Ebbe Groes: Stop Fighting Alone: The Secret to Startup Survival

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The key thing to understand about VCs is that they do their calculations on large numbers. They're going to push and accelerate to get to see if you are one of the 10% of the hits or 30% of okay survivable companies or you belong to the 60% that go down drain. You might start after this first round. We the founders still have 60% or 65% something. Then do the second round and third one and the fourth one. suddenly founders their dreams are shot to pieces and they own 10% of the company. There's nothing fun about it. You feel then cheated from your own dreams. It's important

that surround yourself with all the people that think like you and you don't feel oh I'm alone in fighting this battle. So if there's some founder in a similar situation and he feels that some people are not with him and helping him in this fight then you know here's your chance to get rid of them because you need to save some money. So chop chop. Be sure that the people you are with are really with you. If you then fail, then you fail together and you give it your best shot. Do it with people that you feel that you are doing this together and that

you are not just fighting alone. Welcome to the I Gaming Leader podcast. I'm your host Leo Judkins, founder of 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, high stakes 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. Sums up 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'm here with Ebru, co-founder and CEO of Every Matrix, bootstrapped B2B I gaming platform from a shore ditch garage in 2008. Did very very well. Debt free only 4.3 million raised externally built the world's largest casino content aggregation platform really excited to have you here because yeah we all of course know about you but I want to talk about the decisions that you've made the lessons that you've learned the challenges that you've gone through and really to what got you here today. So welcome to the podcast. >> Thank you

very much. >> Yeah but I I want to talk about um actually a precall if that's okay. So we had a quick call before we actually did this. We started the recording and you turned up with this big mug with a bell on top of it and I loved it. I thought, "Oh my god, this is great." So you said that you use them in meetings sometimes when things go on too long and you mentioned this thing of get to the point or get out of my office. Have you actually ever rung that bell >> on occasion rung the bell? Yes. Yes. This little bicycle

bell. It sits on the head mark and yeah normally when you're in a meeting uh there's lots of participants. They are busy people. they have paid high salaries and sometimes they can get slightly inefficient. So yeah, sometimes good to get to a point and then yeah becomes useful. Hopefully people take it in a nice way. I bet that's probably one of the challenges in scaling especially as a founder where you go from you know kind of starting by yourself or really small out of that garage that we were talking about to a large 4 figure teams size business where you don't control everything yourself anymore

and obviously things go slower meetings for meetings all that kind of stuff. How do you deal with that with the frustration that the organization is slower than it used to be when you you know on decision making on those kind of things? How do how do you deal with that? >> Firstly, I think as a founder organization you have some advantages and you have some disadvantages but in terms of decision making that is really one of the pros here of being that we are in compared to a situation where you have a high management you have a board representing investors owners. Um there's certain limits

to what you allow the management to do. Our case the ownership the management is united. The ownership sits in in our management and we have an ability to take fast decisions for better or worse. But yeah I I see it as a plus we have compared to others clearly then getting these things implemented. Yes, there are things where you have less agility and it has been one of the focus areas we had was to try to see how can we ensure agility all the way through the company essentially by trying to reduce the amount of decision making that needs to be taken at the top

level. And so we built an organization around this. That being said, it can be hard when you have been part of the company from when you were 10 people and 20 people and 50 people and you literally were involved in every single decision from uh wordings and some contract to whatever feature in the product develop and so on. At that time we had the benefit to it. Um so you know at at the time I got into all these things. I see it as a majority because it sort of forced me to get into all these different aspects. Um, I would say entering as a

