By the way, I’m going to talk about “digital revenue” considerably more narrowly than EA typically does in their financial communications. EA counts as “digital” hundreds of millions of dollars of online sales of packaged goods products and “additional content” for console products. Some of this is legitimately “digital revenue,” as I’ll discuss below, but most of it is just an online substitute for a packaged good. I’m going to be talking about mobile, online subscription and virtual goods revenue, and a subset of the console “additional content” revenue when I talk about “digital revenue.”

In my experience, the incumbent packaged goods companies clearly see mobile, digital distribution and free-to-play models as inevitable. They know what’s coming and have known for some time. But within the senior management ranks of these companies there is still a lingering perception that digital doesn’t, in their words, “move the needle” sufficiently – meaning that the revenue generated from existing console franchises still far exceeds the revenue that can be generated, even in aggregate, on new platforms and through new business models. There is an appreciation that the higher-margin revenue from digital can enhance profits but not really produce top-line revenue growth for a company like EA or Activision, doing in excess of $4 billion in annual sales.

The problem with that perception is that it is simply not true any longer. There are games on the mobile and free-to-play PC platforms that are indeed capable of moving the needle. And for real next-generation publishers with customer acquisition leverage (i.e., not the hamster-on-a-treadmill LTV arbitrage kiddies that litter the iOS and social gaming charts), hit games can generate almost unimaginable profit margins, at least by packaged goods standards. One game I know well, Riot’s League of Legends, is poised to grow to World of Warcraft sized revenues in the near future, and is driving record profits for parent company Tencent. In the mobile space, Supercell’s one-two punch of Clash of Clans and Hay Day could together generate as much net revenue as a top 5 console game franchise. Wargaming’s World of Tanks on PC and NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing in mobile generate enough revenue and profit to be tentpole products for an old-school packaged goods company.

The good news for EA’s next CEO is that the company has not been sitting idly – in fact, you could argue that EA has been the most aggressive large publisher in pursuit of digital revenues. EA Mobile, the successor to my startup JAMDAT which they acquired back in 2006, is the largest market share player on iOS and probably on Android, too. They’ve had solid titles like The Simpsons: Tapped Out and the recently-released Real Racing 3, demonstrating that the company can produce top-quality products for the mobile platform. They haven’t been able to deliver a break-out hit – Real Racing 3 is currently lagging behind last summer’s CSR Racing in the top grossing charts – but with some strategic nous and studio leadership unafraid of the new business models, there’s no structural reason EA can’t create a mobile franchise that contributes $200MM a year in revenues and throws off $40MM in profit. If they can control production costs (always a problem for the company) and marketing spending, they should have a decent shot at a profitable billion dollar mobile business in a few years.

Similarly, in PC free-to-play, EA’s Battlefield franchise has been doing well. It is not in the same strata as packaged goods juggernauts like Activision’s Call of Duty or free-to-play hits like League of Legends and World of Tanks, but it is a solid contributor and certainly demonstrates that EA can be competitive in the space. Their Origin portal is no Steam, but it’s not bad, and the lack of recent Steam product innovation may open a window for deeper competition. That said, the Sim City server debacle suggests EA still has a ways to go building a stable, scalable internet presence.

One of the things EA doesn’t get enough credit for is the transformation of FIFA into a virtual goods engine. Without question, FIFA has become the global lynchpin franchise for the company bridging both the packaged goods and digital spheres. As of the end of 2012 the company said it sold 12 million FIFA ’13 units across all platforms. But the most impressive thing to me is that they’ve generated well over $150MM of virtual goods revenue from their FIFA Ultimate Team mod – a virtual goods engine that runs on top of the packaged goods product (this is in addition to the $70MM+ they are generating from the Asian online-only versions).

FIFA Ultimate Team is one of the coolest things the company has done recently – a trading card game masquerading as a management simulation with a fantastic compulsion loop that enhances the core FIFA product. It blows digital trading card games like Rage of Bahamut out of the water and has a passionate, engaged fan base. They should be trying to replicate Ultimate Team with all of their sports franchises. They need to migrate their sports businesses to subscription services, and Ultimate Team suggests that they can make good money with innovative new digital products.

So, assuming EA had a focused next-gen management team with good product selection capabilities and good monetization/analytics skills, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine EA generating $2 billion in high-margin digital revenue (as I define it): three or four $100MM or better mobile franchises, three or four $150MM or better PC free-to-play franchises, $200MM or so from online (Pogo, casual and social gaming), and $500MM from digital sports products, on top of their other online and mobile activities. I think this business, if properly managed, could throw off between $1.00 to $1.50 in EPS.

That sort of business would be roughly 50% bigger than Zynga on the top line and much, much more profitable. So with Zynga as a current apples-to-apples comp, this should be good for $4 billion in market cap by itself, and, given the revenue and earnings growth potential, probably considerably more. Plus, the underlying platforms are all growing like weeds, so there’s a strong tailwind for EPS multiple expansion. When I say that EA could be a smaller, more focused, more profitable company without sacrificing current market cap, this is what I am talking about.

Which brings us to the console business. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, console is the wild card for the future of EA, the platform with the most risk. As everyone knows, the console business has been declining at double-digit percentage rates year-over-year for the last few years. At the same time, the option value ascribed to a possible re-invigoration of the console market from the launch of new hardware this Christmas has produced what some are calling a “dead cat bounce” for EA and Activision, who have the greatest exposure to the new consoles. In order to be a player on the new consoles, EA will need to greenlight a dozen titles, and they will be very, very expensive – given EA’s penchant for big spending, the need to support multiple hardware platforms simultaneously at launch, and online features, this could be close to a $1 billion R&D expense. And given the customary annual refresh in the sports genres, it’s necessary to keep spending year after year.

