Rahul Vohra

What is the difference and how do you think about the difference and how have you brought that into the product?

So, again, this is probably dating both of us.

If you wind the clock back probably 10, 15 years ago now, gamification was a big thing in the Valley.

And it was actually an investment thesis for many venture capital funds.

Many founders were setting out to gamify things.

And it turns out it didn't really work.

And the difference is...

And it's because of the difference, I should say, between game design and gamification.

Game design is when you really make your product like it is a game.

And it's much harder than it sounds.

You think about most software,

versus most games, games don't need to exist.

There are no requirements.

Their only job to be done is to entertain you.

And so it's an entirely different kind of software design than regular software design.

When people think about gamification, they're normally doing things like points and leaderboards and trophies and badges and streaks.

And all of these can kind of push behavior in a certain way, but they don't actually make the underlying thing fun or intrinsically rewarding.

So a really great example of this, by the way, is a research study that was done in Stanford in the 1970s.

They took kids who were aged about three to four years old, I believe, or maybe a little bit older, four or five, and they divided them into two groups.

And one of these groups was told that they were going to get a reward, like a certificate with a gold ribbon.