The King of Gaming: How Bobby Kotick Built and Sold Activision Blizzard for $69B

It's a good question. I actually think it's in your DNA but in my case I had a grandfather who started an insurance company was very entrepreneurial but I actually I just think it's your DNA.

Oh, absolutely. Like the ashtray story wasn't Bobby why the hell did you sell my ashtray on your play date? It was look what my son did. He sold an ashtray. Yeah. And like there was a lot of pride in entrepreneurship, but you know my grandfather was successful and my mother was entrepreneurial even though she was an art school, elementary school art teacher. My dad was a lawyer but entrepreneurial lawyer and so like there was I was always around entrepreneurial people.

We didn't really have Shabbos dinner. If it was a Shabbos dinner it would be at my grandparents which was not that frequent. But you know when you grow up in a town like Roslyn where I grew up it's 95% Jewish. And so you know there's conservative Jews or reformed Jews and then there are the cultural Jews. And I think three days a year in shul kind of thing. No, a little more than that. But so you know I don't that didn't really like you know I had a bar mitzvah with three other people so like I had 14 lines in my haftorah like that's all you get when you're doing it with four guys. But you know I think the dinner table was always about business. My father was a real estate lawyer. So, and he had all of these really fascinating like the all of the great New York real estate developers like the Harry Helmsleys and you know people who were like reshaping the skyline of New York and so the Larry Silverstein crowd Larry Silverstein was a client you know all of the the only client he never had was Donald Trump.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I used to go to his office. I meet his clients. He would take me to clients houses, you know, like I was always as a kid exposed to people in business.

Like I said, I think it's like your default setting, you know? I think if you're really entrepreneurial, those things sort of add to the interest and the learning journey, but I think you just have it. You know, it's sort of an innate thing. I was talking to Warren Buffett about this once and he said the only reliable predictor that he's ever seen for future business success is how early and how enthusiastic you are about starting and running a business. And so I think that's just, you know, sort of your DNA.

I think it starts even earlier.

Um, I mean, you can't generalize it, but I think like if you if you're really genuinely like you get up every morning excited about business, you're probably not going to lose that enthusiasm ever.

Actually, my first company was a hardware company.

So, I ended up meeting this guy and he was my college roommate. He was French. Okay. And not a really French name, Howard Marks, but Jewish French kid. And he had a cousin who worked at the University of Michigan who had an Apple 2. So, and I was a big arcade video game player, but I also like to play text adventures on computers. And so at night, we go to this computing center. we get to use his cousin Pat's Apple 2. And like the first game I got really crazy addicted to was Mystery House, which was one of the early great text adventures. And then I'd leave there and go to the arcade and Defender was a game that I used to play three, four hours a day. And so we started using the computer to write our papers, you know, like freshman year I was using that computer. Sophomore year was using to write my papers. But they could tell that it was a computer because it was on an Epson matrix printer. And that wasn't okay at the University of Michigan at that time. Like you had to either write your paper or type your paper. And I thought, sort of silly, but okay, there's Olivetti electric typewriters that have a serial interface. Why can't we connect the Apple 2 to the typewriter and just use the typewriter as a printer? And in those days, if you wanted to get like that caliber of printing, didn't really exist. So our first product that we made, we found a little local company and we built a circuit board that was a parallel interface from the typewriter to the Apple 2. So it print on the typewriter printed on the typewriter.

So we started this thing and this must have been in '82 and we put an ad in Byte magazine like the very back of Byte magazine. who was, you know, for this parallel interface and you could buy it and turn an Olivetti typewriter into a printer. And we left for Christmas break and came back and there were like hundreds and hundreds checks, you know, Visa cards made out, but like hundreds of orders for our interface. And so we started making them and the defect rate was like one in three cards didn't work. Okay. which pretty high. And so, and we didn't price it in a way where you could actually have a one-third defective rate. And so, we realized every unit we were selling, we were just going to lose money. And so, we kept doing it till June of that summer. And then, this is now 1983, Howard left to go back to France where he was living. And I went with him for 6 weeks and he started working at Apple Computer. And the guy who ran Apple Computer France was a guy called Jean-Louis Gassée who was like a legend in French technical business, you know, I think he was at HP but like very charismatic guy who had become president of Apple and Jobs loved him. And so Howard was working at Apple and he saw a prototype of the Lisa computer which was, you know, one of the coolest things ever created. And he comes back and he says to me, and I'm living in his parents' apartment, and he says, 'I just saw this Lisa computer prototype and it's unbelievable. It's like a graphical user interface and a mouse and we should make this for the Apple, too.' And I said, 'Yeah, this anything would be better than losing money on every printer interface. Like, let's do it.' So, we got back to school. We hired his TA from his like 101 electrical engineering class. And guy was a great guy. He was like the best TA. and we hired him and we said, you know, we're he I think he had gone to Carnegie Mellon and we said, well, you know, we're going to build software to mimic and we didn't have anything that we could explain to him because the Lisa hadn't come out yet. That's right. He didn't know what it was. So, we said it's like the Xerox Star Workstation, which was something that was out there already. Palo Alto Research Center was like the pioneering place for computer graphics and people knew about that. So, you're building the operating system and some applications. So there's no Microsoft Windows but oh no right but way far away but this is the equivalent long before that. Yeah it's literally like a graphical user interface plus we had to build some application software. So we said all right we'll take a we'll make a word processor we'll make a little database manager and a spreadsheet and a mouse.

Oh, yeah. Okay, perfect. So, yeah, you happen to pick someone who was brilliant. We picked like literally the best guy ever of all the places in all of America. He left Michigan to run the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon. Wow. So he's the dean of the computer science program and now he's the head of worldwide R&D. Talk about bashert, this amazing amazing.