In a particularly telling interview, EA’s out-going CEO described the launch of new consoles as “the light at the end of the tunnel.” I’m worried it may instead be the headlights of an on-coming train. The console business, even digitally-enhanced, is just a completely different business than the mobile and online free-to-play businesses. The two businesses require different people, different infrastructure and logistics, different team sizes, different development cadences, different marketing strategies, and very different revenue recognition models. Despite the considerable differences in scale and scope, mobile and free-to-play PC are actually much more alike than either is like console.

Further, I think you could easily take the position that there will never be a return to the installed base level that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft saw with their c. 2005 consoles. They’ve essentially lost the living room. I watch my own children, sitting on the couch, ignoring the massive HDTV hooked up to every game console in existence and broadband internet, playing Temple Run on the tiny screens of their mobile phones. To use the old parlance of by-gone console industry analysis, there is likely to be a massive fall off in peak-to-peak margins.

EA has a dilemma. By yoking their business to the new consoles, they hamstring the company with bloated teams, high production costs, and packaged goods marketing and merchandising that is not, in my opinion, additive to their other business opportunities. Console investment doesn’t position EA well for the future. There are few economies of scale  on the audience aggregation side — unless you think like a feature film company and view the massive TV advertising spend on console games as having a “brand halo” that benefits the mobile and online games. The only way EA benefits is if console players come online and authenticate with EA rather than Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo. Otherwise, EA can’t really do anything to leverage them cross-game or cross-platform. And the console manufacturers are not likely to be easily dis-intermediated.

But if EA doesn’t support the new consoles, they are going to feel strongly that they have missed an opportunity for quick, if ephemeral revenue growth. It’s super-seductive for their senior management, who see the console business as their wheelhouse and who are dubious about launching new franchise intellectual properties through mobile or online free-to-play. Because of this, if they go all-in on console, it’s going to get the lion’s share of the attention of management, and the big, talented teams of developers. It’s going to demand TV advertising and massive retail merchandising presence. It’s going to require sharing audience with Microsoft and Sony, who have their own online ambitions. It is fraught with peril and execution risk, and demands a nuanced long-term strategy. For me, EA Games needs the biggest re-think – that division has been pretty undisciplined about product selection, cost control and marketing spend in the past, and represents the biggest downside risk on the new platforms.

So, in the end, I think there is a lot to work with, but a lot of hard, cost-cutting work to be done to get EA back to greatness. They don’t have the management team to execute against all of these opportunities simultaneously, and recent management losses haven’t helped, leaving the old guard with greater power and stripping the company of some much-needed new thinking.

However, I’m more convinced than ever that traditional attributes like brand and quality can produce meaningful efficiencies in customer acquisition costs, which certainly aren’t negatives for EA. The sports business, while not as profitable as it once was, is still a global force and they’ve done a good job at the margins trying to modernize that business. There are certainly things to be optimistic about. On the other hand, EA is a very conservative company at its core, and will struggle to change in the dramatic way that the new market opportunity requires. EA’s current strategic situation suggests that the search for a new CEO could be very, very difficult.

On that first panel, Blake Wooster from Prozone drew a comparison between football and basketball. He found it interesting that the NBA was just starting to get positional tracking data (through the STATS company SportVU), while the Premiership clubs had access to this sort of data for nearly a decade. Yet, while the football positional data had been available, he said, the level of analytics, the development of a coherent game model, or framework for the data, lagged. I want to return to Wooster’s observation, because I think seeing how this observation played out over the intervening two years speaks volumes about the problem of football analytics at SSAC in 2013.

In 2012 football analytics returned to the main stage at SSAC, but this time the thrill of the new had worn off and expectations were higher. Again, Mark Stein moderated a panel of mostly club representatives and media figures. In my opinion, it was extremely disappointing.

If that panel was all you knew about football analytics, as was likely the case for the vast majority of people who sat in that audience, you would have been perplexed. The most popular and richest sport in the world seemed to be approaching analytics with the mindset of 19th century vicars approaching Darwin. The unstated implications of the panel were dire: bright club analysts were walled up in silos, stunted by secrecy, and largely under-utilized (and also underpaid). The independent analysts — the potential Bill James’ of football — were starved by lack of data. Everybody seemed overwhelmed by the challenges of modeling the flowing complexity and lack of tangible statistical events inherent in the sport. I left that panel feeling like football analytics was the proverbial group of blind men trying to describe the elephant.

Fast-forward to SSAC 2013: the impressive Cornell professor Chris Anderson is announced for the football analytics panel, along with Jeff Agoos from the MLS league office, Blake Wooster from Prozone, and ESPN football analyst Albert Larcada. The inclusion of Anderson, co-author of the great Soccer by the Numbers blog, seemed to be an acknowledgment of the failings of 2012; he has a much-anticipated book on football analytics coming out in a couple of months, and is considered to be one of the most serious independent thinkers in the game. And yes, this year’s panel was better than 2012 — but it was a pretty low bar. Yet, when the panel had ended and the dust settled, it again felt disappointing to me.

