YouSaid · the spoken record

David Helgason

lines on the record: 33
first: 2020-10-29
most recent: 2020-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so since stepping out of the sea of Unity, moving back to Europe, and basically spending most of my time as an angel investor, board member, advisor to a whole bunch of people and friends, kind of more of the same, I think. I'm thinking a lot about climate change and climate technology, climate change fighting technology. So that's kind of a favorite topic of mine. I'm also interested in other societal topics like the lack of trust and the erosion of democracy and things like that. I don't have very good answers, honestly. I'm looking for companies that affect these things and especially climate change. I think I found a few that I like and I do invest in them.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was Diane Green, founder of VMware. So I met her in the spring of 2009 just before I met Sekoya. In fact, she did the introduction to Sequoya. So Diane is just, I mean, she's a titan of her industry. I mean, she's been on the board of Google, MIT, Intuit, and of course founded several companies, including VMware. She offered to invest as an angel, and ultimately she invested alongside Sequoia's investment back in 09. She was a mentor and a friend. And she's just wonderful, man. She was helpful.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in the Yuni board meeting when Steve Jobs died. I just remember bringing the Apple web page up in the meeting and everyone kind of stopped and looked kind of blankly at the screen”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are changing it, like, you know, as an angel and working with a group of angels called Nordic Makers and so on, we are actually trying to evolve it here just more rational terms, better behavior from investors, trying to get more funding going. It's all happening. Things are in a much better shape than they were just a few years ago.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. So I moved away from there six years ago back in Copenhagen, spent some time in London as well, but I'm living in Copenhagen now. I don't know. People are moaning a lot about it right now. It doesn't seem so bad.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god, I read so little these days. It's super embarrassing. And I'm reading stuff around emotions and love and stuff.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like the joint stock corporation, like the invention of separating cash flow and equity is just like it's a brilliant invention. Of course we should use technologies like that.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, probably. I really like the model, depends on what I'm doing. But actually, I do like the VC model. I think it's for high-growth tech companies with big opportunities. It's just a really good model. I know it's been criticized and nothing is perfect. You're not fully completely aligned with your investors ever, no matter what model you have. But the ability to kind of fund ahead of the curve and sometimes think of when you're growing on some kind of hockey stick, you allow yourself to spend on kind of the inverse shape, like for me kind of a lentil graph. I don't know, like a lens form, like lens-shaped graph. That's a really good thing that we have that model. I think it's fantastic.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, absolutely. I'm not saying not turn. No, no. It's more when things are going fast if you have to replace a whole leadership or just a lot of people around you. You may not end up having time for that. So if you don't feel confident that you can evolve through your team, then definitely consider selling. Not automatically selling, definitely always every team has to evolve. Like nothing is static.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably, but also we did well, right? It's not quite the same if you end up writing a company over the top and it goes down and everyone is miserable and you could have made money and now you didn't. And maybe at best you're returning investor money to them sort of to make them whole-ish. Then whatever you did to not sell a company won't look so smart. It's tricky. Somebody told me a question, like a useful question to think through, and that is, you have trust, of course, in the business around you. Like, can your company grow like another face? might be a couple of years growth or whatever. And importantly, do you trust that the people around you can kind of go with you? And if not,”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was never really meant for the money. Money never interested in me terribly much. Somebody told me that if you had a few million dollars, you're really set. Maybe not in Silicon Valley, but most other places in the world, right? You can set up a life and really basically live from that. And that's probably true. So when the company got to a level where that seemed kind of almost certain for me and my co-founders, I think I just relaxed a bit and it's like, yeah, like the rest is just felon glory.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On it and try to always make them a learning experience or draw some other use from them because otherwise you just spin your wheels a lot. So we use them as a way to get closer to partner companies and so on and think we did that sometimes fairly well. And then you're trying to see far enough ahead that whatever they're offering you now seems small. And if you have confidence in where you're going, ideally, you can see a time maybe in a couple of years or more where you will be more valuable than whatever was offered. And if you feel confident and people around you, then you can say no and keep going. It's not always easy, but that's how I thought about it.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when companies are doing well, and we were for quite a while actually doing quite well at Unity, I'm an interest comes in, right? And it's fascinating, it's flattering for at least definitely the first time founder to kind of get that. I learned to take confidence from it, as in if there was a yearly offer and it kind of went up every year, I felt pretty good. That actually gave me confidence to continue because it felt like there was a kind of a little bit of a guardrail that we were operating against. Then you need to manage a little bit expectations around you. I mean, when you're doing well and the board, investors, whoever is around you has trust in you, like it's not that hard to rebuff acquisition offers, I think, but executives, people around you, definitely employees can start kind of getting excited or confused by those. So I learned from smart people to kind of basically hold those tights to your West as they're happening. So if you engage in conversations, just don't spread it too broadly, honestly. Somebody wise told me once that 90% of all M&A interest doesn't happen, which I think is probably putting it optimistically. And the corollary from that is that you should not waste too much effort.