Daniel Graetzer: Founder Mode: Whatever it takes to get the job done

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I regularly would get people telling me you should be so proud of yourself, celebrate the success. And in my head, I don't think people should celebrate raising money like as if they've accomplished something. It's great and you have accomplished something. You've convinced investors that you've got a business idea to invest in, but it's actually just the start of the next step. The valuations they were putting in the business were eye watering. On paper, we were sometimes being pushed for anywhere, you know, 700 million plus. And the fundamentals of the business weren't anywhere near there. The train just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The

stress was getting higher and higher and higher. The stakes were bigger and bigger. We had more employees, more investors demanding more growth. And at some point the the macro started really going against the growth story. The higher up you go, the more problems that is coming at you all the time. There's a saying in business which is like the CEO, the only problems that seep through is like all the [ __ ] all the problems. You don't get the good things because the managers absorb all the good things cuz they want to take the win for it. Owning a business is like staring into the

abyss while eating glass. You have to deal with the very worst problems. Not the reason why you started the business, not the really cool stuff. Always the worst ones because you are the only one that can fix those. I can picture that perfectly. And glass doesn't taste nice. Founder mode says you're the founder. You have one responsibility which is the success of the business. So if anything is going to get in between you and the success of the business, it is your job to deal with it. And that means anything. Your goal is really to make sure that your message is being translated in the

clearest form possible to the entire business. >> Welcome to the I Gaming Leader podcast. I'm your host, Leo Judkins, founder of the I Gaming Leader Mastermind. And on this show, I sit down with some of the most inspirational and forwardthinking leaders in our industry, diving into the real challenges, highstakes decisions, lessons that shape our industry. If you're a VP, director, or an executive in I gaming, this podcast is built for you. Before we dive in, a quick thank you to our sponsor, Sumsub, the full cycle verification platform trusted by top i gaming operators worldwide. Sumsub helps onboard players quickly, stay compliant, and prevent fraud, all

without slowing growth. More information in the description. Hey everybody, welcome to the i Gaming Leader podcast. I am here with Dan Gracer, exceer of Maxim. He's an advisory partner at Partis working on corporate advisory and M&A. He's also an angel investor in several startups around mental health and AI. Today we're going to talk about isolation and leadership, founder versus manager mode, and when to pivot versus when to stick. Dan, I'm super excited to have you here. Thanks for joining the podcast, mate. Pleasure to be here. I feel like we talk so much off camera. It seems only right that we do a little bit on

camera. >> It's about time. I mean, you've been in the mastermind as an expert speaker. You've met each other a few times. Like the very first time we spoke was actually around Yeah. mental health, well-being. So, let's let's actually let's start there if that's all right. Dan, we were talking about well-being and, you know, an app that you were creating or that you were working on. Can we kind of start there and talk a little bit about why that's such an area of interest for you and what how that's how that's come about? >> An interesting area to dive into. What I was really exploring

and still am with that particular project is I felt like a lot of the tools around mental health and mindfulness and coaching and support focus more around bringing down the energy, bringing down the levels, kind of bringing you to a quiet place, less noise. But I actually I believe there's a huge gap in people who are operating almost at the limit of their capacity but want to do it in a sustainable way. So I I noticed that there's a distinct lack of tools, advice, platforms to help high performance individuals operate at high performance level while avoiding burnout while maintaining support around them while knowing how

to read their own like biological signs and just adapting some of these tools that are already being used on yoga retreats but to the workforce and to high performance individuals whether they're athletes or business people. So it's been a real focus of mine for the last almost two years now trying to pick apart that whole world cognitive behavioral training and a lot of these kind of methodologies and and how they can be applied to the high performance cohort. So, one of the things that often happens with high performers, right, is that they're, let's use the metaphor of running, that they're constantly sprinting, right? And especially

in gaming, we see it a lot where everything's urgent. People are constantly firefighting. And of course, we hear about switching off and all that kind of stuff. But I often think about it as like this concept I heard somewhere from from a guy called cognitive gears, right? Where we where we're sometimes we're in like in sprint mode and sometimes we're in kind of consistency mode. Like how do you look at that? How do you look at sustainable high performance and what do you think is necessary for a for a fast-paced high pressure industry to be able to operate at your best at a yeah at

a sustainable at a in a sustainable way. >> I break it down to a few areas. One is like self-awareness. You need to know what you're going through. So you need to be able to read your own signs to be able to gauge the situation that you're in. Have you gone past a point where you need help urgently? You know, are you sleeping well? Are you able to make sound decisions? Are you operating on a good level? are you in a positive mindset or whatever. But there's so there's the like the you know the self judgment and awareness and then there's the application of the

tools. So you need to know they exist. You need to know how to apply them, where to apply them, whether it's things you can do by yourself or whether it's actually going out and getting support like joining a mastermind group or getting a psychiatrist or doing breathing exercises. So I think everyone needs to kind of have both of those things in their toolkit. It's like knowing how to be self-aware. I'm past the point of burnout. I know it's just for any matter of time now I'm going to burn out. Okay, what do I do? But also, it's also knowing when to apply it when you're

