Henric Suuronen On Building And Selling A Gaming Company For $100 Million And Now Backing 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, which he sold to King.

Henric has now co-founded Play Ventures, raising $450M to back startups working in the gaming sector.

In this episode, you will learn:

• 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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About Henric Suuronen:

Henric Suuronen is the Founding Partner of Play Ventures. He previously co-founded Nonstop Games which was acquired by King for US$32m+ earnout.

Henric has over 16 years of experience building mobile games and studios around the world. Before co-founding Nonstop Games in Singapore, he was Product Management Director at Digital Chocolate (Helsinki and Barcelona) and the Head of Studio at Wooga (Berlin).

After King’s acquisition of Nonstop Games, Henric served as Senior Creative Director at King.

Henric also has a successful portfolio of angel investments in gaming including Huuuge Games, Futureplay Games, Traplight Games, Matchmade, Omniata (acquired by King), DataTiger (acquired by Apple) and Astralis Group (IPO on Nasdaq). In total, his investments have raised >$125M of venture financing and made 5 exits + 1 IPO.

Henric is based in Singapore and frequently travels to the main gaming hubs in Europe and the US. He holds double masters’ degrees in Computer Science and Business.

Connect with Henric Suuronen:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Play Ventures
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Dealmaker Show. So today, very exciting. You know, a founder that we’ve got joining us. We’re going to be talking about a lot of gaming. And again, founder turned investor. We’re going to be talking about both sides of the table. He’s also worked at a larger corporate firm. So I think that every single aspect, we’re going to be covering it on the show today. Very inspiring. We’re going to be talking about the building, the scaling,

Alejandro Cremades: also getting incredible exits and incredible returns on investments. And again, brace yourself for quite the episode. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Henric Suuronen.

Alejandro Cremades: Welcome to the show.

Henric Suuronen: Thank you, thank you. And that was almost perfect pronunciation of my Finnish last name. So thank you for that.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, hey, born in the 80s in Finland. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up over there?

Henric Suuronen: Yeah, so to those of you who haven’t been in Finland, it’s of course a cold, cold country. So we have our snow, at least we used to have snow before global warming.

Henric Suuronen: But yeah, in the 80s we had snow. And as a funny story, my birthday was actually just last Friday — I turned 45. And when I grew up, usually on my birthday, there was snow.

Henric Suuronen: And now with global warming, there’s not even snow on the southern coast for Christmas. So that’s how it has changed. But maybe we can talk about global warming on a different podcast than yours.

Henric Suuronen: Anyway, I grew up in Finland. And Finland is kind of maybe known for Nokia, ice hockey, and Santa Claus. And if you don’t follow ice hockey, it’s kind of our national sport. Everyone plays it.

Henric Suuronen: But in later years, also gaming, especially mobile gaming. And I understand why, because it’s of course dark outside and quite miserable. So people like to spend time inside, especially in the winter or in the fall when it’s wet, playing games. And that’s also what I did when I grew up. I played mostly on Amstrad. I didn’t have a Commodore 64 — my friends had one.

Henric Suuronen: Unfortunately, my parents bought the wrong machine, which was a little bit of a downer, because on Commodore 64 there were many more games than on Amstrad. But in that time also came, of course, the Nintendo 8-bit, and my friend had Super Mario. So I played Super Mario a lot.

Henric Suuronen: And when I say a lot, it means eight hours a day or ten hours a day. Later, my brother got a PC, 486 40 megahertz. I played Mortal Kombat.

Henric Suuronen: Then later, Doom — if you remember Doom, the first first-person shooter game. That was also my first touch of multiplayer, which became quite important later in my career, because some PCs started getting modems. You remember — you would dial up over the phone line and play against your friends.

Henric Suuronen: And that was an absolutely incredible experience. I would say sometime in the 90s. But yeah, I grew up in Finland, playing a lot of games, playing ice hockey, and of course also a little bit of studies. My mother actually started getting very worried when I played so much that when I went to sleep, I closed my eyes and under the eyelids I could see units moving because they were kind of etched to my retinas from playing too much.

