Sidharth Swarup: Running on Eight Treadmills

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Sid: First meeting is with IGT, and they cancel the contract. Second meeting, WMS cancels the contract.

Leo: No. 100% of revenue.

Sid: It's a knockout punch. You're on your knees. You just gotta find a way to get back up. We started this business in 2000 with $1,000 investment. We've never put a penny more in. We've never borrowed money. We've never diluted equity. 2014 we made more money than all the 14 years before that combined.

Leo: Those eight treadmills that you're talking about. For you that led to a crash, right?

Sid: I reached out to this friend of mine, it's like, "Listen, I don't know what to do. I need help. What do I do?" And he was shocked. He's like, "What are you talking about? You look like the most sorted guy." None of that is real. It's just masks and masks and masks. I'm just dead inside.

Leo: You told me this story that literally gave me goosebumps.

Sid: They are heroes in their communities. They tell us the other kids have their posters up on the walls. They're a source of serious inspiration of what you can pull off. Now they have an opportunity to move generations out of the streets.

Leo: Why is that important for you to do? Why does it matter to you personally?

Sid: The most selfish thing you can do as a human being is to be kind, compassionate, and generous. Because it comes back to you a hundredfold in terms of joy. That's invaluable. I'm still running on eight different treadmills as fast as I can, even faster than before, but it's a very different fuel. It's not toxic fuel anymore.

Leo: Hey, welcome to the iGaming Leader Podcast. I'm your host, Leo Judkins, founder of iGaming Leader Mastermind. And on this show, I sit down with some of the most inspirational and forward-thinking leaders in our industry, diving into the real challenges, high stakes decisions and lessons that shape our industry. If you are a VP, Director or an Executive in iGaming, 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 iGaming operators worldwide, Sumsub helps onboard players quickly, stay compliant and prevent fraud, all without slowing growth. More information in the description.

Leo: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The iGaming Leader Podcast. I am here with Sidharth, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ingenuity, global games development, RGS, and compliance service provider. TEDx speaker outside of the business as well — we were just talking about that before the recording — but also a dad, avid reader, loves playing board games, really focused on his health. Today we're gonna talk about his leadership journey. Sid, welcome to the podcast.

Sid: Thank you, Leo. Delighted to be here.

Leo: Really great having you. Like we just talked about, first podcast. Can't believe it, man. So many people know you and this is the first time you're on a podcast. So I'm glad you're here. I'm gonna start with a really broad question. You've been in the game for a long time. When you go back all those years, maybe to when you were 18, what did you believe success would look like?

Sid: Okay, let me start with where I was at that time. I came from a little town, which is a couple of hundred miles from Delhi, and because there were no schools there, we all ended up in boarding school, which is a bit of a little bubble with 500 kids, and that's where I was for 10 years. And all the holidays were at home in my hometown or in the hill station where we had a house. So I lived in a very closed bubble to a point, Leo, where I remember once my parents had sent the car to pick me up from school, I must've been about 14 years old, and there was a business magazine in the car with the list of the 100 richest families in India. I opened that magazine knowing that I must be number one on that list. My family has got to be the richest. And I open that magazine, I go through number one, number two, number three, I go through the whole list, and we are not there. The only thing in my mind is there must be a mistake, because we've got to be the richest family in the world. Fast-forward a couple of years, 18 years old, we moved to Delhi. I'm sitting with my dad, and he's telling me the story that in that same year when I was 14 years old, we just moved to a new house and summer was coming, and we had to buy a refrigerator and an air conditioner, and we were short of $100. And that was the reality. So when I was 18 years old, it was really confusing, because I'd lived in this little bubble where I thought I had everything, so there was no desire for anything more. No ambition. I didn't know what success looked like. There was nothing to think about those things. It was just like a clean slate.

Leo: It's weird, the gap between reality and expectation. Do you remember that moment when you were going through that list, when you felt so confused?

Sid: I will never forget that. It just didn't make sense to me. That was such a long time ago, and I remember that vividly — that magazine in my hand, what car I was in, where I was, what was happening outside — because it was a very emotional moment for me. Something is off, you know?

