Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041
Stephane Kurgan (guest), Harry Stebbings (host)
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Stephane Kurgan and Harry Stebbings, Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 explores from Candy Crush To Coaching: Stéphane Kurgan’s Playbook For Scale Stéphane Kurgan, former COO of King and now VC at Index, reflects on scaling King from 100 to 2,400 employees and the principles that guided its growth, culture and ethics. He emphasizes data-driven decision-making, radical but pragmatic transparency, and the importance of communication, trust and speed of execution in scaling organizations. Kurgan also shares frameworks for evaluating leaders, hiring and retaining top talent, setting goals, and giving feedback, along with candid stories about failure, career droughts, and repairing his relationship with his father. The conversation closes with how his operational background shapes his investing, his views on luck, money, and parenting, and what he looks for in founders today.
From Candy Crush To Coaching: Stéphane Kurgan’s Playbook For Scale
Stéphane Kurgan, former COO of King and now VC at Index, reflects on scaling King from 100 to 2,400 employees and the principles that guided its growth, culture and ethics. He emphasizes data-driven decision-making, radical but pragmatic transparency, and the importance of communication, trust and speed of execution in scaling organizations. Kurgan also shares frameworks for evaluating leaders, hiring and retaining top talent, setting goals, and giving feedback, along with candid stories about failure, career droughts, and repairing his relationship with his father. The conversation closes with how his operational background shapes his investing, his views on luck, money, and parenting, and what he looks for in founders today.
Key Takeaways
Treat failure as a core leadership competency, not an exception.
Kurgan argues that a great manager is right only ~55–60% of the time; the real job is to keep making decisions, learn quickly, and avoid repeating the same mistake, rather than to chase perfect accuracy.
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Let data overrule intuition in product and monetization decisions.
At King, very strong product instincts were frequently contradicted by player data; the company systematically tested features (including extremely lucrative ones) and was willing to cap monetization for ethical reasons, prioritizing long-term trust with players and employees.
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Design communication systems deliberately; 90% of scaling is comms and decisions.
As organizations grow, perceived communication quality always deteriorates unless leaders over-invest in clear narratives, vertical cascades, horizontal information sharing, and repeated messaging, all built on a foundation of trust.
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Hold a very high hiring bar and protect cultural fit at all costs.
King used a structured, multi-interviewer, unanimity-based hiring process; relaxing that standard led to mis-hires who then hired others like them, creating misaligned pockets that took years to fix—demonstrating that bad hires are more damaging than slow hiring.
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Use structured frameworks to evaluate leaders across four dimensions.
Kurgan assesses executives on functional performance, organizational maturity (team/process/succession), contribution to the corporate agenda, and their personal leadership journey (role modeling, thought leadership, self-development), creating a balanced view beyond just hitting numbers.
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Practice ‘almost radical’ transparency to increase trust and speed.
Sharing broad access to data, clear compensation grids, and open internal updates drove alignment and engagement at companies he works with, but he cautions there must be boundaries around sensitive topics like recruiting targets and some fundraising or M&A discussions.
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Prepare relentlessly so you’re ready when luck and opportunity intersect.
Drawing on Seneca, Kurgan frames luck as “opportunity plus preparedness”; his own decade-long post-dotcom desert showed the value of continually building skills, network, and resilience so that when the King opportunity appeared, he could fully seize it.
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Notable Quotes
“It’s great to fuck up. I think you have to fuck up.”
— Stéphane Kurgan
“The job is not to be right, the job is to make decisions.”
— Stéphane Kurgan
“There’s much more downside in making the wrong hire than in not bringing in the right person.”
— Stéphane Kurgan
“Luck is a combination of opportunity and preparedness. Your job is to be prepared.”
— Stéphane Kurgan (paraphrasing Seneca)
“You should not be a consumer of your team’s time; you should be a multiplier of it.”
— Stéphane Kurgan
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can a founder practically build a culture where failure is accepted but repeated mistakes are not?
Stéphane Kurgan, former COO of King and now VC at Index, reflects on scaling King from 100 to 2,400 employees and the principles that guided its growth, culture and ethics. ...
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What concrete steps can a sub-50 person startup take to adopt ‘radical transparency’ without exposing itself competitively or legally?
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How should hiring processes change at different stages of growth to maintain cultural fit while still hitting aggressive headcount targets?
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In what situations should intuition override data, if ever, especially in creative or product decisions?
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How can leaders better retain high-potential women and other underrepresented groups once they reach senior leadership, avoiding the ‘Sisyphus’ cycle Kurgan describes?
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Transcript Preview
... it's great to fuck up. I think you have to fuck up. The job of, you know, most managers and leaders is to make decisions. As a manager, if you make 55% of good decisions, you're a really good manager. If you make 60%, you're exceptional. But that means 40% of your decisions will be wrong. I was listening to a podcast with, uh, Zuckerberg and he, and he says, you know, "Failing is one of micro-competencies." That's so true. The job is not to be right, the job is to make decisions. If you keep making the same decision wrong multiple times, then that's a problem, and then you need to have a conversation.
Steph, this is such a special episode for me to do. We were talking downstairs and I was saying, "I've been hearing about your operational excellence for years from Fred Destin." So thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah. Uh, well, thank you so much for, for having me. Um, I mean, I, I've, I've known you for, for a long time. It's ver- it's, it's still a surprise to be here today.
(laughs)
Uh, first, it's a great honor. You know (laughs) , if I... I'm not sure I'm, I'm worthy. And, uh, no, it's incredibly, it's incredible, it's very exciting, so thank you. Yeah.
Well, I so appreciate that. But I was obviously, you know, doing my work before the show on you, and the thing I wanted to start on is, how did you make your first foray into the world of startups? What was that entry point?
I, I wrote my, uh, final paper at, um, university with, with, uh, uh, a, a professor who founded the, the first commercial CD-ROM company in Europe. So he ha- he had seen in the US a product called Disclosure, which was, um, uh, a, a, a business database for, for US companies. And the CD-ROM at the time was revolutionary, because, you know, you couldn't store, uh, that much data on a floppy disc, right? It was a, it was a huge revolution. And so he built that company with ... and bo- he bootstrapped it, and it became incredibly successful. It's a company that was called Bureau Van Dijk, uh, which was sold to Moody's for, uh, more than €3 billion a few years ago. And so he hired me, uh, because he thought, you know, I, I sounded like a good sales guys, and then he sent me, you know, cold calling all over the, the world on banks to try to sell them the, the software and the data. And so I went to... I started with Northern Europe. I went to Russia and Eastern Europe in '91. I went to South America, you know, Colombia during the, the narco wars. I wa- I went all over the world for-
(laughs)
... for four years. Uh, I was living-
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