He Built And Sold A Gaming Company For $100 Million And Now Backs Gaming Startups Through A $450 Million VC Firm

Henric Suuronen’s story is a masterclass in how childhood passion can evolve into global impact. His journey started from pirating games in cold Finnish winters and went on to building a $100M+ gaming company and investing nearly $500M into startups.

Henric has experienced the gaming world from every angle—player, builder, founder, and investor, working in larger corporate firms from both sides of the table. His story reflects how immersive passion, strategic timing, and relentless learning can turn pixels into power.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Growing Up in Finland: A Gamer’s Playground

Henric grew up in Finland, a country famous for Nokia, ice hockey–the national sport, Santa Claus, and long, dark winters, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, when snow was still a birthday guarantee. His world revolved around gaming, and he spent countless hours on Amstrad and Commodore 64 machines.

Later, Henric graduated to the Nintendo 8-bit, playing Super Mario for up to 10 hours a day. When PCs entered the picture, Mortal Kombat and Doom took center stage. His early obsession with multiplayer gaming through dial-up modems planted a seed that would define his career.

Games weren’t just entertainment; they were social connectors. This was especially important for a shy teen like Henric. Multiplayer games offered him a way to connect with others without needing to break the ice in person. He looks back fondly on those days when he would visit internet cafes to play Counter-Strike.

Despite coming from a modest background and pirating games to get access, Henric unknowingly built a vast mental library of game mechanics, player behavior, and what makes a game truly sticky. “I played every single game out there,” he recalls. “That became my education.”

Later in his career, when Henric started designing games for a living, the knowledge he gained from playing those hundreds or thousands of games came in handy. These skills were also valuable as an investor since he could talk about any game with founders.

Nokia: A Corporate Crash Course in Mobile Gaming

After completing his master’s in software engineering, Henric joined Nokia in the early 2000s, then the hottest mobile company in the world with a 43% global market share. At that time, a Nokia phone had a full keyboard, which integrated Excel, Microsoft Word, and other applications.

Henric was entrusted with the task of developing the calculator app. Initially hired as a programmer on the communicator team, he quickly realized he wasn’t a great coder. But a flash of creativity saved his job.

One day, Henric saw colleagues shooting digital mosquitoes on their Series 60 phone screens using the camera API. It sparked an idea: a Bluetooth-based multiplayer urban shooting game using color matching. Nokia loved it and moved him to the games unit based in the capital of Finland.

Although the unit had been rolling for a couple of years, it was losing hundreds of millions on the N-Gage. A device by Nokia in the early 2000s, it was dedicated to gaming, and Nokia was trying to relaunch it on all its phones. This was Henric’s first taste of turning imagination into a product.

Working on Nokia’s Arena Connected, the company’s connected gaming platform, he learned a powerful insight: every phone is a connected device, so even simple games like Snake could be turned into social multiplayer experiences. This belief in connectivity would shape his entire career.

Transforming Gaming with Connectivity

Henric realized that not having a modem connected to a PC was no longer a hurdle. Around this time, flat-rate internet connections started rolling out in some countries. Although it was slow going initially, it quickly became apparent that data was going to be bigger than phone calls and SMS.

Henric could design games that were connected from the get-go. They would be more profitable, have a better user retention profile, and ultimately, monetize more effectively. From the human perspective, the games could bring introverted people together and help them find friends and partners.

As Henric recalls, during his time at Nokia, the company released incredible games like Pathway to Glory, a battle game with amazing features that some iPhone games don’t have even 15 years later.

Nokia used games as a user acquisition strategy because people wanted to buy the brand’s phones just to play games like Snake, which quickly became highly addictive in locations like Spain.

During his time at Nokia, Henric got an offer to move to London to work in a French gaming company called Gameloft. He recalls how he was preparing to move abroad when Digital Chocolate approached him.

Digital Chocolate: The MBA of Gaming

Henric’s big break came when he joined Digital Chocolate, a mobile gaming company founded by Trip Hawkins (who also founded Electronic Arts, which was eventually sold for an incredible $55B).

Trip had also just bought the Finnish company called Sumeya Interactive, which loosely translates to Fuzzy Interactive, a mobile gaming company. When he heard about Henric’s London offer, Trip made a competing offer and invited Henric to join the Digital Chocolate Finland division.

Here, Henric worked directly under Ilkka Paananen and Mikko Kodisoja, who would become the future founders of Supercell, makers of Clash of Clans. Henric loved being a part of the lives of three million people who played the games daily.

Over four years, Henric worked on more than 50 games. He was a product manager, designer, and strategist, in short, everything except a coder. This period became Henric’s “MBA of gaming,” teaching him monetization, virality, retention, and scale.

Henric continued to design games and convert them into products that could be monetized. The coding part was left to expert engineers on the team. Soon, he moved to Digital Chocolate’s Barcelona division, where he was tasked with making iPhone games.

