YouSaid · the spoken record

Ilkka Paananen

lines on the record: 37
first: 2021-01-21
most recent: 2021-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Pretty easy, then, if they are successful, and I don't think those people really need much of celebration, but I think those people do keep on trying despite the failures. And that's why I've always really respected the people who have supported us also in those difficult moments.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think outside looking in might look like an instant success for company and things have always gone so well, but it really isn't true. So I remember the early days, they definitely weren't easy. And we had a huge amount of failures until we finally then got lucky with heyday and got that game out. But even since then, every once in a while we screw up massively on something. So many people who have even in those type of times have supported us. And it's hard to single out one single thing. That's something that I way forward. Sometimes I feel that in the world of entrepreneurship, we talk way too much about people who have been successful. I actually admire more of the people who have tried to set up their company and have failed. But despite the failure, they are try again. I feel those unsung heroes are also people who deserve a lot more respect. And I wish there was entrepreneurship galas for those people because it's actually...”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess that's the dream, even our company mission is we want to create great games with as many people as possible will play for years and games that would be remembered forever. And of course, it's obviously a very bold dream. It's something that is super important to us. We just believe that a fantastic feeling when we are old and we kind of look back if people still are playing the games, it would be a great feeling. It would make us feel that we've actually given the world of entertainment something long-lasting. Well, I described how I feel about Nintendo. It is a pretty incredible feeling that when I was less than 10 years old, I played some of these games on a fell in love with characters like Super Mario, etc. And then you still have these characters, which exist today and people love them and are having fun with them. It would be just a great feeling to be able to invent such type of things.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think game development would be easy. I guess on a very high level, as I said before, I'm just a huge believer in the social value of the games. I just believe that if the game is more fun when you play it with other people, that alone will be magical. Because when it creates an incentive for you to invite our people and then the game is larger than just the game, it becomes a social phenomenon that it gives you our value and not just the fun that comes from playing the game, but it gives you context while you're playing the game, you can talk about something else also with the people. And that's what happened if you look at how, say, kids play Fortnite these days. I mean, Fortnite has become this ultimate place to like hang out. Look at kids playing Fortnite. They can talk about homework and all kinds of things besides the game itself. But Fortnite is just the place where...”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting from the obvious, when they founded the company, could have never ever imagined what it's become. I remember when we were celebrating, when they got, I think, 10,000 daily active users and then it went to like 100,000 and they thought, wow, like now we've really made it and probably won't grow much more. And then it went to million and 10 and 100 million and all that. It still surprised me how lucky we've been as a company, as people. And then the other thing is that I'm still keep on surprised how great people we have, both the people we have and then also these new people come and join us. So lots of people, of course, all the companies talk about how people and culture are their number one asset, et cetera, et cetera. But I think it really is true.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent most of my time obviously with people. I spend my time with leads of teams, obviously. I spend quite a bit of time with recruitment. As I said, try to like keep my finger on the pulse what's going in the company. I try to look for opportunities to improve a company. One of my favorite questions, if not the favorite one, is when I talk to the leads is what's slowing your team down? How can I help? How do we make supercell better? We talk to people about that and we just want to get always constantly get people's ideas how do we make a company better? How do we make the culture better? And we ask people to challenge us, challenge the existing beliefs and nothing is sacred. But of course takes a lot of time and trying to encourage people to speak up.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have a group of passionate creative people, both in the game team, but then also outside the game team, sometimes there is also a bit of a clash. But we try to, of course, pop them out. And I don't think we've ever been at a situation where the game team is absolutely opposed to something that save people outside the game team are trying to do. And the nice thing about Supercell is that we are still a relatively small company. It doesn't take much to get people together and talk about things and agree what to do.