The Exchanges

Q Um. Was there ever a time when it was as bad as it seemed?

A So I do remember, um, when we launched app ads originally, and this will sound comical, but, you know, obviously it was not, you know, it was not a foregone conclusion that those ads would work because they are a new ad format. They're native ads. And when we launched those, um, I got so excited that I went and kind of told all the Partners that were working with Facebook at the time about this amazing thing and so on. I remember all my partners being extremely frustrated that these ads weren't because it took them, you know, six to nine months to figure out. I remember there was a famous bug on Facebook Android that just, you know, these ads weren't delivering and there was something wrong. Um, and that moment I remember thinking, It is, you know, this may not work because it's just, you know, the performance of the ads were not there. And all my partners were pretty frustrated with the performance and so on. And I thought maybe it's not going to work yet. You know, there was somebody that discovered a bug in Menlo Park. I can't remember exactly who it was, whatever, but, um, it was a step function change over a week. These ads started delivering and, you know, it's, and fast forward, I think there was a period of time when I think 30 Five percent of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time, which is absolutely incredible, right? Th…

AI assessment note: “that moment I remember thinking, It is, you know, this may not work”

Q Are you ever tempted to move away with taxes? Like when you look at Italy's a hundred K tax, you look at Lisbon, It's tempting.

A Uh, it's not tempting enough to upset the settled lifestyle that I created for my children, right? My children are very British, which is hilarious thinking about it now, but they are very British, and they have friends here, they have schools here, my wife loves it in Richmond, where we live, so I just don't have, like, you know, no amount of tax is going to You know, really make that a huge difference. I actually think that if you ask many, many people, like, you know, my daughter has an American passport and sometimes people tell me, you know, oh my God, you know, aren't you worried about the taxes and stuff? And kind of, I respond to that by saying the amount of opportunities that will be unlocked for her by having that passport in the future, I think far offset any kind of administrative headache or even the tax burden that she will have. So it's just in the end, it's all a balance of, you know, what kind of lifestyle you want to create for your kids.

AI assessment note: “it's not tempting enough to upset the settled lifestyle that I created for my children”

Q Um, can you just talk to me about that, how you stretch your evenings, get in the time with family and the work? What does that evening look like for you?

A Yeah. So, um, you know, we talked a little bit about my wife and, you know, she's such an amazing person. And, um, frankly, when I was working at Facebook, I didn't, I traveled quite a lot. And, you know, early on when we were building triple dots, You know, I would spend a lot of time, you know, either on the road or whatever, working, uh, when things, you know, in the last two years, actually with COVID, what we learned is that we are more masters of our own schedule and destiny than we think. So I started basically making a point of trying to be home every day by around seven o'clock, spending that time with the kids. And it's not much, it's two hours a day, but you know, it's, Great for them. It's great for me, um, and I put them to bed every night, um, and, and, you know, basically between seven and nine, it's family time, and I try to do nothing related to work between seven and nine, and the more you do it, the more it gets known, um, and people just kind of start auto-censoring it, and then from nine onwards, I, you know, nine to 10, I take a personal break, so every day for about an hour, I watch I play some chess or whatever it is, and then I, uh, from 10 onwards, I, I do work, and that's the work that I actually think is kind of my maker time effectively, meaning, you know, during the day, it's easy to get hijacked by meetings and this and that, but, you know, from 1…

AI assessment note: “between seven and nine, it's family time... from 10 onwards, I do work”

Q No, I, I know where I'm stealing, uh, marketing people from now. It'd be a really bad look when a VC value actually just nicks my talent. Um, something that really pisses me off is the revenue multiple assumption. It's like, ah, well, it's like shitty quality revenue, so we should apply terrible revenue multiples to it. How do you feel about the revenue multiples applied to gaming companies?