Developing Millionaire City in Barcelona

Henric recalls how, at one point, they had 15 games ranking in the top 100 on iPhone. Around this time, in 2009-2010, Facebook emerged on the scene. People started playing Zynga games on the platform, and Henric was tasked with breaking into the platform.

He started with Tower Bloxx, a UFC-type game which attracted 200,000 players. Next, he developed MMA Pro Fighter, which also got a great response. Then, Henric led the development of Millionaire City, a Facebook game built by a team of six.

Within months, it exploded to 3 million daily players, becoming the largest non-U.S. Facebook game at the time. It also became the biggest game in Europe. The success changed his career forever. “After that game,” Henric says, “I never had to apply for a job again.”

WOOGA and the Birth of a Founder

Henric then joined Wooga in Berlin as Head of Studio. Under his leadership, the company grew from 2 million to 11 million daily players and raised $24M in funding. They created the biggest puzzle game before Candy Crush called Diamond Dash, a name Henric invented.

During this time, he read the Steve Jobs biography, which triggered a significant shift. Henric realized it was time to step out of his comfort zone and build his own company. He was inspired by Asia’s live operations model (where game updates happen daily or even hourly).

In contrast, Western games would push updates once a month or quarter. Henric was keenly interested in learning how to execute that and the particular system they had in place. He also zeroed in on the advanced digital item economies in games.

Henric realized that gamers were purchasing digital items on the App Store and combining them to create even better items. This strategy created a much more robust compulsion loop for the player, driving motivation and the desire to get items that were hard to procure while playing the game.

Alternatively, players could purchase the items, which could be expensive. Thus, companies could run a business through the game by converting purchases into a strategy that drives lifetime value (LTV).

Entrepreneurial Leap: Building and Selling a $100M Gaming Company

Henric founded a new studio in Singapore, hiring engineers from Japan, China, and Korea, who were pioneers in these types of games. He moved them to Singapore, and in 2012, he launched his gaming company with $3M in seed funding from Spotify’s early investors.

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Their flagship game, Heroes of Honor, combined Western design and Asian monetization mechanics. This strategy resulted in players spending tens of thousands of dollars inside the game, which was not possible in Western-made games.

The company pioneered hourly live ops and deep item economies, making the gameplay highly engaging and commercially powerful. In 2014, within just three years, King (the Candy Crush company) acquired the studio for $32M upfront plus $68M in earnouts.

King had just gone public for roughly $6B, following the success of Candy Crush. The company was interested in Asia, Asian game making, and deeper item economies. It was eager to explore live operations and the prospect of quickly pushing events inside Candy Crush.

The Deal Almost Interrupted by Knee Surgery

Just weeks before the acquisition, Henric flew to Finland for an experimental knee surgery involving stem cells. Two days into recovery, King’s CEO called: “Can you fly to Stockholm tomorrow?” Henric explained he wasn’t allowed to fly for eight weeks.

The CEO’s response changed everything: “What if I told you I want to buy your company?”

Henric got on that plane. Two months later, the deal closed. Not long after, Activision Blizzard acquired King, giving Henric a clean exit and the freedom to chart his next chapter.

From Founder to Investor: Building Play Ventures

By this time, Henric had played games from the age of six to 20, understanding the mechanics of how they worked. He had worked in the corporate sphere, learning about how the games businesses are run. He had also been an entrepreneur, hiring the right team and raising capital.

Most importantly, Henric had learned the art of pivoting and letting people go when things didn’t work out. He had also learned that to be successful, you need to hire people smarter than you.

Having made angel investments during his founding years, Henric now had the experience and capital to delve deeper. He would analyze the founding team and offer skills in game-making, corporate issues, and entrepreneurship. He has also advised entrepreneurs as a consultant and helped with raising funding.

“To be a good angel, you need a toolbox,” Henric explains. His toolbox included:

• Gameplay knowledge from years of playing.
• Corporate experience from Nokia and Digital Chocolate.
• Entrepreneurial scars from building and exiting his own company.

Henric made 20+ angel investments, including Huge Games, which IPO’d at a $1.2B valuation after he invested at an $8M post-money. He still serves on the board of the company.

In 2018, a conversation at the Game Developers Conference with a fellow founder-operator led to the launch of Play Ventures, one of the first VC funds founded by gaming entrepreneurs for gaming entrepreneurs.

Their anchor LP was Ilkka Paananen of Supercell, which was, in 2018, the hottest gaming company on the planet, following the $10B valuation acquisition by Tencent. Without slides or even a name, Henric’s commitment gave them the confidence to move forward.

Raising Funding for Play Ventures

The first fund was $40M, and since then, Play Ventures has raised over $450M across multiple vehicles, backing studios and platforms shaping the future of gaming.