not even there. It's like I need to go through the next quarter. It's going to be a really big quarter. I'm excited for it. I want to do it really well and do it in a sustainable way. What should I be doing? What tools should I be applying? What help should I be looking for? These are tools that exist in the world, but there's a a lack of people understanding when and how to apply it to their personal situation. Also, basic things is who can you go and talk to about it? Where can you find reasonable advice on it and just even being able to

engage people on a conversation? Fortunately, tools like chat GPT and Claude when they're not being nannied about what they can and can't say. I actually just heard that in New York they're thinking of banning AI tools from being able to give medical advice, which I think is an absolute disaster. But it's never been easier now to get access to this information, which again was where my head's been going in the last year or two is applying like AI to help solve a lot of these problems. not to re-engineer the underlying proven models, methodologies, but actually just helping people identify their problems, analyze themselves and then

know what tools to apply at the right times. >> It's such an important area and especially in this age of AI, right, where people are actually going more and more inward I guess and talking more to an AI and perhaps not talking as much to other people. It's like that whole mental health part is crucial. Can we go a little bit back to your past? We'll talk a little bit about Maxim Betts in a bit. Where did that come from? So what's your origin story if you will around your interest in that particular area and how what were your experiences with that burnout, mental health, sustainable

high performance? >> Yeah, I guess that the headline in the newspaper would be too little too late is a good way to frame it. I always believed myself to be quite resilient and that could help myself better than other people could help me. I guess it's like maybe part of where my family's come from as war refugees to Australia or something like that. The need to to be independent and push no excuses. My grandparents were very resilient. They were very strong minded and I never thought to reach out. I never thought to really consider whether I was under like certain medical conditions like burnout or

stress or anxiety. And I should have seen the signs coming along the way. And I actually now realize that what I was going through, which I'd experienced before in other roles, just not to this level of extremess. And I we can go into why this particular venture caused all of these alarm bells to go off, but I think it's really common patterns in people that are going through the same type of business. You know, I started like falling into all the typical traps of how how do I get through my day? But not sleeping enough, not paying enough attention to sleep, starting to rely on

sleeping pills, probably drinking more than I should, not paying enough attention to my health, letting exercise go is one of the first things. Thought I didn't have enough time, making up excuses for not having enough time, and not really considering the effect of that on my workday. just letting work consume everything, all of my waking time, my hours, and letting it consume relationships and family, and just, you know, becoming everything in my mind and pushing everything out and then not realizing that actually, wow, you've just completely upset the apple cut and uh you're completely off balance and you can't make rational decisions and not really

also realizing that there is tried and tested tools out there. I tried therapy once like a normal therapist which I think I got off like betterhelp.com and it was so textbook it was like cookie cutter stuff like I want you to go and write down an honor book three things that you love or something like that you know like things like that and for me my problems are so complex the person I was talking to she was fantastic but she had no idea what I was going through like the immense pressure of you know like millions and millions of dollars flowing across your desk every

week coming in and out and invested stresses and employees and all kinds crazy things that were just so overwhelming for me to like how could I translate that to a person who's really they understand how to deal with probably more simple human psychological conditions and for me mine was in my head was this is really complex I ended up settling on psychoanalysis but that came again way later so now looking back again it's the same things like I wasn't reading the signs I wasn't self-aware and then I wasn't aware of the tools that I should have been applying to myself now the hindsight has led

me to where I sit today which is okay wow this It's actually really quite simple when you know about it. >> That's the problem. When you're in the middle of it, you're definitely aware about all the pressures. You're aware that you drink a few too many and maybe you're aware that your sleep is being affected. Very often we feel that that's just the season that we're in, right? And I think that's sometimes the difficulty that if you are not aware about the tools that you could use that becomes really hard. So talk a little bit more Dan about Maxim Bed and why that was so

high pressure for anybody that doesn't know kind of what that brand was like how you entered how the macro turned like talk to talk us through the headlines there if you don't mind. >> So before Maxim existed we were kind of trying to build a international business multibrand multimarket strategy we finally after like 2 years got a multis license which is so painful when we thought it would actually be very easy which is why we chose Malta. So we had this pretty strong business plan. We had a great team. We were building our technology. We had a like expertise in every part of a business. We

were like vertically integrated. We really knew our business. And then the Pasper was repealed 2018 and then 2019 everyone started talking about it. I hired partis where I'm now an advisory partner to come and do a consulting project for us and they did a fantastic job. They flew from the US out to Madrid where we had the office and laid out the groundwork and we understood the way the markets were working and the dynamics and by 2020 I think it was we decided let's go all in on the US. Let's shut everything else down. Just focus on the US. This is the holy grail. Investors

were so excited by this. Money was just flying around the market. You saw all the stories of how much money people were raising like billion dollar fundraisers. Spaxs these blank check companies were just throwing money at I gaming. We probably got there a little bit late at least. Maybe we missed the first wave. We probably got start of the second wave into the US. It was just all excitement, all hype. Everything was amazing. We raised a really nice amount of money and started building out this business which we kept saying was, you know, we're going for the holy grail here. It became a business of