And particularly so, given the progress being made in basketball. Blake Wooster’s 2011 comment about the head-start football analytics has with spatial data seemed to have been largely erased in the intervening two years, at least by what was on display at SSAC. The wonderfully droll Kirk Goldsberry, visiting Harvard professor and Grantland contributor, delivered an amazing research paper on quantifying interior defenders in basketball. Goldsberry’s paper was not only an impressive work of data analytics and visualization; it was also immediate conversation fodder for NBA fans, media analysts, and league pros. It took a little-understood but frequently-observed phenomenon in the sport and made it instantly comprehensible through analysis, producing some surprises along the way (i.e., Larry Sanders vs. David Lee). Goldsberry had made a similar impact at SSAC ’12, with a paper about NBA scoring efficiency. This is the kind of work that could propel esoteric NBA analytics into the mainstream.

The best that the football analysts could muster in response was pretty pathetic. Albert Larcada showed some ESPN “heat maps” from the Real Madrid-Barcelona match that basically revealed that Messi played in the center and Ronaldo on the wing. Not that big of a revelation. When asked about fertile areas of investigation, Chris Anderson mentioned “defense” without offering much more. Others mentioned the financial fair play rules and MLS salary cap, again without much to offer in terms of approach. Geir Jordet presented a paper that proved that really good midfielders complete more passes because they look around at the position of players on the field a lot. Interesting in its quantification of the phenomenon, but not really a major paradigm-changer. If you watched one of my son’s U13 club matches, you’d see that kids who look around before receiving the ball are better at football than kids who don’t.

Back in 2011, the brilliant Sarah Rudd (now at football analytics firm StatDNA) published a research paper about the use of Markov Chains to analyze collective contributions to goal scoring in football. For me, this was one of the best approaches I’d ever seen, and it made me think about the situational/probabilistic concepts of space and decision-making — concepts which everyone can agree are at the very heart of football — in a fresh new way. (A variation on her methodology showed up this year in some pre-Super Bowl NFL analytics of expected points from offensive drives.) For the non-professional football fan looking for data-driven enrichment of the match viewing experience, Rudd’s work was astonishing — and would be even better if re-presented in a more visual, fan-friendly way.

There are some really bright people making meaningful contributions to the public understanding of football analytics. Just the one’s I’ve met personally, like Howard Hamilton at Soccermetrics, Simon Gleave at Infostrada Sports in Holland, and Zach Slaton, a contributor to Forbes (his review of football analytics at this year’s SSAC was excellent, and maps closely to my own experience), have all been doing interesting things. I’d highly recommend their writing and the other articles on the StatDNA blog, and the aggregator site Soccer Analysts, as well. They all seem to be doing good work.

But the lack of really important contributions on display at SSAC ’13, particularly compared to the great leaps forward being made in basketball, makes me wonder. The club reps and professional analysts would like us to believe that we are only seeing the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg, and that all the really cool stuff is happening behind closed doors inside clubs or as work for hire. But I have worked in technology businesses long enough to smell bullshit when I am asked to trust the experts and not my own eyes. Often that iceberg is really more like an ice cube floating in a soft drink. I think it is entirely possible that there may be less going on in football analytics than meets the eye.

If the SSAC conference organizers are just going to trot out a group of football insiders in 2014 and let them talk in vague generalities about how hard analyzing football is and how secret their secret sauce is, they might as well not put football analytics on the main stage again. In my opinion, if they have to fill the panel with club representatives and ESPN guys, at least pick one or two key on-pitch or transfer market questions and go really deep. Force panelists to have opinions. Don’t let them off the hook. Better, let’s have some balance between the club reps and the independent analysts, and really take the gloves off. Let’s have an argument about what the best current game model is. It’s about time.

The presentations were extremely diverse, as usual. But there were a couple of dominant themes in the sessions I attended (and there’s a bit of selection bias in the sessions I attended given my own interests):

1. The rise of spatial data. I flagged this as a trend last year, but this year it was clear that spatial data is going to provide extremely important explanatory power for analysts in basketball, baseball, and probably football and soccer, too. It may be the key to unlocking the tricky problem of quantifying defense, which has always been a challenge for conventional statistics.

2. The importance of communication. Probably in response to the continued resistance the data geeks are encountering inside clubs, there was a very strong “story-telling” theme at the conference. Visualization was a hot topic. Making complex data understandable to non-geeks inside clubs, and to fans, was a repeated concern. I was particularly impressed by the “data cartographers” like Kirk Goldsberry (CourtVision) and Joe Ward (New York Times). These guys are true artists.

3. The acknowledgement that data/analytics have significant limitations. This was an interesting theme — the notion that luck and randomness can obfuscate data, that humans have strong results-bias, and strong loss-avoidance bias. It showed up in several talks, as did the idea that intuition and judgment play important roles in decision-making, and the human vagaries and biases that come with that intuition and judgment. I thought Michael Mauboussin did a great job providing a framework for these ideas in his brief talk on luck. The great Nate Silver (whom Bill Simmons referred to as “Dork Jesus” during the show) also provided some interesting insight here.

4. Open-source vs. proprietary data for competitive advantage. When Bill James and the SABR-metricians were making their contributions to baseball in the late 70′s and 80′s, they were a fringe group working with public data. They worked for decades without the taint of team sponsorship, before Billy Beane and Moneyball dragged them into public view. Now that sports analytics has gone mainstream, a lot of important work is being done by in-house number-crunchers, working in secret, in order to provide clubs with competitive advantage. The lack of community and lack of broad data access may be retarding analytics innovation in sports like basketball (as this Slate piece discusses) and almost certainly in soccer. I’ll discuss the soccer problem in another post, but it was remarkable how little progress there has been developing “game models” for soccer, from the public perspective.

