 All right. Ricardo, it is such a pleasure to be here with you today and I'm really looking forward to the next 25 minutes together. Exactly 20 years ago, you co-founded King, the maker of Candy Crush. And with this, you helped pioneer the era of mobile gaming. You welcomed billions of players to this form of entertainment. You entered pop culture. And with King, you've created one of Europe's biggest success stories. And to this day, Candy Crush remains one of the top games played globally. It's been downloaded more than 3 billion times. Truly incredible. To kick us off, given your journey and given how far the industry has come, what's your take on where mobile gaming is today? 20 years on since you founded King. Good morning to everyone, first of all. Yeah, it's been a long journey. I've been doing King for 18 years. I left four years ago. So I've been watching now what's happening in industry from the sidelines in some way. But it's super interesting because a few things surprise me. So one of the things that surprise me is that in an environment which has become extremely competitive, it's still possible actually to emerge and build basically unicorn companies. I mean, a good example is one of the index investments, Dream Games. And you can do so with taking elements that actually are pretty proven and having a fantastic perfect execution on this. So that's been surprising. I think that has also been surprising to me is we sold Candy, we sold King in 2016. And since then, Candy has been doing extremely well. So the revenues have been growing and it's become a key part of Activision. Now, Activision just sold to Microsoft and Candy is doing incredibly well, still one of the top games in the world, both in terms of reach and monetization. And fundamentally, when we went public in 2014, everyone was talking about diversification. And when we met, we worked together with Activision, they were talking about diversification. So in the sense that when you have a game that does really well, what is proven also is that you have longevity in the games. So you don't always have to come up with the next game. But if a game is really strong, has a strong brand, a strong user base, if you focus on execution, on making the game better, surprising in the game, and you keep customers entertained, you can actually keep them for a very long time. And the game is still there in the top charts. And I think Dream Games is another example of that. I appreciate the mention of Dream Games, of course, another company that we've been fortunate to partner with. And actually, one thing that I've learned from both Sonar, CEO of Dream Games, and from some of the conversations that you and I have been having is that product is at the core, and it all starts with a product, and that you don't need to innovate across every area of the product. But you need to have that culture of excellence, and every decision has to be well balanced and really well thought through. So just to build on what you were saying, how do you create that kind of culture of excellence across every area of the product? Maybe I start one step before in terms of the topic of innovation versus execution, and how is one important versus the other. I'm a big believer that if you want to have success, especially if it's in a very competitive environment, marketing is cheap if the product you have is not just useful, but also innovative. And innovative for me means distinctive from what the competition is offering. And if you don't, then marketing is very expensive. And if the product is distinctive and useful, then the users will also talk about it. We're recommended to others, and therefore marketing is cheaper at the end. Now, how do you create something that is innovative in this industry? And here talking about our experience, you know, we were never first. We were not first on Facebook, and we were not first on mobile. And when we launched the first time on Facebook, everyone said, guys, forget it, the market is already established, Zynga got already 80% market share, it's so much bigger, they will copy you anyway if you come up with something new. And then in mobile also, when we launched later on mobile, we were not the first. So what did we do? So we did not follow what all the others were doing. When we launched on Facebook, everyone was focused on resource management games with Zynga first of all. And what we did before launching on Facebook, we created a lot of games, more than 200 games on the web. So we took the best games that we created at the time and re-proposed them with a core gameplay that was a match three. So we didn't innovate on the core gameplay, but where we innovated was taking elements that were proven by putting them together in a new way. So the match three game that was very shallow, we made many more levels and we allowed you to play with other players in a non competitive way seeing them on a map, which now everyone is doing by the time no one was doing, everyone was focusing on resource management. And that's where I think innovation comes in a way that you don't need to invent everything. Once if you try to invent everything at the same time, then it's actually the risk becomes massive. You can come up with something like a new Minecraft, but the chances that you do are very slim and it's very tough. If you take elements that are easier for the user to understand and to get into and then you innovate around it so that the user actually prefers your game versus others and wants to recommend it, that's when suddenly you have something that has high retention. And when you have high retention, then that's the base for everything. From there, you can do marketing and scale the company. And so how do you know when you have a winner? Well, our metric, our key metric was retention and is retention also. So anything that is over 40% day one is a good game to give you put it in perspective. Candy Crush when we launched it was 65% day one retention. And once you once you