 Hello Slush. Good to see you. I think starting the Builder Studio about founding teams with Ilkka Paaninen is really special and the reason is pretty simple. Ilkka has not just only started one company, but actually co-founded two companies, so Sume and Supercell. But also, secondly, started a non-profit foundation, invested in tens of different companies through his family office, Illusion, also through Supercell. Additionally, Supercell operates with these small cells, so basically different small founding teams itself creating the different games. But not just only that. You are on the board of Turun Pallaseuro, the ice hockey team, you are on the board of Walton and many, many others. So I think to kick this right away, Ilkka. When you have a view of sports teams, non-profits, startups, you have invested in tens of different companies, what are the differences between the best teams and especially the best founding teams when you compare these different organizations and so on? Well, you know, it's interesting. So obviously, I've been very lucky in my life in a way that I've had the great fortune of working with some really amazing people, some really amazing teams in my life. And I think the surprising thing is that I don't think this, wherever the team is on for-profit, non-profits, even sports, I don't know if there are that big differences, or at least I've observed many common nominators between these teams and not really matter in what field that team actually is in. So in a way, they are pretty much the same, but you mentioned that you have noticed some common threats. So what are, in your view, those, especially with the very best teams, exceptional teams? Well, if I think about the very best teams that I've come across and had a chance to work together with this, I think that first of all, all the best teams, they aim really, really high. So the level of ambition is high. And say, for example, what they want to do is, if I talk to a founding team who's based here in Finland, these guys are not trying to build the best product or the best company in Finland, and not even the best in Europe, but these guys are aiming to be the number one globally, being the best in the world. And that, I think, is the starting point for those people. And also these teams, they usually have a really clear vision, what they want to do, so crystal clear. But at the same time, it's an interesting balance because these teams are also very open-minded about feedback, and they actually welcome people who challenge that vision. But then, I guess, despite listening to everybody, at the same time, they do decide themselves and they kind of take the feedback that they feel is valuable. So it's not that these teams change the vision based on what's the piece of feedback they've last heard. So those type of things at least come to my mind. And I think the third thing is that these people, oftentimes they are very different. They come from different backgrounds, meaning that when they need to decide on something, there are different perspectives to that matter. But then despite these differences and sometimes even heated arguments, they can get actually aligned behind one common goal. And there's this mentality of disagree and but commit too. So those sort of come to my mind. And then there are some pretty obvious things. Of course, every single person needs to be world-class in their position. There has to be this common set of values and culture, which is really the foundation that you build everything on top of. You know, they have to be inspiring, because if you aren't inspiring as a team, then other people around you won't join you, you can't recruit new people, et cetera. And maybe as a last thing, I would say that I try to like, I mean best teams aren't necessarily, and this is interesting, they aren't necessarily like motivated by the outcome, but they actually, they truly enjoy the kind of the effort, so to speak. So, and especially like as a very concrete example, I personally don't get inspired about teams who, for example, have a lofty goal as in like, what's the kind of exit going to be, or what's the valuation going to be. You know, I don't find that inspiring at all, and I think there's other people like me. So I think there has to be kind of a bigger goal than just money, for example. Right, so you listed like maybe six different things, like aiming world-class, having the best of the best team, getting excited of simply building something together, having strong opinions, loosely held and so on. But maybe if you actually change the table from being an investor and checking these teams and kind of like thinking through the lens of should I invest in this company, and actually like, is this the team that can actually execute on the idea that they are about to do. So what kind of things kind of, what kind of things go in your mind and different traits? Like how do you evaluate that these people have these different things that you mentioned? Well, obviously it's a discussion and oftentimes multiple discussions. And it's just about asking questions and trying to understand the teams and what really motivates them. I ask questions, like for example the first thing I say, but for me it's very important to understand like what's the ambition level. Can you ask questions like previously, like what's the kind of the work that you're most proud of. And trying to figure out like where is the quality bar for that person. And you can die really deep in that topic. Is there a good example of a great response that you have got? No, I think there's like 10s and 10s of great responses and it really depends on the person. I interviewed a person who wanted to join Supercell back in the day and you know that person actually didn't have like almost any work experience. But then like I asked like what are you most proud of? What's the best piece of work that you've ever done? And I think this person had a founded a chess club in the high school. But it was the world's best chess club and then I asked why. And even more importantly I asked like how did you know that it's the world's best. And the person had this very global perspective on chess club. By the way I know nothing about chess, but that gave me an idea that this kind of individual really has this global mindset and really always whatever she does always aims as high as possible. What about the when building companies we often talk about execution. It's a race to find the product market fit and you as an investor usually assess the team and the founder that does this