Stephane Kurgan on Scaling King, Making Decisions and Building Trust

Harry Stebbings asks Stephane Kurgan how he entered the startup world. Kurgan wrote his university paper with a professor who founded Bureau van Dijk, an early European commercial CD-ROM business. Hired to sell its data and software, he traveled widely, installed CD-ROM drives in customers' computers and even carried a vacuum cleaner to deal with dusty machines.

Looking back at King, where he was chief operating officer, Kurgan's first lesson is to trust data over intuition. Free-to-play games generated unusually rapid and abundant feedback, and features that sounded promising to product teams sometimes produced different results in the data. He says the experience taught product leaders to be willing to be wrong.

His second lesson comes from Swedish labor practices. Generous parental leave, sabbaticals and long summer holidays initially seemed difficult to accommodate, but the company planned around them with backups, cooperation and people able to move between roles. Kurgan believes those arrangements made the organization more resilient; this is his experience and assessment, not a universal employment prescription.

He recalls a Candy Crush feature that monetized so effectively that the team felt uncomfortable and capped it. At the peak, he says, King had about 540 million players and seven to eight million paying users, allowing a large business without depending on very high individual spend. He says the company contacted some high spenders to check that they understood the purchases or that a child had not used a parent's card; the figures and safeguards are his account.

Stebbings asks whether the Swedish model can work elsewhere. Kurgan sees no reason it cannot: he values cooperation, thoughtful design and working arrangements that allow people to care for their families. He presents the model as an example he admires, not evidence that every organization will obtain the same results.

Asked what he is running from, Kurgan describes a difficult relationship with his father and leaving home before finishing school. Years later, a child psychologist's advice prompted him to invite his father to lunch and discuss their relationship. He says the conversation changed a great deal, while acknowledging that he cannot know how his parenting would have differed otherwise.

Kurgan evaluates established leadership teams on four dimensions: operating or financial performance, organizational maturity, contribution to the company-wide agenda, and personal development as a leader. Building a strong team and succession plan matters alongside meeting numbers. He calls leadership both a functional responsibility and a collective one.

He cautions that the same grid fits professional executives better than early founders, whose circumstances are more uncertain and whose strengths may be uneven. For founders, he looks for purpose, self-awareness, vulnerability and the ability to attract a strong team. He believes those qualities can be visible early, regardless of age.

An effective executive, Kurgan says, serves the team and multiplies its time rather than consuming it. That means reading materials beforehand, sending questions in advance and using meetings for the few issues that truly matter. Leaders who prepare this way model a discipline others can adopt.

Stebbings asks whether leaders should never ask someone to do work they would not do themselves. Kurgan's version is that a leader should have been willing to do such work at some point in their career, even if their highest-impact job today is different. The principle concerns respect for the work, not doing every task personally.

Kurgan says communication and decision-making dominate the work of scaling. Employees often want more communication, especially as a company grows, so leaders must repeat messages and design both vertical and horizontal information flows. Unless a matter is explicitly confidential, managers should share relevant information down through their teams.

He recommends distributing data and reports before meetings so discussion can focus on what cannot be handled in writing. At King, he says, employees could access the data warehouse, a deliberate decision intended to build engagement and trust. He notes that a public company also has to account for insider status and trading windows when sharing sensitive information.

Communication breaks down when trust does. Cross-functional leaders need to share challenges and ask colleagues for feedback, but politics or poor fit can make those conversations less candid. Kurgan says he gives a well-vetted hire the benefit of the doubt and shares information early, while trust in that person's decisions and execution develops over time.

When trust has been lost, he finds it difficult to rebuild and calls that a personal limitation. He has experienced both cases where communication restored trust and cases where a stain remained. His answer does not claim that every relationship can or cannot be repaired.

Goal setting depends on the function. Kurgan favors ambitious goals that engineering teams help set for themselves, with enough challenge to encourage growth but without treating every missed stretch goal as failure. Finance or legal work can require different standards: a public company's accounts, for example, must be closed on time.

Founder communication with investors also requires balance. Some share operational detail in the hope that board members can help; others withhold so much information that a board cannot do its job. Kurgan says investors need truthful information and enough transparency to be effective, while founders must also consider sensitive information that could harm a financing, transaction or customer relationship if leaked.

Kurgan's own communication mistakes often came from deciding and speaking too quickly. He says communication requires structure, a narrative and carefully chosen words; when he has said the wrong thing, he is willing to apologize. Stebbings asks how that fits with giving feedback immediately after an event.

Kurgan says praise can be spontaneous, though he prefers it to be specific and not so frequent that it loses meaning. More difficult feedback needs an appropriate moment and a concrete example of what could be done differently. It can be brief and constructive rather than a prolonged confrontation.

He describes an unnamed company he advises that adopted extensive internal transparency, including a published compensation framework. In his view this reduced negotiations and helped alignment and trust. He also felt uncomfortable when recruiting names or sensitive transaction information were shared broadly; he says the company later limited some disclosures. His observations reflect a company relationship and are not independently verified.

At King, he says, transparency became harder as the workforce and locations grew. Leaders visited studios, held informal lunches and answered questions rather than spending every trip behind closed doors. He sees accessibility and sharing data and strategy as ways to sustain engagement as a company scales.

For formal feedback, Kurgan starts with strengths, then gives a specific example and an actionable alternative for areas to improve. Criticism without a concrete way forward can create a negative loop. Preparation is essential before raising a difficult issue.

