Only the Obsessed Should Ship
The Moat is Giving a Shit
In 1998, Satoru Iwata sat down with the source code for Pokémon Red and Blue. Four programmers at Game Freak had written the original games more or less on the fly, with basically no documentation, and Nintendo wanted Pokémon Stadium for the N64, which meant the new game needed the original battle system intact.
The problem: nobody at Nintendo could read Game Freak’s code.
At the time, Iwata was president of HAL Laboratory and wasn’t even on Nintendo’s payroll - but he took the codebase home anyway, sat with it, and ported the whole battle system to N64 in something like a week.
A year later he did it again, pushing Game Freak to cram the original Kanto region from Red and Blue inside Pokémon Gold and Silver and writing the compression algorithm himself to help make it fit, because he wanted the players to have more.
Because he cared.
Because he was passionate.
My hottest of hot takes: the only people who should run companies that make things are people who deeply give a fuck about those things. Cheeseburgers or software, it doesn’t matter: if you don’t love it, don’t build it.
If you don’t play games for fun, you shouldn’t be running a games company, and if you don’t read for pleasure on weekends, you shouldn’t be running a publisher, and the same logic extends out to restaurants, action figures, running shoes, and anything else somebody decided to manufacture.
Phil Knight ran middle distance at Oregon under Bill Bowerman, then sold shoes out of the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant before Nike was Nike. Yvon Chouinard started what would become Patagonia in 1957 by forging his own pitons in a coal-fired backyard forge, because the pitons he could buy kept failing him on real rock, and James Dyson built 5,127 vacuum cleaner prototypes across 5 years before one of them worked, and four thousand prototypes deep is a place spreadsheets will not take you.
The inverse case is Bobby Kotick, who ran Activision Blizzard from 1991 to 2023, and the widely reported version of his tenure runs as follows: he didn’t play games, he treated the products as financial instruments to be optimised, and he expressed visible surprise when employees cared about the quality of the work. Diablo Immortal shipped in 2022 with monetisation so aggressive that maxing out a single character through legendary gems was estimated to run upwards of $100,000. After its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing went the same way, the engineers stopped running the company, the finance people took over, and in 2018 and 2019 the 737 MAX MCAS failures killed 346 people across two crashes.
Companies bend toward whatever the person at the top actually cares about, which means that if you care about quarterly revenue, the product gets sanded over time into something that extracts efficiently and pleases nobody, and if you care about the product being good, the product slowly gets good. There isn’t really a third option, no matter how much executive coaching is dedicated to selling one.
The standard objection: this is anti-professional, since running a company is its own discipline, and you can drop a competent operator into any industry and trust them to figure out the unit economics, hire domain experts, and let the experts handle the product part.
I think this is mostly cope.
The “professional manager” thesis assumes domain love is fungible with operational competence, that you can outsource the loving part to a VP somewhere four levels down, and that the answer comes out the same on the other end. The track record on this is grim. Under Jack Welch, GE was the apex example, and his protégés went on to run Boeing and roughly every other major US business the same way, which is what happens when nobody at the top wants the product to exist for its own sake.
Founders aren’t safe either. Plenty of people cared at year one and had stopped caring by year twelve, usually around the time the second house got delivered. Howard Schultz had to come back to Starbucks twice because the version of Starbucks that ran without him kept losing the plot on what coffee was for, and Disney pulled Bob Iger out of retirement in 2022 because his replacement, Bob Chapek, was an operator with zero feel for the films.
What I want from the people who run companies is much smaller than passion: I want the habit of using the product on weekends. If you run a publisher you should be reading novels (other people’s, ideally) by choice on a Sunday with no work email open; if you run a games studio your Steam library should not be empty; if you run a burger chain you should be eating one on your day off, ideally at the competition; and if you run a software company you should be sitting down with your own product on a steady and regular afternoon trying to do something real with it, without the help of the sales engineering team or a deck.
It’s a low bar, and it still excludes most of the people currently running things.
When Nintendo’s finances cratered in 2014, Iwata cut his own salary in half to protect his developers’ jobs, because he believed scared developers make worse games and worse games would kill the company faster than any cost line on the income statement. The 3DS recovered, the Switch shipped in 2017, and Nintendo is still standing on the back of those decisions.
Iwata himself didn’t live to see most of it, dying in July 2015, at 55.
But we live in the world we gave a shit about.
A company like that comes out of someone who is still sitting with the code at home on a weekend while already running the parent company, because he wants the players to have the bigger world, and when the person at the top is instead a spreadsheet manager calculating which IP to milk this quarter, the company ships something else, and the players who pick up the controller can usually feel which one they are holding inside the first ten minutes.
The test for who should run a thing is this.
If you got fired tomorrow, would they still be using the product anyway?
Would they still be playing the games, cooking the food, reading the books, opening the software?
Look at how somebody spends their Sundays, and if those Sundays have nothing to do with the thing they sell, somebody else belongs in the hot seat.