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Trip Hawkins Quotes

Article Overview: Trip Hawkins Quotes

Trip Hawkins Quotes

When I was a kid it was the golden age of television when ‘Leave it to Beaver' was on and I just noticed with my friends that everyone wanted to watch TV, and I thought TV was kind of slow and not very interactive. I noticed from playing board games, that I was really thinking and more involved really using my brain. I sort of personally stumble onto the concept that you learn by doing. And of course, I thought, ‘Hey this is really cool.'

The ones I really liked were simulations, where they were trying to recreate something within the real world. The problem with simulation is there's a lot of machinery that has to get operated. And if you do it by hand, and a good example would be Dungeons and Dragons, or war games, it's really just too much work for most people to play.

When I first saw a computer, I knew this was the answer for me. I realized we could actually put the work inside the machine, and on the screen, we could make a picture of what we wanted you to interact with. And it'll turn into real life in a box.

I realized that I loved to have ideas, and then see those ideas brought to life. And I loved to use games as a way of connecting with other people.

I founded Electronic Arts in 1982, but I really started thinking about it in 1972, 10 years beforehand, when I saw computers. I started thinking about what I wanted to do for them.

How do I differentiate my business ideas from other people's?

I had already struggled with some of my own business ideas, and I thought, ‘Well, I need to go finish my education. I need to make sure that I'm learning the things that I need to learn, and then I need to go help somebody else build a company, so I know how to build one before I have to try to do it myself.'

It was definitely time to get going, and I founded Electronic Arts.

When I founded EA I was 28, but by the beginning of 3DO I was 37. Older, but apparently not wiser. Chip manufacturing is expensive and political. I should have known a company with deep pockets like Sony could pull the rug out from under us...We should have waited another year to launch, to give the software time. Or maybe we should have just waited until the end of time.

It's like being an explorer who discovered North America and the found out, hey, there's South America and Antarctica, too.

I have a number of famous quotes, and one of them is, if you get knocked down, get back up again. I don't really feel like I want to let anything ultimately defeat me.

You know you're gonna have failures, there's no way to avoid it. Especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you're doing something new, of course there are gonna be mistakes. How can you not make mistakes? You don't know what you're going; it's unchartered territory.

You have to have the kind of personality where you're resilient and you can get up and keep moving and learn what there is. What I tell my employees is, ‘I want you to make mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. But, when we make a mistake, let's all study it. Let's all learn from it. After that, we want to make different mistakes. We don't want to keep making the same mistakes.'

I've done everything possible that you could do wrong...I've seen what happens when the whole house burns to the round. It's not a lot of fun. But the important thing about mistakes is to study them and figure out what learning there is that you can extract from it, and then get up off the floor and get moving.

You know what big companies do around mistakes? Number one, everybody tries to avoid making them, so nobody ever does anything very interesting that's new. And, if a mistake gets made, they try to cover it up, or they try to use it to win a political battle by blaming somebody else that's a rival. Not very productive.

If you have that behaviour in a small company, that small company is going to fail - no question. You've got to have a culture that says, ‘Hey, if there's a problem, we've all got to be talking about it because there is something for everybody to learn, and it's perfectly ok to make mistakes.' What is not ok is to not learn and to make the same mistake again

One quality of entrepreneurship is just persistence, not giving up because you have road blocks and also not giving in because other people tell you that you're nuts. You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.

No matter what I tend to be doing, generally people always think I'm crazy, first of all, because I'm always talking about things in the future that haven't happened yet, and people have a hard time believing what's gonna happen. Secondly, I'm almost always a contrarian, whatever direction everybody else is going in, I'm probably figuring out a way to go in a completely opposite direction.

That's the part of the business world that I call the dog-eat-dog part of it. It's not a lot of fun. If you can stay away from that part of it, you're much better off.

You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.

I had the opportunity to work with these incredibly brilliant software engineers. And I appreciated the fact that these guys thought like artists, and they acted like artists. That's not how people at that time thought about engineering of any kind. And that's really what I wanted to do is to bring that level of recognition to it.