Asked whether teams have become too gentle about mistakes, he says decision-making inevitably produces errors. His illustrative claim is that a manager making 55% good decisions is strong and one making 60% is exceptional; these are personal rules of thumb, not measured benchmarks. The issue is not a single wrong decision, but repeating the same mistake without learning.

His decision process is to examine data, consult relevant people and take the time required for due process. Once a decision is made, he favors executing quickly and staying with it. Reversing course repeatedly on a whim, he says, can paralyze an organization; new facts are a legitimate reason to reconsider.

Kurgan stresses the speed of iteration in digital products. A minor feature that takes six to ten weeks to adjust can slow learning; he prefers making a change in days, testing it and iterating again. That is his operating preference for the situations he describes, not a claim that every decision should be rushed.

He recalls a hiring decision at King that changed his thinking. The company originally required six interviews, cross-functional input, an executive sponsor and unanimous support. Under pressure to meet hiring targets, he agreed to allow one neutral assessment; he says interviewers then sometimes persuaded a negative reviewer to move to neutral, and the company made several poor hires.

Kurgan believes a wrong hire can create compounding damage when that person quickly recruits others who do not fit the culture. A misaligned team or studio may take months or years to repair. The lesson he draws is to protect the quality and integrity of the hiring process when growth is fast.

He also distinguishes poor performance from a natural change in fit. Someone suited to an unstructured, high-risk startup may not want the processes of a larger company, and the reverse is also true. An honest conversation and a move to a better-fitting role need not mean either the employee or company has failed.

Kurgan says King grew from 100 to 2,400 employees in three years, hiring as many as 100 people a month at its peak. Early generalists and later specialists arrived with different risk preferences and expectations. He reports almost $1 billion in EBITDA in the year before its IPO; these figures are his historical account and EBITDA is not net income.

The challenge was to retain a coherent culture across those cohorts while allowing values to evolve. He suggests revisiting values periodically rather than treating them as permanent slogans. One King value, “supportive but demanding,” paired care for employees with a responsibility to deliver a reliable experience to players.

On mission statements, Kurgan thinks a seed or Series A founder should be able to say clearly what the company stands for and the value it provides. He recalls King's early mission as bringing “moments of magic.” A crisp statement becomes harder, he says, when a public company has many business units.

Kurgan discusses gender diversity in leadership, arguing that companies need both external hiring and sustained internal development. He describes a pattern at King in which women promoted into senior roles were recruited away soon afterward, requiring the company to start again. When Stebbings asks whether retention was the leaders' responsibility, Kurgan accepts that something was missing and says the company had failed those people.

On compensation, Kurgan says growing companies need consistency within a framework, especially for managers and public-company executives. One-time sign-on or retention awards can address particular circumstances, but leaders must consider how exceptions affect the organization. He hopes the labor market becomes more balanced; that is his 2023 observation and expectation.

Asked when a founder should sell, Kurgan says the decision belongs to the founder, though he will offer an opinion if asked. He recalls King's sale to Activision for about $5.9–6 billion with approximately $1.3 billion of cash on the balance sheet, and estimates the effective price at five to six times EBITDA. Those are his retrospective figures and multiple, not a fresh valuation.

He says the sale was appropriate in context because institutional investors had been invested for more than a decade and needed liquidity. King traded below its IPO price, and its largest institutional investor held around 40%, making a gradual public-market sale difficult in his view. Stebbings challenges the necessity of timing liquidity; Kurgan responds that funds have finite lives, even when extensions are possible.

Kurgan attributes part of his success to luck and preparation. He joined King shortly before a successful Facebook game launched and says that timing was much easier than the company's earlier challenges. His practical advice is to build skills, knowledge and relationships so one can act when an opportunity appears.

He describes a difficult decade after an internet-bank deal was blocked by a Spanish regulator. According to his account, litigation ended in a settlement of several hundred million euros, but the business ultimately sold customers and deposits and closed operations. He distinguishes a relative financial outcome for investors from an industrial success.

During the subsequent period he founded a payments company that did not take off and worked at an enterprise software company affected by the financial crisis. He says finding another opportunity in Europe was difficult, despite confidence in his abilities. The story illustrates his own career rather than a general rule about failure in Europe.

On money, Kurgan says it can buy freedom and security, particularly for a family in an expensive city, but not happiness by itself. He believes money should also be spent, invested and given, including in ways that support artists and other people in the economy. This is his personal perspective.

Moving from operations to investing changed his feedback loop dramatically. At a digital company he received data daily; in venture, meaningful realized returns can take eight to ten years. Financing valuations and operational milestones offer intermediate information, but he cautions that valuations can move in either direction.

Kurgan describes Index Ventures, where he was a venture partner, as a sophisticated collective decision-making organization and credits the varied backgrounds of its partners. He also says he must restrain his bias for immediate action and calibrate his help to each founder: he can be a sounding board, but the founder owns and runs the company. His praise concerns his own firm and professional relationships.

He says King taught him to work with both “mathematicians” and “magicians”: people strong in business and data as well as creative talent. In the quick-fire round, he recommends The Tao of Coaching, reflects on reducing his alcohol consumption and recalls meaningful messages from employees when he left King. These are personal experiences and preferences.

Asked about relationships and parenting, Kurgan advises appreciating both a partner's qualities and imperfections and enjoying time with a first child. He hopes to continue working with founders and mentions an unnamed side project. Stebbings thanks him, and the interview closes.