2009: Love and business with my partner Merci Victoria Grace at our game studio GameLayers. Most every day taking the train with our small dog Pixley Wigglebottom to our office 76 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA, 94105, in the Financial District of San Francisco.
Every day we worked on games. Our goals changed from grow fast and raise money to hunker down and earn revenues. We launched three products during 2009: a rebranding of our Firefox toolbar game and two games on Facebook. To stay alive, we tried paycuts, layoffs, and insufficient attempts to make money fast online.
GameLayers was profoundly engaging employment. I am grateful to my teammates, investors, advisors and customers for their patience as they showed me how to be a better leader. I was fortunate to work with so many smart people who wanted to make a game out of the web.
By the end of 2009 it was clear that GameLayers wasn’t earning enough revenue to keep employees. After exploring investment and acquisition options, we elected to leave our game The Nethernet up and running as Merci and I begin 2010 looking for new employment.
Midway through 2009, we moved into a larger apartment in the Mission District/Noe Valley, San Francisco with our brother Justus. Good times, great eats! We hosted a number of family gatherings at our apartment, a few lit by the wide smile of our new niece Francesca.
We saw the four seasons, the five elements and the corpses of large seals as we ran with Pixley on the beach at Fort Funston, just south of the city. Merci, Justus and I swam in a cold Pacific Ocean there during the fall. Merci and I drove north of the city to eat oysters and enjoy the coastline in Sonoma and Sea Ranch, California.
By December 2009 we were no longer being paid by GameLayers. We cashed in frequent flyer miles for a belated honeymoon to Thailand. We intended to travel the country seeking adventure. Instead we ended up spending two weeks on a small tropical island reading, sunning, swimming, diving, eating, sleeping and being massaged on the beach. We pleasured ourselves like love tycoons at a beautifully reduced rate, creating a fond sense of our compatibility beyond our time working together. Hurrah!
During our honeymoon, I had a chance to read, mostly speculative fiction: Orphans of Chaos series, Mistborn, Collected Works of Lord Dunsany, I Martha Adams, Sarsen Place, Blind Assassin, Pillars of the Earth, Mordant’s Need Series, Tom Clancy’s Net Force. At home, during 2009, I completed Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Fable II, Far Cry 2, Lego Batman, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Fallout 3, Shadow Complex, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Beatles Rock Band, Borderlands, Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360, and GTA Chinatown on the Nintendo DS.
2010: I am catching up on games, poking at projects, exploring opportunities - figuring out what I need to learn next. And I’m dusting off http://links.net/ as a means to experiment with the web. Enjoying my fantastic friends and family and wonderful wife. Exciting times!
(Year in (p)review - thanks to Randy for the prompt, including last year 2008/2009).
