Kyle Wiltshire: Your Company is Not a Family: Bootstrapping Lessons with the Founder of TESTA

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The whole we're a family thing was a terrible thing we did throughout the 2000s. A company is not a family. Let's be honest, we're trying to accomplish this thing. There's clear achievable goals. It's not we're all just here to hug each other and sing kumbaya. We're trying to get this thing done. The reality is sometimes it's a blur and you look back and you're just like, how did I get here? Right? Like all the thousand little baby steps accumulate. One strength I think I've always had is like to hand off. The goal is to make yourself not essential to whatever role you have. How do

you ever get promoted if they absolutely need you to do the thing that you do? I'm happy to get my hands dirty, but I know that I'm a generalist. I'm not the best at anything. I know a little bit about marketing and accounting and finance from doing an MBA, but I'm weak at all of them. An intermediate person or higher is going to be a better subject matter expert in almost anything than me. If I can get the ball rolling and get the right person and hand it off and then see that they're getting traction, then great. If you are clever enough to build another

slot company in 2026, good on you. Cuz I don't know how you can with 400 other studios and 40,000 games. That is a tough racket, right? As a red ocean. I like the uncontested space. It's a problem. People like it. They get it. Name another company that does what we do. You probably don't know of too many, right? >> Welcome to the i Gaming Leader podcast. I am here with Carl Wiltshire, founder and CEO of Tester. We're going to talk about everything from him starting out his eye gaming career in the Philippines, working with some brilliant people as well as some very challenging minds. And

we'll talk about him bootstrapping his company, his leadership journey, some of the challenges and massive failures that he's gone through and the lessons that he's learned from that as well as the big successes that he's had and what we can draw from that as well. It's turned out to be a very inspirational conversation. Kyle has got battle scars to show for his experience and is glad to to share them with all of us. So, with that being said, let's dive in. Hey, Carl. Uh, welcome to the podcast, man. I uh really excited to talk to you today. I I wanted to start with your story

about moving to the Philippines, if that's okay for you. I think it's a good place to start with. Tell me a little bit more about that. What kind of started that move? >> It was pretty simple. They were expanding an Asia operation over there and nobody really wanted to go. I was the only one that put their hand in the air. The team out there was quite small and they were bought up previous operation and are moving it over to the Manila and I was in charge of a team doing I don't know what you call it these days kind of like DevOps frontline support

but also kind of server configuration and moving stuff around making sure releases were clean and all those type of things. So I had just moved to Montreal. I was there all, you know, a month or two and was basically being tasked with setting up this team in Philippines that would help with 24-hour support for all the tech stuff was brutal because it was 12 hours difference. So, I was, you know, staying till 9:00 p.m. in the office and doing these, you know, this is before Zoom. So, we have these like teleconference things in the boardroom and you know, I'm standing there till 9:00 waiting for

people to come into the office on the Philippines side at 9:00 cuz the 12-h hour difference doing a few interviews a night getting it all set up. I got out there and of course nothing went to plan. We thought it was going to be a one-mon project. I hired two people. One didn't show up on the first day and I trained another and it was looking really good and he quit after a month. So, like 3 months into this whole process, we reset. I came back to Montreal. I went back out there one month project turned into three three months turned into eventually some of

the leadership there said why don't you just move here and my hesitation was ah I just relocated to Montreal but it was also like 24 25 and eventually I was like hell why not right so packed up moved out there it was supposed to be a one or two year thing and it kind of became indefinite so worked there a few more years and eventually had a start in the Philippines and how I wound up on that side of the globe >> love it man when we spoke last time you were talking about the craziness of that first job there at the Bodok job. You

mentioned some great names, some brilliant successor, people that turned into becoming really successful people we all know, but you also said about the opposite side, right? There was also some absolute I don't know like extremes on both sides, I suppose, people that yeah weren't great to work with. So tell me a little bit more about what happened and how did that divide happen and how did that kind of show up as you were working there. >> So to go all the way back, I mean I had not much context of the gambling industry. My excitement was that I had worked in tech and IT. You

know, the company I worked for before Bodog was personal motivational company. They did seminars and trainings kind of like Tony Robbins stuff. And they certainly wanted tech, but it was a cost center, right? You were just kind of this natural evil. They had to pay for their email servers and their systems and maintaining their website. So, it was never that strategic. When I jumped into an online gambling company, it's blowing my mind. It's like there there's there's more transactions happening than in a bank. At the time the Canadian entity was Antiggo licensed. I moved over to the Philippines because they had poor license there. That

took me there and I was helping the local operations and dealing with kind of the global support. So it started as kind of this small team but over time I think when I first moved over there there's 50 people and there was after the call center and everything there's about 1,200 when I left. So the company moves very very fast, right? There was an opportunity suddenly there was a new office here and you go from 50 to 100 people. You get this fascinating mix of people. You get people like myself saw an opportunity jumped on it and then you saw people that could do the

