David Helgason, co-founder of Unity, outlines a litmus test for when founders should take acquisition offers rather than continuing independently.
Insight
Helgason: Software pricing tiers are effectively under $1,000 or over $100,000
“There's two prices. There's up to a thousand bucks, and then there's over a 100,000 dollars. 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 …”
Prediction Partly held up
Helgason: Augmented reality will be massive and almost entirely business-focused
“It's going to be massive. It's going to be massive in a very different way. Whereas VR, I think, is all entertainment. Business users that are sort of entertainment-like, you know, kind of looking at products and things like that. Whereas AR, AR is going to be…”
Insight
Helgason: Premier VCs like Sequoia endure extended underperformance without fundraising issues
“A firm like Sequoia, they will, you know, they have to do pretty badly for pretty long before they have a problem raising a new fund, for instance. So, so they're just, I think they're just less worried about the individual deal.”
Insight
Helgason: User-friendly platforms win through high volume at low price
“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.”
Prediction Held up
Helgason: Console gaming is not dying and will remain a healthy market
“No, I mean, like there's sort of, there's been that rumor and expectation, but I mean, the console guys kind of reinvented themselves. They opened their platforms up more. Seems to be no end to that, which, you know, I think is good because frankly you know, f…”
Opinion
Helgason: Overreliance on microtransactions creates an unhealthy gaming monoculture
“It's really just healthy for the ecosystem to have, like, many different ways of monetizing, and, you know, it's become a bit too much of a monoculture in some ways, like, the people that are making all the money are doing the same thing with microtransactions…”