Henric Suuronen: But I think this period is incredibly important for my career because I played every single game there was on PC pretty much. And of course, I came from a poor family because my dad died when I was eight.

Henric Suuronen: So I pirated all of those games. I’m ashamed of saying it, but I think it was actually an important education for my career. If you played every single game, you got very good knowledge of the mechanics — what makes people like a game and come back to it.

Henric Suuronen: I think later in my career, when I actually designed games for a living before becoming an investor, all that knowledge that I gained from playing hundreds or thousands of games in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s came into use.

Henric Suuronen: That’s a skill I still use as an investor because you can talk about any game with a founder. So it’s super important. But yeah, it was playing games and also, of course, playing a little bit of ice hockey. And since I wasn’t good enough as an ice hockey player, I’m happy that I was good enough in mobile games later.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I mean, it’s amazing because as you were talking and you were sharing some of those games, you gave me unbelievable flashbacks. I remember going to the internet cafes to play Counter-Strike and stuff like that. I mean, incredible days. In your case, Finland —

Alejandro Cremades: once it was time to work, you went at it with Nokia. You went through different divisions, and eventually you ended up joining the gaming unit. And that kind of changed everything. So what happened there and would you say that catapulted you into the gaming space?

Henric Suuronen: I mean, I started a master’s in software engineering, and Nokia had — this was maybe 2001 or 2002 — a recruitment fair at my university. They just picked me. “Okay, we hire you as an engineer on the communicator team.”

Henric Suuronen: If you remember, there was a Nokia phone that you opened up and it had a full keyboard. You could have Excel, Microsoft Word, and all. This is 2002–2003 we’re talking about.

Henric Suuronen: I was a programmer on that, working specifically on a calculator app. But I quite quickly realized that I’m a really bad programmer. And as you realize that you’re working in — and this is before iPhone, okay —

Henric Suuronen: pretty much the hottest company out of Europe, which was Nokia. They had a 43% market share in mobile phones. And I worked there. I thought, OK, I’m going to get fired because I’m such a bad programmer.

Henric Suuronen: One day in the cafeteria, I saw a couple of colleagues. They were shooting something on their mobile phones. This was a Series 60 device, one of the first devices from Nokia where you could access the camera feed through an API. They were shooting mosquitoes, digital mosquitoes, on the screen. That got my brain rolling — “oh, shit, what if you would make a game where you can record over Bluetooth the color of your friend’s shirt with a matching on a camera of the color, and then it would be an urban shooting game?” And if you match the color of what you recorded, then the other phone vibrates as you’re being hit.

Henric Suuronen: This game idea rescued me from, I think, getting fired as a programmer, because when Nokia saw it, or some executives saw it, they said, “Come and work at the games unit.”

Henric Suuronen: So I moved to the capital of Finland and the headquarters of Nokia and joined the games unit, which had been rolling for a couple of years. They had lost hundreds of millions on the N-Gage. If you remember, it was a kind of gaming-dedicated phone by Nokia in the early 2000s. They tried to relaunch it on all Nokia phones. That’s when I joined on something called the Arena, a kind of connected layer on top of the mobile phones. I loved that because the whole thing for me growing up was that games — if you play single player, you’re isolated and you don’t meet people. And I was, like many teens in their teenage years, a little bit afraid of talking to girls or talking to people. But games allowed you to, especially multiplayer games, and that’s very important for the mobile part — you can play a game and then you have a shared interest and then it’s easier to talk to someone.

Henric Suuronen: When I joined the Nokia Games team, specifically on the Arena connected gaming part, there was no problem with not having a modem to the PC because every phone was connected. So all the games — even a simple game like Snake — you could think about, “Okay, what’s the multiplayer version of it?”

Henric Suuronen: Every phone was connected. This was also the time when flat-rate internet connections started rolling out in some countries. Not in all, in 2005 and 2006, but they started slowly. Data was going to be bigger than phone calls.

Henric Suuronen: Data was going to be bigger than SMS. And now it’s, of course, very easy to say, yeah, that’s going to happen. But if you go back to 2003–2004, that was not the case. But when you worked at Nokia, you realized, OK, that’s actually going to be the case.

