Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030

Akin Babayigit 0:00 I mean, the size is just comical. I mean, like, you know, there's a lot of things you listen to around saying, like, gaming is bigger than movies and films combined, right? That's a very real thing. But even then, you know, people misunderstand how big gaming is.

Harry Stebbings 0:14 (instrumental music) Ekin, I am so excited for this, my friend. We've known each other for a while. I'm so thrilled that you took the time to join me, so thank you so much.

Akin Babayigit 0:22 Man, it's such a privilege. It's an honor. I do have to say, you know, first of all, on a personal level, I really love you. Really. On a professional level, I think most people don't know, but, uh, we have an amazing professional relationship. You're an investor in our business as well. And we'll talk about kind of startup advice and all of that, but most people don't know you're actually a media entrepreneur, not just any VC. For me, it's such an amazing privilege to be here. You're one of the very few people I tell my kids about at dinner table. I say, "You know, Uncle Harry did this." You know, "I want you to do this like Uncle Harry when they were ..." And it's not me blowing smoke up your ass. This is really legitimate, and I'm really, really happy to be here.

Harry Stebbings 1:03 I mean, poor kids. Uh, one-

Akin Babayigit 1:05 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:05 ... (laughs) and then that, and that will lead to Wandsworth Prison. Uh, but, uh, no, it's funny. I always say when I think about you and Leo, uh, these are the founders where whatever they were doing, it could be selling kitchen knives, you just wanna give them all of your money.

Harry Stebbings 1:17 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 1:17 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:17 But no, I was, uh, talking to JZ before the show and he gave me this very apt description of Turkish Muslim-

Akin Babayigit 1:23 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:23 ... sent by your mother, not by the government.

Akin Babayigit 1:25 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:26 Yale HBS. Give me the snapshot. Like, how did that happen?

Akin Babayigit 1:29 Sure. So, um, I grew up in Turkey, uh, until I was 16, and I was this mega nerd. I was in, like, the math Olympiad team, and I was just, I was one of those people that, um, I was social, but I wasn't, um, you know, externally facing, externally friendly. My mother, um, came in one day, and my mother is not for the faint of heart, and she said, "I decided to put you on a exam for the Rotary Club to go to the US." And I protested and I said, "I don't want to. I'm happy here in Turkey." And, and she came and she said, "Fine, you can be a garbageman then." And that was the end of discussion. So next thing I knew, I was in a exam room, uh, with the Rotary Club. I went to the US, into Wisconsin. And you took a math nerd from Turkey, put them in Tomah, Wisconsin, uh, where not only people did not see anybody from anywhere else, people never saw anyone with dark hair.

Harry Stebbings 2:29 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 2:29 That was an incredible experience. I was the outsider, and that was a very defining moment for me. If I made it in Tomah, uh, you know, I could make it anywhere. So I, uh, stayed on in Wisconsin. I love Wisconsin. I love the US. Met my wife in university, uh, in Wisconsin, studied there. Um, went to graduate school. I was... I thought I wanted to become a professor. Uh, absolutely horrible idea for me.

Harry Stebbings 2:58 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 2:58 Um, and, uh, just like what most people don't, you know... Most people that do consulting don't know what they wanna do with their life. That was me. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life at that point. Uh, decided to just stop graduate school, left Yale, went to McKinsey, spent two years at McKinsey. I absolutely hated it. Um-

Harry Stebbings 3:19 (laughs) Why did you hate it?

Akin Babayigit 3:21 It was a very rigid environment intellectually. There was a way to do things, and, uh, if you didn't do things that way, you would fail, right? And at the time, I couldn't articulate it, but I, you know, wasn't the c- type of person that would, um, you know, necessarily follow the rules. I wouldn't kind of do the way they wanted me to do the analysis and so on and so forth. But the analysis I did was correct, but, you know... So I couldn't just bring myself to act a certain way and, and just kind of, uh, think the McKinsey way. I thought a little bit different, and that made me, you know, not a very strong performer. Initially, I was a very strong performer. Towards the end, I was, you know, not a very good performer at all.

Harry Stebbings 4:08 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 4:08 So I then left and I went to, uh, work for the United Nations for a couple years.

Harry Stebbings 4:13 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 4:13 And that was awesome, right? That was a great experience, um, except, you know, I realized quickly there's not much money to be made there.

Harry Stebbings 4:20 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 4:21 So then I decided to learn more about the world and this thing called business. I went to Harvard Business School. Um, and that was a very interesting experience. Um-

Harry Stebbings 4:30 Was it transformational for you?

Akin Babayigit 4:32 It was in many ways, in the good way and the bad way as well. Um-

Harry Stebbings 4:36 What was the good and the bad way?

Akin Babayigit 4:38 So HBS was a place where I, um, I struggled a lot to fit in initially, because there's, uh, definitely, um, a lot of, um, you know... There's an HBS way of doing things again, right? There's... And, and there's a group of people who are, you know, you can smell them a mile away. They're the HBS people, right? And initially, the first year, I really tried to fit in with that crowd. And, um-

Harry Stebbings 5:05 You're not that crowd. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 5:08 I'm not that crowd. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 5:09 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 5:09 I'm not that crowd, right? So then I realized actually, it's okay. And I tell this to, to my daughter and to my son all the time. It's like, it's okay to not fit into that crowd as long as, you know, you make your own kind of friendships and your own circle. So the second year I did much better. I actually kind of was okay. I was at, you know, peace with not kind of fitting in, um, and I was just much more happier. Um, so I think a lot of the people that I met... So HBS has a- around 900 kids every year. And it was transformative for me, not because of the things I've learned, 'cause I didn't learn much. But I did learn by talking to people what they are, you know, w- what they do, who they are, what gets them motivated. And I learned through those conversations a lot about the, you know, business world, how people think, what drives them, what motivates them.

Harry Stebbings 6:02 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 6:02 That to me was very transformative. And, you know, the friendships that you form at HBS, they, you take them with you for life.

Harry Stebbings 6:10 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 6:10 You know? So that was, that was very good.

Harry Stebbings 6:13 So we take HBS.

Akin Babayigit 6:14 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 6:14 How did we la- land at Facebook?

Akin Babayigit 6:16 So, after HBS, I went to, uh, work at Skype for a couple years. Um, I worked for, uh, Josh Silverman, who's now running Etsy. He actually-

Harry Stebbings 6:24 Yeah, I had him on the show two years ago.

Akin Babayigit 6:26 He is awesome.

Harry Stebbings 6:27 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 6:27 I, I actually listened to that. He's awesome. Very, very nice. That was an amazing experience. Skype was very much like Facebook in the early days, you know? Engineering culture dominated by very strong technically apt engineers.

Harry Stebbings 6:40 Can I ask-

Akin Babayigit 6:40 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 6:40 ... what did you learn from Skype and your time at Skype that you now apply or have taken with you to managing and leading at Tripledot?

Akin Babayigit 6:48 I learned how to ruthlessly prioritize. So, Skype was a very small company. At its peak, I think it was about 300, 400 people, um, and it was dominating the v- voice over IP market and it could've dominated so much more. Um, and, you know, I mean, it was spun off from eBay, acquired by this investor consortium, sold it to Microsoft for, I think, $8.1 billion. And Skype was an engineering-led organization, and being engineering-led, you know, there's no room for fluff. And I developed a very strong, I would say, distaste for fluff while I was at Skype, um, and that really forced me... When you're talking with an Estonian engineer about the, you know, total addressable market or what's Skype's position in it, et cetera, you learn very quickly to get to the heart of the matter very, very fast.

Harry Stebbings 7:45 Can I... I s-

Akin Babayigit 7:45 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 7:46 I struggle with this 'cause I similarly have a distaste for fluff. But when I come in and say, "Hey, forget all the bullshit. Like, just show me last week's performance," n- people are like, "Harry, that, that was too cold. It was jarring."

Akin Babayigit 7:56 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 7:56 "And actually, you need to be m- warmer."

Akin Babayigit 7:58 Sure.

Harry Stebbings 7:59 And I struggle with the balance. How do you retain that humanity with-

Akin Babayigit 8:03 Sure.

Harry Stebbings 8:03 ... kinda, "Let's get to the card of the problem"?

Akin Babayigit 8:06 A lot of it has to do with my personal style, and I think... So, uh, first of all, I'd be very surprised if you are as cold as you just made it out to be. I think you mean well, and anyone that knows you knows that you mean well. And the same, anyone that knows me knows I mean super well. I mean, I, you know... One of the things you told me earlier was that I'm too nice.

Harry Stebbings 8:28 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 8:29 And, um, that is probably true, and I lean into that because I am a nice person, and I am not an asshole.

Harry Stebbings 8:36 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 8:37 And when I am saying something, uh, let's say, "Let's talk about last week's numbers," people know it's me just really wanting to get to the core of the matter. I have almost zero ego, and you know, so I think it's just this, you know... I hope people know what I mean when I say, "Let's talk about the bad performance last week," or so on. And I think d- a lot of this I learned at Skype, and this was done via many, many, many interactions with very apt Estonian engineers. (laughs) You know, that was, that was just something that was, uh ... yeah.

Harry Stebbings 9:11 So, we take this, uh, concision or focus or prioritization.

Harry Stebbings 9:15 Uh, tell me, then we move to Facebook?

