The Exchanges

Q So what was the turning point then when VC money did start to flow in for you?

A So when we sort of had become this kind of, you know, 10, 15 people, we decided, okay, now we have to raise venture capital. So we, we hired a banker, which is not the usual thing, and it's not necessarily even something I suggest people to do. It's not the standard model, basically, right? So, but we, uh, we, um, we found this guy who's actually a venture capitalist now, uh, Paul Hayden at, uh, with London Venture Partners. And, and, uh, he traveled with me, and he kind of wrote the financial model, which we didn't have. We didn't have a CFO when, when we met him. Uh, and he sort of wrote the financial model with us, which we brand the company on that financial model for four years, uh, even bizarrely enough hitting these numbers. But, so we traveled, the financial crisis happened, everything was kind of slow. The app store opens up, um, we launched for that, and that's when sort of the, the, the Silicon Valley and the U.S. VC started noticing us. We had term sheets from various people, including Dawn actually, uh, back in the day, before my brother joined there, and we would have taken some decent term sheets from some, from some decent people, but I was so unbelievably lucky that I Kind of almost on the street. I mean, it was sort of in a random meeting, met a woman called Diane Green, who was, um, back then kind of, um, between roles. She had this sold IPO and then left her…

AI assessment note: “The app store opens up, um, we launched for that, and that's when sort of”

Q I want to discuss the rise of the app store now, uh, which I, to me really is brought about the decentralization of gaming from key players to, to everyone. Um, so, so how do you view then the rise of the app store and its role alongside the rise of unity?

A Well, one of the sort of, uh, ideas also that the company was founded on was the tools can draw a revolutionary industry. So, you know, he, We were actually looking back at the, you know, the home studio and how that affected the music industry, and we were looking at how digital video affected filmmaking. And the sort of, the bit we missed, actually, is that, you know, distribution is kind of the other part. Tooling is one and distribution is the other. So we created tooling, but, but, but frankly, distribution has to have to happen as well. And of course, you know, Apple kind of revolutionized that with the App Store. I don't know, I was, I was, I was looking at the numbers and sort of Exploring the idea a bit at some point, and I realized that, you know, if you had a product seven years ago, you could take it to the internet, and, and, I mean, in theory, you could, you could find a number of people, but it was, there was a lot of friction, and, you know, payment systems, and all kinds of, kind of, problems finding these audiences, or if you had, you know, a lot of money, you would go on primetime television, and you would, sort of, address a hundred million people, and with the App Store, well, plus, you know, Google Play, and a couple of others, you can address something like, what, three billion people, with, with basically no money. It's, it's, it's outrageous. So it's li…

AI assessment note: “Tooling is one and distribution is the other. So we created tooling”

Q Like how much can I get for this?

A Yeah, no, I mean, actually, we were even more naive. No, ok, well, ok, let's see. We picked the macromedia business model, which, you know, is sort of, like, morphed into the Adobe business model, which was, you know, professional software, roughly a thousand bucks per user, and then you might sort of upgrade once every few years. And we had read an article by, the guy was probably the best software blogger at the time, Joel Spolsky, went on to create things like, exactly, and a very brilliant guy, and he had written this You know, kind of a blog about software pricing. And, uh, you know, it's very obvious, I guess, for most people now, but, but we were blown away by this idea that, you know, there's two prices. There's up to a thousand bucks, and then there's over a 100,000 dollars. If you go, if you go past a thousand bucks, then you have to kind of go and do a dog and pony show, and you're just going to support them and hang out with them. And by the time you've done that, you have to kind of charge them, you know, closer to a 100,000 dollars. So we, we paid the lower price. Yeah. And that was pretty much it. We've never really changed it. I mean, we went to subscription later, but the prices are sort of more or less the same. It's just, you know, they're charged differently.

AI assessment note: “roughly a thousand bucks per user, and then you might sort of upgrade”

Q skills there as a board member. You see now as an angel and as advisors to many companies, many different boards at play, For me, wanting to be the best board member I can be to founders that I work with, what advice would you have for me, David, as a former entrepreneur, as an angel, as an advisor, that I can be the best board member I can be?