Leo: How has that shaped you, you think? That specific moment.

Sid: Two things. They're both interrelated, but they're both opposite sides of the same coin. I grew up in a very happy family with a lot of love, which is why I guess I felt like the richest man in the world. And on the other side, what happened was I ended up going to boarding school at a very young age, at the age of eight. And now everybody has their own experiences, but my understanding now of that period in my life, which has taken me many years to understand, is that when I was dropped off to school at that age, you're going from this caring, loving environment at home to going to live with strangers, who become friends later on, in the care of adults who don't really care about you. It's their job. They're being paid to do it. So it's literally going from this loving, caring environment to a very hostile environment, and as a child at that age, you can't understand what it is, so it's abandonment. Then the parents come and meet you, and then they drop you back there. The holidays end, you go back there. And over years and years of going through that, sense of self literally disappears, because you think you're not worthy of being loved, because of which you are there, so you start feeling like a nobody. So when I hit 18, on one side you believe you're the richest in the world, and on the other side, you individually, personally feel like you're a nobody. You're now out there in the world to show the world that, okay, I am someone. And that is very confusing and conflicting.

Leo: It's the inner child work, right? And I know you've done so much work on that over the last few years as well. One of the things that you said is that you were fueled by showing the world you weren't a nobody. Is that what you're talking about here?

Sid: That is what fueled me for a very long time, till literally 2019. And that's going back to '98, I guess. So it is a long period that I ran on that fuel: that I'm gonna show the world I'm an amazing CEO. I'm a very successful businessman. I've got exceptional health. I'm like a rock star. I'm the perfect husband. I'm the perfect father. I'm the perfect son. And the list goes on and on. So you're running on eight different treadmills at the same time, and the crazy thing about that is that you've got this ideal-self picture of yourself in the future of what you wanna look like, and you're comparing yourself with that person. And any day you're not living up to it, you're miserable. It doesn't matter how many good things are happening in your life. And the second thing is the harder you try all these things, the worse you get. I've been married 26 years. She's still with me. She never left me. I don't think I would've been the nicest person when I was in that state. I couldn't have been the nicest brother, couldn't have been the nicest boss. Because you're just running on toxic fuels, and it's just one agenda: to show everybody how good you are.

Leo: Last week when we had Alex Tomich in the mastermind, just hearing him talk about that — he called it a dark passenger from Dexter, which I loved. Such a great example. Those eight treadmills, Sid, that you're talking about — for you, that led to a crash, right? What did that look like? How did that build up, and what was the day like that you realised, "Oh my God, it's all gone"?

Sid: What that led me to was pretty much burnout. Imagine you are your biggest bully and you're bullying yourself senseless morning to night. And eventually you end up in a place where you're just so bruised you can barely function. You don't wanna get out of bed. You don't wanna go to office. You don't wanna meet anybody. You're just tired all the time. You're pretty much in depression. And I remember that moment when I reached out to this friend of mine: "Listen, I don't know what to do. I need help. What do I do?" And he was shocked. He's like, "What are you talking about? You look like the most sorted guy." None of that is real. It's just masks and masks and masks, which is what the world sees, and I've become so good at holding those masks, but the amount of energy I'm burning to keep them up — I'm just dead inside. Then he said, "You know what? Time for you to get a coach." And I'm like, "What's a coach?" That's where the journey started. This is like 2019. And that's when I came into the world of actually getting help to help me figure a lot of this stuff out.

Leo: I'm always curious — I've gone through a similar journey with burnout and getting help, but also just thinking, "Ah, no, I'll sort this out myself." Was it like that for you before as well, where you thought, "I can figure this out myself. I don't need that help. I'm smart enough. I'm hardworking enough"?

Sid: Listen, I think it's the same stuff. We all believe very strongly in what we do, so we think we're absolutely right and we know it all. But I just think I'd got to a point where I knew now I need help, and to just be open to it and get it. And like he told me, which is really interesting: "Why does Federer need a coach? Who the hell are you?" Take a leap of faith, give it a shot, see where it goes.