A I mean, I think it's, I think it's a, um, you know, I, I think it's not totally fair, to be honest, and the reason I struggle with this is, let me give you an example of a gaming multiple versus a, you know, software versus service multiple, right? Gaming companies are valued, you know, three, four times revenues, you know, whatever, future looking, backward looking, however you want to do it, right? Roughly. Whereas, um, Software as a service company can be anywhere between 10, 20, 30. In the height of COVID, it was even like hundred times. You mentioned one time you were looking at a company that was a thousand x, right? So, but if you look at the gaming cohorts, if you look at behavior, these are really, really sticky games. The games that we do, people play these games for a very, very long time. They became, they become people's part of people's lives.

AI assessment note: “I think it's not totally fair, to be honest”

Q I think a lot of people say if you're not passionate about it, and I, I agree with you there, but I, I think a lot of people say if you're not passionate about it, when the hard times come and it's a bad day, You'll give up. How do you respond to that?

A I think you have to be passionate about winning. I think we're all wired differently, right? If you're passionate about winning when the hard, hard times do come and they will come in anything in life, then you need this engine, internal engine to propel you through. But that passion doesn't have to be directed to the domain. You know, I think it's a very Western centric view of the world To think that you have to be, you know, passionate about the domain that you're in. And I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who are just, you know, hard learners, hard workers and learners, they end up not pursuing perfectly good lucrative jobs because of this kind of advice. Don't get me wrong. If you're one of the few people that have, you know, like Eyal is a great example, right? Like Eyal was born To be in the gaming industry. You know, if I saw him doing anything else, I would forcefully take him out of there and then put him in the gaming industry. But that's, that's a luxury. That's not the rule.

AI assessment note: “that passion doesn't have to be directed to the domain.”

Q office work, all these things. And so I totally agree with you there. Um, next one, which I loved. As an investor, this made me so happy. Valuations do not matter. Remember this one on five works well for me. Um, you didn't say this in your funding round. Valuations do not matter in the long run and are dangerous. Break this down for me. Why do they not matter?

A Sure. So this actually, this time I would say the porn is the entrepreneurs are sometimes guilty of subscribing to this type of porn. I've seen many, many cases of companies that are really attracted to saying, Hey, our last round, we were valued at X. And, you know, valuation to me can only be useful if it's a meaningful heuristic For future potential cash flows, right? But valuations now are a measure of what that markets FOMO is for that business. And, you know, we've just seen during COVID times, you know, you could, you know, you know, you could literally get your grandma, grandpa, start a gaming company. You could probably get funded at, you know, a hundred million dollar valuation. And then You know, it's very, very easy as a founder to let that get to you, right? In your mind, all of a sudden you have, let's say, 55% of the business valued at a hundred million dollars, and now you're thinking, okay, I have fifty-five million dollars. Truth of the matter is you have nothing, right? It's just all paper money. Not only you have nothing, oftentimes the mistake is, you know, it could go the other way, and we've seen this when valuations have corrected. Um, You've so much, so many people ahead of you now in a, in a potential liquidation, right? You have, you know, preference, you might have debt, you might have all sorts of things ahead of you, and you've hired people now tha…

AI assessment note: “valuations now are a measure of what that markets FOMO is for that business.”

Q Can I ask, what did you learn from Skype and your time at Skype that you now apply or have taken with you to managing and leading at Triple Dot?

A I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize. So Skype was a very small company. At its peak, I think it was about 304 hundred people. Um, and it was dominating the voice over IP market, and it could have dominated so much more. Um, and you know, I mean, it was spun off from eBay, acquired by this investor consortium, sold it to Microsoft for, I think, 8.1 billion dollars. And Skype was an engineering-led organization, and being engineering-led, you know, there's no room for fluff, and I developed a very strong, I would say, distaste for fluff while I was at Skype, um, and that really forced me. When you're talking with an Estonian engineer about the, you know, total addressable market or what Skype's position in it, etc., You learn very quickly to get to the heart of the matter very, very fast.

AI assessment note: “I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize.”

Q No, I, I know where I'm stealing, uh, marketing people from now. It'd be a really bad look when a VC value actually just nicks my talent. Um, something that really pisses me off is the revenue multiple assumption. It's like, ah, well, it's like shitty quality revenue, so we should apply terrible revenue multiples to it. How do you feel about the revenue multiples applied to gaming companies?