For me, the unexpected insight was that this conference has a lot of applicability to venture investing. A lot of the problems the sports world is struggling with — talent assessment, understanding the contributions of skill and luck to success, the use of data to derive insight into “black boxes,” valuations and the upside potential of players at various stages of development, etc. — have analogs in the venture business. Paying Joe Flacco $120MM over 6 years at this stage of his career is very similar to venture investors betting big dollars and high valuations on previously-successful 40 year old repeat entrepreneurs. Maybe not such a good idea.

Snapchat is a unique mobile communications service that allows users to send photos and short videos to their friends and family. The sender tags the photo or video to disappear after the recipient has viewed it for a few seconds. The heightened sense of privacy created by the fact that the shared content is not persistent has made Snapchat a huge hit with young people. When I asked teenagers about Snapchat late last summer, I heard again and again that they liked it because the ephemeral nature of the content allowed them to be themselves — to share a weird or ugly or banal picture that they would have been uncomfortable posting on other well-known social networks for fear of getting dissed. When you hear things like this from customers, you know the product is connecting with people in a powerful way.

I’m very excited to work with bold entrepreneurs like Evan and Bobby to help build Snapchat. At Benchmark we search for entrepreneurs who want to change the world, and Evan and Bobby certainly have that ambition. We believe that Snapchat can become one of the most important mobile companies in the world, and Snapchat’s initial momentum — 60 million shared “snaps” per day, over 5 billion sent through the service to date — supports that belief. Snapchat’s ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.

Finally, a quick word about Los Angeles. Snapchat is headquartered in LA, a city with an growing community of startups. Benchmark has had a lot of recent success investing in southern California, with our exits from JAMDAT, Business.com, Riot Games and Gaikai having generated over $1.8 billion in equity value. In addition, we’ve made some exciting new investments in LA companies like Thatgamecompany, Dogvacay, Brighter, and now Snapchat. I spent the majority of my career in LA, and I know first hand the energy and talent in that great city.

That said, I want to take issue with two often-repeated conclusions that appear in Dean’s piece (and others) drawn from the OnLive fiasco. The first, more narrow one is that “OnLive failed because it was too early for cloud gaming.” I think this is nonsense. In my opinion, OnLive failed for three reasons, none of which include being “too early”:
OnLive chose a consumer-facing, “console in the cloud” strategy that initially required customers to pay a subscription at a time when subscriptions were going out of favor in gaming under pressure from free-to-play models (they later went free for demos but paid for premium games) and which required publishers to pay a platform tax and let OnLive own the customer relationship. Normally, publishers will only consent to this kind of enforced aggregation and high tax when they are getting something meaningful in exchange that they couldn’t get elsewhere (access to closed iOS devices, or to Facebook’s billion eyeballs, for example). Contrast this with Gaikai, who offered publishers the cloud platform as a metered service, and let them determine how they wanted to monetize their customers, if at all.

In order to be a viable consumer-facing business, and satisfy the implied and explicit quality of service promises that they were making to customers, OnLive had to over-build the network in advance of proven demand. This put tremendous strain on their treasury – cloud gaming can be a capital-intensive business during the network build-out. To me, this reads as “too aggressive” not “too early.”

OnLive’s CEO, Steve Perlman, was a relentless and extremely successful fundraiser. He was able to raise more money at higher valuations than any other company in the space. Unfortunately, that success was a double-edged sword, as he had raised money from investors at valuations which far exceeded the short-term M&A value of his company. He couldn’t salvage OnLive in a sale for a modest premium to the price Sony acquired Gaikai, for example, because he had raised money at two and half times that value. Perhaps high-valuation fundraising would have made sense long-term as an equity preservation strategy for founders and employees, but it severely compromised OnLive’s ability to maneuver short-term.

The second conclusion that Dean makes is that the OnLive collapse will have a chilling effect on investments in games companies. “The rest of the game industry may suffer along with OnLive, particularly if funding for daring ventures dries up,” he writes. He then tries to connect the dots between OnLive, 38 Studios’ bankruptcy, and Zynga’s recent poor stock performance. I think that’s a stretch.

Without question these are unfortunate events for the games business. But, by analogy, no reasonable person looks at the troubles at Nokia, RIM and Palm and thinks that mobile is a bad place to invest. Instead, they look at the management decisions, governance and strategic choices made by those companies and see them for what they are. The overall momentum in games, like in mobile, is bigger and more powerful than the foibles of any particular company, and certainly not a general indictment of “daring ventures” in the gaming space.

Philosophically, I treat text the same way I treat photos, music and video. I want device independence and open (or broadly-accepted) file formats. I want my writing to be future proof. It sucks that I can’t access my college thesis today because I can’t read floppies, I can’t run CP/M and I can’t decode a WordStar file.

The answer to this problem, for me, is UNIX, Dropbox, and plain text. The Mac OS isn’t UNIX, but it’s running on UNIX, and it uses enough of the file system standards to give me OS comfort — I figure I’ll always be able to fire up a Linux client somewhere and mount a device. Dropbox, discussed earlier, gives me device and platform independence. I can get my files on my phone, my tablet, my PCs, and even a generic web browser. Plain text editing has moved well beyond programming and command line geeks, and tools now exist to make using plain text a better alternative than bloated old-school formats like Word.

