Jul 28, 2023 · 1h 5m · news
Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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Former King COO Stephane Kurgan joins host Harry Stebbings to share tactical lessons on scaling digital organizations, implementing data-driven decision-making, and navigating the operational and cultural complexities of rapid hyper-growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 18.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.7 Guest teaching 2.8 Guest disagreement 0.7 Harry pushing back 2.5
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 6:50 Defending Candy Crush spending caps
Stephane rejects standard gaming industry monetization practices, forcefully defending King's ethical spending limits and player protection rules against commercial pressure.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 47:11 Blunt challenge on leadership failureHarry explicitly refuses Stephane's framing of gender diversity retention as an inevitable Sisyphus problem, bluntly accusing leadership of failing to inspire loyalty.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 12:07 Reframing performance grid for foundersStephane corrects Harry's question by explaining that his four-part evaluation framework applies to professional executives rather than early-stage founders.
Harry holds his own ▶ 6:40 Challenging monetization efficiencyHarry uses specific gaming industry knowledge regarding whale monetization driving 80% of revenue to directly challenge Stephane's product decisions around spending caps.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Competency of Failing | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Harry opens with warm praise regarding Stephane's operational reputation and asks how he entered startups. Stephane shares a detailed story about selling CD-ROMs globally in the early 1990s. | |
| Key Lessons from King: Data and the Swedish Model | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Harry asks for non-obvious lessons from King. Stephane explains prioritizing data over intuition and highlights the benefits of the Swedish labor model's generous leave policies. | |
| Deep Dive: Data over Intuition in Candy Crush | 5 | 3 | 2 | 6 | When Stephane describes capping player spending in Candy Crush for ethical reasons, Harry pushes back directly using industry knowledge about whale monetization driving 80% of revenue. Stephane defends King's player-first approach. | |
| The Swedish Model as a Global Standard | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks whether the Swedish model can be exported, then transitions to a personal question about what Stephane is running from. Stephane reflects candidly on resolving issues with his father. | |
| Defining High Performance in Leadership | 2 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Stephane lays out his 4-part framework for assessing exec performance. Harry asks where founders fail on this grid, but Stephane corrects him, clarifying that the framework applies to professional execs rather than early-stage founders. | |
| Evaluating Founders and Rate of Development | 4 | 3 | 1 | 5 | Harry pushes back on the adage 'never ask someone to do what you're not willing to do', calling it ridiculous for executive efficiency. Stephane clarifies that it applies to what you were willing to do earlier in your career. | |
| Communication and Cascading Information | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Stephane explains that 90% of scaling is communication and decision-making, emphasizing vertical cascading of information and lessons learned from Mark Zuckerberg's Meta IPO. | |
| Trust, Politics, and Communication Breakdowns | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks about the mechanics of trust breakdown and whether trust can be rebuilt after a mistake. Stephane shares a personal reflection on his own difficulty rebuilding trust once broken. | |
| Goal Setting across Different Functions | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry inquires about goal setting and transparency with investors. Stephane educates on how stretch goals differ between engineering and fixed-delivery functions like finance and legal. | |
| Personal Communication Mistakes and Feedback Discipline | 2 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Harry asks about personal communication mistakes and real-time feedback. Stephane details the importance of sparse praise and framing constructive feedback with concrete actionable examples. | |
| The Uncomfortable Power of Radical Transparency | 4 | 2 | 1 | 6 | Stephane explains the benefits and edge cases of radical transparency. Harry offers a clear counter-opinion, stating outright that companies should not be transparent about fundraising details. | |
| Scaling and Retaining Trust (The King Model) | 3 | 3 | 1 | 5 | Harry asks if modern corporate teams have gotten too soft compared to 20 years ago. Stephane reframes the issue around the necessity of making decisions and accepting a high rate of error. | |
| Decision-Making Frameworks and Speed of Execution | 3 | 3 | 1 | 5 | Harry questions Stephane's rule to stick with decisions by asking 'what if it's potentially wrong?'. Stephane explains that changing decisions requires new facts, not random whims. | |
| The Unanimity Recruitment Rule and Wrong Hires | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Stephane shares a case study on how relaxing King's recruitment unanimity rule led to compromised hiring standards and bad hires that took years to fix. | |
