There were a lot of good investing and personal finance podcast episodes over the last week. I’ve been meaning to get to this one for a while though, so I will have to get some of these more recent ones highlighted over the coming weeks.
First, let me mention that Yahoo has put the entire audio recording of the Berkshire meeting up as podcasts. Go to your favorite podcasting app or yahoo finance to listen. Might as well get some words from the mountaintop while you mow the grass or walk the dog, right?
Anyway, this week let’s look at an episode of How I Built This, with Guy Raz. In this episode, Guy talks to Nolan Bushnell, who founded both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s. This guy is a real entrepreneurial dynamo and an interesting character. He also had some bum working for him at Atari (on the night shift) by the name of Steven Jobs. He passed on the opportunity to invest in his little computer start up.
One interesting thing that came out during the discussion was Bushnell’s discussion of the economics of the arcade business (which is what Bushnell was involved in prior to starting Atari). I kind of wonder if Virtual Reality might not follow this model.
It seems like the home sets are kind of lackluster, like pong was back at this time. I wonder if people wouldn’t be interesting in leaving the home, going to the virtual arcade, and getting some time on a really high-end system with good apps/games. Like an industrial system that won’t be affordable for the home for years. They could also be networked locally to let you get some really good immersive competitive experiences/gaming.
I’ve done a little nosing around on the interwebs and it looks like there are some franchises doing this, but from what I can tell, they just have a bunch of the like $500 versions of home systems with their headsets like strapped to the wall.
There is apparently some convention in Las Vegas for VR stuff. Maybe I will go check it out. Are any of you in the know in this area? Seems like a potential small business idea or at least maybe a source of tenant demand for all our crappy retail REITs, right?