YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephane Kurgan

lines on the record: 59
first: 2023-07-28
most recent: 2023-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I have a Kickass side project you're going to hear about at some point. And then I'm sure I'll be working with some of the founders. I'm working with today in five years and beyond that.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably space X if you can play with rockets, you have all the satellites, you have all that stuff. I think in terms of doing something”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, when I left King, I received tens of emails of people I hardly knew. Maybe some of them I'm not sure I had met and they were saying incredible things. And that's when you realize you've touched people's lives. And yeah, I mean, I'm still shocked today. I was not expecting that at all.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alcohol consumption. For the first time, we went pretty much dry in January, and it's been awesome. I love wine, but I consume less of it and less frequently now than I used to. Yeah, I feel great. My wife and I were quite surprised and thinking, actually, this is really nice and cool. We don't need another glass of wine or we don't need a glass of wine.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very simple small book called The Tao of Coaching. I spent a couple of years with McKins and Company, which is a great school. It's a great place to have been to. I bore that quote from a venture capitalist, actually. And, you know, it's a very human, very subtle way of discussing work relationship and how you can manage them and how you can become a good coach. That's maybe 100 pages long. It's very easy to read and I think it's very helpful.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At King, there's a very nice saying, which is in that type of gaming, which is mobile gaming. You know, it's the mathematician meets the magician. And I think before I went to King, I could work with mathematicians, but since I've worked at king, I can also work with magicians. And so I have hopefully a great affinity for creatives. And I can work with creatives as well as with the business guys.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to restrain my bias for action because obviously this is not about putting the trigger very often. It's taking a very, very long-term view because it's going to take in to 10 years before the outcome. And so you have to think really hard about whether you want to do something or not. It's been also finding the right balance in terms of working with founders. Obviously, I have a bunch of executive experience, which I can bring to the table, but that can also be overpowering and I need to find with the founder basically where to set the dial, how can I be helpful but not too helpful because they need to make their own way. And so I'm there to serve, right? I try to be a sounding board and always available, but it's their company, they're going to build them, they're going to run them. It's not mine to do.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the number of criteria that will come into making decisions and the subtlety of many of those and how they all come together in forming decisions. It's such a diverse firm if you look at the partnership. We have an incredible richness in our partnership in terms of individual experiences and preferences and profile. And we make these collective decisions on the whole it's been incredibly successful. It's a very, very impressive machine.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many years, but once you're inside, you just realize that they like incredibly high performance machines like an interland risk are really, really very refined. That's been incredibly impressive and I'm incredibly grateful to my own.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The shock is that when you're an executive, especially in the digital business, you have a daily clock, right? The feedback loop is extremely fast. So every morning I would get a thousand data points, all the reporting. And then suddenly you go to a profession where the feedback loop is eight to ten years. So you go from one day to 3,000 days. I mean, of course, you have milestones along the way. You have valuations if you fundraise, but we know how that's really at a reliable milestones because it might go in both directions. You have operational milestones, but the reality is, you know, for an investor is basically when do you return liquidity to your limited partners and your investors? That's been a major change. Also, I had not realized how incredibly sophisticated and fluid these investment firms is from the outside. Because, you know, I had been on the receiving end of working with venture capitals and funds and private codifying.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it buys you freedom and spontaneity, but not happiness. Of course, life gets a lot easier when you are liquid, right? Every LP fails you. Look, if you're raising a family in a larger urban center like New York or London or a place like this, if you don't have access to some liquidity, life is hard. But I think obviously it's not the means to a net, right? You have to spend it and you have to give it and you have to invest it. And it can certainly not stay basically stored in some vault somewhere, not doing anything because otherwise, what's the point? Because by spending it and investing it and buying art and doing all these things, you know, basically you give it back to the economy and you give jobs to people and you fund artists and creators and you do something good with what you've built.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting question. I had confidence in my abilities. I think I had performed quite strongly. I had done two companies before. And actually, both of these companies went on to become Unicorns, even if that Internet Bank was only a unicorn for a few months before the completion. But I couldn't find an opportunity. And so it was quite a challenging and stressful time. And then when another opportunity presented itself, I was a founder. So I founded a payment company, which didn't take off. So I pulled the plug after a year. That was hard too. And then I joined an enterprise software company, which got crushed by the great financial crisis in 2008. 05 to 2009 for very little and then, you know, basically we had to restructure and sell that company for quite little.