Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Kurgan: 2000s European tech lacked the US culture of second chances for failed founders

Stephane Kurgan · Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 28, 2023 · at 54:50

Stephane Kurgan, former COO of King, reflects on the difficulty of finding executive roles in European tech after the dot-com bubble collapse.

0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The US, if you have failed as an executive after building a new startup, you know, they will give you a second and a third chance. At that time, Europe was not like that.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Stephane Kurgan

Disclosure
Kurgan: King repeatedly lost newly promoted female executives to competitors
“Very often, once you promote them to an executive level, be it VP or CXO, you lose them within weeks, and so it happened to us multiple times where we made that investment over years of, you know, bringing up and developing great female leaders, and then when …”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 46:35 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Kurgan: Exceptional managers still make the wrong decision 40% of the time
“As a manager, if you make 55% of good decisions, you're a really good manager. If you make 60%, you're exceptional. But that means 40% of your decisions will be wrong.”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 0:05 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Kurgan: Product teams in data-rich environments must trust data over intuition
“Trust the data, not your intuition. You know, King was always pretty data driven, but it, it's, it was an incredibly data rich environment. I mean, the beauty of free to play on Facebook and later on mobile is that it provides you know, faster and a higher qua…”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 3:06 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
King capped player spending and directly verified high-spending accounts
“One way of doing that was to cap the amount of money that you can spend in the title, and when would, when we would see high spending, we actually would reach out to the players, and we would ask them if they were aware of what they were doing, and to make sur…”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 6:16 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Stephane Kurgan: Successful US software founders average in their early 40s
“If you look at the average age of company founders, and I think we, there was a stat in the US that, you know, successful, you know, founders of founders of successful software companies in the US are in the early forties.”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 13:52 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Kurgan: Leaders shouldn't assign tasks they were never willing to do
“Well, I think you shouldn't ask people to do what you haven't been willing to do at some point in your career. I mean, obviously, as things evolve, you know, the highest impact you might have with, for your shareholders and your company and your team might not…”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 16:36 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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.