Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space

Well, it’s such a privilege. It’s an honor. I do have to say, first of all, on a personal level, I really love you. On a professional level, I think most people don’t know. We have an amazing professional relationship. You’re an investor in our business as well. We’ll talk about startup advice and all of that, but most people don’t know you’re actually a media entrepreneur, not just any VC. So for me, it’s such an amazing privilege to be here. You’re one of the very few people I tell my kids about at dinner table.

I say, uncle Harry did this. You know, I want you to do this like uncle Harry when they were all it’s not me blowing smoke up your ass. This is really legitimate, and I’m really, really happy to be here.

Sure.

I grew up in Turkey until I was 16, and I was this mega nerd. I was in, like, the mass Olympiad team, and I was one of those people that I was social, but I wasn’t externally facing, externally friendly. My mother came in one day, and my mother is not for the faint of heart, and she said, I decided to put you on a exam for the rotary club to go to The US. And I protested, and I said, I don’t want to. I’m happy here in Turkey.

And she came and she said, fine. You can be a garbage man then. And that was the end of discussion. So next thing I knew, I was in a exam room with the rotary club. I went to The US into Wisconsin. And you took a math nerd from Turkey, put them in Tomah, Wisconsin. That was an incredible experience. I was the outsider. And that was a very defining moment for me. If I made it in Tomah, you know, I could make it anywhere. Met my wife in university in Wisconsin, went to graduate school.

I thought I wanted to become a professor. And most people that do consulting don’t know what they want to do with their life. That was me. I had no idea what I want to do with my life at that point. Decided to just stop graduate school, left Yale, went to McKinsey, spent two years at McKinsey, absolutely hated it. It was a very rigid environment. I wasn’t the type of person that would, you know, necessarily follow the rules. I wouldn’t do the way they wanted me to do the analysis.

But the analysis I did was correct. How did that land at Facebook? So after HBS, I went to work at Skype for a couple years. I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize. Skype was an engineering led organization. Being engineering led, you know, there is no room for fluff. And I developed a very strong distaste for fluff while I was at Skype. When you’re talking with an Estonian engineer, you learn very quickly to get to the heart of the matter very, very fast. In between, when I was at Skype, I was presented with this world of mobile gaming.

I learned about this game called Zynga’s FarmVille. But the thing that was absolutely amazing at the time, I read a statistic somewhere that there was more tractors being sold in a day on FarmVille than anywhere else in the world combined. It was very different in terms of a game design philosophy. That element of understanding the psychology behind that actually made me interview at Zynga. Back then I was told the culture at Zynga was not very good, so I ended up not taking that job. But I got bitten by the gaming bug.

I flirted with the idea of going to Turkey at the time. For a couple months, I actually joined this company called Peak Games out of Istan Sure. As an adviser, and they were making Facebook games at the time. And through that, I met Julian, our common friend, and joined Facebook. Decided not to move to Turkey at the end and instead came to London. So

The biggest thing I learned at Facebook actually is things are never as bad as they seem and never as good as they seem. I heard in all hands with Marc. And when I joined Facebook, it was 2012, soon after Facebook launched their mobile offering. Right? Because they were getting really heavily criticized about they don’t have a presence on mobile. They missed the boat on mobile. Sure. Was one of the reasons for that IPO tanking. Exactly. It opened, I think, $38, went down to $19. My wife said, hey.

Are you sure that you did the right thing by joining? And I was like, I actually don’t know, but I think so. And I remember Marc being extremely calm and actually almost in a way confident. And that to me at the time seemed a bit wrong almost. And when I came to the kind of the Ground Floor, I understood that he believed in what they could do as a mobile offering. Right? And Facebook invented a new type of ad unit. Really, was mobile app ads. And fast forward to this day, it’s 90 plus percent of Facebook’s revenue is coming from that.

So I remember how calm Marc was. He did say things are never as bad as they seem. They’re never as good as they seem. That’s the one thing I learned. When things are going absolutely horrendously, possible. And when things are going, you know, incredibly well and so on, I try to bring sense of realism.

Exactly. That’s such a good point, because it will all be okay. We will all be okay at the end of the day. There are times when you have to act, and you have to act with Gusto of IAP.

as bad as it seemed? So I remember when we launched App Ads originally, and this will sound comical, but it was not a foregone conclusion that those ads would work because they are a new ad format, they’re native ads. And when we launched those, I got so excited that I went and told all the partners that were working with Facebook at the time about this amazing thing and so on. And I remember all my partners being extremely frustrated that these ads weren’t because it took them, you know, six to nine months to figure out.

I remember there was a famous bug on Facebook Android. You know, these ads weren’t delivering, and there was something wrong. That moment, I remember thinking, this may not work. You know, the performance of the ads were not there, and all my partners were pretty frustrated with the performance and so on. And I thought maybe it’s not going to work. But there was somebody that discovered a bug in Menlo Park. I can’t remember exactly who it was, whatever. But it was a step function change. Over a week, these ads started delivering.

And fast forward, I think there was a period of time when I think 35% of Facebook’s mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time, which is absolutely incredible. Right? This is how hungry they were for this kind of offering. They were game developers, and game developers are always very hungry to adopt new things that might be game changers.