Akin Babayigit 9:17 Yes. So, um, actually, in between, when I was at Skype, I was presented with this world of mobile gaming. So, you know, I'm not a gamer. I don't have a console at home, but I learned about this game called Zynga's FarmVille back at the time. And-

Harry Stebbings 9:35 I loved FarmVille.

Akin Babayigit 9:36 Isn't that amazing?

Harry Stebbings 9:36 Oh, my God. It was amazing.

Akin Babayigit 9:37 It's still around, right?

Harry Stebbings 9:38 I, I, I didn't know it was still around. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 9:39 It's, it's... There's, like, FarmVille 3 now. It's, it's amazing.

Harry Stebbings 9:42 Does it still make money?

Akin Babayigit 9:43 It still makes money. It's not as big as it once was-

Harry Stebbings 9:46 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 9:46 ... you know? But the thing that was absolutely amazing at the time, I read a statistic somewhere that there was more tractors being sold in a day on FarmVille than anywhere else in the world combined. And now, it seems like almost, like, a foregone conclusion, but back then, it blew my mind. And I started to get into it a little bit more and actually started playing it myself, and it was very different in terms of a game design philosophy. You know, the games that I knew, you would play for an hour a day, uh, continuously, and you'd be done with it, and you'd go do your homework. This was, I kept coming back every 30 seconds, and, you know, whatever it was, and just trying to do something in the game. And that element of understanding the psychology behind that actually made me interview at Zynga, and this was in 2010, and back then, I was told the culture at Zynga was not very good. I had classmates from HBS who were working there, so I ended up not taking that job. But I got bitten by the gaming bug, effectively. Um-

Harry Stebbings 10:50 And then joined Facebook?

Akin Babayigit 10:51 Yeah. So I went, and I, I flirted with the idea of going to Turkey at the time 'cause my wife, who is, by the way, the most absolutely incredible woman I've ever met in my life, she is irrationally attached to her family. So, she said, "Let's go be closer to our families." And at the time, Turkey was growing in popularity as a destination. I had many g- good friends who started businesses in Turkey and said, "Let's go see what this Turkey thing is about." So, I, for a couple of months, I actually joined, uh, this company called Peak Games out of Istanbul-

Harry Stebbings 11:23 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 11:24 ... as an advisor. And, uh, that... And they were making Facebook games at the time, and through that, I met Julien, our common friend, and joined Facebook-

Harry Stebbings 11:35 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 11:35 ... and, uh, decided not to move to Turkey at the end and instead came to London.

Harry Stebbings 11:39 So, I'm sure Julien was fishing here, but he asked, when you review the time that you had at Facebook, it was such a transformative time for the company and for you, I'm sure.

Harry Stebbings 11:47 What were some of your biggest takeaways from being at Facebook?

Akin Babayigit 11:49 Yes.Facebook was an incredible place. I mean, I, um, I really absolutely loved being- spending time there. And I think my Facebook experience probably is very different than a lot of people's Facebook experience because, because I was in London. London felt like an, you know, a startup within Facebook at the time. And a lot of that credit goes to Julian who was, like, the best boss I ever had, right? And he was awesome, and, you know, I still owe everything I've done to this day to him and he'll, he'll c- call m- He'll say I'm bullshitting, but it's true.

Harry Stebbings 12:19 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 12:19 Um, and the biggest thing I learned at Facebook actually is things are never as bad as they seem and never as good as they seem. So it's a very stoic thing to think about and this I actually heard in a all hands with Mark. Um, and when I joined Facebook, you know, uh, it was 2012 and soon after Facebook launched the, uh, their mobile offering, right? Because they were getting really heavily criticized about they don't have a presence on mobile, they missed the boat on mobile.

Harry Stebbings 12:48 Sure, it was one of the reasons for their IPO tanking.

Akin Babayigit 12:50 Exactly. It opened at, I think, 38 bucks, went down to 19 bucks. My wife said, "Hey, are you sure that you did the right thing by joining?" And I was like, "I actually don't know, but I think so." And I remember Mark being extremely calm and actually almost in a way confident and that to me at the time seemed a bit wrong almost because, uh, you know. And when I came to the kind of the ground floor, I understood that he believed in what they could do, uh, as a mobile offering, right? And the people were just spending insane amount of time on their mobile devices in Facebook at the time and Facebook invented a new type of ad unit, um, called the mobile app- uh, mobile ads at the time, but really it was mobile app ads. And, uh, fast forward to this day is 90+ percent of Facebook's revenue is, is coming from that. So, um, I remember how calm Mark was and, uh, you know, he did say, "Things are never as bad as they seem. They're never a- as good as they seem." And I, I s- that's the one thing I learned, you know. When things are going, you know, absolutely horrendously, you know, I try to stay as calm as possible and when things are going, you know, incredibly well and so on, I try to bring w- a sense of realism and, you know.

Harry Stebbings 14:05 It's a really interesting kind of element of my investing that's actually changed, which is, like, I always used to love young founders.

Akin Babayigit 14:10 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 14:10 And the truth is with young founders, they're much more volatile to swings, good and bad.

Akin Babayigit 14:15 Yes. Yes.

Harry Stebbings 14:15 And I find actually with, respectfully, older founders, ahem-

Akin Babayigit 14:18 (clears throat) (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 14:19 ... uh, that you're just much more tempered.

Akin Babayigit 14:20 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 14:21 Good, bad, you know that actually what matters is your child's health, what matters is the family that you have at home.

Akin Babayigit 14:26 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 14:27 A day of performance on Facebook doesn't actually matter.

Akin Babayigit 14:29 Exactly. That's such a good point because it will all be okay. We will all be okay at the end of the day. Um, there are times when, you know, you have to act and you have to act with, you know, uh, gusto and you have to kind of, uh, you know, fight.

Harry Stebbings 14:42 What was one of those times at Facebook when you had to act with gusto?

Akin Babayigit 14:46 Oh, there were so many. Um-

Harry Stebbings 14:48 Was there ever a time when it was as bad as it seemed?

Akin Babayigit 14:50 So I do remember, um, when we launched app ads originally, and this'll sound comical, but, you know, obviously, it was not, you know, it was not a foregone conclusion that those ads would work because they are a new ad format, they're native ads. And when we launched those, um, I got so excited that I went and kind of told all the partners that were working with Facebook at the time about this amazing thing and so on. I remember all my partners being extremely frustrated that these ads weren't ... 'cause they- it took them, you know, six to nine months to figure out. I remember there was a famous bug on Facebook Android that just, you know, these ads weren't delivering and there was something wrong. Um, and that moment I remember thinking it is, you know, this may not work because it's just, you know, the performance of the ads were not there and all my partners were pretty frustrated with the performance and so on and I thought maybe it's not gonna work y- you know. There was somebody that discovered a bug in Menlo Park, I can't remember exactly who it was, whatever, but, um, it was a step function change. Over a week, these ads started delivering and, you know, it's ... And fast forward, I think there was a period of time when I think 35% of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from, like, three developers in Russia at the time, which is absolutely incredible, right? This is how hungry they were for this kind of, uh, offering. And, and, you know, they were game developers and game developers are always very hungry to adopt new things that might be game changers.

Harry Stebbings 16:27 Please, dear God, tell me you hired them for Tripledot. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 16:30 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 16:31 Uh, okay. Before we dive into the meat of the show, so we have that amazing experience at Facebook.

Akin Babayigit 16:35 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 16:36 Tripledot founding.

Akin Babayigit 16:37 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 16:37 What was that, "You know what, darling? I'm gonna leave the well-paid job at Facebook and I'm gonna found a game studio in London with my mate, Liel."

Akin Babayigit 16:44 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 16:45 How does that come about?

Akin Babayigit 16:46 Sure. So there's actually interim step. There's um, uh, a guy that I really love called, uh, Humam. He was the chief strategy officer at Activision Blizzard.

Harry Stebbings 16:56 I spoke to him before the show.

Akin Babayigit 16:57 Did you? Okay.

Harry Stebbings 16:57 Yeah. He is fantastic.

Akin Babayigit 16:58 I'm very curious.

Harry Stebbings 16:59 He's coming on the show actually.

Akin Babayigit 17:00 Is he?

Harry Stebbings 17:00 Because I did a reference for you.

Akin Babayigit 17:02 Okay. All right.

Harry Stebbings 17:02 And then I was like, "Actually, you'd be fantastic on the show. Will you come?" And he was like, "Totally." ............................ (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 17:07 He's, he's great. I, I, I do owe him. He's like, you know, he's- I do owe him so much. He's an absolute amazing guy. I worked with Humam, uh, when I was at McKinsey in Stamford, actually in Stamford, Connecticut back in the days, 2004. Um, and, uh, I, you know, he, he, uh, was the chief strategy officer at Activision, bought King, and I joined him at King effectively. I-

Harry Stebbings 17:30 Mm-hmm.

Akin Babayigit 17:30 One of the biggest reason I joined King was because Humam was there. And I wanted to have a proper game company experience because at Facebook I had an inkling that this is what I want to do-

Harry Stebbings 17:39 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 17:40 ... is start a game studio, but I didn't really have a, you know, proper experience.