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, as I said, it all starts from the games and the game team. So that's core of the super cell around the game teams. We have all kinds of different teams. And their mission is to do whatever they can to make these game teams and their games successful, amazing, amazing creative people. For example, in our marketing teams who've done these videos and we've even released a short film called Lost and Crowned on Clash of Clans. And we've done a series of shorts called Clash Arama has probably gotten like way more than half a billion views on YouTube, etc. Quality is everything to us. I mean, it's absolutely everything. And I think one of the greatest proofs of that is that these videos that you just talked about, the vast majority of those views are organics and they just spread around because they're just great content for our players and also people who aren't yet playing or games. They just love to watch.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This big successes they are so so different to what exists in the market today. That means that initially maybe like not everybody will fall in love with them on day one. But the thing is that are there a group of people who do fall in love and they are so passionate about them that over time as I said they convert other people to love them.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that they've learned is that the most important thing is to focus on the players who really, really love the game, absolutely passionate about the game, rather than focusing on the people who don't like the game and why don't they like it. The thing is that if there's like a group of people, even though it would be small in the beginning, are passionate enough about a game, then what will happen is that those people will convert other people around them to love the game too. And then it will start to grow. But certainly has been true about many of our games. And even the latest Monroe stars, which as I said, not everybody at Supercell loved internally because it was so different and many people say that, oh, it doesn't even look like a supercell game and it's not the mobile game in the first place just because it was so, so different. The thing is that this biggest successes, they are not evident from the start. They sort of happen oftentimes.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It all started actually like when we founded the company. We were six co founders and I think three out of the six people were massive fans almost addicts of this game called World of Warcraft. Many would know. And one of the co-founders, Mikko, he had played the game for like five years at that point. I think the thing that he had realized was that the single biggest reason why he keeps on coming back to a game day after day, month after month, year after year. It's not even the game itself anymore. It's the other people who he has met through the game. When he found it super, so like our dream was to create games with similar longevity. We just wanted to bring these games to a much wider audience and we believe that World of War have was for. That's how it got started. Ultimately it's almost all about the social value of the game. If the game is more fun, then you play.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really has become their baby. So it's extremely sad moment to realize that, oh, it's not going to work out. There just aren't enough players who would love this game. We don't believe in it ourselves. It's very, very sad. What we do think is definitely worth celebrating are all those learnings that come from that failure. And we want to really encourage this risk taking culture. We want to make the failing completely safe. I believe that if you don't take really big risks, never going to grow as a company. Building new great games from scratch by definition, it's hard because we're trying to create something new, something that doesn't exist yet. If you don't take risks, then that'll never happen. The result is just incremental innovation, which we don't want. So that's why we felt that it's really important to kind of promote this kind of a culture of risk taking. And that's why we also quote, celebrate the failures, celebrate the learnings coming from those.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, there's a funny story about this. So, we actually do celebrate in this moment toast champagne, actually, and how we can get started was that this must be in early 2011. There was the first game that got killed. I was having a lunch with a lead of that team and he told me we killed this game and now we're going to have this post more than session. So I just want to tell the company and the company was 30 people at that time. I want to tell the company what happened and what we learned. And I thought that, oh, this sounds like a pretty sad meeting and what could I do to cheer it up? And then I just had this forward. Oh, I'm going to actually go and buy a few bottles of champagne. I'm going to hand him over to that team. Because, I mean, it's nice that they're going to share the learnings and that's how we're going to get better as a company. Then it somehow became this joke. The point is not that we are trying to pretend that failing is fun. It's anything but fun. Can you imagine that group of people, passionate people have worked for a game for months, sometimes for years.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've tried to calculate it quite a few times, as you very correctly pointed out. What makes it difficult is that how do you define what is actually a game? So if, say, group of four people brainstorm a game for a week or two with a whiteboard, it's not a game and then it gets killed. Do you have like an early prototype or do you actually have kind of an official production going on with a full team? I would say that depending how you look at it, I would say that the ratio is probably like one out of 10 or so.