Leo: Do you feel you needed that moment of breakdown as well? I always think about that — our biggest dips, our rock bottoms, they're actually often the fuel that we need to create the change that we want. Is that how you felt about that?

Sid: Again, it's all in hindsight, because at that moment it's very painful. You wanna get out of that pain. So now it's just more of me reflecting in hindsight what happened — a couple of things which happened simultaneously, Leo. Joseph Campbell spoke about The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is the hero's journey, which is what almost every story is about: you're at home in a community, you step out, you take on this uncomfortable challenge, you go through a lot of pain. As long as you stay put, eventually after tons of failures, help will come, or you'll get some wisdom which will help you solve that, and then you get back home victorious. So for me, I think I'd hit that point where every day you wanna just give up and run away, and every day is like, "Okay, just one more step, one more step." And then a couple of things happened simultaneously. One, I got COVID, and I got long COVID, which pretty much disabled me, and I couldn't function more than 10, 11 hours a day. It was severe fatigue, which meant most of what I did had to shut down anyway. Then I joined YPO, which is a peer-to-peer learning organisation, where you have these forums where eight people get together, and that's your close bond of brothers or friends, where you can be vulnerable and you can talk with each other. And third, I got coaches. So I literally got help on all fronts. And COVID was terrible, by the way. Nobody wants to get long COVID. But in hindsight, that's probably the best thing that could have happened, because I really needed to just shut down and restart. And then I got the help to help me rebuild myself back up. So all these things happened simultaneously, and then it was a journey of four, five years to get me past that phase.

Leo: Like a phoenix, man. I love it. Hey, so let's go back to Ingenuity. What was the original vision of the business? How did that all start, and when did you know it was actually working?

Sid: In 2000, I was working at Pepsi. I was working there for two years, and I finally moved up the chain from cleaning cupboards to actually doing some work which was productive, meaningful. And then this friend of mine — he was studying in the US, he was working at Deloitte then — and it's funny, I met him at the first party I went to at the age of 18 in Delhi. I gatecrashed his party, and we became friends. Then he reaches out and he's like, "Sid, let's do something important." I'm like, "What do you wanna do?" He's like, "I've got a damn good plan. I'm in the US, I'll sell. You're in India, you execute, and we figure out what it is as we go along." I said, "That's a fabulous plan. Let's start the business and let's get going." Fast-forward 11, 12 years. We were doing a lot of stuff like websites and application development, had a digital agency, and we'd stumbled into the world of gambling. We did a lot of things, and then we parted ways, because I wanted to just focus on one thing and he wanted to do a lot of other things. So in 2011 we sort of parted ways. I walked out with 17 people in the business. We had two customers, Leo — IGT and WMS at that time — and we thought we'll build a business back at the back of those two customers. In January, February that year, we move out, and then we go to G2E. I go with some of the people in my team who are still there with me. The first meeting is with IGT, and they cancel the contract. They'd been acquired.

Leo: Oh my God.

Sid: Second meeting, WMS cancels the contract.

Leo: No. 100% of revenue.

Sid: And we were like, "What the hell?" We were to build on that. We left the mothership. Now what? Kushpal, who's still one of the senior members of the team today, he's like, "Sid..." And I remember that moment. We were in this hotel in Planet Hollywood, overlooking the building up of the city center. It's a very vivid memory. And he puts his hand on my shoulder: "Sid, you figured it out before. We'll figure it out again. Sleep it over. In the morning, we go back into G2E and we're gonna try and get some business. Don't worry about it." And we went back in and we fought, Leo. And that first year itself, we broke even. And I don't know if I ever told you — we started this business in 2000 with $1,000 investment. We've never put a penny more in. We've never borrowed money. We've never diluted equity till today. And that 2012, we broke even. 2013, we were profitable. 2014, we made more money than all the 14 years before that combined. And that's when we knew we were on the right track.