CEO into a mature organization of our size gives you this very big challenge that there's so much to learn, so much to get into, not necessarily to make the decisions, but at least to have the ability to know the essence of what's going on, to ask the right questions, to know when it's important to maybe step in and when it can be okay to just not be part of it. So, I feel kind of privileged to be in this situation. It's a huge privilege to be able to be part of this long journey. So I've had 18 years in a matrix to get accustomed to

what kind of company this is. It has changed over the time and I've been part of these changes and so even for a slow mover like me I could keep a with this because everything happened quite organically which also relates to this thing about the that we didn't do any big rounds. It sort of forc us to do things slowly. So this is a privilege that yeah in the beginning you have a small organization you can get into everything and then the organization develops fairly organically all this time so I don't get hit as a CEO through all this period with huge changes that I

have to get adjusted to in contrast towards what the hire would have to do. That's something that you must have learned or experienced over time as well, right? Like as a founder, you don't scale with the business necessarily and you run into the bottlenecks of yourself, right? And wanting also even just wanting to be in those decision-m processes but realizing that you no longer can because you stop things from happening, right? You start micromanaging or like how was that for you? What were maybe the earliest signs that you ran into where you thought, "Oh, this is like I need to step out of this process

here and need to start leading." you have to take a look at your outlook calendar. Clearly, it all starts there. If this is constantly blocked and you don't have time to do things that just have a day where you are say not in meetings all day and can do thinking and so do some work, get into the core matter of things. So, you can play a part there. If you're getting too blocked, then you have a problem and this problem will be bad for yourself, it'll be bad for your company, bad for people around you if you become that bottleneck. So I think it's a

reasonably easy gauge of how you make things that you are able to do this have have some space in your calendar and if you put in some hours in the evening or put in a Saturday then it should be fairly rare that this is a necessity. Yeah, from time to time you might do it to you have some hump you have to get over this but you shouldn't be in a state where they happen on a regular basis then be things that excite you that well I really want to get to work today because you know it's a Saturday the sun is shining after the

gym what's nicer than sitting alone and not nobody's bothering you your team's channel or whatever you're using is completely silent except for some stray and that insist on also working on the Saturdays that kind of space free time is something you can treasure if It's not something that is forced upon you and that's the same feeling you have in a larger company as we have today in matrix I say as we had when we are much smaller much your company we try to keep this it it stays fun it's still something you do out of joy >> love it want to talk about the period

between 2015 and 2017 if that's okay for you so you split every matrix into nine independent business units each with sea levels right CEO CTO and a P&L you ran I think two parallel development teams at the time nearly ran out of cash and it's something that we spoke about before as well. So we spoke about investment and we spoke about runway and I think you moved a lot of the operations to book just to survive. Can you tell me a little bit more about that period and what that was like? >> First of all the basis of it is have a hard look at

yourself and say does your software is it able to deliver what you want from your future growth. It's something you have to do from time to time. If we 8 years into our existence would be able to deliver according to our ambitions with the same software as we had when we started the company software we built in 2008 2009 2010. What we realized at the time was that at least for us the white lab segments where you f out simple template sites fairly quickly fairly easily fairly small operators. This was not a sustainable business and so we needed to do something drastically. the the split

into business units was an attempt to address exactly the point that you raised earlier delivering bandwidth and agility on a product level in particular but also on operational level. It is quite demanding to build a competitive sports book and if you look around you see that many have not succeeded with this wellknown few companies that really do this at a high level but for us you cannot expect that the product people the CTO etc would have the ability to both do a worldclass casino platform products payments a pam a sports book and do this with the same resources it can be orchestrated yes but you

will invariably run into these bottleneck issues. So we we said okay let's try to decentralize this also based on a belief that when you try to show here once you cannot necessarily expect to show turnkey yeah we can go and be lucky that a large operator would go block some barrel over to us and indeed this happened and recently it's happened more frequently which I'm very happy heavy for but from the outset a large operator would maybe say yeah we have a shortage in our sportsbook area or casino area or some other area and we're looking to address this but we'll be quite reluctant and

cautious about moving full scale away from maybe in-house maybe a trusted third party that is good in many dimensions. Yeah, there are some B2C's large enough to say we can with in-house address all areas of our business, but the number of such operators is more. You can maybe today in 2026 survive as an incumbent in some midsize European country and you're the largest operator and you have this in-house but in 5 years from now can you do this really not be uh have your business targeted by moving moving to Europe and chain etc. So you'll be facing more competition and in the end you'll realize