Harry Stebbings 17:44 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 17:45 So, uh, joined, you know, Humam at King and it was great.Um, but the thing that I, um, kind of realized is, you know, when I joined, King was also a large company. And I left Facebook because I was frustrated how big it was and how bureaucratic everything was getting. And, you know, there's a saying called, you know, "A camel is des- is a horse designed by a committee." And Facebook was designing, you know, camels all the time. And I left, and I joined, um, King. And, you know, King was a larger company as well. It wasn't, you know, obviously as big as Facebook. But, um, you know, I wanted to do something that was much more impactful. And I knew Lior, you know, for many, many years from my experience at Facebook. And, um, and I actually initially reached out to Lior because, you know, we wanted to do a project within King that, you know, I thought maybe, you know, we could get him interested. And through that, we started kind of conversating again. And the thing that I remember specifically about Lior was here's a guy who's, you know, exceptionally smart, but what impressed me more than that was how good of a person he is. And, you know, he's just a good person. He has an amazing heart, always tries to do the right thing, and it's very rare... Like, before meeting Lior, the, one of the kind of porn that I heard in the startup world was that, you know, successful founders are always assholes, right? Um, this was the thing that I kept on hearing.

Harry Stebbings 19:19 Still hear it today.

Akin Babayigit 19:20 There you go, right? And y-

Harry Stebbings 19:22 Or it's like, or they're a monster. They're a machine.

Akin Babayigit 19:24 They're a monster. They have this, like, you know, insatiable inner thing, et cetera. And I met Lior, and he was none of those things. He's... Don't get me wrong. He's not, you know, a, you know, motherhood and apple pie kind of guy.

Harry Stebbings 19:36 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 19:36 He's Israeli. He spent eight years in the army and so on. Um, and also Eyal, our, our third co-founder, right, they were just... Like, they're the type of people if something bad happens to you, you want them taking over your family affairs, and you want them to make sure that your family is well taken care of. And, you know, he's a guy who successfully sold a business to a publicly listed company and still goes home every night at 6:00 PM to have dinner with his family. That was incredible. Like, I was like, you know, "That is someone that I want to learn from, I want to partner with." Um, and that really drove the decision beyond anything else. And at the time, I was looking into, um, actually on, on the side, I was developing some of these games myself, like Solitaire and so on, because the thesis was, you know, gaming will always be... I mean, I'm simplifying to make a point, but, you know, there will always be a market for Solitaire.

Harry Stebbings 20:32 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 20:32 And I felt that I could and we could out-execute some of the other companies that were making solitaire games. And w- as we started to talk more and more with Lior, I felt that we were thinking very much on similar terms. So, that's kind of how it all started.

Harry Stebbings 20:46 Man, I absolutely love that. And when you were also describing Lior, I'm like, "He is the definition of, like, ruthlessly effective-"

Akin Babayigit 20:53 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 20:53 "... in the most productive way." (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 20:54 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 20:54 But, uh, incredible.

Harry Stebbings 20:56 No, I love that. So, you mentioned, um, kind of the startup porn or mantras that we hear.

Akin Babayigit 21:00 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 21:00 You gave me quite a few before we, uh, did this-

Akin Babayigit 21:03 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 21:03 ... and I love them. Uh, and so I wanna start with one, and, uh, (laughs) it's the idea that you have to be passionate about essentially your domain that you pursue.

Akin Babayigit 21:12 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 21:13 Uh, you have to choose something that you love, and you say that's not true.

Akin Babayigit 21:17 It's... I mean, I think it's absolute bullsh- bullshit. Uh, excuse my French, but-

Harry Stebbings 21:21 Why is that?

Akin Babayigit 21:22 So, I have many friends, successful entrepreneurs, and some of them, actually one of them lives in Canada, and he is in the insurance space. And I can guarantee you he's not passionate about the insurance space. I've never met a single person who is passionate about the domain of insurance. Maybe you might have, but I haven't.

Harry Stebbings 21:40 Terribly boring. I'm-

Akin Babayigit 21:41 It's horrible, right?

Harry Stebbings 21:41 ... so bored by insurance... (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 21:43 And, uh, so that's just not, you know, that's just not true. He's very successful. The business is very successful. Um, I'm the living example of this. I think, you know, Triple Doll- Triple, uh, Dot is a company that's doing quite well, um, but I'm not a gamer by definition. Now, it depends on what you mean by gamer. But any kind of definition you have, you know, I am not a hardcore gamer. I do like games. I like the business of games. I like the philosophy of games, but I'm, I'm not a gamer. I am passionate about winning, and I think that's the biggest difference, because I think, you know, I invest in a lot of companies as mi- myself as well. And I think the thing that people, you know, like, I guess, working with me is, you know, I, I don't have this incentive to, um, tell people, give people this startup porn advice, right? I say, you know... So, and there's a lot of them out there. Um, so, I think being passionate about the domain that you're in is great. It's a luxury. It's not a must to have.

Harry Stebbings 22:50 I think a lot of people say if you're not passionate about it, and I, I agree with you there, but I, I think a lot of people say if you're not passionate about it, when the hard times come and it's a bad day, you'll give up.

Akin Babayigit 23:00 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 23:00 How do you respond to that?

Akin Babayigit 23:02 I think you have to be passionate about winning. I think... An- we're all wired differently, right? If you're passionate about winning, when the hard c- hard times do come, and they will come-

Harry Stebbings 23:13 Yep.

Akin Babayigit 23:13 ... in anything in life, then you need this...... engine, internal engine to propel you through. But that passion doesn't have to be directed to the domain, you know? I think it's a very Western-centric view of the world to think that you have to be, you know, passionate about the domain that you're in, and I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who are just, you know, hard learners, w- hard workers and learners, they end up not pursuing perfectly good lucrative jobs, um, because of this kind of advice.

Harry Stebbings 23:51 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 23:51 Uh, don't get me wrong. If you're one of the few people that have, you know... Like, Eyal is a great example, right? Like, Eyal was born to be in the gaming industry.

Harry Stebbings 23:59 Uh-huh.

Akin Babayigit 24:00 You know, if I saw him doing anything else, I would forcefully take him out of there and then put him in the game industry. But that's, that's a luxury. That's not the rule.

Harry Stebbings 24:10 I, I, I don't know if you've actually seen the studies on post-baby effects, and it analyzes entrepreneurs post having a baby, either man or woman-

Akin Babayigit 24:16 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 24:16 ... but actually, they are, like, significantly higher likelihood to be successful. I think it goes back to your thing. They might not be passionate, but actually, you have the passion to succeed-

Akin Babayigit 24:25 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 24:25 ... for your child's welfare, for their life to come.

Akin Babayigit 24:28 I think-

Harry Stebbings 24:28 Do you see what I mean?

Akin Babayigit 24:28 Absolutely. That checks out so much-

Harry Stebbings 24:30 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 24:30 ... because earlier, at the beginning of the show, one of the things we talked about is how much I respect you, right? And I think you're unstoppable because you have a why, right? The thing with your mother and-

Harry Stebbings 24:40 Mm-hmm.

Akin Babayigit 24:40 ... you know, that's your why, and as long as you have a why, you can bear any how.

Harry Stebbings 24:45 Yep.

Akin Babayigit 24:45 So you just have to find your own why. That why does not have to be the domain that you're operating in.

Harry Stebbings 24:50 Y- Sorry, I'm, I'm fascinated. We, we, we always hear this. Like, people are scared to say, like, "Actually, I'm doing it for the money. I really are." Do you think we are overly cynical about people who do it for the money and we kind of actually stigmatize it wrongly?

Akin Babayigit 25:02 That is such a good point. Absolutely, yes. It's okay to do it for the money.

Harry Stebbings 25:06 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 25:07 It's okay. I'm not doing it for the money, but you know what? Money is a great plus.

Harry Stebbings 25:11 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 25:12 I mean, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can eliminate some forms of unhappiness.

Harry Stebbings 25:16 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 25:17 Right? And a lot of people, um, fetishize this kind of, you know, grandiose meanings in life and, you know, what it means to have a mission statement and you put it on the wall, and, and I just think there's just so much ingenuine- Like, there's just so much lack of genuineness around this, that you know what? A lot of people are doing it for the money. Other people, like me, we're doing it because we think we're good at it and we want to win, and this is... We just happened to found something that we are good at doing, and that drives us. You know, you might be doing it for, you know, your mom-

Harry Stebbings 25:54 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 25:54 ... money. I'm doing it for my kids. I want them to be proud of... You know, these are all perfectly acceptable solutions.

Harry Stebbings 26:00 The lovely thing about us being so close is, like, I can, we can have a very frank... I always was doing it for the money.

Akin Babayigit 26:05 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 26:05 Always. But then the hardest thing came when I actually kind of had a little bit.

Akin Babayigit 26:09 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 26:09 I can be frank, I had $1 million on my balcony, I was like 21, and I said, "I watch Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with Chris Tarrant-"

Akin Babayigit 26:14 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 26:14 "... and then I'll be happy." And I didn't have any friends, and I didn't really have anything. I, I w- you know, I had my mother and that was it.

Akin Babayigit 26:22 Yes. Yes.

Harry Stebbings 26:23 And then it's... That was a really hard moment because you're like, "Well, then I don't actually know what makes me happy."

