20VC: Unity Founder David Helgason on The Hypergrowth Early Days of Unity, Why Running A Company Is Like A Liberal Art, The Secret To A Successful CEO Transition and What Makes Roelof Botha Such A Special Board Member

David Helgason is the Founder @ Unity, the company that gives content creators the tools to create innovative RT3D experiences and deliver better processes for almost every industry. Prior to their IPO in 2020, Unity raised from the likes of Sequoia, Thrive, DFJ, SilverLake and then individuals including Max Levchin and VMWare's Diane Greene. If that was not enough, David is currently a Partner @ Nordic Makers, a group of ten top Nordic angels working together to be the best angel investors in the Nordics. David also serves on the board of Labster, Realm.io and Quizup. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How David made his way from founding Unity in a cafe in Denmark to the $10Bn+ public company it is today? 2.) How would David describe his leadership style? How has it changed over time? What were the biggest challenges David faced as the Founding CEO? 3.) What was the decision-making behind David's transition out of the CEO role? What was challenging? What was key to make the transition successful? How did David know John Riccitiello was the right person for the role? How does David advise other founders contemplating the same? 4.) How does David analyse his own board management style? What are the most important elements a board member can do to help the company and founder? What makes Roelof Botha such a special board member to have? How does David advise new board members today to be successful? 5.) Why does David believe running a company is like a liberal art? How does David think about the importance of vision? How does David assess the current state of the European tech landscape? What can be done to improve it? How can investor approach change for the better? As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. This is the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And on Monday, we released our episode with Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia. And one of his great investments at Sequoia was Unity. And so I thought it'd be awesome to welcome back Unity's founder, David Helgerson, to the hot seat today. And so with that, I'm thrilled to introduce David, founder and board member at Unity today. The company that gives content creators the tools to create innovative experiences and deliver better processes for almost every industry. Prior to their IPO, Unity raised from the likes of Sequoia, Thrive, DFJ, Silver Lake, and then incredible individuals like Max Levchin and VMware's Diane Green. If that wasn't enough, David's currently a partner at Nordic Makers, a group of 10 top Nordic angels working together to be the best angel investors in the Nordics.

• 0:42Harry Stebbings?

  David also serves on the board of Labster, Realm.io and QuizUp. I do also want to say a huge thank you to a team of people who made this schedule possible. Ari Helgerson, Paul Hayden, Hilmar at CCP Games, Barry Schuler at DFJ Growth. I really do appreciate that and we have some awesome schedules here. But before we move into the show today, I wanted to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders

• 1:27Harry Stebbings?

  who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And if HelloSign helps you sign that term sheet, you need to get the term sheet in the first place. And I want to give a mention to Draper Esprit, a publicly listed VC fund that invests in high-growth European tech companies with global ambitions. Their portfolio includes companies like Revolut, UiPath, Kazoo, Graphcore and many other top European companies. Draper Esprit writes checks of USD 5 to 50 million dollars, focusing on sectors like consumer, fintech, health tech, deep tech, enterprise and SaaS. And their investment team has an incredible depth of experience, both as operators and investors, that helps businesses scale globally. If that sounds like the sort of investor you want to work with, get in touch with them at draperesprit.com. That's D R

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  A P E R E S P R I T dot com. And last but by no means least, if you don't have a SOC 2 report, you aren't going to be able to sell to major customers. And SecureFrame helps startups get and maintain SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance in as little as two weeks. Yes, just two weeks. Join companies like Stream, Hasura, Benapass and more to unlock more sales with SecureFrame. 20 VC listeners get 10% off at SecureFrame.com/20VC. But now I'm thrilled to welcome back Unity board member and founder, David Helgerson.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:51Harry Stebbings?

  David, it's been many years since our last episode, but it's such a pleasure to have you back on the show. So thank you so much for joining me on the show again today.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me back. The last conversation was great.

• 3:00Harry Stebbings?

