20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios

24:54I could have some upside and so on. And I spent a lot of time with people, frankly, that I shouldn't have spent. And when you have more liquidity, when you have more money, you don't have to do that. You just can say no to people that you just don't want to hang out with, because frankly, you don't need the XYZ amount from that interaction. So it does get easier in that That sounds because you have more freedom. What I guess what I'm describing is you have more freedom over your own time. You don't have to say yes to people that you don't want to. I'm just wondering why you still hang out with me.

25:23I told you, I love you and I do genuinely find what you're building and it's not again blowing, smoke up your ass, but I think what you're building here is going to be incredible over the next five decades. So this is kind of the time horizon I'm looking at you and I'm saying, okay, when Harry's 76 years old and he looks back what he has built, I think this will be the five decades of Harry because of the way that you operate the relentless execution and The most important thing is you have a why so once you have the why and that's a very personal why that's not a why that can be Satisfied if your why was money there will come a point where we have you know the middition returns your why is very personal Frankly, I'm not here because you invest in our company because thank you, but that's not why I totally get you You mentioned the word that being focused.

26:08Yes And you said actually that money allows you to have more focus this but another Poor man sure that we're disembarking or disabling here is focus his everything you should focus on a single thing early on and do it very well Why is this wrong? Yes, look I'll give you a personal example I mean when we started triple dots early on internally we developed a technology inside triple dot And this may actually not even be a very well -known story for you either this technology was developed inside triple dot and this was not our core area of focus. We were a mobile games company. We were supposed to be building mobile games all the time.

26:44And we developed this technology to enable us to better build games. But then we saw that this piece of technology had such a product market fit in the markets that we didn't even know about. We decided to spin this off into a new entity called Luna Labs. And we basically partnered with another entrepreneur and some of my team from Facebook. But we were very involved. So if in those days someone who was preaching the gospel of startup porn met us they'd say you guys are absolutely doing the wrong thing But Luda was sold within two years to iron source for a pretty healthy amount and we were able to Execute across both paths together, right?

27:25So I'm not anti this message, but the message is given with such certainty that if you're an entrepreneur You hear this message as you say, okay, I must focus on only one thing But no one tells you what to do. What if that one thing is the wrong thing the core fundamental problem here is When you say you must focus on this thing I think the spirit there is that you must not spend your time at Conferences or this I do buy that I think you must focus on execution But this is said with such certainty that I actually have people I have spoken with that listen to to XYZ podcasts and you know some VCs are dangerously prominent in social media and they say, oh, focus on one thing, one thing only.

28:09These guys come to me and they say, well, I focus on building this type of game and I'm going to spend my three years building this type of game. I tell them, okay, but what if it doesn't work? What if you're focusing on the role of things? So it all comes down to basically judgment, right? That judgment of what are focusing on, are you focusing on the right thing? You need to have some breathing room to allow yourself to pivot. You talked about diversification. That's so important early on in the journey of startup. Why is it so important? Because again, there is again, it's the cool ethos of focus.

28:40Do one thing well. Why is diversification important? Because if you're a startup that is trying to create a new product that doesn't exist in the market today, right? You might very well be developing something and bumping your head against a wall. The message is focus, but that actually reads. Not as focus has just keep bumping your head against a wall. And that is a very dangerous advice because the real strength in that case is to know how to pivot and you cannot be formulaic about this. There's just no silver bullet about when to know to persist versus when to know when to pivot. That probably is the singular biggest determinant of success.

29:16I think that there's one question that I think is really important to I'll find a question in that. Do you still have more experiments, which you're excited to try? Yes. And if the audience says no, I think that's the time to pivot. That's a great way to put it. That might be the formula. But reality is, sometimes you just don't know what experiments you want to do. No one can tell you deterministically, you have to start and focus on this thing and keep going. Focus is important. Don't get me wrong. But it is important you need to put an asterisk, right? You have to focus on execution. Because in the early days, nothing else matters.