momentum. You needed to keep building momentum because we needed to keep raising money. It got so expensive to keep growing this business, trying to raise more money. And to do that also, we needed to keep increasing the potential future valuation of the business. So to have better forward-looking revenue forecast, you needed to have more markets. So you needed to be in the next 5 years, I'm going to be in five markets or I'm going to be in 10 markets. Because if I to say, I'm only going to be in Colorado for the next 5 years. Well, my valuation would have been very small and I

wouldn't have been able to raise much money. So to keep raising money, you need to keep getting more market access, doing more deals, creating more brand awareness, hiring more people, spending more money. And so it's this kind of tumble weed effect and the business just kept accumulating and it was going very well for a while. You know, we were accumulating a lot of potential energy and a lot of momentum and making a great name for ourselves and we eventually pivoted to the name Maxim and part partnered with Maxim Entertainment. Did a lot of market access deals with Caesar's Entertainment and the reason we did that

really was to create more noise. You know, we wanted to create a bigger brand. I was this close to closing a deal with Kevin Hart to be our brand ambassador. Had some really crazy conversations with him at three o'clock in the morning on the phone in Las Vegas. Uh we ended up partnering with Nicki Minaj as you're probably aware. The goal was really just to create like a lot of noise and raise a lot more money so that we could go and compete with the big boys. So the train just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The stress was getting higher and higher and

higher. The stakes were bigger and bigger. We had more employees, more investors demanding more growth. And at some point the the macro started really going against the growth story. Firstly, the economics were getting very expensive. Everyone started wanting a piece of the action. The leagues wanted their percentage. All of the data providers wanted a lot of money out of things. You needed new products that were expensive. Market access deals were insanely expensive. Like the minimum fees just to be in these markets were you're talking millions of dollars. This is just before you even operate. So you can just imagine the bird of this business where

you're just spending so much money just so that you have the right to be there and that's before you build a successful business on top of it where you actually get to prove yourself where you actually can prove whether you deserve to be in the game or not whether you can operate a sharp business whether you can operate a good sports book or a good casino. There are big shoes to fill. You recently wrote about hitting a 250 mil valuation everyone around you celebrating uh but you had never felt more pressure or more alone. what what was actually going on for you at that point? >> Yeah, I

regularly would get people telling me that you should be so proud of yourself, celebrate the success. And in my head, and I actually think it's the right approach, is I don't think people should celebrate raising money like as if they've accomplished something. It's great. You have accomplished something. You've convinced investors that you've got a business idea to investing, but it's actually just the start of the next step. And it's I think it's a challenge for founders and entrepreneurs to actually know when to stop and celebrate like when have you actually achieved something like what are the achievements that are worth celebrating and of course internally

for staff morale we were trying to celebrate everything because you needed that you needed to keep people going you need to keep people invested in this business that's going to be tough and you need to keep pushing forward but as the founder and as the person responsible for delivering returns to the investors well they just written me a big check they're nervous they cut the check and that the nerves start the anxiety starts From there, then it's every month is where's my money going? How's my money doing? When's the next deal? So, of course, the investors are pushing you to to raise the enterprise value. So, for

me, yeah, it was great raising at a 250 post. But then when we went to we signed a deal with Caner Fitzgerald to to do a spat to do it to go public through a blank check company, the valuations they were putting in the business were were eye watering. They were kind of in line with the CR in the market but you know on paper we were sometimes being pushed for anywhere you know 700 million plus and the fundamentals of the business weren't anywhere near there right because that wasn't how the market was operating it wasn't based on EBIT or you know your sports book

results it was based on forward-looking revenues at the time and that was the whole spa game and also probably the biggest problem with the spaxs is that because you don't have fundamentals at the time everything's based on forward-looking multiples so there's just so much pressure. So again, immediately after like closing any deal, in my mind it was like, oh [ __ ] now we have to deliver. Okay, how are we going to do that? >> I want to dive into that a little bit more, that valuation because I know we spoke about it before, right? When you're in that position as a founder and you're

raising the funds, right, and you get that kind of crazy valuation, which in your heart and in your mind, you actually know that that's a crazy number that you kind of disagree with and but it's reputable banks talking about it, right? It's like how do you stay grounded through those kind of craziness around you especially in the US I suppose how do you not get lost in that >> well firstly we were honest like with can it's terrible we told them like this is an unfair valuation because I have to justify that it's fine to put one thing on a piece of paper but the

founder and the seauite we need to go and sit down with the investors and convince them why we're putting ourselves where they are so of course there's a lot of song and dance to it but a lot of the time the investors aren't investing necessarily in the fundamentals of the business or the market they're investing in the founders's ability to deliver and we were really confident in our ability to deliver based on what we thought we knew about the market you know based on how the market was at that point in time. So when we did the first I guess the series B round where

we were at 250 things were looking really positive like we believed if we could fulfill our plan and get the market share that we thought we were going to get that we were going to be able to deliver on those numbers. It was really after that things started going a little bit crazy. It was when the market the macro started going against us. One of the challenges was not being able to read all of the signs on the wall and also kind of the lack of alignment between investor needs and the realities of like what a founder's going through because maybe for a stronger founder