A I mean, I think it's, I think it's a, um, you know, I, I think it's not totally fair, to be honest, and the reason I struggle with this is, let me give you an example of a gaming multiple versus a, you know, software versus service multiple, right? Gaming companies are valued, you know, three, four times revenues, you know, whatever, future looking, backward looking, however you want to do it, right? Roughly. Whereas, um, Software as a service company can be anywhere between 10, 20, 30. In the height of COVID, it was even like hundred times. You mentioned one time you were looking at a company that was a thousand x, right? So, but if you look at the gaming cohorts, if you look at behavior, these are really, really sticky games. The games that we do, people play these games for a very, very long time. They became, they become people's part of people's lives.

AI assessment note: “I think it's not totally fair, to be honest”

Q Can I ask, what did you learn from Skype and your time at Skype that you now apply or have taken with you to managing and leading at Triple Dot?

A I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize. So Skype was a very small company. At its peak, I think it was about 304 hundred people. Um, and it was dominating the voice over IP market, and it could have dominated so much more. Um, and you know, I mean, it was spun off from eBay, acquired by this investor consortium, sold it to Microsoft for, I think, 8.1 billion dollars. And Skype was an engineering-led organization, and being engineering-led, you know, there's no room for fluff, and I developed a very strong, I would say, distaste for fluff while I was at Skype, um, and that really forced me. When you're talking with an Estonian engineer about the, you know, total addressable market or what Skype's position in it, etc., You learn very quickly to get to the heart of the matter very, very fast.

AI assessment note: “I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize.”

Q I think a lot of people say if you're not passionate about it, and I, I agree with you there, but I, I think a lot of people say if you're not passionate about it, when the hard times come and it's a bad day, You'll give up. How do you respond to that?

A I think you have to be passionate about winning. I think we're all wired differently, right? If you're passionate about winning when the hard, hard times do come and they will come in anything in life, then you need this engine, internal engine to propel you through. But that passion doesn't have to be directed to the domain. You know, I think it's a very Western centric view of the world To think that you have to be, you know, passionate about the domain that you're in. And I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who are just, you know, hard learners, hard workers and learners, they end up not pursuing perfectly good lucrative jobs because of this kind of advice. Don't get me wrong. If you're one of the few people that have, you know, like Eyal is a great example, right? Like Eyal was born To be in the gaming industry. You know, if I saw him doing anything else, I would forcefully take him out of there and then put him in the gaming industry. But that's, that's a luxury. That's not the rule.

AI assessment note: “I think you have to be passionate about winning.”

Q office work, all these things. And so I totally agree with you there. Um, next one, which I loved. As an investor, this made me so happy. Valuations do not matter. Remember this one on five works well for me. Um, you didn't say this in your funding round. Valuations do not matter in the long run and are dangerous. Break this down for me. Why do they not matter?

A Sure. So this actually, this time I would say the porn is the entrepreneurs are sometimes guilty of subscribing to this type of porn. I've seen many, many cases of companies that are really attracted to saying, Hey, our last round, we were valued at X. And, you know, valuation to me can only be useful if it's a meaningful heuristic For future potential cash flows, right? But valuations now are a measure of what that markets FOMO is for that business. And, you know, we've just seen during COVID times, you know, you could, you know, you know, you could literally get your grandma, grandpa, start a gaming company. You could probably get funded at, you know, a hundred million dollar valuation. And then You know, it's very, very easy as a founder to let that get to you, right? In your mind, all of a sudden you have, let's say, 55% of the business valued at a hundred million dollars, and now you're thinking, okay, I have fifty-five million dollars. Truth of the matter is you have nothing, right? It's just all paper money. Not only you have nothing, oftentimes the mistake is, you know, it could go the other way, and we've seen this when valuations have corrected. Um, You've so much, so many people ahead of you now in a, in a potential liquidation, right? You have, you know, preference, you might have debt, you might have all sorts of things ahead of you, and you've hired people now tha…

AI assessment note: “Truth of the matter is you have nothing, right? It's just all paper money.”

