What is ANY%?

To understand what “ANY%” means (both in the literal sense, and why I picked it as a the title of this newsletter), I need to explain how the term?ANY%?relates to what's known as speedruns.

The literal sense

If you’re not familiar with what a speedrun?is, here’s a definition:

a?speedrun?is a play-through, or a recording thereof, of a whole video game or a selected part of it (such as a single level), performed with the intention of completing it as fast as possible.

One of my favorite videogames ever is?The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW). On average, it takes a player about 50 hours of gameplay to finish the game, although a "completionist" run (wherein you need to “complete” the game as well as all available side quests, etc.) may take upwards of 190 hours of slaying goblins, solving puzzles, and brewing potions to 100% "win" BotW.

Pros who take up speedrunning as a serious hobby (or even a profession!) do not?look?at videogames the same way your average casual player does. Instead, they invest time in routing their way “around” the game. This is done by exploiting glitches, bypassing cutscenes, and measuring the shortest distances their characters can travel to complete a game.

There is a huge audience for “100% complete” speedruns on sites like twitch.tv, with some players finishing BotW at 100% in?as little as 16 hours.

The real fun for me, though, is watching speedrunners completely forgo the logic of BotW, playing it end-to-end in just 25 minutes.

Among many other techniques, this can be typically achieved by vaulting the main character across the map, skipping hours of quests and bosses with the goal of getting to the game’s final cutscene as fast as possible. This is known as an ANY% speedrun.

Why I picked the title ANY% for my newsletter

AAA videogames have entire QA teams that thoroughly bug test them before launch (unless you're talking about garbage games like Battlefield 2042!). Routing your way through these titles is a highly difficult and potentially frustrating hobby. It takes creative genius and obsessive perseverance to abuse a game’s physics in just the right way to get what you want.

Speedrunners “crack” videogames by creating a new meta within the game: finish this puzzle as fast and efficiently as you can, regardless of how it was meant to be played.

I think of startups the same way: while speedrunners battle for high scores on online leaderboards, startup founders are glorified over the highest exits in the shortest periods of time possible. Both startup founders and speedrunners go against the grain of how things should be done, often breaking the rules along the way.

A famous quote often attributed to Henry Ford on slides across ?? innovation ?? conferences is?“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Whether he?actually?said that or not is irrelevant, but he definitely built his company by taking the same risky, calculated moves that your average FinTech would deploy today with fancier terms. Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, but he is most definitely renowned for bringing it to the masses.?Why?him?

There was at least a dozen other car manufacturers when Henry Ford launched his first prototype. The difference is that he didn’t just want to build cars. He wanted to build?many?cars. As many cars as he could in a day, as fast as he could.

Henry Ford didn’t invent the assembly line either. How he revolutionized automobile manufacturing, however, was by learning how to combine car building and assembly line optimizatio, making him the OG speedrunner.

The purpose of this newsletter

I write about startups in my part of the world because founders and operators are thriving despite the volatility in the Middle East. If I were to use gaming jargon, the Arab world's "meta" [i.e.: cross-country regulatory red tape, nascent online payment rails, and absurdly diverse demographics] is perfect for aspiring speedrunners to route their way around it. Will Hala Insurance be the next player to top the ANY% charts in MENA? I hope so. What I know for sure is that I am really enjoying this speedrun, and I'll be writing about all the hacks I can find along the way.

While I often digress and go on long-winded paths irrelevant to the title, I hope you enjoy reading my LinkedIn newsletter as much as I enjoy writing it.

Walid