that the the team you have at your disposal will not suffice and you'll be forced to okay what is what is the area where I can stand out where where I can best use my resources. So we tried to build our software in such a way that we allowed um these large operators to do this. So this went along with the modularity u we sort of got a win-win we thought by both fundamentalizing the development the decision making even the operations. So each of these units would have their own operations team. In Cassini, you have an operations team doing compression of games. They have their

own first line support team or second line, sorry. But sports is the same. There's a training team, a dedicated support team that really knows their stuff. This allows us to sell these compan these products separately, but also to bond them together. And this work quite well for us. You might get into later why I think it might not work well for us in the next um five to 10 years because also this model had advantages. But in terms of product quality, this strong product focus, this put us in a position to have the type of growth that we had from then on. It also nearly

put us in the ground. >> That's the stuff I'd love to talk about because I think that was one of the big challenges is that the development of that just took like like every piece of development probably with every single company took a lot longer than expected, right? You you map it out and then it takes longer and then there's a certain runway and that runway starts running out. So, how was that? How was that? I would say a little bit scary of course but the truth is a little bit different of course you fear that uh everything is lost you start losing money you

start look at the runway months are taken away but you know survival instinct kicks in you look at ways to do something on revenue side oh I have some deals signed but you know if I can somehow launch this client two months faster that's two months earlier get revenues here we were helped by some of our suppliers I mean I will still Think carefully back to some of the suppliers that gave us some credit here. We accumulated a few months of invoices with some of the large suppliers at the time for us. Managed to get them to believe enough in us to sit still a

little bit while we got through on the other side. And then I'm happy to say this is the last time we've been in that situation. But of course, it's usually stress in your organization. you have a CFO whose job really should be something else and trying to keep the better list at bay with some collaboration from management and people dealing directly with them. So there are some stress organization clearly you try to I mean I think maybe one of the harder parts was to gauge how serious a situation can do how much you expect to get out of it. Let's say okay I trim across

a bit better but if I'm 500 people and I say okay what I need to do is 550 and trim to 350 then you can lose so much and you essentially kill the company and I've seen examples of where this happens suddenly you have no development team you have no resources for adding features team that becomes completely disillusioned because they are just patching holes without a chance to really do something serious about it sales people account managers who are unable to really compete. They do the best they can. But so we managed to get into the situation. I say some skills we had, but maybe

the most important one was this ability to have some feeling for uh we needed to go in terms of like serious cost cutting. We did also some things that today some of my dear staff and exaff will treasure which was that we uh did some exchange of salary to shares. So essentially we converted some I did a bit but you know around my my sea level we had guys doing this this was 6 to 9 months of reduced but in some cases much reduced and this in some sense uh you know creates a togetherness you come out of it stronger as you often see in

the situations in the end they make good money on this valuation at the time was like 10fold less than where we are now so to do a factor 10 on some month salaries Yeah, it's a good thing also some people stay with us longer and so all in all I felt we were sort of all coming together at this and uh we very transparent about where the situation was and how we saw it and I really thought we got a really good buy in from people in the company and as I said a buyin that even today I think sort of gives me a little

bit of credit inside the company from us having gone through this and something that hopefully we don't have to exploit but it's a little bit something you can lean on. It's so true, isn't it? They're horrible moments when you're inside of it, but they pull people together and those battle scars, they become your armor almost right afterwards. They become like your strength, I think. And uh it certainly sounds like that's true for you as well. >> It's not pleasant, but I think the harder part of being manager is when you have these big doubts or should I do this or that? I'm not really sure

what is the right strategy. If I know my strategy, I know I if I feel confident about this, then I'm I feel fairly able to the team and get everybody on board and all excited. We are putting towards this. But you don't really know if you're struggling to find your direction. This becomes a serious issue and you feel it immediately yourself and you feel fake. If you're trying to push a message towards people inside your own organization, people you consider friends and yeah, battle allies. If you're not really really yourself sure that this is the right thing. If you're not then yeah you really have

