What I Learned About Building Companies From the People Who Funded Mine

Henric Suuronen and I worked together at Digital Chocolate 15 years ago, when I still had a full stock of hair. Harri Manninen wrote the first check for Deconstructor of Fun studio recordings before I had any idea whether it would work. Later, the two of them funded my startup through Play Ventures and supported Savage Game Studios in getting built and acquired by PlayStation.

So when I say these are my friends, I mean it in the way founders mean it. People who saw the mess up close said hard things when they needed to, and at the end of every disagreement, they always had my back.

I got Henric and Harri on the podcast together to talk about Play Ventures. The result is a conversation about what it actually takes to build something that lasts. Their fund. The companies they backed. And frankly, some of the ones they passed on. 

Here’s what stuck with me.

Experience Is Baggage Until Proven Otherwise

Five years ago, Play’s thesis demanded founders with 10 to 15 years of gaming experience. Proven teams. Proven genres. It was an execution bet. Harri was blunt about the results: not so good.

The shift in thinking is significant. In Istanbul right now, where I’m writing this newsletter from today, the strongest teams are 25 to 30-year-olds who spent a few years at Dream Games, Peak, or Good Job Games before striking out on their own. They want to change their lives and their families’ lives. The drive is different from what Play typically sees in more mature ecosystems.

Henric put it sharply: if you’ve been in gaming for ten years and never created anything successful, is your experience an advantage or baggage? 

In today’s market, which is brutally competitive, it might be better to enter without the baggage. Full of energy, full of innovation, no scar tissue telling you what’s impossible. And a massive chip on your shoulder to prove everyone who doubted you wrong.

This doesn’t mean experience is irrelevant. It just means that experience alone is no longer a fundable thesis. The composition of the team, the co-founder dynamics, and the hunger matter more than the cumulative years on a resume.

The founders I work with who move fastest tend to fall into two camps: Either they completed the first phase of their career with four to eight years at good companies and left before the playbook calcified, or they have long careers spread across multiple studios and roles. What both groups share is that they never got locked into a single way of doing things. They've seen enough variation to know that every company solves the same problems differently, and they're hungry to find out which approach fits the problem in front of them right now. That matters more than tenure at any one place.

The Two-Year Cliff Is a Founder Filter

Most Silicon Valley funds use a one-year cliff on founder vesting. Play is adamant on two years. And it didn’t come from investors imposing terms. It came from Henric’s own experience as a founder.

When Henric started Nonstop Games with three other co-founders, they proposed the two-year cliff to their own investors. Not the other way around. It was a way of telling each other: we are all committed. The first year goes by in a flash. You don’t really know if the team holds together until year two. That’s when the first game failed, and after everyone realized that this is much harder than the pitch deck suggested, it will likely not have the fairy tale ending.

Here’s the insight I wish more founders understood: the two-year cliff is not a punishment. When Play proposes it, they watch what happens. Do the co-founders discuss it honestly and come back aligned? That’s a green flag. Does one co-founder refuse to even entertain the conversation? That tells you everything about how they’ll handle the first real crisis.

I’ve used this structure myself. At the moment, it felt unfair. But I trusted Play. In retrospect, I’m incredibly grateful for it.

Read: Fair Weather Founders, Dead Equity, and the Cliff that Saves

The Body Language Due Diligence

Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman found that 65% of high-potential startups fail due to co-founder conflict. Not because of bad products, wrong markets, or lack of funding. Because the people at the top couldn’t hold it together. That makes the founder relationship the single most consequential variable in early-stage investing, and one of the hardest to evaluate from the outside.

Harri and Henric shared a diligence technique that I think is quietly brilliant in its simplicity. When a CEO is pitching on a video call, they don’t watch the CEO. They watch the other co-founders’ faces.

Ask who came up with the game idea. The CEO answers. But the real information is in the eye rolls, the micro-expressions, the subtle tension in the other founders’ body language. It’s not bulletproof, but it reveals the dynamics that a polished pitch deck never will.

He also described giving teams a weekend homework assignment: go name your company together. The exercise is not about the name. It’s about the process. If one founder comes back and says they just chose a name without the session, that’s the signal. If the co-founders can’t collaborate on something low-stakes, they won’t survive something high-stakes.