29:47PR doesn't matter, brand doesn't matter, you have to be focused on execution. Now, within that constraint, you have to leave yourself room to pivot into x, y, z direction. I agree and I actually disagree. I think a PR and brand often is a bit like culture and it's been like hiring diversity, which is people go at a stage of time I will focus on it. But at that stage of time, you're 50 white dudes in an office and it's really hard to layer on diverse candidates, diverse team members, add eating anything about it super early. I think culture is what happens when you're not looking. This is one area of porn that I can subscribe to.

30:22Culture is truly what happens when you are not looking. But my beef with this whole startup porn is that it is given with such confidence and such uniformity that the truth is it just depends on the individual founder, the individual company, what problem they're solving. If you can afford the luxury of thinking about brand and PR early on, then by all means you should do that. But oftentimes these are competing. Speaking of which, you imagine culture there, mission and vision. You've said before about them being sometimes a challenge. And so I guess, why do you believe that mission and vision statements are usually bullshit?

30:58First of all, when I think about mission and vision statements, right, I often have to google what a mission statement is and what a vision statement is. And the reason I don't know the difference, 99 .9 % of the times that you craft emission and vision statements because someone tells you we have to have a mission and vision statement, right? Because otherwise your mission statement could be I want to make as much money as possible. And that's okay, but no one is going to have a mission statement that says we exist to make as much money as possible. Why is that? I don't know. I think it's kind of weird.

31:30We do want to make as much money as possible as triple -doc, but if you look at a company like Facebook, for instance, I actually wrote it down. It's something like give people power to build community and bring the world closer. I don't know what that means at all. I have no idea. It's too long one. Yeah. You know, give people the power to build community. I genuinely don't know what that means. It just does not reflect why you get up and come to work every day. I would challenge any Facebook employee to tell me they go to work every day to elevate the world's consciousness or whatever it is.

32:03Give power to build community. Most people don't even know what that means. So should we not have them? I am not suggesting that killing them is just antidote. I think there's a time and place, but I do think why have statements when really most of your employees are going to think it's bullshit. I think they serve a purpose and the purpose is if you articulate them well and if you're honest with what the company's mission and vision is, I think they can serve a purpose. If you ask me what they are for triple dot, I will have to look them up. The reality is triple dot exists because and this doesn't make good mission statement vision statement, but we want to build a generational company.

32:43I remember now triple dots mission is to be the world's leading data driven entertainment company. We spend a lot of time crafting that right. I like that. That's not bad. It's not fluffy. But the people around the table when we were crafting that statement, we just despise fluffiness, right? Okay, so when we double down on this mission of mission is important for attracting the best talent, but you said hiring people with the main expertise is tricky as you don't often do it. There are times that we do do it. When I look at the guy who's running the marketing department for us does have experience in marketing, but the people who are really the kind of folks that are reporting to him that are running date to date, we probably have the strongest marketing team of any gaming company I know, those people is the first time they're all worked in like a gaming company.

33:29More or less, any real relevant domain expertise you want to have, you can really learn it in a several -month window, right? If you want to learn marketing, you could learn it in six months. But those people, they are coming from very good schools, they're all incredibly self -driven people, they're all hungry. I think the keyword is hunger. They're all hungry, they all tend to be type a level overachievers those people they will just kill themselves to make sure that the job gets done and that is a Trade that I think that's very innate. I don't know if you can teach that to a person You can teach marketing to anyone.

34:06You can teach pretty much anything you do You cannot teach the hunger and this is very true. It's not like we don't hire experts, right? But the reason we actually prioritize Hunger in the interview process is a very counterintuitive thing to do because imagine you and I start a company. And you know, X, I know why, but we have to also do Z take marketing for instance. It's very tempting for us to say, let's hire person X from that company who's been doing this. And in a way, it's a mental offloading. You're offloading the burden by hiring someone else who's done that. But the context is different.

34:42The thing that they're doing has moved on. They were doing it in a different company with different constraints with different things. Everything about it is different. What happens if you don't have the skill that you're hiring for? So say we're a nerdy stage company. Yes. And menu of the co -founders. We're hiring a salesperson, leader, rap, whatever it is. Meaning you've never done sales before. So we go and teach them really, can we? What do we do there? There's always room for someone who's an expert to teach. But you'd be surprised how easy it is for that knowledge to be gained regardless of the field.

