YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephane Kurgan

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59
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2023-07-28
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2023-07-28
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  1. “That's a very good question. But for a long time, I was running away from my father. I had a very difficult relationship with him. I left home before I finished school. I never had somehow his approval or I never had recognition from him and I basically left that behind and went to build a career and alive somewhere else, which is the UK much later, 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

  2. “Not only the culture, it's just a model of labor relations to a large extent they take the drama out of it. They make beautiful products. There are so many exceptional Swedish companies. They're a bit like the Japanese. They have that incredible sense of design. They're highly cooperative. And they just design a working system which basically lets them live pretty normal lives and have families and take good care of their families and themselves, right? And I think that's a model for the rest of us.”

    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

  3. “Yes, let me give you an example. We came up with a feature in Cannie Crush which was incredibly good at monetization to the point where it made us uncomfortable. And so what we did was we essentially capped the feature. I think we had a number of rules. We were very privileged in the sense that we had a huge number of players. So at the peak we had 540 million players and we had a huge number of spenders. We had seven or eight million spenders.”

    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

  4. “You have anybody can take a sabbatical at any time for another three months. And then they all take their holidays at the same time for five or six weeks. They vanish for the Swedish summer from midsummer to early August. As you arrive there, as a foreign executive, you wonder how you're going to be able to operate a business with that. And then essentially you create all these backup and support systems and labor mobility. The company you have then is much more robust and resilient to shocks because you have very high level of cooperation, you know, the level of skills is very high, they're interchangeable. And we had that shock coming in. And then when we sold the company to Activision Blizzard, they had that shock coming in as well.”

    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

  5. “The first one is trusted data, not your intuition. You know, King was always pretty data driven, but it was an incredibly data rich environment. I mean, the beauty of free-to-play on Facebook and later on mobile is that it provides you faster and a higher quantity of data that almost any other business. And very often we had product intuition in terms of features or whatever where the team would think, okay, this is what we need to change and the data would give you a completely different answer. I mean, it's been a great lesson and humility for product people. You have to be ready to be wrong. You have to read carefully the data and act upon it. That's one thing that's really important. And the other insight is the Swedish model of, I would say, labor relations is fantastic. You build incredibly resilient companies. So it's a bit of a shock when you get there because you have very generous parental leave policies where both parents can leave for six months.”

    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

  6. “I would leave the CD on trial. I was carrying CD-ROM readers. I would open the computers at the time they were 80 or XD computers. I would install a guard inside the computer. I had a vacuum cleaner with me because these were all computers. They were incredibly dusty. So you had to clean them up before you could install the card. So I basically had my suitcase, my CDRM drives, and I went all over the place for five 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

  7. “So I wrote my final paper at University Web, a professor who founded the first commercial CD-ROM company in Europe. So he had seen in the US a product called Disclosure, which was a business database for U.S. companies. And the CDRM at the time was revolutionary because you couldn't store that much data on a floppy disk, right? It was a huge revolution. And so he built that company and he bootstrapped it and it became incredibly successful. It's a company that was called Bureau van Dyke, which was sold to Moody's for more than 3 billion euros a few years ago. And so he hired me because he thought, you know, I sounded like a good sales guys. And then he sent me cold calling all over the world on banks to try to sell them the software and the data. I started with Northern Europe. I went to Russia and Eastern Europe in 1991. I went to South America, Colombia during the Narcos. I went all over the world for four 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

  8. “You so much for having me. I've known you for a long time. It's still a surprise to be here today. It's a great honor. I'm not sure I'm worthy. It's very exciting. So thank 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

  9. “The way I evaluate the performance of the leadership team is I look across four dimensions. 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. We went from 100 employees to 2,400 employees in three years. We were hiring 100 employees a month. We made almost a billion dollars of a bid that the year before IPO.”

    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