to have some open discussions and then get to some common understanding. How's that gone for you then with that conviction like being sure about that this is the right direction because you know the problem is always we never have enough data. We're always about 80% sure and then you've got to go and then actually in the action as you start progressing towards that strategy that's when the real conviction comes I believe. And so how's that for you? How do you go about decision- making processes in such pivotal decisions like splitting the company into multiple business units or even maybe what's coming in the future? How

do you go about these decision-m processes? Do you do that by yourself? Do you talk to the board? You've obviously brought your brother in. Like how what does that all look like? >> I very much lean on other people or I'm not particularly good at just uh come up with fantastic things all on my own and then you know that's just great. It was day one in Matrix. I had a partner Jen Hornet. We ran this for the first many years essentially as cos we had different roles and we didn't put it as cos but of all the people that had importance to this company

he was by far the most one most important one I played a role but he played the equally important roles at the co role but it's very very nice when you have this partner that you have where you have the full trust there's no scheming there's no strategy there's no issues of feeling that you're like looking for something for yourself or something. This is completely straightforward towards each other from the first day we started this company and and this has been a fantastic asset for me and you learn of course who you can rely on for quality of advice and for honesty. you try to

embrace it even though it's really hard sometimes besides Dian also great assets we have inside the company and I do try to listen to them and and you find them not necessarily to be people that report directly to you or that are very highly placed in the company people who um really know what's going on in this area of our company who have an opinion whose opinion I respect and who I'm happy to listen to and so again I think it's it's a little bit It isn't much. We have this easy decision making because we don't necessarily use our board too much. We're not controlled

by our boards at Ste and myself and the majority of the shareholdings in the company. That also allows you to be more open in some ways and to say we will figure this out rather than I have to do it because it's sort of mandated to me and I feel this great stress. It's it's it's a distressing thing that you know if we up then you know it's mostly ste my own body that that we lose and of course I have some obligation towards other shareholders but the fact that it's 25% or so of the shares held by anyone else and two founders this still

means that by and large it's a lesser concern than I would have as a co towards shareholders if this is the majority shareholders and really legitimately I had to spend more time worrying about what's good for them. Yeah. Can I worry a bit more about what's good for the company >> and and it kind of goes directly into the next topic I wanted to talk about because when we spoke last time we were talking about capital discipline really and how that's a very underappreciated topic. I don't know why it doesn't get spoken about enough but that's just the way it is. So I'd love to

talk a little bit about that kind of the thing that you said which I really loved which is that yeah you can take investor money but it just means that you're no longer lord of the castle you said right and your bootstrap you took a single round 4.3 mil I think yeah and every you funded every acquisition since then from cash flows when did you first realize that external capital wasn't the route that you wanted to go towards >> I tried it in my first startup so really I I tried it firsthand again myself a good And we start a company and somewhat to our

surprise we suddenly had she mining first round second round you know the classic VC sheet chill and for us we for quite high valuations and and so we were building this company without any revenue and you know this is uh it's happening AI right now so not to say it's it can't be be great but it can be extremely distorting for your own vision clarity or vision I would say that you are removed from the discipline this the strictness of a P&L here's my revenue here's my cost this is what I have to deal with when I started this my second company which was in

this industry was an affiliate company or bet brain so let's control our cost keep this very very tight and then um and then grow the revenue and then only carefully grow the company as revenue growth allowed it to so this worked out and uh of course it's many companies where you cannot do this. You cannot build open AI where you have braver first. You cannot build a new medicalico where you do this. You have to invest a lot first. But in our industry there are many areas where you can do it. And of course what you can then do is to say okay you build

on this you build some capital and then you use this for later investments. And essentially this is the way we have gone. Yes some things we do needs investments and needs maybe 12 months or 18 months or two years. A several example of this happening inside races right now but where we have the ability to fund this ourselves of course we have a crew. So yes if you sit there and you have your startup and suddenly you cannot do what you think is the right thing because you have investors and you have a board and it's it takes a lot of the joy away. More

than that I mean if you then start not agreeing with their direction is going maybe you're an idiot. Well, you know, when you start a company, it's born out of some um misplaced uh belief that you're right and that if the world thinks differently that the world is wrong and this idea is great and you would absolutely succeed. And as data shows us, of course, most of these startups do not succeed and the founder was indeed wrong. But you start from this belief uh from this misjudgment of probabilities and this is uh your weakness and this is your strength. And when when you then challenge