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between 01, which was my first large exit, I was working with a company called ENBA, so NBA PLC, which was an internet bank. It was the biggest startup of the European public. We raised $250 million and we merged it with the Internet Bank of Telefonica and BBV in Spain for 2.4 billion, front page of the financial debt. For a bunch of reasons, that deal was never completed. It was blocked by the Spanish regulator. And so we initiated litigation. We ended up with a settlement with several hundred million euros. Investors made good returns. The management got some money, but we had to sell our customers in our deposit.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if and when the opportunity presents itself, you can seize it and you can execute against it. That's what I was trying to say. And sometimes it takes a long time. I had a dry patch. I mean, for 10 years, I was pretty much in the desert, right?”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, luck is important in business. You have that saying that when you ask Napoleon how he picked these generals, he said, I picked them lucky. You know, I was a beneficiary of that. I had a very lucky timing when I joined King because I joined right before the launch of the first successful Facebook title. And then it's a lot easier to ride a wave of that sword as opposed to going through some of the very challenging times they had before. But what Seneca said, you know, going back to the Greeks, is lucky is a combination of opportunity and preparedness. And you have to be prepared. And so when you prepared, opportunity might knock on your door and then you can seize that opportunity. And so the only thing that you can do as a professional and the most important thing is to prepare yourself for the opportunity. And so as you think about your personal development, you should focus on accumulating skills and knowledge and network.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment funds have a lifetime. It's typically 10 years and there can be extensions. But so they will invest with you for eight or ten years when they invest early stage. And I think you know what you get into when you sign up with them. You need to figure out a way of basically finding liquidity, distributing that liquidity to the institutional investors. One way of doing this is to go public and then for the investors to be able to sell their shares. It was very difficult to do that with King because we were trading below our IPO price and because our largest institutional investor had 40% of the shares and if they just couldn't sell it down and selling it down, we have driven the share price further below and it would have taken ages basically selling to Activision was a way of delivering against that objective and it was the right thing to do.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would never advise a founder on when to sell. It's a decision to be made by the founder. And if he asks my opinion, then I will tell him what I think. But I think most of the large majority will come to the right decision themselves. There are some instances where it's not the case. And then you want to give a little nudge. It's obviously a very relevant question for King. We sold at a very low multiple. We sold a company at, you know, 5.9. We sold about $6 billion. And there was 1.3 billion of cash on the balance sheet when we sold. So the effective multiple was maybe five or six times a bit. Today, the effective multiple on king inside is probably 15 or 18 times a bit that. So there was a huge value arbitrage. But at the same time, it was the right thing to sell at that time because we had institutional investors who had been in the company for more than 10 years. It was important to generate liquidity for them and we couldn't do it through the stock market.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no good answer there as you scale at some point you have compensation frameworks and it becomes very difficult actually to go outside these frameworks for a bunch of reasons. If it's for an individual contributor that's easier if it's for managers or leaders who will fit within the existing organizational structure there are ways you can structure things. But the reality is that you're going to need to have some consistency. Hopefully the market is clearing a bit and we're going to a place where the balance between talent and organizations goes back to something which is closer to the middle as opposed to being very much a seller market to the advantage of the individual which has been the case for the last few years.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it's on us, right? Clearly, we failed there's something that was missing if they felt that it was the right thing for them at that point to go somewhere else. There was something missing and we failed to bring it.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Develop your female employees and really overinvest to develop them into managers and to leaders. And you have a set of programs around that just to make sure that we're going to get to that diversity at the top. But then what happens is because there is such a scarcity, very often once you promote them to an executive level, be it VP or CXO, you lose them within weeks. And so it happened to us multiple times. We made that investment over years of bringing up and developing great female leaders. And then when they got to that leadership level where we wanted them really to blossom and join the collective leadership and lead the company, they would be snatched very quickly. And so we had to start again and again, hence the Sisyphus analogy.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, it's the challenge of our generation. You know, it's obvious that diverse teams over time perform better. It's not only the right thing to do. It's a much better thing to do by the shareholders and by the employees and by all stakeholders. It's very hard because especially in technology companies, the recruiting pool, for example, for engineers and all STEM subjects is not equal from a gender standpoint. And here I'm talking about gender diversity as opposed to other types of diversity. And what I was referring to as the myth of Sisyvus. So Sisyphus is this guy who keeps pushing a rock up a hill and then the rock keeps falling and he has to start again from the bottom of the hill and push it up again and again and again. And that's what we experienced. So if you look at making your leadership team more diverse from a gender diversity standpoint, you can bring external hires. And there are very few of them. A good rule is one-third external to a third internal. And then you...”