  It was indeed. I think my interview style was a little less polished as hopefully it is today. But I do want to start with some context, David. So talk to me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? And come to found, as we were chatting about before the show, potentially the third most valuable European company in Unity.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  I actually, I don't really have a ranking table. I don't know what we're more or less valuable than. So I'm sorry, I don't really know. I know Spotify is bigger. I'm sure there's others, I just haven't really checked. But how did it get started? I mean, I was a programmer since I was like 11, born 77. So basically, my entire generation were programmers. I think we learned to program to make video games. Most of us ultimately didn't, but because the world needed a lot of code written. But we started us with a dream and I did too. And then I learned to program and I did a bunch of random programming. Then somehow managed to scrape through high school. I got into web development, did a whole bunch of websites and backend systems and content management systems and all the stuff that was kind of the, well, that the world apparently needed a lot of in the mid to late 90s. And then end up working for a couple of like, kind of good software companies, like people that had like really professional approach to writing software, where I learned a lot, but also kind of got this kind of idea

• 3:59Speaker 02

  that it would be cool to run my own. It wasn't really clear what, there wasn't like one vision or anything. So I started a few companies that went like absolutely nowhere. There was probably one content management system. There was like one something generic database connectivity, might have turned into some enterprise like ERP thing, didn't go anywhere. And there was one thing that was like iTunes LP, like some attractive cover art for CDs at the time. None of them raised money or anything. It was a much more sort of naive time in Copenhagen where I was living. So we were just kind of writing stuff, creating stuff and nothing was coming off it.

• 4:27Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask David, how do you know when to keep going with an idea and pursue that kind of vision that you started with? Versus when to give up and move on to the next project? What's your thoughts around that?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Well, I was a massive quitter for years. I dropped out of university several times. I started all these projects that didn't really go anywhere. Then I was connected to an old high school friend of mine, Nicholas. He wanted to make video games. We were now in our twenties and were still fascinated by video games, but also a little frustrated with like the video game industry. Maybe there wasn't, this is before the sort of rise of the indie movement and all this artistic stuff. And we felt the video game industry was kind of a little poor of ideas at the time. Not that we had better ideas, I think, but we had some ideas and we were sort of dabbling in, how might we do games that were different? I was stuck with one of my projects, so he found this German guy online instead, who was already working on some game tech stuff. It's Joakim Antes, they were our CTO. They started working together. I was on the sidelines and I joined them like a year later. So I joined probably in January two thousand and three and we're just gonna make video games.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  But as we were trying to sort of work on different ideas, we kept working on the the engine, the software to run the game and the production environment for games. We fell in love with it somehow. I think it's really interesting code. It's hard. Games are sort of unbounded. You can come up with new ideas. It's not moving data from A to B, right? It's like a lot of things you could do with games. And then the engine, like a game engine, is a really complicated, challenging piece of code. It's gonna run on a lot of different hardware, different CPU architectures, and ultimately has to draw a lot of pixels on the screen and move audio around and move data around networks. It's just, it's really complicated. And therefore interesting. So I think we started falling in love with it and maybe for different reasons. But ultimately, I first fell in love with the tech and sort of creating it.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  And then I started falling in love with the other game developers that we started having the idea of servicing. If we created like really great software for them, they would have an easier time making games and we could bring kind of more people into the game industry. So I started kind of falling in love with the industry and the people. And that's, I think, when I couldn't quit anymore.

• 6:17Harry Stebbings?