| Employee Attrition and Cohorts when Scaling Fast | 4 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Harry proposes a management framework about constantly worrying regarding employee tiers. Stephane nuance-frames the issue as natural employee cohort evolution during hypergrowth scaling. | |
| Company Values: Supportive but Demanding | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | Harry cites a past guest's view that mission statements are corporate BS. Stephane counters that early-stage founders who cannot articulate a clear mission raise serious red flags about direction. | |
| Diversity in Tech and the Sisyphus Analogy | 5 | 2 | 2 | 7 | When Stephane uses the Sisyphus analogy for losing trained female leaders to headhunters, Harry hits back bluntly, asking if that attrition is actually a leadership failure to inspire loyalty. | |
| Compensation Frameworks and Talent Markets | 3 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Harry asks about compensation flexibility and selling companies. Stephane walks through structured compensation frameworks and explains the M&A rationale behind King's sale to Activision. | |
| Luck, Preparedness, and Navigating Career Struggles | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Stephane breaks down Seneca's view of luck as opportunity meeting preparedness, sharing his own ten-year career struggle between his early exit and joining King. | |
| Mindset, Liquidity, and the True Value of Money | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks about personal financial mindset, sharing his tax bill anxieties. Stephane shares his view on money as freedom, and discusses transitioning into VC at Index Ventures. | |
| Quick-Fire Round: Life Lessons, Habits, and Future Plans | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | In a rapid-fire format, Harry asks about influential books, cutting out alcohol, sushi, marriage advice, and future plans. Stephane responds concisely and playfully. |
Statements from this episode (34)
Kurgan: Exceptional managers still make the wrong decision 40% of the time
“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.”
Kurgan: Product teams in data-rich environments must trust data over intuition
“Trust the data, not your intuition. You know, King was always pretty data driven, but it, it's, 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 know, faster and a higher qua…”
Kurgan: King reached 540 million peak players and eight million spenders
“So at the peak we had five hundred and forty million players, and we had a huge number of spenders. We had seven or eight million spenders.”
King capped player spending and directly verified high-spending accounts
“One way of doing that was to cap the amount of money that you can spend in the title, and when would, when we would see high spending, we actually would reach out to the players, and we would ask them if they were aware of what they were doing, and to make sur…”
Kurgan: Ethical product consistency is essential for maintaining employee engagement
“The, you know, many, many of our employees in, in the original, you know, Stockholm studio and many other studios care deeply about the player experience and really want to do something good, right? And provide a magical experience to the players and hence, yo…”
Kurgan evaluates executives on operations, maturity, corporate contribution, and personal development
“The way I, you know, evaluate, you know, the performance of the leadership team is I look across four dimensions. You know, the first one is the operating or the financial performance of their function. So, you know, have they beaten their numbers essentially?…”
Stephane Kurgan: Successful US software founders average in their early 40s
“If you look at the average age of company founders, and I think we, there was a stat in the US that, you know, successful, you know, founders of founders of successful software companies in the US are in the early forties.”
Kurgan: Executives must multiply team time by doing pre-meeting work
“You are the service of your team. And that means that you, the that you should not be a consumer of their time, but you should be a multiplier of their time and their effort. That means that, you know, before you meet with them you know, if there is material, …”
Kurgan: Leaders shouldn't assign tasks they were never willing to do
“Well, I think you shouldn't ask people to do what you haven't been willing to do at some point in your career. I mean, obviously, as things evolve, you know, the highest impact you might have with, for your shareholders and your company and your team might not…”
Kurgan: Dissatisfaction with internal communication worsens as companies scale
“When you run a survey inside a company and you ask the company, You know, is, is communication good? And do you, are you happy with the level of communication? The answer is always no. And it gets worse as you scale, right? So there is never enough communicati…”
King gave every employee full access to its internal data warehouse
“At King, everybody could access the data warehouse, and that was a deliberate choice, because that's driving engagement.”
King consulted Mark Zuckerberg on IPO challenges before going public
“We spent time with Mark Zuckerberg before we went public. It was like a year after his IPO, and he shared these lessons about his IPO, which was very challenging, right? His stock went on 50% after the IPO.”
Stephane Kurgan: Teams must set their own goals to maximize engagement
“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 themselves. But if you feel these goals are not stretching enough, then you should challenge them.”