A So, Ronald never said this to me directly, but I heard it from somebody else that he had said it. I don't know where, that a good board member should be a shock absorber for the company, because there will be shocks, and people will be rattled, and there will be all kinds of crazy things happening, and just slowing the process a little bit down, and like guiding the leadership into Kind of a thoughtful process, not necessarily rushing into decisions, and it's definitely been a good influence on us. My style is very personal, like, you know, I do best when I just get really, really connected with the founders of the leadership, and I think I'm best at just kind of getting to know them really well and guiding them through sort of some of the difficult decisions they have to face, and you can best do that when you just know the context quite well, but there's many different styles, like, there's many ways of skinning that cat. I don't think there's, like, one way.

AI assessment note: “a good board member should be a shock absorber for the company”

Q I do want to ask, you know, you mentioned about kind of selling companies there. And again, I spoke to Paul and Roloff before, and they both said about kind of the several M&A opportunities you had very kind of prematurely in the unity journey. What are your thoughts on fending off premature M&A opportunities, David? And what were the lessons from your experience Turning them down.

A So when companies are doing well, and we were for quite a while actually doing quite well at Unity, you know, M&A interest comes in, right? And it's fascinating. It's flattering for at least definitely a first time founder to kind of get that. I learned to take confidence from it. As in like, if there was a yearly offer and it kind of went up every year, I felt pretty good. And that actually gave me confidence to continue because it felt like there was a kind of a little bit of a guardrail that we were operating against. Then you need to manage a little bit, you know, expectations around you. I mean, when you're doing well and the board, investors, whoever is around you has trust in you, like it's not that hard to rebuff acquisition offers, I think, but executives, people around you, definitely employees can start kind of getting excited or confused by those. So I learned from smart people to kind of basically hold those tight to your west as they're happening. So if you engage in conversations, just don't spread it too broadly, honestly. Somebody wise told me once that 90% of all M&A interest doesn't happen, which I think is probably putting it optimistically. And the corollary from that Is that you should not waste too much effort on it and try to always make them a learning experience or draw some other use from them because otherwise you just spin your wheels a lot. So we u…

AI assessment note: “see far enough ahead that whatever they're offering you now seems small”

Q And so, so how did that develop then? Because the early years weren't always the easiest for you, so I'm intrigued to hear in the early stages of the, of the gaming company that transitioned into Unity, how you kind of, uh, kept positive, uh, in the face of, Of such persistent, positive feedback. What was your driving motivation telling you that this was the right direction?

A Yeah, it's, it's really hard. So, you know, so my two co-founders are kind of writing codes together as early as two doesn't one and two, and they invite me to be the third kind of coder. And then eventually I sort of was kind of, uh, given the founder title a bit later, uh, in the January of three, right? So for me, it's a 13 and a half years and those guys have actually been going even longer. First of all, we're just going to make games, and it seemed like an awesome idea. So we were building this technology to make the game, and building, and building, and building. Eventually, we, we sort of found that, uh, we sort of realized that we had a passion for the tech, and, and that we built kind of a platform that didn't do much, but it had some nice aspects, and it was usable, like it was user-friendly. We were kind of Mac guys, and there was some inspiration there, I think, and then we sort of started exploring that idea, and realized that, you know, if you have a user-friendly platform, and everything else in your industry is really not user-friendly, you could maybe, instead of, You know, selling it a few times for a lot of money. You could sell it for a little bit of money a lot of times. And, and from that, the idea of democratizing game development, which is sort of the, the headline we, we really kind of found the company on was possible. And, and, and, and, and that sor…

AI assessment note: “the idea of democratizing game development, which is sort of the, the headline”

Q I want to discuss the rise of the app store now, uh, which I, to me really is brought about the decentralization of gaming from key players to, to everyone. Um, so, so how do you view then the rise of the app store and its role alongside the rise of unity?