Leo: That's such a moment — you lose essentially 100% of your revenue. You probably felt it was guaranteed as well: big customers, long-term relationships. How did you feel in the moment when you got told, in that first meeting and then that second meeting?

Sid: It's a knockout punch. You've literally been knocked out. You're on your knees. You just gotta find a way to get back up. Very, very hard.

Leo: And so how did that second day go at G2E then? Because there's being the victim or there's being the striker. So how was that second day?

Sid: You go back in, and the thing is you start trying, you start banging down doors again, you start talking to companies. But the crazy thing again, Leo, is what happens after that is a series of miracles. This business signs up with us, OpenBet. They pay us a massive deposit, and then they're like, "Oh, you know what? We've been acquired. Just keep the money." It pays for three months. Suddenly we get this check into our bank account of $100,000 from WMS for royalties, which we didn't even know existed in the contract. It pays for another five months. I mean, it's stuff like that which was happening for the next nine months, and we were like, "What?" It's like there's this guardian angel watching over you to keep you going and living another day. That's what kept us going. And then along the way, of course, we started to get more business, and then we got back in, gradually, slowly.

Leo: I think it's one of the things that a lot of people that haven't started a business don't realise: how much luck is involved. Of course, you create surface area for luck and you go after it, but oh my God, it's so true, isn't it? A couple of stars need to align. That's just the way it is.

Sid: A lot of stars. And 20 years on — how many times, had one star not aligned, we were out of business.

Leo: So tell me a little bit about your brother. Running a company with your brother — what breaks first when it goes wrong, and what is the advantage that maybe other people don't even see?

Sid: First of all, we've been working together in some capacity for 20 years, so we've had a long time to figure out how we work. The second challenge working with your brother — and which is actually with any partner — is we are both very headstrong people. I believe my way is the right way, my way of thinking is the right way, the way I solve problems is the right way, the way I operate is the right way, and you should be like me. And in reverse, he's doing the same thing. And that's where you lead to a lot of conflict. And luckily, we realised this, and again, we got coaches to help us first understand ourselves better, what makes us tick, then understand each other as well in joint sessions. How does he think? What drives him? What environment will he thrive in, and how will I thrive? And then actually taking that and structuring our work around those things. And the other one is obviously this absolute commitment that come what may, we are together. The idea is to remove a lot of insecurity, which creates the room for you to actually do what you're supposed to do. And I think that worked well. It's never been easy. We still fight, argue every day, but we know tomorrow we'll be back to solving the problems together.

Leo: That's super healthy, right? Actually, you need tension. If you don't fight and argue, you're just somewhere in the middle, and it actually doesn't create anything. So it's good to have that tension.

Sid: And you know, Leo, the other thing — if you make it work, again, it's a lot of work, but if you make it work, the result is... I mean, think about it. I've got a couple of months to go for my 50th birthday. I've got one white hair. It takes away a lot of stress. And it's not like with two people running the business — and he's my equal partner — that your pressures come down by half. They come down 10 times, because the pressure compounds. Which gives you, again, a lot more peace to focus on where your attention needs to go.

Leo: I wanna go to two years ago. You decided to scale and pivot all at once — two major turning points — and you chose to hire the right people and get out of the way. Walk me through why you felt that was the right choice at the time.

Sid: What we did at that time was we worked largely with a lot of suppliers — content suppliers — and we did parts of the game development process for them. And what we saw was an opportunity to go up the value chain and do the whole thing, which is build complete games for them and take on much more responsibility. And the truth is, we didn't know how to do it. And the second thing is that we'd been trying to scale the business — an expectation that we can go much faster, and we're not able to. Possibly we don't know what to do and how to do it, so let's get the right people who can help us figure that out. And in general, the management gospel always has been: get the right people and get the hell out of the way. And that's exactly what we did. And the thing is — a slight tweak to what we learned along the way. You need the right people. That's very important. But there's a difference between stepping on their toes and getting out of the way. What I mean by that is: don't step on the toes. They know what they're doing. They're the experts in their fields. Everybody wants autonomy to function. Everybody works in their own ways and solves problems in their own ways. Don't come in the way of that. But don't forget what your job is as a founder, which is two things. And getting out of the way sometimes means getting out of doing those two things, which are very important on the ground. One is ensuring that everybody always remembers the problem the business exists to solve, and all the attention is on solving that problem — not the other 90 that you end up solving which don't move the needle at all. And your job is to be in the weeds to make sure everybody's attention is constantly on that. And the second one is: fundamentally, when you found a business as a founder, you're creating something from nothing. Which means that it's your ability to do a lot with very, very little. Any fool can do little with a lot. When you get out of the way sometimes, the organisation forgets the difference between the two, and you suddenly start needing a lot more to do the same thing you could do with a lot less earlier on. You lose that entrepreneurial spirit in the business — and you have to ensure that never leaves the business. And anybody who comes in the way of these two things is the wrong fit.