Q Um. Was there ever a time when it was as bad as it seemed?

A So I do remember, um, when we launched app ads originally, and this will sound comical, but, you know, obviously it was not, you know, it was not a foregone conclusion that those ads would work because they are a new ad format. They're native ads. And when we launched those, um, I got so excited that I went and kind of told all the Partners that were working with Facebook at the time about this amazing thing and so on. I remember all my partners being extremely frustrated that these ads weren't because it took them, you know, six to nine months to figure out. I remember there was a famous bug on Facebook Android that just, you know, these ads weren't delivering and there was something wrong. Um, and that moment I remember thinking, It is, you know, this may not work because it's just, you know, the performance of the ads were not there. And all my partners were pretty frustrated with the performance and so on. And I thought maybe it's not going to work yet. You know, there was somebody that discovered a bug in Menlo Park. I can't remember exactly who it was, whatever, but, um, it was a step function change over a week. These ads started delivering and, you know, it's, and fast forward, I think there was a period of time when I think 30 Five percent of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time, which is absolutely incredible, right? Th…

AI assessment note: “I remember thinking, It is, you know, this may not work”

Q Again, didn't agree with that one, did you?

A Yeah, I mean, this one is, so look, solitaire, another, the world doesn't need another solitaire app, right? So from that lens, we really weren't Solving a real problem, right? Um, and I'm not necessarily super opposed to this in the sense that, like, I'm not advocating you don't solve a real problem. I mean, of course, if you happen to solve a real problem, that's fantastic and more power to you. But, you know, how many, you know, aspiring entrepreneurs I've spoken with that just thought this was the starting point. This was the point they get off the ground. And the fact of the matter is true innovation happens Through iteration, right? You start working on something and you iterate, you do this thing one percent different, this thing one percent different, and then the aggregate impact ends up being something completely innovative. So I don't like this advice in the sense that I don't think it's necessarily just false, but I think it's a bit misleading because it's okay, you know, we started out building a solitaire app, You know, one of the companies that I was very fortunate to partner with is Dream Games, and they're building a match three game. And you know what? World has plenty of match three games, but theirs is performing much better now. So, you know, there's this thing that we have to be, you know, solving a real problem of some building something that doesn't exis…

AI assessment note: “I don't like this advice in the sense that I don't think it's necessarily just false”

Q mentioned that, kind of, going back to the, um, you don't have to be solving a real problem, and actually, great, great business, fuck triple dots are great business, about not necessarily solving a real problem. How do you advise founders who think, well, I need to articulate that we're solving a real problem to raise money, to raise a pre-seed round, a seed round. How do you advise them?

A It's a great point. I think, um, it depends a little bit on their backgrounds, right? If they are, you know, let's take gaming, for instance, um, and Dream Games is a perfect example of this, right? They, these are guys who's built two hits before, Toy Blast and Toon Blast, when they were at Peak Games, and, uh, when they came out, you know, with the kind of idea of starting a new studio, you know, my advice to them was, You guys may not know how good you are, so you don't even need to tell people what you're going to build because it's going to change over time. And that was true. And that resonated, you know, where they, they had, I think in their pitch deck, they had like seven slides and three of the slides talk about who the team was and what they've built before, because truly no one should care. Like if you simplify it to its core, what you say you're going to build, Is going to change. I don't care who says what, it will be different. So to me, if you have the strength to lean on your previous experience, I would say lean on that, right? But if you're a first time founder, if you're a brilliant guy out of university, if you're a, you know, a Facebook engineer, and you go, and you have to justify what you're going to build, you just have to play the game. So then I advise them on how to play the game and how to communicate what they're going to build in a way that's You …

AI assessment note: “if you have the strength to lean on your previous experience, I would say lean on that”

Q thing that I think is funny is, and kind of correlates to this, people say it doesn't get easier. It doesn't get easier. Akin, I'm going to be fucking honest with you. It does, I mean, for me, I get San Pellegrino delivered, we sit in a nice studio in Belgravia, it gets easier. Do you agree it doesn't get easier, or are you with me, it does get easier?

