The Kick-Ass Founding Team
Advice from investors and industry veterans on how to assemble a winning founding team to set your games company up for success
Editor’s note: Mishka Katkoff is VP Product at Rovio, founder of gaming blog Deconstructor of Fun, and a venture partner at gaming venture capital company, Play Ventures. In this article, he provides invaluable insights into the first fundamental a gaming startup needs to consider, the foundations of any potential success: a strong founding team.
“Everything starts with a strong founding team”. We’ve heard founders and investors say this over and over again. But what makes a great founding team? How do you know you have the founding team that will entice investors into funding your startup? How do you know what traits your founding team lacks, and how to fill these gaps? Are there downsides to moving forward with an incomplete team?
I’ll seek to answer all of these questions in this article. Whether you’re an experienced entrepreneur or someone who’s only contemplating about starting a gaming company, my aim is to help you get your dream off the ground and become the next gaming unicorn!
Now let’s start off by acknowledging the assumption that you have a killer idea — whether it’s a game, a tool, or a platform. And since your idea is so strong, you’ve been able to convince a few of your closest current and former colleagues to work with you.
Now what?
A Team Is More Than the Sum Of Its Parts
“When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is ten percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A-players? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does” - Steve Jobs
Don’t assume that assembling a bunch of highly qualified individuals will guarantee a successful founding team. We see this all the time in sports — a squad of superstars is put together. They should win easily. They don’t. That’s because a team is more than just the sum of its parts. Investors view it as a huge win if the co-founding team (or parts of it) have worked together before. And to be honest, they do not necessarily have to have worked together in the same team. Even being involved in the same projects or studio can help.
The reasons why investors value teams that have previously worked together is that more than 95% of new mobile studios’ first games fail. Disappointments are inevitable, no matter how stellar the founding team is. A team that has worked together before will be better equipped at overcoming setbacks: they’ll have stronger personal relationships which will hold up when put under testing circumstances.
A team that has worked together is also faster. They already know how to work with each other productively and efficiently. They already know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They’ve already shared the same experiences and they are likely to develop a strong culture without ever even stopping to write down their values. And most importantly, they already trust each other.
Having said this, it is not necessary for every single co-founder to have worked together before, but if for example three out of a five-person co-founding team has worked together before embarking on their startup journey, the risk of a team not working out is considerably smaller.
Founding team 101
Cognitive diversity is the way
Let’s be honest, starting up a company with friends who all have roughly the same skillsets is relatively painless. And it seems like the way to go. After all, that’s what they did in The Social Network. But in the long-run, this homogeneous core team will severely limit your company’s potential, as you will face difficulties in dividing tasks and responsibilities, and you will develop blindspots that will increase the risk factor of your startup.
A simple rule of thumb is to have a well-balanced founding team with co-founders bringing complementary skills to the table. In fact, a comparative study between independent and university start-ups shows that diverse founding teams in independent start-ups are more likely to perform better than their more homogeneous university startups.
“In my experience, gaming start-ups with a co-founding team of three business development guys almost always fail — despite usually delivering a sound pitch deck. The same goes for founding teams with only data or marketing people or solo founder setups. Personally I don’t find these teams as great bets compared to a diverse team of 3–5 people with a wide array of complementing skills” - Henric Suuronen, Play Ventures
The makeup of a founding team
The ‘perfect’ founding team is a mythical creature. It’s something you can chase for an eternity without ever finding one. Rather, align your expectations by putting together a ’good’ founding team: one that is straightforward to assemble and can build what you’ve set out to build. Below, I explain the key roles needed in a ‘good’ founding team, and offer some insights into identifying the right people.
1. CEO
The criteria for an ideal CEO can be split into two parts: experience and traits. In terms of the former, the ideal candidate for CEO is someone who has had years of experience working on games, preferably in game development and product strategy. The CEO must also have experience recruiting and building strong teams while enjoying the respect from the local game development community. After all, your first hires are likely coming from this circle of professionals.
“At Play Ventures, we are fans of CEOs who have a deep understanding of the industry and experience in building games. We find that working hands-on in game development and product strategy is often the best training ground for strong CEOs. The reason is that the care and craft a CEO has will usually trickle down into their team and go a long way towards building a culture where everyone cares about making a great product. Note that the CEO’s task is not to build the product, but to build the team and culture that builds great products” - Harri Manninen, Play Ventures
Then comes the necessary personality traits. First is being multi-disciplinary: while a CEO does not need to have business development experience, they should have or be willing to learn business and finance fundamentals. For example, CEOs should learn about concepts like valuation, dilution, corporate governance, and so-on, if they don’t already, before raising investment.
A second important characteristic of a CEO is self-awareness, which also translates to not having an ego. Let’s start with what a lack of these traits looks like in a CEO candidate. This is someone who has an unwavering, false belief in their expertise in one of the critical domains of the business, and cannot let go and delegate. For example, a CEO with only business development experience in games who is intent on leading product strategy as well.
By contrast, a good CEO should be able to acknowledge their weakness and let someone else in their team lead domains where they are not at their strongest. And while we’ve been using founders with a business development background as examples of what not to do, the same applies to founders with a strong technical background. As this study published in Harvard Business Review shows, a strong technical founding team would enhance their chances of success by hiring business experts to complement them.
A good CEO is always looking to have the right person to lead each part of the company. That’s a simple rule of thumb which applies to pretty much everything, except for fundraising. The responsibility of pitching the studio should always be led by the CEO and another co-founder.
