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Singapore
Joined October 2015
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Raoul retweeted
25 years ago, on October 22, 2001, Grand Theft Auto III was released.
This is the team that made it. (I'm second from the right)
Here's what I remember about making it.
For most of development, GTA3 was in a sorry state. It crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes. Only in the last six months did everything come together.
For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30.
In 1999, DMA Design, based in Dundee, Scotland, was going through some changes. The company had recently been bought by Take-Two Interactive, and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh.
Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA3. Unprompted.
Meanwhile, the original GTA1 and GTA2 team had started work on GTA2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective.
In March 2000, the Dundee office was closed and GTA2.5 was cancelled. Take-Two/Rockstar gave GTA3 the green light.
Everything was written from scratch. Only two people worked on both GTA2 and GTA3, and no code or art from GTA2 was reused.
The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development.
Leslie Benzies (the producer) plastered a wall in the boardroom with Post-it notes. They were yellow, green and pink, representing missions, contacts and locations.
Missions were moved around all the time, often handed from one contact to another. Only once the voice acting was recorded were these things set in stone.
You sometimes come across locations on the map that are more detailed than you'd expect. Chances are there used to be a mission contact there that got moved elsewhere.
Working on GTA3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate.
Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage.
Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening.
I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office.
Although we liked the game, it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit.
GTA3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent.
It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off.
Our office was in Leith, Edinburgh. It was a fairly run-down neighbourhood at the time. Just a couple of years before we arrived, J.K. Rowling had been writing the first Harry Potter in that very same neighbourhood.
The thing I remember most is the camaraderie. In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together.
It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together.
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For gta3, Vice and SA; Memory on the ps2 was tight. We had to limit the number of used vehicle models to 8.
My code would occasionally pick a car model to be phased out. Once there were none left on the map, this model would be removed and a new model could be loaded.
The code would pick a model that was appropriate for the area (sports cars in business district, old cars in run-down areas etc).
Most of the time this worked fine.
A few things could throw a spanner in the works:
If the player had gone up the wanted levels, some of the 8 slots would be taken up by police cars, FIB and swat vans and the police heli.
Level designers would sometimes load specific car models for missions. Often these were not appropriate to be used for ambient traffic.
Ambulance and firetrucks could be needed if there was an accident.
If the player travelled to a different area of the map; some of the loaded cars would look out of place and could not be used. It would take a while for replacement models to be loaded.
The game would keep the last player driven car, as it would be jarring if the player went back and it wasn’t there.
At times there would only be 1 or 2 cars models available for ambient traffic. This lack of variation was particularly noticeable if the player was driving the one car that had to be used.
To alleviate the problem, garages remove cars inside of them once the door has closed. This way the model could be removed. When the player opened the door, the cars were re-created in the same spot.
Npc models were loaded/removed the same way. It just wasn’t as noticeable if variety was lacking.
For each game we picked a generic looking character model that looked appropriate in each area of the map. This model was never removed and always ready to fill in.
Screenshot from this vid: youtube.com/watch?v=KWhjv4J6…
Raoul retweeted
Why would I pay $15/month for your software when I can plan, build, review, improve, host, launch, scale, secure, patch, monitor and debug it myself?
Can't stop thinking about this - both want to be provided for, but one is willing to endure for longer 🤯
The internet made it easy for anyone to publish content
Then some people realised that the content itself didn't need to be excellent, publish something to some distribution network online and some quantity of people would watch it
Then those people realised as long as you keep pumping content, you can sell ads and make money
Then they realised if you need continuous content, and quality was not a requirement, you could just give the mic to any Tom Dick or Harriett
Then they saw that it's not that natural for regular, normally adjusted people to put themselves out there publicly, let alone for other people's entertainment
Then they realised they could just platform broken people cheaply, because they were more suited for this kind of work
Then you suddenly have all these weird and broken people being considered as celebrities
And now you have the current state of society
This is one of the biggest social-cultural changes since I was a kid / young person. Very few people were on these things back then. All the way through college these drugs were only taken by people that had "serious problems." The normalization of it is very new and the impacts are probably way bigger than we realize. I think it might be one of the big X factors explaining all sorts of problems and decay today.