A I think it does get easier, right? Because it's, I think it changed the nature of the problems change. It's like when people ask me about kids, you know, when you have a small kid, you worry about something relatively minuscule every single day, maybe every single hour, you know, you worry, is he breathing? Is he turning? And as they grow older, you know, the magnitude of the problems increase, but their frequency decreases. So now with my twelve-year-old daughter, I worry about, you know, She hanging out with the right friends, and if she's not, how can I change that? And, you know, I think it's very similar to work. When we first started the company, and, you know, uh, we were, it was different, but it was a different type of difference. It was, now we're in a place, our, um, daily worries, our problems have changed, and to be honest, personally, you know, having, you More money than I did before. It definitely helps. It's kind of allows me to focus on things that I want. The biggest problem it solves for me is I don't have to spend time to optimize for an unknowable upside in the future.

AI assessment note: “I think it does get easier, right? Because it's, I think it changed”

Q Are you ever tempted to move away with taxes? Like when you look at Italy's a hundred K tax, you look at Lisbon, It's tempting.

A Uh, it's not tempting enough to upset the settled lifestyle that I created for my children, right? My children are very British, which is hilarious thinking about it now, but they are very British, and they have friends here, they have schools here, my wife loves it in Richmond, where we live, so I just don't have, like, you know, no amount of tax is going to You know, really make that a huge difference. I actually think that if you ask many, many people, like, you know, my daughter has an American passport and sometimes people tell me, you know, oh my God, you know, aren't you worried about the taxes and stuff? And kind of, I respond to that by saying the amount of opportunities that will be unlocked for her by having that passport in the future, I think far offset any kind of administrative headache or even the tax burden that she will have. So it's just in the end, it's all a balance of, you know, what kind of lifestyle you want to create for your kids.

AI assessment note: “it's not tempting enough to upset the settled lifestyle that I created for my children”

Q Is it changing how you're operating internally at Triple G?

A Yes. Yes. So we have, we use AI driven tools that, um, You know, enable us to, you know, increase our productivity dramatically. So we use tools that, you know, in the old days, it might have taken us X days to, um, build a three D model of, uh, character to be used in a game. And now we use tools that actually bring that down to a few minutes, right? So it's, you know, it changes everything, uh, from creation to operation, et cetera. But we're still in the early stages of this. You know, the tools are still being developed as we go. Um, and, and it's just a little bit up to us. So we're actually doing many things, many initiatives in the company across that. So we are looking at how we can use AI tools better in ideation, in modernization, in operation, in, on the creative side, on the marketing side.

AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes. So we have, we use AI driven tools”

Q So what single piece of content has had the most impact on you?

A It was a book about how to kind of overcome obsessive compulsive disorder. And, um, you know, I, you know, suffered with OCD for many, many years, and I tried many, many things, um, and this book, actually, this book that I read, how to, uh, basically allow me to stop smoking. So it's a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr. So that, you know, it, you know, I read this book, um, on a, on, when I was on holiday. It's not because I used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. Um, in Italian, there's a saying called smoking like a Turk, and I was the living embodiment of that, right? So someone gave me this book, said, look, you smoke way too much when you go into an office, when you go into a room, the whole room stinks. So, you know, why don't you read this book? And I put it in my bag, forgot about it, went on the holiday in Cyprus, and, um, my wife is from Cyprus, so when we go to her parents' house, there's just not much to do there. So I started reading this book, and And, you know, my whole life changed, not only because I stopped smoking, which is the best thing I've ever done. I stopped it in three days, by the way, just cold turkey, just overnight. But, you know, the fundamental concept of reading words written on ink on a piece of paper enabled me to develop this willpower to overcome an addiction so strong as smoking. Was a complete mindfuck. And that, …

AI assessment note: “it's a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr.”