How’s that for sure? So there’s actually an interim step. There’s a guy that I really love called Humam. He was the chief strategy officer at Activision, bought King, and I joined him at King. And I actually initially reached out to Lior because we wanted to do a project within King that I thought maybe, you know, we could get And the thing that I remember specifically about Lior was how good of a person he is. Before meeting Lior, one of the horn that I heard in the startup world was that, you know, successful founders are always assholes.

Right? This was the thing that I kept on hearing. And I met Lior, and he was none of those things. And also Eyal, our our third cofounder. Right? They’re the type of people, if something bad happens to you, you want them taking over your family affairs, and you want them to make sure that your family is well taken care of. And he’s a guy who successfully sold the business to a publicly listed company and still goes home every night at 6PM to have dinner with his family.

That is someone that I want to learn from, I want to partner with, And that really drove the decision beyond anything else. And on the side, was developing some of these games myself. I felt that I could and we could out execute some of the other companies. As we started to talk more and more with Lior, I felt that we were thinking very much on similar terms. So that’s kind of how it all started. So you mentioned startup pool

I think it’s absolute bullshit. Excuse my French, but Why is that? So I have many friends that are successful entrepreneurs. And some of them actually, one of them lives in Canada, and he is in the insurance space. And I can guarantee you he’s not passionate about the insurance space. I’ve never met a single person who is passionate about the domain of insurance. So that’s just not true. I’m the living example of this. Think, you know, Triple Dot is a company that’s doing quite well, but I’m not a gamer by definition.

Now, depends on what you mean by gamer, but any kind of definition you have. I am not a hardcore gamer. I do like games. I like the business of games. I like the philosophy of games, but I’m I’m not a gamer. I am passionate about winning. I think that’s the biggest difference because I invest in a lot of companies as my myself as well. And I think the thing that people like working with me is I don’t have this incentive to tell people, give people this startup porn advice.

And there’s a lot of them out there. Being passionate about the domain that you’re in is great. It’s a luxury. It’s not a must to have.

You have to be passionate about winning. If you’re passionate about winning, when the hard times do come and they will come, then you need this internal engine to propel you through. But that passion doesn’t have to be directed to the domain. I think it’s a very western centric view of the world to think that you have to be passionate about the domain that you’re in. And I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who are just hard workers and learners, they end up not pursuing good, lucrative jobs because of this kind of advice.

Do you see what I mean? Absolutely. That checks out so much. Because earlier at the beginning of the show, one of the things we talked about is how much I respect you. Right? And I think you’re unstoppable because you have a why. Right? The thing with your mother and that’s your why. As long as you have a why, you can bear anyhow. So you just have to find your own why. That why does not have to be the domain that you’re operating in. We

It’s okay to do it for the money. I’m not doing it for the money, but money is a great plus. I mean, money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it can eliminate some forms of unhappiness. And a lot of people fetishize this grandiose meanings in life and, you know, what it means to have a mission statement and you put it on the wall, and there’s just so much lack of genuineness around this. A lot of people are doing it for the money. Other people, like me, we’re doing it because we think we’re good at it and we want to win.

We just happen to find something that we are good at doing and that drives us. You might be doing it for your mom, with money. I’m doing it for my kids. Now,

with that one, did you? Yeah. I mean, we really weren’t solving a real problem. The fact of the matter is true innovation happens through iteration. You start working on something and you iterate, you do this thing 1% different, this thing 1% different, and then the aggregate impact ends up being something completely innovative. So I don’t like this advice in the sense that I don’t think it’s necessarily just false, but I think it’s a bit misleading because it’s okay. Started out building a Solitaire app. You know, one of the companies that I was very fortunate to partner with is Dream Games, they’re building a match three game.

And you know what? World has plenty of match three games, but theirs is performing much better now. So, you know, there’s this thing that to be solving a real problem of building something that doesn’t exist. And if you’re lucky enough to find something like that, by all means, I’m not disparaging that. But not everyone has to do that.

Broadly speaking, yes. I can say that, you know, like speed is very important. But the porn around speed is something that I’m uncomfortable with because speed of execution allows you to do more iterations than others. But there are points that this is a road, and the road has curves. And you know what? When you’re approaching those curves, sometimes you have to just slow down and actually think and take your time. So I’ve seen many companies in Turkey, also in Israel, where I also do quite a bit of investing, they have this mantra and they put it on the walls and say, you know, speed overall, speed above everything else.

And sometimes, just sometimes, they are too fast when they approach one of those curves and they go off the cliff. At Facebook, we had these posters. Right? They said, done is better than perfect. I agree with that in general in spirit. But when you go over to finance, they said done is better than perfect except in finance. Right? Sometimes done is just more important. And the perfect example in gaming for this is there’s two brothers called Igor and Dimitri. They’re probably the best kept secret in mobile gaming.

It is an absolutely incredible story. They are two brothers. They’re from Vologda, Russia. Right? Middle of nowhere. They started building games. Initially, they started building pay to play games, not even free to play, which was the revolution in gaming. I met them in 2013 in Moscow when I was working at Facebook. When I told everyone about mobile games, free to play, everyone jumped on it. And I remember talking to Igor, and Igor was quite careful and he kind of just wanted to see if this Facebook thing was real.