  Last, David, you mentioned that falling in love with it and not being 100% sure why, and almost a humble but definitely accidental nature in some respects. I always think that actually a founding vision can be quite constraining because it essentially puts a limit on what one thinks they can achieve. If you look today at Unity's market cap and the IPO and everything around it, you would never have had that probably as a vision back when you started in 2003. How do you think about the importance of founder vision today? And do you agree that it could be constraining?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I always try to quote my sources, but in this case it's really forgotten to time. I've not been able to find out who said this originally. But somebody quoted it to me, saying something like, "The value of mission statement can be measured in the quality of decisions it helps you make." And quite early, we decided that we wanted to democratize game development. We've evolved that vision further, which needed to evolve, but that was like the first statement that we kind of put on the wall in the basement room of apartment we live in. And there was something powerful about it. It's not very specific, right? It doesn't say, "We'll democratize game engines." It doesn't say exactly who we're going to help. Kind of vague, democratize game development. It doesn't even speak to just one part of the development phase. For a long time, of course, we most ignored that. I just made an engine that we commercialized in 2005 and started selling to the few poor souls who would buy it at the time.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And because it wasn't very good, we sold it for a cheap price. And it was easy to use, so we sold it ultimately quite many times. But over time, we kept going back to the original vision statement as a fountain of inspiration almost, like, you know, democratize. Okay, who is that? Well, it's a lot of people. It's people who are not making games right now. It's people around the world. It might be underrepresented people. It's just people that don't have access. Maybe they don't have all the funding to do it. Maybe they don't have all the skill sets in the room. And what's games and what's development? And is it only creating the game? Is it launching the game? Can we help operate? Can we think broader about what people are doing with a game engine? And it just kept giving. And yeah, that's been really helpful, I think.

• 8:02Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely. And I think it's incredible to see the expanded opportunities there. When we think about the leadership role in particular, I do want to touch on a couple of big transitions today. And I spoke to Paul Hayden actually before the show, one of your early investors. And he said something specific and he was like, "Before the CEO transition, I'd love to hear David's perspective on what were the biggest challenges for you over the years as the founding CEO? And are there a few that really stand out and come to mind?"

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it was really, really hard. We're three coders, right? They founded the company together. And the first couple of employees were coders as well. And at some point, it turned out I was like a vastly worse programmer than my co-founders. I was pretty good, by the way, but they were really, really good. And when you're sitting next to somebody who's like ten or a hundred times better than you at coding, like why bother? Find something better to do. So I was kind of doing the other outs and ends that a company needs, like cooking lunch and writing copy and creating a customer database and stuff like that. Selling, talking to customers, all that stuff as we evolve. And sometimes I've said that it took quite a while to get into the ground. So I sort of had time to learn on the job. I'm also very social, so I really enjoy meeting people and being out there. So I think I actually relished the role and started kind of enjoying it. Fairly good storyteller, so like, you know, kind of channeling kind of what the company could do and should do. So I found many of these things easy.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And then at some point, it became clear the company needed some kind of actual CEO. And we decided that would be me. At least initially, it wasn't really clear whether I would stay that or whatever. But I learned on the job and I think I did some really good things along the way. But man was entitled sometimes to scale. When we were thirty people, I moved to San Francisco and raised money from Sequoia Capital. First round, actually, five million dollars with Rula Fulta joining the board. And those sort of six to nine months after I moved to San Francisco were probably the worst of my time as CEO. We were thirty people when we raised a round and profitable. And we actually remained sort of break even-ish profitable for quite a while. So that was, I guess, the good part. We had launched support for iPhone game development. That was growing super fast. Our engineers were doing very good work. You know, Joakim Nicholas, CTO and basically cheap product designer, were doing fabulous work.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  But suddenly, the world kind of opened up because I moved to San Francisco. Like, there was all these kind of opportunities, partners. Mobile gaming was exploding and becoming really interesting and complicated. There were service companies. There's a lot of just things going on. Everyone kind of wanted to partner with us. There's different theories of what the CEO should do. Sometimes you talk about money and that's probably true. Make sure there's always some capital. But I think maybe the most important thing is kind of know what the company should do. How you find out is secondary, but you need to know what the company should do. And then you need to kind of channel that and tell other people. And then hopefully, somebody else will do it with you. And I just didn't know what the company should do. I was really confused. And we grew to sixty people quite quickly, which is necessary. We were doing well and there's a lot of exciting things happening. And suddenly, like, I was not in the same room as my co-founders because they remained in Copenhagen.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  It started and it was just a mess like, you know, communication kind of broke down and nobody knew what anyone was doing and we'd tell the board our plans and we had some good plans, but then we sort of changed the plans and didn't tell the board and they were frustrated. Everyone was kind of frustrated. That was definitely the toughest time.