Henric Suuronen: A lot of this connectivity back then, especially with games, made me think — if you design games that are connected from the get-go, you’ll have a better business, a better retention profile for your users, and ultimately also monetize better. On the business side, but also on the personal side, or let’s say the good for humankind side, is that we can bring people who are introverts together and they can maybe find their wife, their girlfriend, or their friends through a game.

Henric Suuronen: And Nokia did, during my time there, some incredible games like Pathway to Glory, for example, a battle game with incredible features that still some iPhone games don’t have 15 years later.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, I remember even Nokia, one of their strategies to do user acquisition back in the day. My very first phone was a Nokia, and I remember playing that Snake game like crazy. It was just so addictive. And at least in Spain, everyone wanted a Nokia to be able to play the games they had, which was an incredible way to acquire new customers. Now, in your case,

Alejandro Cremades: what really cemented you in the gaming space was Digital Chocolate. Obviously, you’ve done tons of stuff afterward, but it was that pivotal moment for you in your career — being able to join Digital Chocolate and be part of the lives of three million people that were playing some of those games on a daily basis. So how was that journey, landing at Digital Chocolate? You spent a few years there and then, obviously, Wuga, which became the most immediate step before you became an entrepreneur. So walk us through what happened there.

Henric Suuronen: Yeah, so I was working at Nokia on a successful project with a French gaming company called Gameloft. I actually got a job offer to move to London. I told my girlfriend, and of course we cried and everything, thinking I would move abroad.

Henric Suuronen: Then Digital Chocolate had just bought the Finnish company called Sumeya Interactive, which loosely translates to Fuzzy Interactive, a mobile gaming company. Digital Chocolate was founded by Trip Hawkins, who also founded Electronic Arts — which you probably saw just got sold to PIF for 55 billion.

Henric Suuronen: This was his third company, Digital Chocolate. He had bought the Finnish company. It was very high profile and had raised tons of money. And Digital Chocolate’s Finland office eventually hired me. They heard I was going to London to a competitor, and they made a competing offer. So I went with them, and I was very happy because I then joined directly under Ilka Paananen and Mikko Kodisoya, who later, of course, became known as the founders of Supercell, makers of Clash of Clans. I have to say I spent four years at Digital Chocolate. That’s where I got my MBA of gaming —

Henric Suuronen: how to make games, how to make a business out of games, how to think about monetization, how to get virality. I probably made 50 games, maybe 55. I haven’t done a proper calculation. Usually as a product manager, sometimes a game designer, sometimes even a little bit of art stuff — anything except coding.

Henric Suuronen: Like I said, I’m a bad coder. Luckily we had great coders to do that part. But I designed games and then figured out how to make them products. In 2010, that’s where my pivotal moment in my career comes. Prior to that, I had moved to Barcelona to the Barcelona office of Digital Chocolate and made some iPhone games.

Henric Suuronen: At one point, we had 15 games in the top 100 at the same time on iPhone at Digital Chocolate. Fifteen out of 100 at the same time. Of course, Steve Jobs also showed some games we worked on on stage, which was quite cool.

Henric Suuronen: In 2009–2010, this new platform, Facebook Canvas, came. People used to use Facebook on the web browser. Of course, not maybe so much now, but back then Zynga was the big company on Facebook gaming. Digital Chocolate tasked me to come up with how we enter Facebook. I made a couple of games. First, Tower Blocks did really well — 200,000 players per day.

Henric Suuronen: A kind of UFC-type game, MMA Pro Fighter, also had a couple hundred thousand players. The smash hit that changed my career was Millionaire City, a city builder a bit like, let’s say, Theme City on Facebook.

Henric Suuronen: That game was done in Barcelona with a team of six, out of which I was one — the product manager — and I also did some of the game design. That was done in six months, and it went very quickly in three or four months to three million players per day.

