[Applause] please welcome to the stage David in conversation with Esther thanks David you found it unity technology from a basement just around the corner somewhere Noble 60 years ago something like that yeah and today it's a unicorn valued three billion dollars employing more than 2,000 people it's a tech company that actually disrupted the entire gaming industry you still on the board and you're one of the most active investors in Denmark a fun fact for everyone in the audience David actually studied physics in middle eastern studies and psychology so that's good out of two weeks of computer science and to science good for you now on your LinkedIn profile you state that you enjoy connecting the dots in front of audiences which is what we're doing today however I wanted this to be a different interview you've given very very many and you have a very impressive record I wanted it to be different because I wanted to take a different route I wanted to see if a certain part of your leadership skill we could call it your emotional intelligence might have played an integral role in your success are you cool with that happy to try try and I just want to say like I'm a little coffee and sniffing today I'm actually really sick I go straight back to bed after this thank you for every little real awful thank you for doing this David now let's start with the where you are you could have chosen anything under the earth because you were in Silicon Valley and you could have gone you could have stayed you could have stayed in Sanford sisqó you could gone to New York Tel Aviv you name it you ended up coming back to Denmark and this is maybe what five six years ago why did you do that you know it's a really good question my wife's Danish and the wanted to move back and we have two kids and there was a certain gravity towards kind of the bicycle life of Denmark which we both like that yeah sometimes I wonder the level in Silicon Valley which is not the u.s. it's just it's a very special place you know it's so high and if you sort of surround yourself with people that are so expert and kind of building technology companies that yeah well like all okay I go back a lot now when you are here and you're looking at the entrepreneurs because you also invest in them do you see any special characteristics of the Danish born companies there's a lot of good companies coming out of here that's good you know people have good educations and you know sometimes think that the sort of freedom from worrying about you know health care which is kind of a big worry in the u.s. American families like frees people up to somewhat to just kind of go and strike on out on their own so I think there's a certain something good about that I think that Merck is okay like it's sort of I think we're like on the level with our neighbors in northern Europe you know instead of starting companies not super better but but also not worse all right and as a co-founder and a leader and investor how do you actually make decisions or motivate people let's look at teams you've been quoted for using empathy passion your gut feeling and intuition is that sort of a mindset or a skill set that is useful for creating successful companies you think maybe hopefully I mean like it worked out this one time really well it's it's it's hard to know I mean I won't think that is I think it's true is that you know when you're trying to lead something because you're put into a position of leadership whatever reason like you shall have to use yourself and this happens to be by my style I don't think there's any way around that but no I think I think these these are these these sort of styles can work really well and I'm certainly did for me I mean it sort of mmm yeah I think we managed to create a really high level of trust and the sort of a calm Slavisa intellectual atmosphere where we're like you know people were sort of you know on any level you know for felt they were allowed to kind of just speak up and have opinions and argue their cases and really really big decisions in the company's history sort of came from I mean there's nothing ordinary about these people because they're all really brilliant but like people without sort of a fancy title or or like a rank on their shoulder yeah so you know any investor will say this that they don't invest in technology per se and they also also don't invest in the best idea they actually invest in the teams and they're looking for something something X and this is kind of what we are revolving around now what do you describe is the most critical factor for growth and success just based on your experience an industry that is undergoing change honestly like I mean the theme is very important I don't want to put that down but but no I mean like we didn't understand how much the game industry was about to change when you started in fact it was maybe not really changing yet so much but it was growing a lot double digits per year for you know decades and I think you know then you put towards that day a team that is select like really good I mean there's some really smart people and and a good culture of whatever is important for that team like in our case it was this kind of deliberation and trying to understand and think through the changes and you know maybe not foresee them but at these were be fast at the cabinet sort of being there with whatever was needed at the time and then you know things can happen very interesting ways so an industry going to change or undergoing change I think in the audience we have just about all industries and everyone is undergoing change yes so the opportunities there I would companies that fail don't get take it to scale very true yeah and so do you see that you applied some certain part of your skills or was that not deliberate maybe it's just that deliberate no I mean well we applied our entire physique like whatever we had we used of course and didn't sleep much so let's get back to your industry it wasn't really foreseen that gaming was going to be