• 10:51Harry Stebbings?

  What was the big change there then? Cause I mean, listen, as a young founder with a company scaling into hypergrowth as Unity was there?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:57Harry Stebbings?

  It's freaking hard. Like, you know, it's a lot to

• 10:59Speaker 02

  It was hard.

• 11:00Harry Stebbings?

  To know what to do. But how did you get out of?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  We looked at each other and weren't sure if I should stay CEO. I certainly wasn't sure and my co-founders weren't sure. The VCs weren't sure. They were nice enough. There was no sort of pushing or I wasn't being kicked out, but there was this question like how to do this. And we decided that we wanted to try to remain founder-led and I basically made a communication plan. We decided to kind of have very regular calls between me and the exec team. Very banal stuff. Actually, there was no sort of big thing, things we should have been doing already, like weekly calls in the whole group and then like also weekly calls with individual execs and co-founders. I got an assistant who was sort of an assistant to me, but also kind of a bit to the whole San Francisco office and the exec team to some level. And we had a very experienced assistant, Kimberly Bailey, who had kind of done like kind of big jobs before and really kind of knew how to run this kind of company to some level, not from a business perspective, but from a sort of kind of communications architecture perspective.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Once we figured that out, it's kind of clicked that there was a day when it just felt right again. And I think it probably took nine months or between six and nine months. And then it was great. And then I think I did a really good job for several years after.

• 11:57Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, obviously you very clearly did. Can I ask then, when you look at the CEO transition, what was the thinking around that for you when you did decide to transition out of the CEO role? And what was the thought process that?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  So we were founding the company in two thousand and three. We launched in two thousand and five. We became sort of a real tiny company, profitable, growth, profitable company in the following years. I moved to San Francisco and we raised the A round from Sequoia in two thousand and nine. And the next four years were just amazing. Like it was so fast. Like growth was fast. There was just so many opportunities opening up. The games industry was changing. There were new platforms. Mobile was really going from like the clever phone era before smartphone era and then on to kind of the big iPhone and Android platforms and all this stuff. At the end of them, we started glimpsing PR and other sort of future things. We learned to be international. We learned to scale. Like there were so many good things we did. And I was getting really worried because I could see a future.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  The way we sort of run out of growth selling the software as we were, that market has turned out to be much bigger than even I thought at the time. And the board was great. We had gotten several investors on board. It was great support I had. I had a good exec team. My founders were amazing. But I needed some extra kind of energy and I was lucky that I ran across John Riquetello, who is now CEO. He had recently left Electronic Arts and of all the sort of, I met a lot of people along the way, but of all the people I had conversations with, he just understood the games industry the best and we agreed the most on the future of Unity and what the company needed. And it was just like the most productive conversations, honestly. I had a handful of conversations between the summer of twenty thirteen and sort of autumn, late twenty thirteen. I convinced him to join the board of the company. He wasn't just a board member, he was working super hard with me, like travelling with me,

• 13:31Speaker 02

  like at least a day or two per week. And we just agreed on so many things and he was so good at sort of thinking through the future of the company with me. We started working on the strategy that was the next stage, which was ads, analytics, data, and sort of a broader service ecosystem to help game developers not just create the games, but launch them and operate them and monetize them. And that was sort of one aspect of it is like technical, like his strategic brilliance and how we worked together on that. And so I joined on that. And the other thing was just that he had run really big organizations and Unity was coming on like five hundred people. And we had a very, very good people, but running that kind of organization and evolving that kind of organization is a bit of a full contact sport. And I don't think I was up for it. I don't think I'd completely run out of kind of runway. I think I could have done a little longer. But the opportunity came up. He was happy to take the role and I was super happy to give it to him.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And John has just done a fabulous job later and I moved to the board and I've been working with him ever since. Yeah, it's six years now.

• 14:21Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask a personal one? It's like you said that about what being like, you know, your upshot or was a role that was kind of optimized for you and how you wanted to work. Was that tough to come to terms with?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Took a bit of time, but honestly, no. I mean, the impulse was as much mine as anything else. Like the day he joined the board, I went home and told my then-wife that just give it a year or two and I think I can make him CEO. So apparently, like I'd actually forgot mentioning that, but when he got the role, she reminded me of this. And yeah, apparently I was exactly on time because it took a year for me to join the board till we made him CEO.

• 14:49Harry Stebbings?

  Because it's been such a successful CEO transition. When you look back over the last few years with John as CEO, when you look back with hindsight, how do you advise prospective founders who are thinking? About making a CEO transition.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tricky as hell, right? I mean, we considered it like way earlier, very naively kind of considered it like we could hire like a because we were three technical account founders and maybe we should have somebody who had done sales before this at a time when we had not done sales yet and so on. So we had some naive conceptions about doing it way early and I'm very glad we didn't. Running companies is like a liberal art, right? It's not an engineering discipline. So like there's these competing things like founders have a special thing. They're listened to by customers and the people internally in a way that is very hard to achieve for new person. It's possible. I think John has done it, but it's not something that just happens automatically. And especially when it comes to change, changing strategy, changing course. I think founders can have a really important impact and it's hard for somebody to come from the outside and just start changing. So like, don't just rush into it. It's a one impulse.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  On the other hand, there are these toolboxes of like leadership and management and how to do a lot of the things that you need when the company is significantly bigger. Well, at any size, I guess, that is ahead of you that you may not have and may not be able to develop fast enough or want to develop. It's hard, man. Basically, I spent most of my time now advising companies either as a board member or a business angel and so on. And I've several times advised people to not change CEOs and I think in several cases they didn't and were very happy to kind of hold on to it a bit longer. So definitely goes both ways. But once you find that person that you really can trust to do it, then you let the competing forces compete. And then if the right thing is to move ahead, it's very healthy to change CEOs as well. John came in and he just questioned some of the decisions I had been making and some of them were great and others not. And it was just nice to get fresh ice on things.

• 16:22Harry Stebbings?

  I totally see that. I'm thinking it's such a nice transition, doing the gradual transition with John joining the board and then a year later. In terms of like the board itself, though, I'm really interested. We obviously had Roelof on the show. Often the biggest takeaways from working with Roelof as a board member and as part of the board with Unity.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  So he was the first VC we brought on. We'd met other people, but we got an offer from Sequoia when we were racing our A round in the spring of two thousand nine. And I'd met a lot of VCs in that fundraising process. By the way, the finish off crisis happened in the middle of that fundraising process. So it took quite a while, like nine months, maybe even longer. So I'd met a lot of people and I just immediately liked him. And he liked us and definitely liked me, I think I can say. They made us a very strong offer very quickly, like eight days to get a term sheet. And it was basically the best term sheet we had. We had a few others. So we made the decision very quickly, as did they. I did a little bit of Press checking on him, just kind of to understand a bit who I was going to deal with. And very consistently from like three different, I think, founders that he'd worked with, of which one I just met on the street, actually, so it was just reference calls based on his input.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  It was very consistent. Basically, they said, he's such a calm, such a rational person. He's not going to bring emotions, he's not going to bring kind of irrational or strange things. And you won't be able to rattle him easily and he'll be supportive kind of through the whole thing. And that was exactly what's been the case. He's been so great. We brought in other wonderful VCs along the way and advisors and our board members, but no, he's incredible. Also, just the most hardworking person I've almost ever met. Well, the other most hardworking person I've ever met is John Rickett, the CEO of Unity, who's kind of scary. His work ethic is insane.