have and that was the start and when you have that then you can optimize and make it better. And from there you can increase and optimize the day two, day seven, day 30 retention and make sure that the users basically stay and then you can also apply the monetization and then innovate also monetization. We know that it also on that side, but the retention is the number one. If the retention is not good, then you lose the customers and there is no way that you can optimize any optimization after that is is hard work. And at what point can you tell you know some games they start off with some retention and then they keep iterating and tweaking to try and improve it. How how much can you improve it? And at what point do you make the decision that this retention will not be increasing? Let's think of something new. And at what point do you actually keep tweaking to get to that retention you need? Yeah, I think the the bar was 40%. So anything that is and the issue is when it's below is very easy because you just shut shut down the game. If it's very high, it's an obvious one. You put all the resources there like Candy Crush. The question is if you have something in between you're stuck in between 40% and it's not as high as some of the competitors what you do then. I think the answer there depends very much on the company. So in the case of King, we had a massive hit with Candy Crush. So all resources went there and it's actually very difficult then to reroute users from Candy where you know you have a retention that is super high, you have a monetization that is incredibly high to a game that is not performing as well. But if for example you don't have the luxury of having a Candy Crush then actually 40% with good monetization might be perfectly good to build a user base and then you can innovate with the next game and you have a user base to use to launch a game to then grow and launch the next game. Because what we did to launch Candy Crush, we launched Candy Crush on a base of existing users on Facebook. And the launch of Candy Crush actually was extremely disappointing. It was one of the days where I got most angry than ever because we were promised by Apple that they would feature us. And the day of the launch we actually didn't get featured. And so I said, ah, you know, it's the most important day. We want to launch this game. We think this game is doing really well and we didn't get featured. It was the luckiest day ever because we took the decision to launch immediately also on Google, which meant we could immediately offer the game to the entire user base. We had on the web and we connected web play and mobile play. So web play on their PC and mobile play. So all the users we had on the PC could immediately play on their mobile device. And so you had the full variety across all the platforms. And the most important thing was we had clean numbers. Because we didn't get featured, we knew exactly how many users were coming from our installed user base, how many users were coming from marketing and we could start to understand better the customer lifetime value and the variety of the game without any disruptions or interference from other sources. So you pioneered in many ways mobile gaming, clearly also cross-platform gaming with Facebook and mobile, which perhaps is less familiar to everyone. You touched on marketing. That's something that you did phenomenally well at King. Can you share a little bit about how to approach distribution and marketing, especially in this time of IDFA and difficulty getting reach for mobile applications? Yeah. So I think, but most people don't know is that actually King had a very strong data infrastructure. We had about hundred people, hundred business analysts that basically do nothing else and checking all the numbers and we were very, very good at understanding everything, both within the game but also on the customer acquisition side. And the way how we skilled the company was entirely organic. So we didn't raise a penny to scale and we went from very little marketing investment to spending around hundred million dollars per quarter in marketing. And the way how we did it was with the chessboard strategy. The chessboard strategy means you put one coin on the first square, you see how the first cohort develops and as soon as you see that the metrics of the first cohort are very healthy and you see what basically the monetization is over the first week, second week. As soon as that cohort allows you, as you say this is actually a very strong, very strong metrics, you invest in the second square of the chessboard and this time you double up. And if the second cohort in the first week performs like the first cohort in the first week, in the meantime you have also the numbers from the first cohort over a longer period of time and you also can assume the second cohort will behave in a similar way like the first cohort of users. So you can then make the investment in the third chessboard, in the third square of the chessboard, but this time you double up again. And if you do that you have suddenly an exponential curve where you go from very little marketing investment to investing hundred million dollars per quarter completely organically. And when we started because of the innovation we were bringing and we were distinct from others and we also integrated in the business model virality because the first model we started with was freemium where you would play the game, you would get five lives. When the five lives finish you could either wait 24 hours or you could pay 99 sorry 99 cents and play immediately or you could invite three friends which basically was free marketing so virality was integrated in the business model and it was absolutely key for us to be able to grow fast. I love that chessboard mentioned something I haven't heard before. How closely do product and marketing need to work together in this context? Very closely, very, very closely. And we monitored all the changes on the, for