This is episode 7 of The OpenVC Podcast. In this episode, Joakim Achren, founder of Next Games (160+ employees, acquired by Netflix), built hit games for Stranger Things and The Walking Dead. Now leading F4 Fund with 28+ angel investments, he shares insights on gaming VC, fundraising, and emerging platforms.
Harrison Faull (00:00.074)
Joakim welcome to the Open VC Podcast. It's amazing to have you here today for episode six. How was your weekend?
Joakim Achren (00:31.25)
Finland is still pretty warm. It's not gonna be that way when slush rolls around. It's okay. It was good weekend. How about you?
Harrison Faull (00:42.572)
Yeah, really good, thank you. I managed to get to the Olympics actually in Paris for a couple of events. So that was really exciting. But yeah, awesome. So you mentioned you're in Finland and that's where you grew
What was it like growing up in Finland when it comes to entrepreneurship? What's the attitude like of people around? And I believe you got started entrepreneurship really early. Was there any family influence on
Joakim Achren (01:11.585)
I think it's very polarized, to be honest. Like in Finland, you're an entrepreneur, you do a company and that company fails, you're pretty much shamed for life in a way, which I think also created an atmosphere where people were kind of resilient and they definitely didn't want to fail.
Joakim Achren (01:35.001)
they pushed through all the hard times without fail, like actually like giving up. I think there's a difference between the giving up and the failure. And I think that also created this culture of once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur as well, the self -made man. I think in Finland that has always been a unique quality. And in some certain regions of the country, it really highlights even further, even more.
So I grew up in a family where my mom was an entrepreneur. On her side, there was like a family business that like she was working in. And I...
was there surrounded by these entrepreneurs as a child constantly spending time there at their factory. That era kind of left me with a spirit that I can do stuff. And I remember when I started dabbling software as a teenager,
it went more into, okay, like they need this kind of software at the company. can create that software and they'll pay something for me. So that ended up like becoming a sort of stepping stone for me to understand that, okay, I can do stuff with software as an entrepreneur.
Harrison Faull (02:56.72)
So were they your first customers? Were you selling back into the family production?
Joakim Achren (02:58.692)
Yes
Harrison Faull (03:03.042)
Awesome. What was it? Because people love to hear about like the first venture, the first entrepreneurial commitment from founders.
Joakim Achren (03:06.18)
Yeah, it was some kind of software too. So it was a glass company in production of different kinds of glass products. So they wanted to catalog what they were working on, like the products. So I created a catalog software for them. Would like really like old PC era stuff. Like 13, 14 years old.
Harrison Faull (03:32.88)
But how old were you when you doing this?
Harrison Faull (03:38.832)
Okay, wow, so it did really start quite young. And was that completely self -motivated or did your mom kind of push you, hey, we'd love this piece of technology, could you just write something up for
Joakim Achren (03:44.633)
No
I actually don't recall where the whole thing came up from, but I only remember I liked it a lot. So it was kind of like not somebody pushing externally, but it was very intrinsic, the motivation to do that kind of stuff.
Harrison Faull (04:04.049)
Wow, that's really powerful. So after creating software for the family business, where did that take you? I know you started selling CD -ROMs to publishers. Was that the next
Joakim Achren (04:15.971)
Yeah, it kind of spanned into that area. I was coding like games and I was doing different kind of stuff.
the mid nineties of this CD -ROM sort of multimedia CD -ROM product. So I jumped into that and started creating some products and got some publishers to actually pay me to create these products. So it was fun times and I was still a teenager back then. Yeah, like definitely something that I felt that this was something I wanted to do.
Harrison Faull (04:47.749)
Yeah. You're a strong entrepreneur from a young age that if you're having customers paying you revenue before you actually built the product, so you could sell before the thing existed, which is always very good for cashflow.
Joakim Achren (04:59.595)
And the problem is that CD -ROM era went away quite quickly actually. We moved on to the internet in the late 90s and nobody wanted CD -ROMs anymore.