Akin Babayigit 26:27 Yes. You know what? That's why the relationships that you form in life are-

Harry Stebbings 26:33 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 26:33 ... the true wealth. They truly are. But, you know, it's such a human nature to want to experience the good things in life and to, you know... And money is, you know... Money shou- probably shouldn't be your number one goal.

Harry Stebbings 26:48 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 26:48 But you know what? If that's what drives you and that's, that's totally okay.

Harry Stebbings 26:52 I wish people would come into hiring processes and say it if it is, because I would structure incentives to make them get more money-

Akin Babayigit 26:58 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 26:58 ... if they achieve goals.

Akin Babayigit 27:00 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 27:00 But they don't. They talk about their passions and their visions-

Akin Babayigit 27:02 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 27:02 ... and it's, like, not their passions and visions.

Akin Babayigit 27:04 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 27:04 Now, another startup porn thing that you said which I loved was, "You have to be solving a real problem."

Akin Babayigit 27:09 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 27:10 Again, didn't agree with that one, did you? (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 27:12 Yeah, I mean, this one is a lit- So, look, Solit- another Solit... The world doesn't need another solitaire app, right? (laughs) So from that lens, we really weren't solving a real problem, right? Um, and I'm not necessarily super opposed to this in the sense that, like, I'm not advocating you don't solve a real problem. I mean, of course, if you happen to solve a real problem, that's fantastic and more power to you. But, you know how many, you know, aspiring entrepreneurs I've spoken with that just thought this was the starting point, this was the point they get off the ground? And the fact of the matter is, true innovation happens through iteration, right? You start working on something and you iterate, you do this thing 1% different, this thing 1% different, and then the aggregate impact ends up being something completely innovative. So, I don't like this advice in the sense that I don't think it's necessarily just false, but I think it's a bit misleading because it's okay, you know. We started out building a solitaire app, you know. One of the companies that I was very fortunate to partner with is Dream Games, and they're building a match-3 game, and you know what? World has plenty of match-3 games, but theirs is performing much better now. So, you know, there's this thing that you have to be, you know, solving a real problem of some- building something that doesn't exist, and if you, if you're lucky enough to find something like that, by all means. I'm not disparaging that. But not everyone has to do that.

Harry Stebbings 28:46 So, I have so

Harry Stebbings 28:47 many things to unpack. You said there about kind of the iterative element.

Akin Babayigit 28:49 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 28:50 I always believed, and especially pre-product market fit, when I look at my seed investments, the biggest determinant of whether they reach or not is their speed of execution.

Akin Babayigit 28:57 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 28:57 Their speed of, like, in between-

Akin Babayigit 28:59 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 28:59 ... iterations.

Akin Babayigit 29:00 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 29:01 Do you agree with that focus on speed and speed of execution?

Akin Babayigit 29:04 Broadly speaking, yes. This is not something that, uh, you know, I have, um... I can't say that, you know... Like, speed is very important, right? But the porn around speed is something that I'm uncomfortable with because...... speed of execution allows you to do more iterations than others.

Harry Stebbings 29:23 Yep.

Akin Babayigit 29:23 Right? But there are points that this is a road, and the road has curves. And you know what? When you're approaching those curves, sometimes you have to just slow down and actually think and take your time. So, I've seen, you know, many, many companies in Turkey, also in Israel, uh, where I also do quite a bit of investing, that, you know, they have this mantra and they put it on the walls and say, you know, speed over all, speed above everything else. And sometimes, just sometimes, they are too fast when they approach one of those curves and they go off the cliff. Um, at Facebook we had,

Akin Babayigit 30:00 um, these posters, right? They said, "Done is better than perfect." And then, I agree with that in general, in spirit, but when you go over to finance, they said, "Done is better than perfect, except in finance."

Harry Stebbings 30:12 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 30:14 Sometimes done is just more important. And the perfect example in gaming for this is there's, um, two brothers, um, called Ig- Igor and Dmitry. They're probably the best kept secret in mobile gaming, uh, Playrix. They-

Harry Stebbings 30:26 I've heard about these guys. Tell me about these guys.

Akin Babayigit 30:28 It is an absolutely incredible story. They are two brothers who started building... They're from, uh, Vologda, Russia, right? Middle of nowhere. They started building games. Initially, they started building games for... They were, um, pay-to-play games, not even free-to-play, which was the revolution in gaming. I met them in 2013 in Moscow when I was working at Facebook. Um, they... When I told everyone about, you know, like, mobile games, free-to-play, everyone jumped on it. And I remember talking to Igor, and Igor was kind of quite careful, and he kind of just wanted to, you know, see if this Facebook thing was real. And so, they just took their time. But when they executed, they executed so well. They weren't necessarily prioritizing speed. And today, well-

Harry Stebbings 31:16 What do you think they did to execute so well?

Akin Babayigit 31:19 First of all, I think they really, uh... And this is a bit anticlimactic because there's no silver bullet in execution. I mean, we are, you know, as a company, we are, you know, we priden ourselves very, very strong executors. Um, and when people say, "What do you do when you're that good?" It's... The answer is really not one thing. It's just we pay attention to details. We, um, make sure that, you know, what matters, we spend a lot of time on, and what doesn't matter, we don't spend time. And that, that judgment is something that's really, you know, you develop it over a period of time. It's not something that can...

Harry Stebbings 31:57 It's so funny, one of my great friends is Gustav Soderstrom, who's the CEO at Spotify, and he says, "Details are not details, they are the product."

Akin Babayigit 32:03 Absolutely.

Harry Stebbings 32:04 And I love that.

Akin Babayigit 32:05 100%.

Harry Stebbings 32:05 Um, you, you also mentioned that, uh, kind of going back to the, um, you don't have to be solving a real problem, and actually great, great business... Fuck, TripleDot's a great business. Are built, not necessarily solving a real problem. How do you advise founders who think, "Well, I need to articulate that we're solving a real problem to raise money, to raise a pre-seed round, a seed round?" How do you advise them?

Akin Babayigit 32:27 It's a great point. I think, um, it depends a little bit on their backgrounds, right? If they are, you know... L- let's take gaming, for instance, um, and Dream Games is a perfect example of this, right? They... These are guys who's built two hits before, Toy Blast and Toon Blast, when they were at Peak Games. And, uh, when they came out, you know, with the kind of idea of starting a new studio, you know, my advice to them was, "You guys m- may not know how good you are, so you don't even need to tell people what you're gonna build, because it's gonna change over time." And that was true, and that resonated, you know, where they, they had, I think, in their pitch deck, they had like seven slides, and three of the slides talk about who the team was and what they've built before. Because truly, no one should care.

Harry Stebbings 33:18 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 33:18 Like, if you simplify it to its core, what you say you're gonna build is going to change. I don't care who says what. It, it will be different. So to me, if you have the strength to lean on your previous experience, I would say lean on that, right? But if you're a first-time founder, if you're a brilliant guy out of university, if you're a, you know, a Facebook engineer and you're go... And you have to justify what you're going to build. You just have to play the game. So then, I advise them on how to play the game and how to communicate what they're going to build in a way that's, you know, defensible.

Harry Stebbings 33:52 The hardest thing for me as an investor, and I use you as the example here. I knew you well before, like, I invested in TripleDot. It was the easiest decision ever, trust you to the hills.

Akin Babayigit 34:03 Okay.

Harry Stebbings 34:03 It's just so ea-... I don't have that luxury with 99%, like you don't when you meet a founder. So as in... And attribution's hard.

Akin Babayigit 34:11 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 34:11 You said that, like, oh, you know, say what you've done and articulate your credits. But attribution's not always true. Some people take credit for things they didn't do. How do you think about actually determining quality in those people when you don't have that historical relationship arc?

Akin Babayigit 34:27 Yes. I think, you know, it's, it's not an easy thing. It's, there's, again, no silver bullets, because every rule we generate, we can c- you know, come up with counterexamples.

Harry Stebbings 34:38 Right.

Akin Babayigit 34:38 But I... In my experience, the people, um, that have s- that will succeed, if you kind of look back, they'll have grit, they'll have perseverance. They're the ones that actually respond to you right away. Like, you don't want someone who, you know, when you're communicating with them, take their time to respond to you or whatever it is. Um, but those are signals. How do you get down to the core, you know? I don't know. It's very hard. It's a very hard question. I think it's like falling in love. I... If you told me to write an algorithm to fall in love, I couldn't. But you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing, you know?

Harry Stebbings 35:14 I, I, I totally... (laughs) Wait a second.

Akin Babayigit 35:17 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 35:17 Uh, I totally get you there. Um,

Harry Stebbings 35:20 next startup poor man. I'm loving this. Like, we should do a show together. Fuck 20VC. We should just call it Startup Poor Man who's, like, disabled.

Akin Babayigit 35:26 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 35:27 Um, okay. You said, "When you do this startup, your life will now suck for a while. That's just how it is." I've heard this many times. I've actually...... said it, um, why is this wrong?

Akin Babayigit 35:38 That's just wrong 'cause, yes, I mean, there are cases that that will be the case. But depends on what you mean by your life will suck. My life didn't suck when I was building Tripledot, um, you know, um, my life... And not because I wasn't working like a dog, but, you know, my life... You know when my life sucked? When I was working two hours a day towards the tail end of my career at Facebook. By all measures, it was supposed to be super comfortable and, you know, whatever. I was cruising, right? I was barely doing any work at all.

