If he had become a dentist like his father, Riccardo Zacconi would have struggled to make 590 million dollars from fillings, the figure that he pocketed in 2015 when he sold the company he founded, King Digital Entertainment, to Activision Blizzard. The key ingredients of his career, gaming and risk, are encapsulated in this extract of a speech he gave to students at LUISS university in Rome: “Take risks, guys. Sometimes you fail, but the only real risk in life is not having risked enough. Take risks. Yes, you will fail, but the more you risk, the greater chance you have to succeed. Even we know that not all games are good. Some fail. But life is a game. Enjoy yourselves!”. Pronounced by the creator of the world’s most famous videogame, Candy Crush, this sounds like advice to follow to the letter.
Studies in Italy and first steps in Germany and the UK
Zacconi was born in Rome in 1967 and studied economics in the capital, but after graduation, he immediately moved to Germany. He initially worked in consulting, in LEK and Boston Consulting as a strategic manager. In this environment, which was more conducive to sharing ideas, he met his future Swedish partners with whom he set up Spray, a portal that blends games and content, combining social contacts, news and gaming. The experiment worked and the site quickly grew: in 1999, it bought Italian portal Clarence and managed to obtain 100 million dollars of funding from British venture capitalists. In 2000, US search engine Lycos (a competitor of Yahoo! at the time) bought the company. Zacconi remained head of the company for the first twelve months and then received an offer to enter the prestigious Californian venture capital company Benchmark Capital, where he refined his knowledge in the development of online start-ups and web gaming.
Maturity, stock market debut and sale
He immediately put what he had learned to good use by founding, together with his usual experienced group of friends, uDate, a small active start-up that deals with online meetings. They spent a few months on it and sold the company for 220 million dollars. After a brief return to the company where he had previously worked, Benchmark Capital, he contacted his Swedish friends again and soon came up with idea of setting up a new venture together. King.com, a complete gaming portal, was established in London in 2003, co-founded by Zacconi who acted as CEO. The section on card games for real money, which was open to the Italian market, only lasted for a few months however and was immediately closed. Perhaps it was not yet the right time.
Millions of players all over the world access the King.com portal and its various applications every day. The company quickly became an app leader with a 25% share of the Facebook market, offering titles that became internationally renowned: Candy Crush, Pet Rescue Saga and Farm Hero Saga attract gamers of all ages and entertain them for hours and hours in every corner of the planet. Candy Crush alone has 158 million daily users. It is a winning business model that ensures secure revenue: King.com is launching numerous games, with an average of three new titles every quarter.
Zacconi also explained to the students at LUISS how to build a solid company, without sacrificing your dreams: “Don’t think about profit. Find an industry you like and try to learn as much as possible “. “Always choose,” he continued, “what gives you the most opportunities, especially when you still don’t have clear ideas.” And he added: “Spend time with smart people: they will be your future team. Start-ups? Only if you really have a good idea. Otherwise, it’s better to learn first.” He concluded by remarking, “I always choose people who are sincere, direct and who think with their heads. I don’t need someone to tell me I’m right. I’m more interested in the one person who disputes what I say. I want to understand why “.
And you need to have patience if sometimes things do not go as planned: in March 2014, King Digital was listed on Wall Street for 7.5 billion dollars, the biggest entry on the stock exchange for a British company, but its share price immediately dropped. Investors were particularly concerned that Candy Crush was responsible for 78% of King’s revenue.
Just over a year later, American video game company Activision Blizzard, owner of games such as Call of Duty, bought its British rival King Digital Entertainment for 5.9 billion dollars. This acquisition had a very clear purpose: the company, a leader in the classic games market, wanted to consolidate its position in the mobile device games market.
Meanwhile, Zacconi – desribed as the “guru of modern time-wasting” by the Financial Times, who ranked him tenth among the top fifty European digital CEOs – explained that the acquisition further bolstered his company, which has a catalog of over 180 games for mobile phones.
The last chapter
Still at the helm of King despite the change of ownership, Zacconi is now investing in startups with a new venture, Sweet Capital. In 2017, he committed to bringing the Founders Forum to Italy, the conference that brings together the largest financiers of European start-ups and continues to operate in this area. With the vision that has distinguished him from the start of his career, he says that he considers supporting new companies to be an exciting prospect: he would like to replicate the model of the École 42, the free coding school founded in France by Xavier Niel, head of Iliad, helping other promising and ambitious youngsters, just as he was a few years ago, to found their own Candy Crush from thin air.