20VC: How To Analyse Platform Shifts Effectively, The Effects Of Not Having Free and Open Distribution & The Right Way To Think About Board Composition with Neil Young, Founder & CEO @ N3twork

Neil Young is the Founder & CEO @ N3twork, the next generation mobile games maker and publisher with their services already touching millions of customers. They have raised over $17m in VC funding from some of the very best in the business including Mike Maples @ Floodgate, Bing Gordon @ KPCB and the team at Google Ventures. Prior to N3TWORK, Neil founded ngmoco, a leading social mobile games company, acquired by DeNA for a reported up to $400m. Before ngmoco, Neil spent many years at Electronic Arts where he was responsible for producing some of EA's most successful game franchises including: The Lord of the Rings, The Sims, Medal of Honor and Command and Conquer, among others. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Neil made his way from telling his mother in the UK he was not going to university to producing world-leading games, to selling a company for a reported $400m? 2.) What are the 2 questions Neil believes everyone should ask when evaluating the potential of a new platform? How does Neil think about the platform shifts at present given his publishing to mobile? Where do most people make mistakes when assessing platform shifts? 3.) Peter Fenton stated on the show: "startups are starved of free and open distribution". How does Neil think about incumbency advantages with regards to distribution? Would an open platform yield greater potential distribution? How does Neil view the world of paid and performance marketing today? How has his views changed on the space? 4.) What are the 3 things that Neil believes all founders must do in order to assemble and manage a board successfully? Why is it important to listen to board members on their own and as a group and compare? Where do most founders go wrong in board management? 5.) Neil sold ngmoco for a reported $400m, what does Neil believe are the 2 big questions that all founders must ask themselves when contemplating a potential sale? What are the 2 different types of acquisitions that exist today? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Neil’s Fave Book: The Second World War Neil’s Fave Blog: Gaming Insiders As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Neil on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month. Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And switching up from the usual Snapchat plug, you can find me on my new favourite channel, Instagram, on @HStebbings1996. I would love to see you there. However, to the show today, and one of the things I absolutely love is having true industry experts with decades of domain expertise, and even better if they also happen to be a Brit like today's guest. And I'm thrilled to welcome Neil Young to the hot seat today. Now Neil is the founder and CEO of Network, the next generation mobile games maker and publisher, with their services already touching millions of customers. They've raised over $17 million in VC funding from some of the very best in the business, including prior guests Mike Maples at Floodgate, Bing Gordon at Kleiner Perkins, and the team at Google Ventures, just to name a few.

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  And prior to Network, Neil founded NG Moco, a leading social mobile games company acquired by D E N A for a reported up to $400 million. Before NG Moco, Neil spent many years at Electronic Arts, where he was responsible for producing some of EA's most successful game franchises, including, checklist out, The Lord of the Rings, The Sims, Medal of Honour, and Command and Conquer, among others. I absolutely have to give all credit to prior guest Bing Gordon for the intro to Neil's day, and without that, this episode would not have been possible, so we really do appreciate that, Bing. However, before we meet today's guest, it's the new year and everyone is thinking of health and diet, and so this month's partnerships will be aligned to that. And did you know that office snacks are the third most requested perk by employees, with 83% suggesting it to be a huge perk?

• 1:27Harry Stebbings?

  Well, that's where NatureBox comes in. NatureBox is the first ever unlimited snacking programme for offices of all sizes, starting with just $12 per month, per employee. You can choose the plan that fits your team and ensure you never run out of snacks again. And if your body is a temple like mine clearly is not, with all those mojitos, then have no fear with NatureBox. Real, simple ingredients, no artificial colours or sweeteners, and free setup, shipping, and a dedicated account manager. What's stopping you getting set up today? With 20% off your first month using the offer code VC20 at www.naturebox.com/vc20. That really is a must. And good health is not just about healthy snacking with NatureBox, but good sleep with Lisa.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Or Tom's shoes of the mattress industry. Lisa have done away with a terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating this luxury premium foam mattress that's ordered completely online and shipped for free to your doorstep. And the 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with three unique foam layers for a universal adaptive feel, including two inches of memory foam and two inches of a really cool latex foam called Avina, which is designed to keep you cool. And all Lisa mattresses are 100% US or UK made. And for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Head over to leesa.com to start the new year with a better night's sleep. But enough of my British voice and time to move on to another British voice. And I'm very, very excited to welcome Neil Young, founder and CEO at Network.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:03Harry Stebbings?