And so they just took their time, but when they executed, they executed so well. They weren’t necessarily prioritizing speed. What do you think they did to execute so well? First of all, I think this is a bit anticlimactic. The answer is really not one thing. We pay attention to details. We make sure that what matters, we spend a lot of time on and what doesn’t matter, we don’t spend on. And that that judgment is something you develop it over a period of time. It’s so funny.

point. It depends a little bit on their backgrounds. Right? Let’s take gaming for instance, and Dream Games is a perfect example of this. Right? These are guys who’s built two hits before when they were at Peak Games. And when they came out with the kind of idea of starting a new studio, my advice to them was, you guys may not know how good you are, so you don’t even need to tell people what you’re going to build because it’s going to change over time. They had, I think, their pitch deck, they had like seven slides and three of the slides talk about who the team was and what they’ve built before.

Because truly, no one should care if you simplify it to its core. What you say you’re going to build is going to change. I don’t care who says what, it will be different. So to me, if you have the strength to lean on your previous experience, I would say lean on that. But if you’re a first time founder, if you’re a brilliant guy out of university, if you’re a Facebook engineer, and you have to justify what you’re going to build, you just have to play the game.

So then I advise them on how to play the game and how to communicate what they’re going to build.

does this roll? That’s just wrong because yes, I mean, there are cases that that will be the case, but depends on what you mean by your life will suck. My life didn’t suck when I was building Triple Dot. And not because I wasn’t working like a dog, but you know when my life sucked? When I was working two hours a day was the tail end of my career at Facebook. By all measures, it was supposed to be super comfortable and, you know, whatever. I was cruising, right?

I was barely doing any work at You

Yeah. You just like sit in the canteen and move. Yeah. You spend enough time to learn the inside of the machinery and develop an expertise and just kind of punting away responsibility. Right? But my life was absolutely miserable because nothing I did actually mattered and I was always very frustrated. I couldn’t have any impact whatsoever. And I was always, am I going to be found out? Like, are they going to realize that I’m doing basically no work? And that was not easy. Right? Compare that to triple.

Where I was working very, very hard, but I was loving it and my life didn’t suck. We talked about work life balance. I do agree that work life balance is not true in the standard sense of you work, you finish your work, you go home, and then you chill. That’s not work life balance. Right? If you’re lucky enough to be doing something that you like, that you’re excited about, you’re good at, you go home, you sleep, and you’re thinking about your work. And that’s why I feel fortunate.

This is kind of what I found with Triple So your life doesn’t have to suck. You can manage your own time. You can manage your own schedule, and life doesn’t have to suck.

Frankly, when I was working at Facebook, I traveled quite a lot. Early on when we were building Triple Dot, I would spend a lot of time either on the road or whatever working. In the last two years, actually, with COVID, what we learned is that we are more masters of our own schedule and testing than we think. I started basically making a point of trying to be home every day by around 07:00, spending that time with the kids. And it’s not much, it’s two hours a day, but you know, it’s great for them, it’s great for me.

And I put them to bed every night. Basically between seven and nine it’s family time. And I try to do nothing related to work between seven and nine. The more you do it, the more it gets known and people just suck kind of auto censoring it. And then from nine onwards, I take a personal break. So every day for about an hour, I watch TV, I play some chess or whatever it is. And then from ten onwards, I do work. And that’s the work that I actually think is kind of my maker time effectively, meaning during the day it’s easy to get hijacked by meetings and this and that.

But from ten to two, you have just effectively me time that you’re actually able to do whatever you want to do. One thing that

me it does get easier? I think it does get easier. Right? The nature of the problems change. It’s like when people ask me about kids, you know, when you have a small kid, you worry about something relatively minuscule every single day, maybe every single hour. And as they grow older, the magnitude of the problems increase, but their frequency decreases. So now with my 12 year old daughter, I worry about she hanging out with the right friends, and if she’s not, how can I change that? I think it’s very similar to work when we first started the company, and it was different, but it was a different type of different.

It was now we’re in a place our daily worries, our problems have changed. And to be honest, personally, having more money than I did before, it definitely helps. It allows me to focus on things that I want. The biggest problem it solves for me is I don’t have to spend time to optimize for an unknowable upside in the future. You know, when we started the company and even when I was at Facebook, right, I would become an advisor to company x. The reason I would do that is, hey, what if they do something really well in the future?

I could have some upside and so on. And I spent a lot of time with people, frankly, that I shouldn’t have spent. And when you have more liquidity, when you have more money, you don’t have to do that. You just can say no to people that you just don’t want to hang out with because frankly you don’t need the x y z amount from that interaction. So it does get easier in that sense because you have more freedom. What I’m I guess what I’m describing is you have more freedom over your own time.

You don’t have to say yes to people that you don’t want to. I’m just wondering why you still hang out with me then. Because I told you, I love you, and I do genuinely find what you’re building and is not, again, blowing smoke up your ass, but I think what you’re building here is going to be incredible over the next five decades. So this is kind of the time horizon I’m looking at you and I’m saying, okay, when Harry is 76 years old and he looks back what he has built, I think this will be the five decades of Harry because of the way that you operate, the relentless execution.

And the most important thing is you have a why. So once you have the why, and that’s a very personal why, that’s not a why that can be satisfied. If your why was money, there will come a point where you’ll have diminishing returns. Your why is very personal. Frankly, I’m not here because you invest in our company because thank you, but that’s not why I’m I totally get you. You

Look, I’ll give you a personal example. I mean, when we started Triple Dots, early on, internally, we developed a technology inside Triple Dots. And this may actually not even be a very well known story for you either. This technology was developed inside Triple Dot and this was not our core area of focus. We’re a mobile games company. We’re supposed to be building mobile games all the time. And we developed this technology to enable us to better build games. But then we saw that this piece of technology had such a product market fit in the markets that we didn’t even know about.