same and maybe didn't have that kind of corporate rigor of moving up the ladder, right? So we had a management team there that was some of the most talented smart people know and lots of them went on to do all sorts of fascinating things or run big companies or built and exited businesses themselves and then some of them were just I don't know what they did it was crazy they were in the same management meeting as us and had nothing to report and there was no real damage to their status right like that there was never any repercussions so I think you can learn from

a wellorganized business but you can learn from a crazy business as well. And the Asia team was constantly changing. I think there was a bit more structure on some of the European and more global operations, but team we went through four or five different managing directors in the course of two or three years. One point, you know, everybody from London moved to Asia, become headquarters. So suddenly we had politics of two of everything. You thought you were the CTO, now there's the other CTO. So it got a little crazy there. So to sum it all up, when the doors wide open like that, kind of

get the best and the worst, there was not a lot of middle ground. It was a crazy place to be. >> I think that's quite um typical for fast growth organizations. You know, it's almost like sink or swim, right? You've just got to deal with it like it's a fire hose. You got to deal with the water coming in. Some people do and some people don't. Do you think it was inevitable that you'd attract people like that or that people like that don't grow with the organization when it grows that quickly or looking back maybe that could have been handled differently perhaps could have been

more successful somehow? What like how would you how would you assess that now? I think when you're constantly changing the macro goals, it's really hard to have consist, you know, if the objectives in January are not similar objectives you have by the end of the year. How can you ever measure where things are? So things move around really quick and what was once the big priority changes quickly. We did get some great things off the ground and work with some great people and I believe in the years you know this was a very long time ago. I'm that organization 2013. So going on 13 years

ago. So I don't know how much of this is relevant now and I haven't contact people there in quite some time. Just in those days it was so manic. There were opportunities. You could get a lot done and learn a lot of things because it was kind of go go go. At the same time what was important was constantly shifting and who was responsible for what was constantly shifting. That gives ambitious people an opportunity to move really quick, but it also means that you can get the wrong people stuck in the wrong places. >> Yeah, makes sense. Thanks for sharing that. Hey, and then in

your intake, you mentioned something that I found super interesting. You said something about how your partners didn't handle things ethically in your previous startup. Let's let's talk about that a little bit. What actually happened? How did you discover it? And especially how did that maybe affect how you structured Tesla now later on? So Tesla comes from another company I run which does very kind of boutique technical work especially in Asia. Any sort of problems with performance or optimizing for devices or availability that's what we really focus on. So Tesla is kind of the brand and the commercialization of something. We've done one shape or form

for 8 n years. We would always have people in various markets that could actually look at a product that could look at a gambling site or you know not just that we've worked with manufacturing cyber security and lots of different groups. They could get on the ground and show us how does this look like on a real phone through a real internet connection etc. This originally started we had a framework where we had some partners who had built up a platform. We had kind of brought them in to help us recruit testers and do all these things. they put this platform together and they really

really drove it in the early years and we were like okay fantastic let's let's get them involved let's maybe set up a separate company and make them partners and you know so we had this whole structure where basically this was this separate company that had these people involved because we wanted them to continue to drive it and we eventually decided okay we're built these features and built this platform and we had an engineer who really went his own direction just did things that he wanted. You know, we had a team in Taipei. He would not communicate or sync up with them. He would keep building

stuff and show us here and there, but he wouldn't share his code. He's not really coordinating with the rest of the company in terms of what we need. He's not interfacing with our clients or the market at all. He's kind of gone off into his own little world building this product, trying to copy another product that was already on the market without really talking to us much. Right? So, we kind of throw up our hands in the air and say, "Well, let's see what he comes up with." After six or nine months or whatever, he gives this this kind of full demo. And A, it's

not really what we want, and B, once this is delivered, he wants, what did he want? He wanted more equity. He was basically holding this product hostage, right? We had been paying him the whole time with revenues from our clients. He hadn't been working with the team. And now we kind of had a gun to our head saying if you want this product you're gonna have to give me this or give me that. And I don't mind tough negotiation but it was kind of like pardon me do you know how we got here in the first place? And unfortunately I think our other partner and

it just didn't really have commercial sense to see this was basically a form of blackmail. So what we ended up doing is kind of just building around them copying a lot of what we had already built with other people. And we found we could do it leaner meaner better without them anyway. So once we started using other resources on it, we kind of said our goodbyes and said, "If you think this platform is worth something, it's yours. You go commercialize it. You go market it. You go figure it out." Because that's that's actually the hard part. Building a tool that you know looks neat is

