Robert Lenzhofer: From Burnout to Unstoppable Entrepreneurship: Lessons in Leadership and forging your own path with Robert Lenzhofer

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Certainly I had burnout and this is also when I learn burnout is not because you work a lot but because there's too many things in your life that are out of your control the organization should be like a brain and the communication should be an automatic documentation that the brain learns and keeps information not loses it basically after a few months it's not the hours a little bit I'm burning out I work so much no like working 12 hours is fine if it flows it's fine but you can have burnout if you work two hours per day basically you learn the most when you lose

really yeah um when you're winning you hardly learned welcome to the igaming leader podcast where we uncover The Human Side of some of the most inspirational leaders in our industry I'm your host Leo Judkins and as an exi gaming director turn performance coach I've worked with over 200 leaders from companies like entain 365 floter and many more to help them build the habits to achieve sustainable high performance in these episodes we share exactly what it takes for you to achieve the same so with that being said let's dive in Robert welcome to the I gaming leader super excited to have you here we uh we

were talking in uh Lisbon and I I been so looking forward to talking to you on this show because there's a few things that you said that really resonated with me and I'd love to share that with the audience so first of all welcome to the welcome to the podcast thank you for having me Robert you've been in you've been in gaming for 20 years starting at bwing in 2001 I think right before that Snoop I believe but what Drew you in the into the industry initially and and and also what kind of kept you excited to stay in there what hooked you to stay

inside of it I was interested in computers when I was six uh basically and uh computers when you're a child and sixy old or 10 year old or 14y old is a lot about games but I also got interested in like fixing computers and playing with them and then you discover programming languages simple ones in the beginning obviously with a c64 and then it gets more interesting with a BC and I started developing certain you know useless or useful applications and also some really simple games as well and so was always on computers and when I finished school in 96 there was just a year

when the internet was basically well in the life I think especially with the HBS protocol being released in 95 or so 96 that's also when the first online casinos came out but I didn't know much about them back then I was basically a software developer back then and applied for jobs in Vienna so I lived most of my life in Vienna now I live in Germany and it was around 99 2000 when I was working for a company called active agent in Vienna which was bought by goldb media I think gold media still exists and it had the same investors as B win in Vienna

and we got as a team five of us we got head hunted to join Bon win in Vienna and B wi was quite interesting because it was basically the only one which properly survived the Doom bubble in Vienna all of them all of the rest basically I think nobody really survived in any meaningful way let's say and so it was kind of the D Tech story you know the the sale or the merger with GBC was the biggest technology exit in Austria by far over a billion and for a long while I think only recently this was beat so it was quite the success story

and and I was in tech when I joined B Min it was quite back then in 206 branded to be when um I I was in essence a technical product manager so I didn't code anymore I was just just a product manager Technic product manager and back then I didn't feel I'm part of the industry I was sitting with my team with some developers I didn't know nothing about sports betting like marketing or branding or Affiliates or anything so didn't although I worked inside an online gambling company I was quite removed from the industry per se so I quite liked the techn part and the

development of Technical Solutions for the ey gaming Industries so to say and to really cut the story short because that's sort of the arch for today where I am today is that still what I do today just the capacity changes the product changes and now you know it's a B2B company Iran which does technical products for the igaming industry in essence so when you kind of realized that you were in ging right what uh what excited you about it what was what was the thing that made you stay some really obvious things meaning I understand it once in a while you look outside and say

should I change Industries and obviously many people have this as well in the industry this question am I contributing positively to this world basically and something really important and there you most people who are educated in Industry notice is that when you look at all the various sort of the UK prevailance study and so on there isn't really a direct correlation between more marketing and more addiction let's say so and that was really important for me to understand and really feel and it was not just the UK study but many others also at B Min we did a study with the Harvard Medical division of

addiction some head of the research team was in Vienna it's common knowledge that there is a certain addiction rate but it's relatively stable and relatively independent there short-term bumps but relatively independent of that so at least I knew I'm not causing additional harm by having better products so that that caused me to to stay and say well if that's true that's what I believe is true then it's like an entertainment industry and entertainment is a really important part of life and it's a really important component and when you group two sort of Industries together the things you don't need the things you need the things

you need are food the things you don't need is a lot yeah is video games is movies is online gambling is certain Sports you don't need yeah so it's a huge huge sector and the service sector and going out generally speaking you don't need to go out in the restaurant you can cook at home so if you include all of that things you don't need and things you need that the things you don't need are actually the larger portion in life that what actually makes life creative and worth living so that's soul searching over over two decades of course every once in a while and