Thinking

Writing well means thinking clearly and organizing. I find outlining absolutely essential when I’m thinking about writing something, or doing a speech or presentation. I almost always scribble out a rough outline for anything longer than a couple of paragraphs.

My long-form writing workflow starts with OmniOutliner. I bang out a basic outline and refine it as much as I can, trying to figure out what I want to say in broad concepts, and in what order. Then I flesh it out a little, or throw it out and start again.

Every piece of significant writing has a narrative structure, an argument. I used to do a seminar for my teams on the art of presentations, and my main point was to get good at storytelling. And storytelling is fundamentally about structure. Beginning, middle, end. Introduction, exposition, conclusion. For me, the outline is an essential part of thinking through structure.

OmniOutliner is simple, powerful and fast. But the best thing about OmniOutliner is its connectivity. It exports to Keynote, rich text, plain text, Word, HTML and best of all, OPML. I’ll explain how I use OPML in my writing workflow in the next section.

Long-Form Writing

Scrivener is the best $45 you will ever spend if you are a serious writer. Much has been written about it already, so I’ll only talk about what I do with it. It is so powerful and deep that it’s like a great programming IDE for writing. But despite its complexity and depth, it’s remarkably easy to use in a basic way. Scrivener gets out of my way and lets me engage with the page as cleanly as possible. It doesn’t feel like a “word processor” — it feels like a writing tool.

Scrivener is opinionated software. It assumes that writers want to write, not format. It assumes that writers want to work with discrete segments — chapters, scenes, sections — and potentially move them around without worrying about the rest of the document. It assumes that writers want to keep their notes and research close to but separate from their manuscript. But it also assumes writers will want to print — or at least read or export — their manuscript in a nice format with minimal effort. Since this mirrors the way I write (and I’d guess the way a lot of others write), this works well for me.

As I said before, I start with an imported outline. Scrivener converts standard OPML files from OmniOutliner into a set of files corresponding to my outline headers. It’s so great to start a potentially long and daunting writing project with a scaffolding like this. I can work on a section, move things around, keep a single idea compartmentalized. But with one click I can see the whole document any time I want. I can do research in a companion interface and quickly incorporate. It has flexible metadata capabilities. It’s fast, too.

With Scrivener’s sync capability, I can link my writing project to a folder on Dropbox, and Scrivener will then output all the distinct parts of my manuscript to the Dropbox folder as plain text files. I can edit them on literally any device — I’ve worked on sections of a book using a Chrome browser text editor in a hotel business center, or using a text editor on an iPhone. When I re-open the project in Scrivener, it syncs with the Dropbox files and incorporates all my changes. There’s a long-awaited iPad version supposedly on the way. If it materializes, it only makes this awesome tool even more awesome.

Short-Form Writing

For short blog posts and longer emails, I use a standard text editor. For several years, I have been using TextMate, which I really like. I never felt the deep passionate love for it that many of my programmer friends did, but it worked fine. When I needed to make a quick text file edit in the Mac Terminal, I could fire it up from the command line with the “mate” command. However, the people behind TextMate are no longer supporting it, so I am now experimenting with Sublime Text as my new text editor. It’s ok, but again, not worthy of special praise. I still tend to prefer the old TextMate 1.5.

I’ve tried a bunch of iPad text editors. I don’t really feel strongly about any of them. Byword, iA Writer, Notesy, TextTastic, and PlainText all seem to work fine. The bigger issue for me on the iPad is text input. Despite a lot of practice, I’m not that comfortable touch typing on the iPad screen. I still prefer the tactile response and size of the standard QWERTY keyboard. I’m also conscious that in the near future this may be a bit like preferring the sound of vinyl records to mp3s — probably defensible, but irrelevant.

When I write for this blog, I write Markdown in a plain text editor. Markdown is a text formatting language that’s easy to type but which, when processed, produces nicely formatted rich text or HTML. The best thing about Markdown is that your plain text stays really readable as text, but can also take on sophisticated formatting for inclusion in a blog. It’s a major labor-saving trick with a relatively gentle learning curve. There’s a great tool for the Mac called Marked which lets you edit in Markdown on a text editor of your choosing, while seeing a formatted copy in a separate window, updated in real time. Highly recommended.

Code

I don’t code for a living, but I’ve written a lot of code in my life and whether it’s simple scripting, a PHP web site app, Ruby on Rails, or Python, code is it’s own unique writing problem. Like with short-form writing, I’ve found that TextMate — particularly the ability to handle multi-file projects — did the job for me. I still use it for small projects. I have never used Xcode, which a lot of people seem to view as the go-to IDE on the Mac. Too complicated for my simple needs, which don’t include Objective C.

Then there is GitHub. This is an amazing workflow resource even for rank amateurs like me. For professional coders, it’s a godsend. It’s a key step in my deployment workflow for the couple of web apps I manage. It’s a great version control / code repository tool. But it’s also a wonderful educational tool, full of great examples of code that amateurs like me can learn from. Git itself is a very cool technology. If I was writing a novel or screenplay, I would try to figure out how to integrate git as a version control system for Scrivener.

This is going to be a massive nerd-fest, so if you are not in the mood for a long read about personal productivity software, stop now. I’ve benefitted from the many bloggers who have shared their tips and techniques for dealing with the onslaught of modern digital work. I’ve learned some stuff by trial and error, and hopefully, if you choose to read on, you’ll find one or two interesting things in the posts that follow.

