This video tells the story of Henric Suuronen, who built and sold a gaming company for over $100M, and then co-founded Play Ventures, a VC fund.
This video tells the story of Henric Suuronen, who built and sold a gaming company for over $100M, and then co-founded Play Ventures, a VC fund that has raised $450M. It covers his journey from childhood passion to successful entrepreneur and investor, highlighting his philosophy on building great startups and finding complementary co-founders.
And the result was for example this we had a users who spent tens of thousands of dollars inside the game. Uh I read the Steve Jobs biography book and and I was like okay sometimes you got to get out of your comfort zone and do your dreams and chase your dreams and a little bit of a cliche but that's exactly what happened and and me and a couple of other people I had worked with partly at Nokia before we started talking let's make our own gaming company and let's go to Asia and the reasoning for Asia was that back in 2011 2012 when we created a company u Asian games had something live operations so that you would push new events inside the game on a hourly basis or daily basis. Uh western games would do it once a month or once a quarter. In Asia they would do in a daily or even hourly basis. So I wanted to learn how to do that and it's a specific type of system you have to have in place.
And the second part was we started seeing like this very advanced item economies uh digital item economies in games. This is something we start now seeing consumer apps in like Dualingo if you follow that on the app store is that that it's not just that you buy a missing currency or a missing item. You maybe grind yourself to a missing item or two of them and then you can combine them and they become even better item and then you can rinse and repeat that almost endlessly. This creates a a much more stronger compulsion loop uh to the player, but also kind of drives motivation and desires that I want to have that sword because it's so hard and to get it. Of course, you can also pay for it and it can be quite expensive. And this of course then trickles down to like the LTV of that game and and how much you can uh kind of run a business on that game. But I wanted to move to Asia to hire
people from Japan, China and and and Korea who were kind of the pioneers in these type of games. Get them, move them to Singapore. They teach me and we work together and we create these games from Singapore to the world. And we launched then with my own company that we then launched in 2012, 2013. We raised a $3 million round of financing from same investors on Spotify and we launched a game called Heroes of Honor where we put everything I knew from Western game making and then learned from the for the Asian game makers together in one game and and the result was for example that we had a users who spent tens of thousands of dollars inside the game and and that was not possible in western made games and then we run live operations on an hourly basis let's say eight a And this is super important how how this continued because the journey was quite quick. I was from founder to exit was 3
years. We we sold the company then in 2014 uh for 32 plus 68 million US dollars to the Candy Crush