We decided to spin this off into a new entity called Luna Labs. And we basically partnered with another entrepreneur and some of my team from Facebook. But we were very involved. So if in those days someone who was preaching gospel of startup porn met us, they’d say, you guys are absolutely doing the wrong thing. But Luna was sold within two years to Iron Source for a pretty healthy amount. And we were able to execute across both paths together, right? So I’m not anti this message, but the message is given with such certainty that if you’re an entrepreneur, you hear this message, you say, okay, I must focus on only one thing.

But no one tells you what to do. What if that one thing is the wrong thing? The core fundamental problem here is when you say, You must focus on this thing, I think the spirit there is that you must not spend your time at conferences or this. I do buy that. I think you must focus on execution. But this is said with such certainty that I actually have people I have spoken with that listen to x y z podcasts and, you know, some VCs are dangerously prominent in social media and they they say, oh, focus on one thing, one thing only.

These guys come to me and they say, well, I focus on building this type of game and I’m gonna spend my three years building this type of game. I tell them, okay, but what if it doesn’t work? What if you’re focusing on the wrong thing? So it all comes down to basically judgment. Right? That judgment of what are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the right thing? You need to have some breathing room to allow yourself to pivot. You talked about diversification. That’s so important early on in the journey of the startup.

Why is diversification important? Because if you’re a startup that is trying to create a new product that doesn’t exist in the market today, right, you might very well be developing something and bumping your head against the wall. The message is focus, but that actually reads not as focus as just keep bumping your head against the wall. And that is a very dangerous advice because the real strength in that case is to know how to pivot. And you cannot be formulaic about this. There’s just no silver bullet about when to know to persist versus when to know when to pivot.

That probably is the singular biggest determinant of success.

a great way to put it. That might be the formula. But reality is sometimes you just don’t know what experiments you want to do, you know. No one can tell you deterministically, you have to start and focus on this thing and keep going. Focus is important, don’t get me wrong. But it is important, you need to put an asterisk. Right? You have to focus on execution. Because in the early days, nothing else matters. PR doesn’t matter. Brand doesn’t matter. You have to be focused on execution.

Now, within that constraint, you have to leave yourself room to pivot into x y z direction.

I think culture is what happens when you’re not looking. This is one area of porn that I can subscribe to. Culture is truly what happens when you are not looking. But my beef with this whole startup porn is that it is given with such confidence and such uniformity that the truth is it just depends on the individual founder, the individual company, what problem they’re solving. If you can afford the luxury of thinking about brand and PR early on, then by all means you should do that.

But oftentimes these are competing. Speaking

First of all, when I think about mission and vision statements, right, I often have to Google what a mission statement is and what a vision statement is. And the reason I don’t know the difference, 99.9% of the times that you craft a mission and vision statement is because someone tells you we have to have a mission and vision statement. Right? Because otherwise, your mission statement could be, I want to make as much money as possible. And that’s okay. But no one is going to have a mission statement that says, we exist to make as much money as possible.

Why is that? I don’t know. I think it’s kind of weird. We do want to make as much money as possible as Triple Tile. But if you look at a company like Facebook, for instance, I actually wrote it down. It’s something like, give people power to build community and bring the world closer. I don’t know what that means at all. I have no idea. Too long one. Yeah. You know, give people the power to build community. I genuinely don’t know what that means. It just does not reflect why you get up and come to work every day.

I would challenge any Facebook employee to tell me they go to work every day to elevate the world’s consciousness or whatever it is, to give power to build community. Most people don’t even know what that means. So should we not have them? I am not suggesting that killing them is just antidote. I think there’s a time and place, but I do think why have statements when really most of your employees are gonna think it’s bullshit? I think they serve a purpose. And the purpose is if you articulate them well and if you’re honest with what the company’s mission and vision is, I think they can serve a purpose.

If you ask me what they are for Triple Dot, I will have to look them up. The reality is Triple Dot exists because and this doesn’t make good mission statement, vision statement, but we want to build a generational company. I remember now, Triple Dot’s mission is to be the world’s leading data driven entertainment company. We spent a lot of time crafting that. I like that. That’s not bad. It’s not fluffy. But the people around the table, when we were crafting that statement, we just despise fluffiness.

Right? Okay.

There are times that we do do it. When I look at the guy who’s running the marketing department for us does have experience in marketing, but the people who are, you know, really the kind of folks that are reporting to him that are running day to day, we probably have the strongest marketing team of any gaming company I know. Those people is the first time they all worked in, like, a gaming company, more or less. Any real relevant domain expertise you want to have, you can really learn it in a several month window.

Right? If you want to learn marketing, you could learn it in six months. But those people, they are coming from very good schools. They’re all incredibly self driven people. They’re all hungry. I think the keyword is hunger. They’re all hungry. They all tend to be type A level overachievers. Those people, they will just kill themselves to make sure that the job gets done. And that is a trade that I think that’s very innate. I don’t know if you can teach that to a person. You can teach marketing to anyone.