I’ve sat on both sides of this. As a founder being evaluated, you think the pitch is about your product. It’s not. The product will change three times before launch. The investor is trying to figure out whether the people in the room will survive those changes together. Every founder should walk into a pitch knowing that the relationship between co-founders is being assessed as closely as the TAM slide. And the hardest part is, you can’t fake energy.

The Conversation Founders Avoid the Longest

Both Henric and Harri were direct about the single biggest failure mode in their portfolio: founders who sugarcoat board updates.

Henric told the story of a board meeting where the team blew past a slide showing 4% D1 retention. He called in from Singapore, stopped the meeting, went back to the slide, and said something to the effect of: this is so bad that it’s actually a blessing. Because now you stop, and tomorrow you work on something new. No debate needed. The number speaks.

The harder version of this is co-founder conflict. Founders hide it out of loyalty, shame, or the fear of looking weak. Henric pointed out that Play’s role in those moments is to mediate, not to judge. They’re trying to find what’s best for the company, not assign blame. But they can’t mediate what they don’t know about.

From my own experience building Savage, I’d put it differently. The shame isn’t about weakness. It’s that you feel like you should be able to handle a relationship with another adult, and when you can’t, it feels like a personal failure. Maybe this is a macho thing. But complaining about another man to your investor didn’t come to me naturally. But when I finally did, the support I received was worth it.

Two Yes Votes Out of Five

Play’s investment committee has five partners. Every vote counts equally. But they don’t require a majority. They require two yes votes out of five.

That means a single partner with conviction can bring one more person along, and the deal happens, even if three partners are opposed. They’ve had deals where Harri was the only yes vote. They’ve had deals where the sponsoring partner changed their own vote to no during the IC discussion, leaving zero out of five.

This structure does two things. It lets contrarian bets survive. And it forces the culture to absorb disagreement without fracturing. If you throw a fit when your deal gets voted down, you’ve just told everyone what kind of partner you are. The system only works if the ego stays in check.

I find this fascinating because most organizations optimize for consensus. Consensus feels safe. But consensus also kills outliers, and in venture, outliers are the entire business model. Two out of five is a structural admission that the best investments will look wrong to most people at the time. That takes institutional courage.

Philosophical Musing on Play, Gaming VC, and What Comes Next

Play Ventures launched in 2018 as a $40 million mobile gaming fund. Today, it's $500 million under management across three funds with over 100 portfolio companies. And the funding into mobile gaming is only a fraction of their current investments.

I wrote last week about the math that broke the gaming venture capital. How gaming startup funding is tracking toward the weakest annual total in over a decade. And how the math gaming VCs need is happening in apps, not in games.

Play saw this before most. Harri made the observation that the App Store was the Game Store for its first decade. The majority of in-app purchase revenue was from games. Then Duolingo, Calm, Headspace, and the rest of the consumer app wave arrived, and suddenly, everything Play knew about UA, retention, LTV, and monetization was directly transferable. Play’s second fund added ad tech, avatar creation, and payments infrastructure. The third carved out roughly a third for consumer apps.

What makes Play's expansion interesting is not that they followed the capital. Plenty of funds have done that. It's how they brought the gaming DNA with them and turned it into an advantage. The gaming founders in their portfolio are learning subscription models from consumer app founders. The consumer app founders are learning retention loops and live ops from the gaming founders. Play sits in the middle of that exchange, and it's producing something neither a pure gaming fund nor a generalist fund could replicate.

Henric told me he wants Play Ventures to be a perennial fund. His benchmark is the legendary Californian venture capital fund Benchmark. A fund that outlived its founders. That's why all Play’s five partners have equal votes, why everyone at Play has carry (earn % of a portfolio company exit), and why two former interns are now partners. 

I've known Henric and Harri since well before they ever became VCs. I've watched them build this thing from a $40 million bet on mobile games into one of the most respected funds in the industry. Knowing how they think, how they operate, and how they treat the people around them, I see no reason they won't become exactly that. The benchmark for gaming VCs.

This post captures the moments that stuck with me, but the full conversation goes deeper into Play's geographic strategy, the golden eras of gaming ecosystems, and what both Henric and Harri wish they'd said more honestly to founders earlier in their careers. This conversation was personal. I hope it's useful.

Listen to the Full Episode

This post captures the moments that stuck with me, but the full conversation goes deeper into Play’s geographic strategy, the golden eras of gaming ecosystems, the tension between being a supportive investor and one who tells founders what they need to hear, and what both Henric and Harri wish they’d said more honestly to founders earlier in their careers.