Eric Hautemont, CEO & co-founder of Days of Wonder, the company behind the boardgame Ticket to Ride, has an interesting history:
I was born in France, came to the US in 1988. I was in the computer graphics industry, and formed Ray Dream. In 1996, I sold Ray Dream to Fractal Design and decided to become a venture capitalist. I wanted to help other small companies get off the ground the way I had gotten help. But I soon discovered that being a VC was a lucrative, but very boring job. Some companies, you’d go to and they’re so smart that you feel you’re bringing down the average IQ by being there, others need so much help you won’t make much of a difference. Either way, most of the time you write a check and then that’s about all you can do — the rest won’t make much of a difference to your fund’s return.
So I wanted to do something else. By this time I had two young kids, and I wasn’t really interested in getting back into the tech-world rat race, working so many hours every week. I wanted something where the pace would be more reasonable. I was thinking about traditional board games. About this time, at Hasbro, the CEO was Alan Hassenfeld, who was the grandson of the founder Henry Hassenfeld. [Hasbro was originally Hassenfeld Brothers and became Hasbro Industries in 1968.] And that was so different from the way things worked in Silicon Valley and the high-tech industry, where things rise and fall and change. I liked the idea of forming something that would last that would still be around in generations. If you look at Monopoly, it was published in the 1930s and is still the highest-selling game. How many other consumer goods can you think of that were at the top of the market over 70 years ago and still are? So at this point I really wanted to think about creating a board game company, and I went back to running a product company, like I had done at Ray Dream. I went to some of the people from Ray Dream — Mark Kaufmann, who was Director of Product Marketing, and Yann Corno, another co-founder of Ray Dream whom I knew from high school — and we started Days of Wonder.