person have a founder market fit to specific problem. And I think there is a great quote that investor from most adventures Toby Koppel said that ideas are cheap, execution is expensive and the ability to execute separates people, not the ability to come up with ideas. So I'm really interested like about especially how do you assess whether a certain founding team has kind of like this execution capability to actually make things happen. Well of course like execution is ultimately like the best proof of execution is just like the history. So what have these people done in the past. And actually like the sort of thing that many people and I guess many investors that it used to do was that you would take the kind of first meeting with a founding team and then you would like schedule the next meeting in say next three to four weeks and this you know this team maybe is like trying to raise money and you know back in the old days in three weeks you couldn't raise money and then you basically turn to assess that okay what has happened during these three weeks like we have no resources, we have no funding and you know like somehow the best teams can get a lot of done basically with no resources and it's interesting to me like if I think about the best for example game teams at Supercell which have been born I mean usually the way they've been born is it's almost like completely organically and you know and nobody has like told them like you know what type of game to do or anything and they put the team together and you know they actually don't have any time to like you know create prototypes and stuff but yet despite all of those things things does somehow magically happen and you know I think there's like that sort of easy kind of common trade you know between many of the best teams that I've come across and you know it's just the ability to execute with seemingly like no resources right right and then like somehow showing that like what you have done with minimal resources in a short time yeah and somehow like things just happen like great things just happen I think there was something we had a short prep call with Ilka for this session just to kind of like have an idea like what to maybe discuss but there was something really surprising for me that you said in that call and it went something like this that the worst mistake you can do is to start a company with your best friend what did you mean by this and why is it so if it's so well I don't know obviously it's maybe not the worst mistake but in my experience and by the way now maybe it's important to find so if I there's sort of a friend from childhood or something like that so I think the danger with like founding companies or any kind of teams if those type of friends is that I mean often times like at least for me like friends are people who I obviously like we are often times we are very like minded and that just means that what I would worry about like founding company with friends is that you know and it is to have like this different type of perspectives you know like to whatever decision you are about to make and if everybody is a super like a like minded and you have kind of follow the similar train of thought when I think like so much gets lost so I think it actually is it's almost the opposite if I think about the you know the teams that I've been personally been lucky to be part of or teams that I've observed from distance I mean often times those are made of like pretty different people different perspectives and there actually can be like very heated arguments about things but then as I said like despite all of that these people can get aligned behind that one common vision and you know there's this mentality that you know you just you know disagree but you commit even if you disagree right right and it gets more difficult if it's a person who is really close to you and you have known him or her for years exactly and the chances are that you won't disagree in the first place like almost on anything which I think would be a problem right maybe leading from there one thing that is special in the founding team of Supercell and also at Vault where in the board as the board member is the fact that you had six people on your founding team what kind of like challenges or benefits this kind of approach where you have like there was you obviously as the founding CEO and plus five other people what kind of like benefits or challenges having these many founders may have and is there a golden number how many founding team members one should have well first of all I don't think there's a golden number at all I think it really depends like what you're trying to do and also of course depends on the type of people you have and I guess I can only like speak from an experience of Supercell like the simple reason for us to have like as many as six co-founders was that you know our goal was to like Supercell the founding idea behind Supercell was that the best people and teams create the best game so therefore we wanted to sort of get first of all we wanted to get the best people to the founding team but two we also wanted to get people who know our sort of quote best people in the industry and collectively like the six of us of course like new lots and lots of people enabled us to like build the next layer of great amazing people people who were actually much better than we were to Supercell how about super concretely when you have that many people on your founding team and you have like every day you have probably tens of different decisions to be done and when you have six people one could argue that you have a committee kind of like how did you during your Supercell early days kind of like agree what to do how did you make the decisions how did you agree what happens how did you form for those not just only having maybe six but just three how the founding team should make decisions and how maybe you should prepare your team to actually move super fast and so on well first of all I think it's extremely dangerous to make decisions as a committee and for us how it worked is that there was a complete trust between the six of us and it's not that they can decide everything as a group of course you know if we had to decide something about the product you know I actually like oftentimes I was not involved because I don't think I'm the best person to talk about product so I excluded myself but then the people who were best people to kind of chime in on those decisions then those guys had the discussion made the decision and let everybody else know and then of course if