Ilkka Paananen

Everything Ilkka Paananen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.

20VC Insight

Paananen: Focusing on competitors prevents a company from ever leading

“If you follow competition, the risk is that you may become, like, overly reactive, like, what Happens around you, and essentially, the best you can be is just to be a fast follower, but if you're a fast follower, then by definition, you will always follow some…”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 14:53 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Opinion

Paananen: Most large game studios focus on control over creative teams

“The irony, I think, about many games companies, and, you know, ours at the time included, is that many companies are focused on actually everything else but the teams that create the actual games. So many of the, especially the bigger game companies are very t…”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 4:38 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Insight

Paananen: Frontline developers make better decisions than upper management

“Therefore, I would argue that the decisions that these people make, they are of higher quality. They're just better decisions than those of the people at the higher level of management make.”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 7:46 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Insight

Paananen: Companies fail from stopping risk-taking, not taking risks

“Well, how I think about it is, I think, like, in my opinion, like, companies, I don't think they ultimately fail because they take risks. I think fail because they stop taking risks.”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 17:24 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Insight

Paananen: Giving employees total trust automatically drives individual accountability

“And, you know, I've also noticed that the more kind of you trust people, I mean, people also, like, the way they can respond is that they get this huge sense of responsibility. Like, most people get it sort of almost automatically if they are just, if they get…”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 9:07 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Insight

Paananen: Success makes creating the next hit game harder due to pressure

“In the games industry, like, the more successful you are, the harder it becomes to Create the next hit game, I feel. Because, you know, when you're gonna start, and there are no expectations, and you kind of have nothing to lose, there's, like, no pressure as …”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 12:54 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Insight

Paananen: An absence of failure signals a lack of ambition and innovation

“If a company, like, never, ever fails, essentially means that they probably aren't trying to do a kind of hard enough thing, or the bar just isn't, like, high enough, and that they're not trying to, like, you know, innovate.”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 17:47 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Assertion Not checkable as stated

Paananen: Supercell maintains a tradition of celebrating learnings from failed projects

“And then that actually became a tradition in the company, which we sort of still have. So whenever we kind of like fail, we actually do celebrate, like not be failure itself because failing isn't cool or fun. Everybody knows it sucks, but, and we are not celeb…”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 19:36 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Opinion

Paananen: Ben Horowitz's book is the best on company culture

“Well, one thing that I'm very passionate about is company cultures, and the best, by far the best book I've read on the topic is by Ben Horovitch called What You Do Is Who You Are.”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 24:47 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

20VC Assertion Supported

Paananen: Supercell's first three games failed completely

“Outside looking in, like, it might feel that Supercell was an instant success, but I guarantee you that in the first two years, it definitely didn't feel like that, because, I mean, as you said, like, the first three games that he put out didn't work at all.”

Ilkka Paananen Feb 1, 2021 ▶ 11:27 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves

The other half of the tape: Ilkka Paananen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Miki Kuusi 4Sonali De Rycker 1Harry Stebbings 1Eric Liaw 1

Every mention by year

One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ilkka's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.

Show	Role there	Eps	Statements	Record
20VCLEDGER	Co-Founder & CEO, Supercell	1	10	100% 1/1	full record on 20VC →