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of the most destructive forces at companies. And by the way, they're stressed out because they are being stressed out by other people. I'm not saying, again, they're not evil, but the forces can be really tough on them.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it definitely was nothing I ever felt with Unity. Yeah, I think we've been extremely lucky and good, I suppose. I mean, when I've seen sort of bad behavior or weird behavior, I think it often comes down to the fact that VCs are money managers for other people. And it's a bit the same as you get in kind of middle management in companies that you get people that are under pressure from different directions. And when you're under pressure from different directions, it's hard to kind of sometimes focus on the task at hand or the task isn't so clear anymore because you're trying to manage different things because it's such an illiquid asset and you're in there so long when you aren't doing that great, your investors, the LPs start questioning what's going on and then you start showing kind of short-term things like this company raised an up round and we sold this company, maybe not a great market, but still we had an exit. And these kind of things, I think, is probably the worst kind of board behavior I ever said. I've seen, and I think most kind of bad behavior comes from that. I mean, these aren't generally bad people, right? So it's like nobody's out there to be evil as opposed to almost nobody. So I don't know. I think it's actually the same you see inside companies, stressed out middle managers.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Rolov never said this to me directly, but I heard it from somebody else that he said it. I don't know where, a good board member should be a shock absorber for the company because there will be shocks and people will be rattled and there will be all kinds of crazy things happening and just slowing the process a little bit down and like guiding the leadership into kind of a thoughtful process, not necessarily rushing into decisions. And it's definitely been a good influence on us. My style is very personal. I do best when I just get really, really connected with the founders of the leadership. And I think I'm best at just kind of getting to know them really well and guiding them through sort of some of the difficult decisions they have to face. And you can best do that when you just know the context quite well. But there's many different styles. Like there's many ways of skinning that cat. I don't think there's like one way.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly what's been the case. It's been so great. We brought in other wonderful BCs along the way and advisors and board members, but now he's incredible. Also, just the most hardworking person I've almost ever met. Well, the other most hardworking person I've ever met is John Richteno, the CEO of Unity, who was kind of scary. His work ethic is insane.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he was the first VC we brought on. We met other people, but we got an offer from Sequoia when we were erasing our A round in the spring of 2009. And I'd met a lot of VCs in that fundraising process. By the way, the finish of crisis happened in the middle of that fundraising process. It took quite a while, like nine months, maybe even longer. So I've met a lot of people, and I just immediately liked him. And he liked us and definitely liked me, I think I can say. They made us a very strong offer very quickly, like eight days to get a term sheet, and it was basically the best term sheet we had. We had a few others. So we made the decision very quickly, as did they. I did a little bit of reference checking on him, just kind of to understand a bit who I was going to deal with and very consistently from like three different, I think, founders that he'd worked with, of which one I just met on the street actually. So it wasn't just reference calls based on his input. It was very consistent. Basically, they said there's such a calm, such a rational person. He's not going to bring emotions. He's not going to bring kind of irrational or strange things. And he won't be able to rattle him easily and he'll be supportive kind of through the whole thing.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's tricky as hell, right? I mean, we considered it way earlier, very naively kind of considered it like we could hire like a, because we were three technical co-founders and maybe we should have somebody who done sales before. This is at a time when we'd not done sales yet and so on. So we had some naive conceptions about doing it way early and I'm very glad we didn't. Running companies is like a liberal art, right? It's not an engineering discipline. So like there's these competing things. Like founders have a special thing. They're listened to by customers and the people internally in a way that is very hard to achieve for a new person. It's possible. I think John has done it, but it's not something that just happens automatically.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took a bit of time, but honestly, no. I mean, the impulse was as much mine as anything else. The day joined the board, I went home and told my then wife that just give it a year or two and I think I can make him CEO. So apparently, like, I actually forgot mentioning that, but when he got the role, she reminded me of this. And yeah, apparently I was exactly on time because it took a year from he joined the board till we made him CEO.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Run really big organizations, and Unity was coming on like 500 people, and we had a very, very good people. But running that kind of organization and evolving that kind of organization is a bit of a full contact sport. And I don't think I was up for it. I don't think I'd completely run out of kind of runway. I think I could have done a little longer. But the opportunity came up. He was happy to take the role and I was super happy to give it to him. And John has just done a fabulous job later. And I moved to the board and I've been working with him ever since. Yeah, six years now.