WP_Query Object ( [query] => Array ( [numberposts] => -1 [posts_per_page] => 3 [paged] => 1 ) [query_vars] => Array ( [numberposts] => -1 [posts_per_page] => 3 [paged] => 1 [error] => [m] => [p] => 0 [post_parent] => [subpost] => [subpost_id] => [attachment] => [attachment_id] => 0 [name] => [pagename] => [page_id] => 0 [second] => [minute] => [hour] => [day] => 0 [monthnum] => 0 [year] => 0 [w] => 0 [category_name] => [tag] => [cat] => [tag_id] => [author] => [author_name] => [feed] => [tb] => [meta_key] => [meta_value] => [preview] => [s] => [sentence] => [title] => [fields] => [menu_order] => [embed] => [category__in] => Array ( ) [category__not_in] => Array ( ) [category__and] => Array ( ) [post__in] => Array ( ) [post__not_in] => Array ( ) [post_name__in] => Array ( ) [tag__in] => Array ( ) [tag__not_in] => Array ( ) [tag__and] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__in] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__and] => Array ( ) [post_parent__in] => Array ( ) [post_parent__not_in] => Array ( ) [author__in] => Array ( ) [author__not_in] => Array ( ) [search_columns] => Array ( ) [ignore_sticky_posts] => [suppress_filters] => [cache_results] => 1 [update_post_term_cache] => 1 [update_menu_item_cache] => [lazy_load_term_meta] => 1 [update_post_meta_cache] => 1 [post_type] => [nopaging] => [comments_per_page] => 50 [no_found_rows] => [order] => DESC ) [tax_query] => WP_Tax_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => AND [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [queried_terms] => Array ( ) [primary_table] => wp_posts [primary_id_column] => ID ) [meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => [meta_table] => [meta_id_column] => [primary_table] => [primary_id_column] => [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [clauses:protected] => Array ( ) [has_or_relation:protected] => ) [date_query] => [request] => SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND ((wp_posts.post_type = 'post' AND (wp_posts.post_status = 'publish'))) ORDER BY wp_posts.menu_order, wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 3 [posts] => Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 868 [post_author] => 4 [post_date] => 2017-05-24 20:08:55 [post_date_gmt] => 2017-05-24 23:08:55 [post_content] => April 1994. I was a PhD student at Brown University in computer science, building mobile robots and programming them to roll around. It was great fun to stay up all night hacking away at the code. Managing projects and going to robot contests was to me more fun than the mathematically-oriented artificial intelligence research I was supposed to be doing.

What I was doing instead of preparing, the day before my Master's presentation.

