Atari, every mention
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How I Built This 37
Founders 32
Acquired 19
the a16z Podcast 13
the Knowledge Project 10
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 9
Capital Allocators 7
David Senra 710 more shows
every year every show How I Built This 37 Founders 32 Acquired 19 the a16z Podcast 13 the Knowledge Project 10 the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 9 Capital Allocators 7 David Senra 7 
20VC 6 
Innovators & Investors 5 
Top Founders 4 
the MAD Podcast 4 
All-In 4 
BigDeal 3 
Latent Space 2 
My First Million 2 
No Priors 1 
Big Technology 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: passages where Atari comes up on How I Built This, Founders, Acquired, the a16z Podcast, the Knowledge Project
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 1:55:31 Ben Gilbert Founder of Atari.
- ▶ 1:55:32 Ben Gilbert Not only Atari, but Chuck E.
Sweetwater: Chuck Surack. How a Customer Service Strategy Built a Billion Dollar Online Pro Audio and Music Company.
- ▶ 18:10 Chuck Surack You know, they have a, an MCI tape recorder, they have a, uh, an Atari
Bill Maris: How Google Could Crush AI Competitors, Why Small Funds Win, and AI's Atari Stage
- ▶ 20:54 Bill Maris I think we're at the Atari command line stage of, of AI, and we're going to get to the, you know, PlayStation 10 stage in the next five years.
The Company Apple Couldn't Kill | Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström
- ▶ 41:22 Gustav Söderström They had this thing called the DeepQ network that started beating Atari games, if you remember that.
The Man Behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick
- ▶ 25:26 Strauss Zelnick Because I was a student of the business, and I was aware that video games were a thing, and I was aware that they were, despite the issue that Atari and Warner Communications had, it was still a growing business. 2 times in the scene
Demis Hassabis: Agents, AGI & The Next Big Scientific Breakthrough · Y Combinator
- ▶ 4:14 Demis Hassabis Atari program, DQN, one of the ways it was able to master Atari games was by doing experience replay. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:34 Demis Hassabis So all of the Atari work and AlphaGo, most specifically, they're agent systems.
The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis
- ▶ 21:06 David Senra That part reminded me that Steve Jobs' mentor, who's the founder of Atari, observed that Steve Jobs only had one speed, that a young Steve Jobs only had one speed, and that speed was go.
- ▶ 33:23 David Senra All the video games that were designed in the 19 seventies and eighties by Atari. 4 times in the scene
François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
- ▶ 32:57 François Chollet Uh, Atari games, right back in, you know, they were very, very early, very visionary in that sense to work on, on this problem so early with these methods, which are still very modern methods. 2 times in the scene
S2E8: Indian Mythology x Gaming: The Age of Bhaarat ft. Amish Tripathi & Mukul Deora
- ▶ 25:27 Mukul Deora I mean, there are many things really that come to mind, but, um, if you see, I'm a gamer, I've been a gamer, uh, since I was a kid, you know, I had, uh, Atari, Nintendo, blah, blah, everything. 5 times in the scene
Marc Andreessen: The World Is More Malleable Than You Think
- ▶ 11:11 David Senra I remember reading a book on Nolan Bushnell in front of Atari. 2 times in the scene
Inside the Minds of the Most Successful Founders | David Senra
- ▶ 5:23 Codie Sanchez It was about Steve Jobs and the founder of Atari.
Excellent Advice For Living: 79 Maxims from a Wise Old Man
- ▶ 11:43 David Senra There's advice that Nolan Bushnell, who is the founder of Atari and Steve Jobs' mentor, gave Steve Jobs when Steve was just 19.
The Most Important Founder You've Never Heard Of
- ▶ 13:05 Shaan Puri But the thing they show is a little TV screen with the Atari game of Pong. 2 times in the scene
Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
- ▶ 1:42:30 David Senra Like Steve Jobs, he was hired at Atari. 2 times in the scene
Steve Wozniak: The Engineer Who Built Apple [Outliers]
- ▶ 15:58 Shane Parrish He completed this a year before Atari released their home version. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:00 Shane Parrish Atari turned them down too, saying they were too busy with video games. 2 times in the scene
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 54:20 Ben Gilbert The Dole Whip and the, um, what's the bird, um, remember Nolan Bushnell told us on the Atari episode that he was inspired by all the animatronic birds.
Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: Why Venture Capital is Broken & How Great Companies Are Built
- ▶ 21:31 Jason Calacanis Atari. 3 times in the scene
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:19:36 Ben Gilbert And they're reading an email from Demis with an update about a breakthrough that they had where DeepMind AI figured out a clever way to win at the Atari game breakout.
- ▶ 1:39:15 Ben Gilbert They had a product called Universe, which was around training computers to play thousands of games from Atari games to open world games like Grand Theft Auto.
Steve Jobs In His Own Words (Make Something Wonderful)
- ▶ 26:04 David Senra One was HP, where Woz was working, and one was Atari, where Steve was working. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:48:42 David Senra Waz had a great job designing handheld calculators at Hewlett Packard, and I had a fun job designing games at Atari, and we were giving them up to start this company.
No Priors Ep. 123 | With ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin
- ▶ 39:52 Misha Laskin It happened with, um, the Atari games, AlphaGo, um, you know, then Dota V and AlphaStar were near super intelligent systems, and if OpenAI and DeepMind had sunk more compute into them, they would have definitely become super intelligent.
Wanna 10x? Be Unhinged.
- ▶ 5:15 Codie Sanchez Uh, work at a company called Atari, so he, uh, didn't really like to shower.
Lessons from Jeff Bezos's Shareholder Letters
- ▶ 22:19 David Senra Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, Steve Jobs' mentor, hires a nineteen-year-old Steve Jobs.
The Greatest Moneymaker of All Time: Jim Simons
- ▶ 25:36 David Senra I, when I read that session in the book, I told you something that Nolan Bushnell, who was Steve jobs, mentor and the founder of Atari said, said only the arrogant or self-confident enough to press their creative ideas on others.
The Life Story of Michael Dell
- ▶ 42:10 David Senra I'm going to go to Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, mentor to Steve Jobs.
- ▶ 1:08:24 David Senra He's like, Steve's like, I'll work at Atari, but I have to sleep in the office.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 21:21 Ben Gilbert Yeah, he's there a little bit, but it's almost as if, you know, Atari instead of being Atari is Bushnell and Valentine.
Advice Line with Steve Case of AOL
Agents @ Work: Dust.tt — with Stanislas Polu
- ▶ 2:34 Stanislas Polu Felt like it was the time you had the Atari games, you had the self-driving craziness at the time. 2 times in the scene
How Steve Jobs Kept Things Simple
- ▶ 14:04 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari.
Marc Andreessen & Andrew Chen Talk Creative Computers
- ▶ 3:41 Marc Andreessen Um, and right, the, the story goes that Nolan Bushnell, you know, built this, founder of Atari, built, built the first Pong game, and he put it in a pizza parlor in Mountain View.
Aravind Srinivas:Will Foundation Models Commoditise & Diminishing Returns in Model Performance|E1161 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 4:40 Aravind Srinivas You know, we used to know each other from PhD days and, and his startup just got bought by Google, uh, for like half a billion dollars because they wrote this paper that learned to play Atari games just from the screen pixels.
Special Forces Sniper: Surviving ISIS, the F.B.I, and Modern Masculinity | Tim Kennedy
- ▶ 49:31 Tim Kennedy The Atari was down there.
Anthropic's Co-Founder on AI Agents, General Intelligence, and Sentience — With Jack Clark
- ▶ 24:31 Jack Clark That he, he led, called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, where we were trying to get game-playing agents that play Atari games to play it better by a human watching the agent playing the game in two different, two different…
The Biography of George Lucas
- ▶ 1:43:00 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. 2 times in the scene
Michael Jordan And Kobe Bryant
- ▶ 1:06:44 David Senra And I don't think that's very different from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, mentor of Steve Jobs, hired Steve Jobs when he was 19.
Napoleon's Maxims and Strategy
- ▶ 10:44 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari and the Steve Jobs mentor.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:59 David Rosenthal Nolan Bushnell has not founded Atari yet.
- ▶ 24:52 David Rosenthal It was written as a fun side project by some MIT engineers in the early days of DEC, and then that became Nolan Bushnell's inspiration for starting Atari and Pong and Space Base.
