LogIn"If you're creating value for people, the capital will come your way."
Valve's Gabe Newell has built his empire on Steam, a near-monopolist in PC game distributions, despite Epic Games' efforts. He knows the pitfalls of this business and has some advice for those who want to start their own.
In an interview with Zalkar Saliev, he said that beginner entrepreneurs should forget the popular strategy of pitching documents to VCs to raise capital; that's a "deeply distracted beginning to an organisation."
"If you're creating value for people, the capital will come your way. Probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise, he said (via PC Gamer).
"Having a big bunch of capital and then saying 'Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch doc, now we have to go and, you know, hire a whole bunch of people to be on this trajectory', I think that's a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of peoples' time."
In his view, the focus should be on the customers and how to make them happier. "The key is to ignore all the distractions around [a business]. ... If you listen to your customers and focus on them it's ridiculously easier to build a business. But the focus should always be on your customers, and on your partners, and on your employees. And then everything else will fall into place over time."
Valve has an unusual working structure, and with its success, perhaps Newell is right in his approach.
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