or seasoned entrepreneur, they would simply go back and sit down with the investors and say, "Guys, the macro's changed massively. We're really struggling to achieve this, this, and this. Your valuation is going to go down. Your money is worth less than it was before. I'm sorry we but we're doing our best. But that takes huge mega balls to be able to go and have a conversation because you can't walk that back. So the other type of founder which is like the bullish younger excited founder is like where there's a will there's a way. We're going to get through this and you just fight. And so

we took the fighting approach and we just fought and fought and fought and we did we tried to pivot and we changed platforms and we changed sports books and we tried to launch new product lines. We tried everything, but we just the tsunami was just coming in too quick and we couldn't move quick enough. It was just so hard to get ahead of like the the wave of both the negative macro and also the fact that we just couldn't raise enough money to compete. So, I think we were more or less honest to ourselves about what we thought we were capable of. And I guess

that's when we realized that we weren't capable anymore is when it was time to pull the plug, which was obviously an incredibly hard decision. But, um, it just end up being throwing good money after bad. If I look back in hindsight now as to how I would feel if we'd raised more money and continued, I'm probably thankful that the market did collapse in the way that it did and that more money wasn't burnt, not just by ourselves, but by a lot of other companies. We all one of the first. I think we were maybe the third to drop out of the market. But after us

with just one after the next after the next and big deals getting wound back and big companies pulling out of the market and huge exit fees needing to get paid for like brand severance deals and market access deals. So I'm also you know it's a bittersweet but also maybe thankful that we decided to pull the pin when we did and not throw more good money after bad. >> Yeah. It could have been way worse. Right. That's kind of what you're describing. One of the things I'm noticing about you, Dan, is that you're like like anyone one, right? You're looking at yourself looking backwards and going, "All

right, maybe I could have made different decisions." And all of us do that, right? And we all go, "Oh, maybe a wiser person or maybe this." And absolutely fine. But when you're that deep in, right, whatever that is, when you're that deep in as a founder, how do you tell the difference between backing yourself, which is really important as a founder, right, or kidding yourself? How do you even know if you don't have the foresight or the hindsight knowledge? >> You need good people around you that you can be honest with and like that you trust their feedback on which is really hard. There was

probably only a few people that I could talk to that really understood what I was going through and had no vested interest one way or another. Anyone in my corporate sphere for the most part were either potentially providers or competitors or they're investors or they were employees. And like by nature none of them are impartial. like they've all got some kind of skin in the game or they want something, you know, and that's just part of the business. I've been a B2B provider before. I've wanted things from my friends. It's okay. But there were only so few people that really had no vested interest whatsoever

in what I was doing and that were close enough to me that could speak honestly and they could see like the Instagram act that was, you know, Dan, the founder of a mainstream media brand, this VIP brand, and like the actual Dan and knew my life and knew what I was going through. And I think my friends did a good job of trying to coach me through things. But also looking back, I didn't have the tools. I didn't know how overwhelmed I was near the end. And I definitely didn't realize how poor my decision-m process had become. I realized that I was not necessarily overwhelmed, but

the emotional maybe anxiety of what the business was going through was clouding my ability to make decisions. And I can't like throw data at any particular decision, say that was the wrong decision or not. I just think that if I had a cooler head, if I had more mindfulness and if I was healthier and if I was more settled, I would have sat back and taken decisions with a much cooler head and maybe we would have pivoted more into other verticals like non-sports betting, non-casino. Right when we were winding up, sweeps was flying. You know, later came DFS, now came prediction markets. A lot of

businesses probably thinking, well, we could have pivoted into those. I'm not necessarily saying we would have. I'm just saying there was just so much emotion around like driving the core business that my mind wasn't really capable of like taking stock and being really strategic. My blinkers started getting more and more narrow just focusing on like the challenge that was like right in front of my eyes. You know, the conversations that I was having right in front of me. Whereas now, now that I'm relaxed and now that I do more corporate strategy work with clients, it's great. I feel like fresh air and I can sit

back and think strategic and I'm creative again, you know, and it's it's wonderful now. Oh, I just wish I could transport this mindset back to 3, four, 5 years ago. >> So, we'll talk about a few things that you've mentioned there. The quality of decisions, I think, is a really interesting one because when you're excited and you're in the middle of it and you also feel the pressure like you probably don't notice that the quality of your decisions is slowly eroding and getting worse. So, at what point you feel that that perhaps isolation was affecting the quality of your decisions and or did you even

notice it at the time? like the lack of options that I was giving myself as solutions to problems, you know, they're almost quite binary at the end. It was like, well, this is have to do this or not do this or go this way or go this way instead of like really thinking laterally and like more creatively like how do I solve problems and it's easy to think, you know, talk about, well, if we go back to first principles, this is how we achieve this. That's great. You know, we're not all Elon Musk after smoking a joint. >> Exactly. the mental capacity to like be

in the middle of firefighting and also be able to sit back and have a kumbaya and like think of all of the potential options. It's the same fundamentals. It's like get yourself in a good place first and then you can make the right decisions. If you're just living with anxiety or you're living with stress, it's just so hard to operate like efficiently. You don't need to be a founder or a CEO to have the same problem. Like you could be managing a team of five people and it's the same thing like in many of the roles that I've had before. I've been in management roles