You can teach pretty much anything you do. You cannot teach the hunger, and this is very true. It’s not like we don’t hire experts. Right? But the reason we actually prioritize hunger in the interview process is a very counterintuitive thing to do. Because imagine you and I start a company, and you know x, I know y, but we have to also do z. Take marketing for instance. It’s very tempting for us to say, let’s hire person x from that company who’s been doing this. And in a way, it’s a mental offloading.

You’re offloading the burden by hiring someone else who’s done that. But the context is different. The thing that they’re doing has moved on. They were doing it in a different company with different constraints, with different everything about it is different.

What do we do there? There’s always room for someone who’s an expert to teach. But you’d be surprised how easy it is for that knowledge to be gained regardless of the field. Right? There’s just so many resources available. For someone who wants to learn sales, there’s just so many things you can do. I’m not suggesting you read a book and you’re an expert, but it can be solved. It’s a solvable problem. You can hire a consultant. You can hire x, y, z, right? But the act of bringing someone into the company has to be very slow.

The fact of actually parting ways with someone probably needs to be very fast. There’s a place for expertise. Don’t get me wrong. What have been the biggest hiring mistakes you’ve made? It’s a very good question. It has been those cases where we’ve hired for etiquette. So you hire someone who’s worked at gaming company x and you say, oh, wow, they’re super senior, they’ve done this. They even check out in terms of when you do due diligence, etcetera, And oftentimes, they don’t work out. They come in, they say, this is how we used to do things there.

And the organisms are very different potentially.

Sure. Why do they not matter? Sure. This time, I would say the porn is the entrepreneurs are sometimes guilty of subscribing to this type of porn. I’ve seen many, many cases of companies that are really attracted to saying, hey, our last round we were valued at x. Valuation to me can only be useful if it’s a meaningful heuristic for future potential cash flows. But valuations now are a measure of what that market’s FOMO is for that business. And we’ve just seen during COVID times, you could literally get your grandma, grandpa, start a gaming company.

You could probably get funded at, you know, $100,000,000 valuation. It’s very, very easy as a founder to let that get to you. In your mind, all of a sudden, have, let’s say, 55% of the business valued at a $100,000,000, and now you’re thinking, okay, I have $55,000,000. Truth of the matter is you have nothing. It’s just all paper money. Not only you have nothing, oftentimes, the mistake is it could go the other way, and we’ve seen this when valuations have corrected. You’ve so many people ahead of you now in a potential liquidation.

You have preference, you might have debt, you might have all sorts of things ahead of you, and you’ve hired people now, and you have to give them options. And they have exercised prices, and to exercise those options, and we see this a lot more in The US than we do in Europe, they have to take out loans to exercise their options. And when the valuations come down, not only they don’t have money anymore, but they also are in debt. So that is the nightmare scenario. Basically, the message here is that it ain’t over until the fat lady sigs, they say in The US.

Right? So valuations are a heuristic. They could be a healthy heuristic, but they could also be a dangerous heuristic, and it will be valuable if you treat valuations as, okay, this is what my potential future cash flow can be. But it’s just a number. Right? This is not the perfect number to capture the essence of your business. It’s just what the market perceives, what the market values your business and the domain you operate in, etcetera. First question,

Isn’t that crazy? Yes. It’s a good point. The perfect anecdote for this is when I was at Facebook, people were getting free food. Back then, Facebook folks would complain about anything. Right? And they would complain, why are you giving me free food? Give me more money instead. And some of the conversations I’ve witnessed in parts of Europe is, I don’t want equity. I want more cash. And I do understand in a lack of a sophisticated enough startup ecosystem why this might be the case. But if you apply any type of regret minimization, you know, you will regret not getting that equity for your sweat, blood, and tears.

I do believe technology is the biggest enabler of wealth and the biggest contributor to human progression. If you’re a hungry girl, a hungry person, within a long period of time, you will you will make a lot of money. You just almost can’t not.

think we could do differently? So I am quite a political person. I’m not a conservative. I’ve I’ve never been. But I do actually like the fact that Rishi is the prime minister out of all the kind of candidates. I actually think he has a pro business agenda, which I really like, and he has ability to articulate a vision that is tech friendly. When I contrast The US and The UK, it’s such a phenomenal contrast because I spent sixteen years in The U US and eleven years now in The UK, and I still subscribe to this American dream, and it you can feel it, you can breathe it, and this is super energizing for a foreigner.

You go into The US, the first question is never, where are you from? Never. It’s almost rude to ask someone, where are you from? The first question always is, what do you do? Contrast that to The UK, where the first question cannot be, what do you do? It’s rude. It’s like, where are you from? I do think there’s a big missed opportunity because the amount of talent, the amount of academic talent in The UK is immense. UK is a hub for bringing people and look at us, we have two Israeli founders, one Turkish founder, who decided to build this company in The UK, created hundreds of jobs with a very pro business government.

And if my message was, hey, I’m going to build a poster child of UK equals success equals tech and business, and then Financial Times was a, you know, well established paper, not only names fastest growing games companies, it’s the fastest growing company in Europe, and that happens to be in my backyard, you know, I would try to create a lot more kind of political capital around that. Can I ask a bit of a two eyes one? Do you think Europe on the whole is a bit fucked?

I don’t think they’re fucked. Why would they be fucked? Right? If you look at the average European, it depends on your definition growth rates, increasing regulations specifically around But take a but take a look at how they live. Right? Big people vote by their feet. And this is why I also don’t think America is fucked. If you look at net migration of any country couplings, that migration into The US is more than net migration out. There are more Germans going to live in The US than Americans are gonna live in Germany.