The Autobiography of Christian Dior
- ▶ 41:21 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. 2 times in the scene
Les Schwab (Charlie Munger recommended this book)
- ▶ 1:17:54 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. 2 times in the scene
Charlie Munger (the NEW Poor Charlie's Almanack)
- ▶ 1:36:48 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. 2 times in the scene
The Autobiography of Ted Turner
- ▶ 1:06:17 David Senra Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck E. 2 times in the scene
Miami Based Fintech did $70m in 2023 Revenue - What about Gross Margin?
- ▶ 32:33 Alex Schwartz When I was 20, but we only have like Commodores and Atari, so.
Steve Jobs (Make Something Wonderful)
- ▶ 17:34 David Senra Uh, he's going to get a job at Atari, he's gonna travel, uh, to Europe, spends a bunch of time in India, comes back.
- ▶ 23:54 David Senra One was HP, where Woz was working, and one was Atari, where 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:46:42 David Senra Waz had a great job designing handheld calculators at Hewlett Packard, and I had a fun job designing games at Atari, and we were giving them up to start this company.
Hermès (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:10:17 Ben Gilbert Bill starts installing arcade cabinets, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, everything we talked about on our Atari and Nintendo episodes.
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:11:06 Ben Gilbert Yeah, this is like, uh, Nolan Bushnell Atari-era Silicon Valley.
Paul Graham's Essays
- ▶ 58:35 David Senra Something that Steve, uh, that Nolan Bush now is the founder of Atari and Steve just mentor, uh, picked up on. 2 times in the scene
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:44:08 David Rosenthal It was started in the same place and time as Intel, Atari, Apple.
TKP Insights: Learning and Thinking
- ▶ 30:41 Adam Robinson He and Wozniak had little, those little Atari mini computers or something. 2 times in the scene
Phin Barnes: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help | E1067 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 18:10 Phin Barnes From, from the seventies when it started and you had folks like Don Valentine jumping into hot tubs with Nolan Bushnell and investing in Atari.
The Tetris Company: Henk Rogers
Seth Klarman – Timeless Value Investing (EP.328)
- ▶ 20:54 Seth Klarman Everybody was buying Warner Brothers back then because they owned Atari.
Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired
- ▶ 1:38:28 Mitch Lasky So, these two professors, they were, you guys talked a little bit about, um, this in the Atari context, right?
- ▶ 1:39:06 Mitch Lasky He, he starts the Atari research groups that basically invent virtual reality.
Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:31:40 David Rosenthal And there's, uh, we actually didn't put it in the episode, but there's a bunch, um, of this in Nintendo history, uh, because Warner Brothers bought Atari, and so Warner Brothers was running Atari as Nintendo was kind of, like.
- ▶ 2:31:53 David Rosenthal That's how they courted, yeah, so that's how Warner Brothers courted Atari and Nolan, and then how they tried to court Nintendo, uh,
- ▶ 2:32:03 Ben Gilbert They put Clint Eastwood on the private jet with Atari flying coast to coast.
Alienware: Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez
- ▶ 48:03 Frank Azor And suddenly, this platform of consoles, which had tens of millions of gamers out there, you know, from Atari and even before Atari, were playing PC-level games.
Oana Olteanu: Why Founders Should Expect More From Their VCs | 20VC #950 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:43 Oana Olteanu Head of microelectronics division at Atari. 2 times in the scene
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 2:07:36 Jason Calacanis I mean, look at, I mean, the stories about Don Valentine and Atari and other places where he was at Cisco.
The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- ▶ 17:31 David Rosenthal Now, to be fair to Sequoia, they're playing on the stage where they could make a mistake that was the single biggest in history, so they're doing something right, but, ah, so the story goes, one day in the late 19 seventies, I think it was…
- ▶ 18:00 David Rosenthal That's been working for me here at Atari.
PayPal: Max Levchin (Part 1 of 2)
Tony Fadell: Product Marketing Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs | 20VC #884 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:00:10 Tony Fadell Well, look, the one of my very first, you know, there was the Atari, there was the Apple II, there was the Sony Walkman, you know, those are all the things that I love, you know.