• 17:46Harry Stebbings?

  It's always a good thing when they're both on the board. I do want to ask, you know, you mentioned kind of Roelof's skills there as a board member. You see now as an angel and as advisors to many companies, many different boards at play. For me, wanting to be the best board member I can be to founders that I work with, what advice would you have for me, David, as a former entrepreneur, as an angel, as an advisor, that I can be the best board member I can be?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  So Roelof never said this to me directly, but I heard it from somebody else that he had said it. I don't know where, that a good board member should be a shock absorber for the company. Because there will be shocks and people will be rattled and there will be all kinds of crazy things happening. And just slowing the process a little bit down and like guiding the leadership into kind of a thoughtful process, not necessarily rushing into decisions. And it's definitely been a good influence on us. My style is very personal, like, you know, I do best when I just get really, really connected with the founders of the leadership. And I think I'm best at just kind of getting to know them really well and guiding them through sort of some of the difficult decisions they have to face. And you can best do that when you just know the context quite well. But there's many different styles, like, there's many ways of skinning that cat. I don't think there's like one way.

• 18:44Harry Stebbings?

  If that's like great board membership and it's a kind of a great VC base, there's also not such a great VC base in certain cases with some kind of bad VC behavior. I'm intrigued, how do you think about this and where do bad VCs really show themselves? And how do you advise founders on kind of bad VCs?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so definitely was not, nothing I ever felt with Unity. I think we've been extremely lucky and good, I suppose. I mean, when I've seen sort of bad behavior or weird behavior, I think it often comes down to the fact that VCs are money managers for other people. And it's a bit the same as you get in kind of middle management in companies, that you get people that are under pressure from different directions. And when you're under pressure from different directions, it's hard to kind of sometimes focus on the task at hand. Or the task isn't so clear anymore because you're kind of trying to manage different things. Because it's such an illiquid asset and you're in there so long. When you aren't doing that great, your investors, the LPs, start questioning what's going on. And then you start showing kind of short term things like this company racing up round and we sold this company. Maybe not a great market, but this is still we had an exit. And these kind of things, I think is probably the worst kind of board behavior I've seen.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  And I think most kind of bad behavior comes from that. I mean, these aren't generally bad people, right? So it's like, nobody's out there to be evil. Well, I suppose almost nobody. So I don't know. I think it's actually the same you see inside companies. Stressed out middle managers are kind of the most destructive force inside companies. And by the way, they're stressed out because they are being stressed out by other people. I'm not saying, you know, again, they're not evil, but like the forces can be really tough on them.

• 20:02Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to ask you, you mentioned about kind of selling companies there. And again, I spoke to Paul and Roelof before, and they both said about kind of the several M and A opportunities you had very kind of prematurely in the Unity journey. What are your thoughts on funding off premature M and A opportunities, David? And what were the lessons from your experience turning them down?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  So when companies are doing well, and we were for quite a while, actually doing quite well at Unity. You know, M and A interest comes in, right? And it's fascinating, it's flattering for at least definitely a first time founder to kind of get that. I learned to take confidence from it, as in like if there was a yearly offer and it kind of went up every year, I felt pretty good. And that actually gave me confidence to continue because it felt like there was a kind of a little bit of a guardrail that we were operating against. Then you need to manage a little bit, you know, expectations around you. I mean, when you're doing well and the board, investors, whoever is around you has trust in you. Like, it's not that hard to rebuff acquisition offers, I think. But executives, people around you, definitely employees can start kind of getting excited or confused by those. So I learned from smart people to kind of basically hold those tights to your waist as they're happening.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  So if you engage in conversations, just don't spread it too broadly, honestly. Somebody wise told me once that 90% of all M and A interest doesn't happen, which I think is probably putting it optimistically. And the corollary from that is that you should not waste too much effort on it. And try to always make them a learning experience or draw some other use from them. Because otherwise you just spin your wheels a lot. So we use them as a way to get closer to partner companies and so on. And I think we did that sometimes fairly well. And then, you know, you're trying to See far enough ahead that whatever they're offering you now seems small. And if you have confidence in where you're going, ideally, you can see a time, maybe in a couple of years or more, where you will be more valuable than whatever was offered. And if you feel confident in people around you, then you can say no and keep going. It's not always easy, but that's how I thought about it.

