1. Flexibility is a huge asset to founders 

My success so far has been a result of a relentless focus on one thing: not the business itself, but being flexible. This is a core mindset that drives my decision making as a founder and a CEO, and has proved to be of huge value. 

Take Animoca. When I joined in 2012, Animoca was a mobile, free-to-play gaming studio. Like any technology, the industry changed quickly, and soon we found we were no longer able to keep up with our competitors. Instead of doubling down and asking ourselves what was wrong, we started to look at new growth opportunities, areas where we could be more competitive. This was a huge learning experience: we tried subscription models, children and family content. Each time, we tried, failed, and pivoted to the next opportunity. 

This is how we came to blockchain gaming—an opportunity we quickly seized and have stuck with ever since. This also demonstrates the element of serendipity, or even luck, that contributes to success. We managed to get involved quite early on with Dapper Labs on a project called Cryptokitties, which was the first ever NFT project (they wrote the ERC-721 standard in August 2017 when we met). Half of your journey is luck, meeting the right people at the right time and seizing the opportunity before it passes you by. 

What you start out building is rarely what you’ll end up building. Founders talk about their North Star, but you should also adopt a healthy degree of flexibility. Being a founder ​​is about identifying new trends, pivoting and pivoting, until you find your lane. 

2. Collaboration is the new competition

Animoca was an early mover in blockchain gaming. So early, in fact, that when we launched, there wasn’t really an industry there yet. We realised that, in order for us to see success in this sector, we needed to seed the industry around us. 

That’s why we’ve placed just as much of an emphasis on investing as we have on building. Often this has even involved us investing in companies we might have once seen as ‘competitors’, but rather are people creating more value and convenience for the ecosystem. Companies like OpenSea who are building the marketplace for people to sell their NFTs, Dapper Labs who are creating great content, and Polygon who are building tech to make the whole system more efficient and easier to use. 

In recent years, there’s definitely been a shift towards collaboration and openness. A lot of the world is run on open source software, while some of today’s best entertainment platforms (like TikTok) are powered by user-generated content. When you leverage the resources of huge communities of people, it’s hardly surprising that they can create better software and better experiences than you can.

4. Don’t make the hard decisions too late

Your founder journey is paved by difficult decisions. But what will make them even harder is leaving them too late. 

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is lay people off when companies I’ve built or run have been struggling. When you see trouble coming, you really can’t lay people off too early. I am an inherently optimistic person, so no doubt felt things were going to improve (in this instance, I was confident we were going to close the next round of funding in time). So I dragged the decision on, kept people on the payroll for too long, and ultimately lost a lot of money as a result. 

For this reason, I couldn’t advocate harder for founders to find a co-founder. I’ve done it with and without co-founders, and the experience doesn’t even compare: having someone there who shares the responsibility is infinitely better. That way, you don’t get stuck with this “the buck stops here” mentality and you have trusted colleagues with similarly vested interests in finding solutions to the hardest problems. It’s also much more fun.