Leo: It makes sense. Complacency starts happening, right? When meetings for meetings start happening, people feel salaries are guaranteed, all of that kind of stuff. The things that we don't think about as founders — that none of that is guaranteed.

Sid: And Leo, it never changes. This friend of mine, he worked with Bill Gates. He was a part of his core team many, many years ago, and they were already a billion-dollar business. He told me the story. He said that they had to build a new product — he was the head of marketing at that time — and they told him, "Okay, I want this market report for these two states in the US. Give that to me." So the next day this guy goes back and he comes up with this grand plan: "I need six months. I need these eight guys that I need to hire, 150K each, to do this project." Bill Gates says, "No, stop." Makes a call, calls the two youngest hires in the marketing team. "You've got these two guys and you've got 15 days." And that's it. And it was done in 15 days. And that's the difference.

Leo: That makes so much sense, because it's not just the pressure. When we reverse engineer that, a lot of delays and a lot of requests for investment come from this fear of failure almost, or this drive for perfection. As business owners, when you actually say, "What version of this can you deliver to me by Monday?" — it just allows people to be faster, and fail faster, and deliver at a quality where you can course correct. How do you use that now? Do you still use that same philosophy of getting that drive for speed into your organisation?

Sid: In the last couple of months, at the back of some of these lessons and learnings — in fact, there's a guy called Paul Graham, he was the founder of Y Combinator, and he'd written this essay called Founder Mode. I wish somebody had given it to me two years ago. It would have made my life so much simpler. I just read that too late. And so now, again, Ananth and me, we rolled up our sleeves, we're back in the weeds. There's literally across the organisation now one layer between us and the individual contributors. We had layered it up over the last couple of years. Now it's all flat, pretty much. And what's changing — we show up with a lot of energy in general, and that's energising everybody. And even the talk is — like when I talk to the guy who's heading my AI: "Are you ready to take on the impossible? I'm gonna make your life hell. Are you okay with it?" And we do it in a fun way. And they're like, "Yeah, bring it on, Sid." And that becomes the whole energy. And then when people start actually doing stuff like that and pulling off miracles in very short spans of time, it energises them even more and gets them even more excited. And that becomes a flywheel, then you feed off, and then you start moving and accelerating.

Leo: Founder Mode — I'll put it in the show notes. For anybody listening, we had Dan Grazer, who was the CEO and founder of MaximBet — he talked about this a lot as well on our previous podcast, so feel free to watch that. But it's a great article about how we don't have to follow the corporate rules of what an organisational structure looks like, and we should be able to skip levels. So, one of the things that you mentioned to me previously: hiring the right people and getting out of the way fails 100% of the time in founder-led businesses. Talk a little bit more about that, Sid. Why do you feel that's the case, and where do you see people going wrong with it — maybe from other peers that you've seen in YPO or elsewhere?