And the reason for that is just more opportunity in The US. And I do think that Europeans are not fucked because they live relatively healthy lives for making good money. So if you think very basic core human level, I don’t think they’re fucked. I think they’re living good lives. Now, if you ask for business competitiveness, yes, of course, there’s a lot of regulatory red tape and there’s a lot of problems with bureaucracy and, you know, you mentioned AI regulation, all of that. And we’ve lost months of productivity over something silly called GDPR and etcetera, right?

But I just don’t think fundamentally that matters in the grand scheme of things because in the end, people here live high quality lives. That’s why I’m here. I want my children to have a good education, access to good healthcare, etcetera. That’s why we’re here.

Is that fair? I do understand why people say it. There has been a hit driven nature historically. However, I think people say it and mean that success in gaming is random. People don’t really mean hit driven. They say just no one knows how successful you are. With mobile gaming, I do take issue that I don’t think it’s a hit driven business. I think it’s a data driven business. You need to create hits, but the way you create hits is very, very different. Again, I can give many counterexample.

Play Race is a perfect example. They’ve had four hits. Triple Dot, we have multiple hits under our belts. And if you look at the business as a whole, the success of a mobile game has nothing to do with how you make the game. It’s all about how you operate the game. I think a lot of times people think about gaming and they think about people in dreadlocks sitting in a room with bean bags and just kind of ideating stuff. That’s not at all how it works.

Right? It’s just all about how you operate the game, what decisions you make, very analytically driven. And live operations is such an integral part of how to make those games work and scale that by definition it cannot be hit driven.

Yes, absolutely. I have invested in founders who have not created a hit game because I think it’s about articulating what you’ve learned in that journey. And the best part about investing in the domain that you’ve spent time in is you can ask very pointed and to the matter questions. And I can say, tell me about how you would think about x y z and, you know, how will you market this game? How will you, you know, monetize the game? You can really form a mental picture of how they think.

I I don’t worry about it because I think if I don’t invest in a company, there’s always a reason at the time that I don’t invest in it. There will always be misses that, you know, as an investor, you will not participate in x y z. That’s just part of what you have to be comfortable with. I think it’s important to learn from those misses, but you can’t really just go back and say, oh my god. Why did I miss that? Why did I you can’t beat yourself over the head too much.

I

Yes. I mean, the size is just comical. I mean, like, you know, there’s a lot of things you’d listen to around saying, like, gaming is bigger than movies and films combined. Right? That’s a very real thing. But even then, people misunderstand how big gaming is. People think it’s, you know, $150,000,000,000 business. It’s way, way larger. My favorite example to give, it’s it’s a bit of a cheeky example, but there’s a game called Pachinko in Japan. Pachinko is this Japanese version of their, I guess, slot machines, etcetera.

And there’s Pachinko parlors in Japan, and the average revenue per year from pachinko is larger than the Japanese auto industry, which is several $100,000,000,000 a year. Just take that sliver of information. That is a type of game that might not be mobile gaming, but that’s people actually spending real money and time and energy playing games. That is not included in any gaming market size estimation. Is that casino gaming? Are they playing for money? So actually, if you go to a pachinko parlor, you cannot withdraw money due to regulation.

So you get different toys, etcetera, and then you have to go and change those toys in a next door shop for money. And it’s just the whole system that they’ve articulated. So But you never say that’s gambling. But gambling is also a form of gaming. I’m not saying necessarily that gaming is big because of gambling. Right? It is a misunderstood market. The size is not really known. If you look at all these market sizes, they don’t actually include gaming related ad tech. They don’t count how we make our money, for instance, because we make our money mostly by showing ads.

And those market size estimates, they don’t count companies like us, which is absolutely crazy. And the other thing I would say is that people have this misconception in their minds that gaming folks tend to be these uber creative types that are hanging out in a beanbag in a room, but that’s just not the case at all. Like, the day in, day out of gaming companies is very, very analytical. If you take my daughter into gaming into Triple Dot, she might think she’s worked, you know, in a hedge fund given the discussion some of the discussion that are taking place.

It’s all math, analytical, data driven decisions. No. I I

I think it’s not totally fair. And the reason I struggle with this is let me give you an example of a gaming multiple versus a, you know, software as a service multiple. Right? Gaming companies are valued three, four times revenues, whatever, future looking, backward looking, however you wanna do it. Right? Whereas a software as a service company can be anywhere between ten, twenty, 30. In the height of COVID, it was even, like, 100 times. But if you look at the gaming cohorts, if you look at behavior, these are really, really sticky games to the games that we do.

People play these games for a very, very long time. They become people’s part of people’s lives. From a

There are different retention metrics we look at. Right? But the retention metrics we look at are really, really long term. Like, we don’t really look at day one, day seven retention anymore. We look at really long term retention. Is that the day three sixty five? Yeah. Mean, day 90, day three sixty five, day 540, day seven twenty, those are the metrics that we try to kind of really look at. The other crazy thing is not only, you know, mobile gaming is new, there’s just so many more type of games that can be done.