for the last 15 years probably. They're just the same things. They're just amplified. And I talk to like friends of mine who have startups and they're small startups. They're like, "Well, I've never been through what you've been through." And I'm like, "Well, tell me about a problem that you've been through." They're like, "Well, you know, like my staff are upset cuz this decision I made, but they don't see what I see or you know, I'm like struggling to like pay bills this month, but I've got invoices coming in month two and three." And like they're exactly the same problems I'm having. They are a different

scale. There's maybe another zero at the end or something, but it's the same problem. You're going through the same thing. Your emotional state is the same. Really, the way to solve the problem is the same. Break it down into its components. Be more rational about it. Solve human problems with human solutions. Solve technical problems with technical solutions. You know, all these things. So, while yeah, that they might have been big for me, there's guys and men and women who were managing companies that were 10 times that size who are dealing with exactly the same problems. Sure, their boards are bigger, maybe public investors, but they're

probably also going through the same challenges. And a lot of them probably aren't are still not doing the same basic things, the same fundamentals of self analysis and then applying tools to dig you out of the hole you're in. >> And the difference is also that is their reality, right? And their reality is of course like the stress, the amount of stress you experience is could be exactly the same. Although there's a like you said a zero less at the end of that figure, it's their reality. So it it's irrelevant what somebody else's size of the business or complexity of the business is. I think

it's one of the big mistakes most people make is that we compare ourselves, right? And we oh well I shouldn't be complaining because X Y Z and it's just it's irrelevant. 100%. I think that's a like a general a general lack of empathy like on the executive level as well. And you you learn it too late. And while businesses are businesses and you shouldn't build a business around people's happiness, there is definitely a level of empathy that I think all people upwards and downwards need to have in businesses for it to be really successful. And it's not sympathy, it's empathy. I think there's a big

difference in a corporate setting anyway. Like I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I'm asking for people to understand what I'm going through because it might help them understand what the business is doing and why we're making decisions. Obviously, if there's headwinds to a business, well, the CEO is naturally going to be trying to sail around them or find a way through that. And people around them should be mindful of that. That there's a saying which I'm going to mess up in business, which is like the CEO or the manager only to ever sees the problems because everyone underneath them solving their problems. So, the

only problems that seep through to the manager is like all the [ __ ] all the problems. You don't get the good things because the managers absorb all the good things cuz they want to take the win for it. That's fine. They deserve that. So if you think about it from like a the higher up you go the more problems that is coming at you all the time like all the time and I think it's like really important for everyone to be able to take note of what the other executives are going through whether it's the CEO whether it's seuite whether it's just departmental managers

I think being an employee being able to read the temperature on their manager is helpful for being able to have a better relationship and also when the right time is to go and discuss your problems or get a solution or ask for a pay rise or complain about something just like you expect your manager to know exactly when the right time is to come down to you with a problem and not burden you with something when it's a Friday and you want to be out taking your mind off work or whatever it might be. >> Love that. That's a great description of managing upwards. Really

important talking about Musk. It's actually from this clip where he's saying that owning a business is like staring into the abyss while eating glass because as the owner you obviously have to deal with the very worst problems. Not the reason why you started the business, not the really cool stuff. You're just dealing with problems all the time. Always the worst ones because you are the only one that can fix those and it's staring into the abyss because at any moment it could all be over. >> I can picture that perfectly and glass doesn't taste nice. >> It's such a truth. Um, one of the things

you wrote about as well. So, by the way, if you're listening, I would highly recommend stuff that some really cool stuff that you'll find in the show notes actually. So, you wrote about um what you needed was people that who aren't impressed by you, have no stakes in the outcome, and who pick up the phone at 11:30 p.m. when you're about to make a bad call. Did that person exist for you at Carousel? I know we were talking about friends, and what difference do you think it would have made if you did have a group of people around you like that that didn't have that

vested interest that perhaps were able to pull you back into reality and help you see that the decision-m quality was going on? All of that kind of stuff. Look, >> I definitely had a support network around me. I have great family, great friends, but they're not equipped to deal with like a lot of the problems that I was going through. I think it's also innate limitation of most people when you're dealing with like quite complex problems. How do I like even have this conversation with people? Firstly, I didn't want to burden my family with what I was going through, you know? And I didn't want

to burden my best friends with what I was going through cuz I felt like this, again, this is like my mindset back then is like, why ruin this time, this limited time that I have with my family or my friends and just be dumping problems when they already get so little time of me anyway? And usually when I'm with them, I'm like I was like on my phone all the time just checking emails. I was really not very present and it's definitely something that I've been working on a lot more. But yeah, I think that's where professional help is really the only way to go. Like

you need people who are really well equipped with not necessarily your specific like corporate problem or your compliance related concern but like equipped with helping you explore your your particular set of problems. Like for me I found it in psychotherapy which I mentioned and what I like about it in particular is that there's not really an answer at the end of any conversation and there's no like particular topic like we're not trying to solve one particular thing. where like exploring challenges that I'm going through. We like talk about philosophy and how that relates to what I'm going through and it lets me go away with