So we started making it and originally we were making it for the Apple 2. We thought, okay, maybe we should make it for the IBM PC had just come out and we had heard a rumor that they were going to make this thing called the PC Junior and we thought, okay, you know, how hard is it to convert from a 6502 Apple processor to an 8088 IBM processor and Intel processor. And so we started looking into that. Went up to meet the Microsoft guys. I got to meet Bill Gates when I was 19. Pretty cool. And then we went to Commodore and this is my Canada story. And Commodore was based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but was owned by this extraordinary Canadian entrepreneur named Irving Gould. And you got to go look up Irving Gould because like in the annals of Canadian Jewish business history, he's got to be one of the most successful people. And I heard about him and I called him up and I said, 'You know, we want to come see you.' And he said, 'Well, I don't really run the day-to-day the business.' And we said, 'Well, we want to meet you.' Yeah. So, we fly up to Toronto. We go to his office. He has beautiful office. And like he was like a schmata guy. Mhm. The Commodore thing happened like by accident. He side hustle took a 20% stake in this company that was making office equipment and office furniture and calculators and so it ended up becoming Commodore and he was really a schmata guy. He was like he was a sputter guy literally he's on shabbos. Okay. But he also was like in the Royal Canadian Air Force and I think when I met him he was probably late 70s. Okay. Okay. And you know, this is like the thing that people can't really understand, but like you go and you're like an enterprising Jewish kid and there's somebody who's like had a similar journey, you have like that instant connection and he like wanted us to be in business with Commodore. So, but we really thought the big opportunity it was Apple and there used to be this trade show that was really important computers called the COMDEX and it was Las Vegas. And so we showed our software this first year in 1983 in November at the COMDEX and Steve Jobs heard about it. And when Howard, my business partner, was at Apple, there was another guy who he worked with in the same cube whose father was one of the original executives of Fairchild Semiconductor, but then became the head of sales and marketing globally for Apple. He also then went to found Kleiner Perkins. Wow. And incredible guy named Floyd Kvamme. Okay. And so Floyd's son Mark and Howard worked together. And Mark said, 'I know Steve Jobs because my, you know, my dad's an executive at Apple and like you guys should go show it to him.' And Steve Jobs was more accessible at this point. Yeah. I mean, he was How old is Steve in '83? I don't remember how old he was. His 30s probably. No, like late 20s. 20. This is before the 1984 commercial and where Apple before Mac was launched before Mac. Right. Right. But you're building a competing product to what he's doing. No, we were building it for the Apple 2. But he didn't Apple had their own but it was based on what they saw with Lisa, right? They were sort of inspired by Lisa, right? So we were going to build Lisa software and a mouse for the Apple 2, not knowing there was a Macintosh. Got it. We had no idea. So, we go and we get to meet Steve and we show him what we're doing and he looks at it and he's like, 'This looks like shit.' And he actually threw the mouse on the floor. He's like, 'This is the ugliest thing I've ever seen.' Throws it on the floor and he takes this little blue bag out and he puts it on his desk like a Tyvek bag. He unzips it and he pulls out the prototype of the Macintosh and he plugs it in and like the little script hello comes up on the screen and we were blown away. Yeah. Oh my god, what are we wasting our time on? He goes I want this for the Apple 2. And we said well what's in this? Like how do you do this? And you know, not to get too technical, but it had like the first 68,000 16-bit processor. And we said, 'Yeah, we can't do that on the Apple 2, but we can mimic it.' And like this was one of these meetings where I was fighting with Steve Jobs when I was 20 years old over when you boldfaced text, should it be noun verb or verb noun? And like 45 minutes of like debate. Wow. over how the interface should work. And of course he won the debate, but he said, 'Okay, I'm building two new Apple IIs. One is called the Apple IIgs and the other is called the Apple IIc and they have more powerful processors and more memory. And you're going to make your It was called Jane. He said, 'You're going to make this for the new Apple II.' So we're like, 'This is awesome, right?' And then we leave and we start making the software with the prototypes for those machines. You're still in school though. I'm a student. Okay. And Jobs comes to Ann Arbor, not really to see us, but more because he was selling computers to he was trying to sell computers to the University of Michigan. And he found out that I was still a student. Got really pissed off. Said, 'You need to quit. You can't.' And when I told him, 'You quit school.' He I need to quit. Like, I'm not giving you a contract for without you if you're in school. It's fair. And I was like, 'Well, I told my parents that I was going to finish school.' Jewish mother. Like, I don't give a [__] Mom Steve Jobs told me to drop out of school. And then he got really pissed when he found that I was studying history of art. He's like, 'That's the stupidest thing you could ever study.' Like I'm like, 'You studied typography?' Right. Exactly.

I went to the University of Michigan. Have you ever been to Ann Arbor? No. Okay. So, we can't use this part. Okay. The cute girls were all in history. Okay. Got it. All right. We actually over lunch we were trying to figure out why you went there and actually that was the assumption just working. I met my wife in English lit class so I get it. Yeah. So, I don't know. And I also thought like the how do you if it's all about like expressing your opinion about a work of art, how hard is that like and if you could write reasonably I only skill I had was like I could write other than being...

It was never in school. It was never in school. Never in school in seventh grade, you know, like I just wanted to go work. I, you know, in high school I sold t-shirts at the US Open. I did the parties at Studio 54 and Xenon. You know, you guys don't know about this, but there was this oil crisis in the 70s where you had to wait on lines to get gas for like two or three hours. I used to go sell snacks on the lines at the gas station. I would go to little league and bring my cooler and at like breaks or in between games I would sell soda snacks to the other kids at baseball games. Like all I wanted to do was be entrepreneur. Yeah. And so anyways, we get Steve gets really pissed. I have to quit, which I do. And then we put the thing in the market and it didn't really work. you know, just sort of dead on arrival.