I mean, you know, when Candy Crush came into the market, everybody said, oh, it’s too late to build another casual game now. Candy Crush took all the users. Then came the Playrix Brothers. They introduced this meta game concept on on casual games. Everybody said, okay. Now now it’s too late. Now it’s done. Then came Peak Games and introduced a different game built on the idea of a game that actually King had. And everybody said, now it’s done. Now now it’s we shoot that. And now there’s Dream Games that is doing something.

Now, if you look at all those four companies, the core is just one type of game. It’s a puzzle game. Imagine how much more content you can create, how much more innovation you can do. There’s just so much more to go, and I think that’s what people don’t fundamentally understand about gaming.

No. You can become a very successful gaming company regardless of your monetization. You have to monetize somehow, of course. But, you know, there are a lot of examples of behemoths that have in app purchases, and I think with the emergence of companies like ours, you can see that actually either a dual monetization strategy or a in app advertising driven strategy can also work very well. People have misunderstood the power of in app advertising model, and I think we’re starting to change people’s minds about that.

T? Yes. We use AI driven tools that enable us to increase our productivity dramatically. So we use tools that in the old days it might have taken us x days to build a three d model of a character to be used in a game. And now we use tools that actually bring that down to a few minutes. You know, it changes everything from creation to operation, etcetera, but we’re still in the early stages of this. So we are looking at how we can use AI tools better in ideation, in monetization, in operation, in on the creative side, on the marketing side.

You’re an investor too.

I don’t believe that should be the deciding factor. I don’t subscribe to a lot of the criticism about the business model because it will change. You don’t have to have necessarily proprietary data to create a valuable business. You can offer tools, you can offer services that really change people’s lives and we see this every day today. It’s not a critical matter that they don’t have proprietary data today. It doesn’t mean they can’t build an offering of something super valuable. We use a tool today that they don’t have a lot of proprietary data, but it’s so powerful already, that’s okay.

most impact on you? A book that I read, which it left a profound impact on me, and this book that I read, how to basically allow me to stop smoking. So it’s a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr. I read this book when I was on holiday. Some because I used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. In Italian, there’s a saying called smoking like a Turk, and I was the living embodiment of that. Right? Someone gave me this book, said, look.

You smoke way too much when you go into an office. When you go into a room, the whole room stinks. So why don’t you read this book? And I put it in my bag, forgot about it, went on the holiday in Cyprus. So I started reading this book, and my whole life changed, not only because I stopped smoking, which is the best thing I’ve ever done. I stopped it in three days, by the way, just cold turkey, just overnight. But the fundamental concept of reading words written on ink on a piece of paper enabled me to develop this willpower to overcome an addiction so strong as smoking was a complete mind fuck.

You know, that definitely has to be the thing that’s changed my life. It’s a very good answer. What’s your single biggest fear? My biggest fear revolves around my biggest why, which is my kids. So my fear is, will I equip them with the right things in life for them to have a meaningful life, a safe life. And my biggest fear is just, you know, frankly, failing as a father is my biggest fear. Because, you know, my father very famously did fail, but I was lucky enough that I had my grandmother around that it didn’t matter.

But I just wanna make sure that’s How did your father, if you don’t mind, interact how you approach fatherhood? Sure. It’s a good question. So my mother got married four times, and she’s a brilliant businesswoman. She’s She’s pretty favorite of diversification too. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And it really actually shaped me because I was raised by my grandparents. And my grandparents didn’t have a perfect marriage, but they did have a marriage, and they somehow made it work. And I look at that, and I really just said, yeah, I really truly am not angry at my father.

Like, I don’t care too much about my father’s existence one way or the other. I’m not angry at him. I just I wish him the well, which is, in many ways, the worst thing you can say to a person. Right? You know? Have you told him that? No. We don’t really speak too much, and, you know, it’s very, very rare that we speak. And for me to tell him that means that I do care, and, yeah, I just don’t really, frankly, care that much. But I could never understand how you can, you know, abandon a responsibility, and it’s the most beautiful responsibility.

We were talking in the kitchen earlier. It’s like after having a kid, I almost look at people who don’t have kids, and I say, oh, man. Do you know what you’re missing? Do you know what it means for your life to have true meaning? And so that to me was not being sappy was I never felt that I grew up without a father because my grandfather and my grandmother were there for me. But that’s my biggest fear is how to make sure that my kids don’t go through that.

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I would say be wary of etiquette. Don’t hire for experience from the shiny company. Don’t hire necessarily from the best school. I’d say, you know, this person is equipped with x y z traits, but this person will probably be hungrier. I’m not advocating that’s the basis on which we hire, but we always try to hire based on hunger, based on grit, based on approach. One of the things that we say is we want to hire people who ask for forgiveness, not permission. And that is something that is probably the single best embodiment of the Triple Dot recruiting culture is We want people who will do things, who will take initiative, bias for action, then ask for forgiveness.

I

Yeah. Mean, I was selling homeworks to my friends, which was slightly legal, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. It was a very non scalable business. I actually learned the value of scalability back then. 11, 12, 13 years old, when I was charging people real money, I’d say, I will do your history homework, which would take you several months to do, and I’d sell that to people. So it does check out. What’s the most painful lesson you’ve learned that you’re also pleased to have learned? The most painful experience of my life was losing my grandmother.