things to think about and ways to address problems. Like it's really quite self-healing process. We've talked a lot about stoicism and I've explored that a lot. And while I'm by no means a stoic, it's helped me just understanding stoicism and reading books like meditations by Marcus Willis. It's just helped me have more frameworks in my mind to deal with things. And it sounds pretty cliche to go and read philosophy. If you can apply some of these things to your day-to-day life, I think there's a really great fit between like corporate performance and like some of these like very old school. I don't think old school

is understated if you're talking about but like like one thing in particular has really helped me is that I've taken from our discussions on like stoicism. We talk a lot about happiness um which I think everyone should really take the time and explore because otherwise what's the point of life if you're not like the pursuit of happiness is understanding what makes you happy. So you start there. You start with your happiness. And then you understand the values that take you there. Like what are the things that are important to me? Like is it friendship? Is it love? Is it action? Is it adventure? Whatever. Is

it one particular person? Is it having a child? And then when I go and make decisions or is it being very successful? Is it being really rich? Is it buying a boat? Whatever it might be, they're all fine. Anything's fine. Like buying a nice watch that could make you happy. Going and picking grass, that could make you happy. And just making sure that every time you make a decision, whether it's business or personal, that you you at least take the time to stop and just consider whether it's in line with your values or not in line with your values. And again, like that simple toolkit

would have helped me so much like 5 years ago just to go like what will make me happy is this business is a huge success and it goes public without sacrificing love or my family or my friend. Okay. So each time I come to a big decision, I'm not saying like every decision, think about it. go, is this decision in line with my values, or does it go against them? Am I pushing myself further away from like my pursuit of happiness or not? And it sounds like it sounds pretty vague, but it's actually not at all. It's just like a little mini micro check when

you're making decisions to say like, I'm going to buy this thing. Is it going to take me closer towards my values and make me happier or not? Is this startup really going to make me happy or am I just chasing something that isn't actually going to make me happy? Like, is money really a happiness driver for me? Is it one of my values or is actually am I just I just want money so that I can spend more time with my family. Okay, cool. Well, focus on that. You know, like don't focus on money is not your goal then. Money like family is your goal

or quiet time is your goal or adventures with your friends is the goal. And yeah, it's like that like kind of general package of like mental models has like helped me so much over the last two years. >> I love it. We were talking about it a few weeks ago as well and how you know often you when you hear these kind of stories that you're talking about people that listen to that often think oh well I've got to have this super healthy uh lifestyle and it's all got to be perfect and then we were talking about yeah sometimes you just need a blowout you

know and that's just part of it and that's again you know when we talk about high performers and high achievers it's often this just this all or nothing approach right of of anything that you pursue. What are your thoughts on that? I think for some people if you don't have like a blowout like if you don't let off the steam sometimes like you can just build up problems in other parts of your life but as long as that's part of one of your values is like the adventure or going out drinking with the boys at the pub or whatever it might be. For me like

I've always tried to in my head like social life, love, family, etc. and like work out exactly what level of what there was like a four burner metaphor that someone said recently where you've got to like adjust the four burners. I don't know whether I agree with that. I think it's a little too simple. I can imagine like having 12 burners, you know, and and maybe adjusting them once a week, couple things in the oven and then electric walk on the side. But I think it's definitely important to understand, you know, like what motivates you. And like for me, if I live in a really

small remote town now, you know, I've really focused on my surroundings and like quality of life. And I think for me like nature and animals is like super important to me and family, but I also need my social life. I need to be in the city every once in a while. like I need to feel somewhat connected, you know, with if I didn't have the internet and could do like Teams or Zoom calls, I wouldn't be able to live here obviously, but but like for me, like being able to go and support friends whenever they do things, you know, like I'm flying over to London

in 2 days to support Daniel Beard and Rob Darling and the Oliver's Wish charity. Like for me, like I I need to go and do these things in the city and then I get to come back to my like beautiful quiet life because that's what I value. I value like 5% crazy city, you know, big big events and then like for me the other 95% needs to be like healthy and quiet and mindful. But that's me. >> Love it. And and that wasn't you before, right? That wasn't you back then. >> Not at all. >> So let's talk a little bit about maybe founders or

even whatever level you're at. Let's talk a little bit about people that under that pressure that are feeling that maybe, you know, experiencing exactly what you were saying before. you know, the uh the lack of sleep, the drinking a few too many. How what would you have needed to hear back then for you to kind of stop for a moment and think, "Ah, this is something I could do differently or this is how I could approach it without it all falling apart because I think that's the biggest fear that most people have if they stop." to go full circle again back to like that project

