Vlad Suglobov

Vlad is a games industry veteran of more than 26 years. In 1995 during his freshman year, he started his career as employee #14 at Nikita Ltd. (now Nikita Online), one of Russia’s first game development companies. In 2000, Vlad graduated from Moscow State University with a M.Sc. in Mathematics and Programming, and spent the next year working as a software engineer on the Moscow team of the US-funded “Voxster”. In 2001 Vlad and colleagues co-founded G5 to develop PC and mobile games. While being CEO from the company’s inception, Vlad continued to write game engine code until 2003 after which he focused entirely on the business. In 2008 the iPhone was released, and it created a new opportunity for the company. Finishing up large publisher contracts, G5 wanted to bring its own games to the promising platform and in February 2009, the company’s first iPhone game “Supermarket Mania” was launched, quickly becoming the company’s biggest financial success to date. Anticipating the revolution that the iPhone was bringing to the industry, Vlad started G5’s publishing operation and set out to license popular PC hidden object games to bring them to the new generation of mobile devices.

In 2011, Vlad moved from Moscow to San Francisco Bay Area to establish G5’s marketing operations in the USA, the company’s largest market. Since 2013, when free-to-play (F2P) games started quickly gaining prominence on mobile, Vlad has steered G5 to focus on this business model with an emphasis on quality and a smaller number of new releases. In 2021, Vlad received his LEAD Professional Certificate from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Today, Vlad continues to be deeply involved in the company’s strategy, marketing and product development.

Holdings: 10,000 shares and 45,000 performance shares. Vlad is also a deputy board member in Wide Development Ltd. that owns 540,000 shares.