2. Technical co-founder
The foundation of a bulletproof games company lies in its technical capabilities. A strong technical co-founder, preferably a full-stack one, is critical because it means that even when you’ve not raised money or (heaven forbid) have run out of money, the show can go on.
If you’re in the lucky position of having two technical co-founders — one client and one backend, for example — that is even better. Strong technical co-founders will also make it easier for you to attract and hire other developers, since they’d be able to learn from and work with them. Quite often developers are attracted by the chance to learn from a very skilled technical co-founder — this is a great asset as small startups usually can’t compete on salary with the bigger established studios.
However, at an early stage, it is more important to have someone capable of being hands-on, so if your technical lead is not already at the CTO level, try to make sure that they are someone who can grow into the role.
Overall, make sure that your technical co-founder has a balance between getting “stuck in” with a hands-on attitude, and a more managerial approach. While you’ll make a tremendous headstart working with a co-founder highly adept at developing and prototyping, you may encounter significant troubles when it’s time to increase velocity and build up the programming team around a programmer who lacks management experience.
3. Other key roles
Designer
While the role of a designer may initially be taken on by your CEO, over time that will not be a sustainable arrangement. A CEO will quickly find themselves caught up with other work that only a CEO can and should do — such as fundraising, hiring, traveling and other business development tasks. As time passes, the creative CEO will likely become a bottleneck to both design and company decisions.
If you decide to have a designer as a co-founder, make sure they are as hands on as possible. Creating design documentation and creative visions is important in large teams but may be even counterproductive within more compact ones. The design person you’re looking for should be multi-disciplinary; able to design and balance characters, levels, puzzles, guide art and animation, in addition to writing code.
Performance Marketer
Having a user acquisition powerhouse as a founding member makes most sense if your company’s game-making methodology is built around short development times, early market validation, and multiple releases per year (for example if you’re focusing on hyper-casual games).
Don’t make the mistake of hiring a performance marketer early on if you can’t utilize their skills. Having a marketing expert sit on their hands while the rest of the team focuses on making the game for a good part of a year is not only demotivating for the individual but also a waste of your resources.
Art Director
If you’re making games that stand out visually on the market, you will need to have a strong Art Director on your co-founding team. A good starting point in your search is looking for people with experience as a Lead Concept Artist, a strong following on Art Station, and experience working with both in-house teams and outsourcing. While there are many types of Art Directors suitable for various types of projects, the type you’re looking for is someone who can do early visual development themselves and scale up the team both internally and externally. Like all positions in a startup, a hands-on attitude is imperative for any Art position in an early stage studio. The Art Director or Lead Artist you add to your early team must be ready, willing and able to do marketing assets, website assets, logo/branding testing and whatever other assets are needed, not only those fun concept shots.
Data Scientist
If you are building a games data or games marketing platform, then it would be highly advisable to include a co-founder with extensive experience working with data. There are hardly any other scenarios where a data scientist is a mandatory member of the founding team, however they can certainly prove valuable once your games go live.
Don’t fly solo
Most of us agree on the power of the team. But there are some lonely wolves out there who have attained success on their own. Could this be a viable path? After all, you have the world at your fingertips, with amazing freelancers and outsourcing partners willing to help you out for a chunk of change.
“Whatever you do, don’t fly solo. Try to find some solid co-founders. Without the co-founders, the next few years of your life will become unnecessarily hard” - Joakim Achren, Elite Game Developers
Being a founder and running a company is incredibly hard work. When you have a bad day as a solo founder, you have no back-up and no immediate support system. It is guaranteed that you’ll often run into situations where there are no clear ‘right’ answers and many difficult choices to make. Having co-founders to rely on will safeguard your mental and emotional health, and ensure that your company has the best shot at success. When you’re alone, those hard days will take you under water, but when you have a founding team around you, those hard days will bring your team closer together.
Investors are fully aware of this, and are much less likely to back your company if it’s a one-person operation.
“Solo-founder companies are a hard sell for investors — and for good reason. No single person on this planet has such a wide skill-set that they can be experts on all the crafts involved in building and running a successful games company” - Henric Suuronen, Play Ventures
Not only that, but what if the founder gets sick? Or there are personal issues that require their attention for a couple of weeks? A company totally reliant on one person to operate is not an attractive proposition for an investor.
Most investors prefer founding teams of 3–6 people that demonstrate cognitive diversity and complementary skill sets. And hey, even one of the most famous lonely wolves, John Carmack, had a co-founder. And he famously reinvented gaming with the world’s first lightning-fast 3D game engine while coding in the evening, and finishing just before dawn to achieve uninterrupted stretches of silence, isolation, and deep work without the rest of the team around him.
Check your egos at the door
Starting your startup journey with a team you have full confidence in is exciting! You’re pumped! Ecstatic! You’ve made the leap. There’s no way back, only forward. But while you’re pounding your chest and high fiving your co-founders, you should also make sure to check your ego at the door. I mentioned the importance of this earlier, when talking about hiring a CEO. However, the same applies for you and the rest of the team — make egos the enemy. Trust me, they will get in the way of success and cause divides in the long-run, especially when facing failures and other difficulties.
Doing this will help you build a culture which encourages team members to become experts in their field, even if it means you, as the founder, let go of some control and power. In fact, the prospect of your team members becoming better experts than you should be a source of excitement. This is a good discussion to have with your co-founders from the start.
Finally, assembling the right founding team is just the first step in this journey. Once you have your A-team together, it’s time to move on to the next step: getting your pitch perfect! Stay tuned for my next article, which will explain exactly how to do that.