A Well, one of the sort of, uh, ideas also that the company was founded on was the tools can draw a revolutionary industry. So, you know, he, We were actually looking back at the, you know, the home studio and how that affected the music industry, and we were looking at how digital video affected filmmaking. And the sort of, the bit we missed, actually, is that, you know, distribution is kind of the other part. Tooling is one and distribution is the other. So we created tooling, but, but, but frankly, distribution has to have to happen as well. And of course, you know, Apple kind of revolutionized that with the App Store. I don't know, I was, I was, I was looking at the numbers and sort of Exploring the idea a bit at some point, and I realized that, you know, if you had a product seven years ago, you could take it to the internet, and, and, I mean, in theory, you could, you could find a number of people, but it was, there was a lot of friction, and, you know, payment systems, and all kinds of, kind of, problems finding these audiences, or if you had, you know, a lot of money, you would go on primetime television, and you would, sort of, address a hundred million people, and with the App Store, well, plus, you know, Google Play, and a couple of others, you can address something like, what, three billion people, with, with basically no money. It's, it's, it's outrageous. So it's li…

AI assessment note: “Tooling is one and distribution is the other. So we created tooling, but... distribution”

Q So do you think the rise of unity would have been possible without the democratization of the app store?

A No, no, no. I mean, like we would have, we were fine. I mean, we were actually kind of a growing company. We, we, you know, we were paying the bills and, you know, we were like 17 people or something by the time the app store opened. So, I mean, we might have been a fine, like a real company and, and, you know, there's no reason to think that we're going to die or anything. But no, I like the, um, the, the, the rise of the iPhone first and the App Store and that was just kind of the perfect, you know, I think in space travel, they call it gravity lift for us. We just kind of managed to hit that perfectly. And, and for various reasons, nobody else really cared about it for a while. So we were, we were kind of the only player there for, for quite a while. Um, of course, you know, because all the money was in console gaming, which is a very different everything actually.

AI assessment note: “No, no, no. I mean, like we would have, we were fine.”

Q I mean, obviously you very clearly did. Can I ask them, when you look at the CEO transition, what was the thinking around that for you when you did decide to transition out of the CEO role? And what was the thought process there?

A So we were founding the company in 2003. We launched in 2005. We became sort of a real tiny company, profitable growth, profitable company in the following years. I moved to San Francisco and we raised the A round from Sequoia in 2009. And the next Four years were just amazing. It was so fast. The growth was fast. There was just so many opportunities opening up. The games industry was changing. There were new platforms. Mobile was really going from like the clever phone era before smartphone era, and then onto kind of the big iPhone and Android platforms and all this stuff. The end of them, we started glimpsing VR and other sort of future things. We learned to be international. We learned to scale. Like there were so many good things we did. And I was getting really worried because I could see a Future, the way we sort of run out of growth, selling the software as we were, that market has turned out to be much bigger than even I thought at the time. And the board was great. We had gotten several investors on board. It was great support I had. I had a good exec team. My founders were amazing. But I needed some extra kind of energy. And I was lucky that I ran across John Ricchitello, who is now CEO. He had recently left Electronic Arts. And of all the sort of, I met a lot of people along the way, but of all the people I had conversations with, he just understood the games industr…

AI assessment note: “I was getting really worried because I could see a Future... needed some extra kind of energy.”

Q So what was the turning point then when VC money did start to flow in for you?

A So when we sort of had become this kind of, you know, 10, 15 people, we decided, okay, now we have to raise venture capital. So we, we hired a banker, which is not the usual thing, and it's not necessarily even something I suggest people to do. It's not the standard model, basically, right? So, but we, uh, we, um, we found this guy who's actually a venture capitalist now, uh, Paul Hayden at, uh, with London Venture Partners. And, and, uh, he traveled with me, and he kind of wrote the financial model, which we didn't have. We didn't have a CFO when, when we met him. Uh, and he sort of wrote the financial model with us, which we brand the company on that financial model for four years, uh, even bizarrely enough hitting these numbers. But, so we traveled, the financial crisis happened, everything was kind of slow. The app store opens up, um, we launched for that, and that's when sort of the, the, the Silicon Valley and the U.S. VC started noticing us. We had term sheets from various people, including Dawn actually, uh, back in the day, before my brother joined there, and we would have taken some decent term sheets from some, from some decent people, but I was so unbelievably lucky that I Kind of almost on the street. I mean, it was sort of in a random meeting, met a woman called Diane Green, who was, um, back then kind of, um, between roles. She had this sold IPO and then left her…

AI assessment note: “The app store opens up, um, we launched for that, and that's when”

Q Final one. What do the next five years hold for you, David? What are the plans in store?