Sid: See, it goes back to the point we were talking about earlier. There are two kinds of businesses. One are founder-led businesses, and one are corporate bureaucracies — large-scale corporates where the founders are out. And the rules are very different in each of the companies. So in the corporate world where the founders are gone, the model works. Because you're creating layers and layers and layers, and even when it comes to problem-solving — whatever the reasons may be — it works in those worlds. The founder world — and again, it's from that article itself, which is where I get some of my insights — what he talks about is that that was the lore in Silicon Valley for the longest time. And they put that to the test, burning billions of dollars doing that, and then eventually realising it doesn't work, for the same reasons. As a founder, your job is to maintain that sense of urgency and agency and earnestness in the business, and ensure that resourcefulness remains, where everybody's constantly thinking of, "How do I do a lot with very little?" And that can't break. And the second is making sure everybody's focus is on the most important problem to be solved. There's been a lot of conversation about signal recently — the better you are at managing signal versus noise, the more effective you are in business. It's actually very true, because most of our time ends up in the noise. If you can just remove the noise and focus on pure signal, you can go pretty far pretty fast with the same amount of effort. And that is, again, the difference for me. In companies where you get the right people and get out of the way, out of the way literally means losing on those two things. Get the right people, but on these fronts, be in the weeds. Make sure nobody forgets.

Leo: Signal versus noise ratio. Super powerful. Something that Steve Jobs talked about a lot. I was reading a blog post from Tim Heath, who we'll soon have as an expert speaker inside the Mastermind, and he's talking about the end of salaries, essentially. Because in terms of salaries, you could be working on the wrong thing very hard for a very long time, and really what we should be paid for — we shouldn't be paid for the hours, we should be paid for the value that we bring to those hours. Just curious — how do you approach that with people that are salaried in the business? How do you ensure that they work on the right things?

Sid: We are still figuring it out. And in fact, this is a conversation that we just had with the HR team last week itself. There are two ways that you do salaries, let's say for engineers. One is the traditional way, which is hierarchy-based. This is the role, this is the designation, here's the band, this is what you should get paid. You wait some time till you go to the next level, and this is what you can earn. The other route, which from what I believe a lot of companies have gone down, is: okay, fine, there's grade one to six. Grade one means this is the outcome you can get and this is what you get paid. Grade two, this is the outcome you can get, this is what you get paid. Because fundamentally, the only question a person has when they're working in a business is, "What do I need to do to get paid more?" You can talk about feedback and career advice and growth potential, but eventually it's just down to a very simple question: what do I do to get paid more? And if you can answer that question in the simplest way possible — which is, to your point, what is the outcome I need to get to get paid this — that's the best system. So we are trying to now move towards that as an organisation. Let's see how it goes. And the second is, of course, you have stock options and things like that to also compensate people who are contributing and adding value to the business. And just the other thing, Leo — the definition of what value means has been changing for me a lot. Value literally now for me means: what are the problems that you're solving which others can't?

Leo: So how has that changed from before? Talk a little bit more about what it means for you now.

Sid: Earlier what it would mean is: what's your job? What's your role and responsibilities? This is what you're supposed to do. So if you're an engineering manager, or let's say the head of the platform team, the job was to build a platform, making sure it's efficient. That is how you would define the roles and responsibilities. When you look at it from a problem point of view, it is: the problem you're solving is, specifically, organisation-wide, reducing the time it takes to build games from four months to one week. Can you solve that problem? Because it's not just a function of "I build a platform, I've done my job." No, it's solving the problem, which includes working across functions and departments and layers in the organisation and getting that outcome in the business. Very different things.

Leo: Yeah, it makes so much sense, because ultimately that's what it's about, right? Outcome — not even output, because output could be bloat, ticking boxes, but outcome is what it's about. I wanna dive into something slightly different. When we spoke last week, you told me this story that literally gave me goosebumps, about Navodaya. Tell me a little bit more about that — where that came from and what it is. I'd love for our listeners to get some goosebumps as well, because I loved it.