Harrison Faull (05:14.194)
Okay, awesome, thank you. You mentioned that you were coding games from a young age as well, and that's sort of where your career took you. And you started Ironstar in 2005, which ultimately did fail, but more so due to technical limitations at the time. What was Ironstar just for the people listening? And could you tell us about any of the lessons that you think you took away from that that made you a better entrepreneur?
Joakim Achren (05:27.406)
Yeah, that was my first startup. had finished university. I was looking at... I was doing already like work as a programmer in a few companies. I was also... I studied game design at the university. So I wanted to get into gaming, applied to several jobs in the industry here in Finland. It was the Nokia N -Gage days. So it was really like a booming sector already. Then
It kind of felt that I don't really want to work for anybody else. I want to do my own startup. So I started Ironstar in 2005 to do like virtual worlds, which were big back in the days, like Club Penguin, Hubba Hotel, Second Life. There was like a vast like amount of those maple story. I think a few things really emerged as lessons learned from that experience of six years of trying to make it work.
First off, I founded the company alone. I think when you're kind of like in your first entrepreneurial thing or even your second company, even third, it's co -founders really benefit a lot because you can take a lot of the heavy lifting where you're doing stuff where there's no salary coming in for...
maybe years. And if you have co -founders who are similarly motivated by, let's just go through this few years of misery to see if there's light at the end of that few years, you're going to be doing so much more together compared to like, okay, you do everything alone and you try to figure out everything alone. It's so mentally and physically costing. So that was the biggest takeaway from my first startup.
Harrison Faull (07:42.899)
I've been there. So my first startup, I was a solo founder, it failed and it's horrible. You blame yourself. And also just having the mental resilience to survive all the resistance that comes. Like you try and make one step forward and there'll be 10 things that are wrong with making that progress. And just having that sanity to know that actually you're heading in the right direction. Having a partner would be very helpful just to bounce off and keep you mentally sane and decompress and yeah, keep you grounded.
Joakim Achren (08:13.155)
Yeah, exactly.
Harrison Faull (08:14.59)
But you definitely became like an expert in your field during that time building Ironstar, which enabled you to then join Supercell, which is one of the best gaming studios in the world. Did you discover anything that they were doing differently? Anything surprising that keeps them at the forefront of the gaming industry?
Joakim Achren (08:34.659)
Yeah, like for sure the CEO Ilkka is an amazing person. Like I don't think there's a better entrepreneur in the world than him. I think the thing that he instilled in the company quite well, I was there for close to a year and a half, two years. He was always talking about the focus and...
It was really hard to sort materialize what that means. But now that I've kind of observed the company as it's gone through, I think like close to 14 years when Supercell was founded in 2010.
That focus is that you are constantly on top of what is the opportunity that the company is going after. Like there's something you're not focusing on the old stuff, but you're constantly trying to go where the pocket like is going to be versus where it is right now. That's the way in Gretzky saying goes. I think that kind of material materializes now quite well with
remerchants of Brawl Stars. That's a really huge title now in the mobile space where a year and a half ago, everybody would have said, Supercell needs to develop a new game and bring it out. I think in the mobile space, we've realized the power of the brand, the longevity of products like Clash of Clans, which is already
12 year old game. It's not going anywhere. It's just getting started. That was something that like in the early days of my career, I was definitely thinking about, okay, there's a product that goes out and then you need to have another product at some point. And like the saying of, yeah, it's an old product already is something that doesn't make sense anymore.
Joakim Achren (10:33.699)
So I think Supercell is great at focusing on what is the opportunity right now.
Harrison Faull (10:41.27)
living in the future, trying to anticipate those market trends and make it a reality, which is actually really quite tough to do. Yeah. So after your time at Supercell, you founded another startup, Next Games, which became an absolute rocket ship, developing the games for TV shows like The Walking Dead and Stranger Things. It grew to 160 employees and more listed on the finish.
