Rusty’s Blog

A benefit of writing blogs is you can revisit your old self occasionally, check in, and compare notes. Since interviews seem to be the new black this week, I thought this would be a good time to see how things are going for myself circa August 2004.

But first, a disclaimer: when conducting an interview with your past self, you must be careful not to reveal any information about the future which might set your past self on an alternate timeline. You might be tempted, as Biff was in Back to the Future II for example, to send your past self future sports scores so your current self may reap the profits.

Don’t.

You might destroy the entire space-time continuum, or you may end up sending yourself crippling addictions to ketamine, nickel-plated revolvers, and expensive champagne. Don’t ask questions, that’s just how The Rule of Unintended Consequences works. It won’t end well.

With that in mind…

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Last year on Aug. 1, I posted my podcast interview with Screaming Sports CEO and co-founder Alec Peters. The show notes I wrote were clumsy (particularly the lede asking about VC funding) and didn’t entirely convey the point I wanted to get across. Lance Weatherby wrote a post yesterday which I think better reflects what I was trying to say about Atlanta start-ups at the time:

So there is a group [of] companies that are out there playing in the consumer space.

But to many [this] does not seem to be the case.  Perhaps because not many of them make it big.

It’s not that they don’t exist or haven’t attained a degree of success, it’s that there’s not a Twitter or a Facebook or something else that’s gotten really huge you can point to and say “there’s this city’s post-bubble success story.” Kaneva is the closest company to that, and I don’t think it has the mainstream recognition that would meet that admittedly nebulous criteria.

Lance said he plans to write a follow-up on why he thinks nothing has taken off at that level, which I’m looking forward to reading.

Also, if this sort of thing interests you, you should listen to the second part of my podcast interview with Bobby Blackwolf of All Games Radio where we discuss Atlanta’s video game development scene.