somebody like disagrees then that's the time to kind of speak up and then we will talk about it but I think that first of all I mean I don't think that all decisions like should or you know are needed to make within that bigger group and I think the one benefit that does come out from like having that bigger group of co-founders is that I already mentioned one which is that you just jointly you just know more people but the other thing is that you know we were actually able to execute super fast because I mean obviously only one out of the six who wasn't the game developer and all of these five other people were like world class game developers which meant that you know we were able to move super super fast also in the product and technology side right maybe every founding team is unique and depending on what you are building what's the problem you are trying to solve there are different roles but maybe one thing that holds is the role of the founding CEO in the founding team so in your view kind of like what are the most important like traits or characteristics or skills specifically the founding CEO should hold in the founding team and what's the role responsibility so I have sort of mixed feelings about this question and topic because I mean often times I feel that we have some kind of created also within startups we have created this like myth about this hero CEO who like somehow magically like knows like you know what's the best thing to do and solves all the problems and you know works harder and smarter better than anybody else and all that which I at least in my case none of those things are true you know if I think about say for example the founding team of Supercell I was just like super super lucky to be able to work with these five other people and I definitely don't think it was about me and wasn't about me and still isn't about me so I think sometimes I think that role is almost like you know somehow it created a myth about it yeah glorified but then what do I think is the job of the CEO like in my mind it's actually pretty simple the way I think about it is that the role and the responsibility of the CEO is to one like first of all make sure that you have the best possible team but you know you have world-class individuals in every single thing that the team needs to do and then of course that that team sort of plays or works very well together that's one thing and then the other thing that you need to make sure is that the culture is such you know they're a team they else can do the best work of their careers and whatever that means but you know that really I mean if you have those two things then we will some luck or we will lot of luck which I certainly had then you know great things can sort of come out of that and in very practical terms I mean I think recruitment is a super you know critical components that the CEO needs to have so you need to be like somehow able to like kind of sell your company or inspire others so that other great people would join it and of course you need to have an eye for recruitment and you know what are the kind of types of people that should join the company and then it sort of comes to decision making my kind of thinking about that is that I mean I don't think that it should be the CEO who makes all the decisions rather I think that it's the responsibility of the CEO to make sure that decisions get made and for example in my case I only make decisions when the team can't get the decisions and sometimes that happens sometimes you just need to step up and say okay we're gonna stop this argument and this is what we're gonna do but in most cases you know of course it's best if decisions do come from the team the second thing you mentioned the role of the CEO is to ensure that the culture is right and fostered so what are the maybe the super concrete things you should do in the founding team to set up your culture in the right way before you actually start running and finding the product market fit for your product well maybe I can share you a true story about the founding of Supercell where I think I got something right and then I got something very wrong so part that I think we as a group got right was that they actually talked so much about culture actually before we founded the company we literally like we I remember this one of our very first meetings you know was that they actually went through the culture deck of Netflix which had just come out I think maybe year before and actually I and the others were also like very inspired about that deck and it talked about you know this culture of freedom and responsibility and we like basically like that inspired us actually to many of the things that we wanted to do at Supercell we spent so much time like not only talking about the type of game and product we wanted to build but talking about what type of company and what type of culture we want to build so that was the thing that they got got right. The thing that they got wrong was that you know it was in my like to-do list always that okay you know write down the values like write down what you kind of had agreed on formalize in a way the culture it always I top of my to-do list but then I was always like too busy with other more important stuff so I never did it actually until it got to this point that I fondly remember this moment like we were I think like around 40 people we had already like opened up for example our office in San Francisco it not only just one but two offices and all that a bit more complex environment and then I was in this meeting and we talked about responsibility which kind of happens to be one of our values and then the other person next to me in a way he was talking about responsibility it actually was something completely different what I had in mind what I meant the responsibility and then that was a big wake up call for me but okay I actually like really need to get on to this and it actually is important to like write this stuff down because when you can write things down and you share it with everybody that's one way to make sure that everybody is actually aligned and that can force this custom what you actually mean you actually think it's very important to actually get pretty detailed about this type of things and you know it's not I mean oftentimes culture can feel very fluffy and the reason why it feels fluffy that you keep it very high level very conceptual like for example like everybody like all the companies in the world product in one way or another one of our values is quality I mean have you ever made a company that