Henric Suuronen: After that game — and it was the biggest game not done by Zynga or in the US, the biggest game in Europe or done in Europe — three million players per day. And after that, I never needed to apply for a job again. All the other corporates I worked with after that came through headhunters. But I left then in 2010 and joined Wooga in Berlin, an early kind of Facebook game company as well.

Henric Suuronen: That went incredibly well. During my tenure there as Head of Studio, it grew from roughly two million players per day to 11 million daily active players per day. We also raised a $24 million round of financing for that company. We made, for example, the biggest puzzle game before Candy Crush called Diamond Dash, which is also a name I invented.

Henric Suuronen: Because if you have alliteration on mobile — the same letter in both words — you usually get higher CTR, which is also easy to prove with performance marketing tests. Diamond Dash was maybe back then the biggest hit. But in 2011, and this goes to my path to being an entrepreneur, I read the Steve Jobs biography book.

Henric Suuronen: And I was like, “Okay, sometimes you’ve got to get out of your comfort zone and chase your dreams.” A little bit of a cliché, but that’s exactly what happened. Me and a couple of other people I had worked with partly at Nokia before started talking — let’s make our own gaming company and let’s go to Asia.

Henric Suuronen: The reasoning for Asia was that back in 2011–2012, when we created the company, Asian games had something called live operations — pushing new events inside the game on an hourly or daily basis.

Henric Suuronen: Western games would do it once a month or once a quarter. In Asia, they would do it daily or even hourly. I wanted to learn how to do that. It’s a specific type of system you have to have in place.

Henric Suuronen: The second part was that we started seeing very advanced digital item economies in games. This is something we start now seeing in consumer apps like Duolingo. It’s not just that you buy a missing currency or a missing item.

Henric Suuronen: You maybe grind yourself to a missing item or two of them, and then you can combine them and they become even better items. And then you can rinse and repeat that almost endlessly. This creates a much stronger compulsion loop for the player and also drives motivation and desire — “I want to have that sword because it’s so hard to get it.”

Henric Suuronen: Of course, you can also pay for it, and it can be quite expensive. This trickles down to the LTV of the game and how much you can run a business on that game. But I wanted to move to Asia and hire people from Japan, China, and Korea — the pioneers in this type of games.

Henric Suuronen: Get them moved into Singapore, they teach me, and we work together to create these games from Singapore to the world. We launched then with my own company in 2012–2013. We raised a $3 million round of financing from the same investors as Spotify.

Henric Suuronen: We launched a game called Heroes of Honor, where we put everything I knew from Western game making and everything we learned from the Asian game makers together in one game. The result was, for example, that we had users who spent tens of thousands of dollars inside the game.

Henric Suuronen: That was not possible in Western-made games. We ran live operations on an hourly basis — let’s say eight times a day. This is super important because the journey was quite quick. From founder to exit was three years.

Henric Suuronen: Very quickly. We sold the company then in 2014 for $32 plus $68 million US dollars to the Candy Crush company. They had just IPO’d following the success of Candy Crush for roughly six billion.

Henric Suuronen: They were interested in Asia and Asian game making, and they were interested in deeper item economies — exactly like I described — where you could have items you grind for days or years to get and then combine them into a better item. Candy Crush didn’t have anything like that. They were also interested in the live operations part — being able to push events inside Candy Crush quickly. So they acquired my company in July 2014.

Alejandro Cremades: Which is saying something. There was also a knee surgery and how not even a knee surgery got in between you and getting the deal done.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess first, how did the initial interaction with King happen? And also, tell us about that knee surgery and that airplane.

Henric Suuronen: Good question. So, yeah, in 2014, about two months before the company was acquired, I flew from Singapore to my hometown in Finland.

Henric Suuronen: I said it’s known maybe for mobile games and ice hockey players, but it’s also known for good surgeons. Even David Beckham, I think, when his Achilles tendon was broken, flew to my hometown to get surgery. Anyway, I flew there for knee surgery. I had a cartilage problem in my knee and hadn’t been able to run for eight years.

Henric Suuronen: At a tech conference, I actually found a lead to an experimental knee surgery that would extract stem cells, put them under a kneecap, and grow new cartilage. I went through that procedure — and I’m happy I can run again because of that.