I was talking about at the start of why I thought actually a lot of this stuff should be focused around high performance people being able to be more high performant is that if someone had told me that these tools can actually just make you even more performant I would have understood it a lot better imagined things like breathing exercises or yoga which I don't do I don't do yoga just to be clear but I appreciate what it does to people or mindfulness like for me my mindfulness is a long bike ride with by myself or an hour in the gym with my headphones on or

walking in a forest, you know, whatever that might be. They're my things. And now I use a lot of AIS also to to fulfill things like basic like journaling and and like checking in every day and basic stuff. But if someone had come to me years ago and said these tools aren't to help you disconnect from the world and find inner peace, they're actually they can be used the flip side. They can make you really powerful. They can make you a super executive. they can make you more successful. They'll make you more money. They'll help you make better decisions. I would have thought about it

completely different. And I didn't. And it wasn't the conversation that was ever had around me. It was, you know, go to therapy and like you you're probably working too hard and you're not doing this enough and you should get away from that and do less of that. And sure, that's probably right for a lot of people. Maybe they hate their job and they're not feeling successful and they're in the wrong area or they're doing the completely the wrong thing and they need to like kind of come back and reset and take magnesium, do an hour of mindfulness or something. But that wasn't my case. And

I think for a lot of executives, it's not their case either. Like they want to be more successful. They just don't want to burn out doing it. Like they want to be able to do it in a sustainable way and be like push yourself and work a bit more and be able to put in like 10 12 hour days, but be effective. Know when to take a break. Know when to stop and do a breathing exercise or to take 5 minutes and do quick walk or to log your feelings in an app at the end of every day or to do gratitude exercises before you

start or go to the gym, whatever they are. Like there's what I realized is there's like hundreds of these micro tools that you can do. And the benefit is not that you do one or you do two. It's the accumulation of them. It's like compounding. It's that you find a toolkit that works for you and they compound over time, you know, and like having a framework for being able to deal with problems and like as I mentioned like when you when you can read yourself and go, okay, well, I've reached this situation. I know this is maybe going to push me over the edge. What

do I do to be able to get through it? like I've got to go, I've got to have a horrible meeting. I've got to fire people or I've got to go and pitch for money and I'm stressed or I'm anxious. Like what do I do now? And so being able to like have this toolkit like I feel like like knowing all those things can make you so much more successful. And you can be really smart, you can be a great entrepreneur, you can like have all the business acumen, you can have all the street smarts, but your body is like a biological mass of blood

and guts and it like it's chemicals and it can break and it can burn out and you can like really destroy yourself like not taking care of yourself and you become ineffective. >> I think there there's great marketing lesson in that as well, you know, which is kind of read the room, understand your audience and talk about the benefits rather than the features, right? like that all of that is basic marketing and I think that is certainly true for executives for high performers it's not about the the meditation or the mindfulness or it's about how can I actually achieve more by using tools right like

that's the headline the headline is the benefit and we hear slowing down and we hear you're working too much and we hear all of that and then you go yeah but if I do slow down if I do work less I can't see how I could still sustain this business so obvious Obviously, I'm not going to do that. And I think that's where the disconnect is between kind of positioning, I suppose, and desire. Do you see the same? >> Yeah, 100%. And it's it doesn't just apply to work. It applies to everything. It applies to like your personal life. It applies to your family. It

applies to your friendships. Take care of yourself. Know what tools to use and when. And yeah, you're right. Like it's mindfulness has had a really bad CMO. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um I want to talk a little bit about something that you said which I love. So I have quite a few founders on podcasts, right? And I often speak to those founders employees or the people that work for them. Typically those type of employees, they all say the same, right? Like, oh my god, this like crazy and every day like changes in mind and all of a sudden this has to happen really quick and

and there's a real difference between something that you talk about, right? The founder mode versus manager mode. this idea that founders need to stay close to the truth of the business rather than relying on on layers of management to relay it. Talk to me a little bit more about that, about your thoughts on that and yeah, how that how that's worked out for you and and how you've applied some of those principles. Maybe start just for anyone listening who hasn't heard this term founder mode because it's a reasonably new term to something that's actually not not particularly new but I believe it was Brian Chesy

the Airbnb founder was giving a talk at a Y combinator like class you know like a school of alumni kind of talk maybe only a couple of years ago and Paul Graham one of the YC partners or principles was there and he heard this talk and he I don't think it was recorded this talk I think that was kept in private Paul Graham blog article on it which I recommend everyone reads. I think if you just look up Paul Graham founder mode, you'll find it. And it basically defined this alternative way of leadership where like the traditional MBA style of leadership is the paradigm is

you hire good people and you let them do their job, right? And you get out of their way. You find capable people. You give them the vision. You don't jump over people. You respect the organizational structure. You respect people's responsibility. Founder mode kind of just throws all that in the bin and says you're the founder. You have one responsibility which is the success of the business. So if anything is going to get in between you and the success of the business, it is your job to deal with it. And that means anything. You do not need to respect a line on a piece of paper. You

do not need to respect like typical meeting formats. You can ask the entire company questions. You can do these thing called skip meetings where you jump over managers. you your goal is really to make sure that your message is being translated in the like the clearest form possible to the entire business but you also need the feedback loop so you're getting the information and you're fixing things everywhere you can call it micromanagement but I don't think that's really the point of this I think micromanagement is usually quite a negative term you in that they talk about someone who's like obsessed with all the details and

they just can't be hands off in my opinion it is doing whatever it takes to get the job done and using all people in the company as your resources. So in maybe the last two businesses when I had sea level roles including carousel group I really wanted to build the perfect environment and in carousel one of our founding pillars at the start was I wanted to take all the problems that I'd seen other businesses and things that frustrated me and create an ideal democratic business. I think we managed to make people happy initially, but I think that it also started to eat itself up with

