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Headline lessons
Supercell started with a six-founder team. From the start, they anchored the company around a simple promise to be the best place for the best teams to make great games. That identity mattered because it led a very specific operating model which enabled them to create an environment where great teams can move fast.
They built that model around seniority and trust. The approach depended on hiring very senior, experienced builders and giving them ownership, because autonomy to having people move fast when they know what needs to be done.
Ilkka Paananen working in a closet after running out of room at Supercell’s first office.
Funding was part of the foundation as well. Early capital looked to be one of the key enablers, starting from founders’ own money and then support from a Business Finland grant alongside early funding. This meant they could keep building and keep taking serious shots even when the first product did not become a hit.
Janne’s role in this system was COO/CFO. He focused on making the infrastructure work so developers could concentrate on building games, without getting dragged into unnecessary bureaucracy or operational noise.
In its earliest phase, Supercell built Gunshine, a browser-based social game designed for Facebook. At the time, this was a move that made sense, as Facebook gaming was already large, infrastructure was familiar, and the path to distribution looked clearer than on the still-fragmented mobile platforms. But as Gunshine developed, the team began to see structural limits. The game was heavy, iteration cycles were slow, and the experience didn’t translate cleanly to mobile devices, which were rapidly becoming the primary way people interacted with software.
Rather than forcing Gunshine to fit a platform it wasn’t built for, the team stepped back and reassessed where they should be building. Mobile still felt uncertain and competitive, but it allowed faster iteration, clearer player feedback, and experiences designed natively for touch. Instead of trying to predict how large the market would become, Supercell focused on building an organisation that could move quickly, test ideas, and adapt as conditions changed. When mobile gaming later expanded rapidly, that organisational readiness proved decisive.
Their product bet matched the platform and instead of taking what had worked on Facebook or PC and making it fit a smaller screen, they built for mobile and touch UI from the start. That choice mattered because it made the product feel native to the new platform rather than like a translation of an older one.
Distribution dynamics were also quite favourable at the time. App Store featuring worked differently then, and charts like Top Grossing acted as a compounding loop. Once a game broke into that surface, visibility reinforced itself because people found the game through the chart and kept it there through buying and continued play.
The market structure amplified this even further. Many players were getting their first smartphones and asking “what should I try?” They asked friends, and there was less competition than later years. Being top-of-mind in that moment had outsized impact compared to now.
The core point is that mega outcomes required alignment and not one magic variable. The talent, the product fit, and the timing all had to click together. Even then, it was hard to know in real time whether they were early or late. They actually felt a bit late at the time, and only in hindsight did it look like perfect timing.
Their first big product attempt, Gunshine, did not become a hit. Instead of treating that as the end of the road, they used it as learning with which to change direction. They pivoted fully into mobile and started behaving like a studio that expects to take multiple real shots before finding the one that carries the company.
That shift was only possible because they were funded well enough to keep going. Early capital gave them the runway to run a portfolio rather than bet everything on one product. In practice, they tried five mobile games in a year. They killed three along the way and ended up with two that worked. These ended up being Hay Day and Clash of Clans.
The operating capability here was not iteration for its own sake. It was the willingness to end projects and redeploy the team once the signal was clear. That mattered, because in games you can’t know upfront which product will become a long-lived winner. The only way through hit risk is to run enough high-quality experiments, and to be disciplined about shutting down the ones that are not turning into real pull.