Henric Suuronen: As I was recovering on the second day, I suddenly got a message from the CEO of King asking, “Hey, can I take a phone call?”

Henric Suuronen: I took the call and he said, “Hey, can you come to Stockholm tomorrow?” Bear in mind I’d had the surgery two days before. I said, “No, I can’t. I just had surgery. I’m not allowed to be on a plane for eight weeks.”

Henric Suuronen: And then he said, “But what if I told you that I want to buy your company?” I was quiet for a while and said, “Yeah, maybe I can somehow get this done.” Of course, the flight from Finland to Stockholm is just one hour.

Henric Suuronen: So we flew all the founders to Stockholm and quite quickly struck the deal in the following two months in July 2014.

Alejandro Cremades: So one thing that happened too is, you know, once the deal with King was done, they ended up getting acquired too. And that actually helped —

Alejandro Cremades: by Activision — and that actually helped for you to be able to get out of the deal. And that kind of catapulted you into this world of startup investment. So you were doing some angel investments prior, here and there.

Alejandro Cremades: But how do you go from being a founder and doing some angel investments on the side to then deciding, “Hey, I want to dedicate this next chapter of my life and career to being on the other side of the table?”

Henric Suuronen: That’s a good question. I think, as I said at the start of this talk, the pivotal things in my life were playing all these games, pirating them from, let’s say, six years old to twenty, and playing all the games. You get the mechanics in your head.

Henric Suuronen: Then later working for corporate — seeing how business is done, how games are done. That was mainly Digital Chocolate, maybe a little bit Nokia. And then being an entrepreneur — hiring the right people, raising capital, sometimes having to let people go, pivoting. We did many pivots.

Henric Suuronen: A lot of things didn’t work.

Henric Suuronen: And I think all of this was what I call the toolbox of skills for investing. And when I was around 30 years old, working on Millionaire City and after that, I came up with this idea — what if I became an angel investor?

Henric Suuronen: I didn’t think about being a VC investor, but an angel investor in gaming. I figured out that to be a really good angel investor in gaming, I first needed to be a founder so I could actually advise the people I invest in. I can’t advise someone to play basketball if I’ve never played basketball. And I think it’s the same thing — I can’t advise someone to be an entrepreneur if I’ve never been an entrepreneur.

Henric Suuronen: So I wanted to have that in my toolbox — how to be a successful entrepreneur. And that means all these things I said: raising capital, hiring the right people, hiring smarter people than you.

Henric Suuronen: Sometimes you make mistakes and have to let them go. Pivot and all that stuff. So when I left King, where I was Creative Director after they acquired my company,

Henric Suuronen: I felt like my toolbox was ready. I quite quickly made roughly 20 angel investments, and it’s gone incredibly well.

Henric Suuronen: For example, I was the first investor in Huge Games. I invested at $8 million post, and roughly five years later, it IPO’d at $1.2 billion US dollars valuation.

Henric Suuronen: I still serve on the board of that great company, but there was a whole bunch of other companies as well in my angel portfolio. For all those investments, I analyzed the founding team using the toolbox I had built.

Henric Suuronen: Game-making skills, founder skills, corporate skills, and sometimes, of course, I even helped them with fundraising or whatever they needed. I think the connected toolbox is key for everything I’ve done.

Henric Suuronen: It took me 15 years to create that — or let’s say 20 years if you take my teenage or childhood years playing games. Then it’s almost 30 years of getting that perfect toolbox to be able to do what I do now.

Henric Suuronen: In 2017–18, I had a friend of mine who I had done angel investments with and consulting for his company. He sold his gaming company, Rocketback, to Disney in 2011. We started discussing on a trip to San Francisco — actually to the Game Developers Conference in March — what if we leveled up our angel investing and launched a fund?

Henric Suuronen: That fund, or that discussion, then led to roughly a year later, we started Play Ventures — a dedicated fund by gaming entrepreneurs investing in gaming entrepreneurs.

