Precision Enables Success:
An excuse to learn about Super Mario Bros.
Top gamers and top investors both appreciate the importance of small details. While advancing through the original 1980s Super Mario Bros. only requires a high-level conceptual model of the game (at a minimum, players must be familiar with the rules, controls, and basic strategy), achieving world-class performance demands immersion in nuance. To set new speed-run records, the best players must identify and adroitly exploit subtle elements that their competitors — and maybe even the game’s designers — overlook.
In this video, Kosmic breaks a world speed-run record in 4 minutes and 56.46 seconds by sprinting through impenetrable walls, stomping upwards on Goombas, jumping through deadly hammers, and even deliberately delaying his start to position himself for later advantages. To the uninitiated viewer, this extraordinary gameplay seems like magic, but the real secret is near-perfect execution and a meticulous understanding of the game’s precise rules.
In Super Mario Bros., damage-inducing objects are approximated by rectangular “hit boxes” that only roughly cover their non-rectangular shapes. By knowing the exact position of each hitbox, Kosmic swiftly and narrowly moves past enemies that appear to overlap graphically but are separated computationally. Furthermore, because the game only allows a limited number of hitboxes on the screen at once, Kosmic can sometimes jump through objects, like Bowser’s dreaded chain of hammers, as if they didn’t exist, and therefore complete levels at jaw-dropping speeds.
Another class of exploits involves Mario’s directionality. Most players think Mario takes damage by touching a Goomba unless he lands on top of it, but the best players know that if Mario collides with an enemy while moving downwards, the enemy is killed regardless of where they interact. At the extreme, great players can then “stomp” Goomba from underneath by timing their jumps just right. A similar but more complex trick even lets Mario run through walls.
Calculating the time these maneuvers save is also intricate. Though most parts of the game progress near-continuously, transitioning between levels only occurs in discrete batches. A helpful analogy is to imagine that at the end of each level there is a bus — departing every 21 frames (~0.35 seconds) — that takes players to the start of the next level. If players finish just in time to catch the bus, they move onwards immediately; however, if they arrive too late, they must wait 21 additional frames for the next bus to leave. This programmatic quirk means that players can only gain or lose time in 0.35 seconds increments.
To catch the bus on time, great speed players will save critical frames by performing elaborate tricks like pixel-perfect wall jumps, momentum-zeroing turnarounds, and strings of rapid short hops. At one point, Kosmic even intentionally slows down to stomp several Koopa Troopas, turning them into non-moving shells that stay on the screen longer. Because of the aforementioned hitbox screen limit, this sequence prevents an additional enemy from spawning out of an upcoming pipe, allowing Mario to enter and teleport far ahead. At the end of each level, the best players will also try to make precise leaps into the base of the flagpole instead of taking an easy jump toward the top to skip a lengthy animation.
The same focus on precise detail and execution that enables top gamers to perform maneuvers unimaginable to casual players also enables ambitious entrepreneurs to disrupt complex industries in ways unfathomable to less granular competitors. Similarly, when we study convoluted parts of the economy at 8VC, it is tempting to substitute the intricate truth with broad approximations and high-level abstractions. However, only by rigorously identifying and analyzing specific details (e.g. dataflows, incentive structures, regulations, etc.) can we determine where, exactly, technology platforms will develop new frameworks and push forward what’s possible.
After looking deeply into logistics, we realized that freight is fungible and, like most commodities, should have a futures market to help buyers and suppliers mitigate market volatility. However, successful financial markets need accurate aggregated data updated frequently, and freight data was fragmented, heterogenous, and often inaccessibly nondigital. This changed when the FMCSA issued a mandate in 2015 requiring trucking fleets to electronically measure driver activity, and we’ve since invested in an ambitious team that is putting together the pieces to launch freight’s first futures market.
Reducing prescription drug prices also requires a deep appreciation of the industry’s precise messiness. Streamlining pharmaceutical companies’ R&D process is important, but a complete answer must also address a complex “rebate” model where large fractions of drug list prices flow backward to pharmacy benefit managers, drug distributors, pharmacies, and insurers, each extracting a cut from this ex post facto payout. A truly innovative business model in this sector must reconfigure these stakeholder relationships and the often perverse, counterintuitive paths by which money flows through the existing prescription drug ecosystem.
Historically, insurance companies were partitioned by region and product line. Following a wave of deregulation in the 1950s, the industry gradually consolidated through M&A but failed to properly integrate their disparate IT systems. As a result, today’s largest insurance companies have disjoint workflows and data management systems that create downstream inefficiencies. A particularly broken junction is the complex relationship between primary carriers and brokers; in sum, carriers have little insight into their broker relationships while brokers have little transparency into carrier rates. Creating a marketplace for this interaction is the right solution but will require confronting many byzantine backend nuances.
Whether fixing freight and insurance, lowering drug prices for millions of Americans, or saving Princess Peach in record time, outsized success often demands inordinate appreciation to detail. Only by stripping reality to its exact fundamental components can we identify and create radically better solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.
Joe Lonsdale
Partner, 8VC
8VC is a San Francisco based venture capital firm investing in industry-transforming companies. For more information, or to sign up for our newsletter visit www.8vc.com