But this is precisely what they are doing, cohort targeting, and this cohort is specifically "people of childbearing age who have at least 1 kid". How do we get them to have more? 0-1 is the hardest transition 1-2 and 2-3 onwards are in many ways more of the same, and here the financial support is actually a big thing.
I'm sure they're thinking about other cohorts as well, and measures for those cohorts will likely and necessarily be different.
Had a chat with my colleagues about the new child-support policies that Lawrence had introduced last evening (everybody is)
And this hits the mark
My takeaway yesterday was that "sure, we're given more money to have kids now"
But ultimately, I feel that the policy acts more like a motivator for families that already have kids i.e. you have 1 child, you'll be more likely to have another with this new policy as @abigbluebird had mentioned
But it doesn't address why Singaporeans don't want to have kids in the first place
→ Smaller, and more expensive housing
→ Expensive cars
→ Highly competitive enrichment for the kids
The list honestly goes on
My wife and I are planning to have kids but we can't help but always question:
"Are we bringing our kid into a world of PvP?"
Raoul retweeted
We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65.
We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life".
You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets.
I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long.
My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite.
TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.
Raoul retweeted
Today we’ve raised $52M Seed and we are announcing the public launch of S2.1 Pro.
>It can clone a voice from 5 seconds of audio
>2x faster than Cartesia & 1/6th the cost of Eleven Labs
>most expressive model with word level control over emotion, intonation, pacing etc
We support frontier AI companies including HeyGen, LiveKit, Retell, Sanas, and OpenArt all run our model in production.
If you're a business and we can't cut your voice AI costs by 50%, we'll give you 1 year of Fish Audio for free.
Book a demo: s.fish.audio/tmapke
To celebrate our first birthday, we'll give you 1 month of S2.1 Pro for free. Like, retweet, and comment “Fish” to get it.
100% co-signed. All Singaporeans need to spend 18 months abroad at the ages of 15, 28, and 40. Proper abroad, live in an apartment in that country, have residence, deal with the local govt and citizenry, full immersion. Landing in Changi at the end of each stint will have them kissing the ground when they arrive.
Singaporeans are romanticizing every country except their own.
And it's the dumbest trade in the world. You're trading the best functioning city on earth for a Netflix version of America that doesn't exist.
I'm Singaporean. I grew up in Singapore and now live in San Francisco for @ADPList. And my friends who moved to London, Melbourne, NYC. I love them, but here's what's actually happening over there. SF's single bedroom will cost $4k a month. Melbourne is great if you like waiting forty minutes for a tram that's late. NYC is a hundred dollars before you've even left the apartment.
Meanwhile in SG, you tap on the MRT. The next train is in two minutes. You eat a Michelin meal for $6 at a hawker. You walk home at 2am and it's safer than most cities at noon. Healthcare works. The government replies to your email.
And here's what nobody wants to say out loud.
The reason Singaporeans romanticize abroad isn't because abroad is better. It's because Singapore works so well that we forgot to be impressed by it. We confused "boring" with "functioning." We thought sterile meant soulless. But every country I've been to would kill to have what Singapore made normal.
You don't need to move to SF/NYC to feel alive. Go to Geylang at midnight. Take the bumboat to Pulau Ubin. Eat at a kopitiam down your HDB.
You're romanticizing the wrong country. It's the one you're in.
ALT A man with glasses sits at a table with a laptop, surrounded by text and images, discussing global connectivity and team collaboration.
Raoul retweeted
I don’t know if this is really true at YC, but it’s always been true for me / @saastrfund
Why? If you have 10 true, unaffiliated customers (not your friends or batchmates), then you almost always you find another 10, another 10, and so on
But < 10 customers? You can fall right back to 0 customers. Often do
The minimum viable traction before applying to YC:
- Option A (strongest): 10+ paying customers
- Option B (strong): 3 paying customers + pipeline
- Option C (good): 5 signed LOIs + 20 interviews
- Option D (apply anyway): exceptional founder-market fit + 60 deep user interviews
Most founders think they need Option A.