this big it was for all the geeks and they were disconnected and how important would you say that you using your digital imagination something I'm very happy about was a success for you building the company I mean we we came out of kind of programming as kids all three of us founders and so as I think we had you know like most sort of Technology geeks we had a very strong intuition for for change I mean when you live in a from when you're like 11 years old you live in a world where computers get you know twice the speed every 18 months or whatever even I think I think you're used to change and like it ain't changed is somewhat intuitive and that probably helped also you know we were very young and I just sort of dumb about about the industry so like we didn't come with a lot of preconceptions like five minutes before we arrived the industry had been quite small yeah and then five minutes later it was quite big so you know a lot of the preconceptions that you know people that we've met who have been in the industry for a decade or more we're kind of getting quite wrong and I mean we're not smart enough to know that but we just you know learn from the beginning like we were sort of had to have this kind of beginner you know moment attitude yeah yeah you were bold and yeah made decisions at some point one of you maybe that was you had the insight to say I want to democratize gaming was that you know what is actually proper hard to know but probably it was Nicolas Francis one of my co-founders or maybe it was I don't know actually but there's a lot of long conversations in the basement but I mean like the history of Technology you know it's almost the history of democratization like taking something and making it more available building tools for each other and let me like the sort of the whole history of civilization is that yes and so we sort of came with that intuition and and and we came to an industry that had like expensive and complicated tools and we were like what if we could make them really easy and and idiots like us could use them so so I think that was the sort of fundamental intuition we had and and brought that to the industry as well yeah and you stop to that right how many times did your board of directors say that's a horse right here it won't pay oh never ever never so everybody believed in your we align ourselves with extremely good investors we were any unable to raise money in Europe when we started for various reasons both because we were idiots because the market wasn't actually that big and then the financial crisis happened and sort of made sure that everything froze up for a couple of years mmm and then we went to the US and again not just general us but to Silicon Valley where there were people that were much smarter than us about these things and they had sort of analyzed that I mean they had seen the smartphone revolution coming they understood how gaming is a really important part of every new computing sort of revolution and how how developers are the ones who are always creating the new things and then they saw a company that like sort of combined with these three forces in one and and also was kind of popular with we were just with made a solution that was popular with our customers and so you know it went really fast by the time we met the right people and they stuck with us so they're still with us yeah after like it years now because we live in a world that is totally unpredictable when there's a lot of uncertainty and as leaders we seek to use artificial intelligence to help us sort the overload of information now do you think that emotional intelligence everything that we're talking about the more softer skills might actually play a bigger role today and in the future than it did before that's a very good question it seems likely I can't I can't quite formulate why though me I mean maybe I mean when things are changing very fast yeah you have less time to analyze and and then you know sort of into intuition and you know trusting other people who have intuitions also like you have a colleague and that colleague has a strong intuition about something and you know maybe you don't have the time or the sort of the data to kind of formulate the thesis is properly in a PowerPoint like this my business case yada yada so if you live in a world where things are changing faster baby there's a case for like peanut trust and intuition to play a bigger role I mean it definitely does that in smaller teams I can imagine lots of leaders in this audience would say well we are overwhelmed with the data and we're being told you have to analyze your data you have to use market analysis to base your decision on that and yet the emotional intelligence and your intuition was probably an integral part of your success absolutely and I actually like I'm always slightly awkward when I meet people that run big companies or bigger organizations because I only ran a company up to 500 people so I'm not gonna make myself sort of you know the authority of how to run a big company but but I can but what I very clearly learned when I was when I was doing my thing was that like III would hire you know leaders middle managers whatever to do certain things and some were really smart and some were very probably smart ant intuitive and the difference was just night and day because the smart people they would sort of be doing analysis and then more analysis and sort of getting stuck and the antutu people they think they could move through sort of very complicated decision space that the ten thousand little decisions you have to make when you're doing a new thing or something with grace and speed that was wonderful they would make mistakes the systemic mistakes because intuition is very like they're always blind to a lot of stuff you blind yourself that's part of intuition but ya know that I mean those were so much more valuable again I don't know how it works in a bigger organization so maybe we should characterize being smart as somebody who also has the