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny what happens when you trust people and you trust the teams because then they get this enormous sense of responsibility. They really think that, okay, this is my game. It's my responsibility. And how do you think about responsibility is that it's not that these people would need to feel sense of responsibility, for example, towards me as the CEO. They feel sense of responsibility towards everybody at Supercell. Then it seems to come quite naturally. It truly is their call to either kill the game or release the game. That actually makes them care so much. And this huge feeling of responsibility comes in. I think that probably is the secret. If it would be like my call, for example, to either release or kill the game, then the responsibility would shift from a team to me. And then they probably wouldn't care as much. But because it's complete their responsibility, they really, really care.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great business call as well, if you think about the last three games you've done. I really have to say that I really admire these teams. It cannot be easy to work on a game where people outside the team think actually I don't believe in your game.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's do what the majority wants to do, which would be not to release it or kill this game, but that would go against what the team wants to do. The chances are that this might be the right business call for the short term, because I mean, we have lots of great experienced people here in the room and they all think this game won't do well. So why would we release it? It might be the right business call. But then on the other hand, we can do that when we can't talk about the independent teams anymore because when they aren't independent and if we do that, even if it would be the right business call, it would destroy our culture, how we thought about it is that the culture is the most important thing in the company. It's far more important than these short-term business goals. So when we've always taken the other path, which is to trust the team, let's have them release the game and let's see what happens. As I said, sort of times that has been actually ironically also be”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of those things that's easy to talk about trust when things are going well. It's very easy to trust a team that it's doing super well. I think the true test of the trust is that when things aren't going well and moreover, like if things aren't going well and then you also happen to disagree with what the team is doing. And that is the ultimate test of the trust, this kind of crossroads many times as a company there. And ironically it's related to one of our biggest hit games too. If I think about the three most recent games that”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flip side of the coin is that if you have these siloed themes and there's no shared learnings and no synergies between any of the themes, that isn't great either. And the way to kind of get those learnings going on is actually like rotating some of the team members. So it's always a kind of”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In there. A great team is something that the core team members, they can complement each other. I think that is the key part. So we were kind of identified certain type of roles that there has to be in the team and in the core of the team. And if you don't have every single one of those type of roles and personalities, then the team just won't work. As a last thing, once you have found a great team, redistributing that team should be very high. I know it's a cliche that you want to keep a winning team, but I do think there's a lot of proof into that. One of the things that you think about a lot is that, okay, of course, there's also a lot of value in rotating people between teams because that's how you can maximize the learning in an organization and especially in an organization like us where one of the biggest risks that we have as a company is that these teams become really siloed. Because on one hand, we are huge believers in this idea of these independent teams.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this probably is like the most difficult part of my and our jobs, just putting together a great game steam. There's so much that goes into it. I wish there was a formula and how can you put it together? But I think it's quite a bit of just trial and error. And of course, over the years, you get some type of pattern recognition of what might work. It's maybe easier to first begin by saying what does not work. I mean, what doesn't work in our experiences, but if you just put together a random group of absolutely great individuals, that doesn't necessarily and oftentimes doesn't make a great team. We've done that a few times as well. We've also tried putting teams together completely organically. That hasn't worked the best way either. So I think it needs some direction oftentimes, a little bit in a way that as a coach or GM in professional sports team puts together the team. I think there are something.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the one thing that I always do before the interview, I actually have documented our culture in a kind of an old fashioned culture memo, if you will. And we always send that memo prior to my interview to the candidates. And we actually talk about it and I ask a few questions about it. And also I want to ask these people who join that, I mean, we are dead serious about our culture and it has its positives and its negatives or challenges. And I want to make sure that the candidate actually wants to join such type of company and we are not the right company for everybody. Some people, it's important for them to have like safety mechanisms like controls and processes and they look to be managers to give them a lot of guidance and we don't have too much of that. So if you're a type of person, then we aren't the right type of company for you.