Well, I didn't tell them. Okay. For a while. Yeah. They thought I was still in school. Okay. And then, when they found out, funny, Forbes found out about us and wrote this great article in 1983. Now, you were top 20 under 20, I think, right? This is way before that. Okay. And this was, it's actually funny because it was the first time Forbes ever wrote about Mike Milken. same issue and we got top billing like he had a little thing and we had like a two-page spread but the headline of the article was when Bobby Kotick told his father he was quitting college to make software his father told him to cut the crap and start doing some school work and that's the headline of the article amazing it's also amazing because like you know we have Jewish parents too you know as proud as they may have been about you know your entrepreneurial ventures yeah you should have been a doctor should I show you your brother's a That's right. Wow. So, what what happened software? So, it doesn't work out as well as you wanted it to. No. Okay. Now, there's an important part of the story that I'm sort of missing because it actually like transformed my life. Yeah. Where'd you raise the money? I think there's a story there. Yeah. So, my dad was a lawyer and had friends who were venture capitalists and they were going to invest in our company and, we had planned this meeting to go spend the time and get the money and it was like $5 million. And you know in the early 80s like when tech was really starting to be something like you know it's not dissimilar from what you've seen over multiple generations whether internet or AI but it wasn't hard to get people interested was hard to get them to actually close and give you the money. So these investors are going to give us the money. The weekend before I was going to meet with the investors, I had a friend who invited me to this party in Dallas that I definitely didn't belong at and it was called the Cattle Baron's ball. Yeah. No juice. Not that I was aware of. Right. You wear like a cowboy hat? Yeah. Cowboy like cowboy boots. Like I knew I had to like fit play a part. Yeah. You know, so I go and I'm at this table with 12 people. the two women who the women who were my friends who I went with their parents and then these other people and sitting on this side of me is this like stunningly beautiful 40-year-old woman and her husband and we start talking and I don't know like how this even came in my head but I looked at him I said I feel like I met you at a bar mitzvah and I said were you like and I told him the name of his family in Great Neck, whose bar mitzvah I thought he was at. And he starts laughing. He's like, 'No.' He said, 'But you know, one of the guys I work with is from Great Neck.' And I said, 'Oh, I didn't know that.' And so we're having this whole conversation. I said, 'But what do you do?' And he said, 'Um, you know, casino business.' I said, 'Oh, where do you do that?' He said, 'Las Vegas, Atlantic City.' I said, 'Oh, I've never been to a casino. I've never been to Las Vegas.' you know, I always thought that was like a gangster kind of business. And he said, 'Yeah, it was at one time.' He said, 'But you know, like I went to University of Pennsylvania, went to I was going to go to Georgetown Law School.' And I said, 'You're Jewish?' And they both said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Oh.' Talking. Next morning, just by total coincidence, they're at the hotel that we're staying at, and I see them. And they said, 'Are you going back to Ann Arbor?' because I had told him where I was in school. And I said, 'No, I'm going to New York.' And he said, 'Why?' I said, 'Well, I started this little company and I'm going to raise money.' And he said, 'Well, why don't you come with us?' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Come on our plane.' And I said, 'How does that work?' And he's like, 'You just come with us and we got a car when we land and we'll drop you off. Where are you going in New York?' And I said, 'To my parents apartment.' He said, 'Great. Come with us.' And I get on this like I've never been on a private plane. I've never been on a private plane like this. It was an MD80. So like or DC9. So like an airliner that was a private plane. Wow. And I get on this thing. I'm like in a couch like this, you know. And I said, 'So how'd you get started?' and says, 'You know, my dad died and he ran bingo parlors and we had one in Las Vegas and I went to go collect the $30,000 that was owed to me by the Silver Slipper Hotel Bingo Parlor and I met some guys and they said, 'Hey, would you like to invest with us in the Frontier Hotel?' And it turned into an opportunity.' and he told me his whole life story and he said, you know, and the guy who helped me out said, you know, I'm going to help you out, but you got to promise someday you'll help a young guy like I'm doing for you. Wow. Pay it forward. And he said, 'So, what's this thing that you're doing?' And I started telling him. He goes, 'You know, I'd invest in that.' He said, 'Well, you know, tell me a little bit more.' And I said, 'Well, we already have investors.' I said, 'I'm very flattered and grateful, but we've got investors.' Was that true? Did you Yeah. Did you actually have Yeah, that's where I was going to New York to sign the contract. Wow. And he said, 'Yeah, well, if it doesn't work out, call me.' And I'm like, 'Okay, great. Where can I have your number?' And I like take down his number. Next day I the morning I go over a friend of mine's house and her dad was a famous entertainer and I said do you know this guy named Steve Wynn? And he's like yeah and I said well he offered to invest in my company. He said if Steve Wynn offered to invest in your company you take the money. I'm like why? He goes he's going to be the most successful entrepreneur in the history of Las Vegas. Pretty Prussian guy. And I said, 'Yeah, I really liked them.' And so we go to my dad's office. Howard had flown in from Ann Arbor to meet me. And I blew the deal with my dad's friends. My dad was really pissed. Why? Why'd you blow it? Just the pitch wasn't right. It just I didn't like one thing that they kept demanding was like I couldn't take a salary until the company was profitable and I had to commit to do it for five years. No matter what, I had to be committed for five years. And And you had no leverage. So you sort of had to take whatever deal they were giving you. I Yeah, there's But you know what it really was? It was like there's something that just said to me, I want to be in business with Elaine Wynn and Steve Wynn. And by the way, Elaine Wynn was as compelling and as impressive and like extraordinary as he was. Wow. And so, but you're in the office ready to sign this deal that would handcuff you for five years and give you no salary does profit like pen in hand. Yeah. And you kept thinking about the flight with the Wynns the day before and you just I mean like you just put the pen down. You're like I'm not doing this guys. Yeah. I said, you know, I think we have a better alternative. And we leave the room and Howard looks at me. He says, what are you an idiot? My dad said, what are you an idiot? Yeah. And I said, 'Maybe.' And I called Steve and I said, 'Hey, I blew the deal with these investors.' He goes, 'Yeah, I knew you would.' And I said, 'So, but my business partner is going to go back to France. He's not going to want to do this.' And so, we really need the money. And he said, 'Okay, so why don't you come meet me?' I said, 'Great.' He said, 'Where are you?' And I told him, he said, 'Here's my address, my office in New York City. They will bring you to me. I'm in Atlantic City.' I said, 'Okay.' We go to his office, Park Avenue. This limo, biggest limo I've ever seen in my life, pulls up. These two big guys get out and they're like, 'Get in.' So, that Howard's looking at me like, 'What is going on?' We just blew this deal for blew deal with like real people who were giving us real millions of dollars of money. And I said, 'I'm telling you, we're just you're going to like this guy. Wait.' and we drive to the 61st Street Heliport in Manhattan and there's this big golden nugget helicopter waiting for us. Now, I was never on a helicopter or a private plane but or a limo probably at this point. Limo I've been in because you know Studio 54 is my business. I every once in a while paid for that. Okay. But so I Mr. Big Shot in the limo. Yeah, exactly. I syndicated it out with eight other guys. You made some money with I went to a prom. Of course. That's right. And so, we get on the helicopter and fly to Atlantic City and they drive us to his office, which is like in the basement of the parking garage and we wait for like 3 hours and Steve walks in with his like beautiful Ferragamo suit and he's like, 'Hey fellas, glad you're here. Okay, what do we do?' And I, you know, we talked a little over business. He goes, 'How much do we need to make a prototype?' And I said, '$300,000.' He takes out his checkbook, writes a check, '$300,000.' He says, 'All right, we're partners. Third, a third, a third. You guys do the work. I'll raise the money.' Who's hungry? That was it. I'm hungry. And I said, 'You know, we