Letter #68: John Riccitiello (2020)
CEO of Unity | 2020 S-1 Shareholder Letter
Today’s letter is Unity CEO John Riccitiello’s S-1 Shareholder Letter. Prior to Unity, he served as CEO, COO, and President of Electronic Arts. He also cofounded the PE firm Elevation Partners alongside Silver Lake’s Roger McNamee (Cofounder) and Marc Bodnick (Founding Principal) and Apple’s Fred Anderson (EVP, CFO).
I hope you enjoy this letter as much as I did!
Letter
Thank you for reading the Unity Software Inc. S-1 and for considering investing in our company. As Unity’s CEO, it is my privilege to share an inside view of Unity.
I’ve spent a few decades working in games and technology. One of the most enjoyable and surprising days I can recall was in the fall of 2013 when I attended one of Unity’s customer events just outside of Vancouver. I expected what one normally sees at these company events. Customer training. Case studies. A few hero moments where the company shows its latest technology. While this was all there, I also experienced something very unusual. I watched independent game creators applaud the speakers like they were at a concert for their favorite band. I met creators—people who just a year or two earlier worked in warehouses, as accountants and as teachers—who attributed their ability to work in the game industry to the existence of Unity and Unity’s tools. I met a few creators that had gone as far as having Unity’s 3D logo tattooed on their bodies, in permanent ink. This was something new, something different.
And, if you are one of the early users of Unity, I want to pause here to thank you. You are and have been the lifeblood of our company. Without you, we would not be here. You were as much a part of Unity’s start as those that wrote the first lines of code that became Unity. We remain as committed to you today as we were when Joachim Ante, David Helgason and Nicholas Francis founded Unity, and we will remain committed to your success in the years to come.
Video and mobile games are among the most technically challenging forms of media to create from a technical and engineering standpoint. They are complicated to build. Games are mostly 3D, they are real time, and they are interactive. 3D means that unlike in a movie, a character or object is fully 3D, meaning that we not only can see the “front” of the character, but can move around and view the character from the other side. Real time means the next frame a player sees is created in an instant—a 30th of a second for many mobile games, and a 120th of a second for some virtual reality platforms. In other media, like TV, and on the web, most content is fixed and unchanging. A designer or director made it. Interactive means that games change in response to the input of players. The content is dynamic and responsive. Unity is the leading platform for creating and operating this type of media. Today, approximately half of all mobile, PC and console games combined are created in Unity, and many creators use our solutions to operate and monetize their products.
We at Unity are proud of our Create and Operate Solutions and how they solve the toughest engineering and data problems for our customers. These are leading and bleeding edge challenges. We see every day how our Create and Operate tools enable aspiring creators to not only be consumers of technology but creators of advanced technology products like games and cloud-based simulation systems that leverage our technologies. We love that we enable technology creators to get their start. Unity’s mission is to enable more people to be creators.
We’re a company born from gaming. But we see so much more. Five years ago, we believed that the real-time 3D tools we build would have applications outside of gaming. We saw that many industries were still wed to create tools that were conceived and built in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the explosive growth of compute power in the personal devices we all now carry with us most everywhere, and in the networks of computers that live in the cloud adding even more processing capability. We first started with an unproven thesis that we could serve customers outside of gaming. We signed up test customers working in augmented and virtual reality, architecture, construction, training, media and entertainment retail and in the auto/transportation industry. Small tests with Unity grew to larger customer relationships, and we started to see innovation from our customers we did not really anticipate. What started as an unproven thesis, transformed to being an opportunity where we needed to hone product market fit, and now, today, it seems inevitable. We’re thrilled to be helping lead the way to the future where much of the world’s content will be real-time and fully 3D.
Our orientation and culture are to encourage the best ideas to come from anywhere in Unity, not just from the more senior or tenured people in the company. We celebrate a culture where the best ideas win, and we train to be able to really listen when our colleagues are expressing these ideas. This is a critically important part of our culture, as we operate at the leading edge of technology.
We are delighted when our tools enable people, some of whom are not born to privilege, to join the 21st century economy. At Unity, we know we’re lucky to work with great people, to be able to invest in them to deliver for our customers and also, as a bi-product of our business help pave the way for many to become technologists themselves.
The world is a better place with more creators in it. And, we intend to make that more true tomorrow than it is today, to the point where real-time interactive 3D is the dominant form of content globally. As a company, we will invest for the long term. And, through this long-term investment orientation, we plan to realize the opportunity we see to drive significant growth in the world of real-time, interactive 3D content. We are building Unity to make this vision a reality.
Wrap-up
If you’ve got any thoughts, questions, or feedback, please drop me a line - I would love to chat! You can find me on twitter at @kevg1412 or my email at kevin@12mv2.com.
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