obviously when you stay for a few years you develop friendships and it feels quite warm and homely it feels like it's more than industry for me friendships have been developed and also I think it's technically interesting because the IG industry Technic is always a little bit behind it's never fullon Cutting Edge yeah like latest tech is closing in but uh because there's certain dominant players who basically play the cash game like big operators raising lots of money and then obviously you solve everything with money so you never take care of Technology properly means there's a gap of a good technology leader and you know creating

lean and mean and Cutting Edge Technology Solutions um for the market and it's arguably a little bit easier to do that in this market then let's say moving to Silicon Valley and trying to compete with the top guys there and you can have meaning full impact so there's there's lots of room to build things because there's lots of gaps and you don't need to be the first one ever to use a technology you can explore Deep dive and really really get to know technology part while the bigger operators and bigger sort of tankers let's say maneuver slower and um yeah that's that's why I think

it's it's it's it's fun and it's impactful technology wise yeah I another that metaphor that you was starting there tanker versus speed bu I want to take you back to when you were at better win or be win think me back through those early days and like how you progressed through your career and some of the biggest challenges were as you were progressing through roles and and you know and moving with the speed of speed of sports betting I suppose in honesty I didn't really progressed much so there was also an interesting learning when I started there were around 30 50 people or so when

I left if you include GBC there were 6,000 people or so or 5,000 people and I didn't really progress actually well I was sort of moved slightly sideways slightly up but the projects were interesting and I think I just didn't do well in larger organizations large I mean like really large and really pyramid organizations there was an incentive a lot and I I guess that's true in in many of these organizations there's an incentive to be a head of or a leader because then you earn more and then you get more responsibility then you lead more people and if if this is not managed well

in then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy there were key people who had a lot of power and they couldn't not abuse but heavily used their power to just hire more people and the more people they had the harder they became to replace basically and I never played this game I was focused on building the you know fulfilling the next project so it was never my career path and that was important learning because when I came out of Bon BN I said well I need small company I need impactful that doesn't mean a big company can't act like a good startup is good management philosophies that

reinforce that and sort of make it happen that you're not drowned by the typical pitfalls of a tanker but I wanted small and from when I left from there I did some Consulting I tried to create my own company in 201 10 11 couldn't raise investment but worked in with a small startup in Berlin and that was a lot of fun and it was quite impactful because your work had immediate impact and got life really quickly and that's a lot of fun and the same with this company now we started with six people really we're 12 now and it's highly impactful because everyone can contribute

heavily the learnings I have taken I can take positively into the future from B Min especially back then to make sure when we we grow further maybe that I hopefully have the right answers to not have a similar challenge or create an environment for people to grow easily who are not necessarily the one who want to lead large teams but still want to be impactful I'd actually like to dive into that because that's such a important powerful and and really uh honest observation of yourself because I think many people feel that that is the only path right the only path ised to actually move up

get more responsibility and then they find themselves there not really sure how to lead teams they start to build a little bit of an Empire then they be perhaps become a bit of a micromanager team disengages and you have a really toxic organization or a really toxic department and it's actually very powerful that you've seen that very early on that that's just a not your kind of thing to do you don't that wasn't your path and B even more importantly you decided to take a different path and go into entrepreneurship very early so what's the moment when you realize that that normal past that most

people think they have to go on wasn't your path certainly when I ended up in hospital at the last year when I was it but me I had major stomach ache and went to the hospital and they said nothing is wrong and they asked me do I have stress I'm like I'm not working a lot and the guy said do you have stress I said I'm not working a lot but so I didn't understand the question back then because certainly I had burnout and this is also when I learn burnout is not because you work a lot but because there's too many things in your

life that are out of your control and that certainly happens in these organizations and so that's when I realized po I had to get back into control and do things where I can control things so that's where I certainly learned it tell me a little bit more about that Robert if you don't mind about burnout because it's something that like I've I've had two burnouts as well and I think it's kind of easier to recognize once you've had it because you kind of see the symptoms coming right it of often comes from things like you said it's not necessarily the hours but perhaps the weight

of those hours right so if if you don't have value really work anymore or uh you have too many things like you said out of your control but how did that happen for you was like the moment all of a sudden that that happen obviously it's gradually over time but it was a moment and then major stomach a couldn't eat properly literally could only eat bananas and like they're quite so in Austria for two weeks this only thing I could eat like was crazy and I went to the doctor again for a checkup and I said still nothing it's all fine it's probably stress or