A Yeah, so since stepping out of being CEO of Unity, moving back to I'm basically spending most of my time as an angel investor, board member, advisor to a whole bunch of people and friends. Kind of more of the same, I think. I'm thinking a lot about climate change and climate technology, climate change fighting technology. So that's kind of a favorite topic of mine. I'm also interested in other societal topics like the lack of trust and the erosion of democracy and things like that. I don't have very good answers, honestly. I'm looking for companies that affect these things, and especially climate change. I think I've found a few that I like and I do invest in them.

AI assessment note: “spending most of my time as an angel investor, board member, advisor”

Q Because it's been such a successful CEO transition, when you look back over the last years with John as CEO, when you look back with hindsight, how do you advise prospective founders who are thinking about making a CEO transition?

A Yeah, it's tricky as hell, right? I mean, we considered it, like, way earlier, very naively, kind of considered it, like, we could hire, like, a Because we were three technical confounders, and maybe we should have somebody who had done sales before. This was at a time when we had not done sales yet, and so on. So we had some naive conceptions about doing it way early, and I'm very glad we didn't. Running companies is like a liberal art, right? It's not an engineering discipline. So, like, there's these competing things. Like, founders have a special thing. They're listened to by customers and the people internally in a way that is very hard to achieve for a new person. It's possible. I think John has done it, but it's not something that just happens automatically. And especially when it comes to change, Changing strategy, changing course. I think founders can have a really important impact, and it's hard for somebody to come from the outside and just start changing. So, like, don't just rush into it. It's one impulse. On the other hand, there are these toolboxes of, like, leadership and management and how to do a lot of the things that you need when the company is significantly bigger. Well, at any size, I guess, that is ahead of you that you may not have and may not be able to develop fast enough or want to develop. It's hard, man. Basically, I spend most of my time now advis…

AI assessment note: “I've several times advised People to not change CEOs”

Q Yeah, no, I totally get you. Can I ask David, if you were to start another company today, would you raise VC money again?

A Yes, probably. I really like the model, depends on what I'm doing, but I actually do like the VC model. I think it's for high growth tech companies with big opportunities. It's just a really good model. I know it's been criticized, and nothing is perfect. You're not fully, completely aligned with your investors ever, no matter what model you have. But the ability to kind of fund ahead of the curve, I sometimes think of when you're growing on some kind of hockey stick, you allow yourself to spend on kind of a inverse shape, like Forming kind of a lentil graph, I don't know, like a lens form, like lens shaped graph. That's a really good thing that we have that model. I think it's fantastic.

AI assessment note: “Yes, probably. I really like the model, depends on what I'm doing”

Q It was indeed. I think my interview style was a little less polished, as hopefully it is today, but I do want to start with some context, David, so talk to me. How did you make your way into the world of startups, and come to found, as we were chatting about before the show, potentially the third most valuable European company in Unity?

A I actually, I don't really have a ranking table. I don't know whether we're more or less valuable than, so I don't really know. I know Spotify's bigger. I'm sure there's others that Just haven't really checked. But how did it get started? I mean, I was a programmer since I was like, 11. I'm born in 77. So basically, my entire generation were programmers. I think we learned to program to make video games. Most of us ultimately didn't, but because the world needed a lot of code written. But we started us with a dream, and I did two, and I learned to program, and I did a bunch of random programming. Then somehow managed to scrape through high school. I got into web development, did a whole bunch of websites, and backend systems, and content management systems, and all the stuff that was kind of the, well, that the world apparently needed a lot of in the mid to late nineties. And then end up working for a couple of, like, kind of good software companies, like people that have, like, really professional approach to writing software, where I learned a lot, but also kind of got this kind of idea that it would be cool to run my own. It wasn't really clear what. That wasn't, like, one vision or anything. So I started a few companies that went, like, absolutely nowhere. There was probably one content management system. There was, like, one something generic database connectivity. Might h…

AI assessment note: “how did it get started? I mean, I was a programmer since I was like, 11.”