all fine and dandy. You go actually go take it to market. So one of those things where they tried to screw us and we took it pretty calmly and methodically and it took six, seven months, but eventually it was like, "Okay, goodbye." Right? So, I'm very careful about who I make a partner and who I bring in. >> Man, that's awful. That's horrible. How How did you stay calm? Like, do you remember the moment when you actually found when he said something like, "I want to have more equity." How did you feel in that moment? And how did you stay calm and methodical as you

said afterwards? >> We already knew we were approaching the end of the road. I wasn't very excited about what was being built. At first, it was kind of like, you got to be kidding me. You're trying to extort me over something you built that I didn't even want that I've paid for. But then the more you think about it, the more you think of that history, the more your blood boils. And I think my partner and I certainly had a few conversations where we were yelling and screaming and, you know, kind of at each other just venting. But in terms of how we dealt with

I'm just very kind, calculated, careful. Um, I mean, to be honest, I talk about it. It still bugs me. I mean, it's it's good six, seven years ago, but boy oh boy. >> Yeah. Because that's the problem, isn't it? You connect the dots afterwards, right? You look backwards and you think, "Ah, these signs were there." You start blaming yourself. It's actually something that we spoke about last time. Remember where we're talking about like the hard thing about hard things, that book where he's talking about where you mentioned management debt and kind of this idea of sometimes you just don't make the hard choices because you

think it's not bad or something. And then afterwards, it's obvious you should have, you know, and but then it's so hard to not blame yourself for that. And you know why did I do it? >> You got to let things play out sometimes. I think I mean you never quite know, right? Like sometimes you have certain biases and you put certain things on people. So you may be looking situation through a negative lens and maybe you should let it play out so you know for sure. I like to know for sure. I'll say the nice thing about a situation like that is when you end

a partnership with someone, you know, sometimes it's what could I have done better? Did they treat me right? In that case, it's so cleancut. Goodbye. I will never work with you again. It's so simple. They almost do you a favor there and there's no ambiguity. The tough part is half the time you kick the can down the road, it bites you and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is fine or you get more information and the situation isn't a big deal. You can't snap at everything. Make every long-term decision right off the bat. You got to let some things out. Hindsight's 2020. When they do eventually

bite you, you go, "God, why' I waste so much time on that?" >> Yeah, that's the thing. And very often there's just no good decision, right? There's no clear decision. it's bad or worse. There's just options and you've got to choose and you're the only one that can choose because you're at the top. What are you doing differently because of that experience now? Like are you approaching decisions differently or are you are you less trusting of people? Like how how has it affected you? >> I'll tie this to something else and employee stock options which I've done in the past. I really like that Silicon

Valley model of getting everybody thinking long term and this natural filter of people that want to take a little risk with you and therefore can actually reap the upside reward or think a bit more long term. I was probably too freewheeling with partnership and equity in the past. I've learned through both employee stock optin programs and stories like that. You got to be really careful who you partner with. And one thing I remember partner of mine said during that whole thing was if you're going to screw me over when there's no money on the table here nothing's really been built. You're screwing me over over

nothing. So how would you act if there was something serious cuz the the trust really shows up once there's you know millions of dollars flowing or people or equity or whatever you have bank accounts that are full. That's a different story. So, I'm just very careful about who I consider on who else is on the balance sheet, who holds the equity, basically. Um, sharing revenue, sharing payments. You got to be very careful with who you partner with. >> It's so true, isn't it? Even the best families break up over minor money issues when somebody dies, right? Yeah. So, uh, makes a lot of sense. You

you bootstrap tester, right? And, um, explicitly, I think because of that, that's a deliberate constraint that you've put in place. One of the things it does, I suppose, is it limits how fast you can grow because there's a runway. But what growth opportunities did you have to say no to because you didn't have outside capital. And looking back now, was it worth it to bootstrap it? You feel? >> Yeah, I'm glad we did because so I had a real estate start in between stints in the gambling world or tech consulting world. We took venture capital and it became you're immediately on a track and once

it's almost easier to raise funding and run a business when you haven't. I your pre- revenue or whatever. The second you start bringing financials into the situation, everybody's got those numbers to work off. So, we ran that company quite aggressively and we found some product market fit. And the mistake is when we started making some revenues, we thought we had cracked it. So, let's throw a whole bunch of money at things, get super aggressive with the marketing, budget. It was Philippines so the salaries weren't super expensive but we blew up to like 70 people at some point and then we couldn't sustain it like a

lot of the revenues we found were churning out or they we thought we had a product people wanted they didn't quite get it and so things started to nose and suddenly we had to lay off almost all the people we had and we had to get rid of the fancy office all the coffers went dry and we had to rethink how the whole company actually worked right so I've been a lot more careful to make sure that we understand the inner workings of what the pain points of customers, do they like us? You know, I think the first two test of clients, the team was

