A Gen-X Fairy Tale

Evie is doing the day by day of our journey.  I have other blogs to tend, so I will only weigh in occasionally. - PJR

Yesterday we were at Bald Point State Park. It is a beach thing - lots of birds.  We were on a platform at the end of a boardwalk.  The place was pretty well deserted.  That seems to happen a lot.  This lovely setting just for us.


Another couple came walking down the boardwalk and went to the rail and was looking out for some birds or whatever (They were sparse at this point).

In a setting like that I have an irresistible impulse to make up a back story for the people, which I will sometimes share with Evie, sometimes to her amusement and sometimes to her chagrin, I whispered to her "She's the earner".

Of course, they were dressed casually, but even at that you could picture her in an office, but him not so much.  He had less executive presence than I do, which is saying something. He was wearing a Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt.  They were a lot younger than us, although not kids.

I think Evie got the conversation going noting his shorts which it was just a bit chilly for the day.  We're from Massachusetts. Oh we used to live in Cambridge, but now we are in Asheville, NC.

Now I'm recomputing the story.  He is some sort of tech guy, that's why he gets away with his presentation.  What were they doing in Cambridge?  (I'm thinking he went to MIT) Oh just jobs.

Now I am getting blunt.  So do you have some sort of tech job? Rob answers that he in fact is a computer programmer.  What sort of programming?  Well I created a solitaire program.  Like World of Solitaire?  Indeed, that very site is in fact his.

I have been spending a lot of time on World of Solitaire, which is really a great site.  Many people think that there is only one game called solitaire.  Actually, it is more of a game form. The game most of us learn is Klondike Turn 3, which is confirmed by the statistics on Rob's site.  Of the not quite 10 billion hands that have been played on WOS over 6 billion have been Klondike Turn 3.  Klondike Turn 1 accounts for another 5%.

WOS has over 50 different games including numerous versions of Klondike. I started going through them in alphabetic order, but fell in love with Algerian Patience and have been playing that a lot.

Here is the thing that is really amazing.  This was the first time that Rob and Tiffany have met one of their players in meatspace.  Rob communicates a lot with users by email.  And the site is just him, which is actually kind of amazing, which brings us to the Gen-X fairy tale.

Rob and Tiffany were both born in 1978.  (As far as somebody named Tiffany goes, really, when else?)  Rob's father gave him a Commodore 64 and taught him Basic when he was eight years old.  After that all he wanted to do was code.  They had vocational training at his high school and one of the choices was computer programming, so he learned a few other languages including COBOL, which to him was like studying ancient Greek - about as useful anyway.

All he ever wanted to do was code.  He got a job at a call center, where he started writing programs to make himself more efficient. Management was smart enough to promote him and use his talents. That led to another job in Boston.  It is probably getting less so, but coding was one area where people had not gotten credential happy.  I mean really, you could judge people by their work.

When he was 29, he met Tiffany.  He had never had a girlfriend up to then.  He found that he couldn't keep his mind off of her, so he decided to take up a project that would give him a break from thinking about Tiffany. He decided to write a solitaire program.  Hardly a unique idea.  I remember it coming with early nineties machines.  He wanted it to be really good though.

Thus was born WOS.  It was a really fun hobby and didn't cost all that much.  But sometime after their marriage, Tiffany suggested that maybe he could consider getting some ads to offset the $300 per month server cost that he was incurring.

So he signed up for adsense and did so well that Google moved him up to the next level.  The ads on WOS are very unobtrusive way over on the right side of the screen and there is a "hide ads" button that will make the playspace better.  He seems really proud of that.

Evie asked Tiffany how well that worked.  She said that they have essentially retired.  Rob of course is still maintaining the site, but that was never work in the first place.  They were in Florida buying a lot for their second home.  Evie noted on the way out that they were driving a Tesla.

Turns out that maybe I wasn't that far off in fingering Tiffany as the earner.  Actually, she was the monetizer.

Rob said he tried another site called World of Card Games, where users would interact with one another, but monitoring their bad behavior was too much hassle.

It is really something talking to somebody who is brilliant and accomplished while being uncorrupted by higher education.  He told me that for a feature on WOS, which I hadn't noticed, called challenges he had preset decks that were winnable.  He wanted to rate how hard they were.  So he had the computer play a million hands making random moves and if it won a lot he rated it easy.

Later on when doing some reading he realized that he had invented Monte Carlo simulation.

Going back to making up stories, I started thinking about what Rob and Tiffany might be making.  It is an extremely broad range, but it is a bit of a meditation on the ecology of the internet.

Here is how I look at it.  You have users, content producers, platforms, advertising sellers, advertising buyers.  The advertising buyers are buying the attention of the users.  Rob and I are both content providers.  He owns his own platform.

I'm doing a lot of projecting here, but based on my reading of them Rob and Tiffany live within their means.  And I would say that their lifestyle calls for at least 300k, certainly not much less.  So that is the low end.

The high end is mind-boggling.  If we consider hands played as equivalent to pageviews, Rob is worth 2,000 times what I am.  And he owns his own platform.  That would put him into low ten figures ceteris paribus.

I doubt very much that Google is paying him that much.  His site is actually designed to discourage ad viewing, forbes.com not so much.  Also it is possible that I get credit for reaching a higher income demographic - people who are worried about tax issues.  Regardless, he is an enviable situation, but I don't envy him.  I delight in his good fortune - and having Tiffany in his life is probably the greatest part of that.

Rob is probably one in a million in his generation, but I'm really glad to have met him and will now enjoy his site even more.

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Peter J. Reilly CPA writes about taxes on Forbes.com.