Does a background playing games build transferable skills that make someone a better founder?

Aidan Gomez · Aug 19, 2024 · hedged

Video games cultivate traits that matter for founders: willingness to grind through repetitive painful work toward a goal, and a framing that failure is retryable and improvable.

Games teach resilience and give you a second attempt, unlike cultures where a single reputational failure ends you; that notion of progress through failure carries over.

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Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

Games are safe simulation sandboxes that teach growth mindset and social skills — encountering challenges, failing, iterating, cooperating, dividing tasks, taking and ceding leadership, losing and winning gracefully

Playing and replaying challenges is literally the iterate-on-failure loop, and multiplayer forces cooperation, task division and leadership rotation

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Harry Stebbings · Mar 8, 2023

The interviewer's own observation (which he says he tweeted) is that the best founders he works with have a background in either game design or in being exceptional game players

Pattern he has observed across the founders he works with

Scope: based on his own portfolio/experience

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Harry Stebbings · Aug 19, 2024

Based on meeting many founders, the speaker observes a very high correlation between those who gamed in their early years and those who achieved success as founders.

Pattern he has observed across meeting many successful founders.

Scope: based on his own observation of founders he has met

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Victor Riparbelli · Jan 15, 2025

Playing computer games is one of the best things a kid can do for future success

Strategy games are a microcosm of the universe that let you run enormous numbers of decision simulations with fast two-way feedback — training you'd otherwise only get by actually running a business

61:42 Strategy games train business decision making through simulation

Harry Stebbings · Jan 15, 2025

Running a clan in a computer game is better preparation than university

61:49 Clan leadership in games beats university as founder preparation

Victor Riparbelli · Jan 15, 2025

Playing computer games as a child is socially and cognitively valuable — comparable to solving math problems or reading STEM books — rather than isolating or a waste of time

Games are social because you play with others online, and strategy games exercise the same faculties as math and STEM reading; the parental fear of isolation is the same nuance-free claim now made about TikTok

66:32 Games are socially and cognitively valuable not isolating

Glen Coates · Mar 8, 2023 · hedged

Gaming and game design backgrounds may produce good founders because both require an analytical and competitive mind willing to repeatedly fail at the same problem for marginal improvement

Founding a company and building product is mostly an exercise in losing — smashing your head against the wall repeatedly for slight gains and occasional small rewards

5:47 Gaming analytical competitive mindset tolerates repeated failure