35:15There are just so many resources available for someone who wants to learn sales. There are just so many things you can do. I'm not suggesting you read a book in your an expert, but it can be solved. It's a solvable problem. You can hire a close -altempt. You can hire XYZ, right? But the act of bringing someone into the company has to be very slow. The fact of actually parting ways with someone probably needs to be very fast. There's a place for expertise. don't get me wrong. Well, the biggest hurry was they, as you've made. It's a very good question. It has been those cases where we've hired for etiquettes.

35:48So you hire someone who's worked at gaming company X and you say, oh, wow, they're super senior, they've done this. They even check out in terms of when you do due diligence, etc. And oftentimes they don't work out. They come in, they say, this is how we used to do things there. And the organisms are very different potentially. I actually say that the rate of decayal operating experience has never been graced it because of two things. One is actually, I think, AI fundamentally changes so much about prior stacks. I think you can say the same for cloud actually, not having some enterprise cases.

36:19And then two is COVID. In the fun moment, he changed how a generation feels about in place, like, recession, in office work, all these things. The next one, which I loved as an ambassador, this made me so happy. Valuations do not matter. Remember the sound one on five works, well for me, you didn't say this in your funding. Anirations do not matter in the lower on and on dangerous. Blaken is down for me. Why do they not matter? Sure. This time I would say the porn is the entrepreneurs are sometimes guilty of subscribing to this type of porn. I've seen many, many cases of companies that are really attracted to saying, hey, our last round we were valued at X.

37:00Valuation to me can only be useful if it's a meaningful heuristic for future potential cash flows. But valuations now are a measure of what that market's FOMO is for that business. And we've just seen during COVID times, you could literally get your grandma grandpa start a gaming company, you could probably get funded at, you know, $100 million valuation. It's very, very easy as a founder to let that get to you. In your mind, all of a sudden, you have, let's say, 55 % of the business valued at $100 million. And now you're thinking, okay, I have 55 million dollars. Truth of the matter is, you have nothing.

37:40It's just all paper money. Not only you have nothing, oftentimes, the mistake is it could go the other way. And we've seen this when valuations have corrected. You've so many people ahead of you now in a potential liquidation. You have preference. You might have debt. You might have all sorts of things ahead of you. And you've hired people now and you have to give them options and they have exercise prices and to exercise those options and we see this a lot more in the US than we do in Europe. They have to take out loans to exercise their options and when the valuations come down not only they don't have money anymore but they also are in debt.

38:13So that is the nightmare scenario. Basically the message here is that it ain't over until the fat lady sings as they say in the US, right? So valuations are a heuristic. They could be a healthy heuristic, but they could also be a dangerous heuristic. And it will be valuable if you treat valuations as, okay, this is what my potential future cash flow can be. But it's just a number, right? This is not the perfect number to capture the essence of your business. It's just what the market perceives, what the market values your business and the domain you operate and et cetera. That's question. Do you think anyone in Europe aren't you gives a shit about accuracy?

38:51I find it actually it's a lot more of a carriage -based culture in the US. Isn't that crazy? Yes, it's a good point. The perfect anecdote for this is when I was at Facebook, people were getting free food. Back then, Facebook folks would complain about anything, right? And they would complain, why are you giving me free food? Give me more money instead. And some of the conversations I've witnessed in parts of Europe is I don't want equity, I want more cash and I do understand in a lack of a Sophisticated enough startup ecosystem. Why this might be the case But if you apply any type of regret minimization, you know, you will regret not getting that equity form or your sweat blood and tears I do believe technology is the biggest enabler of wealth and the biggest Contributor to human progression if you're a hungry girl hungry person within a long period of time you will make a lot of money.

39:44You just almost can't not. A final one before we move into game, which I do wanna discuss, but you would name the fastest growing company in Europe by the financial tolerance. Yes. What do you think you gave politics? You think differently around accreditation, around salutations? Sure. What do you think we could do differently? So I am quite a political person. I'm not a conservative. I've never been, but I do actually like the fact that Rishi is the prime minister out of all the kind of candidates. I actually think he has a pro -business agenda, which I really like and he has ability to articulate a vision that is tech -friendly.