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you scale to a large company and it becomes a public company and you have multiple business units and in some businesses that can be challenging, for example, from a privacy standpoint, it can get really difficult to put together CRISPR's mission statement. When you're early stage, it should be pretty straightforward to know what you stand for. Actually, I think if you can't”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Values is the behaviors you would expect to the leadership and the employees to abide by when they are in the company environment. And what we used and actually what I would be using if I had another company is we try to balance them. So for example, one of the values was supportive but demanding, right? Because we were a hugely caring company, but also we wanted people to stay focused and to deliver. And we were running, you know, the biggest game in the world and we had the biggest network of players and we had the responsibility towards these players. And so we were going to be demanding with ourselves and with our employees to keep delivering outstanding entertainment to our player base.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep specialized expertise as opposed to horizontal skills. They're less risk avers. They look for a different compensation mix, maybe less equity, more cash. And they want to work in a more organized environment where you have a set of processes and you have a set of rules. And so you have these cohorts of people who venture your company within three years who are totally different. And you need to retain a single cemented culture that wraps around all of them. And that's a huge challenge, but you have to evolve your values, for example. your values cannot stay static. So every year you have to revisit whether the values you had for the company are still the right values. To your point, I think there's a natural cycle of attrition. It's the right thing for both the company and the employees. And it's not about failing or underperforming. It's just that it's not the right place for them anymore.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For most people there is a cycle in the scaling, and so there will be a good fit between their skill set and the company for a while. And then at some point, it's not the right organization for them anymore. And you need to have grown-up conversations and they need to find something where they can be very successful and where there's a better fit. Nobody has failed. It's just the way things are and organizations and people should be honest about it. If you think about our company, we went from 100 employees to 2,400 employees in three years. So at the peak, we were hiring 100 employees a month. And so the people who joined, obviously, at the start of the journey, where they had a very high risk appetite, they had very horizontal skills. You know, they could do many, many different things. But then as you get closer, suddenly the company becomes much larger, very profitable. We made almost a billion dollars of a bid that year before IPO. You're running to IPO and you need to specialize. So you bring people in functions who have very...”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the right person because that person, if you scale fast, will be recruiting himself within a few weeks. And then you will create pockets of people who are not culturally aligned with the organization. And before you know it, in a matter of months, suddenly you have part of the organization, which doesn't really fit anymore. And that's happened a number of times. And then it takes months or sometimes years to fix this thing. Not something you can fix overnight.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we had at King was we required the unanimity for recruitment. We put in place, again, a well-documented recruitment process where we wanted six interviews, you needed a cross-functional interviewer, an executive sponsor, and unanimity. And after a lot of lobbying, after five or six years, because we were not meeting our recruitment targets, I agreed to soften the criterion and that if one of the interviewers was neutral, we could still proceed with the hire. What happened is actually when one of the interviewers was negative, you know, the other five would lobby him to change his rating and to go to neutral and they could proceed with a higher. And we made a number of wrong hires. And, you know, there is nothing more important when you scale than recruitment. If you in doubt, there is no doubt. I think one of your guests said, I think that's Frank Slotman. I completely agree with him. There's much more downside making the wrong hire than not bringing.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, it's part of a sense of urgency, which is another common theme that we've heard about many times on the podcast. But if you make a decision, just go and do it as soon as you're out of the door, pretty much. And speed of iteration is very important. And to your earlier point, I've seen companies where they take six weeks or eight weeks or 10 weeks to come up with a minor iteration to a pretty minor feature. Just way too slow in this day and age, you need to really come out within days with a new feature and test it and see if it works or not. Iterate again and move on again and go really fast. Just can't afford to have these cycles in months anymore.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, you will have exceptions if you follow due process and you looked at the data and you consulted right here. Probably 95% of your decisions will be the decisions you should have made. And if indeed there are new facts that come to light and you change your mind, that's okay, but you need new facts when facts change, I change my mind. If there are no new facts and you change your mind on a whim, that kind of behavior will cascade down the organization and you will paralyze it. You can do that.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at the data, consult widely, and when you make a decision, if you have two syndicated, syndicated. And when you make a decision, stick with it. What is incredibly toxic in organizations? And I've seen that many times is you make a decision and then you come back on it the next week and then the following week and basically drives paralysis in your organization. Go through due process, take the time, but once you make it stick with it, I think that's very important. And then I have a bias for execution. Once a decision is made, executed immediately, the faster, the better.