Harry Stebbings 36:09 I guess, what are you doing when you're doing two hours a day? 'Cause we hear about this, like, rest, invest.

Akin Babayigit 36:12 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 36:13 You just, like, sit in the canteen and let someone else-

Akin Babayigit 36:14 Yeah, you spend enough time to learn the inside of the machinery and, you know, you develop an expertise in just kind of punting away responsibility, right? Like, and-

Harry Stebbings 36:24 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 36:25 ... you know, spend time enough there, and... You know, but you know what? My life was absolutely miserable because nothing I did actually mattered and, you know, I was always very frustrated, um, because I couldn't, you know, have any impact whatsoever. And I was always, you know, was like, "Am I gonna be found out?" Like, "Are they gonna realize that I'm doing basically no work here?" And that was not easy, right? That was not good. Compare that to Tripledot where I was working, uh, you know, very, very hard, um, but, you know, I was loving it and my life didn't suck. There was, like, some psychological challenges, like, you know, I used to, um, think about, you know, my HBS friends who were, like, working at Goldman and getting, whatever, millions of dollars a year, and I was basically making, you know, no money (laughs) whatsoever initially, right? That part was, you know, hey man, like, you know, I have a family, I have a kid. But that's when really kind of trust and kind of the comradery comes in, 'cause then I look at Eyal, I look at Lior, and I say, "You know what?" Like, "We're in this together." This is kind of, you know, the family kind of thing. And, um, and, you know, your life doesn't have to suck. It genuinely doesn't, you know. You ta- we talked about work/life balance. I do agree that work/life balance is not true in the standard sense of, you know, you work, you finish your home, y- y- so you, you work, you finish your work, you go home, and then you chill. That's not work/life balance, right? Um, if you're f- you know, lucky enough to be doing something that you like, and I don't mean it in the startup porn way, right? That you're excited about, you're good at. You go home, you sleep, and you're thinking about your work. Um, and that's why I was... I feel fortunate this is kind of what I found with Tripledot. So, you know, your life doesn't have to suck. Yes, you will work hard, you know, but you know what? You can manage your own time, you can manage your own schedule, um, and life doesn't have to suck.

Harry Stebbings 38:25 Speaking of managing your own time and schedule, I hope it's not too personal, but we were just chatting about it before and you sort of spoke about how you structure your evenings.

Akin Babayigit 38:30 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 38:31 Um, can you just talk to me about that, how you structure your evenings, getting the time with family and the work? What does that evening look like for you?

Akin Babayigit 38:37 Yeah, so, um, you know, we talked a little bit about my wife, and, you know, she's such an amazing person. And, um, frankly, when I was working at Facebook, I didn't... I traveled quite a lot and, you know, early on, when we were building Tripledot, you know, I would spend a lot of time, you know, either on the road or whatever, working, um, when things... You know, in the last two years, actually with COVID, what we learned is that we are more masters of our own schedule and destiny than we think. So, I started basically making a point of trying to be home every day by around 7:00, spending that time with the kids. And it's not much, it's two hours a day, but, you know, they, it's great for them, it's great for me, um, and I put them to bed every night, um, and, and, you know, be, basically between 7:00 and 9:00 it's family time, and I try to do nothing related to work between 7:00 and 9:00. And the more you do it, the more it gets known-

Harry Stebbings 39:38 Mm-hmm.

Akin Babayigit 39:38 ... um, and people just s- kind of start auto-censoring it. And then from 9:00 onwards, uh, you know, 9:00 to 10:00, I take a personal break. So every day for about an hour, I watch TV, I play some chess, or whatever it is, and then I, uh, from 10:00 onwards, I, I do work. And that's the work that I actually think is kind of my maker time, effectively, meaning, you know, during the day it's easy to get hijacked by meetings and this and that, but, you know, from 10:00 to 2:00, or 10:00 to 1:00, or whatever it is, you have just, effectively, me time that you're actually able to do whatever you want to do.

Harry Stebbings 40:15 No, I, I totally get you there and, uh, I love that. I think it's so important to have that family time. And you're right, I think it does get known internally. One thing that I think is funny is, and it kind of correlates to this, people say, "It doesn't get easier. It doesn't get easier." Akin, I'm gonna be fucking honest with you, it does. I mean, for me-

Akin Babayigit 40:29 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 40:29 ... I get a San Pellegrino delivered, we sit in a nice studio-

Akin Babayigit 40:32 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 40:32 ... in Belgravia. It gets easier.

Akin Babayigit 40:34 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 40:34 Do you agree it doesn't get easier or are you with me, it does get easier?

Akin Babayigit 40:38 I think it does get easier, right? Because it's... I think it changes... The nature of the problems change. It's like when people ask me about kids, you know? When you have a small kid, you worry about something relatively minuscule every single day. Maybe every single hour, you know, you worry, "Is he breathing? Is he turning?" And as they grow older, you know, the magnitude of the problems increase, but their frequency decreases. So now, with my 12-year-old daughter, I worry about, you know, "Is she hanging out with the right friends? And if she's not, how can I change that?" And, you know, I think it's very similar to work. When we first started the company and, you know, uh, we were... It was different, but it was a different type of different. It was... Now, we're in a place our, um, daily worries, our problems have changed. And to be honest, personally, you know, having more money than I did before, it definitely helps. It's, kind of allows me to focus on things that I want.

Harry Stebbings 41:37 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 41:38 The biggest problem it solves for me is I don't have to spend time...... to optimize for an unknowable upside in the future. I mean-

Harry Stebbings 41:48 What do you mean by that?

Akin Babayigit 41:49 Sure. So, when, you know, when we started the company and even when I was at Facebook, right, I would, you know, become an advisor to company X, and the reason I would do that is, "Hey, what if, you know, they do something really well in the future? I 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 wanna hang out with, uh, because frankly you don't need the XYZ amount from that interaction. So, it does get easier in that sense because you have more freedom. What I'm... 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.

Harry Stebbings 42:33 I'm just wondering why you still hang out with me then. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 42:35 (laughs) I told you, I love you and I do genuinely find this... I think what you're building, and this is 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 is 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'll have, you know, diminishing returns. Your wife is... Your why is very personal. So, that's why I'm here. I don't really, honestly, frankly, I'm not here because you invest in our company because, you know... I mean, thank you, but that's not why I'm here.

Harry Stebbings 43:28 No, I, I totally get you. Um, you mentioned a word there b- being focus.

Akin Babayigit 43:32 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 43:33 And you said actually that, you know, money allows you to have more focus.

Akin Babayigit 43:36 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 43:36 (laughs) But another, you know, porn mantra that we're disembarking-

Akin Babayigit 43:39 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 43:39 ... or disabling here is,

Harry Stebbings 43:41 "Focus is everything. You should focus on a single thing early on and do it very well."

Akin Babayigit 43:45 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 43:46 Heard that many times.

Akin Babayigit 43:47 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 43:47 Why is this wrong?

Akin Babayigit 43:49 Yes. Look, I'll give you a personal example. I mean, we, um... When we started Tripledot, um, early on internally we developed a technology inside Tripledot, um, and this may actually not even be a very well-known story for you either. Um, this technology was developed inside Tripledot, and this was not our core area of focus, right? This wasn't something... Like, we're a mobile games company. We're supposed to be building mobile games all the time. And, um, we developed this technology to enable us to better build games, but then we saw that this was... this, this piece of technology had such a product market fit in the market that we didn't even know about, and we decided to spin this off into a new entity called Luna Labs.

Harry Stebbings 44:39 Okay.

Akin Babayigit 44:39 And we, uh, you know, basically partnered with, uh, you know, another entrepreneur and some of my team from Facebook, and, uh... 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. You're kind of divided between two projects, and, you know, this and that." Um, and you know what? There's maybe some element of, you know... I understand that kind of why they're saying that. But Luna was sold within two years to IronSource for a pretty healthy amount, um, and we were able to execute across both paths together, right? So, I'm not necessarily anti this message, don't get me wrong, but, you know, the message is given with such certainty that if you're an entrepreneur that, you know, you hear this message, 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, right?

Harry Stebbings 45:43 Uh, uh, so do you think this is a g- And I, I really actually quite like misalignment because I think no one talks about misalign... Everyone's like, "Ah, founder, you know, VC is so aligned, so aligned." There's not. There's like clear eyes. Here, to me, that is an area where you can diversify your risk-

Akin Babayigit 45:56 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 45:56 ... create separate pools of cash potentially for you.

Akin Babayigit 45:58 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 45:59 And that's fricking awesome.

Akin Babayigit 46:00 Absolutely.

Harry Stebbings 46:01 But for me as an investor, now obviously I'm invested afterwards-

Akin Babayigit 46:04 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 46:04 ... I'm thrilled that it worked so well. But, like, it, it is still a diversion of attention.

Akin Babayigit 46:09 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 46:10 And that's not in my interest because I don't have holdings in Luna.

Akin Babayigit 46:13 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 46:13 Do you think that's a misalignment between founder and investor?

Akin Babayigit 46:16 So, in our case, again, this goes back to, you know, Lior always doing the right thing, I always try to do the right thing, what we did was, w- precisely because of that, we said, "All people who invested in Tripledot basically will mirror the cap table to Luna."

