Nathon Gunn, CEO of Social Game Universe missed a unique opportunity to create a service like YouTube in the nineties because he was looking for approval from the major content producers. The new thinking is to ship often, and Version 1.0 of our offering doesn’t have to be perfect – we need to get our “art” so the world can see. Users will tell us what is wrong, and they will help us to make it better – we just have to listen to them. Do you agree with that?
Nathon (Photo credit: Matthew Burpee)
Here is an excerpt from Gunn’s interview.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Nathon Gunn: We work a lot in the internet industry, and one of the things I did in the nineties was I created a technology for uploading video to the web. I believed in the idea of users creating their own content, instead of big companies creating content and distributing it to users, and that’s what is now known as user-generated content. I worked for nearly four years trying to convince the big companies to get behind me, support me and build this. What I wish we had done differently was just built and launched the product.
We’re are living in an era with technology where you can, with a couple of people, build and launch things, and you find out very quickly if it works or doesn’t. I probably would have changed my need to be loved by the big companies, and my need to get the big companies to support me because of a psychological dependence on what I had grown up with – the idea that CBS and NBC and ABC were the big players and you had to be involved with them. So I was hampered by something that I don’t think the new generation of entrepreneurs really are as much, and I would change that.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Nathon Gunn: It’s funny how mentors can influence your life. Certainly one of the most important things has been support. When things are tough, you need people who you can talk to about the challenges, and you need people who support you even when you make mistakes. Mentors have been there and they know what you’re going through, so they can lend a kind of empathy, as well as intelligent advice that you can’t get from friends necessarily. I have been influenced to be a good person, to be ethical, by some of my mentors who have made it a point of living their lives in a wonderful way by giving back to people even in their mentorship. And so by example they have led the way. I have done my best, and will continue to try to do my best and follow in their examples. I think they have influenced my life to remember to be generous to other people, and to be ethical in dealings, to take the high road whenever you can.
In some cases, I’ve had mentors who I’ve seen do things, and they’ve even talked about some of the things they’ve done wrong, and I’ve learned from negative examples or what not to do. And a good mentor will be quite candid about that, and I think in another way my life’s been influenced by mentors was simply through generosity. Sometimes a door needs to be opened and you just can’t open it yourself so I think that’s another way they have influenced my life.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Nathon Gunn: I received a lot, but if there was one core message, is to stick to it. There have been many lessons that have been important to me because of my specific strengths and weaknesses. But if there is one thing that a mentor has shared, and the mentors have brought to the table in their message is to stick to it, because these are all people who have made it through thick and thin, and we are all people who go through thick and thin, and one of the few things that you can’t get from anybody else, that you can get from mentors is the reminder that you can make it if you stick with it.
Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?
Nathon Gunn: I made a point of working with the best people I could find. I made a point of conceptualizing the most interesting projects that I could imagine that were realistic opportunities that would be in demand by the customers and the audience. And I used those conceptual ideas for really exciting and interesting products to inspire the best people I could find, and then together we went and found support, and opened doors to the kinds of partners who we wanted to work with. I would say it requires reading about things, it requires meeting people to make sure you have access to talent requires understanding your industry, know which doors you want to open, and which people you need to talk to. It requires learning how to talk to those people, in their language, about the things that you want to do, and then it just requires work and persistence, – not to beat a dead horse – but that’s been my formula, and it seems to work.
What are five takeaways from Nathon Gunn’s interview? Please add your thoughts in the comments section below.
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