  Neil, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Huge thanks to being at KP for the intro, but thank you so much for joining me today, Neil.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Oh, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

• 3:11Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I want to start today with a little on you and how you made your way into the wonderful world of early stage startups and gaming. Let's start with that.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm from the UK, grew up in the UK and at a very early age taught myself to code. Decided not to go to university and instead start in the wonderful world of video games. Very quickly realized that I was not the world's best video game programmer. And like a lot of failed engineers, basically became a manager in the video game business. That's called a producer. So I was a video game producer in the UK, made my way to the United States, joined Virgin Games, Richard Branson's Virgin, had a game company, which was one of the leading game companies at the time. And then in 1997, I joined a company called Electronic Arts and stayed with Electronic Arts for 11 years

• 4:02Speaker 02

  as a producer, executive producer, general manager of studios. In 2008, I left DA and started one of the first mobile game companies, a company called NG Moco that was backed by Kiner Perkins I Fund. And we scaled that over the course of the following Few years to one of the largest companies in the space, sold it at the end of two thousand and ten. And two thousand and thirteen, left the acquiring company and started this company, Network, which is my second venture-backed company. KP is also an investor, along with Floodgate Fund and some others.

• 4:35Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I mean, clearly the best there. We're big fans of both Mike and Bing. But I would love to ask, you mentioned your time with EA there, one of the kind of core category-defining companies in the space. Were there any big takeaways for you from those eleven years producing some huge hits? And the big lessons that you've taken now today to Network?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so let's see, a few kind of key takeaways. The first is, big companies tend to have particular agendas. And so when you work at a big company, it's important to really understand what those agendas are and make sure that you're building things that are consistent with them. And throughout my career at Electronic Arts, there were times where I was perfectly aligned with what the company was doing and there are other times that I wasn't. And generally, the times that I wasn't, the outcomes weren't as good as they could have been.

• 5:18Harry Stebbings?

  Did you communicate when the alignment wasn't there? And is there a right way to do that?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I did not personally do a great job of doing that, but it is important to do. I think at that stage in my career in particular, I was very, very focused on charging forward. And so sometimes when you're in a large company and the large company doesn't quite see your vision and you're not doing a great job necessarily of communicating it, you can butt heads more than not. I was fortunate in that fifty-one percent of the time, I was right, or fifty-one percent or more in my assessment of what needed to be made or how we should build something. And so I was given the benefit of the doubt in most cases. But I do think that it's very important for a leader to be able to communicate upwards, outwards, you know, throughout their organisation. And that's certainly something today that I hold sort of very, very dear to the way we operate here.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  So I think that's one lesson. I think, you know, EA is a consumer company and you're trying to build things for the mass market, the mass market of gamers. I think one of the lessons that I learned, really from working on Lord of the Rings. So I built a series of Lord of the Rings games in very close collaboration with Peter Jackson and Wingnut Films and New Line Cinema, and they were a very successful series of games based On movies and one of the lessons learned from Peter Jackson is that the path to the mass market goes through the hardcore. And so every audience has a hardcore and it's something that you need to find and understand and cultivate and deliver a product to. Because it gives you this sort of authentic foundation upon which the rest of your audience will stand.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  So that's a key lesson for me. And along with that, everything ultimately has a natural audience. So if you had two teams or two game teams, one game team is working on a game based on Star Wars. And another is working on a game based on Babylon five. They're both exactly the same team, exactly the same game. The game based on Star Wars will just simply outperform the game based on Babylon five. Because the audience appeal of Star Wars is that much greater. And so when you're building products that you're trying to reach scaled audiences for. You really do have to ask yourself, what do those audiences want? What do the customers ultimately desire?

• 7:26Harry Stebbings?

