David Helgason is the founder of Unity. Helgason served as CEO of the game technology company Unity Technologies since co-founding it in 2003 and until October 2014, with the unflinching vision to democratize game development, and to develop technology and business models for the next generation of the games industry.
Tell me about your early years.
I am originally from Iceland. I grew up in a population of only 300,000 people. On Thursdays, there were no television broadcasts whatsoever. It was a safe place to live. Kids played outdoors well past dinner time and sometimes until midnight. I moved to Denmark with my mother when I was 10 years old.
Before you went to university, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do?
I thought that I would become a university researcher or scholar, so I attended university to study different subjects, including psychology, Arabic, Middle East studies, and physics. I even studied computer science for two weeks. However, I was bored out of my mind, so I dropped out of university to start a game development company with a couple of friends.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Challenges are part of the journey. Knitting together your vision into an actual business, knowing what to listen to, and sticking to your belief are all difficult goals to achieve. One of the things that is both fascinating and difficult about running a tech company in a global competitive market is that, as your company grows, the leadership, and not only the CEO, will become distant from the business itself and, in a sense, start living in the future. At certain points in time, next-quarter numbers are mostly set, and the leaders know what they will be only slightly divergent, and the product map of what they have decided to build indicates roughly when it will be built. So, they start integrating that information into their thought process and start living in a world where the tasks are already done. They start thinking about what happens next. In the large company, the further it succeeds, the more it exists in hypothetical world. The leaders make decisions in that world, take their decisions back to the team, and explain to them that the business model might have to change. The team doing the work on the ground struggles to understand why the change is necessary, not because they are unintelligent but because they live and work in a more concrete world than the leaders. Reconciling that difference is a challenge that I often see other entrepreneurs face and a challenge that is not documented well.
What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned?
None of the members of the initial team that started the company had any kind of experience with building or managing a company. Because we were building everything from scratch, we lacked the infrastructure to support hiring and operations. However, we were all committed learners dedicated to giving each other feedback, and we tried to extend that attitude to the entire company.
How do you hire?
Part of hiring is a gut feeling. You get a first impression about people; we do that throughout life. I look for people whom I want to spend time with. There needs to be energy, passion, and a sense that I can trust him or her. I also hire people who are smarter than I am.
How do you manage smart people?
I do not manage smart people. Smart people rarely want to feel managed. I give them the space and time to do their work as long as they complete quality work on time. I also provide them with guidance and direction, give them regular feedback on their performance, and clarify goals and expectations. That dynamic affords a strong network of understanding and intuition about the people we are.
How to build a great company culture?
One of our values is being yourself. It is vital to be able to walk into work and be comfortable. I also think that it is healthy to be humble and to exude humility throughout the organization. We have always upheld the Scandinavian mentality that nobody should give orders, that we should debate matters, and that the best idea should be pursued, no matter whose idea it is. And that strategy has worked well for us.
How should we approach to failure?
Failure is a part of daily life. Diane Greene, an early investor in our company, said something that I really appreciated—something to the effect that companies should be careful not to overlearn from their mistakes. If an idea fails, you should nevertheless be ready to try that idea again later but slightly differently. I took that lesson to heart—to not give up on an idea just because it failed in a certain situation.
All startups make a lot of mistakes. If you work on, say, a long-term project, you know that it could majorly fail, but you do not know how long you should keep working on it. That uncertainty is one of the greatest problems with building anything. As a leader, you want to get close to people who perform the work and hang out with them so that you get a better feel for how they feel about the work and so that you can understand early on how things are going.
What advice would you give a first-time entrepreneur?
My first piece of advice is to work really, really hard. It is amazing how good life can be if you simply work hard. Starting a company requires being so obsessed with solving a problem that you cannot imagine not working to solve it. When my cofounders and I discussed the business, we tended to argue about the topic under discussion, not people. We adopted different perspectives during the conversations, I would take somebody else position and it is clearly sign that we were focused on the argument and not the people, we were not defending on position and I think it’s healthy.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
This post is part of “CEO Talk” series, which features leaders around the world speaking about their journeys. What does it take to become a successful entrepreneur or CEO? What is the path to success? What challenges did people face and how did they overcome them? Lan Anh and her guests answer all these questions and much more. To view the entire series, visit here.