Q And I want to discuss the fundraising process with you now. Um, so let's start off with the, how it differed from stage to stage. So from seed to where you are now, how, how's the fundraising differed?

A Sure. So, I mean, we followed sort of a, maybe a slightly unusual path as in we, well, I don't know, we tried and failed to raise venture capital. That's not, maybe that's unusual, but then we, then we went and borrowed money from, from, from somebody's father, from the bank. And then we sort of just built a profitable business in the sort of old fashioned way back in the day. Right. So we launched, you know, five and, and basically we never really spent money. So we were always kind of break even profitable ish. We tried, we had a multiple sort of a dry runs at raising venture capital because it was very frustrating to have Like basically so, so extremely constrained, uh, cashflow, but we had to do it. So we did it. And frankly, like, if you look at the, like what we're doing, it was like a, objectively speaking, it was a small industry. Like the market didn't exist. So, so it made sense not to invest in us and nobody did.

AI assessment note: “we tried and failed to raise venture capital... then we went and borrowed money”

Q And we spoke about the app store there, and I want to move to kind of a slightly different demographic, but still a platform on the whole, and that's emerging platforms in gaming. We hear a lot of excitement around VR. I'm intrigued as to how Unity also their strategy to fit changing platforms, and kind of what What the challenges are of this when there's many platforms?

A I mean, so, so we, we, we went multi-platform extremely early and, uh, and dramatically so, you know, whereas other people would, you know, try to target three, four different platforms. We went to kind of seven and 10 and 25 at this point, which is sort of an impossible feat. And also took like years and years of engineering and re-engineering, just the development process and the release process. Uh, but it's, it is a competitive advantage because nobody else can really address the number of platforms we can. With, you know, VR and AR, which is sort of a number of platforms, you can sort of fit it into mobile VR, room scale VR, and then AR, which, you know, has to be mobile. These are exciting platforms. They're very new. They're, the numbers are small. I mean, like, you know, even if you're really generous with, with VR, you know, it's something like one, 1000th of the mobile ecosystem, right? So, right.

AI assessment note: “we went multi-platform extremely early and dramatically so”

Q And then penultimate question, biggest challenge for you today, what kind of is your daily, uh, struggle?

A So, so, you know, I, I stepped back From the COC more than a year and a half ago now, you know, somebody else now has the headache of running a company that has just passed a thousand employees, by the way, a very, very brilliant CEO that I have some, you know, take some pride in having brought into the board first. And then, uh, we managed to convince him to take the COC. I'm just sort of, uh, somebody who is trying to be very close with the company and know what's going on and help connect dots inside and outside the company. You know, advise some people, uh, like, or some teams on product decisions and business decisions, but it's not my struggle, so I can't claim that it's very stressful for me, and plus the company's doing very well, which is wonderful.

AI assessment note: “it's not my struggle, so I can't claim that it's very stressful for me”

Q And I'm intrigued. Obviously we talked about the app store there and Apple recently, uh, did made two big adjustments to the app store in terms of paid search. And the subscriptions. Um, so how do you think that affects the gaming industry? I know a friend of mine, Nicola DiMassi at Glue, is, is very excited for that. Um, what is your take on it?

A I, I don't know yet, except, like, it's really just healthy for the ecosystem to have, like, many different ways of monetizing, and, you know, it's, it's become a bit too much of a monoculture in some ways, like, the, the, the people that are making all the money are doing the same thing with microtransactions in a Fairly sort of a predictable way. And that's not, again, it's not really healthy for the ecosystem. It's wonderful for them, but, but it's really wonderful that, that we may be able to see a world where this kind of a slightly old fashioned by now subscription relationship to their customers. Uh, this is how like MMOs were back, you know, when we were younger.

AI assessment note: “it's really just healthy for the ecosystem to have, like, many different ways of monetizing”

Q kind of a couple of big transitions today. And I spoke to Paul Hayden, actually, before the show, one of your early investors. And he said something specific. And he was like, before the CEO transition, I'd love to hear David's perspective on what were the biggest challenges for you over the years as the founding CEO, and are there a few that really stand out and come to mind?

