YouSaid · the spoken record

Akin Babayigit

lines on the record: 82
first: 2023-06-26
most recent: 2023-06-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Health, wellbeing, 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, et cetera. 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 learn the professional stuff aside. I think the personal.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 what's 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 that they also in return have to understand your needs as an investor. And 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest misalignment is it happens when things are going exceptionally well or things are going exceptionally bad. A friend of mine that has a very successful public company and he mentioned the time that every time the stock would come down, the investors would ultimately sell as much of their shares as possible, which would put downward pressure on the stock more. And I would say very few we Cesar long, long-term people. Like you have a horizon that you want to exit in 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 liquidity needs, I would say.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 throat in times when they might not need it.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean different type of operational value. You introduce them to someone who they ended up hiring, but they probably put them into their own filter. But the idea of you should partner with us because we can help you in XYZ 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 so the implication here is that they've really played an outsized role into that company. 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 want to 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 is 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?”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 24-7. 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's kind of how I went on this journey of starting a company. And it was a very non trivial decision. When we first said, I'm going to start a mobile gaming studio, people thought I was like from Mars. That was pretty funny.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most painful experience of my life was losing my grandmother. 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 I 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. If you knew how little people talked about you, you would not care about most things. 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 a burger king or something, still make enough to look after my family.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I 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'll do your history homework, which would take you several months to do, and I'd sell that to people. So it does check out.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say be wary of etiquettes. 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 XYZ 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, buy us for action, then ask for forgiveness.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 I just don't really frankly care that much. But I could never understand how you can 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, 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, 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 wish him the well, which is in many ways the worst thing you can say to a person, right?”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My biggest fear revolves around my biggest why, which is my kids. So my fear is rely, 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 want to make sure that...”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overcome an addiction so strong as smoking was a complete mindfuck. You know, that definitely has to be the thing that changed my life.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It's not 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 all”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 3D model of character to be used in a game. And now we use tools that actually bring that down to a few minutes. It changes everything from creation to operation, et cetera, 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 modernization, in operation on the creative side, on the marketing side.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you can become a very successful game in company regardless of your monetization. You have to monetize somehow, of course. But 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 PNAP 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean day 90, day 365 day 540 day 720, those are the metrics that we try to kind of really look at. The other crazy thing is not only mobile gaming is new, there's just so many more type of games that can be done. I mean, you know, when Candy Crash came into the market, everybody said, oh, it's too late to build another casual game now. Candy Crash took old users. Then came the PlayRix Brothers. They introduced this metagame concept on casual games. Everybody said, okay, 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, no, it's done. Now it's that. And now there's Dream Games that is doing something. Now, 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes There are different retention metrics we look at, right? But the retention metrics we look at are really, really long term. We don't really look at day one, day seven retention anymore. We look at really long-term retention.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 software as a service multiple, right? Gaming companies are valued three, four times revenues, whatever, future looking backward, looking, however you want to do it, right? Whereas software as a service company can be anywhere between 10, 20, 30. And 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”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 day in, day out of gaming companies is very, very analytical. If you take my daughter into Triple Dot, she might think she's in a hedge fund given the discussion, some of the discussions that are taking place. It's all math, analytical data.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, actually, if you go to a pachinka parlor, you cannot withdraw money due to regulation. So, you get different toys, et cetera, and then you have to go and change those toys in the next door shop for money. It's just a whole system that they've articulated.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I mean, the sizes are just comical. I mean, like, you know, there's a lot of things you'd listen to around saying gaming is”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 as an investor, you will not participate in XYZ. 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?”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I can say, tell me about how you would think about XYZ and how will you market this game? How will you monetize the game? You can really form a mental picture of how they think.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 hitrim. They say just no one knows how successful you are. With mobile gaming, I do take issue with 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. Playricks is an perfect example. They've had four hits triple dot we have multiple hits under our belt. 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scheme of things because in the end, people here live high quality lives. That's why I'm here for I want my children to have a good education, access to good health care, et cetera. That's why we're here.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But take a look at how they live, right? 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, net migration into the US is more than net migration out. There are more Germans going to live in the US than Americans going to live in Germany. And the reason for that is just there's more opportunity in the US. And I do think that Europeans are not fucked because they live relatively healthy lives 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 mentioned AI regulation, all of that. And we lost months of productivity over something silly called GDPR and et cetera, right? But I just don't think fundamentally that matters in the grand.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 of function.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 well-established paper not only names fastest growing games companies, the fastest growing company in Europe. And that happens to be in my backyard. I would try to create a lot more kind of political capital around that.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I am quite a political person. I'm not a conservative. 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 16 years in the US and 11 years now in the UK. And I still subscribe to this American dream. And 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus US. 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 make a lot of money. You just almost can't.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paper money. Not only do you have nothing, oftentimes the mistake is it could go the other way. And we've seen this when valuations have corrected. 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 $100 million valuation. It's very, very easy as a founder to let that get to you. In your mind, all of a sudden, you have, let's say, 55% of the business valued at $100 million. And now you're thinking, okay, I have $55 million. Truth of the matter is you have nothing. It's just all.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 when you do due diligence, et cetera. 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 XYZ, right? But 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 are 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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 dots mission is to be the world's leading data-driven entertainment company. We spent a lot of time crafting that.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, give power to build community. Most people don't even know what that means.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 statements 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 dot. 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think culture is what happens when you're not looking. This is one area of porn that I can't 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”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's 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. 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a 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.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This type of game, and I'm going to 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 startup.”
2023-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source