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John superself, no matter which office, no matter what position, even trainees oftentimes. The reason isn't that I feel that I would be somehow like superior in interviewing people or I would like to make sure that they don't make mistakes, but it's a great way for me to keep my finger on the pulse on what type of people are we getting to the company. And one of the best advices that I've ever gotten about recruiting is that if you can try to imagine the imaginary average quality of a person at the company and then there's a new candidate who is about to come in, ask yourself the question that is this new person, is she or he gonna like raise the average quality of the company? And that's what I also try to look for. And it's been really amazing to see like year after year how much more great people we've been able to get to the company.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that big of a team. So we have four offices and have recruitment people in every one of those offices and work very close with our teams who need new people. What they do is that they help those teams put together the job descriptions, like trying to really challenge these people, teams, okay, what type of people are you looking for, let's actually write it down. And then once they agree on the profile of the people that they're looking for, when they go out and try to look for such people, and oftentimes they are the first ones who make the contact. And then they basically run the process and our interview process, I guess it's quite famous, it is really lengthy and it takes time. And we really appreciate all the candidates who actually do take the time to go through that process because it does have a lot of interviews. It can be 10 or more. I know it goes probably like counter to any logic, but I, for example, still interview every single person.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, and this maybe goes against what I just said about processes. I mean, if there's one process, there actually process does make a lot of sense. It's probably the recruitment process. In that process, you want to sort of accumulate all the learnings through the years that you got on. Because as you say, that probably is the most important process in the company, actually. Early on, we were six co-founders, as you may imagine, there wasn't much process. We simply asked ourselves a very simple question, which was who are the best people that did ever work previously? And that got us to like we grew when the company from maybe about six to maybe 25 or so. And it all came through from our own networks. We just made sure that the people who”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minded, and actually, like a lot of people who have done very well at Supercell, they oftentimes have had their own companies previously. So they're founders of their own companies. Later on, they wanted to join us. And those type of people tend to do super well at the company. And then the third criteria is that you just have to be great to work with. Doesn't mean that you have to be friends or anything outside. We like people to be humble and of course trustworthy and those type of things.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important thing is, I think we call it the passion for excellence. So just meaning that we try to like identify how high is a bar for this individual. I mean, what is like, does this individual know great looks like? That is so important that you really understand and you can set the bar as high as possible. And that is sort of basis for everything. Other thing is that we call them proactive doers, meaning that Is this individual able to get to that bar and figure out a way anybody telling that individual how to do so or to do so in the first place? I'd like to think Supercell as a company of 340 like entrepreneurs at Supercell we don't talk about employees and leadership and ownership we are just super salient and we have very little control mechanisms or processes at the company so for you to like do well at supercell you have to be very entrepreneurial”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the things that they've done here. And that was an interesting moment, and I kind of realized that. And then the other moment that I remember, I remember seeing the very first version of the Netflix Culture Deck, which I think it probably came out, was it 2008 or 2009, something like that. And there we talked about this culture of freedom and responsibility. But there we talk more about that from individual perspective, like about the employees themselves. like something really like struck me about that we ever kind of found a new company this must be the idea but then we kind of took that idea further and instead of thinking about freedom and responsibility of individuals we start to talk about freedom and responsibility of teams and that led to the idea of supercell”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not made me fully realize this was at some point I started to look back at okay, let's look at the heat gains that our company has put out what is sort of a common denominator of these games. One is that they had really amazing people and great teams behind the games. But interestingly, the other thing was that most of these games somehow had nothing to do with all of these fantastic processes that we had designed. The usual story was that we just didn't have anything else for these guys to do so sitting somewhere in the corner of the office and they were just doing whatever they wanted to do. And they're sort of flying under the radar, so to speak. And then the next thing you know, this amazing game comes out. And then I start to think that, wow, that these amazing games may come out not because of me or the process that I put together. They come out despite”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we put together all kinds of control mechanisms to make sure that the company actually develops