Eventually, I realized my heart was really not in academia, as I describe in detail (including two crazy but nice pranks), in my forthcoming book Soulburners. Meanwhile, I was getting more and more excited about a new project, an idea that gripped and wouldn't let go. I've always been a big projects person. At MIT we'd call that the "work hard, play hard" attitude. I would get hooked on some undertaking, and just go go go. Like most entrepreneurs, I was long on enthusiasm and short on experience. I read in The Economist magazine that the Internet was the next big thing, and that was certainly my own experience. In the computer science department I was the "Internet guy" because I'd taken the time to play with the plonky and terrible tools that were available at the time. In February 1994 I gave a department lecture with an overview of all the tools like Gopher, a kind of text-only browser, and Netscape, the first real browser. [post_title] => Too good an idea to let go [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-good-idea [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2017-05-24 20:15:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2017-05-24 23:15:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://johnny-monsarrat.com/?p=868 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 678 [post_author] => 4 [post_date] => 2017-04-24 18:03:17 [post_date_gmt] => 2017-04-24 21:03:17 [post_content] => Of course the idea involved computer games. Every programmer I knew wanted to want to write a computer game. So it's was going to be a game... on the Internet. Right! It had to use the most cutting edge technology. If it weren't a challenge, it wouldn't be fun. At MIT, I had done a lot of live roleplaying. This is basically improvisational theater: Dungeons & Dragons, live and on stage. I was one of the actors and playwrights. It was a lot like what I thought online gaming should be: live roleplaying on the Internet. I'd almost started a company to do live roleplaying in the real world back in 1991. Imagine thousands of people in some kind of huge graphical chat, playing wizards and fighters and magicians. They call this a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), but it would be more than a MUD. It would be a huge party. It would be the biggest, longest roleplaying game ever. I knew a lot about roleplaying, but always been too busy for MUDs. However, the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Brown was a hackers' paradise, and a bunch of us tossed around names for a company, eventually choosing "Cyberspace", a word from science fiction. This would turn out to be a terrible name. I didn't have a garage, so we set up shop in my studio apartment. Talk about "living at work"! I only had one laptop computer, and could barely afford one desktop computer for UI development. Tim Miller, one of the computer graphics experts at Brown, gave me a stack of research papers and lots of advice, and I started writing the 3D graphics software. Then a bunch of friends and I set up in my mother's house. First we camped out in her living room. Then we spread to her family room. Then we took over the basement, and she moved out! She went to live with her boyfriend for the summer. We took over every room in the house except the garage! [row] [column md="6"] [/column] [column md="6"] [/column] [/row] [post_title] => Everything but the garage [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => four-guys-and-a-garage [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2017-06-03 14:53:37 [post_modified_gmt] => 2017-06-03 17:53:37 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://johnny-monsarrat.com/?page_id=678 [menu_order] => 1 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 684 [post_author] => 4 [post_date] => 2017-04-24 18:05:08 [post_date_gmt] => 2017-04-24 21:05:08 [post_content] => September 1994 was almost the end of Johnny Monsarrat. I was walking in Providence, and suddenly an accident forced a car up onto the sidewalk. Bam! I went flying. Fortunately I survived, and thanks to the personal injury system I got $30,000. It wasn't much, but it let me afford to become Turbine's first full-time employee in January 1995. None of us had any experience in business, but I'd done lots of leadership at school and thought I could hack it. So I read some books, spoke with businesspeople, and tried to figure it out. In early 1995, the startup center at Brown University gave us a lot of advice on starting a company and helped me to compile our first business plan. The leader of the department also wanted to invest, and it was weird to be taking business advice from a guy who was "on the other side of the table" negotiating an investment, so we ended up turning down the extra money. We gave presentations to businesspeople and they asked us a lot of tough questions. At first I had practically none of the answers. However, by keeping an open mind and learning from my mistakes, things slowly came together. The team and I went to Papa Gino's, a pizzeria, for their all-you-can-eat lunch, and I noticed that the drinks were included. Why weren't they making extra money by charging for the drinks? Suddenly I had an epiphany. I had always enjoyed solving puzzles, which to me had always led me towards a career in technology. But businesspeople solve puzzles too -- puzzles like how to make money from an all-you-can-eat lunch and puzzles of interacting with people. This was something I could tackle.   [row] [column md="6"] [/column] [column md="6"] [/column] [/row] [post_title] => An unusual way to raise money [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => an-unusual-fundraiser [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2017-05-24 20:51:43 [post_modified_gmt] => 2017-05-24 23:51:43 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://johnny-monsarrat.com/?page_id=684 [menu_order] => 2 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 3 [current_post] => -1 [before_loop] => 1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 868 [post_author] => 4 [post_date] => 2017-05-24 20:08:55 [post_date_gmt] => 2017-05-24 23:08:55 [post_content] => April 1994. I was a PhD student at Brown University in computer science, building mobile robots and programming them to roll around. It was great fun to stay up all night hacking away at the code. Managing projects and going to robot contests was to me more fun than the mathematically-oriented artificial intelligence research I was supposed to be doing.

What I was doing instead of preparing, the day before my Master's presentation.

Eventually, I realized my heart was really not in academia, as I describe in detail (including two crazy but nice pranks), in my forthcoming book Soulburners. Meanwhile, I was getting more and more excited about a new project, an idea that gripped and wouldn't let go. I've always been a big projects person. At MIT we'd call that the "work hard, play hard" attitude. I would get hooked on some undertaking, and just go go go. Like most entrepreneurs, I was long on enthusiasm and short on experience. I read in The Economist magazine that the Internet was the next big thing, and that was certainly my own experience. In the computer science department I was the "Internet guy" because I'd taken the time to play with the plonky and terrible tools that were available at the time. In February 1994 I gave a department lecture with an overview of all the tools like Gopher, a kind of text-only browser, and Netscape, the first real browser. [post_title] => Too good an idea to let go [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-good-idea [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2017-05-24 20:15:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2017-05-24 23:15:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://johnny-monsarrat.com/?p=868 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [comment_count] => 0 [current_comment] => -1 [found_posts] => 20 [max_num_pages] => 7 [max_num_comment_pages] => 0 [is_single] => [is_preview] => [is_page] => [is_archive] => [is_date] => [is_year] => [is_month] => [is_day] => [is_time] => [is_author] => [is_category] => [is_tag] => [is_tax] => [is_search] => [is_feed] => [is_comment_feed] => [is_trackback] => [is_home] => 1 [is_privacy_policy] => [is_404] => [is_embed] => [is_paged] => [is_admin] => [is_attachment] => [is_singular] => [is_robots] => [is_favicon] => [is_posts_page] => [is_post_type_archive] => [query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => 6546c9a92affc11d820194411b956cfb [query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] => [thumbnails_cached] => [allow_query_attachment_by_filename:protected] => [stopwords:WP_Query:private] => [compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => query_vars_hash [1] => query_vars_changed ) [compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => init_query_flags [1] => parse_tax_query ) )