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of energy, and I was lucky that I ran across Sean Richelo, who's now CEO. He had recently left Electronic Arts. And of all the sort of, I met a lot of people along the way, but of all the people I had conversations with, he just understood the games industry the best and we agreed the most on the future of unity and what the company needed and it was just like the most productive conversations honestly I had a handful of conversations between the summer of 2013 and sort of ultimate 2013 I convinced them to join the board of the company he wasn't just a board member he was working super hard with me like traveling with me like at least a day or two per week and we just agreed on so many things and he was so good at sort of thinking through the future of the company with me we started working on the strategy that was the next stage which was ads analytics data and sort of a broader service ecosystem to help game developers not just create the games but launch them and operate them and monetize them and that was sort of one aspect of it is like technical like is strategic brilliance and how we work together on that and so i talk on that and the other thing was just that he had”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're founding the company in 2003, we launched in 2005. We became sort of a real tiny company, profitable, growth, profitable company in the following years. I moved to San Francisco and we raised the A round from Sequoia in 2009. And the next four years were just amazing. It was so fast. The growth was fast. There was just so many opportunities opening up. The games industry was changing. There were new platforms. Mobile was really going from like the clever phone era before smartphone era and then on to kind of the big iPhone and Android platforms and all this stuff. The end of them we started glimpsing VR and other sort of future things. We learned to be international. We learned to scale. There were so many good things we did. And I was getting really worried because I could see a future the way we sort of run out of growth, selling the software as we were. That market has turned out to be much bigger than even I thought at the time. And the board was great. We've gotten several investors on board. It was great support. I had a good exec team. My founders were amazing. But I needed some extra kind of”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we looked at each other and weren't sure if I should stay CEO. I certainly wasn't sure and my co founders weren't sure. The VCs weren't sure. They were nice enough. There was no sort of pushing or I wasn't being kicked out. But there was this question like how to do this. And we decided that we wanted to try to remain founder-led. And I basically made a communications plan. We decided to kind of have very regular calls between me and the exec team. Very banal stuff. Actually, there's no sort of big thing. Things we should have been doing already, like weekly calls in the whole group and then also weekly calls with individual XX and co-founders. I got an assistant who was sort of an assistant to me, but also kind of a bit to the whole of the San Francisco office and the exec team to some level and had a very experienced assistant, Kimberly Bailey, who had kind of done like kind of big jobs before and really kind of knew how to run this kind of company to some level. Not from a business perspective, but from a sort of communications architecture perspective. Once we figured that out, it's kind of clicked that there was a day when it just felt right again. And I think it probably took nine months or between six and nine months. And then it was great. And then I think I did a really good job for several years after.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is kind of know what the company should do, how you find out as secondary, but you need to know what the company should do, and then you need to kind of channel that and tell other people, and then hopefully somebody else will do it with you. And I just didn't know what the company should do. I was really confused and grew to 60 people quite quickly, which is necessary. We were doing well and there's a lot of exciting things happening. And suddenly, like, I was not in the same room as my co-founders because they remained in Copenhagen where it started. And it was just a mess. Like, you know, communication kind of broke down and nobody knew what anyone was doing. And we tell the board our plans and we had some good plans. But then we sort of changed the plans and tell the board and they were frustrated. Everyone was kind of frustrated. That was definitely the toughest time.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good things along the way, but man was attired sometimes to scale. When we were 30 people, I moved to San Francisco and raised money from Sekoy Capital. First round, actually $5 million with Rilla Folta joining the board. And those sort of six to nine months after I moved to San Francisco were probably the worst of my time as CEO. We were 30 people when we raced around and profitable and we actually remained sort of break even-ish profitable for quite a while. So that was, I guess, the good part. We had launched support for iPhone game development. That was growing super fast. Our engineers were doing very good work. you know, Joachim, Nicholas, CTO, and basically chief product designer were doing fabulous work. But suddenly the world kind of opened up because I moved to San Francisco. Like there was all these kind of opportunities partners, mobile gaming was exploding and becoming really interesting and complicated. There were service companies. There's a lot of just things going on. Everyone kind of wanted to partner with us. There's a lot of different theories of what the CEO should do. Sometimes you talk about money, and that's probably true. Make sure there's always some capital. But I think maybe the most important thing.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it was really, really hard with three coders, right? I founded the company together. And the first couple of employees were coders as well. And at some point, it turned out I was like a vastly worse programmer than my co-founders. I was pretty good, by the way, but they were really, really good. And when you're sitting next to somebody, it was like 10 or 100 times better than you at coding, like wipe other, find something better to do. So I was kind of doing the other odds and ends that a company needs, like cooking lunch and writing copy and creating a customer database and stuff like that, selling, talking to customers, all that stuff as we evolve. And sometimes I've said that it took quite a while to get humanity off the ground. So I sort of had time to learn on the job. I'm also very social, so I really enjoy meeting people and being out there. So I think I actually relished the role and started kind of enjoying it. Fairly good storyteller. So like, you know, kind of channeling kind of what the company could do and should do. So I found many of these things easy. And then at some point it became clear the company needed some kind of actual CEO. And we decided that would be me. At least initially it wasn't really clear whether it would stay that or whatever. But I learned on the job and I think I did some really...”