have all the contracts already written because we're going to do it with my dad's friends, so we can get them sent over tomorrow.' And he goes, 'Contract schmontract. You guys are my family now.' And he walks out. And Howard looks at me and I look at him. I said, 'All right, we're in the basement of a parking garage in a casino in Atlantic City and a guy just gave us $300,000 and said, 'We're his family now.' Did he just make you an offer you can't refuse? I said, 'We're going to die cuz we really don't know what we're doing. Like we don't know how to make this software and this is serious. This is Steve Wynn. Even then he was a big deal. I didn't know that. But I learned very quickly. Well, and then the software doesn't work in the end of the day. Well, that was like the embarrassing part. But so we take the money, we go like and he actually I didn't know this at the time. I obviously found out afterwards, but Elaine and Steve both thought like these guys would make great son-in-laws and they had two daughters. Oh, interesting. And so it's quite the courting. Yeah. you know, and could have worked out either way, right? But so we take a few years and Steve got like really interested and did he like you or did he like the tech? Was it was he comfortable with the technology? Yeah, he liked the idea of making computers easy to use, but it was awesome. What did he I mean your family now. What did he say to you when you had to turn him and be like, 'Sorry, Steve, like it's not working.' Well, there was a moment where, and this was like one of the great moments of my life, but John Sculley calls and says, 'Steve Jobs really liked what he saw.' And was John Sculley the CEO of Apple at this point? He was. Okay. And he said, 'So, why don't you come to Cupertino and let's talk about a deal?' So, I called Steve Wynn. I said, 'I think Apple wants to buy us.' And he goes, 'Really?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He goes, 'Well, that's not really why I invested.' He said, 'You know, I don't know that we want to sell out, but he said, 'We should hear him out.' I said, 'Well, we can't do this on our own. You got to come to Cupertino with us to the meeting.' So, he takes the big DC9. This is like San Jose used to be like a really long driveway with like houses like in the early 80s. It wasn't like the bustling metropolis that it is today. And DC9, private DC9s never landed in San Jose airport. So he lands and our buddy Mark Kvamme, we go to pick him up and he's in his like suit and tie and we drive to Apple headquarters and we go into John Sculley's office and you know Steve has an eye problem. He has retinitis pigmentosa so he can't see. So we walk in and everywhere you look there's like no smoking signs and he sits down in Sculley's chair. This is Steve Wynn. Yeah. Okay. Sit down Sculley's chair. lights up a big cigar waiting for John Sculley to walk in. Sculley walks in. Steve says, 'Yeah, it's great to know you.' And he said, 'You know, where'd you work before Apple?' And Sculley says, 'Pepsi.' And Steve says, 'Oh, I'm good friends with Don Kendall.' And he didn't realize was his ex-father-in-law. Wow. And Steve starts going off about why he invested. He said, 'You know, I was talking to my friend Steve Ross who owns Atari and he said, 'What the guys are building is like going to revolutionize computers.' He's giving this like whole sales pitch to Sculley. And Sculley says, 'Um, yeah, well, we're interested in doing something.' And, you know, maybe we'd acquire the company. And I don't know where Steve came up with the number. He goes, 'Yeah, you know, maybe $80-100 million we'd consider it.' And I'm like, I have no idea where he came up with the number, but Okay. What number did you have in your head? I didn't have a number because I was like, anything. We literally don't know what we're doing. Like, this isn't going to work. And so he says, John Sculley looks at Steve, he goes, 'Listen, we like what the boys have built, but we probably could re-engineer this and not do much time. And so, we're not turning Apple computer upside down for these guys, right? you know, do you want to do a reasonable deal? You know, we might consider it, but you guys are gonna have to first decide like do you want to do a reasonable deal?' And then he says, 'Hey, could we meet the CEO?' And John Sculley says to Steve, 'I am the CEO.' And he goes, 'No, the young guy.' And he said, 'Well, Steve Jobs's not around today, but you know, perhaps some other time. and thank you for coming and we'll why don't you guys deliberate on this and we'll talk to you again. So, we leave, we get on Steve's plane, we fly back to Las Vegas. He says, 'You know, that's the first time in a long time I've gotten the my way or the highway speech.' And I said, 'Well, you know, what do you think? Like, this sounds pretty good. We could, you know, I think we could get like $4 million, like maybe a little more, but we could sell the company and make some money.' and he said, 'Look, we each have to vote. I didn't put this money up for you guys just to sell out when you're 20 years old and move to the south of France and make millions of dollars.' He's like, 'I want to build a business.' He said, 'So, my vote is we build a business.' And clearly they are excited about what you're doing. And Howard said, 'Yeah, I think we should build the business.' And I said, 'South of France.' And good answer. They overruled of course. Yeah. And of course like you know a year and a half later we were bankrupt more or less. And so so Steve couldn't say much at that. I mean he his view was like look you know you guys gave it a good college try. Let's like come up with something else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know he rolled the you rolled the dice and it didn't work out. Did that change the relationship between you and Steve Wynn? Not really. Well that's interesting. Let's try something else. So I mean he still considered you his partner even though this has failed. He was he already was telling you he's on board for the next one. Was like more like be resourceful. I'm not giving you any more money. Yeah. But be resourceful and make a pivot and come up with something else. So we started licensing that software to Commodore to whoever we could get a contract. And we came up with some other entrepreneur ideas. We took some contracts developing software for other companies like Electronic Arts and you know there were a lot of companies that were looking to get in the consumer software business. So we just started coming up with pitches and getting contracts and keeping the doors open and started building up a like a contract software development business. And this is you and Howard still at this point. Yeah. Yeah. And then how do you sort of go from that to sort of like what becomes Leisure Concepts? Well, before you get there, like I mean you could have been Microsoft. No, I mean you were building operating systems. We weren't we didn't have good enough technology. You didn't have good enough. I mean it was that idea. We just didn't have the capability. We had the vision. So how did you then cuz you obviously became the greatest video game developer on the planet. How did you then take that learning of you didn't have the talent, you couldn't pull it off. at this massive opportunity and then go and pull it off in another massive opportunity. So it took a little while you know like we kept getting more contracts and being more entrepreneurial and you know we started building up the business to being like a legitimate software development business and we had contracts and in 1987 the stock market crashed Black Friday and Commodore had launched this computer called the Amiga and it was an amazing computer but it was designed. All the engineers at Commodore were ex-Atari video game hardware designers. So, they designed this thing that they thought was going to be a serious computer, but it was actually just like a souped-up video game system. And it felt like a video game system. Yeah, it was like a video game system. And so, market crashed in '87 and Commodore had, you know, a billion dollars of revenues and $150 million market value. And my best friend from growing up was a guy named Eddie Lampert. and he had just left Goldman to go work with this guy named Richard Rainwater who spun out from the Basses and was a really great investor. So I go to see Eddie in Fort Worth and I meet Richard and I tell him about Commodore and I said, 'We should buy this company and take this Amiga, take the disc drive out and the keyboard out and put in a CD-ROM drive and make it the first 16-bit CD-ROM based video game system and it's going to be a big big idea and Rainwater likes the idea. So he calls Irving Gould, who owns 20% of Commodore, and says, 'Hey, how'd you like to sell us your 20% stake in Commodore, and we'll give you a big premium?' And we'll take over the company. And Irving said, 'No, I don't want to do that.' And kept like trying to convince him and trying to convince him. He said, 'I actually I don't think the direction that Bobby wants to go is the right one.' He said, 'I want to compete against Sun Microsystems. I don't think the...