Q Yale HBS. Give me the snapshot. Like, how did that happen?

A Sure. So, um, I grew up in Turkey, uh, until I was 16, and I was this mega nerd. I was in, like, the math Olympiad team, and I was just, I was one of those people that, um, I was social, but I wasn't, um, you know, externally facing, externally friendly. My mother, um, came in one day, and my mother is not for the faint of heart, and she said, I decided to put you on a exam for the Rotary Club to go to the U.S., and I protested, and I said, I don't want to. I'm happy here in Turkey, and, and she came, and she said, fine, you can be a garbage man then, and that was the end of the discussion, so next thing I knew, I was in a exam room, uh, with the Rotary Club. I went to the U.S. into Wisconsin, And you took a math nerd from Turkey, put them in Tomah, Wisconsin, uh, where not only people did not see anybody from anywhere else, people never saw anyone with dark hair. That was an incredible experience. I was the outsider, and that was a very defining moment for me. If I made it in Tomah, you know, I could make it anywhere. So I, uh, stayed on in Wisconsin. I love Wisconsin. I love the U.S., Met my wife in university, uh, in Wisconsin. Studied there. Um, went to graduate school. I was, I thought I wanted to become a professor. Uh, absolutely horrible idea for me. Um, and, uh, just like what most people don't, you know, most people that do consulting don't know what they want to do w…

AI assessment note: “went to graduate school... Left Yale. Went to McKinsey.”

Q So what single piece of content has had the most impact on you?

A It was a book about how to kind of overcome obsessive compulsive disorder. And, um, you know, I, you know, suffered with OCD for many, many years, and I tried many, many things, um, and this book, actually, this book that I read, how to, uh, basically allow me to stop smoking. So it's a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr. So that, you know, it, you know, I read this book, um, on a, on, when I was on holiday. It's not because I used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. Um, in Italian, there's a saying called smoking like a Turk, and I was the living embodiment of that, right? So someone gave me this book, said, look, you smoke way too much when you go into an office, when you go into a room, the whole room stinks. So, you know, why don't you read this book? And I put it in my bag, forgot about it, went on the holiday in Cyprus, and, um, my wife is from Cyprus, so when we go to her parents' house, there's just not much to do there. So I started reading this book, and And, you know, my whole life changed, not only because I stopped smoking, which is the best thing I've ever done. I stopped it in three days, by the way, just cold turkey, just overnight. But, you know, the fundamental concept of reading words written on ink on a piece of paper enabled me to develop this willpower to overcome an addiction so strong as smoking. Was a complete mindfuck. And that, …

AI assessment note: “it's a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr.”

Q Ooh, save the meaty topic for lots. Fucking hell. Um, what's the biggest lesson in terms of what it takes to hire the best people?

A I would say be wary of etiquettes, you know, don't hire for experience from the shiny company, don't hire necessarily from the best school, you know, if in doubt hire someone from the, you know, if you put a gun to my head between someone from You know, Oxford versus someone from, you know, uh, another university. I don't know the UK universities that well. Um, I'd say, you know, this person is equipped with, you know, XYZ traits, but this person will probably be hungrier, right? So I'm not advocating that's the basis on which we hire, but we always try to hire based on hunger, based on grit, based on Just approach. One of the things that we say is we want to hire people who ask for forgiveness, not permission, and that is something that is probably the single best embodiment of the triple dot recruiting culture is we want people who will do things, who will take initiative, bias for action, then ask for forgiveness.

AI assessment note: “we always try to hire based on hunger, based on grit”

Q Sorry, I'm fascinated. We always hear this, like, people are scared to say, like, actually, I'm doing it for the money. I really don't. Do you think we are overly cynical about people who do it for the money, and we kind of actually stigmatize it wrongly?

