Multi-billionaire Gabe Newell says the whole startup culture of pitching VCs makes no business sense:

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation and the driving force behind much of the company’s unique philosophy, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev, a channel that’s more business-focused than games but, hey, this is Gaben. The full interview is yet to surface but a few shorts from the conversation have been released, including one about Newell’s daily routine (“get up, work, go scuba diving“).

Yeah yeah: easy enough when you’re a billionaire with a fleet of superyachts. But the reason Newell is a billionaire with a fleet of superyachts is Valve, or to be more precise Steam: the de facto PC distribution platform that takes a 30% cut on nearly all sales. These days it is of course a very different company from the one that launched Half-Life 2 alongside Steam, but is one of the most spectacularly successful businesses in the world while remaining privately owned: the profit-per-employee makes Apple and Facebook look like lemonade stands.

During the interview with Saliev, Newell is asked what advice he’d give to people starting businesses: fairly boilerplate perhaps, but Newell’s answer is essentially to ignore the entire model that Silicon Valley has been built on.

“I see a lot of people that go into situations thinking that what they need is a pitch document to VCs to raise capital,” says Newell, “and that’s a deeply distracted beginning to an organisation. If you’re creating value for people the capital will come your way. Probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise.

“Having a big bunch of capital and then saying ‘Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch doc, now we have to go and, you know, hire a whole bunch of people to be on this trajectory’, I think that’s a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of peoples’ time.”

And just like that, 99% of tech startups are explained. But it feels more widely applicable too, especially at a time when Microsoft is boasting about being in a stronger position than it’s ever been while subjecting its workforce to periodic bloodbaths. Newell’s summation will be familiar to any Valve-watcher, but some things do bear repetition.

“The key is to ignore all the distractions around [a business],” says Newell, “and just focus on ‘how do we make our customers happier’, right? If you listen to your customers and focus on them it’s ridiculously easier to build a business. But the focus should always be on your customers, and on your partners, and on your employees. And then everything else will fall into place over time.”

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years’ experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”