40:19When I contrast the US and the UK It's such a phenomenal contrast because I spent 16 years in the US and 11 years now in the UK And I still subscribe to this American dream and you can feel it you can breathe it and this is Super energizing for a foreigner. You're going to the US. The first question is never where are you from? Never, it's almost rude to ask someone, where are you from? The first question always is, what do you do? Contrast that to the UK, where the first question cannot be, what do you do? It's rude. It's like, where are you from? I do think there's a big missed opportunity because the amount of talent, the amount of academic talent in the UK is immense.

40:55UK is a hub for bringing people. And look at us, we have two Israeli founders, one Turkish founder, who decided to build this company in the UK created hundreds of jobs with a very pro business government. And if my message was, Hey, I'm going to build a poster child of UK equals success equals tech and business. And then financial times was a, you know, well, established paper, not only names fastest growing games companies, the fastest growing company in Europe. And that happens to be in my backyard. You know, I would try to create a lot more kind of political capital around that. Can I ask you about a two -hour question?

41:31Do you think Europe on the whole is a bit fucked. I don't think they're fucked. Why would they be fucked? If you look at the average European, it depends on your definition of the increased -fog race, increasing regulation, specifically. But take a look at how they live, big people vote by their feet. And this is why I also don't think America is fucked. If you look at net migration of any country coupling, that migration into the US is more than net migration out, there are more Germans going to live in the US than Americans are going to live in Germany. And the reason for that is just more opportunity in the US.

42:03And I do think that Europeans are not fucked because they live relatively healthy lives for making good money. So if you think very basic or human level, I don't think they're fucked. I think they're living good lives. Now, if you ask for business competitiveness, yes, of course, there's a lot of regulatory red tape and there's a lot of problems with bureaucracy and you know, you mentioned AI regulation, all of that. and we lost lots of productivity over something silly called GDPR and etc. right? But I just don't think fundamentally that matters in the grand scheme of things because in the end people here live high quality lives.

42:41That's why I'm here. I want my children to have a good education, access to good health care, etc. That's why we're here. I do want to touch, can we do a great fight or I'm just gaming? Because I think there's just some like, per sick mistakes that people make. Then when I hit all the time, It's such a hit driven business, huh? It's not that. I do understand why people say it. There has been a hit driven nature historically. However, I think people say it and mean that success in gaming is random. People don't really mean hit driven. They say just no one knows how successful you are. With level gaming, I do take issue that I don't think it's a hit driven business.

43:17I think it's a data driven business. You need to create hits, but the way you create hits is very, very different. Again, I can give many counter examples. Played Rix is a perfect example. They've had four hits. Triple Dot, we have multiple hits under our belt. 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. I think a lot of times people think about gaming and they think about people in dreadlocks sitting in a room with bean bags and just kind of ideating stuff. That's not at all how it works, right?

43:49It's just all about how you operate the game. what decisions you make very analytically driven, and live operations is such an integral part of how to make those games work and scale that by definition it cannot be hit driven. Would you ever invest in a founder who's never created a hit game? Yes, absolutely. I have invested in founders who have not created a hit game, because I think it's about articulating what you've learned in that journey. And the best part about investing in the domain that you've spent time in is you can ask very pointed and to the matter questions I can say tell me about how you would think about XYZ and you know, how will you market this game?

44:29How will you you know monetize the game? You can really form a mental picture of how they think do you worry about being at the expert in master's I missed Riverside, which is a great need and pull costs into a miss to script Because I was like I didn't as bad as anyone I've done 3000 shows Do you want that you know too much to actually be an effect of a lester? I don't worry about it because I think if I don't invest in a company There's always a reason at the time that I don't invest in it There will always be misses that you know as an investor you will not participate in XYZ That's just part of what you have to be comfortable with I think it's important to learn from those misses But you can't really just go back and say oh my god.