A That is such a good point. Absolutely, yes. It's okay to do it for the money. It's okay. I'm not doing it for the money, but you know what? Money is a great plus. I mean, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can eliminate some forms of unhappiness, right? And a lot of people Um, fetishize this kind of, you know, grandiose meanings in life, and, you know, what it means to have a mission statement, and you put it on the wall, and, and I just think there's just so much ingenue, like, there's just so much lack of genuineness around this, that, you know what, a lot of people are doing it for the money. Other people, like me, we're doing it because we think we're good at it, and we want to win, and this is, we just happened to found something that we are Good at doing. And that drives us. You know, you might be doing it for, you know, your mom.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely, yes. It's okay to do it for the money.”

Q Unpacking that for me. That's a great statement. Why is it so important? Because again, that goes against the core ethos of focus, do one thing well. Why is diversification important?

A Because at the beginning of a startup, right? And in most cases, I mean, we took a different route. We went after a known market. We took on execution risk, right? But If you're a startup that is trying to create a new product that doesn't exist in the market today, right? You might very well be kind of developing something and bumping your head against the wall, right? And the message is focus, but that actually reads not as focused as just keep bumping your head against the wall. And that is a very dangerous advice because, you know, the real, you know, strength in that case is to know how to pivot and And, and there, you cannot be formulaic about this. There's just no silver bullet about when to know to persist versus when to know when to pivot. That probably is the singular biggest determinant of success is.

AI assessment note: “message is focus, but that actually reads not as focused as just keep bumping your head”

Q Ooh, save the meaty topic for lots. Fucking hell. Um, what's the biggest lesson in terms of what it takes to hire the best people?

A I would say be wary of etiquettes, you know, don't hire for experience from the shiny company, don't hire necessarily from the best school, you know, if in doubt hire someone from the, you know, if you put a gun to my head between someone from You know, Oxford versus someone from, you know, uh, another university. I don't know the UK universities that well. Um, I'd say, you know, this person is equipped with, you know, XYZ traits, but this person will probably be hungrier, right? So I'm not advocating that's the basis on which we hire, but we always try to hire based on hunger, based on grit, based on Just approach. One of the things that we say is we want to hire people who ask for forgiveness, not permission, and that is something that is probably the single best embodiment of the triple dot recruiting culture is we want people who will do things, who will take initiative, bias for action, then ask for forgiveness.

AI assessment note: “we always try to hire based on hunger, based on grit, based on Just approach.”

Q Um, can you just talk to me about that, how you stretch your evenings, get in the time with family and the work? What does that evening look like for you?

A Yeah. So, um, you know, we talked a little bit about my wife and, you know, she's such an amazing person. And, um, frankly, when I was working at Facebook, I didn't, I traveled quite a lot. And, you know, early on when we were building triple dots, You know, I would spend a lot of time, you know, either on the road or whatever, working, uh, when things, you know, in the last two years, actually with COVID, what we learned is that we are more masters of our own schedule and destiny than we think. So I started basically making a point of trying to be home every day by around seven o'clock, spending that time with the kids. And it's not much, it's two hours a day, but you know, it's, Great for them. It's great for me, um, and I put them to bed every night, um, and, and, you know, basically between seven and nine, it's family time, and I try to do nothing related to work between seven and nine, and the more you do it, the more it gets known, um, and people just kind of start auto-censoring it, and then from nine onwards, I, you know, nine to 10, I take a personal break, so every day for about an hour, I watch I play some chess or whatever it is, and then I, uh, from 10 onwards, I, I do work, and that's the work that I actually think is kind of my maker time effectively, meaning, you know, during the day, it's easy to get hijacked by meetings and this and that, but, you know, from 1…

AI assessment note: “between seven and nine, it's family time, and I try to do nothing related to work”

Q So welcome to the team. Penultimate one. What's the biggest misalignment between founders and VCs?