Harrison Faull (11:13.09)
market and was eventually acquired by Netflix who took it private again. What are some of your most memorable moments from from that experience? Founding a company, having it go public, growing it from just you and your co -founders? Yeah there must be so much but what stands out in your mind is some of the most memorable
Joakim Achren (11:14.382)
Yeah.
Joakim Achren (11:35.109)
Yeah, I think the most memorable thing is like there was that huge opportunity in when we got going in 2013 when there was every year the Western market was like getting like hundreds and hundreds of millions of new users on smartphones. And it was just blue ocean territory. And we knew that and...
We were really happy to have backers who also understood this potential who were saying, let's put more money in here. Let's grow quickly. So we went from like starting the company, raising 10 million in the first year or so, the history of the company, going from like few people in a room to 60 people in a few years.
And then we IPO'd after the success of the Walking Dead game. Then we were over 150 people already at that stage. I think the main lesson there is that when you're doing this kind of scaling, you have to have the best people in the world. We were very adamant on spending time to get the right people in.
It was not always easy and we probably did mistakes there, but that was a focus. And I think what helped a lot was the momentum that we had and everybody knew that this is a unique moment in the games industry and a unique moment for Finnish companies as well.
where there is the smartphone era sort of like starting to boom. Like now if you look at in 2024, it's kind of done. Like there's no more new users coming in in the Western countries where there's the spending power in these games. Of course, it's still growing in certain regions of the world, but like I think the big opportunity was there 11 years ago. like having the right people, having the right capital at the right moment.
Joakim Achren (13:40.577)
the biggest memory for me from there.
Harrison Faull (13:44.194)
So raising 10 million in your first year, that's quite a big chunk. How is that possible in the gaming space when there can be such a long lead time to actually going to market and releasing a product and getting revenue in? You have to find the right investors, I imagine.
Joakim Achren (14:00.813)
It was the unique moment that we had the smartphone adoption. Like that's not right now at all. Like this, like we can talk a bit about the sort of like a timing when investing in games, but that was like very much like an anomaly, which was kind of repeated in the COVID times when valuations also went up, capital was flowing in.
Like that was not sustainable. think the mobile era sort of coming up and this new platform where there's new user adoption, that was huge. COVID was just a bump. So that was more difficult to evaluate that there's actually a big thing coming here.
Harrison Faull (14:45.816)
make sense so it's opportunistic, good market timings, right conditions, there was just enough investor appetite for that space that helped you raise so much capital. So the second thing you touched on which was hiring well. It's incredibly difficult thing to do. Do you have any tips from hiring over 160 people? What kind of things do you do to help increase your chances of picking the right person?
Joakim Achren (14:53.015)
Exactly. Yeah.
Joakim Achren (15:13.213)
I think first you have to have a really wide funnel of really great candidates, which usually come from your network of existing people that you know, who know people. So investing in building a network is the easiest ever been because of social media, LinkedIn.
Like what I've done since I started angel investing, I started a sub stack called elite game developers, where I post every week, sort of like something I'm thinking about, spending time on sharing knowledge. And I've grown.
to 10 ,000 subscribers, also posting on LinkedIn, Twitter. think this is like, sort of like the easiest thing you could do is just build a really good professional network for yourself. And then you can get that reach to these great candidates through there. So that's how the funnel is built. I think then how do you do the right picking of the candidates is a skill that comes from just learning about
what kind of person you need, like can they work independently, things like that. I think that then it becomes more like something you can really like just learn by looking at like documents online about like how to
Harrison Faull (16:37.465)
Was everyone in person when you were hiring for the next games? Or did you have remote workers as
Joakim Achren (16:43.491)
Yeah, that was like we had a satellite office in Germany but like other than that everybody was in the office in Helsinki. It was a different time. I think now it's everybody's hybrid at least in Finland.
Harrison Faull (17:01.018)
Yeah, so I ask, because when it comes to coders, you can have what's been called like 100x coders, the ones that are really efficient, incredible at what they do, like almost artists with how they write code and how efficient it can be. But sometimes there come side effects with those types of people who are brilliant, who are geniuses, where they're not necessarily the best team players.