very small. We signed them and I said, "Okay, we're going to see if they stick around for 6 months or a year before we make any other decision. We're running another business. We'll keep it kind of lean because I want to see if this is actually some, you know, do they need us for a project this quarter or going to use it consistently." Once we saw evidence that okay this is something that's useful and valuable and people will pay and continue to pay for okay now we can hire some expensive engineers and put aside a marketing budget and do all it's also just the natural

extension of when you have other people's money when you're spending money that would have been in your pocket otherwise you're a lot more careful you're a lot more scientific about things so that's been a real lesson as well so by the time we take a large venture check if we do we would have a form formula and it would just be this is you know the only thing holding us back now is just growth and commercializing and it's just kind of a just add water scenario versus we're still in the woods exploring. >> Yeah, makes sense. And I mean now again looking backwards would you

have done exactly the same thing? Would you have bootstrapped it again or would you have taken capital? >> Maybe would have brought some partners in earlier but again I wanted evidence that things look quite healthy. What I've learned about myself is I'm naturally not fundraiser. It's not my favorite thing to do. I've also learned when I was running that real estate startup with my partners, if we didn't raise funding in the next couple of weeks, we were toast. We wouldn't make payroll. So, it naturally rises to the top of your priority list. When you're running one business off the free cash flow of another, you're

not distracted by raising money. So, it it's strange because you don't need it. I thought that would give me lots of leverage. And in fact, it never became my biggest priority. So we would get offers or conversations would happen to say no. But then you realize that six months have gone by and you haven't put any money together. So it's a different way of doing it. It's leaner, but I feel like everybody has a deeper understanding of what we do, what work, what doesn't work. When you're running off other people's money, I think the CEO, CFO, or both are going to spend a huge amount

of their time fundraising. Then how much time are they actually going to spend on the business? So I'm I'm I I wouldn't I wouldn't do it any differently. It sounds like you like it's made you far more considerate of how you actually want to position the product, how finding that product market fit, thinking about okay, how do we optimize this and then how do we scale rather than thinking scale early and burning a bunch of cash just to figure out that it didn't work, right? >> Yeah. And what we do is a little experimental and different as well. If we're building a platform or another

slots company or some sort of market proven thing, it's about competing and executing, it's kind of a different ballgame. Like we're building something that's unique. The crowd testing industry is quite large. Aiming at gaming and understanding what works with gaming and what doesn't, then looking at other verticals. It's all quite specific, right? So, we can't run on too many assumptions. We're at the point now where I think we have learned most of the things we want to learn. So now it is more about commercializing it, growing it, just being more efficient at what we do and making it bigger. >> Yep. Love it. Carl, hey, you

invest too, right? You're an angel investor. What do you look for when investing that you wish your previous partners had look for in you? Is there any red flags that you walk away from a deal? Any specifics that are important for you? >> At the angel stage, mostly the people because they are going to learn lessons and things will change. there will be at least a few changes in how they commercialize it or how they do things. I do try to look for people that at least are open to feedback. I know what it's like to run a company and everyone's got an opinion. Sometimes

you don't want to hear it, but if they're not interested in other perspectives or people from different walks or different sectors, that's kind of concerning. They should be open to it. Uh but I mostly look for people and just try to assess, do they have the kind of grit to do this? Can they change it if they need to? Do they have the balls to do just really unpleasant things sometimes like fire people or fire a customer? You have to have these confrontations. Sometimes you can be polite. There's plenty of times you just have to do things that aren't pleasant. So, are they of character? I

probably look the product and the model and the market more so than a lot of people. I because it's angel money, I don't care that much about some massive crazy giant return. I want to see 3x's, 4x's, 5xs. I've done okay at it. It's a lot of time. I'm doing less and less of it now. I've never invested in any eye gaming stuff just because I'm so exposed to that sector anyway. I'm glad I got into it because it taught me a lot about being on the other side of the table and what it's like to be a smaller person on a cap table versus

a big VC. You don't get to set any terms. It's kind of these are the terms. They're not going to haggle with you over 10, 20, 30k. It's taught me a lot. We'll see how I do. It's been about a decade of doing it. think of kind of wound up coming out breaking even after all that. So, it's a hard hard class to invest in for sure. Everything they say is true. >> Really? Yeah. >> Not everything pays, right? >> No, no, that makes sense. But it sounds interesting as well from just being able to see things outside of eye gaming like you've just said

about tester as well earlier which is okay. Yeah, there's a big market out there that does something similar and from your consulting you could have built anything, right? You could have built a studio platform, whatever. But you chose crowdsourced sourcing, crowdsourced. Oh my god, that's a tongue twister. Crowdsource testing, which which I suppose operationally quite difficult. Not, you know, it's not the most obvious choice. It's not necessarily super flashy either, but why was there a specific why did you do that? Was there a specific like frustration that you ran into that you thought, "Oh my god, the world needs this?" saw it in almost everybody

