Elliot C Smith (Page 7)

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Balatro is a special kind of good

Balatro is a great game. Reviews, game of the year awards, and general sentiment seem to agree. The question I've been pondering is why. There's something special about the way the mechanics and small details of the game come together that make it so satisfying. This

Manage risks, not methods.

The hardest part of transitioning into management is becoming comfortable with people doing things differently from you. Your job shifts from what you can output to how much output you can generate in others. Many first-time managers make the mistake of thinking their job is to ensure their reports do

Maxwell Plus - Lessons Learned

(This post also appeared over on the MSV blog.) It is easy to announce a new investment in a new company when all we need to talk about is the potential of an opportunity. But we don’t speak enough about the companies that don’t make it. Maxwell Plus

Thoughts on service and tech startups

Some definitions. The rest of this post will only make sense if we’re on the same page about what a technology and service business is. The scenarios I am describing combine human-delivered specialty service and a technology platform enabling that service delivery. In the long term, these companies tend

Let your users start over

I wish that more products had an option to reset to factory settings. Whether I haven’t used a product in a long time or have found a new way to set things up, there are plenty of reasons to return to square one. In a world where more and

The Signal and the Noise Review

Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise successfully walks the fine line of communicating a complex set of ideas in enough detail to be both interesting and informative. The book introduces the reader to statistical modelling through examples in sports, politics, finance, and science. It makes no attempt to

Lessons from one too many model spreadsheets

Few things can be as helpful and potentially time-wasting as modelling your business with a spreadsheet and setting metrics. A clear model of how you make money is a great tool to help identify bottlenecks or risks. On the other hand, it is very easy for models and the team

Kingdom Two Crowns: Call of Olympus

Kingdoms Two Crowns Call of Olympus extends the best the series has to offer while adding new and interesting mechanics. The game maintains its complex gameplay tied behind a set of simple mechanics. Overall, the DLC provides an excellent collection of extra content to an already well-made game. Those familiar

The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire is a short, fun adventure from All Possible Futures that, short of a few launch day bugs, is a great game. I picked this one up via PlayStation Plus, where it was a day-one inclusion. Despite getting it for free, I recommend you pick up a copy.

Nodebuster

Nodebuster is a simple game packed with fun. An entry in the ever-growing genre of small, incremental-type games, Nodebuster provides a few hours of fun at a very reasonable price. The game's premise is simple enough: move your cursor on top of the enemies while triggering automatic attacks.