Video game industry is like a real industry and I'd rather do something that's commercial. She says, 'No.' And I just thought, you know what? We got to just make video games. Maybe hardware is too complicated. Let's just make video games. And like by some sort of crazy coincidence thing, my sister's high school boyfriend's father had this company called Leisure Concepts. And it was a licensing company. Like they were a licensing agent. They licensed t-shirts and, you know, coffee mugs, lunch boxes, but they had just signed a client called Nintendo. Yeah. And so I thought, 'Yeah, this is cool.' And we actually bought 20% of Leisure Concepts, became the controlling shareholder from my friend's dad, went up to Nintendo. We're the owners now. I'm the CEO. We're your licensing agent. And we said, 'We're really software guys and we'd rather like we like being your licensing agent, but we'd actually rather make video games.'

$440,000.

Yeah, we I forgot what we paid to buy the 20%, but the company, let's see, it had a market value of $7 million. It was public. Okay. And we bought his 20% for a million half dollars.

Steve helped with it. So Steve had already come back into it, but also Richard was involved in this, too.

Yeah. And Eddie wanted to be, but he wasn't until later.

Me, Howard, me, you, Howard, and Steve.

You know, I liked them, and I liked them, but also I thought that there was a real business there and that Atari's failure was not because there wasn't a market because people were playing video games on computers and Nintendo in '87 launched the 8-bit Nintendo and they sold like 25 million units in two years in the US. And so you realize like there was a market for video games that was just untapped. And so and there weren't really independent game companies. You know, when Atari started, Activision was born and Magic was born. There were some other companies that were making video games independently, but it hadn't really been like a professional business. And so I thought there was a big opportunity to be in the video game business. And we were at Nintendo and the chairman of Nintendo, incredible guy named Howard Lincoln. And he said, 'You know, there's this company, Mediagenic, used to be Activision. They changed their name. They're insolvent. Maybe you should look at it.' We looked at it and it was a $20 million public company. And I thought, 'We don't have $20 million.' And it's too bad cuz they own Pitfall and River Raid and Kaboom and all these great games I used to play in the Atari 2600. And but we didn't have enough money to buy it. And so a year after he suggested it, Mediagenic lost this patent infringement judgment and they were bankrupt.

And so again, Canadian company factors very prominently, but 25% of Mediagenic was owned by a subsidiary, a Canadian subsidiary of British American Tobacco. And I just cold called the company and said, 'Hey, would you be willing to sell your 25% interest in Mediagenic to us?' Which wasn't worth very much, $400,000. So spent $400,000, bought 25% of Mediagenic, which was Activision, called up the CEO and said, 'We're your largest shareholder. We want to have a meeting.' And he wouldn't even have a meeting with us. He's like, 'Hey, glad you're our shareholder. Thanks for calling.'

All the IP because what happened in the 80s, every video game company was going bust and Activision just kept buying all the IP. So like that game I told you was I was crazy about, Mystery House, was part of a company called Sierra. They owned Sierra. They owned Imagic. They owned Infocom, you know, like they bought all the IPs and no one wanted it. No, they couldn't. And they couldn't afford to make games based on any of that IP.

No, it was a retail product. Remember, it was on a cartridge. Yes. So like all the investment was in a hardware cartridge, not in the making of the software.

We didn't have a clue. No, we So we had built up this profitable business doing software development. Yeah. And we're making profits and in addition to everything else, Activision had $200 million of tax loss carry forwards. So, if nothing else, we thought if we merge our profitable private business into this business, at least we'll get to use the tax losses.

Yeah. We believe in video games. They have a ton of IP. Maybe we'll figure something creative out with it. No, we were going to make Pitfall. We were going to make River Raid like all these games that we loved.

We're gonna make them. Yeah. And like I think that the big insight is a game like Pitfall had sold from 1980 to 1983 when Activision went public. It had generated $200 million of revenues.

Atari collapsed and the whole industry was based on selling Atari video games. Yeah. On the console. Yeah. So there just there was no distribution of where to play the game. It was just computers. And so you could only really buy video games on computers until Nintendo. And the thing we liked about Activision is they were the first American Nintendo licensee. So they had a license. You had to get a license from Nintendo to make games for their platform. They not only the license, they told you how many cartridges you could make. So it was a restricted supply. They had to approve the game. Then you had to wire them the money or give them a letter of credit to make the cartridges which they made for you. But they liked us and they liked Activision because Activision had helped them in this litigation that it lost but that ultimately Nintendo won which was against Philips in the Netherlands over this patent infringement. And so they were really very willing to let us make video games, but they said, 'We don't really want you to be our licensing agent and a licensee. You sort of have to pick one.' So then we sold our stake in Leisure Concepts so that we could focus on building Activision, which was bankrupt. And I had a couple of crazy lucky things cuz there it could have gone bankrupt and gone right very easily. And we didn't have capital, you know. All we had was what we put up, the $400,000 to buy our 25% stake. And then we had a little bit more money and we bought some debt that was owned by one of the creditors. And most of the creditors, we said, 'This is our plan for the bankruptcy is you're going to get equity. Otherwise, it's done. You're gone. Like you're going to lose it.' So like, you know, or nothing. Almost everybody was willing to take equity. Except Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. They had the letter of credit on some inventory and they were like, 'We just want sell the assets, sell the furniture, want the money.'