So, what is a workflow? My definition is the combination of tools and processes that I use to accomplish a task. The human-machine (software & hardware) interaction that helps me get work done. Given the amount of time we all spend interacting with software on computing devices of various kinds, and the productivity pressures of modern life, it’s worth being a little thoughtful about your workflow.

One of the greatest myths of the computer revolution is that a device or a piece of software represents a “solution.” Most of the tools in my computing arsenal require a lot of time and effort before they blend seamlessly into a flow and help me get things done. Often, new hardware or software starts off as a problem and only becomes a solution after a steep learning curve and hard work. The workflows in these posts represent solutions that work for me.

Two caveats. First, these are my opinions; sometimes I’ve tried competing products and rejected them, sometimes I have just settled on the first thing I’ve tried. These aren’t necessarily the best choices. They are simply my choices. Your mileage may vary. A lot. Second, I am an unapologetic Mac user. I own a couple of awesome Alienware X51 PCs that I use to play games, but I don’t work on them beyond some web apps in the Chrome browser. Most of the tools in these workflow posts are highly Mac and iOS specific. I’m sure someone out there will know better, cheaper alternatives to many of these products on the PC. Or Ubuntu. Whatever.

Everyday Workflow

Email & Calendar

I have to get this out of the way up front: I hate email. Well, not email itself, which is pretty great, but rather email clients. Unfortunately, my everyday workflow is dominated by email, so I spend a lot of time either in the Mac Mail client (which I use to aggregate my email accounts), or a Gmail or Exchange web client. I used to use Outlook/Entourage, which I found slow and buggy. I tried Sparrow, which worked fine for Gmail — nothing special, but simple and efficient — but not for my Exchange mail (the company behind Sparrow was recently acquired by Google).

My email workflow is inefficient and error prone, but I haven’t found any better way to do it over the last 20 years. Any time I’ve tried to develop automation to help me process my in-box, I’ve ended up with errors or lost email messages. I depend so much on reliable, timely email that I end up laboriously, constantly going through my in-box by hand, sorting, deleting and prioritizing. Ugh. Maybe I haven’t figured out the deep ninja tricks to make an email client work for me, but I’ve really struggled to develop a sensible workflow around my in-box. My only golden rule is to respond immediately to anything that’s susceptible to a quick resolution. The longer something sits in my in-box, the more error prone my workflow gets.

Because my overflowing in-box is a poor proxy for a task list, I tend to work from my in-box out to various other tools which I use to track tasks and projects. I’ll discuss task management later, but I have come to rely on the great Clip-o-Tron 3000 plugin for OmniFocus. This is a great little plugin — you launch it from the Services menu in Mail on a highlighted email message and it creates a task in your OmniFocus in-box with the text of the email as the task’s note. Great for getting email into a more manageable form.

I use the Mac Calendar as well. It works fine with Exchange and with Google’s Calendar, and I get a lot of shared calendars from people and organizations through Google. I tend to use Calendar for appointments and due-date specific tasks, while I use OmniFocus for my “next action” stuff.

File Management

Given the continued primacy of files in my workflow, the most important tool I use is Dropbox (disclosure: Benchmark is an investor). I absolutely adore Dropbox. If you don’t know what it is, stop reading this and go get it. I’ll wait. I no longer use the Documents folder on my Mac; instead I default file storage to my $99 a year 100Gb Dropbox account.

The great thing about Dropbox is how seamlessly it integrates into my computing environment. Because my Dropbox folder exists as a folder on my computer, it is available off-line and can be manipulated just like any normal file system folder. I always have access to all my files on all my devices. It also does a good job syncing settings for some of my software. It’s a hard disk in the cloud for my mobile devices. I don’t view it as a backup strategy, but it certainly gives me peace of mind that my files are synced and replicated in multiple locations. Essential.

I am also a big believer in basic file formats, because basic file formats give me the flexibility to avoid software lock-in, future-proof my work, and also use single-purpose tools on files to accomplish specific results. I try not to use apps that don’t have native support for either plain text, OPML, PDF, Markdown or some other broadly adopted format. A great thing about the Mac is the ability to print to PDF from any application. The combination of these basic file formats and Dropbox is fantastic, as it allows me the independence to use, for example, a new text editor that comes out on the iPad with all my existing files, no conversion or translation necessary.

One of the most useful workflow tools for file management on the Mac is Hazel. This simple program runs in the background as a system preferences panel and does one thing incredibly well: it applies rules to folders, like smart folders on steroids. This sounds kind of arcane, but in practice it’s magic. For example, I have a rule that watches my Downloads folder and moves any .dmg files to an “apps” folder on Dropbox at the end of the week. I have another one that looks for local Garageband projects and moves them to a Shared Music folder on a server. I have another one that cleans up my Desktop folder, and another that cleans up my Trash. Very cool.

Despite all this, I don’t love using folders as the main organizational scheme for files. I am currently playing with the academic research tool Papers to organize and keep track of board meeting presentations, pitch decks, and other company information. It feels very academic and designed to solve a publication/citation problem, but it gets rave reviews so I am seeing if I can adapt it to my needs.

Task Management

I am a big believer in the to do list. I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and, while I’m not religious about it, I have internalized a lot of the GTD methodology. Being a venture capitalist, and formerly a CEO, my day is usually filled with lots of small, discrete, and often disparate tasks. The core of my daily workflow is managing and processing lists of things I have to do, usually by myself: research, writing, phone calls, introductions, investment decisions, board meeting follow-up, etc.