  I would love to ask, you said it kind of about kind of going to where the audience is. And a very striking element for me when kind of charting you and your journey when looking at Angie Moko in two thousand and eight. The inflection point in app store growth. Today, we have the likes of Elad Gil stating that we're all looking for the next truly rich vein to explore in his words. And supported by Benedict Evans. I'd love to hear your thoughts then, as a producer and content creator today with NetWarp. On this kind of awkwardness of platform shift and how it affects your thinking on roadmap and vision.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Well, two thoughts. The first is we tend to overestimate the impact of technology shifts in the short term. And then for the ones that succeed, we underestimate them in the long term. And I think what that means is that when a new platform or a new technology comes along. People tend to jump in enthusiastically and there's often a lot of carnage that comes from that. I think early stage consumer VR has been suffering from that now for the last couple of years. And in the long run, VR may be a very, very powerful platform. But it may not quite fulfill the potential that those early stage contributors and developers thought that it might. So that's sort of an example of one of those platform shifts that people.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Get very excited about in the short term, over commit themselves and then ends up not quite fulfilling the potential. That being said, platform shifts are inevitable, whether they're just platforms that are hardware platforms or distribution platforms. And the way I view them simply as opportunities that you have to time effectively. And so with each shift in platform, you need to ask yourself a couple of really simple questions is one, when will it be real? And two, what user behavior has changed and how do I leverage that? And I think if you keep that, those two things at the heart of your decision making process, you're going to find yourself in a better position than if you just get caught up in the excitement of something, of something new and, and jump in sort of willy nilly.

• 9:20Harry Stebbings?

  Being in the world of VC, I'm used to jumping in willy nilly into undefined spaces, but I would love to discuss another concern with regards to kind of the platform shift itself. And one that Peter Fenton said on the show with regards to the starvation of free and open distribution. How do you think about this and the kind of potentially fallow period for consumer in the incumbency and vantage state of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple? And how you think about distribution of your content?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the fact that we don't have free and open distribution in the long term stifles the rate of change. I think the primary reason for that is often that platform holders and consumers' interests are not necessarily always aligned. You know, if you think back to Apple's introduction of I A P, for example, within a, this is within a constrained platform like iOS or the App Store. There was a long period of time, a relatively long period of time where Apple said free apps are always going to be free. Paid apps are always going to be paid. If we have an in-app purchase product, it will only be available for paid games.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  And of course, today, the scale of the free, freemium, free to play marketplace relative to pay for download marketplace is pretty dramatically skewed towards free. It took a lot of lobbying and a lot of effort to get Apple to see that opportunity. If that had happened a year sooner, the market may have grown much more quickly. Those misalignments between the interest of the platform holder and the, or the opinion of the platform holder and the interest of consumers. Basically means that the rate of change in those constrained systems just isn't quite as fast as it would be in an open system.

• 10:56Harry Stebbings?

  I am intrigued if you delve one layer slightly deeper into the distribution element. We had James Carrier at NFX on the show and he stated that his views have maybe changed on paid versus organic channels as a necessary organism for growth. How do you think about paid versus organic and has that maybe changed over the years with the starvation of oxygen from distribution?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an essential channel. It's very difficult for me to imagine building a business with any predictability that relies on, as its core premise, the idea of making things that are popular and viral solely. You're happy to have things and you strive to make things that a broad audience of people like and that has the mechanisms to be adopted organically from customer to customer. But you really do have to appreciate and respect paid channel as a method to find customers. And so what that really means is you start looking at your business as an LTV versus CAC business and that then has huge implications on the type of organisation that you build,

• 12:00Speaker 02

  the type of products that you build, how you engage customers, how you monetise customers, how you hunt for those paying customers within the marketplace. I'm not sure, by the way, necessarily that free and open distribution necessarily makes it easier for customers to find the things that they want. You could make the argument that in a sea of products, it's equally difficult to find stuff if it's not editorialised or presented to you in a certain way. But my sense is that today, paid is the number one thing that you need to think about, especially if you're operating in a very dense or crowded marketplace like the app stores.

• 12:34Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, and this is asking from an element of naivety from me not being maybe so into tech at the time, but if you compare the structures of your EAs of the world who didn't have the paid distribution channels of your Facebooks and your Instagrams and all the lights that we have today, and comparing that to the structure of the organisation that you have to build today where paid and CAC to LTV is a prominent part, how do those structures compare with the differing element of the CAC to LTV?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  So at Electronic Arts today it's different because Electronic Arts has evolved and changed and so it'd be difficult for me to kind of comment specifically on how the company there is structured today but while I was at Electronic Arts our primary method of distribution was to consumers on DVDs that they purchased in stores and so that meant having a sales force that sold directly to those retailers. Electronic Arts actually in the game space pioneered the idea of a direct to retailer distribution model and it was one of the very, very powerful assets that the company has. You know, when you think about EA, you think about it as, oh, it's the company that makes Madden or it's the company that makes FIFA or Battlefront and certainly those franchises