45:07Why did I miss that? Why did I you can't beat yourself over the head too much? I want to get by the gaming before we move on You hear about gaming market misconceptions. It could be a size, it could be timing, all the other things on the gaming market. We're like, ah, people get it so wrong. Yes. The size is just comical. I mean, there's a lot of things you listen to around saying gaming is bigger than movies and films combined. That's a very real thing. But even then, people misunderstand how big gaming is. People think it's $150 billion business. It's way, way larger. My favorite example to give is a bit of a cheeky example, but there's a game called Pachinko in Japan.

45:48Pachinko is this Japanese version of their slot machines, etc. And there's Pachinko parlors in Japan, and the average revenue per year from Pachinko is larger than the Japanese auto industry, which is several hundred billion dollars a year. Just take that sliver of information. That is a type of game that might not be mobile gaming, but that's people actually spending real money and time and energy playing games. That is not included in any gaming market -size estimation. Is that casino gaming? Are they planning for money? So actually if you go to a Pachinko parlor you cannot withdraw money due to regulation, so you get different toys, etc.

46:25and then you have to go and change those toys in the next door shop for money and it's just a whole system that they've articulated. So, you know what I say, that's gambling. But gambling is also a form of gaming. I'm not saying necessarily that gaming is big because of gambling, right? It is a misunderstood market. The sizes not really known. If you look at all these market sizes, they don't actually include gaming related attack. They don't count how we make our money, for instance, because we make our money mostly by showing ads. And those market size estimates, they don't count companies like us, which is absolutely crazy.

46:59And the other thing I would say is that people have this misconception in their minds that gaming folks tend to be these uber creative types that are hanging out in a beanbag in a room but that's just not the case at all like the day in day out of gaming companies is very very analytical. If you take my daughter into a gaming into triple dot she might think she's worth you know in a hedge fund to give in the discussion some of the discussions that are taking place. It's all math, analytical, data -driven decisions. No, I know where I'm stealing marketing people from. Something repaces me off is the revenue multiple assumption.

47:36I was shitty quality revenue. We should play terrible revenue multiples to it. How do you feel about the revenue multiples of pledge gaming companies? I think it's not totally fair and the reason I struggle with this is let me give you an example of a gaming multiple versus a software as a service multiple, right? gaming companies are valued three, four times revenues, whatever future looking backward, looking however you wanna do it, right? Whereas software as a service company can be anywhere between 10, 20, 30, and the height of COVID, it was even like 100 times. But if you look at the gaming cohorts, if you look at behavior, these are really, really sticking games to the games that we do, people play these games for a very, very long time, they become people's, part of people's lives.

48:20From a point of they become a lot of people's lives, Because when you see like candy crush. Yes. Like that, six year life, or whatever it is, they've actually endured. A what point is it part of someone's life and you see that retention? There are different retention metrics we look at, right? But the retention metrics we look at are really, really long term. Like we don't really look at day one, day seven retention anymore. We look at really long term retention. Is that a day 365? Yeah, I mean, day 90, day 365, day 540, day 720. Those are the metrics that we try to kind of really look at. The other crazy thing is not only mobile gaming is new, there's just so many more type of games that can be done.

48:58I mean, you know, when Candy Crush came into the market, everybody said, oh, it's too late to build another casual game now. Candy Crush took all the users. Then came the Playrix Brothers. They introduced this meta -game concept on casual games. Everybody said, okay, now it's too late. Now it's done. Then came peak games and introduced a different game built on the idea of a game that actually King had. and everybody said, now it's done. Now it's for sure that. And now there's Dream games that is doing something. Now, if you look at all those four companies, the core is just one type of game. It's a puzzle game.

49:31Imagine how much more content you can create, how much more innovation you can do. There's just so much more to go. And I think that's what people don't fundamentally understand about gaming. Do you need in -app purchases and in -app advertising to be a behemoth game income? No, you can become a very successful gaming company. regardless of your monetization you have to monetize somehow of course but you know there are a lot of examples of behemoths that have in -app purchases and I think with the emergence of companies like ours you can see that actually either a dual monetization strategy or an in -app advertising driven strategy can also work very well.