burnout and your system is reacting and it was basically it's it's really interesting you can recognize it easily very easily if if you have done it before if you had it before but that I heard that statement later on a few years later that it's about the things you can't control and the way you down basically so it's not the hours little I'm burning out I work so much no no no like working 12 hours is fine if it flows or working 6 hours is fine but you can have burnout if you work two hours per day basically because don't work at all right yeah

yeah and um and um a friend of mine once said this you can be quite lazy although we work many hours and I found that really profound because there's a lot of people who work a lot of hours but then you look at the output and what I realized as well in this last year at bmin my output was productively zero I worked a lot but productively I didn't ship a product that had to do obviously with the TR structure of the project that had to do also with organizational changes were there was layers of layers of layers of non-control basically yeah there's a merch

looming there was the there this other product integration was there and you're like okay what do I do yeah I mean there's no harm in trying to be good and trying to be nice but you you come first is is is an important learning it's this metaphor I really really like what do you do in an emergency situation in a plane you put it on yourself first the oxygen and then you help other people but burn is typically you don't help yourself first you still try to help other people and everything is out of your control and whether you work 12 hours or two hours

it doesn't matter you feel the same and that's sort of I could indicator for somebody to realize work L hours if you still feel the same at least one point on the check is that that you're close there love it thank you very much for sharing that the uh what it also kind of ties into this idea of an oil tank right and at sometimes as we we worked many hours like you said but our productivity is is close to zero because productivity equals the actual outputs that you have right the results that you've achieved and sometimes those results are just or the output slowed

down because of the organizational complexities and I suppose because there's just too many layers or there's too many decision makers has it frustrated you for a long time right that I'm assuming that's kind of what leted you to start up your business in 2010 tell me a little bit more about that I think I summed this up a few times recently for me that's my personal path I mean everyone has their own sort of feelings about and your data points are low you know you have two data points in life and they they guide you yeah don't take too much advice from people because you

have your own data points today I feel it less I think but I always felt I'm a really good number two I'm just looking for good number one and I never found one really yeah found one maybe for a short period of time I had B in actually but sort of because waves re organizations swamped it but never really found a good number one to work for and then I'm like okay [ __ ] I have to create my my I have to create my own workplace so the foundation of this company is not over 50% but to a certain large percentage was well I

need to create my own workplace because otherwise I freak out at some point I mean you can do that as well if you are if you know yourself well if you have good LIF experiences you can do that in organization too but yeah that's the way that's the path I've chosen to create my own workplace and that's sort of part of the reason to found this company hey and and being here now Robert what are some of the kind of the lessons that you've taken with you from being in more of a corporate environment or working for somebody else what are some of the lessons

that you've took taken from that and maybe adjusted or incremented in in your business today you learned the most when you lose really yeah um when you're winning you hardly learn so I couldn't say I'm taking a lot of wins or positives from there but equally the the losses are interesting because you realize how like without bad intent it sort of went to a path I think many people didn't want it to go I mean if you look at the be the off is now I think 99% of people left so it also shows that like many people weren't happy and many people left like

after GBC and left so so the the learning is really to be careful that it doesn't happen and and how I don't think I have the answers really I don't want to at least I don't want to claim I have them I have some ideas so there's this this eight nine 10 years I've been at B in the last 10 years where I've been mostly with smaller companies and smaller companies also means you educate yourself a little bit you're more outside you're more talking to people I moved to Berlin when the whole startup scene happened in Berlin and to try to raise some Capital so

you learn about term sheets you learn about Investments you learn about like all of these things and and also you get in touch like through either social media or directly through certain leaders in in this sort of Silicon Valley or like tech industry as well how teams are managed and then you read certain books and over the years you sort of create almost a new picture and I mean there's a few busws out there which I think still hold true like this old passsword from Jeff Bezos these pizza teams yeah quite important that you make sure teams are never larger than that that you can

still feed one team with a pizza let's say that was the term yeah and that resonates with me and we talk about this internally now that we have growing not crazy but we're growing and so there's a path that we will eventually have more people and sort of the way we want to solve this is to not have this pyramid as well that we built a functional Island strategy we have two products now maybe at some point it will be completely separated connected via processes and apis but then they are their Islands in their own right let's say we are also thinking of having more