Sid: So two years ago, my son was applying to universities in the US, and he needed to get an internship, and he wanted to do an internship with an NGO. So I reached out, and somebody introduced me to this lady, Sangeeta Mehra. Once I heard her story, I'm like, "Son, step aside. I'm taking over now, because this is amazing." What she had done — she was running this export business about 20 years ago, very successfully, out of India. On the way to the office, she would cross this red light in one of the streets in Delhi. And there were a lot of kids who used to be begging there. What she would do at that time was just give them cookies and food and things like that. And then one day she's like, "Listen, it's not enough. I could do much more with them." And she sold her business. She set up this centre in the middle of their community, their slum, where these kids lived. She started to take these kids off the streets, first convincing the schools to take the kids, because they were rowdy and there were behavioural challenges. Then she built a centre where she would educate them and supplement the learning so they could cope with school. She created this incentive system: "Okay, you know what? If you go to school, you come to my centre, I'll take you for movie nights. I'll take you to the American school where our kids were studying, to their play areas," and so on and so forth. And she created this whole programme. And most important, she treated them like human beings in her centre and showered them with love. And at the back of this, now 17 years, she's got a couple of hundred kids that she takes off the streets, 10 to 12 graduate every year, which is amazing. But the problem was that despite that, the best jobs they were getting were janitorial jobs in hospitals and malls. And we were like, you know what — my own journey, working with my children, learning about neuroplasticity and how people learn and adapt and grow — I always felt that I wanted to see how I could apply that to the people who are least privileged. And the minute I met her, I'm like, "Oh my God, you've done the first hard part of the work. Now let's use our skills as an organisation and supplement this." So the experiment we ran: let's take eight kids from the batch which passed out recently — kids with agency and ambition — and let's get them into Ingenuity as employees. I mean, they're not kids anymore. They're 18, 19 years old. And we're gonna create a programme which is a little ruthless, but it's gonna be a programme of high performance, which is: fast-forward a decade, we should be competing with Google and Microsoft to retain them. And anybody who doesn't fit into that way of working will be out, unfortunately, because it's about excellence. We started this programme, Leo, three years ago, and I remember the first day these kids came into our office and we showed them around. And then I said, "Do you have any questions?" And we were in the reception area, and this girl looks at me and she points at the boardroom and she says, "Is this where we'll be staying?" And I almost had tears in my eyes. And then the way we created the programme was: we're not gonna give them money in the beginning, because they may not use it to eat food or sleep well. We take care of all accommodation. We take care of all food, all medical — because they've never been in an air-conditioned office. They're gonna get rashes and fall sick. We take care of their health, wellness, weekends, sports, integrating them socially. And then we got a whole lot of people in the organisation to also volunteer to support these kids in the various stages of the journey. We enroll them in college. Let's build their resumes. So some people were involved with getting them through college. Some were on communication and English. Some were on vocational training. Some went to development, some to art, some to engineering, and so on. And that's how it all started. If you met them three years ago and you meet them today, you won't recognise these kids. They're working for some of the largest companies in the world, building their games, doing the art, doing the testing of games, working in IT teams. And I remember, a couple of weeks ago, I was just walking past one of the girls who's working in the art team, and I just stopped by her desk. I'm like, "Show me what you've done." So she opens the screen. She opens a whole lot of art. I'm like, "So what have you done in that?" She stares me down. She's like, "What did you ask me? I've done that whole thing." "Okay, hold on. Next screen." "I've done that whole thing, too." "Next screen." "I've done that whole thing, too. How dare you ask me that question?" And now we've got about 17 people who are on that programme, Leo.

Leo: Wow, I love that, man. And what happens when they go back to their family, or when they go back to their village — people that knew them from before?

Sid: They can't recognise them. They are heroes in their communities. They tell us that the other kids have their posters up on the walls. They're a source of serious inspiration of what you can pull off. Of course, they're very lucky to have gotten this opportunity, but they're a source of a lot of inspiration. And it's not just them — now they have an opportunity to move generations out of the streets into literally the middle class. And even what they're earning today is more than they could have ever imagined and dreamt of three years ago. So it's a massive transformation.

Leo: I love it. Why is that important for you to do? Of course it's inspirational and it's giving back. Why does it matter to you personally?