And our lawyers were all like, you know, look, you're this Hong Kong Shanghai bank, they're a secured creditor. Yeah. They don't they don't they don't budge. They don't want to be your partners. They're owed $2 million. Just $2 million worth of assets. Like they don't care. Yeah. We show up in San Francisco at the creditors meeting and the lawyer for Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank walks in motorcycle helmet he taken off it's like wearing a motorcycle jacket and he's got a big like handlebar mustache and he walks in and everybody's like if you don't get this guy on board you're done and he looks at me and he goes and I said Zadic what are you doing here. He said, 'What are you doing here?' I said, 'I bought Activision.' He's like, 'Why?' And I said, 'I want to make Pitfall River Raid Kaboom into video games.' I said, 'What are you doing here?' He said, 'I'm the lawyer for Hong Kong and China Bank.'

My aunt's best friend. Wow. My mother was his babysitter.

Jewish guy. Yeah. Wow. And he takes me outside. He's like, 'Do you really want to do this?' And I said, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'But we need your consent.' Like, 'You got to go along with this.' He goes, 'All right.' Comes back in and he says, 'I'm on board for the credit.'

From Queens. Queens.

All the lawyers said, 'There's no way this guy is going for this. No way.' Wow. It was like the craziest coincidence. So, he allows you to do this. Let me do it. You they get equity. They become your partners. I guess they get actually they got paid off. They did get some equity, but he said, 'Look, I'll give you a payment plan, right? But I'll give you the time to'

No, you're bleeding money. Like, where did the what now? So, we had to lay off a bunch of people. We had like we were selling the furniture to make payroll and it was a bankruptcy, an actual bankruptcy where we had a approved bankruptcy plan. We got everybody to convert their debt. And I was thinking about this the other day. I don't know who held and who didn't, but if you were a creditor of Activision and you held your equity from that equity restructuring, it's the greatest return in the history of any bankruptcy in America.

Yeah. Cuz like think about it. It was $20 million that was restructured. So and they creditors got even the equity the in bankruptcies equity doesn't get equity. Our bankruptcy plan we gave the equity holders equity a 1% stake. Wow. So if you just think about 1% of the purchase price was 80 billion. You know think about what the creditors would have.

Just you want that think about this name Mediagenic. It's a terrible name. I can't believe anyone called it that. But also Activision is a great name, but maybe it's because it has brand equity now. I don't know. You make Yeah, you kind of make the name, but you like the name. I thought it was the best name ever. It's like what's interactive what's a better name for interactive television than Activision? It's active and the original logo was an incredible logo. And so we're like, 'Yeah, we're Activision. We're a video game company. That's what we're going to do. We're going to make video games.' And you know, we started to like we raised a little bit of capital. You know, we kept things going.

That was later. We first had to like get from 1991 to 1995 where we were even in a position to raise any capital. So four years of making no money.

You did right away. Right away. You know what? I never ran a business that didn't make money. Like that gets back to the DNA of I don't know how to do that.

You know, even selling your mother's ashtray. Yeah. Yeah. Like I don't have the ability to be in a business that generates losses.

No, we had to be entrepreneurial. But here's what we started to do. We took old games, put them in like anthologies, repackaged them. We were entrepreneurial and we figured out how to sell stuff. So we sold furniture. We also came up with new ideas to take the old library and resell it. So we were selling like 1980s developed text adventures like the Lost Treasures of Infocom. Then we were remaking some of the old games like we remade Pitfall into a new game for Nintendo and you know just started being entrepreneurial and so you know we went from the bankruptcy to actually generating revenues and you know by 95 I think we were up to probably 60 million in revenues.

And profitable. And then we raised $40 million in the public market. And that was like the amount of capital that really got us to be able to build the business.

Yeah. I've been doing conference calls since 1996.

Of a tech company. Yeah.

I mean, look, you know, my like if I think about my business upbringing, it was really reading the Berkshire Hathaway annual report every year. Like that was that was that was your MBA. That was your Yeah, that was my business training. And so, you know, Warren used to say like you get the shareholders you deserve. And my view was I don't need control as long as you do the right thing. And you know, when I did the deal, I did it with a guy named Brian Kelly who I had brought into Leisure Concepts to be the CFO. And probably the smartest person that I've ever met, the person with the best judgment, and like we became instantly good friends. But when I was doing Activision, I called him and I said, 'Listen, this leisure concepts thing I think we should get out of. I think we should buy this bankrupt company.' And he's like, 'I'm not moving to California. I live in New Jersey. My family's here, so not moving, but maybe it's an interesting idea. Let's take a look.' I did it, and I said, 'You should be my partner.' And excuse me, Howard had moved back to France. He sort of was getting distracted, didn't really want to do this. And so, you know, 94, he actually started an internet company in France. Then yeah did it and moved to the US but didn't really include us in it and he left to go do that and Brian was my real partner and you know we brought in a president right away and then we brought in in '95 after we raised our money brought in a guy from Procter and Gamble to actually professionally run the company and so wow you know I was somewhere in between founder entrepreneur and you know I had to learn the skills of being a professional manager, but I got to do that with someone who's actual a professional manager.

Yeah. And I can tell you there was the beginning of it did not go so well.