Studios internal Studios so they can also be their own islands and when they grow to 10 people that's fine you know but suddenly you can have an organization of 5050 people and it won't feel heavy and large and politically basically I see other operators also having is that you fall into the trap to believe your intuition how organizations should be run what happened back then a lot was that you had a CM Department let's say and the intuition tells you well we have one cm Department one voice to the customer all products goes through one cm department and the consequence and sort of it's a

question of like you have to choose where you want your [ __ ] basically what do you want to be [ __ ] yeah and that when you make the choice you're going to be [ __ ] in product you know you're not going to be precise in product you're going to be good in the single voice to the customer but you're going to be [ __ ] in product and this was changed later that each vertically had the own sort of unit and Island to communicate correctly to the customer maybe it wasn't perfectly the same English or the same German yeah maybe the same

brand big but it was objectively better and I think that's what a lot of companies still do to Bron to say so this this is one quick break here if you're ahead of director VP or executive in I gaming who's successful at work but is finding it hard to achieve balance in life and switch off from work then I've got something that's going to help on the third of February we are launching the igaming leader reset a six- week coaching program in which I will personally work with 15 I gaming leaders to build habits for sustainable high performance all in just 20 minutes a day

it's limited to only 15 leaders so if that's something that you want to know a little bit more about head over to igaming leer.com and I hope to see you there now let's get back to our conversation so that's this is for me 99% of the books you read are evolutionary they like are interesting insightful very few books are like eye opener who like explained the world in a really different way to you and one of those books was I read long time ago I keep reading it every 3 years it's called lean Thinking by James P wck and second auor it's really interesting it's

old and it was basically about the Toyota production system and this is highly interesting for any Tech leader as well because this is where Kang comes from uh from the Japanese Toyota production system this is where Cam boards come from it's the Japanese term as the story goes in car manufacturing the Toyota production system took over the leaders in Toyota became consultant and traveled all over the world one famous example is Porsche who got really quite successful it swept basically all auto Manu manufacturing because all of them did it slightly by their in intuition it was all about big scale big volumes everything has to

be highly efficiently per each station has to do a highly specialized task and then it's handed over to the next station only to realize it builds up shelf stor storage space which needs space which creates a 4y products which creates delays but one example do you know how long it takes to produce one can of Coke tell me I'm not sure no no idea a to a total of 9 to 12 months wa if you include the whole if you include the whole value chain from basically from getting the raw materials for the can you know take making the can then it's stored for three

months somewh it's waiting so a lot of this is also sort of a Japanese term called muda waste so the way to look at good flow in a company is to look at your product basically becomes eyes and sees how long it's waiting and how long it takes that the low reaches from the beginning to the end basically and and the more waste m is reduced the the more flow you have in the company that's really important because then you have quicker feedback loops your products come to Market quicker you have less storage space it's also with digital products when you develop a software and

it's been ready but it's tested 3 months later almost always you have to go back and change things because you have new information after three month or something has changed on the production environment or an infrastructure so to optimize flow reduce waste things are not waiting and things can be done quickly one after another basically so you need to really almost fight against intuition at objec if you look at output and flow hey and how do you apply that in your business Robert like what are some examples of where you've maybe identify wage optimized it maybe use some I don't know some non-typical approaches to

uh increasing efficiency of flow in your business one of the things which was learned in the Toyota production system and it's like it applies everywhere is your intuition tells you well you have like five tasks to complete a certain element of a software of a car well clearly I have to split up between five people clearly that's what your inition tells you because you have Specialists they're the experts and they that's what they have to do but what happens suddenly you build silos things have to go from one person to the next yes like the one person can do the task quicker than anybody else

but it has to wait for the next person it piles up basically as well then you have communication issues then the flow is reduced so one example for instance we have deliberately chosen is we we build games for the web and the technology in the web predominantly is Javascript or typescript and games have a front and the back end and and you are much better advised to optimize flow if one person is able to do the back end and the front in one person because then not two people have to communicate there is no waiting time there is no scheduling of backend and front end

and that's why technology decisions are sometimes really important we chose no CHS typescript in the back as well so a game developer has the chance of building a game end to end I've seen it in the previous company R we had Java on the back end then one developer was doing the Java back end the other one was doing the front end and it created scheduling the back end was ready but the front end wasn't and the front end guy was waiting but the back end was delayed the typical things and this is one one key example we have chosen deliberately to optimize for flow

one of the things that I highly interested in when you mentioned it is asynchronous meetings and and optimizing especially optimizing time you know in in game we obviously we work across multiple territories often most people working from home there are diff we are on different schedules and one of the most inefficient things I see is is meetings right meetings are so inefficient because they're often ill-prepared they become a coffee chats they are they have lack outcome they are not really synchronized with what the ideal time is for me they disrupt me from my you know day-to-day schedule so you've chosen to take an asynchronous approach

