Henric Suuronen shares his journey of building and selling a gaming company for over $100M, and his subsequent transition to co-founding a $450M VC fund.
Henric Suuronen shares his journey of building and selling a gaming company for over $100M, and his subsequent transition to co-founding a $450M VC fund to back other gaming startups. He discusses key experiences and philosophies that led to his success in both entrepreneurship and venture capital.
Find out what you're good at and then study even more of that. Try to become even better because you're probably good at something that you have a tendency to be good at. Meaning that you're already better than 90% of people or 99%. And then if you invest more time in that because you have passion and already a good starting point, you will become better than million people. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today very exciting, you know, founder that we got joining us, you know, we're going to be talking about a lot of gaming, you know, and and again, you know, founder turn investor, you know, we're going to be talking about both sides of the table. He's also worked at larger uh corporate firms. So I think that, you know, every single aspect, you know, we're going to be covering it on the show today. You know, very inspiring. We're going to be talking
about the building, the scaling, uh also getting incredible um exits, uh also incredible returns on investments and and again, praise yourself for quite the um episode. So, without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Henrik Surinen. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Thank you. And that was almost perfect pronunciation of my Finnish last name, so thank you for that. >> Amazing. Well, hey, well, born in the 80s in Finland. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up over there? >> Yeah. So to those of of you who haven't been in Finland, it's of course a cold cold country. So So we have our our snow at least used to have snow before global warming. But yeah, in the 80s we had snow and and as a funny story, my birthday was actually just I've turned 45 last Friday and and when I grew up, usually on my birthday there was snow. And now with with
global warming, there's not even snow on the southern coast for Christmas. So that's that's how it has changed. But maybe we can talk about global warming on a different podcast than yours. But anyway, so yeah, I grew up in in in Finland and and um and in Finland is kind of maybe known for Nokia, ice hockey, and Santa Claus. And and and if in case you don't follow ice hockey, it's kind of our national sport. Everyone plays it. But in later years also gaming, especially mobile gaming. And and I understand also why because it's of course dark dark outside and quite miserable. So people like to then spend time inside especially on the winter or in the in the fall when it's wet playing games. And that's also what I did when I grew up. So I played mostly on Amstrad. Uh I didn't have my friends had a Commodore 64. Uh unfortunately my parents bought the wrong machine which was a little bit a
downer but because on Commodore 64 there was much more games than on Amstrad. In that time also came of course the Nintendo 8bit and and my friend had Super Mario so played Super Mario a lot. Uh and when I say a lot it means eight hours a day or 10 hours a day and and later my brother got a a PC uh 48640 MHz and played Mortal Kombat. Then later Doom, if you remember Doom, the first first person shooter game, that was also kind of my first touch of kind of multiplayer, which is quite important later in my career, is is because some PCs started getting modems, if you remember, and and you would dial up over the phone line and play against your friends and and that was absolutely incredible experience in in I would say that was sometime in the 90s. But yeah, growing up in Finland was interesting playing a lot of games, playing ice hockey and of course also a little bit of studies and and my
mother actually I I she was getting very worried when I played so much that when I went to sleep I closed my eyes and undered eyelids as units moving because they were kind of like etched to my retinas from playing too much. But I I think this this period actually is incredibly important for my career because I played every single game uh there was uh on on PC pretty much and and of course I came from a a poor family because my dad died when I was eight. Uh, so I pirated all of those games and I'm I'm ashamed of saying it, but it I think it was an actually an important education for my career that if you played every single game, you got a very good knowledge of what are the mechanics, what are the things that makes people like a game and coming back to a game and and I think later in my career when I actually designed games for a living before becoming an investor, all that knowledge
that I gained from playing all those hundreds or thousands of games in the 80s and 90s and early 2000 comes into use and that's some a skill I still use as an investor because you can talk pretty much about any game uh with the founder. So super important but yeah it was playing games and also of course playing a little bit of ice hockey and and as I'm not good good enough ice hockey player I'm happy that I was good enough in in mobile games later. Well, I mean it's I mean it's amazing because as you were talking and you were sharing some of those games, you know, it gave me unbelievable flashbacks. I remember going to the internet cafes to play Counter Strike and, you know, stuff like that. I mean, it's a it's incredible days. No, I mean in your case, you know, Finland, you know, once it was time to work, you went at it with Nokia and you know, you went there on different divisions, you
know, and eventually you ended up joining the gaming unit and that's kind of like what changed everything. So, what happened there and how do you say would you say that that catapulted you into the gaming space? Yeah, it's I mean I I started a a masters in in software engineering and and Nokia had this was maybe 2001 or 2002 they had a a recruitment fair at my university and and they they just picked me okay that we hire you as a engineer on on the communicator team. So if you remember there was a Nokia phone that you opened up and you had a full keyboard you can have Excel Microsoft Word and all and this is 2002 2003 we're talking about so I was a programmer on that and working specifically on a calculator app but I quite quickly realized that I'm a really bad programmer and and as you realize that you're working in a and this is before iPhone okay so pretty much the hottest company out
of Europe which was Nokia they had a 43% market share in mobile phones and I worked there and I I thought that okay I'm going to get fired because I'm such a bad programmer and one day in the cafeteria I I saw couple of colleagues they were they were shooting on something on their mobile phones and and this was a series 60 device so the first device from Nokia where you could access the kind of through an API the camera feed and they were shooting mosquitoes on their you know digital mosquitoes on the screen and and that that got my brain kind of rolling that. Oh that what if you would make a game uh where you kind of can record over Bluetooth the the color of your friend's shirt uh with a matching on a on a camera uh of the collar and then you would kind of be urban shooting game and and if you match the color of what you recorded then the other phone vibrates as you're being hit and
this this kind of game idea rescued me from I think getting fired as a programmer because when Nokia saw it or some executives saw it they come and work at the games unit. And and so I I moved to the capital of Finland and the headquarters of Nokia and joined the games unit which had been rolling for a couple of years and they had lost hundreds of millions on the engage. If you remember, there was a kind of gaming dedicated phone by Nokia in early 2000s and they tried to kind of relaunch it on all Nokia phones and that's when I joined on something called the arena which was a kind of a connected layer on top of the mobile phones and I love that because a whole thing for me growing up was that games are if you play single player you're isolated and you don't meet people and I was you know like Many teens in in in kind of their teenage years a little bit afraid of talking to girls or
talking to people, but games allowed you to especially multiplayer games and and that's very important for the mobile part is that you you can play a game and then kind of you have a shared interest and then it's easier to talk to to someone. And when I when I kind of joined the Nokia games team on on specifically on the arena connected gaming part I was like there's no problem with not having a modem to your PC because every phone is connected. So all the games you could do is it even a simple game like snake you could think about okay what's the multiplayer version of it because every phone is connected and this is also the time when flat rate uh flat rate internet connection started rolling out in in some countries and not in all in 2005 and 2006 but but but but they started slowly that okay data is going to be bigger than phone calls data is going to be bigger than SMS and and and
now now it's of…