The first time I heard this said I laughed.

Four years ago when I left San Diego I had to learn a lot without a lot of time. The first thing I picked up on in San Francisco was that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what he was doing.

Even though I had previously worked for GameLayers, which made PMOG, a venture-capital backed Firefox toolbar game, I was just a remote employee then finishing up college. I had no idea what it meant when our CEO Justin Hall said he had to raise more money to keep our game running, or how much it cost for us to have an office above a Mexican restaurant on 2nd Street. I only knew that I was enjoying what I was doing, was somehow saving money, and was going to be the first person in my family to graduate from college with a bachelors degree.

When people started getting laid off at GameLayers a year and a half after I started, I didn’t think much of it. I felt my work had value and I didn’t know what a “User Experience Designer” or a “Front End Developer” did anyway. So when Justin called to tell me that we were going to start making Facebook games and *we* no longer included *me* I never thought I’d hear from him again.

Yet, just a year later, he sent an e-mail that would change my life:

An Englishman named Clive Downie (now the COO of Zynga) whom I greatly respect, but whose accent I still have a hard time understanding interviewed me and explained they needed to figure out what to do with community. While waiting through the weekend at the Travelodge in Berkeley, I had done some back of the envelope math and figured out the bare minimum I’d need to live in the Bay Area. Sure enough, I was offered that exact amount, plus some shares in the company. Clive told me that he thought those shares would be worth a quarter-million dollars one day.

(I also laughed at this.)

Somehow, I became employee number 79 at ngmoco☺, the “next generation mobile company” founded by Neil Young, Bob Stevenson and Alan Yu. At the time, I didn’t know anything about equity or how the San Francisco start-up scene really worked, but I thought I knew something about community and was up for anything, particularly a challenge. Just five months after I started, ngmoco would go on to be acquired by DeNA for $400 million.

Over the next 3 years, I’d have six different managers, triple my income, and become the director of a department I founded. For good or for bad, my entire approach to “Player Relationships” was based off a “just say yes” strategy I morphed out an anecdote Clive had told me about how Matell offered a lifetime replacement of any of their diecast car collection. He claimed you could send in the most beat-up, run over and destroyed Hot Wheels and Matell would mail you back a brand new one, no questions asked. This actually turned out to be applicable to mobile games customer service, but that’s another story.

Looking back at all that now though, the single biggest thing I learned came about early while reviewing an enterprise service agreement with our corporate council, Kien Dao before a conference call.

Kien asked me incredulously, “You actually think we should agree to these terms?”

“Yes,” I said, “[the company] says its their standard agreement. I’m sure they work with bigger companies than ours.”

“That’s the problem,” he explained hastily as we walked together, “you don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t. It’s impossible. That’s everyone’s biggest weakness and what makes us all equal at the end of the day. That’s why you always have to ask a lot of questions, even when you *think* you know the answer. That’s why you also have to **listen** to guys like me when I tell you these contract terms are no good. You just don’t know. But maybe one day, if you listen and ask enough questions, you actually will. Now, what conference room are we in?”