to meetings which I think is brilliant so can you explain us a little bit more about that how you do that how it works and why it's so important for you first of all it's not that we invented this or that we are novel we just copied other crazy ones who are very successful there's specifically one company out there called gitlab and GitHub there are the two sort of companies for software code repository and and deployments and so on and gitlab was at the time at least when we looked four years ago the largest remote only company and they did something really interesting they published

a handbook it's basically about how asynchronic happens and works so we simply copied a lot from there or let's say we were inspired by a lot of the principles and we also had it easy because we started as a new company and we talked about this and we started like this switching an existing company to fully remote or asyn I I don't know if it's it's hard because it also depends on the personality of people but what does async mean async isn't the religion meaning we don't only do async but we lean into async so we try that that every sort of first step is

long form considered text and what I always say a lot is tools incentivize certain behaviors for instance what is syc syc is a call but also chatting because chatting is like a conveyor belt and if you jump in 3 minutes to late to the conversation you you're the idiot basically and then I'm like oh this guy we already discussed this scroll up basically but it's also synchronous you have to be there at the same time simple small things incentivized Behavior if you have slack for instance where you have a small box and you know people say Hi how are you enter what's going on I

have this question enter and it's that behavior is highly incentivized with this modifications and the small box but we use a different tool where simply it's focused less around chat more around messages and async messages which means it's just a large input box it's a simple ux UI change but that also tells you what to do you should write up more because you have more space it's a subtle thing but that that what it does into to you in your brain and also notifications are light they are turned off for messages they're turned on if you're chatting and you're not immediately messaged with all these

messages basically just one example we have this feature called gamble games in in in slots it's like when you win you can 50/50 gamble or Lea Gamble and so on it's a it's a long long threat but this this long considered messages and screenshots and what's really beautiful about this thre is we started it three years ago and it's still ongoing and so you start a you know start a conversation you put the screenshot on there because it's not a chat people don't instantly answer like 24 hours later the first person answers because the person slept over it and thought about it and checked some

screenshot post an answer then this goes on for like a week so that is slower than syc but it's typically faster at the end of the month because you not constantly in meetings you don't have to wait for the next meeting you can think about it and participate in this threat and also what happened as well with this particular project we sort of didn't pursue it for a while for three month and then we picked it up again it takes you 12 minutes 40 minutes to read the threat you up to date on two things and that's really vital compared to most think organizations you're

not only up to date on the outcome but also how you arrive there how many meetings do exist in an organization jump simply to realize why did we do what we did the organization should be like a brain and the communication should be an automatic documentation that the brain learns and keeps information not loses it basically after a few months and that's so powerful because we can come back and like oh how how do we do this then people read through the chat and be like ah okay that's why we did it oh fine we can close the meeting makes a lot sense I think

the other unseen benefits of it that uh we haven't discussed here yet but I think is so powerful is with these instant communication tools even with email that often people use as an instant communication tool because they're constantly checking it instantly buying it disrupts you from your flow right you might be working on something and you get interrupted by these notifications you're distracted you go into that thing it takes you time to go back to the thing that wasn't work to you before and that is all prevented by AC GIS work makes their organization highly efficient if you're an organization and you have meeting free

Thursdays or something it's a Band-Aid you have a problem you haven't solved it and it's not helping it's just it's weird when you have meetings all day and sudden you have no meetings it also you can't it's hard to get into the zone of like oh I'm going to do productive Thursday because that's really what it is it's not it's not meeting free Thursday it's productive Thursday um so it's it's it's hard yeah um it's a Band-Aid and it's not working I think I want to ask one last question which is from your 20 years in gaming what's what's one piece of advice that you

would give someone that perhaps is kind of moving through their career struggling with s juggling all these balls and and feeling the pressure and you know how can they best navigate their career and make progress in a way that is sustainable I think first of all an anti sort of advice don't listen to advice too much because there's too much advice out there and and 95% is not for you you have to find your own path don't listen to me um but so but basically try to find a correct view of the world there's industry media there's regular media there's like your network inside the

company try to get more and try to find your own path and find your own correct view of the world because a lot of [ __ ] out there is confusing as [ __ ] um so you you just don't listen to me don't listen to anyone really because often times it's just it's just too tempting to U reinforce your own bias you already have yeah we know the social media site is how it works yeah um so maybe some light piece of advice Tred to get a broad range of advice from vastly different people in vastly different audiences should be social media should be

conferences but don't listen to one person or two person only I think thank you very much Rob ni talking to you and thank you very much for joining thank you thank you for the time thank you for joining me on the igaming leader podcast if you enjoyed today's episode head over to igaming leer.com for more conversations and insights don't forget to subscribe to this podcast I'm your host Leo Judkins and hope to see you next week

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