A Yeah, I mean, it was really, really hard. We were three coders, right, that founded the company together, and the first couple of employees were coders as well, and at some point, it turned out I was like a vastly worse programmer than my co-founders. I was pretty good, by the way, but they were really, really good, and when you're sitting next to somebody who's like 10 or a hundred times better than you at Coding, like wipe other, find something better to do. So I was kind of doing the other odds and ends that a company needs, like cooking lunch and writing copy and creating a customer database and stuff like that. Selling, talking to customers, all that stuff as we evolve. And sometimes I've said that it took quite a while to get humanity off the ground, so I sort of had time to learn on the job. I'm also very social, so I really enjoy meeting people and being out there. So I think I actually relished the role and started kind of enjoying it. Fairly good storyteller, so like, you know, kind of channeling kind of what the company could do and should do. So I found many of these things easy, and then at some point it became clear the company needed some kind of actual CEO, and we decided that it would be me. At least initially, it wasn't really clear whether it would stay that or whatever. But I learned on the job, and I think I did some really good things along the way. But ma…

AI assessment note: “man, was it hard sometimes to scale.”

Q I mean, obviously you very clearly did. Can I ask them, when you look at the CEO transition, what was the thinking around that for you when you did decide to transition out of the CEO role? And what was the thought process there?

A So we were founding the company in 2003. We launched in 2005. We became sort of a real tiny company, profitable growth, profitable company in the following years. I moved to San Francisco and we raised the A round from Sequoia in 2009. And the next Four years were just amazing. It was so fast. The growth was fast. There was just so many opportunities opening up. The games industry was changing. There were new platforms. Mobile was really going from like the clever phone era before smartphone era, and then onto kind of the big iPhone and Android platforms and all this stuff. The end of them, we started glimpsing VR and other sort of future things. We learned to be international. We learned to scale. Like there were so many good things we did. And I was getting really worried because I could see a Future, the way we sort of run out of growth, selling the software as we were, that market has turned out to be much bigger than even I thought at the time. And the board was great. We had gotten several investors on board. It was great support I had. I had a good exec team. My founders were amazing. But I needed some extra kind of energy. And I was lucky that I ran across John Ricchitello, who is now CEO. He had recently left Electronic Arts. And of all the sort of, I met a lot of people along the way, but of all the people I had conversations with, he just understood the games industr…

AI assessment note: “I needed some extra kind of energy. And I was lucky that I ran across John”

Q founding vision can be quite constraining because it essentially puts a limit on what one thinks they can achieve. If you look today at Unity's Market cap and the IPO and everything around it. You would never have had that probably as a vision back when you started in 2003. How do you think about the importance of founder vision today? And do you agree that it could be constraining?

A I always try to quote my sources, but in this case, it's really forgotten to time. I've not been able to find out who said this originally, but somebody quoted it to me saying something like the value of mission statement can sort of be measured in the quality of decisions it helps you make. And quite early, we decided that we wanted to democratize game development. We've evolved that vision further, which needed to evolve, but that was, like, the first statement that we kind of put on the wall in the basement room or apartment we lived in, and there's something powerful about it. It's not very specific, right? It doesn't say we'll democratize game engines. It doesn't say exactly who we're going to help. Kind of vague, democratize game development. It doesn't even speak to just one part of the development phase. For a long time, of course, we mostly ignored that. It just made an engine that we commercialized in Kind of buy it at the time. And because it wasn't very good, we sold it for a cheap price, and it was easy to use, so we sold it ultimately quite many times. But over time, like, we kept going back to the kind of original vision statement as kind of a fountain of inspiration almost, like, you know, democratize. Okay, you know, who is that? Well, it's a lot of people. It's people who are not making games right now, people around the world. It might be underrepresented peo…

AI assessment note: “the value of mission statement can sort of be measured in the quality of decisions”

Q And I want to discuss the fundraising process with you now. Um, so let's start off with the, how it differed from stage to stage. So from seed to where you are now, how, how's the fundraising differed?

