Games That Make You Smarter

Start-up Diaries

Maria Burns Ortiz — There will not be a single week between now and Thanksgiving week that I’m not on a plane at least once. And I’ve come to realize it’s not like things are going to slow down dramatically after that. As a startup, being busy is a good problem to have. It means you’re moving […]

There’s No One Thing, It’s a Lot of Things

September 16, 2015 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

bags of money — Did you ever see those commercials about how the government wants to give you free money? Government grants go unclaimed every year! The government wants to give you money! Yeah, that’s a lie. The government does not want to give you money. You have to knock the government down and […]

Show me the money! Grants vs Investor Funds

September 16, 2015 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Picture of codices. The Mayans used these to record their history — Our wonderful artist, Justin Flores, is always telling me that you can say more with art than with words. To show you our game progress on Aztech, our bilingual game coming out next year, I decided to include a couple of images on the off chance that he is right […]

An Aztech Picture Worth a Thousand Words

September 5, 2015 in Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

People in the tech startup world take for granted the idea that everyone knows what an accelerator is – but this post is a nod to the fact that the vast majority of people probably have no idea what that means. You see, there’s this tendency within the tech […]

What Is an Accelerator?

August 24, 2015 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries / Women in Tech by Maria Burns Ortiz

Going through our archives, we came across this great post from September 25, 2013, “Don’t Believe Other People Are Smarter Than You + Github Is Awesome” that we wanted to share with you in case you missed it the first time around. If you want to be a programmer, […]

Throwback Thursday: Don’t Believe Other People Are Smarter Than You ...

August 20, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by admin

My oldest daughter started second grade today. On the first morning back to school, she woke up early without taking much nudging. She was up and ready to go in nearly record time. She grabbed her backpack and was in the car with half an hour to spare before the […]

Startups Take Sacrifice

August 14, 2015 in Parenting Like I Know What I'm Doing / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

audience at pitch session — I just returned from South by Southwest’s V2Venture conference where I attended the pitch contest, and I left the event thinking — like I do every time I attend a pitch event – how completely subjective pitching is. It depends 100 percent on who you’re pitching to and […]

The Perfect Pitch: (Spoiler! There’s No Such Thing)

August 3, 2015 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Certain parts of a job can get done with less effort or in less time after you’ve done them a dozen times. Case in point, the image above is from the canoeing scene in Fish Lake. The first time I played that part, I thought I’d never make it down the river […]

When Running a Startup, You Never Slow Down

July 15, 2015 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

In his autobiography, Lee Iacocca said something along the lines of: ‘Is not a people person’ is the kiss of death on a performance evaluation, because people is all we have working here at Chrysler. I have known some brilliant programmers who never achieved their potential because they could not […]

Works Well With Others: Key to Start-up Success

July 1, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

characters on map — Elements can have data. What the heck good is that? Why would your <div> tag need data? I’m always trying to learn new things, even if I have no particular use for them at the moment, because you never know. I had an idea that the sounds that play when you […]

Better HTML5 Game Development: Data Attribute

June 30, 2015 in AnnMaria / Code Talk / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

The New York Times succinctly summed up the problem with many of the “hot startups” that are getting all the buzz. [The current tech] boom is characterized by a rise in so-called on-demand services aimed at the wealthy and the young. With a few taps on a phone, for a […]

Technology for the 100 Percent

June 15, 2015 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

No one is ever going to give me $3 million in seed money just because I have an idea. I am not white enough, young enough, male enough and not only did I not drop out of an Ivy League school, I actually stuck around the University of California (a […]

When Disadvantages Are a Blessing

June 2, 2015 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars