What EA, Atari, and Supercell Taught David Gardner About Executive Leadership

I had a moment to decide, but he was my best sales guy. So what do I do? Do I shoot the high performer? But in the case of values, I said no values trumps this situation. So I had to fire him. And everyone else in the organization saw that and realized, okay, these values are real. Hello and welcome back to Mission Executive Edge. Today we're talking with David Gardner. If you don't know his background, he was early at EA, became an EVP studio COO, was the CEO of Atari from 2008 to 2010 and then became a general partner at LVP. Early investor in Supercell, early investor in Natural Motion on the board of CD Projekt Red has had a great impact on the games ecosystem around the world and certainly within the London ecosystem and European ecosystem as well. Excited to share with you today our conversation with David Gardnerv. David has had one of the most storied careers in gaming. As Dan notes, one of the first people that Ilke pitched supercell to. You know, our conversation, he casually mentioned that he was sat on the same desk a long time ago with Demis Hassabis, the co founder of DeepMind and one of the most influential people in AI in the world and a Nobel laureate. Interesting though he's super low ego and actually we spent a lot of our conversation time not talking about all the wonderful successes, but actually some of the more difficult points. And it's interesting how the learning points came from the difficult times maybe at Atari where things weren't going well. And that's when really the forced reflection and the growth comes from as well as somebody who was putting values in consistently across the whole of his conversation. Right. He's someone who cares deeply about values and I think our listeners can be interested in, or you can be interested in the fact that we have a lot of role models for success here, but here's one who's very deeply principled and that comes across in everything that he says and does. Absolutely. And the learnings from successes and failures add up to a wealth of knowledge that you can deploy later in your career. So it's really fascinating conversation with David today. Hello and welcome to Mission One, the Executive Edge. I'm Gerard Marles, your co host for this podcast, joined as always by Dan Hampton over in Florida. And today we have an extremely special guest in David Gardner, who's also joining. He's an American, but also joining from the from London. David, welcome to the pod. Thank you very much. Great to see you. And Gerard and Dan, very nice to be connected up here on, on the Ethernet? Yeah, absolutely. I think motivation changes over time. I was excited about learning about Europe as a. As a kid. A lot of kind of neighbors and friends sort of spoke about it. It was. And I traveled over and I used to come back and I was an early employee at Electronic Arts and they used to come back raving about how exciting it was to. Because it was new and it was exciting. It was. The grass was always greener on the other side. And it was actually those early trips that in my enthusiasm for Europe and the guys at EA were like, okay, you are always so positive about Europe. Why don't you go over there and help us figure out what to do next? And so that got me my first posting, if you like, my first assignment which was to London. And you know, when you. I guess everyone has their own, their own first imprint. I grew up in California mainly a little bit of time in the Deep south, but I don't talk too much about Mississippi years. But this was my first really big city, London. And wow. I mean it. I was so excited and I've been excited about London ever since. That was in the early or the mid-80s, I suppose, and which was a boom, the start of the boom era for London. The kind of change of kind of political momentum. The city of London becoming more deregulated. So the expansion of the kind of global banking centers, et cetera. And of course in our world it was gaming and it was tech. You know, it was Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s and VIC 20s and BBC micros and microns. It all started. It all just kind of kicked off and it's been, as I think we all know, it's been one of the major gaming centers of the universe. So I've just loved it here. And David, we've jumped in the middle here. We should just introduce you to our listeners and for the sake of younger listeners, we'll explain what a Spectrum is as well at some point. There we go. And so David, you have had a. I'm going to use cliches we do in these sort of intros. So go ahead. You've probably heard them all before, but sort of a storied career, shall we say, in a very positive way. You early on Electronic Arts, I believe you started, it was a customer support role or customer service type role. We can go into that. You then rose through the ranks and through the geographies as well to become EVP over there and studio CEO. You then went to Atari, which is one of the. Again one of the great brands of gaming and particularly here in uk, it's held in extremely high regard. And I know Dan's a big fan of Atari, so he had worked. Yes, yeah, exactly. So your complaints to David, if you ever had any problems with the Atari system or later in its iterations and then evolve further on that, having had that very successful executive career going to the EVP level, to the C level, you then were you co founder of London Venture Partners. You're sort of a general partner over there. Yeah. And London Venture Partners again, I mean it's. You guys, forgive me sake. You're sort of the OGs of games investing, certainly in Europe and I think globally recognized as really being early on to spot the potential of games as a venture capital sector and I think again, easily one of the very top funds in Europe and in the west for reputation for investing in games. And I think you've got a lot beyond games as well. Maybe. So you've really sort of seen success in quite different areas. And then again on David to then be a board member and I believe you're on the board of Embracer again, probably make a film about those years. Right. Like. And then currently your. If I have your title, right, Deputy chair of the super Advisory Board, CD Projekt Red, which again, if we talk about European powerhouses of aaa, it's really up there at the top. And again, we could, we could talk a whole hour about. About why they've been successful and. And when they haven't been successful and then how they've sort of come back from that. Right. As well, which I think is interesting. But David, it took a long time to introduce you, which I think is credit to just what you've done and how different it is. So first of all, I'd say big thank you from us and from our listeners to joining us on the pod. No, it's great. It's always fun to talk about things that you love and appreciate being on the podcast. Great. Dave, kicking us off. Jordan, tell us about that. Just again, we can't go into all the detail, but we're focused often on executives are thinking about how do you get to those very top levels of job you've made that journey. When you were starting in customer services with ea, were you thinking, yeah, one day I'm going to be, you know, EVP of this place and I'm going to shoot there. And that was the straight line. Or tell us about how that evolved. Yeah, I think it's a good question. I don't think we Had EVP titles then. But I, you know, I was young. I started at EA when I was 17, so that was a little bit unusual already. And as you get older, you as sorry, time goes on, you kind of hear the stories of like when they first met me. And I remember now being told they all thought what, you know, Trip Hawkins was the founder. He had met me in the context of the Consumer Electronics show and we hit it off and, and has actually a polite but an argument about, about a product and a company. And so that made an impression and he thought, okay, I like that sort of opinion thinking person. I want to hire him at this startup. And he was starting Electronic Art. So anyways, it was, it was where I started and I did a few different roles. I had actually previously to that been working three years at a computer retailer, which at that, that time there really weren't chains or things like that. It was specialty shops in different cities. And so I was, I was pretty deep on, on the retail front and knew all about the products. And, you know, there were dozens of, of software products, not hundreds of thousands as we have now. And I knew how the trade system worked, et cetera. So my first job was actually to help them set up the distribution terms and conditions and the kind of retailer training. And then once we ship games where it's like, okay, well, you know, we had like 15 or 20 employees. Like, somebody's got to do customer service. And I was definitely the youngest guy, so I got assigned the CS job. But I think there, there were definitely some, you know, some learnings from that. And ironically, one of the. I used to therefore open all the posts, all the mail camera to me and we got letters from abroad and there was an Italian that kept writing us letters and he would write us incredible, beautiful art letters. I still remember his name, Mara Marchetti. I don't know where he lives or if he's a miracle. Listens to this podcast. He was a beautiful artist and I was. That again, contributed to my fascination with Europe. I thought, you know, what is this? So I did make it a goal to try to get out of customer service as soon as I could. But it did help help me learn about dealing with people and having motivation, you know, wanting to get out. But. But fortunately I would say I'd been able to just love what I do. And then we had a. Particularly then at the startup culture at ea, there was so much that needed to be done if you were willing. And that was more important than kind of experience. Competence came through doing, you know, if you have the right attitude, you have the right kind of, I don't want to necessarily say just intelligence, but kind of compute. Right. There's kind of personality, there's, there's the ability to learn, there's the kind of willingness to, to not give up. Those things all played a role to getting promoted. It sounds like you love the startup journey. Were you after, were you really interested in kind of an early stage environment or was it games that attracted to you to ea or was it at both? It was definitely both. And as I mentioned I worked at the retail store and of course games were fascinating. You know, at first we were like selling computer to do word processing and databases and things like that. But then games started showing up and there were these kind of early graphic adventures and Sierra Online shipped some stuff and you were like, wow, it was painting this stuff. A lot of the stuff obviously selling Apples and Apple had a very peculiar kind of video graphics register and it was not continuous. So you would, if you would write an image to memory, it would kind of appear at the top of the screen, in the middle of the screen, at the bottom of the screen. It wasn't sequential, it was a very strange way. It would paint these pictures and these things would come to life and it was just, I don't know, I can still remember today, the excitement of seeing the screen come alive with a piece of art. And I loved computers, I just loved computers. And then gaming is of course fun. Very few people don't like games and so, and I really love business. So suddenly I'm doing business with games at a startup on computers. So I've. No one can stop me. I was just so excited and I was fascinated by this Silicon Valley concept. I was in the west coast and this kind of venture capital fundraising, starting up new ideas, you know, trip came out of the then big Apple computer or starting something up. So these themes kind of have echoed and repeated because now I'm doing venture and still in the game space. So I'm sure we'll touch upon some of those things. But I think it was, you know, a lot of these things are like, you know, are they ducks that get imprinted when they first, you know, kind of arrive on the scene and then once you kind of have those impressions, they stick with you. So that's, yeah, that's kind of what happened to me at a young 17 year old and now I think that was a very big factor. Yeah, I, I would say it is probably, it is a little bit more organic. I mean as you Maybe as you learn and as you mature, you start to become a little bit more strategic or thoughtful. And so I have had to make some decisions and we could come to those conversation later. But yeah, I think, you know, the big news for me was that I was in a great place and it was rapidly growing. So that just presented huge numbers of opportunities and the company was willing to take risks. I was not. And I'm not a college graduate. I didn't follow at all a typical role. I mean, our founders were Harvard and Stanford MBA students and had raised venture capital. They were all very kind of impressive CVs. But there, you know, we were also dealing in a brand new industry that didn't really have. You couldn't hire anyone with years of experience. And I actually had years of computer computing experience with Apple iis and the relevant kind of audience and technology, even though I was 17. So it's partly a story of that and that rapid growth, providing opportunity and the culture of the company, in this case Electronic Arts, to, to promote from within and try. But you know, we were growing like crazy, so we were hiring all the time. It was a good place. Was there like a secret sauce here in terms of your upward ascension within ea? I know you mentioned taking on the role like customer service, that that kind of defaulted to you, but was it just, you know, a kind of a mixture of taking on the tasks that, that, you know, are filling in the gaps where the company needed you, or was there, was there something else that kind of helped propel that upward ascension along with the growth, you know, across. I think it's a combination. I was passionate and not afraid of work and because I was at the company from the beginning and really, again, you know, you start young and you believe everything they tell you. So I was very much, you know, you cut me and I bled, you know, kind of EA blood and so. And that's actually, I think what made me useful to send to Europe. The idea was I was, if you like the kind of DNA that was being kind of chipped off of the, then San Mateo, the California mothership and then transplanted. And I think that, I mean, of course it was a good benefit to me, but I think that was smart because as EA grew and went international to all the different European countries, it very much felt like ea. And people would comment on that when they would come visit from the US and they would say, wow. In fact, we, I think held our DNA better and longer than the US which of course continued to grow and it was a big market but they. The rate of hiring there meant that, and the change of leadership there just meant the DNA eventually changed. So I think that was the. I think that was kind of the main event there, David. So thinking about Decree went from being EVP of ea, a very large company list. Was it listed at that point, I presume, or. No previous. No, it listed about. Listed about 10 or 15 years after it started. Okay, so you. You went to a very senior role there, and then you went to be CEO of Atari. Just tell us about. Was that. Was that a step change? Was that something you'd always wanted to be a CEO and deliberate? Yeah, I started developing the kind of desire to be a CEO I had. You know, you mentioned some of the titles, et cetera, a COO role. The da. I was, prior to that running the international businesses. But, you know, it's always a team effort. And these companies decide how to. What to put in or not to these different verticals. And at one point, I had everything geographically based. Then we went to a global studio and a global publishing setup. So those things then got separated from geography and put into kind of functional areas. So I thought I wanted to try to do the whole piece. And after 25 years at EA, I eventually ended up living back in California at headquarters and weirdly, had reverse culture shock. Even though I am American, I've lived most of my life in Britain. And I found I missed being in London and being in the uk. So after a few years of being in California, moved back and I didn't have a job. I had to kind of restart. And that's when the Atari opportunity happened. And for those of, you know, Dan, like, you know, Atari as an American, it was one of those kind of cultural things, but it eventually exploded. Hasbro Toys ended up another American company, bought the the brands and the assets. And then in another twist of fate, a French company called Infogram bought Hasbro's digital piece. Hasbro refocused on the classic toys and paper business. And so Atari got owned by Infograms in France. And Infogram was going through a change. Private equity had taken it over and they were looking for a new management team. And that's when I came in. And so I rebranded the business to the original Atari brands, even though under the brands it was a very. It wasn't really the original Atari, even though they had Pong and they had Breakout and they had all the kind of franchises, and it's just different. What was that change like? Or was there a change, do you think? Or again, you're thinking about, you're going up to. Exactly. Tell us about that. Like, how do you, and again, think about our listeners who might be thinking about, you know, let's say they're at a director level now and they're thinking about, okay, what does it take to be the V.P. the C level? Like, what are the gear shifts from someone who's done it? What do you have to go through? I think the fun, by the way, I would be honest on the outset, I would say my, my time at Atari was not successful. I can blame it on the market. We had the 2008 financial crash. I can blame it on. It's difficult to turn around in the gaming world. Something that's underperforming dramatically and losing money. Very hard to turn it around. But ultimately I took on the role. You know, I, I, I should have known those things. And, you know, I owe that. That's my fault. But I did learn. Unfortunately, you learn the most through failure and pressure, I think. And that's why we probably, it's getting, getting better. The attitude toward failure, particularly, you know, Europe has always had a hard, you know, the US in the kind of Silicon Valley piece, they always talk up failure, but it's harder in Europe. But failure is the accelerator of learning, if you're open to it. And I would say the big shock, I remember, you know, when you kind of walk in and all eyes are on you and everyone's looking at you, like, what do we do? Particularly in a situation where things aren't going well, they want help. And it's different if you arrive in a company that is doing well and you're the new CEO, you kind of have time, think momentum. I mean, the systems are just running. You kind of get on the ship and it's like, yeah, it's great. Everything's working here. I think I'm another coffee and. But if you arrive to something on fire, you don't really have time to mess around. And I came out of a very successful company that had been successful for a very long time. And the systems are all working, the products are all coming to market, the sales numbers are all getting blown open, and you're, you know, achieving new record profits. Very different when you arrive at the opposite scenario. And I probably hadn't thought through quite enough. I knew it was broken. I thought, okay. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to turn into a digital products company. I wanted to trade on the fantastic brand history, which was, I think at the time it was the 17th most recognized brand. And hadn't had any marketing spent on it for decades. I thought there was enormous potential, but I didn't really appreciate how, how it needed to be dealt with straight away. And you are responsible. And when you're part of a team and you're not the CEO, of course you're trying to build a team. There are a lot of things to talk about, being a CEO and building a team, but ultimately, as they say, the buck stops with you. People kind of wait for your commissioning or your decision making or your kind of setting and direction, but when you're a VP or part of another team, you're not making that final. You're making recommendations, you're kind of getting feedback from everybody else and then it kind of snaps together and that CEO that you're working for sends you off. And when you have to do it, and especially for the first time, and especially when it's a crisis, I found it too tough. I wasn't proactive enough. I kind of, in fact, some of the things I did, the things I reverted to, were based on values of, you know, we need to tell the truth, we need to do the right thing. We need to. A lot of these values that I had were, are good values, but actually when you're very weak, you have to be very careful. And I remember making a comment that, you know, we had stuff at retail that had not sold through, and at ea, we didn't like that. We would keep the shelves clean and new products would come out. We always had new things so we could mark down the old stuff. Well, we didn't have that strength. We didn't have the ability at the then Atari to take the dead stock out of retail that would bankrupt us. It wasn't even an option. It wasn't a question of integrity. It was just a question of what we could afford to do. And so I again, I found that, you know, you really need to have emergency measures. And I think I, you know, if, if I had known that going in, I would have just structured who I recruited and how I dealt with it extremely differently. Atari goes on. You know, you may have seen some of the branding and some of the clever things that they've done. It's just not a typical game company. And in fact, it's under new leadership in the last kind of 18 months. It's doing some interesting stuff. I had a very good chat with a new CEO who reached out to me six months ago, and it's very interesting to see how they're renovating that place. I've seen the, some of the Web three games coming. I see maybe an Atari Classic or something as well. But you know David, I imagine you know that CEO experience has been valuable for you, you know, beyond those years and in as an investor as well as an investor and as a board member. I mean I found it actually has helped me a lot and we were a public company so that was another extra stress. So yeah, I mean I think it is good to be ambitious and it's good to try to be a CEO, but you also have to think about, especially if you're a first time CEO, you have to think a little bit about your personality, what you're strong at, what you're not strong at and try to be prepared for what you're going to. Maybe don't pick the first hardest thing. Maybe fine. Those years were not the best years either in terms of timing. 2008 with the crisis, nothing you could, no one could foresee that. So. But David, I think that's really interesting because I mean we've talked in the past a little bit about advice to people about the C Suite. It's like it's a little bit of care for what you wish for. Right. Like the. And I think people can get. We've seen it. People get so swept up in sometimes wanting the CEO job. It's. It's almost. It takes over other considerations. Maybe they or other thought processes you might go. If it was just, you know, another similar type. Type role. Yeah. And also I thought it was interesting what you were saying about the, the sort of. The transparency piece. I think we've heard that again of. It's hard sometimes because you've got values and you've got instincts that sometimes work as a human level. Right. As you think like hey, I want to be transparent because I'm a transparent person and to not be is somehow morally wrong. But I have heard that from a number of execs or saying you don't have to share everything. There's a level of noise that people don't need to worry about. You need to slightly like protect them. Not lie to them, but protect them from being worried about information that's not their day to day concern to stay focused. I mean basically I think if people buy into a plan, I mean you can be honest about the challenges, but you can say these are challenges we will face later. Today's challenges are these. This is the sequence to deal with this issue and eventually you ship that small example of kind of retail inventory. Once you ship something that's good, then you can balance out the issues later. You just don't deal with those things up front. You have to sequence things. So that's a bit of a. You, doctor. And David, I mean, just picking up on that. I suppose it wasn't you because again, I think we're big fans of, like, the learning aspect, right? And the iterative aspect. And when you think about your career. And again, we're trying to advise people on careers. We're often trying to say to them, like, make the right decision. Right? We're trying to help them make the right call, think about things ahead. But, like, how do you feel about that? I mean, do you sort of feel like actually, again, you're someone who's taken risks? You're someone who backs people who are taking entrepreneurial risks. Would you advise someone to say, like, hey, actually it is okay to do that. It might not work out, but you still gain value from that and learn it, or, you know, learn from that and it's part of a tapestry of career that's. That's still accretive to you, if that's what you want. Or do you. Do you think a bit about different. I'm curious, like, what your advice might be to yourself, you know, a month before you go into that job, we'd say, yeah, still go do it. You learn a lot. Or, hey, actually give this one a skip maybe. It's a very good question, very hard to give a generic answer to. I think there is wisdom around every decision and. And wisdom in many counselors. So I think it's good to, you know, maybe your wife or husband or whoever your partner is, it might be your best friends. It might be people you trust on a subject to try to process it. Nowadays, it might even be chatting with ChatGPT or Claude. But when I reflect back, I think, actually, I love Risk, and I've been quite careful, even though sometimes it sounds like I haven't. I actually look back and I think I am. I'm a little bit more careful than I would have that I would like to be. I think taking risks is very good. You need to take calculated risks. And again, you know, I think taking the Atari job could have been. I mean, I think we had brilliant ideas. I just really got stuck on dealing with the problems rather than the future. And I would have organized my team very differently had I been aware of the problems. And you could have assigned a fireman to the old problems and kind of a super creative hit squad on the new things, and then it could have been a very different outcome. So, yeah, just kind of getting a good understanding of what you're stepping into and having a reasonable battle plan. Because as you know, the human brain has various levels of functionality. It's. It has intuition and reaction to things that you train for. You are in the. I don't know, Dan, if you. The pilot stuff, I actually, I fly small planes and one of the most amazing things is they can train you to do things that are unnatural. For example, when the engine is on fire, your nature is to scream and run and get the heck out of there. But actually, you see the. I mean, you saw it with Sully, who lost his engines and the plane that went into the. To the river. New York. Yeah, I want to say Hampton, but it's not happening. The river in New York. He runs a protocol, he runs a procedure. You can train yourself to do that. But what is. So you need to prepare yourself for these things so that your reaction. And it's nice to stay in a zone where you sort of feel like, oh, I've got the intuitive reaction to what to do, but it doesn't stretch you, doesn't bring you further. And I think ultimately you kind of get bored. So I think the idea of taking risks is good learning. And then that learning gets put into place and that helps you do the quick calculations and do a better job. Once you've kind of processed that learning, that's kind of where I'm trying to head on that. David, you've had a lot of experience across multiple functions and environments. How are you thinking? How has that shaped your hiring philosophy? How has it shaped how you're evaluating talent now, as you're thinking about it from a board level perspective, but what's your general, you know, kind of philosophy on. On hiring people? So I. It's evolved over the years and it's a cliche, of course, hire the best people, which is of course, that's right. But I think there are two parts identifying them and, and actually I think everyone's talented. The question is, are their talent sets correct for the task that you have? I remember hiring a head of marketing and was very excited. And then I watched in front of my. I think they were the right person. You know, you interviewed dozens of people and then they just crashed and burned in front of the, the, the, in our case, the other kind of country level marketing leads. And I thought, what have I done? I knew instantly I'd made the wrong call. And then I, of course, was embarrassed and I thought, oh no, you know, you're going to fire Somebody and that's horrible. And I hate firing them. And they were in a good job before I hired them. And then I realized they were really good at something else, and we put them in charge of external relationships and they'd made the company far more money and it grew an incredible network. And I realized, wow, I very nearly ruined. I don't know if I ruined their career, but very nearly just kind of reactionary. Took somebody out when actually he's just getting their skills in the task and then they flew. So that was a huge learning for me. And I think the culture of the business attracts good talent. So getting the right culture in place so that you are attractive, hopefully nowadays leaders are more collaborative and, you know, not. I mean, everyone's got a personality, but you want to release talent. So when you, when you work with people, you. I think people like working with people that appreciate them, encourage them, set them up to succeed, invest in them. So I think those are all, you know, you're trying to be attractive and thoughtful, but I think do not be afraid. I wanted to say, actually, I don't know if you hire good talent as much as you need to fire bad talent. And I think one of the problems is, you know, we used to focus so much on hiring the right talent, and people would be in so many interviews and you try to make the best decision and then you find out. It takes about a year to find out if they're any good because you get the first impressions and then. But then you become either you're distracted and you just don't want to deal with it because you're firing is a horrible thing and you feel afraid of it. But actually people watch does the company fire on values or not? And we had a situation once where the sales guy was very successful and then, you know, he would always kind of win the sales award and this, that. And then one day we figured out one of the reasons he was so successful was at the end of the quarter, he would speak to his customers and say, I need you to take a bunch of stuff that you don't need and then you don't want, but you can send it back next week. And so he would stuff the channel, which is against. Against our protocol. And it was against. Actually later in, in life, there are all these regulations about, you know, sales have to be real, et cetera, so you can't kind of scan the books. And I realized what he was doing was wrong. He knew it was wrong, and I had a moment to decide, but he was my best sales guy. So what do I do? Do I shoot the high performer? But in the case of values, I said, no values trumps this situation. So I had to fire him. And everyone else in the organization saw that and realized, okay, these values are real. So that then reinforces the right culture, that then attracts the right people, and then people perform also. It helps kind of put guidelines out. People are like, how am I going to do that? How do I get fired? So I think firing, I mean, letting people go, if you want to use the nice talk, setting them free to find their best self, those doing them a favor, in that language, I'm doing them a favor. I want you to be a better person. So that's what I've got to say. I mean, obviously, if it's gross misconduct, it feels pretty easy. But if it's. If it's. I would say you obviously make your best choice. You try your hardest to get a great person, but then do not be afraid to make a change. So then you will eventually get it right. And I think that's probably an underutilized. David, take us through that process, because I think, again, we hear different things. Do you think. I mean, my own experience might be, I think gut leads and then you sort of catch up with it, right? You're like testing it, testing it. Then after you test a lot, you usually find out your gut was right. Is that losing time, testing it? Do you. Once you do, you feel like you know pretty quickly and you have to validate a little bit? Like, how do you decide? Actually? Yeah, because as you said, one case might be the wrong role. I need to move this person to a better role. The other case might be bad hire. I need to get rid of this person regardless. Like, how do you tell between those two and what's your toolkit? So it's so good. I mean, I am quite an intuitive person because I didn't grow up through, you know, kind of a rigorous academic approach to things. There is wisdom in getting input from others. And that's one of the reasons I work collaboratively for investing. I don't want to be just kind of working, you know, shooting from the hip. I learned so much from other people's use. And that's why when we do, when we do interviews, you get quite, you know, half a dozen people interviewing and you get everyone together and you debrief. I think it's amazing what people spot and what they. What gets, you know, learned from that. But I think you don't want to. You don't want to be flippant with people. So you, you are messing people around. So I think, you know, it is a big responsibility to hire someone and you don't want to just say, ah, it didn't work out, goodbye. I think almost as I started the conversation. I think everyone has talent and it's a question of, you know, hopefully you have a role to then or you can organize that role to lean into that talent and create that success circuit. Sometimes if you're a small company and you know you just can't, maybe you have to let them go. But yeah, or if you know it's a particular emergency, you just can't deal with it. But by and large I think you can work over time. If people are just not motivated or their major ethical issues and you didn't spot going in then, then maybe the right decision is to let somebody go. Yeah, and I'm just curious about that. Again, they're at a certain level and they're worried that there's a cap right to where they can get to if they don't have that CV or if they're feeling a little bit of an imposter because, or maybe coming from a country they've immigrated, they're not feeling a little bit out of place because that can be a real thing. What advice would you give that person, a listener who's saying, do I fit in there? Or I feel like I'm overcoming, I'm playing a different game to everyone else now what do I do? I think mostly that's self imposed. So you're, you're downgrading yourself unnecessarily. I think people will more and more. We have a performance culture and it's, I think it's, you know, it's gone, it has continued to go on a fantastic direction. So if you add value, if you are good, if you work collaboratively and you know, you make sense, you've got insight, you treat people properly and treat people well. I don't think there are those limits and shame on companies that impose those limits and I think they will ultimately get by, you know, they'll get surpassed by better companies that have a better culture, rewarding high performance talent. So, and I, I think also if there's too much focus on, you know, I, I, I again, I think if there's a little bit too much not, you know, you're stressing over it, you kind of bring it up and you make it an issue that kind of just puts friction around the issue. I think probably not necessary. David. It's just thinking back to your most successful hires. Has there been a common thread with those? Were they always obvious or was there something else that you can point to? I guess I think curiosity, stamina and chemistry with the company's culture are the most common success factors. And yeah, and I think it's super cool. I tell you what is super cool nowadays, having been in the industry for a while. And also a good lesson to always treat people well, you know, literally. And I go to meetings with like these are the most senior people in the company. Like they were in customer service when I started, you know, they. And they've so far surpassed my levels, et cetera. And it's can we can have some very frustration fun moments where we realize that, you know, they're more senior than I am now. And it's amazing what, you know, just to see people fly. So it's really cool. And I, and I definitely feel like not feeling like you have to always be on top or you have to be better than, you know, everyone you've ever hired or whatever. Actually it's quite freeing to go the opposite way. To see people just go as, you know, as high as they can go. You know, I worked, he didn't work for me directly, but if you guys know Demis hassabas who's started DeepMind and has gone on to become a Nobel laureate, a knight, you know, or a senior executive at Google and it's had major impact on AI technology. The guy was, you know, was a programmer at Bullfrog on theme park and we sat opposite each other. I was the product manager. And you know, the guy is just, you know, he's by any objective measures outstripped every everyone in the games industry for what the impact on society. And it's incredible. And he remains a wonderful human being throughout the whole process. But it's just wild to see, you know, when you just kind of let people go how far they can go. Yeah, that's a great story by the way. David. You sit across these guys. That's a great, that's a great two. That's a great room, right? Like a line of what happened to the other people in that room? Like how many dope. That's great. And you know, talking about you are a Joe partner at London Venture Partners, as mentioned, one of the premium venture capital funds in games in the world. Tell us about again we have people who either may be execs who at the back of their mind are thinking one day I'd like to go out and found a company. I'm thinking about that, I think a lot of people do. Should I go take VC money? Is that interesting route? It goes up and down, and I've got my own views on it. But tell us a little bit. From a talent perspective, when you're assessing a set of founders in front of you, how does that differ? Give us an insight to the mindset of an investor. How does that differ different from, say, a CEO hiring his team? Or does it differ, like. Curious about that. In the case of venture or in the case of a startup, you also have to have people that can handle the lack of resource and still manage to find a way. One of the big things I realized, and I learned this also when I was at Atari, where we didn't have the kind of balance sheet that an EA had. We jokingly, when we first did Formula one, and it was like we did some market research, we saw the size of the market, we thought, yeah, let's do Formula one. We find who's the licensing agent. We go meet Bernie Eccleston in some crazy place in Hyde park, and he's an absolutely terrifying guy. Too crazy a place to meet Bernie Eccleston. Yeah. Okay. And we need like 5 million bucks. So we called the CFO back in the States, he wires us 5 million bucks, and boom, we're in the business that, you know, of course we're already successful, but that's like nothing compared to what you have to do as a founder at a startup where you don't have any money. You might have all kinds of great ideas, then you have to convince investors, you know, you have to do everything on a shoestring budget. And it's just so different. The level of stress and kind of inventiveness and tenacity that you have to have. Of course, eventually it works. And. And sadly, statistically, most cases it doesn't work, but sometimes it works. And then it's incredible because you built something and you've changed something and you've created a whole new culture. And it's an incredible experience, but it is very different. And so the learning I've had, we've invested in lots of people that have come out of other companies. And at first you sort of think, oh, they've had all this experience that, you know, they know all this stuff. And then you learn that actually you want people who've had failure or who've had to have the grit and who can do, you know, kind of convince people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, including give somebody money versus the big successful executives who Just as that with that story, I've said, you know, it's one thing to lead a team. I have infinite so called infinite resource compared to the other scenario. And often, you know, I remember I just didn't know that much about cash because EA was cash positive and you know, we had hundreds of millions in the bank and now they have billions in the bank and. And you just don't think about it. It's just like something that you wire but then when you at a startup you realize it comes from the sky. Right? Manna from the header. Yeah, exactly. And when you're at a startup that is you're counting the days you have alive and you have. It's a completely different relationship. Perhaps there'd be a touch point there that might be a little bit controversial. Right. Because founders can be slightly different beings, shall we say. And listening to a Louis III podcast about this today, and they were talking about there's a bit of a myth of these kind of strange, sometimes borderline sociopathic view of these founders, right. Who are, as you said, can convince people to give them money in some sort of Svengali type way and are different from other people. And that can be sort of hey girlfriend, that can be sort of in our culture you've got to be this kind of almost non person to go and be a successful founder. Right? Obsessive, perhaps not ethical like all these other things. I mean a. Just do you have a comment on that? Do you see a generation coming through who are trying to be a musk and I don't know, be super odd just almost because they think that's successful? Do you think that's a good formula? Do you think it's a bad formula? Just curious on your own views on that. Yeah, it's a great observation. I've seen lots of different types of people successful as founders. It ultimately people have to be willing to be convinced and therefore trust that you have a shot at doing something. And sometimes it's because of that Svengali personality type that you mentioned. We coming from the games industry and funding the games industry kind of avoid that because we sort of feel like we want to see the real, real skills and the real talent of the people and we don't mind so much if someone is kind of more into the product or more technical and the only extra little consideration we have to have is are they credible in front of non games investors when they need to raise larger sums of money. So being a good communicator is an important skill in that regard. But I remember we were early investors in the supercell team and they are such straight shooters. It helps that they're Finnish and all the Nordic people seem to. I don't know what they do in that part of the world, but, you know, they're just like, we're going to do this and it's going to take three weeks and it's going to cost this much money. And they always do it and they smile and then it always happens and it's like, you know, how do they. How do they do that? But they, it's not that they get to success through that, but they just build a trust and they were, they were just authentic games guys and there was just no messing around. And they were on a mission to try to crack the code for what was coming next. And crack it they did in a huge way. David, tell us more about the story because we're going to take a moment. All these names you're dropping is. It's the who's who, right? So were you there when the first pitch ilka comes in and says like, hey, we're going to do this. Tell us about that initial reaction. Tell us. We were the first capital in with a bunch of other kind of early investors and kind of personal investors. They were. There were a handful of them and they had come through the kind of mobile game era where it was. It was J2 and me. It was all the kind of. Not smartphones but pre iPhone, you know, the kind of. All the horrible 300 SKUs, because no, no phone was the same and it was all autonomous anyways. They. They kind of slugged their way through that and. But they had games background and what was incredible and interesting, we'd already started putting LVP together and we had met quite a few entrepreneurs and we're getting a sense of the quality of entrepreneurs out there in the market, particularly here in Europe. And what was very different about those, their team, first of all, as I mentioned, they had this kind of cultural vibe. They were very straight shooters and they had a lot of experience and they were just saying, this is what's broken, this is how we're going to fix it and this is how we're going to operate. And they had this philosophy of not being afraid to kill and that systematic approach and that kind of simple measuring system and the lack of fear of not wasting time on stuff that wasn't going to work and their reference checks, et cetera, they just, it just made sense. And even though they. We didn't actually particularly love the game they were working on, it was a Facebook game. But we just thought, okay, if they're true, if this is true, they're going to kill this game. And they did. They eventually killed it and moved on. And the clash of clans and heyday and, and, and shifted platforms and. But they also, you know, delighted their customers. It was culturally extremely different seeing how they would charge, how people, how customers enjoyed giving supercell money to play their games, versus at the time, the brand values got very defined by that. And you know, again, supercell is one of the most successful richest companies and everyone loves them even though they're, you know, super successful. Was their fast iteration, which I'm assuming you, you say faster, quick to kill, was that, is that something you look for and have looked for since in other founding teams? Is that, is that the DNA or you or, or there other things you, you, you take from that? Because that was such a huge success. Right. It's an honesty that I'm looking for. So the quick kill was a, it was a. We're not going to take the attitude of, well, you know, we can make this work and this is our baby and you know, it's an ugly baby, but just wait and you know, all that kind of stuff, they, they just were willing to take tough decisions. And a startup, you have to take really tough decisions. Sometimes the decision is stick with it. But you, you have to be all in and you have to, you have to be willing to just hear the data. And so we're looking for people that can be very efficient. So you have to be quick because that's your only advantage really. You're broke, you've got ideas, you're unencumbered. So you have to be kind of a rapid strike force. And we've made some mistakes. We've invested in some teams that spent five years trying to build stuff and we thought at the time it made sense, but we sort of had to relearn. What's the role of venture in the game's ecosystem? We can't fund everything. It doesn't make sense. Some things belong to big game companies with huge balance sheets and other things belong to kind of startups. I appreciate you sharing that. How has this kind of shaped your view as a on the board or as you evaluate teams, you're evaluating ideas, you're giving your guidance and influence. How has all this kind of shaped your view as a board member These days? I try to learn what the company mission is and what of that mission is making that company successful, trying to Protect that. I was, you know, on a call today, we had a. We're really trying to quantify and discuss risk. And Steve Jobs has this great quote about first the company is successful, then they hire a lot of accountants and lawyers or something. I forget what his kind of list of things. And then they kind of end up taking over and then the creative people get shoved out and then the company stops innovating and then they stop being. And the company dies. So in the context of that, I think you have to take risk and you have to protect the culture that makes the amazing products that makes the company successful. And you have to understand how to, I think especially as you grow up as a company, how to mitigate risk as you have more people, more customers, more investors. Your job is to be as consistent as you can and as you get bigger, you can kind of bring help with you to mitigate these risks. And that's what I'm trying to make sure that a company has the right resource, the right kind of priority list and is trying to do as much as they can, but not so much that they blow up is kind of a simple way of saying it. Yeah. So yeah, there's a governance piece that comes with being on the board, but I think the governance. The governance can also be, I don't want to say a destroyer, but I think it's about risk adjusted activity. You have to sort of say we must take risk, but then if we're going to take that risk, how do we either communicate what we're doing to investors so they know they're on this risk, so they're willing to be on this risk event, but then what do you do to protect and report that risk and then attract the right talent to deliver on that mission? So that's the other big piece is you're really having to. Yeah, I'm really trying to go deep on the talent side to make sure that do you have the right people in the right roles? And then are you supporting them, training them, equipping them and rotating them out if they're the wrong ones? And yeah, that whole pipeline, because ultimately it comes down to people that are delivering. Absolutely, yeah. And trying to preserve the secret sauce along the way, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Do you think if you went back to some of your EA days and now with that knowledge of being a board member, that would influence some of those hiring decisions you made back then? Is there any sort of. Do you think you might do differently? Right. If again, again, think of our listeners who haven't been a Board MEMBER OF CG Projekt Red like, what can they absorb from your mistakes or learnings to their own executive situation to know? Yeah, I think. Well, I would. A lot of times the board is viewed as the, you know, the high school principal or the headmaster or whatever. I think as collaborative of a relationship as possible is. Is good. I mean, the board needs to be objective and that's, I think that's one of their key roles is making sure that they're not getting sucked in and drinking the Kool Aid, but still understanding the mission and the potential and pushing as well as protecting and having a different, you know, where we're scanning on a different time horizon. We're not doing day to day, we're doing longer. So I think it would, I would. Again, my biggest shaping and impact was at the early days of EA was the intensive feeling about the company culture having to be right. And I carried that through. I feel that really is so important that the board protects and encourages the right culture. And under that, you know, a lot of unspoken things around integrity and having. Treating people correctly and owning up to mistakes and being a learning machine and, and a lot of really positive things that can, where you can kind of work. Supercell is another great culture focus. They have this amazing statement which is when we succeed, we drink beer and when we have to shut a game down and failed, we drink champagne. Because we want to encourage the teams to take the risks to learn and to try. So they stay humble with success, but they stay ambitious with attempts. And I think that's a great metaphor. So I think you want that because otherwise you kind of create a. Oh, we don't want to take any risks and everything's working. And of course nothing stays the same. Nothing stays the same, David. I mean, I think some really consistent points there about values. Right. It came up in that last answer. I think it came up in multiple points and I think that's. Again, I will sing your praises to those who don't, but I think you're seen as an investor of greater integrity. Right. And I, I won't say there are other people I can think of who don't have that, but I think it is. Again, there's a lot of views on LinkedIn and social media about venture capitalism and all the rest, but I think anyone who knows you, David, knows some of it earned. Yeah, some of it indeed. Yeah. Again, we could do another podcast where we do the tear down. Right? That's the other thing that's popular now, the tear down of Visas but no, I think your reputation is somebody. Again, people who know you as friends and all the rest, they speak of a person with great values, sort of in the boardroom and outside of it. So, David, we're at Time, but thank you so much for coming on. Brilliant. Onto the pod. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So much fun. Thanks, guys, for pushing this out and trying to encourage people to level up. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Great. Bye, guys. That's another episode of Mission 1, the Executive Edge. If you found this valuable hit, subscribe and leave us a review. It helps other professionals discover the show, have a question about executive hiring, or want to share your own experience? Reach out on LinkedIn or visit Mission1IO podcast. We read everything, and your stories often inspire future episodes. The Executive Edge is brought to you by Mission One, where we specialize in placing senior leaders at tech, entertainment and AI companies. Learn more at MissionOne IO. 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