example, live ops. Live ops is something that we launched at some point and we said okay actually we see that actually users want more content but if you launch more content only at the end of the journey you make only the players who actually finish the game or happy and for the others it becomes a bit boring after a while always the same level. So we launched live ops with special events that are available only for a specific moment of time and we got the idea because we were looking at a study that was comparing London with Paris and they were saying okay why do tourists always go to London when actually when you ask them they actually would like to go to Paris and they did a study which said that actually because in London there are more events at a time limited so you can go to this exhibition but the exhibition is only available in August if you don't go in August then you will never see it again. So tourists said okay actually I want to I would love to go to Paris but if I don't go now to London I will miss out on that exhibition and that's where we started thinking okay actually we should do the same also for games and then we launched live ops. Wow amazing I love that. We've obviously talked a little bit about Candy Crush and the incredible success you had with Candy Crush but you founded King in 2003 Candy Crush launched in 2012 and so arguably it wasn't quite the overnight success. What were those early eight to nine years like and how did you stay motivated? Oh Jesus we almost went bust three times in that time and I think the hardest times it took us two and a half years to take our games from the web to Facebook so you have to imagine we had started with a new model in Europe which was skill games at the time no one was doing skill games no one had heard about skill games i.e. games where you would compete against others either for fun or for a small entry fee and then you could also win some real money so it was not gambling because it was based on pure skill and so we had the one side to demonstrate that this model was absolutely based on skill so it was not gambling we didn't need a gambling license and everything was fine because we managed to convince all the largest portals in Europe to work with us and we became the largest partner of Yahoo first in Europe and then in the US and if you went to the Yahoo Games channel we were we are busy there we were busy doing their powering their games business until in 2007 Facebook opened up their their their their their their portal their software their their product to games that's where Zynga launched and I took a bit of time but in 2008 2009 it started growing like exponentially and Facebook killed Yahoo and killed Yahoo especially in the games area so we lost we were the largest partner of Yahoo and Yahoo lost in their games channel 45 percent of their users in one year and we lost 45 percent of our of the new users in one year and it and if you are there you have no idea what's happening it felt like some someone took the the carpet under your under your feet and it took us two and a half years to actually crack the model because Facebook did not allow us to take our skill model to Facebook and that put us with the back to the wall and we had to find a new way to bring our games to Facebook and anything that is bad actually if you work on it can become very good and for us maybe if we had not been with the back to the wall we would not have been pushed so hard to innovate and change completely our business model because what we did in the skill gaming model all the games we offered were only one level which would compete over three minutes with other people and we had developed more than 200 games when we went to Facebook we took the best of these games only one level and made out of these like these games much deeper games with many more levels and that's something that at the time no one was doing and and we innovated on the model in this way I love what you said everything bad has something good and you clearly have an incredible determination and ability to really pursue where you want to go how do you motivate other people to also be coming be like that and come along with you on this journey when things maybe aren't going well I think for me the most important thing is honesty and transparency so even during the bad times we were extremely honest and transparent on one side with our board with the investors and on the other side with the team so we didn't we never said oh don't worry everything is going well and everything is fine because we treated our team as adults saying look this is where we are and these are the things we are doing to to change things and the best way to do that is to use visuals and the visuals the visual that I used at the time was a character called Mordillo and not many people know it but it's a character and we showed this character lying down on the beach under an umbrella under the sun sipping a cocktail and so and I said this is where we are today everything is fine this was in the beginning of 2009 and we started seeing the big impact on of Facebook on us and on Yahoo and on us see this is where we are and then I zoomed out and I showed it was an hourglass so the sand underneath was falling was flowing down and I was saying okay this is where we are it's only a matter of time that we are going to be out of business and we need to change we have time and that's the reason why we split the company and you guys 50 percent of the company is is working on keeping the lights on and you have zero resources for innovation you only have resources to keep the lights on and thanks to your work we're able to have the other 50 percent of the company which we are dividing in five teams working on five different experiments and these are the five experiments so that's how we managed to keep people with us and and then we kept them updated on how the experiments were going I mean you use what I've heard from any is that you're an incredible motivator of