Joakim Achren (17:25.207)
Hmm.
Harrison Faull (17:25.559)
and they're more individualistic and that creates friction in a startup when everyone's trying to head in the right direction. So managing those sorts of conflicts. Do you think it's worth going after the best talent you can possibly find at the expense of perhaps team chemistry or is there a balance to be struck there?
Joakim Achren (17:44.602)
I think there is a balance always. Like there's certain, like somebody who can do so much heavy lifting as a, as like an individual contributor. And then there's a team player and you just need to balance it out. What do you need in the team right now? I think all those variables kind of like go back to asking what do need in a team? If the team is full of like people who already.
are getting shit done quickly. I think it's really hard to bring in somebody who needs a lot of social interaction to perform or who is very much a team kind of spirit. I don't know, it really depends. You want to evaluate the current situation.
Harrison Faull (18:27.771)
I make sense. Yeah. Yeah. And where the startup is and what your next milestones are perhaps as well. So a lot of factors to consider and it's not easy for founders to navigate that well. You mentioned that you are, have been an active angel investor and you've actually, you co -founded a gaming syndicate. So super niche, you only ever invest in gaming syndicates and that's grown to over 200 members and you did.
Joakim Achren (18:39.481)
Yep.
Harrison Faull (18:55.226)
I believe 20 SPVs with investments. Was that intentional to help you learn more about the space or was that again, you trying to build top of funnel, build deal flow for yourself with having more members and people referring deals? How did it come about going from a solo angel investor to actually creating a
Joakim Achren (19:18.437)
Yeah, sort of motivation to do the Syndicate was that I was very fascinated about the model of actually not having a VC fund, which I nowadays do have. Like I've been a VC for a year and a half now with my first fund. But with the Syndicate, we started in 2020 or it was like I was the only person who set it up. I had a huge network of operators in the gaming space, founders.
bring them together to a Slack group like channel and saying that I'm going to introduce deals that I see and we will co -invest in SPVs where we pool in 100 to 200K. Like it's a first come first serve. So I would get people who would put in 10K, 5K and then all of a sudden we have
150k which was the allocation and then I created SPV with a company in UK called Odin.
the SPV would pull the money in, would it be invested? I would get carry based on the success of these SPVs. So we started in 2020. I did the last deal somewhere early 2023. So about two and a half years and we did about 25 SPVs during that time. So yeah, it was really great.
Harrison Faull (20:50.844)
Wow, and you did that again solo. So you started a startup family. Your first startup, you're on your own. Second startup, you had a few co -founders and then back to being a solo founder for the
Joakim Achren (20:53.593)
Yes.
Joakim Achren (21:04.003)
Yeah.
Harrison Faull (21:05.091)
You like making life hard for yourself.
Joakim Achren (21:07.921)
Well, it's like doing a startup and being an investor. It's totally different thing. You have sort of risk diversification when you're investor. You have portfolio of companies where you're involved as an owner in.
For one, think the struggle with the syndicate was that there was no salary. So of course, like it's basically like there's, I'm doing this as an angel investor still. Although I'm, I'm kind of running a syndicate, which has its own overhead. Of course, it was like, I could get the carry, which was great as a reward, an incentive to do this kind of operation.
That actually there's a few reasons why I ended up stopping this whole syndicate early last year. I wanted to get into VC for quite a while, do my own fund. I was a venture partner with a gaming fund called Play Ventures for two years. Got to see them up and close operating, spending time with their portfolio, doing deal flow with them. So...
It was kind of, okay, this is a career path more this VC for me where I see myself for the next 25 years doing a lot of interesting things. So I also had the feeling that since the COVID craziness was starting to go down in late 2022 in gaming.