• 13:45Speaker 02

  have helped that company grow and develop but its first great asset I think was its sales force and distribution and it afforded it the ability to, by going directly to the retailers, essentially muscle in and get more shelf space for the products that it was selling. And so at the time when I was at Electronic Arts, you built the game, those games cost anywhere from five to a hundred million dollars to make. You launched them on a predetermined date, you pre-manufactured the discs and then sold those discs directly into retail and so demand planning, the scale of production, the amount that you were going to spend on marketing, both in print and outdoor and television,

• 14:27Speaker 02

  became a very, very important piece of the puzzle and it's why actually licensed intellectual property became so important in the traditional games business. If you compare and contrast that to the type of organization that you need to build when you're in a purely digitally distributed world, really the access to the customer, albeit abstracted through an app store, has been provided to you and so your predominant method of reaching that customer is through paid marketing. And so the type of organization that you build today is an organization that is world-class at managing user acquisition across every performance marketing channel, every measurable marketing channel that you possibly can. And so on the CAC side, it's

• 15:10Speaker 02

  About what's the cost of an impression or the cost of ultimately the cost of an install, which is the click through rate on that ad, the conversion to install when someone hits the app store. And then on the software side, it's how effectively do you convert that cohort of customers into a paying customer? And then how effectively do you continue to monetize that customer? And ultimately, at the end of the day, you're asking yourself, is my lifetime value of a customer higher than the cost of acquiring those customers in a time window that makes sense? When you're building that type of company, that thinking has to permeate the entire organization from user acquisition, you know, all the way through to product development and customer service.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Because at the end of the day, our success ultimately is dependent upon the lifetime value that you can derive from your customer base and how efficiently you can acquire those paying customers.

• 16:05Harry Stebbings?

  And you scaled this form of business incredibly successfully with NG Moco, leading to the exit. So I do want to discuss the exit process with you slightly because I had Josh Felster at Freestyle on and he said that companies are sold and not bought. I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you agree with this and maybe the thesis behind that thinking for you.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I think what he means there is that you make a choice to sell your company. And there are two outcomes, one's a good one and one's not so good one. The good one is you're doing really well, you have lots of suitors that are approaching you, asking to acquire the company because they have a need. And you make an active choice that that is a better outcome than for you on balance than going alone. And so that's sort of the good outcome. The bad outcome is, hey, the business didn't quite go the way that you hoped it would go. And now you need to find the softest landing possible for the people that you have a responsibility to, the employees, the investors, and you have to try to maximize the outcome and the return. And so if you don't want to be sold, you can't be bought. You know what I mean?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Like, at the end of the day, it's an active decision you have to make in both of those scenarios, whether or not you truly want to sell your company and join another or go on to the next thing.

• 17:18Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, in terms of the decision making? Around whether it's the right choice. How did the decision making look like for you with Angie Moko? And would you have any advice to founders who are maybe entering that contemplative process?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  So specifically with Angie Moko, we reached a point where we felt like the valuation that we could get for the company at that particular moment was at its peak, at least for the the short term. This apex of valuation that it would be difficult for us to get back up to again on a multiple basis for many years. And so as we realized that, we became more open to the idea of being acquired. Although it was not general operating practice to kind of focus on that or or think about that. But we became open to it because we just realized, hey, you know what? The market is beginning to get much more crowded.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  The position that we hold will only be defensible for us, you know, for a relatively short period of time. And so now we would be open to the idea of being acquired. And that happened to coincide with a number of companies approaching us and saying, hey, you know, would you be interested in joining us? As we went through the process then of assessing whether or not those companies would be a good fit, there were really two things that we paid attention to at the time. The first is the obvious, which is like, is the valuation appropriate for where we were in our life? Did it feel like the right thing for us to do economically for our investors and our employees and and the founders of the company? But the second thing was, would it be an enriching experience? You know, we were not particularly interested in selling the company and then just leaving immediately.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  We were only interested in continuing the process of trying to build our company and learn and get as much value out of that outcome as we possibly could from a sort of an educational standpoint. So for us, it was really driven predominantly the decision to sell the company to DNA, which was a Japanese publicly traded game company. That decision was motivated as much by the fact that we felt like they had almost secret knowledge from the future that the way the Japanese mobile market had developed, it really led the Western market in terms of audience engagement and monetization.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  And these ideas of LTV versus CAC were particularly mature in that market. And it was felt like something that we really needed to understand more deeply. And so at the end of the day, the decision to sell that company boiled down to really just two very simple things. Was the valuation right and did we feel like it would be an enriching experience? And I think in both of those cases, the answer was was yes. So I think for people who are going through the process of asking themselves whether they will sell their company. The first question that they need to ask is ultimately, what are they trying to achieve? And what are they trying to accomplish? Once they've answered that question, then they can make the determination of whether or not that will be best served by being a part of another company and going through that acquisition process or not.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  So I think that's the way I would filter it.