Harry Stebbings 46:32 Oh, wow.

Akin Babayigit 46:33 So, Julien, who was an investor in Tripledot, basically became an investor in Luna-

Harry Stebbings 46:38 Wow.

Akin Babayigit 46:38 ... without actually investing extra capital into Luna. And when we sold Luna, they all did really well. We didn't have to do that, but we did because-

Harry Stebbings 46:46 That's really good. I did not know that.

Akin Babayigit 46:48 Right? Yeah. So, we... There are ways to address those misalignments, but the core fundamental problem here is when you say, "You must focus on this thing," I think the spirit there is that, you know, you must not spend your time at whatever conferences or this. I, I do buy that. I think you must focus on execution. But this is said with such certainty that I actually have people that, you know, I have spoken with that listen to XYZ podcasts and, you know, some VCs are really, you know, (laughs) dangerously prominent in social media, and they, they say, you know, "Oh, focus on one thing, one thing only." And they... these guys come to me and they say, "Well, I focus on building this type of game, and I'm gonna 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 wrong thing?" So-... that judgment, it all comes down to basically judgment, right? That judgment of what are you focusing on. Are you focusing on the right thing? Or you need to have some breathing room to allow yourself to pivot if the thing, you know, you talked about diversification-

Harry Stebbings 48:00 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 48:00 ... that's so important early on in the journey of the startup. So, you know-

Harry Stebbings 48:05 Unpack that for me. That's a great statement. Why is it so important? 'Cause again, that goes against the core ethos of focus, do one thing well. Why is diversification important?

Akin Babayigit 48:14 Because at the beginning of a startup, right, and in most cases, I mean, we took a different route. We went after a known market, we took on execution risk, right? But 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 kind of developing something and bumping your head against a wall, right? And the message is focus, but that actually reads not as focus, as just keep bumping your head against the wall. And that is a very dangerous advice, because, you know, the real, you know, strength in that case is to know how to pivot.

Harry Stebbings 48:49 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 48:49 And, and, and there, 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, is-

Harry Stebbings 49:03 I, I think that there's one question that I think is really important to ask yourself when questioning that, and it's, do you still have more experiments which you're excited to try?

Akin Babayigit 49:12 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 49:12 And if the answer's no, I think that's the time to pivot.

Akin Babayigit 49:15 That's a great, that's a great way to put it. That might be, um, the formula. That might be the formula, you know? But reality is, sometimes you just don't know what experiments you wanna do, you know? So no one can tell you s- you know, 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, 'cause in the early days, you know, nothing else matters. PR doesn't matter. Brand doesn't matter, you know, it just doesn't matter. You have to be focused on execution. Now, within that constraint, you have to leave yourself, you know, room to pivot into XYZ direction.

Harry Stebbings 49:59 I agree, and I actually disagree. I think that PR and brand often is a bit like culture, and it's a bit like hiring diversity, which is people go, "At, at a stage of time, I will focus on this."

Akin Babayigit 50:09 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 50:09 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. I do think you need to think about it super early. I spend a lot of time with companies on, like, bluntly brand and PR early-

Akin Babayigit 50:22 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 50:22 ... 'cause otherwise you get to a stage and the journalists are like, "Who the fuck are you?" (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 50:26 Yeah. No, I think,

Akin Babayigit 50:28 I think, you know, culture is what happens when you're not looking, right? I heard this somewhere, and I think this is one area of porn that I can subscribe to. It's, um, you know, culture is truly what happens when you are not looking. But I do think that you can spend time on building a brand and building a PR, but that might be time that you're not spending in solving the core. It just depends on, it just depends on the situation, right? My kind of whole beef with this-

Harry Stebbings 50:58 My beef.

Akin Babayigit 50:58 ... my beef with this whole, um, kind of, um, startup porn is that it is given with such confidence and such uniformity, that sh- 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, more power to you, then by all means, you should do that.

Harry Stebbings 51:22 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 51:23 But oftentimes these are, you know, competing things. So, you know.

Harry Stebbings 51:27 And I sometimes see it get well ahead of product and product execution.

Akin Babayigit 51:30 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 51:30 And then you're in a really dangerous territory.

Akin Babayigit 51:32 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 51:32 I think a lot of founders are too good at selling themselves and not selling their companies these days.

Akin Babayigit 51:36 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 51:36 Um, speaking of which, we mentioned culture there, uh, mission and vision.

Akin Babayigit 51:41 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 51:41 Wonderful things.

Akin Babayigit 51:42 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 51:43 Aren't they? Aren't they just wonderful? Uh, you've said before, um, uh, about them being sometimes a challenge. And so I guess, why do you believe that mission and vision statements are usually bullshit?

Akin Babayigit 51:53 Yes. First of all, when I think about vision and, mission and vision statements, right? First of all, I per- and this might be just my shortcoming, right? Throw my hands up. I often have to Google what a mission statement is and what a vision statement is, right? And I've spent enough time, um, across multiple companies to, you know, I should know the difference, but I don't. And the reason I don't know the difference sometimes, right, before I Google-

Harry Stebbings 52:19 I, I don't actually know the difference now.

Akin Babayigit 52:21 See? So 99.9% of the times that you craft a mission and vision statement is because someone tells you, "We have to have a mission and vision statement." Right? 'Cause otherwise, you know, your mission statement could be, "I wanna make as much money as possible." Right? And that's okay. But no one is gonna have a mission statement that says, "I wanna make as much... We exist to make as much money as possible." Right? Why is that? I don't know. I think it's kind of weird, right? Like, this is not, uh, like, you know, we do want to make as much money as possible as Tripledot. But, you know, 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.

Harry Stebbings 53:13 That is not, that is not their mission statement, is it?

Akin Babayigit 53:15 It is.

Harry Stebbings 53:15 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 53:16 I have no idea.

Harry Stebbings 53:17 It's too long, one.

Akin Babayigit 53:19 Yeah. C- I don't know what, you know, give people the power to build communi- I genuinely don't know what that means.

Harry Stebbings 53:25 But Zoom is like, "Bringing happiness." You're like, that's quite generic. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 53:28 (laughs) That's it, you know? Yeah, and actually, I was talking with a colleague of mine, uh, Alex Verbitsky, before the call, and he told me about...... a time when, you know, they were at a, um, WeWork off-site. Uh, he used to work at WeWork, and it's a European kind of, you know, management off-site. Um, and, uh, they were talking about the mission and the vision and, uh, the guy who was leading Europe at the time said, "I got a text from Adam Neumann and said about the new mission statement." And it was something like, "Elevate the world's consciousness."

Harry Stebbings 54:02 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 54:02 And literally 30 seconds later, they got another text saying, "Hey we have a major problem because the toilets are clogged in the Waterloo location."

Harry Stebbings 54:10 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 54:10 You know? It's just, it just does not reflect why you get up and come to work every day. I would challenge any Facebook employee to, you know, in their heart of hearts tell me they go to work every day to, you know, elevate the world's consciousness or whatever it is, p- give power to build community. Most people don't even know what that means.

Harry Stebbings 54:29 So should we not have them?

Akin Babayigit 54:32 I think it's... I am not suggesting, right, that just killing them is just the antidote. Like, I think there's a time and place, right? But I do think why have statements when you know, really most of your employees are gonna think is bullshit. I think they are... They serve a purpose, and the purpose is if you articulate them well and if you're honest with, you know, what the company's mission and vision is, I think they can s- serve a purpose, right? Y- if you ask me what they are for Triple Tot... uh, uh, Tripledot, I will have to look them up because-

Harry Stebbings 55:12 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 55:12 ... you know? The reality is Tripledot exists because... and this doesn't make good mission statement, vision statement, but we want to build a generational company, right? I remember now. Tripledot's mission, I think, or vision, is to be the world's leading data-driven game, th- j- data-driven entertainment company. We spent a lot of time crafting that.

Harry Stebbings 55:34 I like that. That's not bad. It's not fluffy.

Akin Babayigit 55:36 It's not fluffy because the... Look, I mean, it could be even less fluffy, right? It, it could just be, you know, just... But the people around the table when we were crafting that statement, we, we just despise fluffiness, right?

Harry Stebbings 55:50 I think ours is building the next generation of venture-

Akin Babayigit 55:52 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 55:53 ... at the intersection of venture and media.

Akin Babayigit 55:56 See? Okay. So that's, that... It's not something if you put up in the wall, people are gonna be like, "Oh my God, come on, that's bullshit." It's like, that's why I'm here.

Harry Stebbings 56:04 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 56:04 You know? That's what I do every day. That's what makes me get up. Uh-

Harry Stebbings 56:07 I wanted We Use Media to be the best fucking investors.

Akin Babayigit 56:12 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 56:12 But I got told I couldn't swear in a mission and vision statement. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 56:15 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 56:15 I thought it was too direct.

Akin Babayigit 56:16 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 56:17 Um, uh, okay. So when we double down on this. Uh, mission and vision is important for attracting the best talent.

Akin Babayigit 56:23 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 56:24 So (laughs) I'm loving it. Seriously, I think you could do a show, like startup mantras like just, just-

Akin Babayigit 56:29 (laughs) .

Harry Stebbings 56:29 ...

Harry Stebbings 56:30 totally ruined. But you said hiring people with domain expertise is tricky.