products and games to that direction. But then over the years, I realized that there are a lot of negatives about this type of way of thinking. Because isn't the great the best creative people in the world? They don't get this feeling of ownership. And oftentimes, I mean, the reality is that actually the people who know the best what is best for the game and for the players, those people are actually the people who are building the game. It's not the leadership team, like not people like me. And over the years, I realized our job as leaders, we should enable these creative people to do their work better, not try to control it. We spend so much time hiring the best people in the world, also at digital chocolate. And if you do that, why on earth can you try to control them? Why don't you just trust them to do the best thing? One of the things”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that they kind of kept, and what I learned was that ultimately it's all about the people. And digital chocolate, I was very lucky to work with such amazing people. I kind of fought at most times that we are going to have the best strategy, the best plans, the best processes in place. And digital chocolate, and mostly because of my doings, was actually quite a sort of a structured company. And also when it comes to innovation. So we had process almost for everything. If you ask me like, okay, how does digital chocolate think about New Gaines development send you like a slide deck of like 50 slides explains exactly how things work? And we had all kinds of processes for like how do we green light new games. We almost thought that we or myself and Micro leadership team over there had a kind of crystal ball that as if we kind of knew the best what the players and the consumers want.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were able to cut deals with most of the European carriers, even with some of the US based carriers. And then a massive amount of these Java-based phones came to market and actually we started to make some money and the company started to grow. And back in 2004, we sold our company.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, that's how they kind of got started. And of course, had no idea what we were doing. Learned by doing and eventually even managed to graduate somewhere in between. So that's how we're going to get started in year 2000. So set up a games company. And funnily enough, we were actually doing mobile games at that time. If you recall those days, there was this thing called like the feature phones that were coming to the market, mostly from manufacturers like Nokia, for example, of course, based here in Finland. And of course, there was no app stores, nothing like that. So you would need to distribute this Java-based games through carriers. It was a very different world at that time. But that's how it got started. We founded the company almost exactly at the time in the dot-com bubble burst and there was no financing available. So we basically financed it by just doing work for higher work. And then on the side, we developed our own IP and our own games. I think we got lucky.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was doing had never had a proper job except some summer jobs. And if you ask my parents, they probably still think I never had a proper job because all I've done, I've been CEO of gaming companies.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Afford to pay any salary, and I guess for that reason there was nobody else who was applying to join them. All they wanted to do was to develop gains and they needed somebody else to do everything else. And I was probably the only applicant, as I said, and then I kind of got the job and I didn't get any pay. But the funny thing is that these guys thought that, okay, you got to do all the sales for us. And we need to give you a proper title so that people would actually want to see you. I guess they didn't know what to call me. So when they decided to call me the CEO. And I think I was 22 years of age, and of course had absolutely no idea.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess we would need to go back to the year 2000. So I was still a student at Helsinki University of Technology. I had a business major though. And my actually in my early days of my studies, for some reason my dream job was to become ERA management consultant or a investment banker simply because that's what everybody else in my class wanted to do. And so did I. But then at some point in my studies, I got really interested about entrepreneurship and I started to think that, wow, this actually could be really cool, you know, trying to build your kind of own thing with a group of great people. And then I just got like super lucky. I happened to bump into this group of people who wanted to found a company. And it happened to be a games company. And earlier, especially my teenage years, I had been a massive gamer and still played a lot of games. And then these guys, they couldn't.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all, thanks so much for having me, Patrick. I think to summarize the whole point about that phrase is that I just believe that the more decisions that teams make and the less I make, the better in an ideal world, like if I made no decisions, then that would make me, I guess, the word's least powerful CEO. The whole idea about supercell and what is at the core of our culture is this idea of this small and independent themes that we call cells and these independent game teams sacred inside supercell. And the way to think about them is think about smaller startups within the greater company. That's how we think about them.”
2021-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Ilkka Paananen – Superpowering Teams – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.17] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source