the over democratization of problem solving, too many cooks in the kitchen, information not necessarily filtering down too much, being overfiltered, and then the net result is people feeling disconnected, feeling confused, being involved in too many conversations, and just being overwhelmed by information. So, I really really respect phantom mode. something I've had like parts of it in my head and I've tried to do over the years, but this was like someone throwing the Old Testament in the bin and going, "Here's the New Testament. Follow this." You're like, "God, this is what I've thought all along." And it just it was really clear for me. I'm like, "Guys, like

if you're building a business, you should really consider this." Like results over process any day of the week. Like, do what it takes. You're like, you're there because you have an instinct. You believed in a vision. You've you've taken steps to go and get this thing off the ground. You've got capital from somewhere. You make convince people to believe in your business. Don't let it fall apart because you're trying to respect like norms, business norms, which are just theoretical anyway. Ultimately, if your business is successful, people respect you no matter how you went about it. Obviously, like within limits, respect people. They're humans. Don't demean

things, take care of your staff, reward them fairly, etc. But this is like this whole new paradigm for like how to aggressively be successful. And I love it. I really love it. >> Yeah. It's almost like a permission slip, right? And I think that's very often where you look at these books or what we were talking about before as well. You have these consultants that look at super successful businesses that put it in frameworks. And when you're in the midst of things, when you're growing something aggressively or you're under the pressure of, you know, running out of runway, whatever it is, right? That's like those

principles, those frameworks are not going to save you. They're not going to help. There might be some, you know, might be some good work in I don't know like an Eisenhower matrix on prioritization, but everything is coming at you, right? I think some of the stuff that you've said here on when to pivot versus when to stick like all of that is so important. So my last question, Dan, what would you say to a founder right now who's maybe 18 months into something that isn't quite working? Their investors are perhaps getting nervous and they're making these decisions by themselves where they're perhaps not even realizing

that the quality of those decisions are going down and down as you experience. What would you say to them? Yeah, look, I mean, I don't want to sound like the same thing over and over again, but does come back to some of those same principles. It's like firstly, if you're a found, be the best version of a founder you could possibly be. And so, that starts with like taking care of yourself. If you're not making good decisions because you're stressed or you're anxious, like deal with that. Get to the root cause of that. Like, firstly, do you have some underlying health condition that you need

to worry about, whether it's like chronic anxiety or something else? Like, can you get help? Do you see an endocrinologist? Are you getting your blood test done? Like, honestly, go back go back to basics. like do first principles on that. Sort yourself out. Be the best possible founder you can possibly be. Like be the best human so you can make the best decisions. And then presuming that you're in a perfect state and you're making optimal decisions. Then there's like typical business things like s cost fallacy and like you know knowing how to make hard decisions. And I think they're really important like to understand that

maybe you do have you're emotionally overweighting a certain decision because of some something historical which you don't need to worry about. You know, like past performance doesn't reflect potential future performance. Back yourself to make hard decisions. I think as businesses grow, and this definitely happened to me, founders lose confidence in decision- making potentially because maybe you lost a couple of runs. Your job is to make more good decisions than you make bad decisions. I think that is super super critical. You can break down some big decisions into smaller decisions as well. Unless you're like fundamentally changing the entire course of your business and you're moving

from a sports book to mining Bitcoin, your decisions are probably a little bit more nuanced than you realize and they can be broken down into smaller challenges. People need to back themselves a lot more. Again, like realize how you got there. But just being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest things you can do in the world, at least as in the business world. And whether you're doing it when you're young or when you're older, there's usually like a history. There's some pattern these typical patterns that I think entrepreneurs seem to find themselves in like family styles of the way they grew up their family

background their their style of education like how hands-on they were you know are they early adopters versus late adopters. I think you'll find a lot of entrepreneurs are early adopters like they're they're anxious to make and break things and you're making like a whole trail of decisions to lead you where you are today and look back at your decisions. If you made a lot of horrible decisions and like you probably shouldn't be there, well then maybe you should also think twice about like whether you should be an entrepreneur or not or you're just chasing money and that probably comes back to the other conversation is

you like what why are you actually in this? What is your goal? Do you love building businesses? Like me personally, I love business. I love creating things. I love technology. I love products. I love consumer products. I like building things that people enjoy. I really love the process. So I think it's like just a combination of fundamentals and and frameworks. >> Dan, thank you so much for your time and sharing your experience. I really love the conversation with you. >> Always a pleasure. >> Thank you for listening to the I Gaming Leader podcast. If you're a VP, a director, founder or an executive in I

gaming making the biggest decisions alone. That's exactly what I've built I Gaming Leader Mastermind for. small inner circles of vetted senior executives, weekly hot seats, and accountability from people who understand the effects of the decisions that you need to make. Find out more and apply at igamingleer.com. And a final thanks to our sponsor, Sumsup, the full cycle verification platform for i gaming operators. Player onboarding, AML, fraudrevention, all in one place. More at sumsup.com/gambling. See you next week.

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