Akin Babayigit 56:34 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 56:34 And so you don't often do it.

Akin Babayigit 56:36 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 56:36 Why, why?

Akin Babayigit 56:37 So we... There are times that we do do it. Of course, there are times, you know, like if you are a game studio, you have to have a 3D artist that, you know, is, you know, the, the, the, the subject domain expert, et cetera. Um, I think when I look at, for instance, our marketing department, the guy who's running the marketing department for us does have experience in marketing. Um, but you know, but the people who are, you know, really the kind of folks that are, you know, reporting to him that are running day-to-day, we probably have the strongest marketing team of any gaming company I know. Um, and those people is the first time they all worked in like a gaming company, more or less. And the reason for that is marketing is a field, and, uh, you could talk about this for many other things. It's like any real relevant domain expertise you wanna 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.

Harry Stebbings 57:40 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 57:41 But those people, they are coming from very good schools. They are all incredibly self-driven people. They're all hungry. I think the key word is hunger. They're all hungry. They all tend to be kind of, you know, type A level overachievers that are insecure. Um, and I don't mean this in a bad way. I am a very insecure person as well.

Harry Stebbings 58:04 Same with me.

Akin Babayigit 58:05 So those people, they will just, you know, kill themselves to, you know, make sure that the job gets done. And those are the... That, that is a trait that I don't think you can... I think that's very innate. I don't know if you can teach that to a person. You can teach marketing to anyone. You can teach pretty much anything you do. Even what we discussed, 3D art, you can teach it to a person. You cannot teach the hunger. And this is very true. So the reason we don't... It's not like we don't hire experts, right? But the reason we actually prioritize, um, hunger in the interview process is a very counterintuitive thing to do, because imagine you're, you and I start a company, right? And you know X, I know Y, but we have to also do Z, take marketing for instance. It's very tempting for us to say, "You know what? 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. The thing that they are doing has moved on. They were doing it in a different company with different constraints, with different thing... Everything about it is different.

Harry Stebbings 59:22 So I, I, I've got so many things. First off, like hiring for hunger. I agree.

Akin Babayigit 59:26 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 59:26 I've got this wrong 90% of the time. I thought they were hungry. And honestly, I can... I think this generation is fucking lazy. They do not work... Sorry, I'm on a rant now.

Akin Babayigit 59:34 No, no.

Harry Stebbings 59:35 They do not wanna work hard. They do not want to come into the office. They get paid top dollar and actually they want great package, they want all of this.... and they don't work hard. And so I've misjudged hunger. Have you misjudged hunger, and what have you learned from your hiring success or failures in this?

Akin Babayigit 59:53 Sure. I mean, we're, you know, we have 450 people, I'm sure, and you know-

Harry Stebbings 59:57 Okay.

Akin Babayigit 59:57 ... we get, we get things wrong all the time. But I think what we do get right is, um, we have a very high standard in terms of hiring. You know, to get a job as a marketing analyst at Tripledot, you have to pass through several case interviews, you have to do modeling exercises, you have to do... and you have to talk to so many different people that have different levels of intellectual aggressiveness, right? And if you pass through that filter, no one can, you know, tell you you're not hungry. Or, you know, if you just kind of put... it's like, you know, converting to Judaism or something, right? Like, I have a friend, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who, you know, is, um, is a Twitter personality-

Harry Stebbings 1:00:41 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 1:00:41 ... who converted to Judaism, and, you know, i- i- it's just like, if you are tr- if you're that, if you're that kind of going through those hoops, then I think it's, you know, uh, maybe you do belong there, right? So, our process is, you know, very vigorous, and if you just make it through that process, then, you know, you do know that you have a certain baseline of not only intellectual, uh, curiosity, but also hunger and, and, um, and rigor as well.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:13 What happens if you don't have the skill that you're hiring for? So say we're an early stage company-

Akin Babayigit 1:01:18 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:19 ... and me and you are the co-founders, and we're hiring a salesperson, leader, rep, whatever it is.

Akin Babayigit 1:01:24 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:24 Me and you have never done sales before.

Akin Babayigit 1:01:25 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:26 So we can't teach them really, can we?

Akin Babayigit 1:01:28 No.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:28 So should they not have d- uh, how do we, what do we do then?

Akin Babayigit 1:01:32 I think, look, y- you know, there is always room for someone who is an expert to teach, right? The, so, you know, in that case, if you and I just start hiring people, maybe we should hire someone who has some idea about sales, right? But, um, you know, you'll be surprised how easy it is for that knowledge to be gained, regardless of the, of the field, right? There are resources, there are, you know, there are just so many resources available. For someone who wants to learn sales, right? There are books written on SaaS sales. There's just things, there are just so many things you can do. I'm not suggesting you read a book and you're an expert.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:10 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 1:02:11 But, it can be solved. It's a solvable problem. You can hire a consultant. 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.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:28 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 1:02:29 That's something we are trying to stay close to in the business. And there is an al- there is a, there's a place for expertise. Don't get me wrong. Definitely.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:37 What have been the biggest hiring mistakes you've made?

Akin Babayigit 1:02:40 Oh, that's a very good question. Um, first of all, I mean, we're a living organism, right? So, we'll, we'll, we'll know in a couple years much better. But if I look in the past, it has been those cases where we've hired for, for etiquette. So, y- you hire someone who has worked at gaming company X and you say, "Oh, wow, they're, you know, super senior. They've done this." They even, you know, check out in terms of when you do due diligence, et cetera, they even check out. Um, but o- and oftentimes, they don't work out. They come in. They say, "Well, you know, this is how we used to do things there," and, um, you know, and, you know, the organisms are very different potentially. This is, you know...

Harry Stebbings 1:03:25 I, I actually say like that the rate of decay on operating experiences have been greater because of two things. One is actually having AI.

Akin Babayigit 1:03:30 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:31 Fundamentally changes so much about prior stacks.

Akin Babayigit 1:03:33 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:33 I think you could say the same for cloud actually-

Akin Babayigit 1:03:34 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:35 ... in on-prem and some enterprise cases. And then two is COVID.

Akin Babayigit 1:03:38 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:38 It fundamentally changed how a generation feels about in-place like motivation-

Akin Babayigit 1:03:43 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:43 ... in-office work, all these things. That's right. I totally agree with you there.

Akin Babayigit 1:03:46 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:46 Um, (laughs) next one,

Harry Stebbings 1:03:49 which I loved. As an investor, this made me so happy. Valuations do not matter.

Akin Babayigit 1:03:53 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:03:54 Remember this one? It's, uh, one out of five works well for me. Um, (laughs) you didn't say this in your funding round. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 1:04:01 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:04:01 Valuations do not matter in the long run and are dangerous. Break this down for me.

Akin Babayigit 1:04:07 Sure.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:07 Why do they not matter?

Akin Babayigit 1:04:08 Sure. So this actually, 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." And, you know, valuation, to me, can only be useful if it's a meaningful heuristic for future potential cash flows, right? But, valuations now are a measure of what that market's FOMO is for that business. And, you know, we've just seen during COVID times, you know, you could, you know, you know, you could literally get your grandma or grandpa start a gaming company, you could probably get funded at, you know, $100 million valuation. And then, you know, it's very, very easy as a founder to let that get to you, right? 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." Truth of the matter is, you have nothing, right? It's just all paper money. Not only you have nothing, oftentimes the mistake is, you know, it could go the other way, and we've seen this when valuations have corrected. Um, you've so much so many people ahead of you now in a, in a potential liquidation.

Harry Stebbings 1:05:32 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 1:05:33 Right? You have, you know, pref- you know, preference. You might have debt. You might have all sorts of things ahead of you, and you've hired people now that... 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, but...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. So, that is the nightmare scenario. And valuations are, it's, uh, 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 so long as you measure, you know, the pote- I think it will be valuable if you treat valuations as, "Okay, this is what my potential future cashflow can be." You know, but it's just a number, right? It's just a number. It doesn't really... This is not the perfect number to capture the essence of your business, right? It's just what the market perceives, what the market values your business and the domain you operate in, et cetera.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:49 First question, do you think anyone in Europe actually gives a shit about equity? I find that actually it's a lot more of a cash based culture in Europe-

Akin Babayigit 1:06:57 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:57 ... versus US.

Akin Babayigit 1:06:58 Isn't that crazy? Yes, I mean, yeah, it's a good point. I don't... So, what I can tell you that, you know, we have, um, operations in Eastern Europe, and I have had a lot of conversations when, you know, we may want to give someone equity and they're like, you know, "No." And actually the perfect anecdote for this is when I was at Facebook, you know, people were getting free food, right? And, you know, 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, you know, the, some of the conversations I've witnessed in parts of Europe is, "I don't want equity. I want more cash." And, you know, I do understand kind of in a lack of a sophisticated enough startup ecosystem why this might be the case, but, you know, if you apply any type of regret minimization, right, to this, I think, you know, you will regret not getting that equity for your sweat, blood and tears. Um-

Harry Stebbings 1:08:01 Well, it's an interesting one, like, actually, because, like, pre-product market fit startup, I'd almost be like, "Load me up on cash."

Akin Babayigit 1:08:06 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:08:06 Like, there is a 95% chance that we won't make it to any form of meaningful outcome. Load me up on another 25K.