I worked with especially in my experience is gray markets or offshore markets you don't always have good feedback from the ground but we also saw it with technical consulting we did sometimes we get buried in data of all these charts and all these points and all the things but it's like can somebody also tell me a story and just show me how the thing looks on the phone or on the computer can somebody give me it's like that classic mom test right you've built this piece of software or app for months and it's perfect and you hand it to a relative and somehow they managed

to take the path where it like goes, you know, totally ass backwards. You you will always learn something when you get a real person to get their hands on it. So that's that's an old problem we saw consistently and we had done it so much with our technical clients. Where I started putting two to two together is I just saw that some gaming companies were hiring these larger crowd testing firms. They were quite expensive. People were saying, "Hey, don't you do this already? like could you do this more efficiently or do something like this and help us out here. So it was kind of one

of those things where the market came knocking and eventually I saw oh this is how you can commercialize it. this is how we could aim it at this category, right? The nice thing about, you know, our industry is as big as it is in terms of money and size and people. It's not that hard to like speak to, right? Like if you wanted to like build a company and say, you know, something like insurance, which I think is actually a very similar industry to ours, it'd be very hard to get that brand out and known. Whereas in gambling, it's kind of a small community of

people that actually talk and make decisions and it's not too hard to explain what you do and get it out there. So that's what it came from. It was a real problem that was driving us. I like uncontested space, right? If you are clever enough to build another slot company in 2026, good on you because I don't know how you with 400 other studios and 40,000 games, that is a tough racket, right? As a red ocean. So I like the uncontested space. It's a problem. People like it. they get it and you know name another company that does what we do. You probably don't know

of too many, right? >> Yeah, exactly. I love it. So many good references already, Kyle. I love it, man. Like the mom test. I highly recommend reading the book if you're listening. It's great. And uh yeah, the like red ocean versus blue ocean strategy really important as well. Just understanding where your market is and not fighting for the bottom of the barrel, you know, like really really good. I I wanted to go back to that hard thing about hard things that we were talking about just a little bit earlier. And I mean, one of the things in there is about taking the easy way out

and then paying 10 times harder later, right? That's the whole concept. And I think we all recognize it where we think we kind of avoid the short-term pain uh where we feel it later, right? We don't want to have the uncomfortable conversation. Can you tell me about a time where you've done that? Where maybe you've taken the easy way out on a management decision and later on you found out, oh my god, I really shouldn't have done that. How did that blow up for you? What what did it teach you? If >> I go way back to one of the first teams I built once

I moved to Manila and I brought all these guys on, I eventually found a fantastic team who kind of took it over from me and that let me kind of move a rung up the ladder and work on other things. But there was one guy there who was just generally a not a very good performer. Nice guy, but made mistakes. And mistakes in that line of work are costly. They cause downtime. They cause bugs. They cause potential security issues. But he eventually over time did build up a fair amount of domain knowledge. But that that that kind of tendency to just mess things up and

not really improve just continued and continued. Right? This was early in my career and I come from a technical background. I think if I look in those early years, my biggest mistake was thinking that you could solve people like a technical challenge. I gave him the right support and the right training and the right this and the right that it would all come around. So, I put a lot of attention on trying to fix this kind of squeaky wheel. And what it ultimately doing was losing confidence the rest of the team because the guys that were better and did their job. They knew they were

getting paid roughly the same. They got very frustrated with this guy. They got frustrated that they would have to clean up his mess. They were getting compensated roughly the same. They got frustrated that I was giving this guy more coaching and attention than the guys that were performing well. So, I really don't know how to say this nicely because it's it's a terrible thing to say, but I mean, you have to learn to fire people when it's not working because it's actually this weird superpower that brings the whole other it sets the example for everybody else cuz some somebody comes into a group and they

kind of look at the lowest performer and they go, "Well, that's the low bar. That's the minimum you must do in this team, right?" Some people will come in and do the minimum or at least benchmark off the minimum. And if you accept that then you're going to bring the whole group down. So if I look back and there was a couple of cases like that wasn't just at that particular team and sometimes they were good individual performers but they had the wrong attitude or cause conflict or sometimes they were good when they worked but they would strictly go home at 5:00 p.m. on the

dot and that would jam up other teams because they were waiting on something or whatever and then we'd have another business get to this thing. So now I jump on those things much faster. Leniency is fine, but if you see that somebody is not doing well, you got to give them the opportunity to improve and have those conversations. You got to jump on it really fast because it'll drag down everybody else. Especially in a small team, they can hide better organizations. When you're a team of 20, every time you hire one person, you've grown the team 5%. So that's a mistake I probably too many