50:06People have misunderstood the power of in -app advertising model and I think we're starting to change people's minds about that. How do you think about how AI changes the world of gaming by I think creation, distribution, consumption. I think AI changes everything about everything. Is it changing how you operate the internet? Yes, we use AI -driven tools that enable us to increase our productivity dramatically. So we use tools that in the old days, it might have taken us X days to build a 3D model of character to be used in a game. And now we use tools that actually bring that down to a few minutes.

50:43It changes everything from creation to operation, et cetera. but we're still in the early stages of this. So we are looking at how we can use AI tools better in ideation, in monetization, in operation, and on the creative side, on the marketing side. You're an ambassador to the thing that everyone says is, ah, but they don't have any proprietary data. That's just a thin layer on top of X model. You have the data. How do you think about investing in new AI tools when they don't have proprietary data? I don't believe that should be the deciding factor. I don't subscribe to a lot of the criticism about the business all because it will change.

51:20You don't have to have necessarily proprietary data to create a valuable business. You can offer tools, you can offer services that really change people's lives. And we see this every day today. It's not a critical matter that they don't have proprietary data. Today doesn't mean they can't build an offering of something super valuable. We use a tool today that they don't have a lot of proprietary data, but it's so powerful already, that's okay. That's my friend, I want to move into a quick fight, so I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts, so that's on the cake, let's do it.

51:52So what single piece of content has had the most impact on you? A book that I read, which it left a profound impact on me, and this book that I read, how to basically allow me to stop smoking. So it's a book called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr. I read this book when I was on holiday, It's not because I used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day in Italian. They're saying called smoking like a Turk and I was the living embodiment of that, right? Someone gave me this book said, look, you smoke way too much when you go into an office, when you go into a room, the whole room stinks. So why don't you read this book?

52:27And I put it in my bag, forgot about it, went on the holiday in Cyprus. So I started reading this book and my whole life changed not only because I stopped smoking, which is the best thing I've ever done. I stopped it in three days by the way just called Turkey just overnight But the fundamental concept of reading words written on ink on a piece of paper Enabled me to develop this willpower to overcome an addiction so strong as smoking was a complete mind fuck Yeah, that definitely has to be the thing that's changed my life. It's a very irrelevant. What's your single biggest fear? My biggest fear revolves around my biggest why which is my kids?

53:04So my fear is rely, equip them with the right things in life for them to have a meaningful life, a safe life. And my biggest fear is just, you know, frankly, failing as a father is my biggest fear. Because, you know, my father very famously did fail, but I was lucky enough that I had my grandmother around that it didn't matter, but I just want to make sure that's... How did you fall that if you didn't want an interact how you approach fatherhood? sure is a good question. So my mother got married four times and she's a brilliant business woman. She should really Maybe a damn investigation to yes exactly exactly and it really actually shaped me because I was raised by my Grandparents and my grandparents didn't have a perfect marriage But they did have a marriage and they somehow made it work and I Look at that and I really just said I really truly am not angry at my father Like I don't care too much about my father's existence one way or the other I'm not angry at him, I just, I wish him the well, which is in many ways the worst thing you can say to listen, right?

54:04You know, he told him, no, we don't really speak too much and you know, it's very, very rare that we speak and for me to tell him that means that I do care and I just don't really frankly care that much. But I could never understand how you can, you know, abandon a responsibility and it's the most beautiful responsibility we were talking in the kitchen earlier, it's like like after having a kid, I almost look at people who don't have kids and I say, oh man, you know what you're missing? Do you know what it means for your life to have true meaning? And so that to me was not being sappy was I never felt that I grew up without a father because my grandfather and my grandmother were there for me.

54:41But that's my biggest fear is how to make sure that my kids don't go through that. Oh, save the meaty topic for the hot, definitely. What's the biggest lesson in terms of what it takes to highlight the best people. I would say be wary of etiquettes. Don't hire for experience from the shining company. Don't hire necessarily from the best school. I'd say, you know, this person is equipped with XYZ traits, but this person will probably be hungrier. I'm not advocating that's the basis on which we hire, but we always try to hire based on hunger, based on grit, based on approach. One of the things that we say is we want to hire people who ask for forgiveness, not permission.