You know, she was everything to me. She just genuinely was the most amazing person. When I look back, I kind of realized I was truly, for the first time, felt like I was on my own. I don’t know if I learned a super valuable lesson there, but I did learn nothing at the end of the day matters. We will all die. And then I have a tendency to take negative and try to push it into positive. So actually that played a huge factor in my thinking, saying why I want to become an entrepreneur, why I want to do this, why I want to do that.

Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. You know, like if you knew how little people talked about you, you would not care about most things. Right? So I really subscribe to that. Of course, we all want to be loved and everything, but we’ll all die. It won’t matter. So I really believe that. And, you know, worst case, I can always get a job at Burger King or something, still make enough to look after my family. So that’s kind of how I went on this journey of starting a company.

And it was a very nontrivial decision. When we first said, I’m gonna start a mobile gaming studio, people thought I was, like, from Mars. That was pretty funny. Tell me, what would you most like to change about the world of venture? Venture is so important, but I’m actually amazed how much we’re all swimming in our own bullshit sometimes. And I say this because I invest in companies, and a lot of times companies, I think, want to partner with me because I don’t peddle the same bullshit to them.

And it’s very dangerous, I think, for VCs to give definitive advice because as a founder, you are thinking about what you’re building and it’s very dangerous for someone to helicopter in even an hour a week on a month or whatever it is to give you advice because they’re not feeling the nuts and bolts of everything you’re doing all the time. That’s not what they’re thinking about 20 fourseven. At best, they are taking other lessons learned in other companies, translating them, putting them through a filter, and then telling you what they think applies to your case.

It can be quite dangerous. Right? So I know actually the best founders talk about quote unquote value add VC firms and giggle because I don’t think a VC can truly add operational value to a truly exceptional founder. I’m happy to be proven wrong otherwise. Why do you think that is?

I mean different type of operational value add. You introduce them to someone who they ended up hiring, but they probably put them into their own filter. But it’s the idea of you should partner with us because we can help you in x y z fashion is very dangerous. But there’s a lot of venture capitalists, especially in The US, that will say, we did this company, and then we introduced them to this. They ended up doing this deal, and therefore and so the implication here is that they’ve really played an outsized role into that company.

And the biggest value add, I think, that a VC can have on a company is really just to be there for the bad times and just be a friend in the good times. So, you know, if you have a company that you build and five years later, you wanna really go the distance. Right? And you want to really grow this thing and maybe you want to do some secondary. And that’s when the true kind of friendship will come out. It’s like, do I feel comfortable enough just telling you, hey, man, listen, I want to do some secondary or hey, I think we should buy x y z company.

What do you think? And I think it’s a very different philosophy, but this is a game that the best founders know what they’re good at, what they’re bad at. And your job as a VC, I think, is to be there, offer support when they need, not to necessarily push support down their throats in times when

But that is so important. You are not pretending to know about their details of their business dealings day in, day out. And I think it’s very important because other people don’t do that. I can tell you that I’ve seen situations where in board meetings, you know, VCs will ask them, have you done an analysis on x y z and how you prepare? You’re literally eating into operational time of that founder for something that you want to scratch your own intellectual itch. That is actually value destruction.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that, sure, there are cases where you can add value like the case that, you know, you introduce that person and so on, but I don’t think that’s kind of what you say. Right? If people partner with you because you’re a nice guy, you’re very smart, you’ll be around for a long time, and you provide them a buffet of options that they can tap into should they choose to. So Thank you. Welcome

The biggest misalignment is it happens when things are going exceptionally well or things are going exceptionally bad. A friend of mine has a very successful public company, and he’d mentioned the time that every time the stock would come down, you know, the investors would ultimately sell as much of their shares as possible, which would put downward pressure on the stock more. I would say very few we sees are long, long term people. Like, you have a horizon that you want to exit and totally understand that’s the business.

Right? So I fully appreciate that. But it is a misalignment because if you partner with a truly exceptional founder, you want to be as long term greedy as possible, not short term greedy. I think that’s the main one. The time horizon of your partnership and and liquidity needs, I would

Absolutely. At the end of the day, if you weren’t an investor in a business, but if you were just kind of talking to a friend who’s the founder, your advice to them would be like, you have to do this. Right? For you. So different. Right? So that’s the main misalignment. But I do believe at the end of the day that you’re in the business of backing exceptional people. If you have high conviction that they’re truly exceptional, you will rid them of the burdens of returns as that.

They also, in return, have to understand your needs as an investor, and, you know, the best relationships that I’ve seen, both sides are, hey, this is what I want to do. These are my constraints. Help me reach those. Help me solve those problems. Okay. Final one. Yeah. That is five years for you, 2028. What do what

Hopefully alive. Right? I have no idea. I’m just really enjoying it right now. We have this ability to build a generational company. It’s very rare that you are at a moment in time that Triple Dot is in at the moment. Right? We are in a place where we have great growth, we have a phenomenal team. So why not just try to go the distance and try to build this truly generational company? At the same time, I do really love people say, hey, you know, you’re an investor, etcetera.

Like, I don’t view myself necessarily as a professional investor. I think I happen to give people advice free of charge, by the way. I don’t have to invest. That is truly from the heart. That is real. That is not covered in layers of bullshit. And people really like it, and people choose to work with me on that basis. And I really enjoy that as well. But there are the professional stuff aside. I think the personal health, well-being, family health, being in a good place with my wife, being in a good place with my kids, that takes precedence above everything else.

So if I can be there, that’s the most important thing.

Thank you so much.