this and say you're born from this then it's deeply troubling damaging to your sense of self because you create this and someone tells you no it's wrong and we will now force you to do the opposite and this is impossible to do anyway that's what happened in my first company it was quite painful left that company I used the money from them to start the next one that gave me a bit of runway it was 200k I got from this but it was enough to get us to cash break even on that second that morphed into a matrix 7 years later. >> Love it. Yeah. I

had um had Dave McDall on the podcast as well, right? And so for people listening, Dave McDall is the founder of FSP which uh later on acquired which we'll get to in a bit and he spoke about that, right? That he was constantly just trying to find cash and then he felt he never got the balance right. I almost feel like sometimes it's like trading the crown for a fuel tank, right? What often happens. And so how was it for you? What were maybe decisions that you could or couldn't make that a company in a VC backed you know like perhaps a VC backed competitor

simply could have made or couldn't have made >> the key thing to understand about VCs is that they do their calculations on law of large numbers I invest in 20 companies 40% will succeed to some level six takes will fail of the 40% that succeed let's say 30% will be okay companies and last 10% will potentially be like hits that will make a lot of money for them. This is problematic for you as a founder because what they're going to do rightly from their point of view is they're going to push and accelerate to get to see if you are one of the 10% of

the hits or 30% of okay survivable companies or you belong to the 60% that go down and drain and for them it's important to get to that point in two years, 3 years, four years. This is the old business model. You might yourself want to spend more time and take things more slowly, be more careful under constant pressure by doing the opposite to accelerate and to see if this bears out to win market share which investor initially buys into that this is an interesting market. So let's go and grab uh this quickly. It doesn't work well then you blown it. If the investor still thinks

this could be maybe interesting when the next thing is going to happen is you ran out of money and they come with another bunch of money. Unfortunately for you uh this happens in slightly different terms. So you might start with this okay after this first round you know we the founders still have 60% or 65% something they do the second round third one then the fourth one this is how these things end up and suddenly the founders they're still active in the company their dreams are shot to pieces and they own jointly 10% of the company um shrinking but every time some investor utilizes some

option that they got as part of route etc. I pity these people. I have tried it. It's just uh there's nothing fun about it. You feel then cheated from your own dreams and you're still there working. Of course, if you have the ability to control the terms, ensure yourself that you can manage this cabin injection without ever needing money again. I would say this is literally the key thing you should you should do this only go this path. You feel confident that you can reach the targets that are set up in front of you. So that if you raise more money is not from need. It

should never be from need. Hen say then I think it can work out well. I didn't manage but I can see see where it goes wrong and this is the wrong one advice to anyone trying to go down that path. Love that because that's so true and it happens to so many people I speak to as well and suddenly you don't recognize the business that you originally built and you don't have you lost control as well. Right. It's probably one of the biggest fears for most people is exactly that because you built something that you were passionate about and it's no longer it's no longer

your baby >> and then for whatever reason people often feel compelled to stay in this company they no longer recognize and look after this baby that in fact somebody adopted out of your womb you gave birth away from you and you can now admire the baby a little bit from a distance raised by somebody else in which you don't approve of but here you are feeling just happy that you see the baby from time over the kindergarten fence is no joy. Walk away and leave a nice little baby in case you ever want to know about your real dad. >> One of the things that