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, you know, who is that? Well, it's a lot of people, it's people who are not making games right now, it's people around the world, it might be underrepresented people. It's just people that don't have access. Maybe they don't have all the funding to do it. Maybe they don't have all the skill sets in the room and what games and what's development. And is it only creating the game? Is it launching the game? Can we help operate? Can we think proper about what people are doing with a game engine?”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always try to quote my sources, but in this case, it's really forgotten to time. I've not been able to find out who said this originally. But somebody quoted it to me saying something like, the value of mission statement can be measured in the quality of decisions it helps you make. And quite early, we decided that we wanted to democratize game development. We've evolved that vision further, but needed to evolve, but that was like the first statement that we kind of put on the wall in the basement room apartment we lived in. And there was something powerful about it. It's not very specific, right? It doesn't say, will democratize game engines? It doesn't say exactly who we're going to help. Kind of vague democratized game development. It doesn't even speak to just one part of the development phase. For a long time, of course, we most ignored that and just made an engine that we commercialized in 2005 and decided selling to the few poor souls who would kind of buy it at the time. And because it wasn't very good, we sold it for a cheap price and it was easy to use. So we sold it ultimately quite many times. But over time, like we kept going back to the original vision statement as kind of a fountain of inspiration almost.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unbounded, you can come up with new ideas, it's not moving data from A to B, right? It's like a lot of things you can do with games. And then the engine, like a game engine, is a really complicated, challenging piece of code. It's going to run on a lot of different hardware, different CPU architectures, and ultimately has to draw a lot of pixels on the screen and move audio around and move data around networks. It's really complicated. And therefore interesting. So I think we started falling in love with it. And maybe for different reasons, but ultimately, I first fell in love with the tech and sort of creating it. And then I started falling in love with the other game developers that we started having the idea of servicing if we created great software for them. They would have an easier time making games and could bring kind of more people into the game industry. So I started kind of falling in love with the industry and the people. And that's, I think, when I couldn't quit anymore.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was a massive quitter for years when I dropped out of university several times. I started all these projects that didn't really go anywhere. Then I was connected to an old high school friend of mine, Nicholas. He wanted to make video games. We were now in our 20s and we're still fascinated by video games, but also a little frustrated with the video game industry. Maybe there wasn't, this was before the sort of rise of the indie movement and all this artistic stuff. And we felt the video game industry was kind of a little poor of ideas at the time, not that we had better ideas, I think, but we had some ideas and we're sort of dabbling in how might we do games that were different. I was stuck with one of my projects, so he found this German guy online instead who was already working on some game tech stuff at Sio Akimantes, the RCTO. They started working together. I was on the sidelines and I joined them like a year later. So I joined probably in January 2003. And we're just going to make video games. But as we were trying to sort of work on different ideas, we kept working on the engine, the software to run the game and the production environment for games. We fell in love with it somehow. I think it's really interesting code. It's hard games are sort of”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generic database connectivity might have turned into some enterprise like ERP thing, didn't go anywhere. And there was one thing that was like, iTunes LP, like sort of interactive cover art for CDs at the time. None of them raised money or anything. It was a much more sort of naive time in Copenhagen where I was living. So we were just kind of writing stuff, creating stuff, and nothing was coming off it.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually don't really have a ranking table. I don't know what we're more or less valuable then. I don't really know. I know Spotify is bigger. I'm sure there's others. I just haven't really checked. But how did it get started? I mean, I was a programmer since I was like 11. I born 77. So basically my entire generation were programmers. I think we learned to program to make video games. Most of us ultimately didn't, but because the world needed a lot of code written, but we started us with that dream and I did too. And I learned to program and I did a bunch of random programming. Then somehow managed to scrape through high school. I got into web development, did a whole bunch of web sites and backend systems and content management systems and all the stuff that was kind of the world apparently needed a lot of in the mid to late 90s and then end up working for a couple of like kind of good software companies like people that have like really professional approach to writing software where I learned a lot but also kind of got this kind of idea that it would be cool to run my own. It wasn't really clear what that wasn't like one vision or anything. So I started a few companies that went like absolutely nowhere. It was probably one content management system. There was like one something.”
2020-10-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source