One problem I’ve always had with strict GTD is that the old contexts for work never really matched my workflow. Like many modern workers, I have a lot less formal separation between home and work, desktop and mobile, than GTD contemplates. If you use the GTD methods but have experienced this same problem, read Sven Fechner’s “A Fresh Take on Contexts.” Worked for me.

I’ve tried pretty much every To Do list program out there. I’ve tried using outliners and text editors. I’ve tried using paper. My requirements for a task management tool are pretty simple. It has to be fast, accessible, and available on multiple devices (with good sync).

After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled on two tools for my task management: OmniFocus and Asana (disclosure: Benchmark is an investor). I use OmniFocus for my individual, daily brain-dump task management, and Asana for managing tasks on team-based projects.

OmniFocus is a pretty canonical implementation of the GTD methodology, but that isn’t why I adopted it. I like the speed, the UI (particularly the keyboard shortcuts and mobile apps), and the sync. It is deeply integrated with the Mac OS and iOS, so it plays nice with many other apps in my workflow. I spend a ton of time in this app every day, and it would be the most difficult piece of my workflow to replace.

I use Asana mainly for collaborative tasks performed with teams, where it really excels. I am extremely excited by the promise of Asana, particularly the openness of the platform and the ability for the fundamental data architecture to solve so many different collaborative task management problems, from bug tracking to planning a kid’s birthday party.

The thing that’s particularly great about Asana for teams is how it can aggregate a lot of a project’s history and data and even decision flow in a single interface, taking tons of email out of my in-box and creating a historical record of the project. If I was running a startup again, I’d organize around Asana and Dropbox and Google Docs from the get go. It would probably cut company email traffic down by 50%.

I love Asana’s slick web client. I wish they had an equally slick native mobile experience and I know they are working hard on it. If I could use contexts on my personal projects in Asana, and if it was as deeply integrated with other apps as OmniFocus, I could imagine doing all my task management in Asana.

Information Management

I use Evernote to keep track of all the little bits of information that I amass in my daily life. I probably only use a fraction of its capabilities, but it works to organize little bits and pieces of digital clutter, despite its wonky interface and unnecessary complexity. It’s highly searchable and works well on mobile devices. I used to store my browser bookmarks in the cloud on Delicious until it went away, and I moved all my Delicious bookmarks into Evernote where they coexist with everything else I store in there. It’s the best “digital shoebox” that I’ve used, but I think it’s ripe to be disrupted by an innovator with better design sensibilities.

I use Instapaper as a cache for longer articles that I want to save to read on airplanes. Very simple and very powerful, great on mobile devices. I love how it puts these articles into a standard format, so it feels like I’m reading a personalized magazine or newspaper rather than a collection of saved web sites. It’s a worthy companion to Twitter, if, like I do, you use Twitter as a firehose of information, a next-gen socially-curated RSS news feed. Integrates really well with the Kindle, too. I wish there was a video version where I could cache things to watch off-line with a personalized, consistent interface.

Office Suite

I do a lot of work in what’s historically been known as the Office Suite of software applications. I do a lot of writing, I do a lot of business modeling and other math in spreadsheets, and I do a lot of presentations.

The looming end of Microsoft Office as the dominant productivity software for business is a joyous thing for me. The old canard that Office was necessary for file format compatibility is fast disappearing. While I have Office installed on my machine, I rarely use it. I never use Word for text editing (I’ll talk about that more in the Writing Workflow post), and I prefer Apple’s Keynote for presentations, having abandoned Powerpoint long ago, so all that’s really left is the spreadsheet, and there I’ve largely replaced Excel with Google Docs. I love the ability to share that’s inherent in the Google suite, and I like the web integration (the ability to look up stock prices into cells through Google Finance, for example). I wish it was a little faster, though. It’s good for the kind of spreadsheet work I do, but it is not really suited to big, complex, inter-linked spreadsheets.

Identity Management

This is a subject for a separate post, but given the current state of identity (and security) on the internet, a password management tool is no longer an option but rather a necessity. In the past, these have been marketed as convenience tools (“automatically log on to websites!”) but their ability to generate strong passwords that I don’t have to explicitly remember is now the higher valued use for me. I’ve used two that I really like. 1Password has tons of features, decent mobile clients, but no native sync (I use Dropbox to sync it, but it’s a hack). In my experience, it has pretty buggy integration with browsers. Lately, I’ve found myself using LastPass more for my web identities, and 1Password as a more general identity vault. LastPass has a good 1Password import, and it’s not a lot of overhead to run both, so that’s what I do.

For me, Chrome plays an important role in my identity management, because I can use Chrome Apps to get access to my Gmail and Google Docs as well as third party sites that integrate with my Google identity, On my game PCs I do all my work through Chrome; I don’t own any client software other than games and anti-virus. Amazon and Apple are my go-to commercial identities (and Valve/Steam and Xbox Live for games); I have credit cards on file and one click commerce enabled. Amazon Prime may be the best (and most dangerous) commercial innovation in the history of the internet.

Identity management is both more of a challenge and more promising on mobile where apps dominate. A lot of the best apps, like Uber, manage my identity and credit card info in a way that makes their service incredibly seamless. It is interesting that Facebook Connect plays a greater role in my identity management on mobile than on the web, because it’s more of a pain to create new secure credentials on the phone or tablet. I’ve also just upgraded to iOS 6, and am looking forward to seeing how the new Passbook evolves.