I've heard you speak about is um that you had a realization about turning away business and that came from kind of watching the alternative and watching that perform miserably, right? So you're talking about tier one operators and so tell me a little bit more about that period. >> Oh yes, it's it's of course it's classic versus junior cost. It is so easy in particular when you're struggling a bit to to take any business and you get misdirected. But um the ability to to say no to business that is a wonderful wonderful luxury even better than having money to invest into into new things. It's a

bit an investment and a gamble I was able to take. We were able to take and and I'm very happy to have that ability. But yes, the most crucial part is that one because this is truly disrupting for your business when you start taking on business that you deep down know is not going to lead you towards the decision you have. As a software supplier, you're almost being guided by the needs of your clients. So by getting the right clients, you'll be forced to go the right way and you get the wrong clients, you're forced to go the wrong way. This is not so hard

to understand when you take a step back. uh maybe but they can be quite hard to understand if you sit in the middle of it and you are in the know break even a little bit like okay here's the deal it's not really what we wanted but it's money so we'll take it clients will complain and demand and uh want things regardless of whether they are on the path that you want or not whether they are large or whether they're small they want access to your top management and to your road map and to everything and they all have that ambition you have to control

the access to this scarce resource became more strict about what policies we have for allowing clients that kind of access. We segmented our clients and so okay we have have our gold clients and our silver clients, our bronze clients and we all know who they are and here's the list and everybody in the company are aware of this. this is limited and we can still work as a small company and sort of have the same use of bandwidth if we just say okay don't don't we have 400 clients now um but yeah I see something 15 to 20 clients that is sort of on the

list of where I have would receive them regularly of course I'm not hitting a com or anything but even this year of course also meet the most important clients from time to time it's useful for them easily for me so this this uh this turned out really well but again only really helps you when you can sure that these are the right types of clients. >> Yeah, because that is so true, isn't it? Like I hear so many people that are in your position like years ago that have one big client who then dictates the road map, right? that where you build features for them

and it kind of doesn't align with your if that's a client that doesn't fit your vision, it doesn't align with what your vision for your business is anymore and you create a Frankenstein and suddenly the business 5 years later is not sellable, is not scalable, is not like it's nowhere near what anybody else you basically can't sell anymore, right? And so I think that's one of the biggest challenges staying true to your own vision and your own road map. Is that how you feel about it as well? >> I do. And then when you see okay I want to implement a change you should say

okay this change will not happen overnight. Um this phase you refer to from 15 to 19 where we rebuild this it was also a change of business model but not only in architecture and organization believe this we had a mult B2C license. So we had white devil sales we decided it was not for us and then we it took us probably 3 to four years to pace it out. The first thing is you start saying okay we want really more of these deals and less of the this stuff while deals. Second things we for bit signing you then this part of our business starts to

shrink until we get to the point where we can say it's now such a small part that we can find a way to just cut this off completely. We knew we wanted to cut off completely and it took us some time. Um when it went below 10% then we managed to sell off this business a horrible deal we ended up to be but that's not so important but the most important thing was we got rid of something that was distracting for main goal. So sort of if let's say you give up some% of your revenue but you win not having the burden of managing a

side of your business that is uh simply not leading in the right direction. Then in a fairly short time you will start realizing efficiencies from us having to span both the type of business you want and our case tier one pure software deals that we wanted and we want to let go of the smaller turnkey white label deals where our license was involved. We had all kinds of worries about this. Get rid of these worries. frees up one part of your brain and you can use this for where it's really needed because clearly uh anything you want to achieve the more things you want to

do at the same time the harder it becomes. So very very good to see see ways to simplify and concentrate what your business is and be very clear about this and then stay as good as you can and straight and narrow on this. It's true, isn't it? like helps with your sales, with your marketing, with your messaging. Everything becomes clear because now you're going after this one one single message. I want to talk a little bit about Yonas if that's okay. So, he recently joined you as co-CEO. I know that you and him have had been speaking about it for some time as brothers of

course, but like what what made you kind of finally pull the both of you finally pulled the trigger on that? What made you make the decision that that's somebody that you needed next to you as a co-CEO? There's many factors. Firstly, he's been speaking about it and uh we we are brothers. We are friends and uh we like to spend time together and I admired what he' been doing in his business and he liked what I've been doing in mine. So, it's always something that was a little bit would be fun to do one day. Next thing that happened was in realizing that we were

actually quite comfortable with the way the things were running privately built. We were starting to generate good profits. we're paying dividends for the sake of ownership have an exit a trade sale or an IPO. Such an exit would of course also mean that normally at least that there will be a change in management happening. If that's not happening then what is the long-term plans for the management of the company and when you look around then that's a certain type of company the family owned businesses. He recently did a deal with Mar for their Davies business was a fantastic deal for us and this is some