isn't like trying to do but you know when the question is that what does it really mean and for example Supercell what it means is that the action and the behavior that comes from quality is that we kill a lot of games and that's painful incredibly painful but you know that is what we mean the quality and you know I think we've learned that these values don't really mean anything unless like some very concrete actions follow from them and if you have a value in your company just figure out like what is the action then the question is that is it a value like in the first place should it be there if there are no concrete actions that follow that value like why is it there and I think that was maybe partially at least the reason why why what happened in the early days of Supercell kind of like you killed one game you kind of like heavily pivoted to mobile and so on because you knew that this wasn't going to be as big as you have agreed and as ambitious was that the part of it? Yeah I think like that too but maybe the biggest reason was because we had a very high level ambition and still have it at Supercell and our strategy was we wanted to create games for the masses and then like back in 2010 we had this platform to start from Facebook but then we relatively quickly discovered but you know for us like we're never going to be the number one company on the Facebook platform and then I do remember we had this discussion but okay we got all like I mean if you can't win this game like let's try to pick a game but we actually can win and that's what kind of inspired us to do the pivot to mobile so we got super lucky there So we have a bit more than four minutes left so there's a couple things I want to especially ask so when you find the product market fit you maybe start to scale from the three four or five people to ten to maybe fifty at some point and then to eventually hundred to two hundred how does the role of founding team change during that process and what's the kind of like what's kind of like the importance of founding teams when the company grows Well I think like how the role of founding team changes it really depends on like if the founders have been put into kind of leadership positions or managerial positions so maybe you have somebody who's like for example leading the engineering and it goes just fine then there's maybe four or five engineers but what happens is there's like forty or four hundred and then obviously there is such a thing that at some point you probably need somebody who has experience in doing that type of thing or maybe you've been or maybe you've been lucky that you have somebody in the founding team who's also passionate about leading other people and not just writing code but that somebody can grow into that role but you know oftentimes you see sort of changes in those types of things and again I think this is a really great test for the founding team so the best founding teams like have no egos so it doesn't matter what is your personal role in the company and in the founding team all you want to do is do whatever is best for the company or best for the team and it doesn't matter what's your kind of personal role and you know I've seen like so many times people sort of quote stepping down on their roles because they see that there's somebody else in the company who actually is better at this job than I am and those are actually like really big cultural moments and certainly have been for us when ever what happens. When you build a company it's already incredibly difficult and on the journey there will be different conflicts with the founding team. You don't always agree with everything and that's great as you mentioned but what are maybe the typical conflicts that you might face with your founding team when building a company and is there something that the worry best and exceptional founding teams do differently when they face a conflict? Well I think the conflicts obviously it depends like what type of companies there's probably like millions different types of conflicts and as you say there should be my advice would be that embrace the conflict that's a great thing I mean the fact that there is conflict that's a really really good thing because when you can get different perspectives to be matters but my very simple advice whenever there's a conflict and especially if you start to feel that you're losing trust on somebody, you know sit down with that person or with those people and talk about it take the bull by the horns and this by way is one of the I think differences between sort of great teams and average teams because for average teams these discussions are so hard but they just don't have them it's so inconvenient to talk to somebody about these types of things but the great teams they embrace it and they do it and for example I fondly remember one meeting in 2012 before Supercell released Heyday and we had a founding you know group meeting of six of us were sitting in the lunch area and then you can imagine like I mean we had like I believe we had like amazing developers in our founding team but then we have one of our founding coders tells to be our founding coder but hey I have to tell you but I think you're coding too slow and in front of everybody and I still remember that but I think that's a great example how you can raise a bar and I guarantee you that the other guy wasn't slow at all and it was probably the first time in his life that somebody tells you that but I think that's like a sign of a great founding team changing you know the other people and you're kind of helping them raise the bar and not afraid of conflict Exactly, super shortly if you would start another company how would you approach building the founding team in super short Yeah for clarity I'm not gonna start a new startup but like the way I would do it is that first of all I would like you know gather like a group of people who I think I potentially could start that startup I would try to form a vision with those people and then I would use this vision formation process and test like is this a great founding team and you can we get aligned how does this process feel to me you can iterate on that and then like through this process you probably will discover that okay is it a great team or not what changes need to be made etc and once you can arrive to be kind of the final team okay this is it then I think I would just as I said I would write down the vision, the plan and don't forget to write down the culture and then just you know put let go That's it, thank you Elko Paanen Thanks very much