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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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: 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.”
Kurgan: King generated nearly $1 billion in EBITDA pre-IPO
“We made almost a billion dollars of EBITDA the year before IPO”
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.”
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: Tech talent market is shifting away from candidate-dominated seller's market
“The market is clearing a bit and we're going to a place where you know, the balance between talent and organizations you know, goes back to something which is closer to the middle as opposed to being very much you know a seller market to the advantage of the i…”
Kurgan: I will never advise a founder on when to sell
“I would never advise a founder on, on when to sell. I think, you know, it's a decision to be made by the founder.”
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…”