• 20:17Harry Stebbings?

  And often the kind of aides and advisors in this process is the board. And you've had all time greats on your board from Bing Gordon at KP to Mike Maples at Floodgate. So I'd love to talk about this and maybe some big lessons from having such individuals on the board and working alongside them in really building and scaling NG Moko.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think when you're assembling a board, the thing that you want around the table are a set of complementary intelligences. So what you'd want to try to avoid is too much overlap in terms of their ability to help help guide you. And so what you're really doing is you're just trying to assemble a team of people that together can help you build the very best company that leads to the very best outcome for everybody involved. And so our board today, for example, you have people like Bing, you have Mike Maples, you have my co-founder Bob Stevenson, you have Noah Knuff from KP Growth. And each of these people brings something very different to the table from my perspective. In the case of Bing, you know, I've always thought of him as the wizard brain.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  You know, the guy who can think orthogonally, can give you wild feedback that helps you think in a different way. When I think about Mike Maples, he, if Bing is the wizard brain, Mike is the lizard brain. Or as probably he would like to be the thunder lizard brain, but the lizard brain in that Mike very expertly. States the obvious. His instincts about what you should do at any given point in time are not particularly complicated by a whole bunch of sort of thoughts of finesse. They're just very obvious and very thoughtfully presented. And Mike helps you pragmatically think through problems. Someone like Noah from KP's Growth Fund,

• 22:02Speaker 02

  you know, Noah is a world-class financial engineer. And as we try to go build the company that we are, we hope to make here ultimately, having that set of complementary intelligences that can aid me and in combination with Bob, who sort of understands our creative process here better than anyone. That group of people, I think, is a pretty world-class team of individuals. So when you're assembling a board, I think it's all about figuring out the makeup of that team and being very selective about the people that you you have around the table.

• 22:32Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, my partner Fred Destin always stresses the importance of board intimacy between founder and board members. How do you view board intimacy and significance? And how do you really look to build it among the founder versus the board member? In terms of that radical transparency, that honesty, that kind of connection?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  I think that you have to be radically transparent. There's no benefit to being anything other than radically transparent. And you have to start that from the very outset. You also have to understand that, and the board has to understand that at the end of the day, you're the CEO of the company. And whilst you will listen to the feedback that each individual provides you with, you need to to make decisions that you think are in the best interests of the organization. So for me, I guess my my methodology for working with our board, it's one, pick a great board. It's two, communicate with them frequently and transparently. Three, it's listen to them individually and listen to them as a group.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  And when you see patterns that are off where you're headed, lean into that as quickly and as early as possible. Surface that, have a conversation. Because if you've got a group of people that you believe in and that you trust, and they're giving you advice in a vector that is different than the vector you're pursuing, you're actually More likely to be wrong than you are to be right. And so being a good listener, trying to understand what the board is really telling you is very important.

• 23:59Harry Stebbings?

  No, I love that differentiation between listening to single versus kind of plural board members. I would love to finish though on a quick fire round today. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts in about sixty seconds. How does that sound, Neil?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Sounds great.

• 24:12Harry Stebbings?

  So what's the biggest book recommendation for me?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  World War Two by Winston Churchill, best book I've ever read. It gives you intimate insight into how leaders make decisions at points of great stress.

• 24:25Harry Stebbings?

  An inflation point in your life that changed the way you think.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  My mother crying when I told her I wasn't going to go to university. And instead I was going to make video games. Me being absolutely determined to prove to her that that was the right choice.

• 24:46Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, that's that's a brilliant one. I remember the same when I dropped out of law school. Moving swiftly on, favourite blog or newsletter? What are the must reads for you on a rainy day? Are there any great business of gaming blogs? We've got the business of fashion. I'm a big fan on kind of the business behind games. Is there a business of gaming blog?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  There's a group called Gaming Insiders, which is sort of a an email group that I'm a member of. And I find that interesting from certainly from from time to time. I have to tell you, I'm not a huge consumer of newsletters and I'm not really a huge consumer of reading blogs or or reading websites. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but the idea for me, basically after two hundred words on a webpage, I find it really, really difficult to focus.

• 25:29Harry Stebbings?