Kurgan: Early-Stage Venture Investments Require Marriage-Like Founder Transparency
“When you invest in a company, it's a marriage, you know, it's gonna last, if it's early stage, it's gonna last for a very long time, And you need some level of transparency. If that transparency isn't there, you know, we're not going to be effective, and we we…”
Kurgan: Praise should be spontaneous yet sparse to retain high value
“You can be very spontaneous with praise. You want to be, you know, 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. An…”
Kurgan: A manager's job is making decisions, not being right
“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. That's, and there is no negative feedback about that. If you keep making the same decision wrong multiple times, then that's a problem.”
Stephane Kurgan: Frequently reversing decisions drives organizational paralysis
“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, you know, basically drives paralysis in your organization.”
Stephane Kurgan: Digital companies must iterate features in days, not months
“And speed of iteration is, is very important, especially in, in digital businesses. And, you know, to your earlier point, I, I've seen companies where, you know, they take six weeks or eight weeks or 10 weeks basically to come up with you know, a minor iterati…”
Kurgan: Relaxing King's unanimous hiring rule led to bad hires
“I agreed to soften the criterion, and that if one of the interviewers was neutral, we could still proceed with the hire. And then what happened is actually when one of the interviewers was negative, you know, the other five would lobby him to change his rating…”
Stephane Kurgan: Making the wrong hire is worse than missing a candidate
“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 in the right person, because, you know, that person, if you scale fast, will be re…”
Kurgan: King grew from 100 to 2,400 employees in three years
“We went from, you know, 100 employees to 2400 employees in three years, and so you have these cohorts. So at the peak, we were hiring 100 employees a month”
Kurgan: King generated nearly $1 billion in EBITDA pre-IPO
“We made almost a billion dollars of EBITDA the year before IPO”
Kurgan: Scaling companies must re-evaluate core values annually
“You have to evolve your values. For example, your values cannot stay static. So every year you have to revisit whether, you know, the values you had for the company are still the right values.”
Kurgan: Founders who cannot articulate a mission statement lack directional clarity
“And actually I think if you can't articulate a mission statement as a founder when you're at seed or series A stage, I have a question mark about whether you know, where you're going and what value you, you're gonna be delivering to your clients.”
Kurgan: Leadership hiring should be one-third external, two-thirds internal promotions
“So, you know, a good rule is one-third external, two-thirds internal, and then you develop your female employees, and you really over-invest to develop them into managers and to leaders, and you have a set of programs around that just to make sure that we're g…”
Kurgan: King repeatedly lost newly promoted female executives to competitors
“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 where we made that investment over years of, you know, bringing up and developing great female leaders, and then when …”
Kurgan: Late-stage tech companies must standardize compensation before going public
“A lot of that data is, is gonna be shared with your institutional investors, and they will actually pay attention. That's one of the things where you have to do a lot of work actually being, before going public. Is your compensation policies.”
Kurgan: Tech talent market is shifting away from candidate-dominated seller's market
“The market is clearing a bit and we're going to a place where you know, the balance between talent and organizations you know, goes back to something which is closer to the middle as opposed to being very much you know a seller market to the advantage of the i…”
Kurgan: I will never advise a founder on when to sell
“I would never advise a founder on, on when to sell. I think, you know, it's a decision to be made by the founder.”
Kurgan: King sold to Activision at a 5-6x EBITDA multiple
“We sold at a very low multiple. We sold a company at, you know, 5.9, or it's all about six billion dollars with and there was 1.3 billion of cash on the balance sheet when we sold. So the effective multiple was, you know, five or six times EBITDA.”
Kurgan: King's largest investor held 40% of shares post-IPO
“It was very difficult to do that with King because we were trading below IPO price, and because our largest institutional investor had 40% of the shares, and it was, you know, they just couldn't sell it down, and selling it down, you know, it would have driven…”
Kurgan: 2000s European tech lacked the US culture of second chances for failed founders
“The US, if you have failed as an executive after building a new startup, you know, they will give you a second and a third chance. At that time, Europe was not like that.”
Stephane Kurgan: Venture capital operates on an eight-to-ten-year feedback loop
“When you're an executive, especially in the digital business, you have a daily clock, right? The feedback loop is, is extremely fast. So, you know, every morning I would get a thousand data points, you know, with all the reporting, and then suddenly you go to …”
Stephane Kurgan: Scaling King required pairing 'mathematicians' with 'magicians'
“At King, there's a very nice saying, which is, you know, it's the mathematician meets the magician, right? 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.”