6 Brutal Lessons From First 100 Days As CEO
In March 2025, Jon Bellamy took over Jagex the Runescape company, and Alexis Bonte took over Stillfront. Mishka Katkoff got them in the same room and asked about their first hundred days on the job. What came back was not a playbook but more of a confessions.
This is what Mishka learned from the diaries of two CEOs.
Listen to the full conversation on Deconstructor of Fun
1. The plan is made before day one.
The textbook says listen first, act later. That you should come in, listen to everyone and formulate your plans based on your learnings. Yet both told me the plan was written before the clock started. They knew exactly what they wanted to do.
Jon played RuneScape for twenty years, worked at Jagex out of university, and then sat on the board through the Haveli (private equity) deal. Alexis, on the other hand, sold his studio to Stillfront and ran the group as a COO before taking the top job. They knew their companies intimately.
"The plan was very clear for me from the get-go," Alexis said. In other words, if you arrive on day one still gathering data, you have burned a third of your window. The hundred days are for executing visibly, not for discovering.
2. Subtract, don’t add.
Jon divested two studios, killed everything that was not RuneScape, and closed the hundred days by renaming the company Jagex, the RuneScape company. Alexis cut 75 games across 21 studios down to seven franchises and deleted the regional business units entirely.
Notice what neither of them did: launch anything. The first hundred days produce a shorter list, not a longer one. Jon's entire strategy is three sentences. Obsess over the games, make them easy to get into, and pour players into that funnel. Jagex then grew four to five times faster than in any year of the previous decade.
RuneScape is a fantasy online multiplayer role-playing game created by Jagex in 2001. It’s not only still going. It’s doing better than in decades.
3. If cuts are needed: make one brutally deep rather than 10 measured ones.
Alexis rebuilt his exec team inside a year, from twelve people to six, from two product people to four. People tell him that it was fast. "No, I should have done it in the first three months. "Underneath sits Alexis's line about culture: "We're not a family. We're a pro sports team. If the striker isn't scoring goals, you put him on the bench."
Personally, I have never once heard a CEO say they cut too deep too early. On the contrary, you hear of death of morale by a thousands cuts. The regret is free. It costs nothing in hindsight, and it signals decisiveness. This is the hardest decision of your first 100 days. Standing in front of the team who survives the layoffs will stay for you forever. But that is part of the job of being a leader.
Alexis was blunt: "If you're not decisive, you shouldn't be the CEO."
4. Knowing the company only helps if you are willing to spend that knowledge.
How much does it help to know the company and especially its key people inside out before taking over as a CEO? After all, you’d assume that as an outsider you could be more calculated. There’s less relationships and emotions involved, which frees up decision making.
Jon, who joined the company from the board, called knowledge "a liberator and a gift," then flagged the trap. "It is not the same thing that was true ten years ago when I was last here." Familiarity ages into presumption faster than we are willing to admit.
The insider also pays a relationship tax, though less than I expected. On firing people he had worked with for a decade, Alexis said the conversations were easier than he feared: "You kind of know when their heart isn't in there anymore. And they know you know."
5. Map the lines you cannot cross.
Old School RuneScape ships almost no content without a 75 percent player vote. Put real microtransactions in that game and, in Jon's words, "there would be riots, and there should be."
Alexis keeps a shorter list: studio culture and the community and game that grow out of it. Everything else is an open game. After all, he changed a large share of his studio leadership specifically to protect that culture.
Sacred means the thing, not the people currently standing in front of it. Most executives get that backwards, which is how you end up defending comfort and calling it heritage.
6. One story, repeated up and down, constantly.
Jon spends 20 to 30 percent of his month on the board, up to 60 percent around big decisions. Alexis targets 20 and reads anything above that as a symptom of strategic misalignment rather than diligence.
Jon's reason for keeping the board narrative and the internal narrative identical is one of the most honest thing said in the entire episode: "I don't have the brain power to be able to manage two sets of stories." And the framing I keep coming back to. You are not at the top of the company when you become CEO. You are "the pinch point on an hourglass," with the board and shareholders flaring above you and players above them.
What the first hundred days are actually for
Both men described the same underlying thread of the newly minted CEO’s job, which is unlearning the thing that got them there.
Jon spent his career doing transactions. Hundreds of millions deployed, accretion modeled, share price watched. Now he manages sentiment, and sentiment takes months to show up in a subscription number. He told me that in a business like his, feeling matters more than the data. That must be an uncomfortable sentence coming from a man trained to trust the data.
Alexis took the longer road. He built his first game with six people and paid the bills out of his own pocket, then spent years running studios, where the job is at least legible: ship the thing, watch the number, fix the thing. The seat he holds now offers none of that comfort. He answers to a board, to shareholders who reprice him every quarter, to a culture that only moves at the speed of trust, and to players who form strong opinions about decisions whose reasoning they will never see. Four constituencies, and you cannot ship your way out of any of them.
Here is the part that is applicable for most us, wheter we’re ascending to a studio or a team leadership role: The first hundred days are not a grace period. They are the only window in which an organization actively expects you to change things and will forgive you for it. If you spend that window doing the job you were already good at and the company quietly files you under what you were, not what you were hired to be. Every correction after that period will cost ten times more and reads as panic rather than direction, which is why so many turnarounds arrive two years late.
None of this is a CEO problem. The shape of first months on the job is identical whether you inherit twelve hundred people, a studio of sixty, or a team of five. The first hundred days are the cheapest time you will ever get to stop being the person who earned the job and start being the one it requires.
My unsolicited advice is to throw away imposter syndrom feelings and embrace the person you need to be to succeed at the job you earned. There’s no time in self exploration. Only transformatio of the company and yourself with it. That’s the price of being the new CEO.
