Yep, and did he just draw a general rule from just one example (Activision)?

No:

At least three social gaming companies I know of will be, or already have, hit $50m in revenue in their first three years of business.

Hi. Nabeel here. To be clear this should not be thought of as conclusive academic analysis. These were just interesting indicators that I found.

I was using the data that was available from the article linked, which means it's the largest 100 public software companies, then segmented by type. Which meant, any individual category had roughly 5-8 companies with which to sample.

In the entertainment category it was Activision (4 years to $50m), Electronic Arts (6), Take-Two (6), International Game Technology (10) and a few others.

Maybe gaming is timeless, it just seems to me that some fields have a time when they boom, and other times when they don't boom so much. So looking at a company founded during the boom could be misleading.