Boston. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading pre-seed through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
Later today, I’ll walk across the Charles River with “Polar Opposites” playing in my headphones, in honor of a much younger self who dreamed of moving here—and then, for an important stretch of my life, did.
In the meantime, here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
Even [Will] Wright’s disinterest in sequels, which frustrated the business tenets of game development, indirectly paid huge dividends. The modular design of The Sims allowed EA to cheaply produce expansion packs. This concept was born of the underlying simulation design but also Braun’s need to produce sequels without Wright, who could then pursue his latest dream.
– Chaim Gingold, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, June 4, 2024. Revisiting this thread from July. The tension between creativity and business—sometimes productive, sometimes destructive—is a strong undercurrent in this book, taking many forms. I smiled (ruefully) at this aside about a consulting business that got tacked onto the core video game shop and later spun out: “Maxis Business Simulations also illustrates how investments can function as creative projects for venture capitalists, who may not even agree among themselves on a shared vision.”
Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.
– John McCormack, VP Software at Apple, quoted in Nilay Patel’s “Apple iPhone 16 Pro review” in The Verge, September 18, 2024. I came across this remark in this post by Sebastiaan de With, creator of the Halide camera app. The relief I felt upon reading it surprised even me; I suppose I must have felt some underlying tension related to my phone’s dual identity as high technology and a sacred store of everyday moments with my kids. The straightforward, low-syllable-count language McCormack uses here gave me the feeling as a user, “they really get it.” (Which I think is both a) the goal of his rhetorical style b) likely true.)
We’d been working on the full run of [Artifact] for about three years, and the product had been out for a year. We were looking at the metrics, looking at growth, looking at what we had done, and we had a moment where we said, “Are there ideas or product directions that will feel dumb if we don’t try before we call it?” We had a list of those, and that was kind of mid-last year. We basically took the rest of the year to work through those and said, “Yeah, those move the needle a little bit,” but it wasn’t enough to convince us that this was really on track to be something that we were collectively going to spend a lot of time on over the coming years.
– Mike Krieger interviewed by Nilay Patel for Decoder, September 9, 2024. (A double-Patel week here on Diagonal.) I think “what do we need to try before we call it?” is an important prompt for startups and life decisions alike. Often, there’s an idea so obvious that you’re sort of saving it—either out of avoidance (you don’t want it to be the thing that actually works, because then that would be your reality) or wishful thinking (“as long as I still have this to try, there’s still hope”). And it can be hard to tell whether it’s avoidance or wishful thinking until you actually try, which is why it’s important to name it.
Before Space Invaders, games played to a specific score, a competitive score, or a timer. There were no lives, a temporary failure simply set you back from achieving the next highest score. There was a certain amount of exhilaration in that, but even a perfect game could only last for so long.
– Ethan Johnson, “Continue? How Games Became More than Score,” March 30, 2021. Came across this post in a reply to Andrew Borman’s post about a memo from the Atari archives titled “Should video games have an ending?” I continue to think that the history of video games offers a decoder ring for understanding the minds of technologists.
i grew up during the time when writing was something a lot of people did by posting online in completely non-monetized settings (livejournal, deviantart, various dead websites) utterly for fun and i feel like that way of working has been wholly relegated to fandom settings
– Kate Wagner on X, September 17, 2024. Fandom is another decoder ring for understanding the minds of technologists.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com