Henric reflects on how his investment journey evolved from early-stage confidence-building to becoming a top-performing fund. Over the years, as returns began to flow and his team expanded, he saw clear proof of the competitive edge they had believed in from the start.

“We returned our first fund one and a half times net DPI,” he explained, referring to their 2018 vintage. With 18 companies still active in that fund, Play Ventures is now positioned among the top 1% of Carta-tracked funds globally, a milestone that reinforced their strategy and conviction.

The Founders Who Stand Out

Henric emphasized that in early-stage investing, people matter more than anything else. Identifying the right founders is where great venture performance begins. He shared that what they look for goes far beyond the vague label of “great founders.”

In fact, one of the strongest indicators of future success is a complementary founding duo—two people with distinct but perfectly aligned skills. One founder often embodies the visionary qualities: inspiring others, fundraising, and hiring top talent.

The other is typically the operational backbone: a relentless executor who ensures the machine runs. “That combination,” Henric explained, “creates balance. It’s what my own partnership with Harri Manninen is built on.”

He also noted something less intuitive: the best founders are not always the “nicest” people in the room. Some of them have intimidating brilliance or nonconforming traits.

Henric pointed to well-known figures like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as examples of how unconventional personalities often drive extraordinary outcomes.

“Sometimes,” he said, “the founder should make you a little uncomfortable—they’re either so smart or so different that you know you need to back them.”

Henric highlighted the importance of founders understanding both their strengths and weaknesses. Teams that know where they shine and where they need help are far more likely to scale effectively. “It’s very hard to work with a founder who thinks they’re great at something they’re not,” he added.

Betting on Founders Smarter Than You

Henric illustrated this philosophy with a recent example: Appcharge, a D2C payments company and the “biggest rocket ship” in Play Ventures’ portfolio. When he first met the founders, their intelligence was overwhelming—in the best way.

Appcharge went on to raise a $58M Series B round led by IVP from San Francisco. “They made me feel uncomfortable in a good sense,” Henric recalled. “I had to immediately go Google and learn more about D2C payments because they were 10 times smarter than me in that space.”

This discomfort became a green flag. For Henric and his team, one clear rule is never to invest when they believe they know more about a space than the founders. Early-stage investors should be betting on exceptional people, not dictating expertise.

Advice to a Younger Self

If Henric could speak to his younger self, he joked that the obvious advice would be to buy Nvidia or Apple stock and hold it. But beyond that, his real advice would center on networking and doubling down on unique strengths.

Henric shared an anecdote from his early career at Nokia. At 24, he noticed a summer intern who seemed unusually close to the CEO, getting invited to barbecues and high-fiving in the office. When Henric asked how he knew the CEO, the answer stunned him: “I make the PowerPoint slides.”

At that time, Nokia had a 43% market share. That moment changed how Henric thought about value creation. Nobody at the C-suite level wanted to design slides, but someone who could do it well became indispensable.

Henric decided to master that skill himself. He studied visual design, storytelling, and crafting persuasive fundraising materials. Over time, this seemingly niche talent became a superpower, one he still uses today to build compelling investor decks, refining as he goes along. He also learned AI tools.

Mastering One Thing Exceptionally Well

Henric believes that everyone has something they are naturally good at, something where they already outperform 90% of people. “If you double down on that and keep refining it,” he explained, “you can become better than a million others and maybe even the best in the world at it.”

This relentless sharpening of strengths is not just advice for individuals, but it’s also how Henric evaluates founders. The most powerful teams are built by assembling people who are world-class in their respective zones and who respect each other’s craft.

“People love working with someone who’s the best in the world at something,” Henric said. “You put several of those people together, and that’s when you build an all-star team.”

Closing Reflections

Henric Suuronen’s journey from founder to top-tier investor is built on a clear philosophy: bet on exceptional people, play to your strengths, and never stop learning.

His success with Play Ventures isn’t accidental; it’s rooted in a deep understanding of how great teams are formed, how true talent manifests, and how personal skill-building compounds over time.

Whether building a fund or a startup, Henric’s guiding principle remains the same: find your edge, sharpen it relentlessly, and surround yourself with others who’ve done the same.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Childhood gaming obsession became Henric’s foundation for building and investing in billion-dollar companies.
• Corporate experience at Nokia taught him how connectivity could transform simple games into viral products.
• Henric’s “MBA of gaming” at Digital Chocolate refined his expertise in monetization, virality, and retention.
• Founding his own studio and selling it for $100M+ proved the power of combining Western design with Asian monetization.
• Play Ventures grew from a founder-led vision into a $450M+ top-performing VC fund.
• Henric believes great startups are built by complementary, exceptional founders who make investors “uncomfortably impressed.”
• His core philosophy: master one thing exceptionally well, bet on smarter people, and keep sharpening your edge.

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

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