A Sure. So, I mean, we followed sort of a, maybe a slightly unusual path as in we, well, I don't know, we tried and failed to raise venture capital. That's not, maybe that's unusual, but then we, then we went and borrowed money from, from, from somebody's father, from the bank. And then we sort of just built a profitable business in the sort of old fashioned way back in the day. Right. So we launched, you know, five and, and basically we never really spent money. So we were always kind of break even profitable ish. We tried, we had a multiple sort of a dry runs at raising venture capital because it was very frustrating to have Like basically so, so extremely constrained, uh, cashflow, but we had to do it. So we did it. And frankly, like, if you look at the, like what we're doing, it was like a, objectively speaking, it was a small industry. Like the market didn't exist. So, so it made sense not to invest in us and nobody did.

AI assessment note: “we tried and failed to raise venture capital... we went and borrowed money”

Q founding vision can be quite constraining because it essentially puts a limit on what one thinks they can achieve. If you look today at Unity's Market cap and the IPO and everything around it. You would never have had that probably as a vision back when you started in 2003. How do you think about the importance of founder vision today? And do you agree that it could be constraining?

A I always try to quote my sources, but in this case, it's really forgotten to time. I've not been able to find out who said this originally, but somebody quoted it to me saying something like the value of mission statement can sort of be measured in the quality of decisions it helps you make. And quite early, we decided that we wanted to democratize game development. We've evolved that vision further, which needed to evolve, but that was, like, the first statement that we kind of put on the wall in the basement room or apartment we lived in, and there's something powerful about it. It's not very specific, right? It doesn't say we'll democratize game engines. It doesn't say exactly who we're going to help. Kind of vague, democratize game development. It doesn't even speak to just one part of the development phase. For a long time, of course, we mostly ignored that. It just made an engine that we commercialized in Kind of buy it at the time. And because it wasn't very good, we sold it for a cheap price, and it was easy to use, so we sold it ultimately quite many times. But over time, like, we kept going back to the kind of original vision statement as kind of a fountain of inspiration almost, like, you know, democratize. Okay, you know, who is that? Well, it's a lot of people. It's people who are not making games right now, people around the world. It might be underrepresented peo…

AI assessment note: “value of mission statement can sort of be measured in the quality of decisions”

Q If that's, like, great board membership, and it's a kind of a great VC base, there's also not such a great VC base in certain Cases with some kind of bad VC behavior. I'm intrigued. How do you think about this, and where do bad VCs really show themselves, and how do you advise founders on kind of bad VCs?

A Yeah, so it definitely was not nothing I ever felt with Unity. I think we've been extremely lucky and good, I suppose. I mean, when I've seen sort of bad behavior or weird behavior, I think it often comes down to the fact that VCs are money managers for other people, and it's a bit the same as you get in kind of middle management in companies, that you get people that are under pressure from different directions, and When you're into pressure from different directions, it's hard to kind of sometimes focus on the task at hand, or the task isn't so clear anymore, because you're kind of trying to manage different things, because it's such an illiquid asset, and you're in there so long. When you aren't doing that great, your investors, the LPs, start questioning what's going on, and then you start showing kind of short-term things, like this company raised an upround, and we sold this company at maybe not a great market, but still, we had an exit. And these kind of things, I think, is probably the worst kind of board behavior I've ever said, I've seen. And I think most kind of bad behavior comes from that. I mean, these aren't generally bad people, right? So it's like nobody's out there to be evil. I suppose almost nobody. So I don't know. I think it's actually the same you see inside companies. Stressed out middle managers are kind of the most destructive force inside companies. A…

AI assessment note: “when I've seen sort of bad behavior... it often comes down to the fact”

Q And so, so how did that develop then? Because the early years weren't always the easiest for you, so I'm intrigued to hear in the early stages of the, of the gaming company that transitioned into Unity, how you kind of, uh, kept positive, uh, in the face of, Of such persistent, positive feedback. What was your driving motivation telling you that this was the right direction?