intuitive these at least the value of their intelligence was greater when they could also could make these fast decisions yeah so I looked you up on LinkedIn and I saw you have a very impressive long list of recommendations you've given and you use phrases like this person's passion was fantastic or she was so fabulous I don't have words for it so if you need to talk to her call me I can keep you you know the full story there were people that have fall of you for a very long time so I asked myself David how do you lead passion how do you lead to over performance into this rock-solid loyalty young kids can get jobs everywhere so yeah yeah just in our case you know we we fell in love with our customers our customers were really cool people they're smart they're creative at trying to make games or trying to build things and and so I think we just fell in love with them and then and then it sort of merely became a task of of conveying that love and of showing it it's all I mean it was a company sometimes run on like a like millions of hugs we would hug each other and hug our customers and at some point I wanted to introduce it as if there's a KPI but oh they're good so let's go back to Denmark again and discuss us is coming up a unicorn nation if we could how would you describe the Danish tech scene today and compared to those that you see Silicon Valley and elsewhere and how has it evolved in your opinion over the last I don't remember so five years you've been back yeah so I mean I moved to Seneca Silicon Valley ten years ago and then I came back five years right so so when I left it was like nothing there was like nothing here is quite bad when I came back it was a lot better and now it's better yet which is great so people who are here they're like yeah we got much better which is true but I mean you should not underestimate that other ecosystems also got better okay so so I'm not sure actually if Denmark really gained too much but I mean the good thing is the world is significantly flatter so you know investments happen even more easily across borders US investors are investing in Europe US companies acquire European companies that are at a higher rate at least in the tech sector that before and so on so so so that means that it's sort of easier to maintain a system here yeah I mean it's it's improving we're trying to make it better great we have some global leash foot holes and we'll be discussing them today one of which is the FinTech scene robotics health tech act tech or new food and Coptic now these ecosystems have some of the same challenges as we've seen elsewhere namely attracting enough talent digital talent and in our case also investments what's your perspective on this I think these are all sort of reasonable clusters or like what I call it the F clusters or ecosystems at least if some of them especially when it comes to golf tech I'm not sure the Danish sort of public sector is a particularly good customer I think they you know there's been made a lot of stupid decisions instead of buying like solutions from small companies going instead of hiring you know sorry - name one outfit like a like an Accenture but that's a category of companies for a lot of million to build like bad solutions shitty shitty solutions and I think like the public sector could be much better at that otherwise yeah like I think you know you we will have valuable companies in all these all these segments and already have and there'll be more and that's good for sure so so how would you describe the current scene for building a unicorn here in Denmark so actually if you look at the stats that sistex Denmark has produced a lot of like this unicorn like billion-dollar companies statistically way batting over over you know per per capita that's a lot so in that sense it's good the problem has been like you know when you grow past a certain size you need to move to the you know whether customers are the big markets the capital and so on so so all these companies left except maybe one or two so that's that's that's a problem I think we look to Sweden where the the sort of tech industry you had like sort of a five seven year lead for various sort of historical reasons maybe not just historical but also historical reasons and and there you got a Spotify to stay through like you know to the five and not the end but like to an IPO to being worth I don't know what some tens of billions of dollars yeah and and we haven't seen that in Denmark could we see that in the next five ten years I think it's quite likely and if it's gonna happen it's gonna happen through a number of things including you know some of the people have done it before helping them out so at least that's that's the sort of task of of some of us yep so today we're focusing on new technologies and AI is one of them do you see any specific perspective for the Danish digital frontrunner you'll have them all in front of you within a I do you see AI as the vehicle for the new growth yeah like a is machine learning various sources related technologies are extremely powerful when applied right it's hard to imagine okay there will be a few companies that get really big without using machine learning AI that but most companies will apply it apply this and yeah so you know three years ago we decided that unity we had to double down on it like two very large scales we hired a lot of people invested a lot and it's really paying off just in like kroner on kroner investment it's already very profitable for us to have done that and and it sort of ensures our future so it's hard to imagine no again sorry most most companies should go deep on that there's some good conferences there's a reasonable amount of talent is talent is very scarce everywhere that is an issue that we grow the talent by hiring more people and you know bring people from you from from schools and universities so more AI and we will do more unicorns but thank you very much this was the end of my interview and thank you for coming thank you for you okay thanks