When I was presenting a deal to the syndicate, there was less appetite to invest. So I was also becoming like, okay, we have 200k allocation into this gaming company deal, but we're only getting to 40k from the members. So it was also a time to switch over to something where I can spend more time developing conviction, making the decision on my own to invest a certain amount from a fund. So.
Joakim Achren (23:10.015)
Syndicate is great. You definitely need a network. You need to have great deal flow. You need to find great companies as well. So gaming, think like we could talk a bit about this, like what makes a good time to invest in gaming. It's not always that way.
Harrison Faull (23:28.776)
Yeah, I'd love to. So you must be one of the most experienced gaming investors in all of Europe, one of the very few that have managed to have a public exit and create an entity that is still thriving today. What excites you about a game? You've got so much to do for today. What stands out when you're looking at gaming investments today? What's top of
Joakim Achren (23:52.601)
Yeah, it's an interesting kind of put like
There's probably three things that I would highlight as great gaming investments. First off, like the game, like if there's an opportunity, somebody building a game, somebody like a developer that has the vision for a product, which is new, unique, interesting, there's market for that. There's like the opportunities there and they're going after it. And the founder
I think that's a great gaming investment. How capital -intensive is, of course, is always a question in any case, which creates problems. How quickly can you show traction? I don't really like doing gaming investment where you need to raise yet another round to build a game, to actually ship it. I'm rather now looking at companies that can go through kind of seed round and
ship the game versus like raising a series A and still not having revenues. That's a struggle. I think also the way that timing has always played into gaming VC exits has been very evident like the
huge for all sorts of exits like you had Supercell, King, Rovio, Peak Games. There's like billion dollar exits in gaming but it only happened to these companies who were kind of capitalizing on that mobile sort of like tailwind that was happening in the 2010s and now it's non -existent that opportunity.
Joakim Achren (25:40.601)
But before that, we already had the social network boom, which was kind of maybe a bit too early yet. But when Facebook opened up their canvas application interface where people could play games on a desktop when they browse to Facebook, Zynga grew up then and became a huge company there. was Playfish, there was other companies as well who became like unicorns in that era.
So I think we're just waiting for something like that to happen and usually it has related to something like a platform emerging where you can play games which hasn't existed before. There have been several attempts like smartwatches like the iWatch playing games on that definitely didn't pan out into a huge platform. Vision Pro is a big question mark still like at some point it might be huge but is it for gaming?
So yeah.
Harrison Faull (26:40.799)
And also sometimes the platform isn't the one that makes the money. If you look at the PS4, PSP versus Xbox battle, it's just become a bit of a price war there. And actually it's the games that make the money rather than the hardware manufacturers. So in your investments, are you looking for the games or are you looking for the platform? Or is it a combination of games on the next platform?
Joakim Achren (26:44.046)
No.
Joakim Achren (27:03.649)
It's combo, definitely. With fund that I have, F4 fund, where we invest from now, we look at opportunities where there's like new platforms emerging. There's, know, a new platform could be something like a Roblox. It can be something that already lives and exists on the internet and it doesn't need a specific device. You can already play it on all the devices and it's just an augmented platform.
So those are really interesting.
Harrison Faull (27:35.722)
So what's the most recent F4 investment that you can disclose here? And why did it stand out to you? Can we get an example of this?
Joakim Achren (27:45.375)
Yeah, like there's one company that hasn't really done a lot of noise about this investment. It's a small company in New Zealand called Incandescent Games, which is developing a very interesting game for where you have basically like a Minecraft meets No Man's Sky, where you're building stuff on planets and then you can fly between the planets.
And the way that this founder is building this company is so unique. It's the right way to do like stuff early. Small team. Everybody's doing everything. Coding, social media, everything. The product velocity is amazing. Yeah.