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's great to fuck up. I think you have to fuck up. The job of most managers and leaders is to make decisions. As a manager, if you make 55% of good decisions, you're a really good manager. If you make 60%, you're exceptional. But that means 40% of your decisions will be wrong. And so I was listening to a podcast with Zuckerberg, and he says, you know, failing is one of macro competencies. That's so true. So the job is not to be right. The job is to make decisions. And of course, you're going to get a bunch of decisions wrong. And there is no negative feedback about that. If you keep making the same decision wrong multiple times, then that's a problem. And then you need to have a conversation.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always start with the good stuff, positive feedback to start with. There are always a couple of items that can be developed. And for those, you have to be very specific and have an example ready. So if you say, well, you know, I think you could do this differently or you can improve this. And let me give you an example of what you've done, here's how you could have done it differently. If you don't have that certain part, feedback is useless because they cannot action it. And it's actually very toxic. It creates a negative loop. So if there's an issue, make sure you are prepared and you have that example and you have a way to improve.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to agree with you. I think they managed to be incredibly successful at fundraising while being transparent many, many times. I think they might be a little less transparent today.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company extremely efficient in terms of shipping. I was uncomfortable a couple of times when you have the names of people who are being recruited that are shared internally. You need a lot of trust in your employees to be really careful with that because that can be damaging to the carriers of some individuals. So if you have any discussions about transactions or personal matters, and I think over time they've slightly adapted. There are a couple of things that now they might not disclose.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I work with a fantastic company and two fantastic entrepreneurs. One of their principles has been apply radical transparency to the way they have founded and they've built their company and they mean it. So everything is totally transparent from every conversation at every level in the organization with everybody to compensation. And so initially, you know, all the employees and the board members and investors and the stakeholders would receive that weekly newsletter where everything was. And it's incredibly powerful. So what works really well is in terms of, for example, compensation discussions, which and negotiations that can take a lot of time and create a lot of tension, there's no room for negotiation because it's all, you know, they have that grid, which is public and the whole system is completely transparent. And there's no room for negotiation. So it cuts these discussions short. The company, you know, the employees back to the trust point, they know pretty much everything. So the trust is extremely high. The engagement is extremely high. And so that makes the”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, praise you can be very spontaneous with praise. You want to be very systematic with it when you see something that's great. You absolutely have to call it. But at the same time, you want to be sparse because otherwise it loses quite a bit of its value. Everybody will know if you are sparse with your praise when you get it, they will value it immensely for more challenging feedback. You need to pick your time. But, you know, it's also highly valued if you have the right team members. You just need to box it in a way where you say, hey, by the way, maybe you could have done this differently and give an example and say, but no problem and move on.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions made too fast and communicated too fast. Communication takes work, it takes structure, communication is about telling a story and telling a story takes time to build the right narrative and the right structure and find the right words. In my experience, I made communication mistakes when I communicated before I was ready. And typically they would be saying something in front of somebody which was not the right thing to say. And then, you know, I have no problem to go and apologize. I can say sorry.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some of them, it takes time to find the right balance. Either they overcommunicate, they will share too much operational data with investors and board members. They might believe that we expect or they might believe we will help with some of that operational detail. Some of the founders want to keep boards and investors at the distance, and sometimes there's information retention that goes beyond what makes an investor and a board member effective. And then you need to sit down and have a pretty direct conversation. That's not the deal, right?”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will depend on the function. What's very important is for teams to set their own goals because that's how they're going to be engaged and that's how they will stretch and thirds. But if you feel these goals are not stretching enough, then you should challenge them.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a personal failure of mine. I have a hard time trusting after something goes wrong, but I can get there, but it's help. I have a number of specific examples where I managed to rebuild trust afterwards, and somewhere basically there was always a stain that could never be removed.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you will definitely give them the benefit of the doubt if you had a thorough recruitment process and you'll be very transparent and you will share with them as much information and as with any other member of the team in terms of trusting them with the ability to make the right decision and execute that trust will be earned over time.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's when trust breaks down. Because horizontal communication is also very important. So when you get your staff together, it's all about sharing information or sharing challenges and also getting feedback from the rest of the team that might help you in solving your challenges. And you can only do that in a trusted environment as you scale politics starts to enter the organization where you might have leaders who do not have the right fit or who might have been imposed or whatever. Suddenly you lose the congenial nature of the meeting and the discussion around the table and you have a communication breakdown.