times. >> It makes a lot of sense. That's so many people do that because you've got to go through performance improvement plans and all that kind of stuff. As a manager, you're also almost forced to spend more time with poor performers than with high performers. And it definitely sets the wrong tone within your team, right? It sets the wrong intention. But I think the other side of that is what it does to you as a leader as well. When you're constantly just being involved with people that you need to fix because they're not they're not living up to whatever the standard is that you want

to have for that team. It drains you, right? It drags you down to that level as well. Just think about sports teams or something. I don't know for listeners how much sports experience, but you know that when you play with a better team, you actually play better immediately as well. And it's the exact same thing, right? It's a strange 2 plus two equals five thing, right? Like things are really larger than the sum of their parts if you have all the right ones in there. So that becomes, I think, more and more of the focus as you mature. Really careful about who you bring on. Really

careful about who you let continue to be in the team or where you place them or what their capabilities are. And I mean, the sports team analogy is so common because I just haven't found anything else that works quite that well. The whole we're a family thing was a terrible thing we did throughout the 2000s. A company is not a family. We have a mission. We're trying to all do this, right? Love working with these guys, going out with them when we got the opportunity, but let's be honest. We're we're trying to accomplish this thing. There's a there's there's clear achievable goals. It's not we're

all just here to hug each other and sing kumbaya. We're trying to get this thing done. Sometimes you have to let go of people you really like. could see that maybe they will be this or that, but you've given them the opportunity and the results just aren't there. So, I think I made that mistake for a good I don't know 8 n years running before I tighten it up. And again, when it's running off your own money, you get a little more ruthless with those things. >> Look, everybody will recognize that. Everybody will have gone through it. It's kind of this, you know, hire slow

fire fast idea which um yeah, it's difficult. You've got to protect the team and protect the business. So I think you're right. Hey, I want to talk a little bit about this parrot problem that we talked about. You said that you've hired people that are so good at paring back to you on what you want to hear. Again, something I think most of us will recognize, right? Where people just repeat what you say and they understand the business better than anyone. But months go by and then yeah, they haven't executed on a single thing, right? A feel that it can often be a bit like

boiling a frog. You know, the frog doesn't even notice. it just gets worse and worse until the moment actually kind of dies and I think sometimes it's like that in management as well. It's kind of it's too late. How how's that been for you? Have you got examples of that? >> One of the kind of shifts I've need to make because I mean we're now all over the globe. We've got people across Europe and Latin America and Central Europe. It is a little different now, but especially in the early test of days, it was entirely in Taipei. Taiwanese people, they work hard. They know their

stuff. They come in sharp, but it's tough to get that that push back, that confrontation. My leadership team is quite good at it, but generally speaking, when the boss has been in the office, nobody's going to push back too much or say this or that. Over years, we've encouraged it and it's gotten a lot better. But that was always the challenge. I would set things out or when we talk strategically, you get nods and then people go off and work. Sometimes you want your ideas to be checked or filtered or if you had more information maybe you would think of it differently. So I was

always looking for people that understand this more strategically. And then I throughout the years there was a couple times they're on projects or in full-time roles we hired in people with the exact opposite who would could kind of speak at that 60,000 foot level like you know abs you know tell you exactly what you wanted to hear. They understand what you're going for, plans were, but you know, the months go on and on and everybody in Taiwan is getting done and the big strategic talker has not delivered anything. Again, as you get older, all these cliches really ring true and talk is truly cheap, right? Lots

of people can talk. We now live in a culture where social media and podcasts or whatever, everybody has lots to say, right? The ability to speak and argue is valued so highly, but it's not actually that valuable in most organizations. Like you need a kind of tight team making the decisions and plotting the course and they want feedback and everything of course, but you don't need 5,000 decision makers. You need couple sharp people and mostly people executing. So there's that balance between kind of have somebody to get stuff done but kind of filters back and somebody that understands but can actually execute, right? So trying

to find or build those is always the magic. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the hardest pieces is all right, we want people that still get their hands dirty as well because they understand how things work but can also talk on a very high level. And one of the things that you just touched on is kind of those cultural differences right between Taipei, Philippines, Canada and many different nationalities within those places as well. One of the big things that I feel is true there, you tell me if I'm wrong, is kind of directness of people, right, in different cultures, like how willing or acceptable

or normal is it to push back on things? How do you deal with that push back or lack of push back? Do you act differently with different people from different cultures? Are you just you and that's what you get? So, how do you handle that? like you said, you just know who you're talking to. With people you know that are less likely to challenge or push back, you want to encourage and draw it out of them. And then for the people that have a thousand ideas or whatever, you you you fight back, right? Like, okay, if we're going to do that, then I'm going to