Harrison Faull (28:34.721)
Wow, okay, that sounds very exciting. And then putting the investor hat back on. So we've covered the uniqueness there. You touched that they have capital efficiency with the team, with everyone being able to do multiple roles at the early stage. But when it comes to market timing, how do you think about market timing with that particular investment? How is it played on what platform and where is the audience going
Joakim Achren (29:00.131)
Yeah, these kind of products, they live nowadays from the zeitgeist of what sort of youngsters, how they consume stuff. Like you think about YouTube, TikTok, growing games through those kind of channels is the right way to do it. You can start on day zero when you still don't have a game, you start a channel which just...
distribute content regarding your development of the game you start creating a
mailing lists, collecting email addresses and then you're working on that game for several years before you ship it out, like three years and then the game comes out and you already have an audience that you're shipping it immediately to and there's a big proportion of those who want to spend money and then as business models in gaming have evolved into more of this freemium model
It also opens up a way to monetize people who have more capability to spend more are able to do that. So I think that's where the evolution of these things has gone to. And a gaming company that comes out right now needs to kind of utilize that. I do still see a lot of mobile game studio pitches which are for a casual mobile game.
which relies heavily on just running Facebook ads to scale the game. I don't believe that's a sustainable model to go after. Wells is already in the space. All the big players who are already owning that realm and they're doing the social media, they're doing everything else. That's an area where I think a game developer needs to first focus on, is the audience building.
Harrison Faull (30:55.002)
So you're looking for a less competitive space in the market and actually what you touched on there is a bit of magic for people thinking about building their game. Don't wait until the game is ready to start advertising the game. You can show traction, non -revenue traction by building that waitlist, even selling pre -orders or skins to people on early releases just to build up that hype before the game's close to being released.
Harrison Faull (31:25.686)
How do you advise founders about perfection? Because people, there's been a trend about releasing products earlier and not waiting for it to be perfect. Whereas the person building the product generally, normally they're aiming for perfection. They have this vision of a product, they want it to be glitch free. They want it to have all the features that they initially dreamed of. But you also don't want to disappoint your initial audience. So when is the right time to launch that MVP?
Joakim Achren (31:55.397)
I think the way you want to do it is probably launch something that already gives an experience which represents fun for a game.
Like the earlier you can do that, the better. It depends so much on the product, but you need to sort of show fun and evaluate if it actually is fun already. If it is not, like what is the reason? How long, how much do you need to build out? Like in mobile gaming, it was kind of,
Like a sentiment that the game needs to have more and more content before it can show fun. But I think we, as the industry kind of evolves, we need to pull back on that and start like understanding more what is fun quite early. And I think the way that developers are experimenting nowadays, that's very healthy. Where they put like early prototypes out into like closed testing where
bringing people into an office to play the game. All of that and more. That's what I would say you need to do.
Harrison Faull (33:10.777)
I think that's a really, really strong answer. So you touched on the fact that you're a professional VC investor now. You run the F4 fund and it sounds like you're geographically agnostic with a portfolio company based in New Zealand already. Could you tell us a little bit more about the F4 fund? What are you looking for? How do you guys add value? Have you had any rocket ship successes yet? Although I appreciate it's quite early.
Joakim Achren (33:38.821)
Yeah, we focus on investing in attention businesses, which means basically everything in consumer, social media, entertainment, communication. It's broader than a gaming fund. We've done 15 investments so far and there's only five gaming investments. So we've done consumer applications.
some podcast hosting company even. So it's quite broad. We invest super early. We try to help the founders because we're both me and David Kaye who's my partner. He's also a founder. We both do a lot of heavy lifting for the founders regarding like what should they be doing next. Like give support as much as possible there.
Harrison Faull (34:33.36)
Thank you. Could you give us an example of where you have moved the dial for a portfolio company? Like you've got loads of experience in the space now, even though if it's not a gaming company, you've learned so much about running startups and actually getting to the finish line of having a successful exit. Is there a tangible example of where you have moved the dial for a portfolio company already?
Joakim Achren (34:57.977)
I think there's so many steps involved in helping. It's more like, you you're there every day talking to the founder, doing introduction.