YC has funded companies with Option D.
Know which option you have. Apply with what's true.
Co-signed 100%. When you have kids, your work time has to be actually "work", and not "8 hours of computer screen faffing about with some random work-related tasks scattered in between"
Since @marclou’s post, I’ve had 10–15 DMs from people asking how I worked with a newborn.
A few were from people expecting their first child soon and quietly bracing for their output to collapse.
My answer: the biggest shift is realising that hours spent staring at a computer are not the same thing as productive work.
Most people probably have 2 (maybe 3) genuinely useful hours in them per day anyway.
The rest is often tweaking, checking, wandering, refreshing, pretending, overthinking, or doing work that feels responsible but does not actually move anything forward.
A newborn makes that painfully obvious.
You no longer have unlimited fake work time.
So you have to ask better questions:
Am I working on the right product?
In the right market?
At the right time?
Is this task actually high leverage?
Will this compound?
Because the worst outcome is not “working less.”
The worst outcome is trading time with your family for work that produces no real result. Fake work where you fart around now has a very hard cost.
With a newborn, you’ll have a lot of weird quiet moments while they sleep, feed, or lie on you.
Use that time to think clearly.
What do I actually want?
What is the one thing I can do today with my limited focused time that gets me closer?
Then do that.
Everything else, throw away.
This wedding poverty porn is stupid. Don't get into debt for a wedding, but spend as much as you want. It's a party. You (hopefully) only get married once, and it's meant as a celebration, not just for you and your spouse, but for all the people the love and care about the two of you. Have fun.
My hot take...
There is absolutely no reason why you should spend more than $5,000 on a wedding if you’re making less than $1M+ a year.
I literally got married in a parking lot wearing a $150 dress from Anthropologie with roses from the grocery store… and I was worth a few 8 figures.
The modern wedding is nothing more than a huge financial cosplay we’ve normalized for pure performance sake.
Just discovered that Crisp has silently been dropping a lot of our email replies 😲😱 and got an absolutely ridiculous reply from support that "we use shared IPs and that might cause issues sometimes, but unclear when and how". Incredibly disappointed. What other providers do people recommend?
Try to remember when you last did any of this to your own father, realise how short and fleeting this time is, and enjoy every second. It honestly passes by too quickly. Later in life when we wake up without anyone jumping into bed with us, we come home and nobody is there to greet and shout HII DADDD to us, are we free, or are we alone?
Every morning at 5:30am my 4-year-old jumps into my bed and is so excited to see me he can’t help but talk my ear off.
Every morning my 2-year-old demands that I lay on the couch in front of him so he can use me as a pillow.
My 4-year-old rushes to show me every rock, flower, or trinket he finds because he’s so excited by it and knows that I will be too.
No matter how minor the “injury”, my 2-year-old will present me with the injuried body part and demand I “kiss it.” Which instantly heals it.
Every time my 4-year-old asks to race, I let him win. He couldn’t be more proud that he’s faster than Dada.
My 2-year-old can’t leave a room without demanding that “Dada come!” And I’m expected to follow him.
When my 4-year-old is on my shoulders, my 2-year-old gets so jealous that I have to carry him too.
I can’t do any project around the house without both boys demanding to help me.
Sometimes it’s exhausting. But I’ll relax when they’re older.
I posted a job opening a week ago - we currently have 2000 (!!) applications from that job portal. But the job description explicitly says that applications should come be sent through our website. Less than 10% of the applicants actually read and did that, and so far amongst those, we're seeing a ton of AI answers (some with the ChatGPT prefix "sure let me write the answer for you"), many with resume links not publicly accessible, and so on.
I've interviewed a bunch of the good ones, interesting batch. But the funnel math here is fascinating.
22 more days to go, let's see what happens.
