Laurens Rutten founded CoolGames in 2010 in the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht. CoolGames is now a profitable studio with almost 50 game professionals operating from the Herengracht in Amsterdam. In his session, Laurens will talk about how raising venture capital can help grow your company from an ambitious but immature start-up doing mini-games for the web, to an internationally active scale-up with big game development budgets. He will address the benefits of bringing professional investors on board, without disregarding the downsides of giving up some control as a result. In particular Laurens will talk about many of the potential pitfalls when your growth is also externally financed. To prevent you from making the same mistakes that he did.

Laurens founded CoolGames in 2010 with the aim to enable instant mobile gameplay outside of the traditional app-stores. He is a serial entrepreneur at the cross-roads of content & technology. Before CoolGames, he founded two other companies in the mobile entertainment industry. With CoolGames, Laurens closed game partnerships with many leading studios and platforms, including Zynga, EA, Rovio, Hasbro, Bandai Namco, Snapchat, Microsoft and Facebook. Besides his role at CoolGames, Laurens is also a Board member of the Dutch Games Association (DGA) and is a regular speaker at conferences and industry events about ‘post app-store’ channels and HTML5 game development.