Facebook Millionaire Charlie Cheever: All I Really Need To Know, I Learned Playing Starcraft

Charlie Cheever

Starcraft II is the game of choice for the Silicon Valley engineers building companies like Facebook, Asana, and Quora.

The game is basically a 21st century version of Chess. Except that instead of starting with your Rooks, Bishops, and Queens, all you have at the beginning of a game is the pawns. You have to then direct these "pawns" to mine natural resources, build factories, and use those factories to build more powerful pieces.

Also, unlike Chess, where players alternate turns, Starcraft II is live and ridiculously fast-paced.

Valley lawyer Justin Liu says he knows people at Facebook, Quora, Asana, Google, and Microsoft who play up to 15 hours a week.

The very best Starcraft II player out in Silicon Valley, at least according to one gamer source out there, is Charlie Cheever.

Cheever is the 20-something, blond, good-looking, now rich, engineer who played crucial role building Facebook as an early employee, before quitting last year to cofound Quora, a Q&A site that all the Valley bigwigs love.

Cheever himself is pretty modest about his game. On Quora, he writes, "On the current account I have on Battle.net, my W/L record is 56-76. That's about 1/3 of the games I've played in my life. In general, I'm pretty bad. Probably D/D- on ICCup."

The best ever or just OK, Cheever says he's learned a lot about life and business playing Starcraft II.

Macro is usually more important than micro but at critical moments, micromanagement can mean the difference between massive success and disastrous failure

For example, if you are making a movie, building a great team of actors and other people to work on the movie and getting enough funding, etc. is generally going to drive the success of the film, but if there's just something off about the story, then the movie can fail so that's something that might need good micro. (Star Wars I-III could be considered examples of this.)

For a StarCraft example, see 8:30 - 9:30 into InCa vs. Rain M4 Set 1 here: http://www.gomtv.net/2011gslspon... for an example of having a good strategy and good macro but then screwing everything up with bad micro at a critical moment.

There is usually more than one way to accomplish something.

For example, you can deal with tanks with either chargelots, warp prism bulldogging, immortals, or lifting the tanks with phoenix.

Context means a lot.

The map and situation will make different choices better and worse but it doesn't necessarily mean anything definitive about any particular choice in the abstract. In life, there are usually multiple paths to the same place.

If you want to be a Super Bowl winning quarterback, you can either go to a big name program (like Tom Brady at Michigan), maybe not get much playing time but be surrounded by top notch coaches and teammates and competition so you're well prepared for the NFL, or you can go to a smaller school (like Ben Roethlisberger at Miami of Ohio) and be "the man" for 4 years, get to throw a ton of passes, and generally get a ton of good practice and attention. In most things, there are a lot of wrong ways to approach a problem but still usually more than one way that will work.

Timing is critical.

For example, Loopt had a lot of the same ideas as foursquare, but started before location services were ubiquitous and commoditized on mobile phones, and so they spent a lot of time doing stuff like striking deals with carriers that turned out to not be that valuable for them, whereas foursquare was able to just focus on iPhone (and later BlackBerry Android) experiences.

In StarCraft, timing a push exactly to maximize your advantage is one of the most important principles of the game. Relatedly, you can never get back wasted time. If you forget to build a probe for 15 seconds, you'll never be able to catch up to someone who is executing the same build perfectly.

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