• 21:45Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is it tough from like a monetary perspective? And it's like overnight, your life changes with an acquisition that can be as sizable as I'm sure offers came in at. Is it challenging from that perspective? And I'm interested, how do you think about relationship to money in particular?

• 21:57Speaker 02

  I was never really in it for the money. Money never interested in me terribly much. Somebody told me that, you know, if you had a few million dollars, you're really set. Maybe not in Silicon Valley, but most other places in the world, right? You can set up a life and really basically live from that, and that's probably true. So when the company got to a level where that seemed kind of almost certain for me and my co-founders, I think I just relaxed a bit and it's like, yeah, like the rest is just fun and glory.

• 22:18Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it made you a better leader and decision maker when you had that kind of downside scenario taken off the table? When you knew that at the end of the day, you'd be fine, may not be hugely.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, probably, but also like we did well, right? Like, it's not quite the same if you end up writing a company over the top and it goes down and everyone is miserable and you could have made money and now you didn't. And or maybe at best you're returning investor money to them, sort of, to make them whole-ish. Then whatever you did to not sell the company won't look so smart. It's tricky. Somebody told me a question, like a useful question to think through. And that is, do you have trust, of course, in the business around you? Like, can your company grow like another phase? It might be a couple of years growth or whatever. And importantly, do you trust that the people around you can kind of go with you? And if not, do you feel confident that you have time to replace them or evolve them and so on? And if not, then maybe it is a good time to sell. I think that's a useful litmus test, I guess.

• 23:08Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it is? Cause Aaron Levy at Box is always very pronounced in terms of saying like management churn is the most inevitable thing of startups.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Oh, no, absolutely. I'm not saying not churn. No, no, it's more when things are going fast, you know, if you have to replace a whole leadership or just like a lot of people around you, you may not end up having time for that. So if you don't feel confident that you can evolve through your team, then definitely consider selling. Not automatically sell and definitely always, every team has to evolve, like nothing is static.

• 23:31Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I totally get you. Can I ask David, if you were to start another company today, would you raise VC money again?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yes, probably. I really like the model. Depends on what I'm doing, but actually do like the VC model. I think it's for high growth tech companies with big opportunities. It's just a really good model. I know it's been criticised and nothing is perfect. You're not fully completely aligned with your investors ever, no matter what model you have. But the ability to kind of fund ahead of the curve, I sometimes think of when you're growing on some kind of hockey stick. You allow yourselves to spend on kind of a diverse shape, like forming kind of a lentil graph, I don't know. Like a lens form, like lens shaped graph. That's a really good thing that we have that model. I think it's fantastic.

• 24:06Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, listen, I totally agree. Hence my commitment to it for the last fifteen years.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  And like, you actually just like the joint stock corporation, like the invention of like separating cash flow and equity is just like, it's a brilliant invention. Of course, we should use technologies like that.

• 24:19Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to move, though, David, into my favourite element of any episode, though, which is the quickfire round. So I say a short statement, as you remember, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound good?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Okay. Oh, man, let us try it.

• 24:29Harry Stebbings?

  So we're all supposed to be reading more in quarantine. What's your favourite book and why?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I read so little these days. It's super embarrassing. And I'm reading like stuff around emotions and love and stuff.

• 24:40Harry Stebbings?