55:23And that is something that is probably the single best embodiment of the triple .recruiting culture is. We want people who will do things, we will take initiative, buys for action, then ask for forgiveness. I always like tangibility and I think one of the best questions to ask is to determine whether someone has that, is to say, Tell me about the first time you made money. I find with great people who really have that hunger, they could have come from a rich family, from a poor family. I was probably in the middle. I remember buying and selling Nokia phones between different eBay sellers. Yes, I was.

55:54Do you see what I mean? It extends that early. No one's like, oh, I went to Stanford and I raised a seed round from first round and that was my first salary. Yeah, I mean, I was selling homeworks to my friends, which was slightly legal, by the way. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a very non -scalable business. I actually learned the value of scalability back then, 11, 12, 13 years old when I was charging people real money, I'd say I'll do your history homework, which would take you several months to do and I'd sell that to people. So it does check out. What's the most painful lesson in the event? You also please to have learned.

56:24The most painful experience of my life was losing my grandmother. You know, she was, you know, everything to me. She just genuinely was the most amazing person. When I look back, I kind of realized I was truly for the first time I felt like I was on my own. I don't know if I learned a super valuable lesson there, but I did learn nothing at the end of the day matters. We will all die. And then I have a tendency to take negative and try to push it into positive. So actually that played a huge factor in my thinking, saying why I want to become an entrepreneur, why I want to do this, why I want to do that.

56:58Because at the end of the day it doesn't matter, you know, like if you knew how little people talked about you You would not care about most things, right? So I really subscribed to that. Of course we all want to be loved and everything But we'll all die. It won't matter So I really believe that and you know worst case I can always get a job at a burger king or something still Make enough to look after my family. So that's kind of how I went on this journey of starting a company And it was a very non -trivial decision when we first said I'm gonna start a mobile gaming studio people thought I was like from Mars, that was pretty funny.

57:31Tell me, what would you most like to change about the world adventure? Venture is so important, but I'm actually amazed how much we're all swimming in our own bullshit sometimes. And I say this because I invest in companies and a lot of times companies I think want to partner with me because I don't handle the same bullshit to them. And it's very dangerous I think for VCs to give definitive advice, because as a founder you are thinking about what you're building and it's very dangerous for someone to helicopter in even an hour a week on a month or whatever it is to give you advice because they're not feeling the nuts and bolts of everything you're doing all the time that's not what they're thinking about 24 seven at best they are taking other lessons learn other companies translating them putting them through a filter and then telling you what they think applies to case.

58:22It can be quite dangerous, right? So I know actually the best founders talk about quote -unquote value ad VC firms in Giggle because I don't think a VC can truly add operational value to a truly exceptional founder. I'm happy to be prudent wrong otherwise. Why do you think that is? Like let's just this company now that we're investing, very grateful to have you as person I'll be in the fund, who Petrama, I just introduced some and really helped me out than you had with sales. Is that not valid? I mean different type of operational value. You introduce them to someone who they ended up hiring, but they probably put them into their own filter.

58:57But it's the idea of you should partner with us because we can help you in xyz fashion is very dangerous. But there's a lot of venture capitalists, especially in the US, that will say, we did this company and then we introduced them to this. They ended up doing this deal and therefore, and so the implication here is that they've really played an outsized role into that company. And the biggest value at I think that a VC can have on a company is really just to be there for the bad times and just be a friend in the good time. So if you have a company that you build and five years later you want to really go the distance, right?

59:32And you want to really grow this thing and maybe you want to do some secondary. And that's when the true kind of friendship will come out. It's like, do I feel comfortable now just telling you, hey, my listen, I want to do some secondary or, hey, I think we should buy XYZ company. What do you think? And I think it's a very different philosophy, but this is a game that the best founders know what they're good at what they're bad at and Your job as a VC I think is to be there offer support when they need not to necessarily push support down their throats in times when they might not need it I think honestly I win a lot of the time because people are like we do that and I race again That's it back in like respond when we message him, but otherwise don't get in our way But that is so important.

