Making Serious Money From Casual Games: King.com CEO Riccardo Zacconi (Part 6)

SM: Can you describe the games that people are playing in these tournaments? RZ: We had about 150 games on the site. They are classic casual games. They go from puzzle and word games to suduko and card games. We develop all the games in-house.

Making Serious Money From Casual Games: King.com CEO Riccardo Zacconi (Part 5)

SM: Let me ask you some ramp questions. In 2003, you launched the site. In 2005, it started becoming profitable. What was your revenue ramp between 2003 and 2005? RZ: In 2003, we had very little. Revenue, in euros, was 14,000. In 2004, we had 2.3 million and in 2005 we had 10.8 million.

Making Serious Money From Casual Games: King.com CEO Riccardo Zacconi (Part 4)

SM: Who were your primary partners in the early days of King? RZ: We partnered with Lycos, T-Online, and major portals.

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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