Henric Suuronen: There were not many things like that. Actually, to my knowledge, none were founded by gaming entrepreneurs. So it was kind of… Now there are other funds like ours, but back then when we founded the fund, we were quite a unique proposition.

Henric Suuronen: The first person we went to was my boss from Digital Chocolate, Ilkka Paananen, who then ran Supercell — which, at that point already in 2018, was pretty much the hottest gaming company on the planet, following the $10 billion valuation acquisition by Tencent.

Henric Suuronen: We had no slides for the fund. We didn’t even have a name. It was just the two of us. He said that if you do this fund, we will invest. That gave us confidence. “Okay, now we’re actually making the fund.” So then we got the licenses here from Singapore, from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and started fundraising.

Henric Suuronen: That first fund was $40 million dollars.

Alejandro Cremades: And obviously, you guys have done the first fund, second fund, third fund, and then you have the other two vehicles, which are the Opportunity and the Future Fund. Right now, all in all, how much capital have you guys raised to date for the different funds?

Henric Suuronen: It’s roughly $450 million US dollars, which is, I mean, it starts to be quite a big sum. I remember when I was raising the first fund, I was thinking, “Oh, shit, $40 million is too much.”

Henric Suuronen: But over the years, as you get confidence, and of course also success and return your funds and all that, it comes. You get a wider team, and you see that, okay, we actually have that competitive advantage we thought we had when we started the fund.

Henric Suuronen: And we are succeeding and really, really doing well and paying great returns to our investors. So, as we even put on our website, we returned our first fund one and a half times, DPI, net fees.

Henric Suuronen: And there’s, I think, 18 companies left in that fund. And that’s a 2018 vintage, putting us in the top 1% on card attract funds in the world, even like one that win.

Henric Suuronen: One thousands of funds of that too.

Alejandro Cremades: So when we’re talking about returns here and success on startup investments, what would you say is the one key ingredient that you see in founders? Because, I mean, you guys are doing early stage, so it’s all about people.

Alejandro Cremades: But when it comes to people, what is that one trait that you see in founders that you’re like, “I need to invest in this company”?

Henric Suuronen: So often what we look for is—it’s easy to say great founders—but it’s so, so much more complex than that.

Henric Suuronen: We usually look for a dynamic duo. There are two people—very much like in my own fund, I have it—my partner, founding partner, Harimandinen. There are two people who complement each other perfectly. There’s maybe one more COO type, the other one is more visionary, able to fundraise, able to inspire people, able to hire people, and the other one is like a pure execution machine. So we often look for a kind of founding duo. And sometimes, and this is something I have learned maybe in later years, that—

Henric Suuronen: It’s not that the nicest founders are the best. Sometimes the founders need to make you a little bit uncomfortable. They’re either so freaking smart that you feel uncomfortable, or a lot of very successful people have some kind of out-of-the-norm traits.

Henric Suuronen: And I mean, Steam Jobs is a good example of that. But also like Mark Zuckerberg, also out-of-kind-of-norm traits. And often we see those in the invest founders we have. So we’re looking for a kind of founding duo often, or of course it can be a wider team, but there need to be at least two people who really gel together and have complementing skills, not overlapping skills.

Henric Suuronen: And they kind of know what they’re good at and they know what they’re not good at. That’s a super important thing, because I sometimes see founders who think they’re really good at something, and then it’s very hard to train them. It’s very hard for them to delegate that task to someone else.

Henric Suuronen: So to really answer your question, I think it’s this: the founding duo worked together before. They have grasped, thought about the problem. They want to go and do it better. They maybe have chips on the shoulders from their previous corporate screwing them over money or something like that, and they want to show they can.

Henric Suuronen: And now they have this idea they’ve been thinking about, and they trust 100% each other, and then they go at it. So that’s, for example, we have this company—just announced—AppCharge.

Henric Suuronen: It’s in our second fund, D2C payments company, in mobile. We just announced that there was a 58 million round led by IVP from San Francisco. And this company is just our current biggest rocket ship. And we’re the biggest shareholder there. And I remember when I had the first call with the founding team that I loved the idea.

