A Conversation With Pinball Wizard and Serial Entrepreneur Jay Adelson
In this episode of The Anycast, Matt sits down with someone he considers a friend and a person who has had three of the world’s coolest jobs: Jay Adelson.
They have a conversation about Jay’s career and influences, his approach to hiring, how Jay sees social media today vs. the beginning, why a caring founder shouldn’t be penalized, and more.
- Jay shares his origin story and how he got to where he is today – including winning the Michigan Student Film Festival with a super 8 movie called The Invisible Man at the age of 8, starting the first Internet television network, running a social media company in 2006, and being part of the business that changed his perspective: Centric Electric.
- Jay goes over how Scorbit came to be and how it got influenced by Jay’s son Benjamin and Jay’s passion for pinballs.
- Matt and Jay talk about the role of community in what Jay focuses on, how hard it was to build the hardware, and how he approached coding.
- Matt asks Jay whether he’s good at hiring or not, as well as how he decides if a candidate is the right person for the job.
- The mailbag question revolves around where Jay believes pinball is today and where it’s going.
- Jay goes over how he sees social media today versus social media of the early days, as well as what he’s particularly proud of.
- Social media plays a role in people tending to always compare their insides to everybody else’s (filtered) exterior. Matt and Jay share their thoughts on what that means in regard to taking action, making things happen, and achieving success.
- For Jay, we should rethink what a founder should be and should not penalize someone for caring.
- Silicon Valley is still very important but Jay believes that the pandemic has helped us by spreading the sphere of influence out and by creating a little bit more diversity.
- Matt asks Jay about the greatest and the worst days of his business career.
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