Sid: Somebody had told me a while back — I'm sure somebody very wise — the most selfish thing you can do as a human being is to be kind, compassionate, and generous. Because it comes back to you a hundredfold in terms of joy. That's invaluable. And it's just the sheer joy this brings to me. And not only for me — all the people involved, and the impact this has on them. It's just a pleasure to see that. It just feels amazing, Leo.

Leo: Well done, Sid. I bloody love it. Such a great story. Very inspirational. One of the things you said to me as well is that your coach told you that the multi-billion-dollar ambition that you had — that you should embrace it and use it, right? What was that like for you, going through that journey, understanding that that's something you had to embrace? And what does success look like for you now, sitting in the present rather than in the future?

Sid: It's along similar lines to what Alex said in the last session that you had with him. There are a couple of things to this. Have you heard of this guy called George Mallory? He was one of the first guys to attempt Everest. There was a press conference in New York — he was going to attempt the climb — and somebody in the press asked him, "Why would you go on such a foolhardy expedition where everybody before you has died?" And his answer was, "Because it's there." Somebody's gonna do it, right? Might as well be me. I'd rather die trying to do it than not try it at all. That was his point. Now, what I've figured out in the last couple of years working with my coaches is: what I want, what my needs are, what my desires are — they've been shaped by every second of my existence on this planet, good, bad, or ugly. Don't question it. Use it. So for instance, if I have this need for validation — how do you use it? You build an incredible board, people you respect who are impossible to please, and just by trying to please them, you'll just keep growing day on and day on, looking for those little nuggets of validation. You game the system, you game yourself. Similarly, if your need and desire is to build this multi-billion-dollar organisation, you may never get there, but if that's what you want, go for it. And I've felt a lot of guilt wanting to do it. And why do I wanna do it? I mean, we've got such an amazing problem to solve in the industry. We solve it. That's my Everest. It's very clear what that looks like. And why do I wanna climb it? Because it's there. And why are you feeling guilty about it?

Leo: Yes. Use it as your fuel. I love it. And I think the approach many people take is to change that, right? To change it rather than embrace it.

Sid: And the reason you change it is because: what will people say when they hear that? Versus being absolutely authentic to who you are, for the good, bad, or ugly. It's complete acceptance of who you are and then running with that fuel. So you're still back to running on eight different treadmills. That hasn't changed. Fast-forward five years, I'm still running on eight different treadmills as fast as I can, even faster than before probably, but it's a very different fuel now. It's not toxic fuel anymore.

Leo: Hey, we spoke about how the whole journey, every single part of it, was necessary for you to get to where you are today. And I think that's true for everybody. But I wanna ask you: for somebody that maybe feels like they're on eight different treadmills now, what's something that you would say to them? What should they do next when they realise those eight treadmills are no longer sustainable and they need different fuel in their life?

Sid: After having gone through coaching, Leo, and understanding what it is, I wonder: why doesn't everybody do it? Because all it is — effective coaching is about you getting to know yourself better, growing as a human being. Because as you grow older, the complexity in life increases, and you struggle when you can't cope with the complexity. The more you understand yourself, the better you're equipped to grow in the right way to deal with that complexity. My advice always would be: get a coach. And you can't figure these things out yourself. They're practically impossible, because you believe you know it all. So get somebody who you can converse with, talk to — and the best coaches don't say a word. They just let you ramble, ramble, ramble till you figure it out yourself. My advice would be: get help. Get to know yourself better. Be more authentic in what you do, and then take that forward from there.

Leo: Such great advice, Sid. Thank you so much for today's podcast. Been super helpful, really insightful, really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you very much.

Sid: Thank you, Leo.

Thank you for listening to the iGaming Leader Podcast. If you are a VP, a director, founder, or an executive in iGaming making the biggest decisions alone, that's exactly what I've built The iGaming Leader Mastermind for. Small inner circles of vetted senior executives, weekly hot seats, and accountability from people who understand the effects of the decisions that you need to make. Find out more and apply at igamingleader.com. And a final thanks to our sponsor, Sumsub, the full cycle verification platform for iGaming operators. Player onboarding, AML, fraud prevention, all in one place. More at sumsub.com/gambling. See you next week.

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