Would-a-had.

What could have been and wasn’t.

I remember playing penny poker with my dad. Seven card stud was the game, and on the last card, after the bets, he would go around the table and read out the results.. 3 of a kind, a “would-a-had’, two pairs.

I ‘would-a-had’ a straight flush, or a full house, or a <insert winning hand>if only I had the right cards. It always stuck with me. When we reflect on our past and the choices we have made, we often see all the would-a-hads. Would-a-hads are not quite regrets. These are not things we did that we wish we could undo, these are things we now wish we could go back and do over and this time actually.. do it. Not think about it, not contemplate it… do it.

My own would-a-had came back to me last night as I was copying an old hard drive onto a solid state drive to just.. well.. keep stuff, and I stumbled upon some art I did way back in the day. These were some animations and tests I was doing while I was fiddling around with trying to write a really fast ambient occlusion vertex shader to simulate global illumination rendering.

I came up with a game idea, called Scatterboxes. It was like a game I had worked on in the past, Tribes, and it had components of a building game and a first person shooter. You could run around and shoot ‘boxes’ to build the terrain and structures and then you would have your weapon to take out opponents. The look would be simple and I thought we could be able to have huge sessions (128+ players) and it would look great and not need a crazy video card.

If the game sounds like Minecraft or Roblox meets Fortnite.. yeah…

When Roblox went IPO this week I had a ‘would-a-had’ moment. I could be ringing that bell, if had it not been for..

for me not believing in the idea enough to push it harder. My pitch to the others on the executive team was half hearted at best. I ‘kinda’ thought it would work but I was not convinced, not ready to go all in, and certainly not ready to leave the company to found yet another one to try.

And then the idea that it would have been ‘big’ is not a sure thing. It took Roblox a LONG time to get to where they are, and to suggest that it was just a matter of time would discount the years of effort, execution, and business model experimentation that lead them to where they were.

I look back at this would-a-had and think about what held me back. Why did I not trust myself? What was it that had me not believing that it was possible? What voice inside my head talked me out of it.. what took away my confidence?

I do know that I meet with a bunch of founders and many doubt themselves, that the idea is not that great, that they are not up the challenge, and that somehow they don’t deserve or cannot be at the level to make such a thing happen. Success won by a good idea made great by years of relentless execution is not something that they deserve or is possible for them.

I may be a little late in my new years resolution, but I am going to do, or do not. If I don’t do, then that is a choice I make, and I need to own it. No more momentary pity party. No more would-a-hads.