Um I would say I was willing I realized how important it was to professionalize the business. And Ron, the guy's name was Ron Doornick. Ron was really willing to allow me to have the founder role and participate in the management. But we had a very fortuitous thing happen. I think very early on made him rethink what his role was and appreciate what my role was. And I'll tell you the story because it's a great one. So, we were making Toy Story the video game and Ron had just come on board and we were going up to Pixar to have a meeting and Steve liked to come to our meetings cuz I'd been in business with him all along the way and he was going to come to the meeting and Ron came in. I don't even think it was PowerPoint. I don't know if PowerPoint was invented then. It was like a deck and it was like a 50-page dense deck. And he came into our weekly meeting and he sat down. He said, 'You know, we're going to bring this to the Pixar meeting.' And I said, 'No, that's not how the meetings go at Pixar. We show them the game prototype and then they comment and then they show us like where the movie is in production and they tell us like things that we need to make sure align with what the movie is.' And we don't really like we don't use a presentation. And he said, 'Bobby, I'm the president of the company. I don't really think you should be prescribing how we're going to organize the meeting.' He said, 'You know, we've got a lot of business issues that need to get addressed.' And I said, 'Um, all right, that's fair, Ron. Um, you could have five pages and five bullet points per page. A third of the page needs to have pictures of the game. Then you could have the bullet points. The headline needs to be in a 14-point Helvetica. And the text of the bullet points needs to be in Garamond Condensed.' By the way, it's called founder mode. Yeah. Seriously. And he said, 'What are you talking about?' And I said, 'Steve, I know like what he is willing to look at.' Yeah. You'd have five points. Those are the fonts. He likes those fonts the best. Believe me, I know like his font choices and the imagery is very important because that's going to show like what's in the game. He goes, 'This isn't going to work.' He said, 'I don't think I'm the right choice for you for this job. Like, you're telling me font choices how many pages I can have in the deck.' I said, 'No, I'm not just telling you the font and the font sizes.' And he's like, 'This isn't, you know, this is not what I signed up for.' And I said, 'Make your deck. Let's go to the meeting. Do what I say. And if you don't think it's effective as a meeting, you're good. Leave.' Yeah. And if it works out, you'll trust my judgment on things like this. I said, you know, all I want you to do is be successful. It's not like I want to tell you the font. Well, you have a vested interest in him being successful. Like you guys are partners here. I said, I've known this guy for 12 years. Okay. I've worked with him when he went to NeXT. I came back and worked with him when he came back to Apple. I've worked with Pixar since the founding of Pixar. I said, I can tell you like just trust me on this one. He's like, 'Look, I don't really feel comfortable working this way, but you know, in the spirit of wanting to like partner, okay.' And we get in the van from Oakland airport to drive to Pixar and he passes out the new deck and it's six pages. I'm like, 'What's the extra page?' He said, 'Oh, we got focus group test results back and I wanted to share them.' I said, 'Doesn't seem like a good idea. I don't think they're going to respond to the idea of a focus group. Like that's not Pixar.' And he said, 'You need to trust me on this.' I said, 'I'll make you a deal. I'll trust you. If this meeting doesn't go well, you're going to stay, but you're going to accept like when I come and tell you like this is important and it matters, we're not going to have a debate. You're going to heed that advice. You'll accept it.' I said, 'How about that?' And he goes, 'It's fair. Go in.' And I said, 'Don't pass out the deck until after we have the conversation. Go in.' Passes out the deck. I see Steve. That's the last page. He looks at me and he looks at the guy and he goes, 'What the [__] is this?' And I said, 'Ron.' And Ron says, 'Well, uh, Steve, you know, we, uh, tested the game. We had a focus group, and here's some results we thought it was important to share with you because we think it will inform on how we make the game, and uh, we thought this would be useful for you.' Steve looks at us. He goes, 'Where are you from?' He goes, 'Procter and Gamble.' He goes, 'Do you think the Godfather came out of a focus group? You think Gone with the Wind came from a [__] focus group? He goes, 'Do you think great entertainment comes from focus groups?' Cuz that's where it comes from. Comes from inspiration. It comes from like the creative minds of people like John Lasseter. He's like, 'We're not looking at [__] focus groups.' And he looks at me, he goes, 'Get the [__] Procter and Gamble guy out of the room.'

And to Ron's credit, out walked out and it was a bad meeting after that. Lasseter like got things sort of back to a place where but like walked out afterwards, you know, Ron sort of acknowledged, yeah, things didn't go quite the way I expected. Understand? Yeah. And but he was like the greatest president I could ever have. You know, it's like he figured out how to manage the balance of like creativity, passion, inspiration and process and right like the people that we ended up getting after that from Procter all helped the company.

Like reluctant. Okay. You know, he still he wanted to run the company and I but I also sort of, you know, Brian, my business partner, really convinced me. He's like, 'Look, we got to let this guy help us professionalize the company. Let's be the entrepreneurs, you know, like there are things that we're going to need to acquire.' And so, we spent our time on the acquisitions, on, you know, the vision. And he actually really did professionalize how we execute and like that, you know, allowed us to do things that I don't think we ever would have been able to do.

He's not a he wasn't that was one of the things like it wasn't about ego to be honest with you. Like I'm not a big ego guy. Brian's not at all an egominded person and Ron wasn't either. So, you know, he had sort of the, you know, desire to run the company. And I think we gave him the broad latitude to actually help build and grow the company.

I think that combined with like he had an appreciation for the fact that there were certain things like skills that he wasn't bringing to the business that were critical to the evolution of the business.

This attention to detail. The font five. I mean the idea objectively the idea of a focus group sounds good on paper.

I also think he thought like, well, these time-tested tools that we use to build and grow Procter and Gamble are going to work. You know, you're at the end of the day, you're selling a consumer product that gets in a box and goes to Walmart and people pick it up off a shelf and it can't be that much different. Yeah. And he was within Procter. One of the reasons why he left is he was more of an entrepreneurial person and he didn't quite fit. He's Dutch and he didn't quite fit in the culture and you know a lot of like what he brought to our culture, you know, if you're a Dutch person whose parents operated a single supermarket in a small town in Holland, you understand thrift. Yeah. You know, and like I have a, you know, I grew up with a depression era mentality and Brian, my business partner, literally grew up in a two-room apartment on top of a bar in Jersey City with six siblings. Like, you know, we understood like the value of a dollar and we shared that with Ron. So, you know, he and we all understood like we were there to make sure that we were putting the money into product making in the right way and getting the most out of every dollar that we invested in. So, like there was that shared understanding.

It's a really good question. Um, you know, I think very early on what we learned was that franchises, especially the ones that had these broad appeal, big customer bases that were like globally appealing audiences, that we used to think that the way that you would create innovation is the new idea. Mhm. And the new idea had to be a new game. Yeah. Novel, completely new, like fashion. But what we realized is like, wait a second, you have an audience of people and you can try out innovation on that big audience of people and you get the benefit of the popularity and the appeal of a franchise. And that the pathway for innovation was actually easier with a proven franchise than something that you had to build from the ground up and try and convince people they actually wanted to buy. Now, that wasn't always the case. Like you had to have a balance between the proven franchises that you keep creating new innovation in and coming up with new ideas that wouldn't necessarily be in the franchise, but the franchises would give you a more predictable revenue stream that allowed you to experiment both in the franchise but also with new ideas.

Well, Tony Hawk is a great story in of itself because we like we encouraged innovation within our like we had a the model was an unusual model. We bought independent studios but we bought them because we loved the people who ran them and so we didn't change anything. We would buy them and say like hey we'll help you with like the HR systems if you need it or DNA or Yeah. whatever like thing like you and you had to say you needed it you know it's like if you liked how you were running it and you were making a profit and delivering on time like we wouldn't change the formula like you know again it's principle of Berkshire Hathaway we could tell you in five minutes if we want to buy the business you have to supply the management because we can't and you know what if we liked what you were making and we felt like you were passionate enthusiastic about the games you were making you're our kind of team. Yeah. But when you I mean you uncover this idea that you don't always need to come up with something new and innovate like in fashion, but you can take one thing that people already like and iterate on it and do new versions of it and really go deeper on the franchise.