I thought, ‘Okay, what's going to be my edge, and how am I going to define what I'm doing differently?' Once I had that key idea of the software developer as an artist, once I had that idea, a whole bunch of other ideas flowed from that, because I realized that I need to go study the music industry, I need to study the book publishing and Hollywood and figure out how they do things, why they do them that way, and then I need to borrow, and rearrange, the things that they're doing to fit my industry so that I can invent and create this new industry.

It was such an alien idea and I could tell people were uncomfortable with me talking about it. I was John the Baptist, who maybe got my head cut off.

I have a tremendous amount of patience and willingness to look many, many years ahead, and plan and wait for things to work out.

I have probably the best personal collection of games you're going to find anywhere. I've just been a nut for almost any form of software, but games especially whether it's card games, board games, computer games, video games, I've just got a spectacular collection. And of course now I have four kids that are at different ages, so when we want to play, boy, we've just got a fantastic set of choices.

I have to honestly say that I'm in business, but I basically just tolerate it. I don't really want to be in business per se. It's just that, in order for me to do what I enjoy doing and to really get it out there and to have it be as appreciated by as many people as it can be, it's got to be done in the context of a commercial, capitalist enterprise. And it's kind of a necessary evil.

The real purpose of what I'm doing is the creative expression, seeing your ideas come to life. I love to see consumers having a great time and having all these people be really passionate about these new things the way I am.

My oldest friends have always said that the reason I started Electronic Arts was just to make games that I wanted to play myself... that Digital Chocolate is an excuse to make MLSN Sports Picks. And there's a lot truth in that. I mean I grew up wanting to make these sports simulations so I could play them myself.

You can't get anywhere without incredible passion, because if you're an entrepreneur, there's gonna be a lot of bumps in the road. A great artist has to do their art. There's nothing that can stop them from doing it. They just have to get it out there. It's the same thing for an entrepreneur. If you don't feel that way, then you're probably not really an entrepreneur.

If you don't have a lot of passion for it, you're not gonna make it. And that's, I think, the big test.

Every market has unique characteristics. What I find shocking, quite frankly, is that Western companies have consistently failed to learn from these obvious lessons.

They are abusive and neglectful of their supply chains, to their own detriment, and nobody in the West has really moved beyond voice marketing to educate the masses about mobile data. As a result, the data ARPU is understandably lower, and besides SMS and WAP browsing, we have zero ‘killer apps' in mobile so far.

This is one of the biggest challenges for an entrepreneur - to try and figure out when you are right and when you are wrong. And you better know that you're wrong some of the time so that you can do enough introspection and searching to occasionally be willing to back off.

Nobody else was doing it and they all thought we were nuts, and it wasn't working. It was a real struggle for two years. There was this constant temptation to throw in the towel and forget the whole thing. But I stuck with it. It was very painful - I had to lay off friends, the company had a lot of financial problems, everybody was miserable. But it's just one of the things you have to deal with - making choices like that.

I always find myself out on the leading edge of these new media, and since I've done it now for so long, I feel very comfortable out there, being out on the frontier where it's rough and unclear and a lot of things have to be sorted out. I don't mind making that longer-term investment and figuring things out and waiting for it all to come around. And there's always a lot of confusion in the beginning and different ways of thinking about it as a business. And that's what I've always loved doing is being out there on the front, figuring that out for the first time.

Today, the new frontier is social computing, and you see it exploding on the Internet, and it's also about to explode on the mobile phone. Obviously on the Internet we have this succession where it's not enough to have YouTube, you've gotta have Google, and that doesn't prevent there from being a need for YouTube or MySpace, or Facebook or Neopets, there's always different expressions of these different communities that allow people to connect.

All we have really seen so far with the mobile phone, is text messaging. We're just really at the very starting point with mobile phones that are in fact a much larger number of computers on a much bigger and more ubiquitous network. I mean we have two billion people with these mobile phones today, it's gonna get to three billion pretty quickly here in the next year or two. Whereas with PCs we're talking about hundreds of millions, it's a much larger market with mobile phones.