one example of this then Robert just saying that over time I've started to interface family businesses as well where it can be second third generation even and yeah it has some appeal I don't know part of is maybe your ego etc the desire to leave behind something of some duration some desire to not see what you built being gobbled up or dismantled uh by some new owner. >> Yeah. And if you don't need to do it, then why not? So this was also playing a part of course the is family but it is also you know it gives me that feeling of ensuring succession planning

as well. Um although I'm not uh near retirement I hope but um but yeah it's nice if I can get to where I would not need to stay at my post simply because of lack of alternatives try to hire sea level people and they look around the industry tons of examples it is incredibly hard my best take on how I can find sustainable way of doing this but having to step back again 5 years later older and out of shape that would to do it where I really get a chance to see this unfold and be influences and of course vitally really choose somebody that

that I trust has the heart and and the brains to do this in the right way. So you met all these criteria yeah it's early days he's been the company for 2 months I can say that I had very high expectations and it's gone better than I expected. I'm very very happy. It's a great joy to work with him and of course he needs time to get into the business. He's starting to get to where step by step he's contributing more and this of course will only grow. Um so this is how we're doing it and it's it's a lot of fun and also feel

it's very good. >> I love that. My last question you're now a 10minute walk away from the old garage with the London office. It's not the garage anymore. It's a hotel from what I hear. That must first of all that must be quite quite funny to be back there right and opening that office in London but if you go back to that garage that you were in back then what's one piece of advice that you'd give yourself now with all this experience that you've got the challenges that you faced the lessons that you've learned what's one piece of advice that you would give your old

self in that garage >> good question but it's also something I think has a rather obvious answer because it turned out pretty well in 2008 or 2009 Benstein giving an advice from 15 years into the future versions that all knowing or seeing uh beings here. So, I think uh probably I would uh look down and I would uh I would pat myself a little bit on the back a little bit and say, you know, you're probably in fine without my advice because it turned out like this. I think if you really need advice from your future self, it's probably because you end up in a

pretty shitty situation and you're like, why didn't why didn't Leo come and and tell young Leo that he really shouldn't have have done this? But yeah, since we ended up here, then I would say okay, let the older instead of relax and enjoy where he is in 2026, there's no need to go and help the younger because he actually maintains pretty well. >> Let's turn it into a lesson then. So, if you think about a founder that is perhaps in that period where they're also running out of cash, that period where things are tough and you've got to hold on to your vision and the

foundation of your vision is being shaken because, you know, you see the end of that runway going in. What would your piece of advice be for that founder? >> That is uh to stay optimistic clearly. I mean and here it's important also like like you choose your clients and the clients lead their right clients lead you in the right path. Same true around the people around you. We had uh we had a CFO then our dark hours uh who were insisted that we were actually legally bound to declare bankruptcy and he insisted on this and uh Ste and I said well maybe he should get

on our job because we think we'll pull this through. Um and um and lo and behold we did and he left the company but it's quite my CFO today. I have completely I know that that he is part of our team and he's not going to sit there and be worried about his own or whatever this or that. It's important that you surround yourself with all those people that you feel things like you and in this way at least that they have this buy in and you feel at least support. You don't feel oh I'm alone in fighting this battle because I wasn't. And and

so if there's some founder in a similar situation and he feels that some people are not with him and helping him in this fight, then you know here's your chance to get rid of them because you need to save some money. So chop chop. Be sure that the people you are with are really with you. Um and that will make it easier. But usually if you then fail then okay then you fail together and you give it a give it your best shot. So go ahead and give your best shot, but do it with people that you feel that you are doing this together. Um, and

that you are not just fighting alone. >> Thanks. Thanks so much for your for your time and wisdom. Really loved talking to you and I'd say keep ringing that bell on your T- mug. I I love it. I thought it was great. >> It didn't ring once during our interview. So it was a good sign, I guess. >> 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 lead a 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 iamingleer.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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