Making Serious Money From Casual Games: King.com CEO Riccardo Zacconi (Part 2)

SM: How much did you sell the company for? RZ: We sold it for $764 million.

Making Serious Money From Casual Games: King.com CEO Riccardo Zacconi (Part 1)

Riccardo Zacconi is the CEO of King.com, a company that is pioneering casual gaming online. Prior to coming to King, he was EIR at Benchmark Capital and before that, managing director at Spray, a European portal company that was sold to Lycos in 2000. Before joining Spray, he was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group.

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Venture Capital in India: Ashish Gupta (Part 1)

Dr. Ashish Gupta is a co-founder of Helion and serves on the boards of Gridstone Research, Jivox, Kirusa, MuSigma, Naukri.com, and SMS Gupshup. He has co-founded Tavant Technologies and Junglee. His investments include Daksh (IBM), Odesk, Obongo (AOL), Speedera (Akamai), MakeMyTrip, Merittrac (Manipal Group), and Kaboodle (Hearst). Ashish is a Kauffman Fellow and holds a Ph.D.

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Simulating The Brain: Baynote CEO Jack Jia (Part 7)

SM: What has been your financing history? Did you finance this yourself at the beginning? JJ: I bootstrapped it a little bit. I recruited Rob Bradshaw out of Interwoven to join me. Scott Brave was the other person with me initially, and he came out of Stanford. I did not need a lot of funding

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Simulating The Brain: Baynote CEO Jack Jia (Part 6)

SM: How do you get the context? JJ: You have to emulate the brain. If you can emulate sensors and the neocortext, then we can behave just like humans. If you have human input on one hand and human behaviors on the other, then you can interpret human behaviors. You can give people what they

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Simulating The Brain: Baynote CEO Jack Jia (Part 5)

SM: Context is a key element of my Web 3.0 formula. JJ: At the time, I did not know the importance of context. That came later at Stanford. I just knew that it what was in people’s minds. Since I could not get into people’s minds, the closest thing I could do is judge what

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Simulating The Brain: Baynote CEO Jack Jia (Part 4)

SM: Let’s get specific. How did you identify the problem itself? Did you do market research of some sort? JJ: My market research was to identify CIOs and CTOs. I came up with a list of people I knew or people who I knew second hand. There were about 45 CIOs, CEOs, and CTOs on

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Simulating The Brain: Baynote CEO Jack Jia (Part 3)

SM: How long were you with Interwoven? JJ: I was there for eight years. I started to realize that when companies become bigger innovation becomes very difficult. I really felt that during the last four years. Even with over 1,000 employees, of whom at least 300 were technical as engineers or product managers, it was

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