StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Ilkka Paananen

Co-Founder & CEO, Supercell · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@ipaananen ↗LinkedIn ↗supercell.com ↗

Ilkka Paananen co-founded the Finnish mobile gaming giant Supercell in 2010, which developed globally dominant titles including Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, and Hay Day. He is widely known for establishing a decentralized organizational culture built on small, autonomous teams and describing himself as the least powerful CEO.

10statements → 2claims → 1claims resolved → 3.7/5average certainty → 2.3/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 7said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 2 opinions · 6 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ilkka argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Paananen: Supercell's first three games failed completely
“Outside looking in, like, it might feel that Supercell was an instant success, but I guarantee you that in the first two years, it definitely didn't feel like that, because, I mean, as you said, like, the first three games that he put out didn't work at all.”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 11:27 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

How they sound: speaking style how? →

263 words/min while actually speaking · 6.1 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ilkka Paananen: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 24 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,265 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Ilkka Paananen is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 65%

Everything Ilkka Paananen said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Paananen: Focusing on competitors prevents a company from ever leading
“If you follow competition, the risk is that you may become, like, overly reactive, like, what Happens around you, and essentially, the best you can be is just to be a fast follower, but if you're a fast follower, then by definition, you will always follow some…”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 14:53 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Opinion
Paananen: Most large game studios focus on control over creative teams
“The irony, I think, about many games companies, and, you know, ours at the time included, is that many companies are focused on actually everything else but the teams that create the actual games. So many of the, especially the bigger game companies are very t…”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 4:38 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Insight
Paananen: Frontline developers make better decisions than upper management
“Therefore, I would argue that the decisions that these people make, they are of higher quality. They're just better decisions than those of the people at the higher level of management make.”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 7:46 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Insight
Paananen: Companies fail from stopping risk-taking, not taking risks
“Well, how I think about it is, I think, like, in my opinion, like, companies, I don't think they ultimately fail because they take risks. I think fail because they stop taking risks.”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 17:24 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Insight
Paananen: Giving employees total trust automatically drives individual accountability
“And, you know, I've also noticed that the more kind of you trust people, I mean, people also, like, the way they can respond is that they get this huge sense of responsibility. Like, most people get it sort of almost automatically if they are just, if they get…”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 9:07 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Insight
Paananen: Success makes creating the next hit game harder due to pressure
“In the games industry, like, the more successful you are, the harder it becomes to Create the next hit game, I feel. Because, you know, when you're gonna start, and there are no expectations, and you kind of have nothing to lose, there's, like, no pressure as …”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 12:54 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Insight
Paananen: An absence of failure signals a lack of ambition and innovation
“If a company, like, never, ever fails, essentially means that they probably aren't trying to do a kind of hard enough thing, or the bar just isn't, like, high enough, and that they're not trying to, like, you know, innovate.”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 17:47 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Paananen: Supercell maintains a tradition of celebrating learnings from failed projects
“And then that actually became a tradition in the company, which we sort of still have. So whenever we kind of like fail, we actually do celebrate, like not be failure itself because failing isn't cool or fun. Everybody knows it sucks, but, and we are not celeb…”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 19:36 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Opinion
Paananen: Ben Horowitz's book is the best on company culture
“Well, one thing that I'm very passionate about is company cultures, and the best, by far the best book I've read on the topic is by Ben Horovitch called What You Do Is Who You Are.”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:47 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves
Assertion Supported
Paananen: Supercell's first three games failed completely
“Outside looking in, like, it might feel that Supercell was an instant success, but I guarantee you that in the first two years, it definitely didn't feel like that, because, I mean, as you said, like, the first three games that he put out didn't work at all.”
Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 11:27 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

The other half of the tape: Ilkka Paananen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Miki Kuusi 4Sonali De Rycker 1Harry Stebbings 1Eric Liaw 1

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", Hi Feb 1, 2021 19m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more