  No, that's why most people say Twitter, so I completely understand. What would you most like to see change in the world of startups and VC?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  I would most like to see VCs respecting the time of entrepreneurs. I can tell you that when I go spend time talking to a VC, there's three types of interaction I have. There's one interaction which is like very exciting. Holy shit, we have to work together. Those are obviously great, but they're few and far between. The second, which I appreciate almost as much is the

• 26:00Speaker 02

  We're not interested. Thanks for your time, but it would be highly unlikely for us to do anything. And the third is, oh, yeah, you know, we should stay in touch, you know. How about we try to schedule something, you know, for a month from now or eight weeks from now? That kind of slow roll or slow no is, you know, it's just wasting the entrepreneur's time. And I get why the VC might want to do it from a, you know, retaining optionality standpoint. But at the end of the day, the likelihood that I'm going to end up working with someone who's so rolled me is really, really low. So I think everybody would just be much better if it's like, hey, yes or no.

• 26:36Harry Stebbings?

  No, I completely agree. I love that. A summarization of the three different types. I would love to finish on the next five years for you and for network. What does the roadmap have in store for us?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Ultimately, I think that there is an opportunity to build an entirely new type of gaming company and then media company that's born from games, a company that's as enduring as Electronic Arts has been or Activision has been in the space. In the Western markets, I think there's ultimately the opportunity to build a company that is as meaningful and as impactful and as scaled as a company like Tencent has been in the East. People often forget that 55% of Tencent's revenues come from games. The games industry is exceptionally scaled and the audience of people who grew up playing games are the same audience of people that watch television shows, go to movies,

• 27:28Speaker 02

  participate in many of the consumer things that your listeners fund. And so for us, what that really means is how do we go build a company that has the ability to prosecute that scaled marketplace today? And so that means these high LTV games where the lifetime value is higher than the CAC, a very sophisticated user acquisition organization that forms the basis of a new type of publishing company. And then all of the apparatus necessary to do that well today. Tools, technologies, systems that are made available, not just to our own internal teams, but to other game teams and game companies and application developers that might want to operate their user acquisition at the same scale and capability that we do today.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  The consumer tools and technologies, content and services that customers who play these games want and need to serve their insatiable appetite to communicate with one another, to consume media about the things that they love and to be a part of this kind of wonderful world of games and games media. So if we're successful, five years from now, we will be on the path to building the next great gaming company.

• 28:37Harry Stebbings?

  Well Neil, as I said, I heard so many great things both from Bing and from Mike, so thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  No, you're welcome. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

• 28:49Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic guest and such a comprehensive walkthrough there by Neil. I do want to say again, a big thank you to him for giving up the time today to be on the show. If you'd like to see more from Neil, which I highly recommend, you can find him on Twitter at @NCYoung. I do also want to say a big thank you to Bing Gordon at KP for the intro to Neil today, without which the episode wouldn't have been possible. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes at the 20 minute VC, check this one out. We're swapping out Snapchat for today and you can check us out on Instagram at Hstubbings with two Bs, 1996. It'd be fantastic to see you there. But before we leave you today. It's the new year and everyone is thinking of health and diet and so this month's partnerships will be aligned to that. And did you know that office snacks are the third most requested perk by employees with 83% suggesting it to be a huge perk? Well, that's where Nature

• 29:34Harry Stebbings?

  Box comes in. Nature Box is the first ever unlimited snacking programme for offices of all sizes, starting with just $12 per month per employee. You can choose the plan that fits your team and ensure you never run out of snacks again. And if your body is a temple like mine clearly is not with all those mojitos, then have no fear with Nature Box. Real, simple ingredients, no artificial colours or sweeteners and free setup, shipping and a dedicated account manager. What's stopping you getting set up today with 20% off your first month using the offer code VC20 at www.naturebox.com/VC20. That really is a must. And good health is not just about healthy snacking with Nature Box, but good sleep with Lisa, the Warby Parker or Tom Shoes of the mattress industry. Lisa have done away with a

• 30:20Harry Stebbings?

  terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating this luxury premium foam mattress that's ordered completely online and shipped for free to your doorstep. And the 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with three unique foam layers for a universal adaptive feel, including two inches of memory foam and two inches of a really cool latex foam called Avina, which is designed to keep you cool. And all Lisa mattresses are 100% US or UK made. And for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Head over to leesa.com to start the new year with a better night's sleep. As always, a huge thank you from me and everyone at Team 20 VC. We so appreciate your support and cannot wait to bring you next week's episodes.