  Love it. Listen, I totally with you. I barely ever read anything, but I try my best. Tell me, what would you most like to change about the Silicon Valley tax scene today?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  That's a good question. So I moved away from there six years ago, back in Copenhagen, spent some time in London as well, but I'm living in Copenhagen now. I don't know. People are moaning a lot about it right now. It doesn't seem so bad.

• 24:57Harry Stebbings?

  Let's switch it on its head. What would you most like to change about the European tax scene today?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  We are changing it, like, you know, as an angel and working with a group of angels called Nordic Makers and so on. We are actually trying to evolve it here. Just more rational terms, better behaviour from investors, trying to get more funding going. It's all happening. Like, things are in a much better shape than they were just a few years ago.

• 25:16Harry Stebbings?

  If you're a cocktail, David, what cocktail would you be in, why?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  I almost only drink natural wine.

• 25:21Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me the biggest single takeaway for you from a board meeting. What's the most memorable moment you've had in a board meeting?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's in the Unity board meeting when Steve Jobs died. I just remember bringing the Apple webpage up kind of in the meeting and everyone kind of stopped and looked kind of blankly at the screen.

• 25:34Harry Stebbings?

  Who was the most impactful angel to Unity and what did they do?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  So that was Diane Green, founder of VMware. So I met her in the spring of 2009, just before I met Sequoia. In fact, she did the introduction to Sequoia. So Diane is just, I mean, she's a titan of our industry. I mean, she's been on the board of Google, MIT, Intuit, and of course founded several companies, including VMware. She offered to invest as an angel and ultimately she invested alongside Sequoia's investment back in 09. She was a mentor and friend and yeah, she's just wonderful, man. She was helpful.

• 26:04Harry Stebbings?

  Final one. What are the next five years hold for you, David? What are the plans in store?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so since stepping out of the CEO of Unity, moving back to Europe, I'm basically spending most of my time as an angel investor, board member, advisor to a whole bunch of people and friends. Kind of more of the same, I think. I'm thinking a lot about climate change and climate technology, climate change fighting technology. So that's kind of a favorite topic of mine. I'm also interested in other societal topics like the lack of trust and erosion of democracy and things like that. I don't have very good answers, honestly. I'm looking for companies that affect these things. And especially in climate change, I think I found a few that I like and I do invest in them.

• 26:35Harry Stebbings?

  David, as I said, it's been far too long since our last episode, so I can't thank you enough for joining us.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Cool. Thanks for having me.

• 26:45Harry Stebbings?

  Such an incredible journey when you look at Unity's day and I want to say huge thank you to David for all he did to make that show so special. If you'd like to see more from David, you can find him on Twitter at David Helgerson. Likewise, it'd be great to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do so on Instagram at H Stabbings 1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there, but before we leave you today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign. A great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million.

• 27:23Harry Stebbings?

  Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And if HelloSign helps you sign that term sheet, you need to get the term sheet in the first place. And I want to give a mention to Draper Esprit, a publicly listed VC fund that invests in high-growth European tech companies with global ambitions. Their portfolio Includes companies like Revolut, UiPath, Kazoo, Graphcore and many other top European companies. Draper Esprit writes checks of USD five to fifty million dollars, focusing on sectors like consumer, fintech, health tech, deep tech, enterprise and SaaS. And their investment team has an incredible depth of experience, both as operators and investors, that helps businesses scale globally. If that sounds like the sort of investor you want to work with,

• 28:08Harry Stebbings?

  get in touch with them at draperesprit.com. That's D R A P E R E S P R I T dot com. And last but by no means least, if you don't have a SOC two report, you aren't going to be able to sell to major customers. And SecureFrame helps startups get and maintain SOC two and ISO twenty seven thousand and one compliance in as little as two weeks, yes, just two weeks. Join companies like Stream, Hasura, Benner Pass and more to unlock more sales with SecureFrame. Twenty VC listeners get 10% off at secureframe.com forward slash two zero VC. As always, your support means the world to me and I can't wait to bring you another incredible set of episodes next week.