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The week. We had that discussion, I think, actually with Meta. I mean, we were very lucky. We spent time with Mark Zuckerberg before we went public. It was like a year after his IPO and he shared his lessons about his IPO, which was very challenging, right? His talk went down 50% after the IPO. And I think that's one of the insights we took from that discussion.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You role model it if you have your staff meeting, you know, at some point it's your turn and you should only communicate what cannot be communicated in writing or through reporting earlier when you run a digital organization typically they're very data rich designing and distributing these very detailed reports which would go pretty much everywhere and you know at King everybody could access the data warehouse and that was a deliberate choice that's driving engagement that means I trust every employee to be responsible with the data. It's a very big decision to take when you decide to go public because if you do that that means the whole company will be insiders and they can only trade within trading windows and so you have to make that decision on whether you want to treat your employees as adults and they will be responsible with essentially the data and the power you share with them or whether you want to allow them to trade any deal.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you run a survey inside a company and you ask the company, is communication good? And are you happy with the level of communication? The answer is always no. And it gets worse as you scale. So there is never enough communication. In a company, and if you aspire to be a leader and it's even through public markets, you have to be ready to repeat yourself a lot. And that's good. It's perfectly okay. But that means you really need to design your organization in a way where you're going to have very thorough communication, both vertically and horizontally. So vertically, you want to communicate with your direct team and then tell them that they have to cascade it all the way down so they will have to communicate with their teams and then the teams below. And they should communicate everything unless you tell them this you can share. They should push down every little bit of information to the very bottom of the company because”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to do the work. I think you are at the service of your team. And that means that you should not be a consumer of that time, but you should be a multiplier of their time and their effort. That means that before you meet with them, if there is material, you read the material. If you have questions, you send them the questions and you come prepare to the meeting and you focus on the couple of issues that really matter. And if you apply that discipline to yourself, you will drive it down through the organization and you will have a much more effective and efficient organization. So it's all modeling.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, first, many of them are not young in the young sense, right? If you look at the averages of company founders and there was a start in the US that founders of successful software companies in the US are in the early 40s. And so very often we work with founding teams who are from late 20s and 30s, sometimes to the early 40s. And so obviously you apply a slightly different evaluation grid at that stage, but it's really what is the appetite to listen, what drives them, you know, what is really the objective? Do they want to build something that's going to change the world? Are they self-aware? Are they vulnerable? I mean, great leadership, you know, it's self-awareness and vulnerability as well. And those are qualities you don't need to be older to have these qualities, right? They aren't show early. Do we feel they will be able to build a great team? That's something you can see reasonably quickly. You just look around them if they already brought a couple of people with them and you get a sense for, okay, you know, do we believe?”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With founders in the early days, I don't think that grid would be applicable because there's so much uncertainty. You need to navigate much more tactically in the early days and the early years of building a company. The framework applies better to professional executives and managers than to founders. You will find the founders spiking exceptionally on some of these and maybe less on some others. For them, it's the ability to put a fantastic team together and then show them the way as opposed to getting high marks on all of these dimensions.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, talking about leaders, I use the way I evaluate the performance of the leadership team is I look across four dimensions. The first one is the operating or the financial performance of their function. So have they beaten their numbers essentially? The second one is organizational materiality. So have they built a great team? Do they have strong people in all the key functions? And are they challenging them? Have they built great processes? Do they have great succession in place? The third dimension is to what extent do they contribute to the corporate agenda? Because if you're a leader, you have two hats, right? You have your functional or your operational hat and you have a second hat, which is the collective hat of the collective leadership. And then the last one is where they stand on the leadership journey and personal. And so are they a role model? Are they a thought leader? Are they being sought after by other people in the organization? How are they developing themselves?”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have three kids. There was basically a speech at school by a very famous child psychology called Stephen Bidulf. And what he was saying is, if you don't have a good relationship with your dad, how can you expect to have a good relationship with your sons? And what you need to do if you want to fix that is to go and sit down with your dad and make peace with him. I hadn't been at war with him or whatever, but I hadn't had that conversation. And so I went to sit down with my dad probably 15 years ago. And as I had the hardest thing I've done, I wouldn't see in my life, but close, right? And basically I took him to lunch and we had a proper chat and it's changed a lot of things.”
2023-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source