nolanbushnell

Yes, and at Chuck E. Cheese. And at all of my companies.

Bob Noyce, one of the founders at Intel, told me, "If you think the other guy's business is easy, it means you don't know enough about it." It's very easy to think of a business from the opportunity side when in fact there are many hard obstacles that have to be beaten to be successful.

Don't sell to big Hollywood studios. Atari had an extraordinary corporate culture that was destroyed within 2 years of the sale. I think that Atari would still be important today if that sale hadn't occurred.

The most important part of starting your first business is to right-size it. Don't start out thinking you're going to do twitter or facebook. But do something you can fund with the money that is in your wallet - get some experience with a little tiny company that you can do in your spare time. Train yourself. I've seen too many startups in which it's like they want to play in the big leagues before they played any sandlot baseball.

Many, many, many times! And yes, they loved it as much as most of the rest of America does. After I sold it, they were mad at me because they couldn't get as many free tokens as they wanted.