Starcraft and Startups

Starcraft is popular within tech startup circles for good reason. It’s a an cold, heartless meritocracy. It values investment in yourself. It requires hardcore analytical thinking. It makes you divorce yourself from the emotional rollercoaster that is day-to-day success and failure. In fact, it teaches you to love the good kind of failure and to learn everything you can from it. And it reminds us that real communities based in shared goals and common experiences can thrive across geographic, cultural, and lingual barriers.

I know this, in part, because I spend a non-trivial amount of my free time playing. I’m good enough to know that I’m not truly good. I also know it because of this guy. I’ve seen every episode of his show since I discovered it in June of last year. He’s brilliant, and surprisingly wise for his age.

I haven’t been excited by sports for probably ten years, but I now watch every major Starcraft professional tournament. I’ll take this over football any day. With it, I get to participate 1-on-1 with great people from around the world, and I get to be on the edge of something new.

Technology is disrupting sports, too, and as usual, the geeks got there first.