Last year, I went out to NAB [the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, Nev.] with my fellow Flame artist Colin Stackpole. On the first night, I won $300 playing roulette. Colin was quite impressed. We immediately spent the entire pot on a nice dinner.
The next day, the real gambling began. Basically, we’re betting the future of our company on the products on the floor, and on the companies behind those products.
Colin likes the nightlife. I don’t know if he’d just gone to bed when I came knocking on his door the following morning, but he looked it. I, on the other hand, turn into Hermione Granger at NAB. I like to get a big breakfast at the buffet—you know, the real big ones with every kind of meat known to man. Then I’m off to be one of the first at the show.
I also like to run into old friends, competitors and other people in the business. If you’ve ever been to Vegas, you know there are business cards and advertisements all over the place for escorts and houses of adult entertainment, as prostitution is legal in Nevada. I like to slip one of these business cards into the pockets of the guys I meet without them knowing. That way, their wives can find them in the laundry.
If you go to a booth with a product you can actually use, they treat you like a high roller. If you’re not a customer, you’re treated like a nickel slot player. The salesman says, "In six months, we’ll have uncompressed D1 in and out," and I can see the dice rolling in my mind. Someone else says, "In a year, we’ll be out of beta," and I can actually hear the roulette wheel spinning. My personal favorite is, "When you get back home, you’ll find the upgrade waiting for you." Here, it’s as if the dealer has dealt me one too many cards and I bust.
At the Discreet booth, we’re sitting in front of a computer that’s as large as a refrigerator and costs well over a half-million dollars. We’re discussing functionality, speed and feasibility. Colin is impressed by none of this. He is still talking about the three hundred dollars "we" won last night.
You see, the biggest mistake people make in Vegas is not staying at the tables too long, it’s in buying a piece of equipment. One can’t buy a piece of equipment just because it has a button or two more than that another one—that’s the wrong reason. You’re really investing in a company and its technological path.
You look at where a company has been and look ahead to where it’s going, and then you determine whether it’s a leader or not. (Or maybe it’s a follower?) You gamble on the future. The smart ones know that the guy who makes the equipment and the guy who buys it are in business together.
So now I have to really gamble and bet where the industry will be in a few years. I have to put my money down on where certain companies are going and how fast they’ll get there. I have to roll the dice and put my company and myself in the best position to succeed. Sometimes it feels like I have little more control over all this than I did over that roulette wheel last night.
The one thing I know for sure is this: To do nothing at all is a losing bet.