Akin Babayigit 1:08:13 It, I, yeah, maybe. I mean, it depends on your personal situation, right? I do believe that, you know, technology is the biggest enabler of wealth and the biggest contributor to human progression. And if you're a, you know, hungry guy, if you're a hungry girl, hungry person, if you are a, you know, smart, um, driven person, you know, within a long period of time, you will, you will make a lot of money.

Harry Stebbings 1:08:44 Right.

Akin Babayigit 1:08:44 You just almost can't afford, y- you just almost can't not, right? So, um, you know, if you have, if you have to have the cash to, you know, continue your living, your livelihood, then by all means. But, you know, I do think that you will regret in the future a lot more not having more upside in a case of, you know, the company becomes very successful than the opposite.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:13 For you as a founder hiring people-

Akin Babayigit 1:09:15 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:15 ... when they say, "Hey, give me cash-"

Akin Babayigit 1:09:17 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:17 ... are you like, "Ugh"?

Akin Babayigit 1:09:19 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:19 Because I've had this before and it's-

Akin Babayigit 1:09:20 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:20 ... it's quite dis- disheartening.

Akin Babayigit 1:09:22 Yeah, I mean, uh, it's, it's a bit cultural dependent because, you know, there are parts of Europe where that's just not a thing. Like, people just, people think you're trying to pull a fast one on them if you say, "I'm gonna give you equity." And so it is, you know, case by case.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:36 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 1:09:36 But if you have a person in the UK or in the US and you're trying to hire them and you're trying to incentivize them, and they're saying, "Uh, uh-uh, I'd rather have cash," then, you know, it does signal that at least we're not thinking about this in the same way. I th- we, we do M&A, Tripledot is very actively doing M&A and, you know, we, we look at different companies to buy, and the same is true even for companies. And, you know, sometimes we, you know, offer them a cash consideration, sometimes cash plus equity, and the cases we love is when people, we might offer someone a total consideration amount and they come back and say, "Hey, can I have Tripledot equity?" Because it just shows that they believe this is the perfect way to create a win-win and they believe in our story, they believe in our vision. Um, it just, yes, it's different. It's, you, you know, you can't say

Akin Babayigit 1:10:29 it's the same.

Harry Stebbings 1:10:29 I agree. Um, uh, a final one before we move into gaming-

Akin Babayigit 1:10:32 Sure.

Harry Stebbings 1:10:32 ... which I do wanna discuss, but, um, you were named the fastest growing company in Europe by the Financial Times.

Akin Babayigit 1:10:37 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:10:37 Um, an amazing, uh, achievement.

Akin Babayigit 1:10:40 Thank you.

Harry Stebbings 1:10:41 What do you think UK politics can do-

Akin Babayigit 1:10:43 (laughs) .

Harry Stebbings 1:10:43 ... differently around accreditation, around salutations.

Akin Babayigit 1:10:48 Sure.

Harry Stebbings 1:10:48 What do you think we could do differently?

Akin Babayigit 1:10:50 So I think UK... So, uh, I am quite a political person. I, I do like to get involved and without getting into too much specifics, right? I'm not a Conservative, I've, I've never been, right? But I do actually like, um, the fact that Rishi is, you know, the Prime Minister. Out of all the kind of candidates, I actually think he has a pro-business agenda-

Harry Stebbings 1:11:14 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 1:11:14 ... which I really like, and he has this kind of ability to articulate a vision that is, you know, tech friendly. I always said, actually, you know, when I contrast the US and the UK, it's such a phenomenal contrast 'cause I spent 16 years in the U- US and 11 years now in the UK, and I think, and, you know, people call me sappy for believing this, but, you know, the US, I still subscribe to this, you know, American dream. And it, you can feel it, you can breathe it, and this, this is super energizing for a foreigner. You go into the US, no one asks you, the first question is never, "Where are you from?" Never. It's almost rude to ask someone, "Where are you from?"... well, 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, right? It's almost rude. It's like, "Where are you from?" And, you know, the way it manifests is that I have friends who are third-generation Turks born in Germany, uh, that they cannot say, "We're Germans," right? So, I do think there's a big missed opportunity because the amount of talent, the amount of academic talent in the UK is immense. UK is a hub for, you know, 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, you know, I'm sure he's very busy, et cetera, and so, I'm not, you know, you know, complaining, but, uh, you know, if my message was, "Hey, I'm going to build a poster child of, you know, UK equals success, equals tech and business."

Harry Stebbings 1:12:55 Sure.

Akin Babayigit 1:12:55 And then Financial Times was a, you know, well-established (laughs) paper, not only names in something like, you know, 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. So-

Harry Stebbings 1:13:11 Can I ask you a bit of a divisive-

Akin Babayigit 1:13:12 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 1:13:12 ... one? Do you think Europe on the whole is a bit fucked?

Akin Babayigit 1:13:15 Um, I, I don't think that ... I don't think they're fucked. Why would they be fucked, right? If you look at the average European, you know, I think th- it depends on your definition-

Harry Stebbings 1:13:28 Like, decreasing-

Akin Babayigit 1:13:29 ... of fucked.

Harry Stebbings 1:13:29 ... growth rates, increasing regulation, specifically around AI.

Akin Babayigit 1:13:32 But take a, but take a look at their life, how they live, right? And look at... and people vote-

Harry Stebbings 1:13:39 Sounded (laughs) like a true European.

Akin Babayigit 1:13:40 Right? People... but p- people vote by their feet, right? Um, and this is why I also don't think America is fucked, and actually America... if you look at net migration of any country couplings, net migration into the US is more than net migration out, right? There are more Germans going to live in the US than Americans going to live in Germany. And the reason for that is just there's more opportunity in the US. And I do think that Europeans are not fucked because they live, you know, relatively healthy lives. They're f- uh, you know, making good money. So, if you think very basic core 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, you know, regulatory red tape, and there's a lot of problems with bureaucracy, and, you know, you mentioned AI regulation, all of that. And, uh, I mean, we've lost months of productivity over something silly called GDPR and et cetera, right? Um, but I just don't think fundamentally, you know, that matters in the grand scheme of things because, in the end, people here live high-quality lives. And that's why we're here. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm not living in, you know, somewhere in Africa or Asia or whatever. I want my children to have, you know, a good education, access to good healthcare, et cetera. That's why we're here.

Harry Stebbings 1:15:06 Are you ever tempted to move away with taxes? Like, when you look at Italy, it's 100K tax. You look at Lisbon. Uh, uh, it's tempting.

Akin Babayigit 1:15:14 Uh, it's not tempting enough to upset the settled lifestyle that I created for my children.

Harry Stebbings 1:15:21 Yeah.

Akin Babayigit 1:15:22 Right? My children are very British. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:15:25 (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 1:15:25 Which is hilarious thinking about it now. But they are very British, and they have friends here, they have schools here. My wife loves it in Richmond, where we live. So, I just don't have... like, you know, no amount of tax is going to, you know, really make that a huge difference. I actually think that if you ask s- many, many people... like, you know, my daughter has, uh, an American passport, and sometimes people tell me, you know, "Oh, my God," you know, "Aren't you worried about the taxes and stuff?" And, kind of, I respond to that by saying, "The amount of opportunities that will be unlocked for her by having that passport in the future, I think far offset any kind of administrative headache or even the tax burden that she will have." So, it's just, in the end, it's all, all a balance of, you know, what kind of lifestyle you wanna create for your kids.

Harry Stebbings 1:16:15 I agree, unless Keir Starmer comes in and raises-

Akin Babayigit 1:16:18 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:16:18 ... capital gains tax and fucks us all.

Akin Babayigit 1:16:20 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:16:20 In which case, I will see you in Lisbon. (laughs)

Akin Babayigit 1:16:22 Well, by the way, that's why I actually mentioned, um... I actually do admire, kind of, what Rishi is trying to create as a narrative, as we're pro-business. And, you know, I think it's super important. I think, you know, businesses, small businesses especially, are the driver of any, you know, any growth in any economy around the world. Um, you know, so I do, I do believe, but, you know, unless I'm paying every single dollar that I've earned, (laughs) you know, I don't think that it's worth upsetting the lifestyle I created for my kids.

Harry Stebbings 1:16:56 I, I do totally get you in terms of the trade-off there. I do wanna touch

Harry Stebbings 1:17:00 before we do a quick fire on just gaming, 'cause I think there's just some, like, classic mistakes that people make. The one I l- hear all the time, "Ah, it's such a hits-driven business, huh?" Is that fair?

Akin Babayigit 1:17:11 I do understand why people say it, right? I think, um, if you look at the history of gaming, um, you look at console, you know, games developers and I think there has been a hit-driven nature historically. However, I think people say it and mean that, you know, success in gaming is random. I think it's, uh, it's all... people don't really mean hit-driven. They say just, you know, y- no one knows how successful you are. With mobile gaming, I do take issue with that. I don't think it's a hit-driven business. I think it's a data-driven business. And I think you are, you know, you need to create hits, but the way you create hits is very, very different. Again, I can give many counter-example. Playrix is an ex- perfect example. They've had four hits. You know, Triple Dot, we have multiple hits under our belt. Um, you know, the guys that are at Dream Games, they had multiple hits. On and on and on, right? 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, and how you operate the game is not, you know, I think