You had to. Yeah, there was like the prerequisite for keeping your customers excited is always going to be like innovation, but the innovation didn't necessarily need to be that new game. It could be within the game, but like Pro Skater is a great example. So, the studio that was making Pro Skater had done some other work for us in like helping software development in an area. They wanted to make a skateboarding game. By total coincidence, my brother-in-law was an agent at William Morris and we had like a family friend who was working for him who called me one day and said, 'You know Tony Hawk?' And I didn't know Tony Hawk and he said, 'Yeah, he's a skateboarder and he's a really cool guy and he wants to make a video game.' And somebody else pitched him on an idea and you know, I said, 'You know something? I think we have a prototype for a skateboarding game that one of our studios is working on.' So, unattached to any professional skater. No name of course. Yeah, just a skateboarding game. And I called the guy and I said, 'What do you think if we got Tony Hawk to be involved through this?' He's like, 'It'd be cool.' Tony came over and I met him and like he's one of these people. He has money-making DNA. Hardest working guy like and was he's brilliant and like when we started pitching him the game immediately he's like no I think you want to do this you want to make you know like he had great creative ideas for how to actually modify the game and so we cut a deal with Tony you know I don't even remember what the advance and the guarantee was but it was like you know cut the deal and you know he it wasn't like any fancy big deal but he get so invested in the process and then he started being the evangelist to get other skaters. So like he knew all the skaters he knew like and he also understood popular culture like he's so insightful about culture and so he started to infuse like the game design with like the important things about like Tony picked the music. Wow. for Pro Skater and you know he got the musicians like the you know whoever the music artist was he called them and like got them to sounds like font again you know someone going deep into the details.

Feels great.

No, but you know, this is what was going through my head and this is a it's actually an untold great story. So, TikTok got banned by the Trump administration. And Steven Mnuchin and I grew up together. We've been friends for years. And Treasury Secretary. Yeah. And I called him and I said, 'Um, what's the thing with TikTok?' And he goes, 'It's going fast.' And I said, 'Okay, tell me the details.' And he tells me. And I said, 'All right, I'm not sure we can do all this in the time frame.' And so I called Safra Catz who's the CEO of Oracle and you should do one of these with her. Yeah. And Larry, but software would be great. And I called her and I said, you know, I'm thinking about buying TikTok. I need a secure cloud or I can't do this and I actually need to convert 40 million lines of code that's commented in Mandarin. Do you have any interest? And she's like, I don't think Larry will be interested, but let me ask him. She calls me back half an hour later. Just like, 'Yeah, we're interested.' So now I find out that Microsoft is the other bidder. And I thought, I don't know if this is like a great thing to compete against Microsoft for. And so I called the CEO of ByteDance, who I knew and was friendly with, and I said, 'You know, I know Microsoft is the other bidder. What do you think about the idea of me doing it with Microsoft?' And he said, 'Yeah, I'm okay with that.' So, I called Satya and I said, 'Hey, listen. I don't like I don't want to bid against you, but I really want to do it. I have Oracle, but I think it'd be better if we could do it together.' And Satya said, 'Look, I don't even know if this deal is going to happen. I don't even know if it could get approved, but we're really far down the road and I don't think it's a good idea to bring in a partner now. But you know, if it doesn't work out and we don't get this deal done, maybe we should sit down and talk about us buying Activision.' And I said, 'Hey, we're public. You always have the opportunity. You can always buy Activision, right?' And so, but I'd love to do this with you. And he said, 'No, you know, we're going to do this one on our own.' So, I got Oracle. Now, the deal doesn't happen. And fast forward a couple years and he calls me and he said, um, you know, we're not where we would like to be in gaming. What do you think? And I said, Satya, I told you then, I'll tell you now. If you make a fair offer to the shareholders, of course, we're going to entertain the idea. You know, the thing that was going through my head though is I, you know, you see me, I live here in Hollywood. I have watched over the last decade what has happened to Hollywood and when you look at Apple, Amazon, Netflix all coming in and making content without a profit requirement, they get a free pass. You know, it's like they're doing it to acquire subscribers. And I thought the exact same thing was going to happen to video games. And I was worried. We're a standalone company with a big market value and a great business. But if Amazon, Apple, Tencent, Netflix, Disney, you know, all these companies start coming in and they're going to be making games and bidding up the cost of talent and not doing it with an actual profit motive. You can't compete. Yeah. And then you look at like Nintendo and Sony who are the dominant players. They own the hardware. Now you've got Android and Apple that are the two new entrants as the platforms and they're making games. Remember Google announced they're going to be in the games business. Apple has Apple Arcade which is probably the most successful subscription game service of all time. And I'm sitting here thinking I don't know how are we going to run the business in this new era of this new business model. No desire of profit. And I didn't think we could because our whole incentive and reward system was based on giving our employees percentages of the profits. There are no profits. Like how are we going to pay people? And so I was really worried about like what would be the long-term future of the business? And so when Microsoft made the offer, it was unbelievable premium. It was all cash and billion dollars all cash. Well, we had at the time we closed the deal, we had about 12 billion in net cash on your balance sheet. Yes. They paid 68 billion net 80. Yeah. 80 was a full full deal, right? So 68 billion is still pretty damn good. I mean, it's unbelievable. Yeah. But it worked out for everyone because they're a good owner. They got something incredible. They got a great company, great business. Phenomenal. Phenomenal. Maybe you spent your life building this thing. And they have, you know, it's incredible. Yeah. And they didn't know what to do with it. Yeah. They didn't have a great game business, right? You know, it's like their hardware wasn't that successful. They didn't have any franchises. They own Halo. Yeah. And Minecraft, okay. But they didn't own anything. Like their share in games was diminutive. And so this gave them a library talent, gave us somebody that would be an owner that would actually be willing to fund the development of the library in a way that we couldn't. They're willing to lose money if they have to, but it gave them the opportunity to compete against Sony, Nintendo, Google, Apple, Tencent that they otherwise wouldn't themselves.

I think it's like the most important thing when you think about your responsibility as either a CEO or a business owner or a business founder is your responsibility to your stakeholders. And you can't ever lose sight of that. Like even if you're the owner or the controlling shareholder, your customers matter, your shareholders matter, your partners, like they all matter. And so if you always like stay true and keep the conviction to your obligation, responsibility to your stakeholders, you'll always be successful.

Thank you guys for having me. It was really fun.