From a Copenhagen Basement to the NYSE: David Helgason on Building Unity
In 2002, a Danish programmer asked for help on an OpenGL forum. A German developer replied. An Icelandic university dropout joined them. Eighteen years later, their company went public at $13.7B.
That company is Unity. The dropout is David Helgason.
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Their first game flopped, so they sold the engine instead
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They built it in a basement, living on leftover bread from David’s café job
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Apple launched it on stage at WWDC. Then almost nobody bought it for months
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Their first developer conference sold 32 tickets
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More than half the world’s top mobile games were later built on it
David ran Unity as CEO for a decade, handed over the job in 2014, and left the board this year after more than 20 years.
