Akin Babayigit
Founder & Managing Director, Arcadia Gaming Partners. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestoroperator@akinbabayigit ↗LinkedIn ↗tripledotstudios.com ↗
Akin Babayigit co-founded mobile gaming company Tripledot Studios and playable ads platform Luna Labs. Following his tenure in daily operations at Tripledot, he launched Arcadia Gaming Advisors to invest in emerging mobile game studios.
1shows
1appearances
46statements
4resolved
2supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Akin Babayigit said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Babayigit: Requiring domain passion is a dangerous Western startup myth
“I think it's a very Western centric view of the world To think that you have to be, you know, passionate about the domain that you're in. And I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who…”
Babayigit: VCs cannot add operational value to truly exceptional founders
“Because I don't think a VC can truly add operational value to a truly exceptional founder.”
Babayigit: True innovation comes from iteration rather than novel problems
“True innovation happens through iteration, right? You start working on something and you iterate, you do this thing one percent different, this thing one percent different, and then the aggregate impact ends up being something completely innovative.”
Babayigit worked only two hours a day late in his Facebook career
“When I was working two hours a day towards the tail end of my career at Facebook. By all measures, it was supposed to be super comfortable and, you know, whatever. I was cruising, right? I was Barely doing any work at all.”
Babayigit: Tripledot lost months of productivity to silly GDPR regulations
“We've lost months of productivity over something silly called GDPR and et cetera, right?”
Babayigit: Mobile game success comes from live operations, not creative design
“And if you look at the business as a whole, the success of a mobile game has nothing to do with how you make the game. It's all about how you operate the game. And how you operate the game is not, you know, I think a lot of times people think about gaming and …”
Babayigit: AI startups do not require proprietary data to build valuable businesses
“So you know, but I don't subscribe to a lot of the criticism about the business model because it will change. You know, you don't have to have necessarily proprietary data to create a valuable business. You can offer tools. You can offer services that really c…”
Babayigit: Most people who enter management consulting lack career direction
“Just like what most people don't, you know, most people that do consulting don't know what they want to do with their life.”
Babayigit: McKinsey is an intellectually rigid, formulaic environment
“It was a very rigid environment intellectually. There was a way to do things, and if you didn't do things that way, you would fail, right?”
Babayigit: Harvard Business School's value comes from peers, not academics
“HBS is around 900 kids every year, and it was transformative for me, not because of the things I've learned, because I didn't learn much, but I did learn by talking to people what they are, you know, what they do, who they are, what gets them motivated”
Babayigit: 35% of early Facebook mobile revenue came from three Russian developers
“There was a period of time when I think 30 Five percent of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time”
Babayigit: Facebook became overly bureaucratic and designed products by committee
“I left Facebook because I was frustrated how big it was and how bureaucratic everything was Getting, and, you know, there's a saying called, you know, a camel is, is a horse designed by a committee, and Facebook was designing, you know, camels all the time”
Babayigit: The founder of $1.4B gaming company Tripledot is not a gamer
“Triple Dot is a company that's doing quite well. But I'm not a gamer by definition. Now, it depends on what you mean by gamer, but any kind of definition you have. You know, I am not a hardcore gamer.”
Babayigit: Startup Mission Statements Are Mostly Disingenuous
“I mean, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can eliminate some forms of unhappiness, right? And a lot of people fetishize this kind of, you know, grandiose meanings in life, and, you know, what it means to have a mission statement, and you put it on the wa…”
Babayigit: Startups must slow down at critical strategic curves
“Speed of execution allows you to do more iterations than others. Right. But there are points that this is a road, and the road has curves, and you know what? When you're approaching those curves, sometimes you have to just slow down and actually think and take…”
Babayigit: Successful founders always respond to messages right away
“The people that have, that will succeed, if you kind of look back, they'll have grit, they'll have perseverance. They're the ones That actually respond to you right away.”
Babayigit: True work-life balance means doing work you continuously think about
“Work-life balance is not true in the standard sense of, you know, you work, you finish your home, so you work, you finish your work, you go home, and then you chill. That's not work-life balance, right? If you're, you know, lucky enough to be doing something t…”
Babayigit: Entrepreneurship gets easier over time like raising children
“I think it does get easier, right? Because it's, I think it changed the nature of the problems change. It's like when people ask me about kids, you know, when you have a small kid, you worry about something relatively minuscule every single day, maybe every si…”
Tripledot mirrored its cap table to Luna Labs for existing investors
“So in our case, again, this goes back to, you know, we are always doing the right thing. I always try to do the right thing. What we did was precisely because of that, we said all people who invested in triple dot basically will mirror the cap table to Luna. S…”
Early startups need room to diversify and pivot beyond one product
“So that judgment, it all comes down to basically judgment, right? That judgment of what are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the right thing? Or you need to have some breathing room To allow yourself to pivot. If the thing, you know, you talked about diver…”
Babayigit: Early-stage startups should ignore PR and brand building
“You have to focus on execution because in the early days, you know, nothing else matters. PR doesn't matter. Brand doesn't matter. You know, It just doesn't matter. You have to be focused on execution.”
Babayigit: Technical Skills Can Be Taught in Months, Intrinsic Hunger Cannot
“You can teach marketing to anyone. You can teach pretty much anything you do. Even what we discussed, three, the art, you can teach it to a person. You cannot teach the hunger, and this is very true.”
Babayigit: Hiring senior startup talent based on pedigree often fails
“If I look in the past, it has been those cases where we've hired for etiquette. So you hire someone who's worked at gaming company X and you say, oh, wow, they're, you know, super senior. They've done this. They even, you know, check out in terms when you do d…”
The other half of the tape: Akin Babayigit's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Danny Cohen 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 8
2023 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Danny Cohen: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist |E1079 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Nico Wittenborn: Consumer Subscription Apps; Using Evolutionary Biology to Invest; Solo GP's | E1017 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2021 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Akin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Managing Director, Arcadia Gaming Partners | 1 | 46 | 50% 2/4 | full record on 20VC → |