Today’s Entrepreneur is Seppo Helava, Founder of Wonderspark. Wonderspark is a company committed to building games in unusual ways. They’ve pioneered technology that iterates 20-50x faster than most of their competitors. This approach let a team of five people dethrone Zynga in 2010 from the #1 Casino game spot on the App Store with a team 1/10th their size with 1/100th of their budget.
Helava is a graduate of BS in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998.
Wonderspark (currently in the top 8 finalist) is competing in Vator Splash Oakland 2015 startup competition.
Wonderspark self-categorizes itself in Mobile games.
The top 8 finalist will compete and present live on stage in front of several hundred tech influencers (CEOs, media and investors).
Here’s a little about Helava:
Companies I’ve founded or co-founded: Self Aware Games
Companies I work or worked for: Electronic Arts, Maxis, Social Concepts, Factor 5
Company exits (of companies you founded): Self Aware Games
My favorite startups: Self Aware Games
What’s most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation? The most rewarding thing is building something new that people love using, and being able to have a dramatic positive impact on the arc of peoples’ careers.
What’s the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs make? Everything takes longer, and costs more, than you think it will. Building something new isn’t something you can plan to the day. You have to work really hard to stay flexible.
What are the top three lessons you’ve learned as an entrepreneur?
Fair isn’t always equal.
People are the most important thing.
It’s not “how” you do something. It’s “why”.
The last company Seppo founded is on track to make $300M this year alone. He’s worked on everything from the Sims to hardcore action games, on teams ranging from 2 to 160 people. With his last company, Self Aware Games, he focused primarily on creating a company that made genuinely social games for phones, and focused on putting the team first, working in a way that was sustainable for the long-term.
At Self Aware, he built and ran the team from 2-50+ employees, and from $0 in revenue to over $50M/yr & #1 on the iOS Top Grossing list. The thing he’s most proud of was that the team had nearly zero turnover in five years, and was consistently happy and excited to get to work. He worked hard at developing a company culture that focused on experimentation, long-term sustainability, and taking big leaps forward while managing risk creatively.
He’s an MIT grad, a lifelong gamer, a father of two, and loves making things no one’s ever made before.
*Want to be included in our Today’s Entrepreneur series? Email me: mitos@vator.tv
