Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is a billionaire, but what does he attribute to his business success? Speaking to Zalkar Saliev on YouTube (via GamesRadar), Newell said it comes down to “luck” and “being surrounded by really great people.”

Newell is reported to own a fleet of yachts, and he is known to work from one of his ships, taking breaks from time to time to go scuba diving. While Newell may be a billionaire, he said he is not one to “study the subject of billionaires and so on.”

As for specific people that Newell credits with helping him along the way, he called out Neil Konzen, Doug Klunder, and Jeff Harbers, all of whom he worked with in the early days of Microsoft. Newell and Konzen worked on early versions of Microsoft Windows, while Klunder created Microsoft Excel. Harbers, meanwhile, developed early versions of Microsoft Office–he died in a plane crash in 2006.

Newell said he was “lucky enough to be around people like them” at Microsoft. He added that his luck continued when he left Microsoft to start Valve in 1996. Of course, Valve would go on to become a gigantic success with games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead, and the massively popular platform Steam. Through it all, Valve has remained privately owned, despite companies trying to buy it.

“I think that’s how I’ve ended up where I am. I mean, it’d be great to say I’m just this absolutely f**king wonderful person and I earned all of this and this expresses my awesomeness, but there was an awful lot of luck that went into it,” he said.

One of Valve’s next upcoming games is Deadlock, a multiplayer game that’s early in development.