Sebastian Mallaby – The Making of the New Future in Venture, Venture is Eating the Investment World 14 (Capital Allocators, EP.245)
- ▶ 14:45 Sebastian Mallaby Saw opportunities in startups that were really had a product idea, but didn't have a business organization, and Atari is a good illustration of this. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:39 Sebastian Mallaby That was the discovery of the hands-on method I described with Atari.
MyCroft Raises $5m to Ship Home Speaker Echo Competitor That Doesnt' Suck In Data
- ▶ 1:39 Nathan Latka He's the founder of Stellar Semiconductor, which was sold to Broadcom in 2000, then went on to found Cryptic Studios, which was sold to Atari in 2008.
a16z Podcast | Gaming Goes Mainstream
- ▶ 6:15 Marc Andreessen So it was a spinoff from Atari. 5 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Machine Intelligence, from University to Industry
- ▶ 1:07 Frank Chen You were the first ones to do reinforcement learning on playing Atari games, right, which Google later popularized. 5 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself
a16z Podcast | Tech Trends Changing Gaming
- ▶ 27:57 Tim Schafer Like, when I was a kid, I didn't, um, have any idea how I could get in contact with a guy, you know, Nolan Bushnell, or like, you know, I love my Atari so much, I don't know what to do with this.
The State of AI & What's Next // Dileep George, Vicarious AI (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
- ▶ 3:07 Dileep George Ah, this is a famous example, ah, from, ah, ah, DeepMind on playing Atari games.
#47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1)
- ▶ 36:49 Adam Robinson He and Wozniak had little, those little Atari mini computers or something. 2 times in the scene
1107 Activision Blizzard CEO: ICO's are Just Like Selling Digital Swords in Mortal Combat!
- ▶ 11:24 Howard Marks Okay, in Atari, you have to put a cartridge in a, in a thing.
1057 Talend CEO: "IPO was right move"
- ▶ 6:54 Mike Tuchen And that's really kind of directly in the Atari wheelhouse for us.
Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell (2017)
- ▶ 1:48 Guy Raz Cheese, the pizza joint with the games that kept you distracted for hours, and an Atari video game, which could, frankly, distract you for a lot longer. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:51 Nolan Bushnell And so, Ted put in 250 dollars, I put in 250 dollars, and that's all the money that went into Atari. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:08 Nolan Bushnell Only of which, Atari only did about 35,000 of them. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:53 Guy Raz Alright, so is anybody at Atari freaking out at this point?
- ▶ 22:01 Guy Raz Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.
- ▶ 24:00 Guy Raz I mean, the Atari console that you were building only played Pong, right?
- ▶ 30:10 Guy Raz So, all right, so you're running Atari, it's doing really well, and then what? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:59 Nolan Bushnell But then we sold the company, and Warner didn't want to be in the restaurant business. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 44:44 Guy Raz Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari and Chuck E.
20VC: YC's Daniel Gross on How YC Can Democratise AI & Reduce Incumbency Advantages, Why ML Enabled Software Will Eat The Software That Ate The World & Whether AI Will Produce Independent Companies or Be Technology within Incumbents
- ▶ 19:11 Daniel Gross That is to say, I'm able to understand an Atari game with far fewer examples than whatever DeepMind can cook up, because I have an understanding of gravity, of, take Pong as an example, of what happens to an object when it collides with…
Ex Machina's Scientific Advisor - Murray Shanahan · Y Combinator
- ▶ 6:13 Murray Shanahan For example, if you, if, if a lot of this, a lot of work here at DeepMind has been done with these Atari retro, uh, computer games.
- ▶ 44:21 Murray Shanahan About, so they published this paper about, um, a system that could learn to play these retro Atari games completely from scratch. 2 times in the scene
An AI Primer with Wojciech Zaremba · Y Combinator
- ▶ 5:59 Wojciech Zaremba These are, uh, these are, like, the initial results are coming from DeepMind, uh, and, um, but, but simultaneously, um, simultaneously, it takes extremely long time, like, in terms of real-time execution, to learn to play computer games,…
AOL: Steve Case
- ▶ 4:30 Steve Case Back then, most people didn't have PCs, but a lot of people had Atari game machines.
Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell
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