Unity’s Future Starts with U

Today is a historic day for Unity as we list on the New York Stock Exchange with the stock ticker symbol “U”.

I’ve spent a few decades working in games and technology. One of the most enjoyable and surprising days I can recall was in the fall of 2013 when I attended one of our Unite events. I expected what one normally sees at these company events. Customer training. Case studies. A few hero moments where the company shows its latest technology. While this was all there, I also experienced something very unusual. I watched independent game creators applaud the speakers like they were at a concert for their favorite band. I met creators—people who just a year or two earlier worked in warehouses, as accountants and as teachers—who attributed their ability to work in the game industry to the existence of Unity and Unity’s tools. I met a few creators that had gone as far as having Unity’s 3D logo tattooed on their bodies, in permanent ink. This was something new, something different.

And, if you are one of the early users of Unity, I want to pause here to thank you. You are and have been the lifeblood of our company. Without you, we’d not be here. You were as much a part of Unity’s start as those that wrote the first lines of code that became Unity. We remain as committed to you today as we were when Joachim Ante, David Helgason and Nicholas Francis founded Unity, and we will remain committed to your success in the years to come.

Video and mobile games are among the most technically challenging forms of media to create from a technical and engineering standpoint. As many of you know, they are complicated to build. Unity is the leading platform for creating and operating this type of media. Today, 50%+ of all mobile, PC and console games combined are created in Unity, and many of you use our solutions to operate and monetize your products.

We are proud of our Create and Operate solutions and how they solve the toughest engineering and data problems for you, our customers. These are leading and bleeding edge challenges. We see every day how our Create and Operate tools enable aspiring creators to not only be consumers of technology but creators of advanced technology products like games and cloud-based simulation systems that leverage our technologies.

We’re a company born from gaming. But we see so much more. Five years ago, we believed that the real-time 3D tools we build would have applications outside of gaming. We saw that many industries were still wed to create tools that were conceived and built in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the explosive growth of computer power in the personal devices we all now carry with us most everywhere, and in the networks of computers that live in the cloud adding even more processing capability. We first started with an unproven thesis that we could serve customers outside of gaming. We signed up test customers working in augmented and virtual reality, architecture, construction, training, media and entertainment retail and in the auto/transportation industry. Small tests with Unity grew to larger customer relationships, and we started to see innovation from our customers we did not really anticipate. What started as an unproven thesis, transformed to being an opportunity where we needed to hone product market fit, and now, today, it seems inevitable. We’re thrilled to help lead the way to the future where much of the world’s content will be real-time and fully 3D.

Our orientation and culture are to encourage the best ideas to come from anywhere in Unity, not just from the more senior or tenured people in the company. We celebrate a culture where the best ideas win, and we train to be able to really listen when our customers and colleagues are expressing these ideas. This is a critically important part of our culture, as we operate at the leading edge of technology.

We are delighted when our tools enable people, some of whom are not born to privilege, to join the 21st century economy. At Unity, we know we’re lucky to work with great people, to be able to invest in them to deliver for our customers and also, as a by-product of our business, help pave the way for many to become technologists themselves.

The world is a better place with more creators in it. And, we intend to make that more true tomorrow than it is today, to the point where real-time interactive 3D is the dominant form of content globally. We are building Unity to make this vision a reality and we thank you for being part of that journey yesterday, today and tomorrow.

John Riccitiello