Harrison Faull (35:08.886)
So you're not just writing first checks, you're definitely and then walking away. You're getting stuck in, you're really getting hands on, you want to see everything, you want to be almost treated like a co -founder. Don't hide anything from us, we will try and help you in any way. That's sort of the positioning of the
Joakim Achren (35:24.677)
Yeah, the biggest support I've seen myself giving founders is around fundraising. Because when you raise your first round, you're in a way committing yourself to raising another round in 12 to 24 months. So my focus has been a lot on how does the founder actually keep an eye on that fact and what is required for them to achieve that.
And when that is hard, I definitely spend a lot of time thinking about ways to actually escape that problem. If the fundraising for some reason won't be happening, if there's not enough traction, what do we do then? How do we create like momentum again and things like that? So those are the things where I think I've had the most sort of success with so far.
Harrison Faull (36:24.248)
So you're really connected to the space and I know you're now focused more broadly on attention, but if I could bring you back to just the gaming sector for a second, where do you see that evolving? What do you think the next platform will be and how do you think investors should be thinking about this space?
Joakim Achren (36:40.613)
It's a really good question. I wish I had that crystal ball. I think the gaming industry has always surprised everybody about what kind of consumer adoption happens next. There's a certain product that comes out and then people start playing there.
This is how I would say we evaluate platforms. Like there's a trend which has been going on for a year or so now is that TikTok has actually been promoting gaming on their platform where you can actually play a game inside TikTok. our, where we spend time is thinking about is that a viable place where a startup could go and build a game in TikTok or a portfolio of games and build
a company that sort of merits the venture back sort of model where you're doing this 12 to 20 months always raising going from pre -seed to seed to series A and we need to know will that be actually a viable model for that kind of a business and
Certainly now it's still too early to say if TikTok is that kind of a place. I think the same goes for Fortnite creatives where people are creating startups that just create content for that players can play inside Fortnite. Is that a viable company for VC to invest in? I don't know yet. I have my doubts. Same for AI. So it's, yeah, it's tough.
Harrison Faull (38:17.991)
It's risky isn't it when your distribution is reliant on an individual platform because you're effectively giving up lot of control and we've seen examples of where Facebook being top of mind can come in and wipe out an entire gaming industry because they wanted to. Not necessarily because it was commercially sensible but because they didn't want the risk of that third party data getting out of there and that took a few people by surprise I
Joakim Achren (38:38.052)
Yeah, there's some.
Joakim Achren (38:47.493)
Yeah, there's also like the mobile platforms have their own agendas as well. Where kind of you could do spender targeted Facebook ads in 2020 and two years later it was gone. That opportunity. So because of Apple's changes to the privacy. So I think the agenda of these platforms is always something you need to take into consideration.
Harrison Faull (39:15.528)
Okay, awesome. We didn't really touch on it much, but in your journey of building next games, were there any tough moments? I'm sure there were many, but is there a story of a day you were pulling your hair out, just for the founders that are listening who are having a bit of a tough time, actually, you might not be able to see the light at end of the tunnel now, but just sticking in and surviving.
is the right
Joakim Achren (39:46.765)
Yeah, we had one game launched that went really badly, which we had to cut down our staff and do the layoffs. That was terrible. Basically, we were building up for like the success of one game was the whole company's success. And when we shipped the game, everybody believed that it's going to work.
There was no paranoia, any healthy paranoia whatsoever, which I think every founder should have of what they're building. And they should always think about like, how do they mitigate those risks? What do they do if this actually fails? Like even though that that's your plan B, but still like having that plan B on the table makes sense. Don't put all your bets in one, one basket in a way.
Harrison Faull (40:42.665)
Well, yeah, thank you for being candid on that. know redundancies tend to be one of the hardest moments for founders because you've spent a lot of time trying to recruit these people and you become attached to them and you know about their lives and it's not nice to let someone go and disappoint them, especially when it's not necessarily even their fault. It could be like other market dynamics, but it's definitely the right thing to do for the company and you might not have any choice.