Henric Suuronen: I loved the founders, and they did make me feel a bit uncomfortable because they were so freaking smart. And I had to, right after that call, go and Google and browse and learn more about D2C because I realized that, OK, these guys are 10 times smarter than I am in this space.

Henric Suuronen: And so that’s—we do not want to invest in founders when we think we know more about the space than them. That’s also a good rule.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. So obviously now, after doing all those investments, starting a successful company that you exited for over $100 million bucks, and then having experience on the corporate side of things—if you could go back in time and give a piece of advice to that younger self, that younger Henrik that was maybe entering the venture world, let’s say before you started Nonstop Games—what would be that piece of advice that you would give to your younger self and why, given what you know now?

Henric Suuronen: It’s a good question. Of course, easy would be to say, go and buy Nvidia stock or Apple stock and don’t do anything else.

Alejandro Cremades: There you go.

Henric Suuronen: But that’s good advice. I actually bought Apple stock 2002 or 2003 when I was at Nokia, and then I was like, but they have the iPod, and it has 75% market share.

Henric Suuronen: There’s not much left if you’re 75. Of course, little the node would do with iPhone. But I sold, unfortunately. I did a 3X, I think, on Apple, but if I would hold it, it would be absolutely insane now. But anyways, so what advice, outside of that, I would tell the younger self is that—

Henric Suuronen: Yeah, it’s really the networks you have, which of course school plays a role, but the networks. And always, always believe in what you’re doing and try to find an edge. If you’re good at something, make it become even better at that. So one of my secret skills: I, for example, do all the fundraising materials for our funds, all the slides.

Henric Suuronen: And early in my career, when I was at Nokia—and this is a little funny story—I was maybe 24 years old, and every day there was a guy sitting next to me, and I would see the CEO come there.

Henric Suuronen: The CEO of Nokia would come to a summer intern, a 24-year-old or 26-year-old, and ask him, “Are you coming to my barbecue?” and high-fiving him. I went to him and asked him, how do you know the CEO of Nokia?

Henric Suuronen: And this was back then—this is when they had 43% market share. And he said, “Yeah, I make their PowerPoint slides.” I’m like, what? So no one likes on C-level to make PowerPoint slides, but if you have really good and sexy PowerPoint slides, everyone thanks you—the CEO, “Oh, you have very good slides.”

Henric Suuronen: So they found out that this one guy sitting next to me was really good at PowerPoint and making good-looking slides. So I picked up on that, and I went online, learned how to do visual design, how to tell a compelling story. I read books.

Henric Suuronen: And even when I noticed, OK, I started getting good at fundraising and that kind of material production, I continuously developed my skills.

Henric Suuronen: Even to this date, going to, you know, the AI tools we have now—maybe make the basic set with that, and then you start pimping it yourself and thinking about the title. So the advice I would have for my younger self—sorry for the long answer—is: find out what you’re good at.

Henric Suuronen: And then study even more of that and try to become even better, because you’re probably good at something that you have a tendency to be good at, meaning that you’re already better than 90% of people or 99%. And then if you invest more time in that, because you have passion and already a good starting point, you will become better than a million people that are in it.

Henric Suuronen: Or—and then continue to continue—and suddenly you’re really freaking good or best in the world at something. And people like to work with someone who’s best in the world in something. And then you assemble a team with someone who’s really freaking good at that, someone who has honed their skills in something else.

Henric Suuronen: And that’s when you get this type of all-star team. And that’s also what we look for in founders. But that’s the advice I would give, in addition to buying Nvidia stock or Apple stock, to my younger self.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. And Rick, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Henric Suuronen: So I’m going to be a very boring VC and say that I’m not active on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it. But reach out on LinkedIn or on my email. So it’s very easy. It’s Hendrik at play.vc.

Henric Suuronen: And I try to, you know, answer as much as I can. I do get a lot of emails, but tell a compelling story already in the subject line, and I try to make time for you.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Henrik, thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Henric Suuronen: No, it’s been awesome. Thanks for making this, and hope everyone plays more games.

*****

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