I think for the next 20-30 years this is gonna be the big trend in every dimension of computing, where people are getting more and more social value out of it. And what I wanna do is have the mobile phone turn into the hearth that's in your hand, and have people increasingly find new ways to depend on that device really connecting them with all these different social worlds.

When I first saw a computer, I knew, this was the answer for me. I was going to be able to make real life in a box and expose the kind of games I wanted to play to the public.

If you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you're going to have to be somebody who can tolerate a high rate of change, you have to be willing to put a lot more hours into it, you have to tolerate the fact that you're going to make more mistakes and have a culture that responds to that.

When I was young, I was completely fearless, and sometimes you have success because of that, sometimes you make horrible mistakes because of that.

It's not like business for me is a hobby that I'm especially passionate about. I have a lot of skills and experience at it, but I'm really there more for the art of what I'm doing. I'm a total game addict, and of course I play games in all kinds of different forms. And obviously the mobile phone just happens to be the most convenient way to play today.

Mobile is like the Internet was at the 9600 baud dialup stage. In theory it's all there, but it is a rare day when you can get everything to work the way you would like. But the infrastructure is good enough now and it is steadily improving, and we know what great things we have to look forward to...And it's a real thrill to just create something new that nobody's ever thought of or heard of or didn't know they needed.

Related Articles
  The Video Game King: The Early Years of Trip Hawkins
  Lesson #1: “If you get knocked down, get back up again”
  Entrepreneur On The Move: How Hawkins Is Taking Mobile to New Dimensions
  Gaming His Way To The Top: Hawkins Makes It Big, Twice
  Lesson #3: “If you don’t have a lot of passion for it, you’re not gonna make it”

Article Tags: golden age of television, trip hawkins



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Facebook application - Hi Kevin - thanks for the suggestion! The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? I like your idea as well. We've got a rollout schedule of new features for the site that we are working on first before we can get to the Facebook app. We're also not sure how hard it is to integrate into Facebook. It looks like there is a php way to do it which is great because that is our core competency.
Facebook applications - ....[quote:36s714h1]The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? [/quote:36s714h1] So far my own foray into Facebook has been a complete bust, though I expected that from the start. But if I do an Application for my own particular field of interest, such as Your Favorite Sci Fi movie...that might get people going. So Evan when you figure out how to do this please let me know how complicated it is!!
5 Entrepreneur's success stories - My local paper's business section profiled 5 successful entrepreneurs in the Jan 6, 2008 issue of the paper. Thought I'd share just a bit of it here. Bill and Heidi Dittmar: Executive Lifestyle Jeff Wassmer: Spectrum Deloise Hawkins, Star Whitaker and Lenzy Hill: Touch of Elegance Stephen Brosius: Advanced Door Systems Pam Watson: Goodrich and Watson Insurers Bill and Heidi Dittmar: Executive Lifestyle founders of a magazine called Executive Lifestyle. Started in 1991. Revenue has grown more than 200% since 2004. 4 full time, 3 part time employees "We started off with $1,000 and a stupid idea." It began as This Month, a guide for tourists, and morphed into Executive Lifestyle. Jeff Wassmer: Spectrum Company specializes in computer network security and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. Wassmer was an 11-year Air Force guy, so he had "ins" in order to form this business. Deloise Hawkins, Star Whitaker and Lenzy Hill: Touch of Elegance Founded business in 1994. 12 employees. Their company designs and plans an average of 25 events each month in Hampton Roads and other parts of Virginia. Stephen Brosius: Advanced Door Systems Started company in 1995. 5 full-time employees, plus subcontractors. After having worked as a subcontractor for others in the construction business for 20 years, he decided to start his own business. Pam Watson: Goodrich and Watson Insurers At age 49, she was approached by an insurance colleague to buy out their employer's insurance division. They did so, and became employers themselves., witj 4 full-time people.


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