The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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 …”
Le Nel: Revolut and King built brands before spending on marketing
“Out of sample of two, which is King and Revolut, the brand was much bigger before a single dollar of marketing was spent, right?”
Le Nel: King unlocked TV ad measurement long before any gaming competitor
“So, for example, at King, what we cracked We cracked the TV measurement framework way before everyone, and therefore we were the only company running TV.”
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…”
Kurgan: King sold to Activision at a 5-6x EBITDA multiple
“We sold at a very low multiple. We sold a company at, you know, 5.9, or it's all about six billion dollars with and there was 1.3 billion of cash on the balance sheet when we sold. So the effective multiple was, you know, five or six times EBITDA.”
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…”
Kurgan: King generated nearly $1 billion in EBITDA pre-IPO
“We made almost a billion dollars of EBITDA the year before IPO”
Antoine Le Nel: Agility Is Measured by Speed of Killing Projects
“That's how you probably can measure the agility of the organization is how quickly you kill projects versus how many more chances you're giving to them.”
Kurgan: Ethical product consistency is essential for maintaining employee engagement
“The, you know, many, many of our employees in, in the original, you know, Stockholm studio and many other studios care deeply about the player experience and really want to do something good, right? And provide a magical experience to the players and hence, yo…”
King gave every employee full access to its internal data warehouse
“At King, everybody could access the data warehouse, and that was a deliberate choice, because that's driving engagement.”
Stephane Kurgan: Scaling King required pairing 'mathematicians' with 'magicians'
“At King, there's a very nice saying, which is, you know, it's the mathematician meets the magician, right? And I think before I went to King, I could work with mathematicians, But since I've worked at King, I can also work with magicians.”
Kurgan: King reached 540 million peak players and eight million spenders
“So at the peak we had five hundred and forty million players, and we had a huge number of spenders. We had seven or eight million spenders.”
Kurgan: King grew from 100 to 2,400 employees in three years
“We went from, you know, 100 employees to 2400 employees in three years, and so you have these cohorts. So at the peak, we were hiring 100 employees a month”
Kurgan: King's largest investor held 40% of shares post-IPO
“It was very difficult to do that with King because we were trading below IPO price, and because our largest institutional investor had 40% of the shares, and it was, you know, they just couldn't sell it down, and selling it down, you know, it would have driven…”
Kurgan evaluates executives on operations, maturity, corporate contribution, and personal development
“The way I, you know, evaluate, you know, the performance of the leadership team is I look across four dimensions. You know, the first one is the operating or the financial performance of their function. So, you know, have they beaten their numbers essentially?…”
Kurgan: Relaxing King's unanimous hiring rule led to bad hires
“I agreed to soften the criterion, and that if one of the interviewers was neutral, we could still proceed with the hire. And then what happened is actually when one of the interviewers was negative, you know, the other five would lobby him to change his rating…”
King consulted Mark Zuckerberg on IPO challenges before going public
“We spent time with Mark Zuckerberg before we went public. It was like a year after his IPO, and he shared these lessons about his IPO, which was very challenging, right? His stock went on 50% after the IPO.”
Console game companies trade at 12-14x EBITDA; mobile trades at 5-6x
“When I look at the EBITDA, you know, the trading multiples of the traditional console gaming industries, they're trading at, you know, 12 to 14 X EBITDA. And then you have the mobile gaming companies like, you know, King, for example, got sold for five X EBITD…”
Le Nel: King ran 1,000 parallel A/B tests at peak maturity
“I remember at some point we were running like maybe a thousand AP tests in parallel and so on.”
Index Ventures co-invested $5M in King after Apax preempted round
“So we were going to lead with fifteen million, which at the time was a huge Series A, and they came in with twenty-five million, and we had an opportunity To put in an incremental five million at their valuation, and we decided to hold our breath and do it.”