1:00:12You are not pretending to know about their details of their business dealings day in day out. And I think it's very important because other people don't do that. I can tell you that. I've seen situations where in board meetings, you know, VCs will ask them, have you done an analysis on XYZ and how you prepare? You're literally eating into operational time of that founder for something that you want to scratch your own intellectual itch. That is actually value destruction. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that sure There are cases where you can add value like the case that you know you introduce that person and so on But I don't think that's kind of what you say right?

1:00:52You people partner with you because you're a nice guy. You're very smart You'll be around for a long time and you provide them a buffet of options that they can tap into should they choose to so Welcome to the team. Ha ha But I'll turn one was the biggest miss the lord between founders and leafies The biggest misalignment is it happens when things are going exceptionally well or things are going exceptionally bad. A friend of mine has a very successful public company and he mentioned the time that every time the stock would come down, you know, the investors would ultimately sell as much of their shares as possible, which would put downward pressure on the stock more.

1:01:30And I would say very few we seize our long, long term people. Like you have a horizon that you want to exit and totally understand that's the business, right? So I'd fully appreciate that but it is a misalignment because if you partner with a truly exceptional founder You want to be as long term greedy as possible. That's short term greedy. I think that's the main one the time horizon of your Partnership and liquidity needs I would like to think like outcome scenario planning it matters to me that you are 5 -10 million dollar company it depends on the size of thunder I'm just kind of doing a $300 million asset for most funds doesn't really move the needle in any meaningful way.

1:02:05Yes. So I'm going to give you advice that is aggressively oriented around growth, customer acquisition, it dentured actually that will align to my outcome desires. Actually, if you have a $300 million asset in your intent, or $20, that's pretty great. Yes. And so it will skew the advice that you give as an investor and the advice you receive as a founder because of the differing benefits of outcome to each party. Absolutely. At the end of the day, if you weren't an investor in a business, but if you were just kind of talking to a friend who's the founder, your advice to them would be like, you have to do this right for you.

1:02:36It's so different, right? So that's the main misalignment. But I do believe at the end of the day that you're in the business of backing exceptional people, if you have a high conviction that they're truly exceptional, you will rid them of the burdens of returns as that. They also in return have to understand your needs as an investor, and you know, the best relationships that I've seen, Both sides are, hey, this is what I want to do. These are my constraints. Help me reach those. Help me solve those problems. Okay, the final one. Next five years, the 2028. What is, what is, hopefully a life? Right.

1:03:09I have no idea. I'm just really enjoying it right now. We have this ability to build a generational company. It's very rare that you are at a moment in time that triple dot is in at the moment, right? We are in a place where we have great growth. we have a phenomenal team. So why not just try to go the distance and try to build this truly generational company? At the same time, I do really love people say, hey, you know, you're an investor, etc. I don't view myself necessarily as a professional investor. I think I happen to give people advice, free of charge, by the way, I don't have to invest, that is truly from the heart, that is real, that is not covered in layers of bullshit, and people really like it, and people who choose to work with me on that basis and I really enjoy that as well.

1:03:58But I don't do professional stuff aside. I think the personal health, well -being, family health, being in a good place with my wife, being in a good place with my kids, that takes precedence above everything else. So if I can be there, that's the most important thing. I always say like work with great people, you respect the butt and good shit. 100%. I think our relationship really is kind of the embodiment of that. And I so appreciate you as my friends. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you, I loved it. Loved it too, thank you so much. I always remember that quote from a man tool, work with great people you respected and might and good things will happen.

1:04:34My relationship with Akin is exactly that I really do treasure our friendship and I want to thank him for being such an incredible guest on the show today. If you want to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can on YouTube by searching for 20BC, but before we leave you today, over 50 % of your day is filled with tedious tasks. What would you do if you got that half a day bank? Now you can with Coda, the all in one platform that changes the way your team works together, and Coda just introduced an AI -powered work assistant to take the busy out of work. With Coda, your team's important workflows and content already live all in one place, and Coda AI helps each team member focus on the highest priority work, even as priority shift across the team.

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