people and clearly a fantastic leader is this something that has come naturally to you is this something that you had to work on I don't know I think for me the key way of thinking the key basically the starlight has always been treat the others how you want to be treated yourself so I always thought if I was on the other side how would I want to be treated I want to be treated like an adult I don't want to be told stories that are not real and and I want to be part of the solution not not not part potentially of the problem and so that's how I always acted in any thing I did and actually before King we did another company called spray which was an early early startup in 99 and we ended up selling the company to Lycos and I ended up because Lycos moved location and so on I ended up firing all the people I had hired so I fired hundred people and I fired them in a way as if I wanted to be fired so very honest I told them how things were what I can do what I cannot do and I gave I really honestly and when we started King since we had not a penny for marketing we only no one want to give us money so I put in 100% of my money in it so I didn't have any money for marketing I went knocking the doors and the first doors are not where the doors of the people I fired which in the meantime we're working at large portals like the online and yahoo and so on so you always meet twice I think that's that's a key thing in the industry that's right you always first impressions matter last impressions the last money is the most important yeah yeah I could speak for a very long time with you about this these are very important questions how to think about culture setting that from the top like you mentioned I know we're coming up on time shortly how would you advise founders today who are thinking about launching a gaming business in this era of post-covid era of AI what would be your guidance to everyone in the room well I can tell you where but I'm focused on now where I think it's interesting I think I'm a big believer in in AI I think AI is a tool so you need to know how to apply this tool otherwise if it's just a black box I think it's it's it's not useful enough especially in games where you need to where the results in the short term can be very different from results in the long term when you look at numbers but I think I can have a massive impact on games because I think the example of dream games that perfect execution can really take you to the top can allow you to monetize at a better level than others and monetizing better means that you can acquire customers and have a pay back on the customer that you acquire faster than others and therefore you can break through the roof and that's AI can have an impact at all stages it can have an impact on the on the on the marketing having better performance marketing understanding by the numbers doing optimizing the creatives optimizing the channels has a massive impact on the clv tracking clv and optimizing the entire user experience so I've been now spending time with a company for example called metica and we are looking at at optimizing the for example starting from where the money is in the shop so every user gets a different experience depending if if a user is a heavy user or or a more beginner you get that you can get a different offering at different moments in time and I think that is going to give you a better performance over time and it will also therefore allow you to buy at a better rate do you think we'll have AI native games I think you will have much smaller teams in the future that will be able to innovate much faster and come up with games that where you actually play with the AI becomes your partner and the game develops as you continue as you progress depending what route you have chosen and also based on your personal interests okay okay looking forward to will be I mean you know the beauty now is that the world in one thing is for sure we don't know today what games will come out in three or five years from now and what games will be but one thing is for sure there will be a lot of innovation there will be a lot of innovation and one thing we know is the category continues to grow year-over-year also and you've been fundamental in helping to pave that way what are some final sort of words of advice that you would give to founders in the room some core lessons or anything that you would have done differently looking back at your time over the past 20 years for me there are two two key things you know you touched briefly on culture and the other point that I would also put in his hiring so I think culture is fundamentally how you behave when you come into the company and you know what time do I come in how do I have to think am I innovative or how much can I innovate can I talk and not talk can I take responsibility so in innovation and then the new people that come in always look up to the next level up and the next level up looks again up so fundamentally it's the pyramid so the founder creates the culture so depending how you behave not what you say not the papers not the the companies that come in with beautiful words you create a culture we don't have much time the second key point is hiring so always hire ahead of time so hire where you want to be in two years from now not where where you are now and and don't start hiring higher senior guys that have seen this before and and and be you know the bar you put in hiring is is what will develop where the company will develop because good people hire good people not good people hire not good people and and if you start with not good people it's very difficult that these people will hire people that are better than they are so fantastic final words to end on hire people that are better than you yeah Ricardo thank you for doing this you're an incredible inspiration to many here in the room you've defined the past 20 years excited to see what the next 20 years will bring and your role in the industry thank you so much thank you so much