A Yeah, I think the biggest misalignment is, um, it happens when things are going exceptionally well or things are going exceptionally bad. I think the kind of gray area in between are, um, you know, you know, you can debate, but, you know, a friend of mine that has a very successful public company, um, and, um, you know, he mentioned the time that every time, you know, the, um, stock would come down, You know, the investors would ultimately sell as much of their shares as possible, which would put downward pressure on the stock more. And so like, you know, they would, I would say very few VCs are really long, long term people in general, right? Like you have a horizon that you want to exit and totally understand that's the business, right? So I'd fully appreciate that. But it is a misalignment because if you, if you partner with a truly exceptional founder, You want to be as long-term greedy as possible, not short-term greedy. I think that's the, that's the main one. I think that's, you know, um, the time horizon of your partnership and, and liquidity needs.

AI assessment note: “time horizon of your partnership and liquidity needs”

Q Do you agree with that focus on speed and speed of execution?

A Broadly speaking, yes. This is not something that, you know, I have, um, I can't say that, you know, like speed is very important. Right. But the porn around speed is something that I'm uncomfortable with, because speed of execution allows you to do more iterations than others. Right. But there are points that this is a road, and the road has curves, and you know what? When you're approaching those curves, sometimes you have to just slow down and actually think and take your time. So I've seen You know, many, many companies in Turkey, also in Israel, uh, where I also do quite a bit of investing that, you know, they have this mantra, and they put it on the walls and say, you know, speed overall, speed above everything else, and sometimes, just sometimes, they are too fast when they approach one of those curves, and they go off the cliff. Um, at Facebook, we had, um, these posters, right? They said, done is better than perfect, and then, I agree with that in general, in spirit, but when you go over to finance, they said done is better than perfect, except in finance. Sometimes done is just more important, and the perfect example in gaming for this is there's, um, two brothers, um, called Igor and Dimitri. They're probably the best kept secret in mobile gaming, uh, playwrights.

AI assessment note: “Broadly speaking, yes.”

Q What have been the biggest hiring mistakes you've made?

A Oh, that's a very good question. Um, first of all, I mean, we're a living organism, right? So we'll, we'll, we'll know in a couple of years much better. But if I look in the past, it has been those cases where we've hired for, for etiquette. So you hire someone who's worked at gaming company X and you say, oh, wow, they're, you know, super senior. They've done this. They even, you know, check out in terms when you do due diligence, etc. They even check out. Um, but, and oftentimes they don't work out. They come in, they say, oh, you know, this is how we used to do things there. And, um, you know, and, you know, the organisms are very different, potentially. This is, you know.

AI assessment note: “it has been those cases where we've hired for, for etiquette”

Q Is it changing how you're operating internally at Triple G?

A Yes. Yes. So we have, we use AI driven tools that, um, You know, enable us to, you know, increase our productivity dramatically. So we use tools that, you know, in the old days, it might have taken us X days to, um, build a three D model of, uh, character to be used in a game. And now we use tools that actually bring that down to a few minutes, right? So it's, you know, it changes everything, uh, from creation to operation, et cetera. But we're still in the early stages of this. You know, the tools are still being developed as we go. Um, and, and it's just a little bit up to us. So we're actually doing many things, many initiatives in the company across that. So we are looking at how we can use AI tools better in ideation, in modernization, in operation, in, on the creative side, on the marketing side.

AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes. So we have, we use AI driven tools that”

Q So welcome to the team. Penultimate one. What's the biggest misalignment between founders and VCs?

A Yeah, I think the biggest misalignment is, um, it happens when things are going exceptionally well or things are going exceptionally bad. I think the kind of gray area in between are, um, you know, you know, you can debate, but, you know, a friend of mine that has a very successful public company, um, and, um, you know, he mentioned the time that every time, you know, the, um, stock would come down, You know, the investors would ultimately sell as much of their shares as possible, which would put downward pressure on the stock more. And so like, you know, they would, I would say very few VCs are really long, long term people in general, right? Like you have a horizon that you want to exit and totally understand that's the business, right? So I'd fully appreciate that. But it is a misalignment because if you, if you partner with a truly exceptional founder, You want to be as long-term greedy as possible, not short-term greedy. I think that's the, that's the main one. I think that's, you know, um, the time horizon of your partnership and, and liquidity needs.

AI assessment note: “the time horizon of your partnership and, and liquidity needs.”