I remember reading about, I don't know if you came across this fact, but Netflix had a really tough time back in the 19, I think it was 2001 when the first dot -com boom crashed and Reed Hastings actually had to let go two thirds of the company all at once, which he wasn't expecting to do and he didn't want to do. But he found that the company was more productive once he let go those two thirds of the company because the people that were left were superstars and they didn't have any blockers and they liked the freedom.
that they got with having less middle management, which is quite a remarkable story. yeah, it's never going to be easy to let people go.
Joakim Achren (41:47.767)
No, definitely not. Yeah, I've read Reed Hastings has the book.
Joakim Achren (41:54.783)
rules which basically starts with that story.
Harrison Faull (41:55.155)
Yeah.
Harrison Faull (41:58.983)
a good read for anyone who hasn't read it. Okay, so the opposite end of the spectrum. Are there some particularly proud moments that you've got throughout, maybe not even just next games, but just throughout your professional career to date that might not necessarily been so expected? I know people when they list and they get to ring the bell on the new StockX change or something like that, sometimes they have this great feeling of emptiness at that moment because they've sort of accomplished everything they'd set
eyes on up to that point. But are there, yeah, well, what sticks out to you and your
Joakim Achren (42:30.127)
Yeah.
Joakim Achren (42:35.371)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of the things happened at the next games that I still think a lot about because we were moving so fast, doing so big things. So those kind of stick out when now as the last five years as an investor full -time, it's kind of like just a daily grind in a way. There's no huge situation yet. I think when
founders that are backed who have big exits. I think those are going to be the big moments, but I think the launch of...
Harrison Faull (43:10.174)
You've already had some big successes, angel investing. I thought you had a gaming studio investment, which is maybe your first angel investment that's already up 20x or more. Is that right? Okay, okay, pay for games.
Joakim Achren (43:21.785)
Yeah, there's no exit there yet.
Joakim Achren (43:26.787)
Yeah, I would say like when we shipped the Walking Dead game at Next Games, was kind of like amazing moment when we hit the US number one in like chart position on iPhone. That was amazing. And of course, the day of the IPO as well. That was also a huge thing. Yeah.
Yeah, of course, like I have two kids. So having those kids are like huge. Well, so maybe I immediately, I think about like, okay, I skipped the IPO dinner with the bank to be with the family back in 2017. So I'm also thinking about, okay, I do have this other life, which is super important. And all the founders out there should also think about family.
Harrison Faull (43:56.597)
Yeah.
Joakim Achren (44:20.323)
sort of something that you need to have in order to go through like these crazy adventures.
Harrison Faull (44:28.525)
It can be, some founders don't necessarily share the down moments with family because they're so reliant and they have a lot of confidence in your ability and they've got to be as invested in the future vision of what it could become as you are as the founder, but also having a partner that can act as a sounding board and help you in the tougher times is very valuable. And I know you've said before on podcasts that actually angels can do a similar thing. So if a founder can't,
Joakim Achren (44:49.505)
Yeah.
Harrison Faull (44:55.421)
necessarily go to their family or their co -founder, maybe they go to an investor knowing they've experienced a similar tough time, tough moment and they're asked for advice about how they navigated it themselves and get some insights about the steps they should take to overcome that struggle.
Harrison Faull (45:13.727)
But yeah, we're coming to the end of the hour. You've accomplished so much in this space and you've got some really exciting projects going on with the F4 fund. What are your future goals? What are you striving for
Joakim Achren (45:29.631)
I think that's a really good question as well. I'm starting to a sore throat here.
Yeah, some goals. think continuing my investor career, backing great founders. think finding great companies to invest in is something that I constantly think about like where are they? And then they all of a sudden just land in your lap from nowhere. I think developing processes is great. Just pushing yourself forward.
That's basically it.
Harrison Faull (46:12.257)
Awesome. Thank you very much for your time. It's been a great episode, loads of amazing insights. Thank you very much for coming
Joakim Achren (46:20.324)
Thanks Harrison.
