Riccardo Zacconi is an Italian businessman, management consultant, and video game developer. He is best known as CEO of

King King is a royal title given to a male monarch. A king is an Absolute monarchy, absolute monarch if he holds unrestricted Government, governmental power or exercises full sovereignty over a nation. Conversely, he is a Constitutional monarchy, ...

, a video game development company he founded in 2003. King is the developer of the popular mobile game app ''

Candy Crush Saga ''Candy Crush Saga'' is a free-to-play tile-matching video game released by King on April 12, 2012, originally for Facebook; other versions for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 10 followed. It is a variation of their browser game '' ...

''. On May 26, 2019, Zacconi announced he was stepping down as CEO of King. (published 05-26-2019)

Early life

Zacconi was born in 1967 in Rome, Italy. He attended

Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli Luiss University () is a private university located in Rome, Italy, founded in 1974 by a group of entrepreneurs led by Umberto Agnelli. It provides undergraduate and postgraduate education, in addition to a range of Double Degree programs, in ...

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

from where he graduated in 1993 with a

Bachelor's A bachelor's degree (from Medieval Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six years ( ...

degree in

Economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

Career

After leaving university, Zacconi worked as a consultant. One of his roles during this time included a six-year period as project manager at

Boston Consulting Group Boston Consulting Group, Inc. (BCG) is an American global management consulting firm founded in 1963 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the "Big Three (management consultancies), Big Three" (or MBB, the world's three large ...

, between 1993 and 1999. His first career role was as a consultant during a two year long stint at LEK consulting, between 1991 and 1993. At the start of the

dotcom boom The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

in 1999, Zacconi joined the

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

online messaging startup Spray before it was purchased by

Lycos Europe Lycos Europe was a pan-European network of websites, offering services including communication tools, online communities, web search, e-commerce, web hosting, homepage building and Internet access. It was an independent corporation, sharing no c ...

in 2000. In 2001, he left Spray and moved to the UK as Entrepreneur in Residence for Benchmark Capital until August 2002 when he became vice president of European sales and marketing at Terrence "Lee" Zehrer's uDate. He left this company shortly after its merger with

Match.com Match.com is an online dating service with headquarters are in Dallas, Texas. The company has offices in Dallas, West Hollywood, San Francisco, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, and Beijing. Match.com is owned by Match Group, which owns several online d ...

and in March 2003, he co-founded King, becoming the CEO. He has since grown the company into one of the most successful mobile gaming businesses worldwide. He said he would remain in the King CEO post until July 1, 2019, but would stay the chairman. According to the ''

Sunday Times Rich List The ''Sunday Times Rich List'' is a list of the 1,000 wealthiest people or families resident in the United Kingdom ranked by net wealth. The list is updated annually in April and has been published as a magazine supplement by British national ...

'' in 2020, Zacconi is worth an estimated £410 million, an increase of £15 million from the previous year.

Media profile

Zacconi is a leading figure in the UK tech industry and is a proponent of the UK government's efforts to establish a tech city in

East London East London is the part of London, England, east of the ancient City of London and north of the River Thames as it begins to widen. East London developed as London Docklands, London's docklands and the primary industrial centre. The expansion of ...

. According to an interview in the

Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was foun ...

, he also has a positive reputation in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

as a leading tech figure following a dinner with

Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...

. He was reportedly identified as the

poster child A poster child (sometimes poster boy or poster girl) is, according to the original meaning of the term, a child afflicted by some disease or deformity whose picture is used on posters or other media as part of a campaign to raise money or enlis ...

for Europe's mobile gaming sector. He was knighted by the Italian President in December 2016 with the title of Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zacconi, Ricardo 1967 births Living people 20th-century Italian businesspeople 21st-century Italian businesspeople Italian management consultants Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli alumni Video game developers