box, right? So, it really depends on who you're talking to. I think I've actually seen moments where my team sees me do that and they're like, oh, that's gez. Cuz normally I'm pretty nice with the type A guys. No one's getting into big arguments there, but every once in a while in a different context, I'll have to fight back a little. Just knowing the strengths and weaknesses of who you're working with. And that's why the sports team analogy kind of works so well. Your job as a leader is really to assemble the best people and they are smarter than you in many, many ways. And

you're kind of steering it. You're making sure they all stay together and stay incentivized and you point them in the right direction with things. But it does oddly get easier as you get stronger and stronger people. One of my favorite things to do is just whenever we're executing on something. I love it when I'm no longer involved. I love it when, you know, just at ice, our booth is buzzing, old tables are filled, people are selling this thing that we only came up with a couple years ago. They know it better than me. Sometimes they get lost in the product tiers, the specifics, they know

it all. Same with technical projects. The reports are flying out. All the details are there. I'm not in the details anymore. That's always my goal to not be in the critical path in any way, shape or form. >> I love that, man. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that handoff. So, I ran into Jenny in IGB Exec lounge in Barca and she was buzzing from having the having the booth there. You said something that I found really interesting. You said you were like lazy the last few trade shows, right, where your team ran the booth, you handled sales, did presentations without the reason why

I really love that is because for a founder, that's a huge handoff, right? It's your baby. Nobody's ever going to be as passionate about that thing as you are. Or maybe they are, I don't know. But walk me through how you actually structured that handoff. How do you get over yourself first of all of letting go of that? And then secondly, how do you get people to do it right in a way that you're also comfortable with as a founder of that business? The reality is sometimes it's a blur and you look back and you're just like, how did I get here? Right? Like all

the thousand little baby steps accumulate. One strength I think I've always had is like to hand off. The goal is to make yourself not essential to whatever role you have. How do you ever get promoted if they absolutely need you to do the thing that you do, right? And how do you go from the founder and CEO of a company to just the owner that kicks back? You're always going to need to be replacing yourself in some capacity. My strength is in certain things. I'm I am happy to get my hands dirty. When we started doing technical projects years ago, I was researching, putting it

together. I have a technical background. I mean, I'd be lost these days, but you know, once upon a time, the first guy we hired put everything on a whiteboard, tiny meeting room, and started downloading it to him. So, I'm happy to get my hands dirty, but I know that I'm a generalist, not the best anything. I know a little bit about marketing and even a little bit about accounting and finance from doing an MBA, but I'm weak at all of them. Like, there there's going to be an intermediate person or higher is going to be a better subject matter expert in almost anything than me. If

I can get the ball rolling and get the right person and hand it off and then see that they're getting traction, then great. If you want to talk about more more books, kind of lean startup, you know, you're going through these loops. You this idea, you want to see if it's executed. If it's executed, this thing should change. You kind have this hypothesis, you test it, and you just go through those loops over and over again. The things that work, you dump fuel on those fires. And the things that don't work, you have to be quite aggressive to snuff them out. If you're not getting

the results, you have to deal with it. You can't just be pock committed, right? Recently, we brought somebody on who said to me, I love working with founders because founders, they're not attached to anything personally. I think in the corporate world, there's a lot of politics. I put my name on this so it can't fail. We got to go through. But founders, it just they'll have this idea and it'll be them that was pitching it and you know, I'll throw it in the trash can a couple months later. That didn't work. New thing, right? So, it's that lack of attachment to any idea. happy to

be wrong because you just know you're going through the loop, right? Throw it out, try it again. Eventually, I'll be right and we'll double down on that. So, I think you just do that a whole bunch of times and try people out. When things work, you invest in them. When things don't work, don't. I mean, it makes it makes it sound simple, but that's fundamentally how you get there, I think. Yeah. And I think the other thing which is also going to be true for you is that because you're a generalist and prudently honest about yourself, you're able to connect a lot of dots, right? you

see connections that other people in your organization won't see because you know a little bit of everything rather than being super specialized in one area. I think that is a true unique um superpower specifically for founders and yeah it's important because then you can start those fires and see what's going to what's going to take off >> and you need to know your weak spots too and compensate for them. But I think in any industry you either want to be quite wide or quite deep. If you're in between, you're not going to be super helpful, right? I mean, you get to a point in your

career where if you don't understand the basics about accounting, you are toast. Even if you're great at sales, operations, whatever, if you don't understand how this all eventually gets broken down into the one thing you can compare from any business to any business, the only standardized part of the business, you're toast, right? So, you need to have some understanding of every little part if you're going to run the whole org. I think >> yeah, mentor of mine called it T-shaped knowledge. So T t T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T