So, that’s a pretty exhaustive look at my everyday workflow. Next, writing …

Benchmark was privileged to lead Gaikai’s Series A financing back in the fall of 2009 and to participate in both subsequent rounds alongside Rustic Canyon and NEA. We were early believers in both cloud computing (Rightscale, Eucalyptus, Engine Yard) and next-gen game distribution (Riot, Meteor). We saw Gaikai positioned squarely at the intersection of these powerful trends.

Thanks to the great team at Gaikai for their creativity, diligent work and strategic nous. I had the opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with the senior team on site in Aleso Viejo when I served as executive chairman, and I saw Rui Pereira, Robert Stevenson, Brendan Irbe, Nanea Reeves, Mark Anderson and, of course, David Perry in action. They are all true professionals and fully deserve their success.

I particularly want to thank David Perry, Gaikai’s CEO. I first met David when he was making the ground-breaking console game Aladdin and I was at Disney. While we crossed paths over the intervening years, Gaikai was our first opportunity to work closely together. Like all great entrepreneurs, David believed that his idea could change the world, and he went out and made it happen. He has been a relentless ambassador not just for Gaikai, but for the whole category. David saw a future for gaming in the cloud, and his leadership both at Gaikai and now at Sony is going to see that future realized.

Many people in the packaged-goods games business know NaturalMotion from their Euphoria and Morpheme 3D animation engines, which have been used in high-end console games to produce incredibly realistic character animation (if you’ve played Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, for example, you’ve seen this in action).  Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion, recognized that he could port a substantial subset of these technologies to the surprisingly-capable iPhone and iPad platforms, and in so doing leapfrog existing assumptions about what gaming could be on those devices.

The early results, My Horse and CSR Racing (which Apple recently demonstrated on stage at the WWDC keynote), show the incredible promise of console quality and production values matched with the successful free-to-play business models that have taken root in mobile gaming.  NaturalMotion is in production on a slate of innovative products that will stretch the boundaries of some existing genres, as CSR has done with iOS driving games, and also create some exciting new genres we haven’t seen before on the platform.

I’m looking forward to working with NaturalMotion, and with an incredibly talented entrepreneur like Torsten Reil, on this exciting endeavor.

There has been positive play and goals have been plentiful (not a single nil-nil draw in the group stage), including some real gems like Ibrahimovic’s or Welbeck’s or Ballotelli’s (you could put Di Natale’s in the mix, or Silva’s, or Schevchenko’s brace, too). Unfortunately, many of the first-round goals went in against the Irish, whose -8 goal difference and 9 goals conceded in repeated pastings were an embarrassment — and not a great advertisement for the expanded 24-team format in 2016. Apart from Ireland, there were three 5-goal matches and five 2:1′s, a welcome absence of play-acting and diving, and few major complaints about the officiating (save the Ukraine non-goal vs. England).

The fact that every group went down to the last match (and in several cases, down to the last kick in injury time) made for some excellent TV. The final matches went on simultaneously, with the mood of the fans rising and falling as news came into each stadium from the other match in real time via text and Twitter. There were several moments when a single goal could (and did) upend a group.

In Group A, the Czechs beat Poland and the Greeks miraculously beat previously dominant Russia by equally-tense 1:0 scores, sending the match winners through to the quarterfinals against most predictions.  In B, Portugal stylishly beat the floundering Dutch 2:1 to advance (pre-tournament favorite Holland lost all three group matches); Germany beat Denmark by the same score and won the Group of Death. In C, the big favorite Spain won the group, but barely beat Croatia 1:0 in a game they could easily have lost but for Casillas’ save of a diving Croatian header (which, had it stood up as the winner, would have knocked Spain out of the tournament).  In the other match, Italy beat the hapless Irish to advance. Finally, in Group D, England gutted out a win over the hosts Ukraine 1:0 and won the group, while Sweden manhandled a lifeless France 2:0 and left the tournament with some pride.

I can’t move on from the group stage results without mentioning the utterly baroque tie-breaking rules for the UEFA tournaments. I’ve read the commentary on both sides of this issue, and I appreciate the potential unfairness of the UEFA rules. It’s lame that most fans couldn’t figure out the various permutations for advancement in a major tournament without a computer.

That said, the mini-leagues and UEFA coefficients produced some unexpected results, and I would argue that the net result was a meaningful forcing function in favor of winning the final matches rather than drawing (and the fact that there were no draws on Match Day 3 seems to support that — despite the fact that draws would have been just fine for many teams). I think that made for a better viewing experience. By the way, the best and simplest fix for this that I heard was to use UEFA rules for two-way ties (head-to-head) and FIFA rules for three-way ties (goal difference).

As good as the group stage has been, the tournament looks set up for a great finish.  On one side of the bracket, Germany play Greece and Italy play England. On the other side, Spain play France and Portugal play Czech Republic. I’d love to see a Portugal-Spain semifinal, with Ronaldo going against his Real Madrid teammates, and a Germany-Italy grinder. But I can imagine England getting past Italy to face Germany, and I wouldn’t be surprised by a Czech victory over Portugal in a low-scoring game.

The Spain-Germany final looms. They are clearly the two most in-form teams in the tournament so far, and I can’t really see any of the remaining teams beating them if they play at their best. But there may be a lot of twists and turns left in this tournament before we get there.