A Yeah, it's, it's really hard. So, you know, so my two co-founders are kind of writing codes together as early as two doesn't one and two, and they invite me to be the third kind of coder. And then eventually I sort of was kind of, uh, given the founder title a bit later, uh, in the January of three, right? So for me, it's a 13 and a half years and those guys have actually been going even longer. First of all, we're just going to make games, and it seemed like an awesome idea. So we were building this technology to make the game, and building, and building, and building. Eventually, we, we sort of found that, uh, we sort of realized that we had a passion for the tech, and, and that we built kind of a platform that didn't do much, but it had some nice aspects, and it was usable, like it was user-friendly. We were kind of Mac guys, and there was some inspiration there, I think, and then we sort of started exploring that idea, and realized that, you know, if you have a user-friendly platform, and everything else in your industry is really not user-friendly, you could maybe, instead of, You know, selling it a few times for a lot of money. You could sell it for a little bit of money a lot of times. And, and from that, the idea of democratizing game development, which is sort of the, the headline we, we really kind of found the company on was possible. And, and, and, and, and that sor…

AI assessment note: “we caught that bug of like, that seems like a really bad-ass idea to do”

Q And I'm intrigued. Obviously we talked about the app store there and Apple recently, uh, did made two big adjustments to the app store in terms of paid search. And the subscriptions. Um, so how do you think that affects the gaming industry? I know a friend of mine, Nicola DiMassi at Glue, is, is very excited for that. Um, what is your take on it?

A I, I don't know yet, except, like, it's really just healthy for the ecosystem to have, like, many different ways of monetizing, and, you know, it's, it's become a bit too much of a monoculture in some ways, like, the, the, the people that are making all the money are doing the same thing with microtransactions in a Fairly sort of a predictable way. And that's not, again, it's not really healthy for the ecosystem. It's wonderful for them, but, but it's really wonderful that, that we may be able to see a world where this kind of a slightly old fashioned by now subscription relationship to their customers. Uh, this is how like MMOs were back, you know, when we were younger.

AI assessment note: “it's really just healthy for the ecosystem to have, like, many different ways of monetizing”

Q Can I ask David, how do you know when to keep going with an idea and pursue that kind of vision that you started with versus when to give up and move on to the next project? What's your thoughts around that?

A Well, I was a massive quitter for years. I dropped out of university several times. I started all these projects that didn't really go anywhere. Then I was connected to an old high school friend of mine, Nikolaus. He wanted to make video games. We were now in our twenties and we're still fascinated by video games, but also a little frustrated with like the video game industry. Maybe there wasn't, this was before the sort of rise of the indie movement and all this artistic stuff. And we felt the video game industry was kind of a little poor of ideas at the time. Not that we had better ideas, I think, but we had some ideas and we were sort of dabbling in how might we do games that were different. I was stuck with one of my projects. So he found this German guy online instead, who was already working on some game tech stuff. That's Joachim Antis, our CTO. They started working together. I was on the sidelines, and I joined them like a year later, so I joined probably in January, and we were just going to make video games, but as we were trying to sort of work on different ideas, we kept working on the engine, the software to run the game and the production environment for games. We fell in love with it somehow. I think it's really interesting code. It's hard. Games are sort of unbounded. You can come up with new ideas. It's not moving data from A to B, right? It's like a lot of thi…

AI assessment note: “Well, I was a massive quitter for years. I dropped out of university several times.”

Q Can I ask David, how do you know when to keep going with an idea and pursue that kind of vision that you started with versus when to give up and move on to the next project? What's your thoughts around that?

A Well, I was a massive quitter for years. I dropped out of university several times. I started all these projects that didn't really go anywhere. Then I was connected to an old high school friend of mine, Nikolaus. He wanted to make video games. We were now in our twenties and we're still fascinated by video games, but also a little frustrated with like the video game industry. Maybe there wasn't, this was before the sort of rise of the indie movement and all this artistic stuff. And we felt the video game industry was kind of a little poor of ideas at the time. Not that we had better ideas, I think, but we had some ideas and we were sort of dabbling in how might we do games that were different. I was stuck with one of my projects. So he found this German guy online instead, who was already working on some game tech stuff. That's Joachim Antis, our CTO. They started working together. I was on the sidelines, and I joined them like a year later, so I joined probably in January, and we were just going to make video games, but as we were trying to sort of work on different ideas, we kept working on the engine, the software to run the game and the production environment for games. We fell in love with it somehow. I think it's really interesting code. It's hard. Games are sort of unbounded. You can come up with new ideas. It's not moving data from A to B, right? It's like a lot of thi…

AI assessment note: “Well, I was a massive quitter for years. I dropped out of university several times.”