T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T-shaped bar, right? It's like the T is very you've got wide knowledge on many different areas and then you've got one bar going downwards which is your deep knowledge about subject matter. I think that's quite interesting visualization and it makes sense. So last thing I wanted to talk about is kind of your the tech to sales thing. As a founder, people often feel that a lot of it needs to be sales. You said you're not super salesy extroverts, right? which is great, but you're CEO of a of a

salesdriven business, right? Tell me about the first time you tried to sell Tesla and it went badly. I'd love to hear that. How did that work out? >> Boy, I mean, so much of it goes badly in the early days. I don't know if I have one particular story. I mean, first of all, you think anybody that'll talk to you as a potential lead that they may not be actually qualified for they don't have the problem or whatever, right? Second, you have kind of the easy comparisons for something like Tesla. I can go on Fiverr and get a tester for 50 bucks. It's like you

absolutely can't. And if you're looking to only do one test, please do that. You are talking to the wrong guys, right? I think when you first start selling something, again, those loops, you haven't been through them. So, even if you come nice and prepped and you know your product, you will get caught flatfooted because you just haven't heard that one before. And unless you're an absolute genius, you can't come up with a good response on the fly. got to think of it, right? Um, and this is something that I'm not I like having everything organized and structured. I'm not somebody that can smooth talk my

way out of those type of situations. So, there was plenty of those in the early days, but you just do it enough times and you talk to enough people, take enough jotss, and eventually something comes through. So, in the early days, we didn't quite know where or what our profile was. We spoke to a lot of white label and affiliate groups and small people and we spoke to them because they know the problems better than anybody else. They drive a bunch of traffic to an operator. It doesn't convert or certain things in the reg process kill them. They don't get their share of the revenue. Everything

dies. Affiliates also typically don't have the most giant unless they're huge companies. They're used to doing everything on a share. Investment to them means investment in web and SEO stuff which is not cheap but it's also not that expensive. So to turn around and say here's an enterprise IT contract for a bunch of testing packages. It's way out of their league, right? They think I'm going to do business for a couple hundred and it's like my business will never work if I'm doing that. So yeah, in those early days you just you got to go through that loop lots and lots of times. What are

your actual problems? What are your objections? Mr. D kind of my is ready or I'm ready to paint a picture. And with time, you also just learn to spot who's interested, who's not, who's even in your wheelhouse to begin with. And it becomes oddly satisfying when you can say, "Oh, yeah, this isn't the fit." Right? Politely, but you just know this isn't we're not what you're doing and what I'm doing. There's not a match here. Maybe, you know, best of luck. Keep in touch, etc. It gets easier. In those early days, you just don't know. You're in a dark room kind of fumbling for the

light switch. >> Yeah. Love it. Uh very last thing like when we talk about people that inspired you know me people often mention I don't know like Zuckerberg or Bezos as business inspiration but you mentioned a guy who inherited regional wrestling turned it into global entertainment Vince McMahon. Why is that? >> I'll put the disclaimer on him if he's not a very nice guy and all sorts of terrible accusations against him. So, I don't condone anything Vince McMahon does with personal life and doesn't sound like a very nice guy. But what I liked about his story was wrestling. It had this kind of gentleman's understanding

where it was territorial in the US and there was this group in the Northeast and this group in the southwest and they all kind of had their parameters and nobody stepped out of line. He came from a wrestling family. He inherited it from his dad who I think was in the Carolinas and he was the first one to say and think that I could make this bigger, I could do this better, I could gobble up this whole thing. He chased the TV contracts and he chased all the best talent from all the regional spots. Everybody in the industry hated him and like I don't know

if I could even be that type of person. He must have been despised getting death threats left, right, and center because he took the whole model for an industry and just said, "No, we're going to do it this way." And within a decade, by the time they were doing Wrestlemania and pay-per-views and they had the TV contracts, the regional wrestling had turned from the actual pro circuit into the minor leagues cuz everybody wanted to go to the WWF where contracts were happening and where you get the exposure and where you could build your career, right? So, it's crazy to me that nothing really about the

macro changed. Maybe cable TV, but it just took one guy to look at it all and have the ambition to piece it all together and just railroad on through. Right. So, I always found that to be a really interesting story. And to this day, I mean, it's merged with the C and it's still growing. Now, they're going after international stuff. So, it's a very it's a very, very strange business. I'm kind of fascinated by it. I can't watch it anymore. It's just too childish. Having grown up with Steve Austin and everything, there's always a certain attraction to what is going on with the company. Like

what a strange industry, right? >> Yeah. Love it. Kyle, thank you so much for your time today. Really love your openness and honesty and sharing all your experience with us. >> It was great to do it. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining me on the i Gaming Leader podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, head over to iamingleer.com for more conversations and insights. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. I'm your host, Leo Judkins, and I hope to see you next week.

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