Selling BeyondPlay: Smart Exit or Too Early?

Karolina Pelc: I’m going to be very vulnerable here because I don’t talk about it openly for many reasons. My personal failure is that I never saw the multiplayer product live. Work-life balance always assumes that work is hard and life is easy, and it’s not always the case.

Yevhen Krazhan: Welcome to Bet It Drives Show, the show that takes you up and over the iGaming world. Let’s buckle up and take off. 

From dealing cards to dealing with casinos, Karolina Pelc has come a long way in iGaming with Her Play. She helps new founders grow, and now she’s sharing her lessons in a brand-new book. Karolina, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Karolina Pelc: Where do I start? My name is Karolina Pelc. I have been in the industry for over 20 years now, which a lot of people find surprising. I guess it’s a compliment because maybe I don’t look it.

Yevhen Krazhan: You look young and beautiful. I don’t know where that 20 years came from.

Karolina Pelc: I started when I was 19, in a land-based casino. I’ve been through the trenches, from the very bottom of the industry, I would say.

Yevhen Krazhan: Land-based, you mean doing the dealer, crew, fiesta?

Karolina Pelc: I was a casino dealer for a good five years. My father is a casino manager and inspector, so I spent five years working in Poland, then I worked in London, and then I worked on cruise ships. It was supposed to be a temporary side job, but when I came back from the cruise ships, that was exactly when online gaming started to boom. I thought, why throw away the years in land-based casinos if I can try to transfer those skills online? The only problem was that no one wanted to give me a job because nobody thought the same way.

That’s my beginning. More recently, I’m probably most known for my role at LeoVegas, where I was a casino director and spent quite a long time. Then after LeoVegas, naturally, BeyondPlay was the startup I built. It was a very small company, but I’m proud to say it had pretty strong brand awareness. I guess a lot of people know who we were at BeyondfwoePlay, certainly helped by the fact that we were bought by this other little company called FanDuel.

So that’s about me. Outside of that, I’m an advisor, startup mentor, keynote speaker. I just spoke at the Helipad event, and I’m a book author as of very recently.

Yevhen Krazhan: I know your schedule is always busy. The first things we do can be a good learning curve. And now you are at the top of this industry, right? Staying on the side of protecting the young, protecting startups, maybe even women in business, is probably partly your role. Can you tell us about that as well?

Karolina Pelc: I try to stay clear of quoting the huge “female empowerment speaker” or “diversity ambassador” titles because it comes through my actions more than through my words. I don’t like people to box me into this feminist box because it’s not what it is.

But yes, I do feel deeply about promoting other women in gaming. I invest in female-founded startups. I have three of those in my portfolio, and they are all young women whom I have the privilege of mentoring, although really I’m learning as much from them as they can learn from me. That was also the goal behind the book. I knew the book would appeal to both men and women because it’s not a book for females only, but I knew the empowerment part would play a big role for a lot of aspiring female entrepreneurs and business owners. From the feedback I’m getting so far, it was exactly on point.

Yevhen Krazhan: So you prefer to lead by example, your own example, not just talks.

Karolina Pelc: Absolutely. To put it in context, if you invite me to a conference and offer me a panel about AI, gamification, product, or anything like that versus a main stage talk about female leadership or diversity, I’ll choose product because I want to be the representation rather than talk about the representation.

Yevhen Krazhan: Hands-on practical things, right? Wonderful.

Karolina, this is the Feel the Beat section. The first question would be: what is your anthem for your power moves? What is the power anthem that accompanies you?

Karolina Pelc: That’s easy. I have had this song for the past two years. It’s my walkout song for my keynotes. I listen to it anytime I need to energize. It’s “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals.

Yevhen Krazhan: Nice. So, Karolina, casino floor energy. You started there, and you still probably remember that quite vividly. What is the casino floor vibe or melody that you remember?

Karolina Pelc: That’s a hard question because when you’re working in a casino, you cannot hear any music. All you can hear is the jingles from the slot machines: ding, ding, ding. It would be hard to name a song. I would say the sound of the video poker machines ringing in the background, or the jackpots exploding, is the soundtrack from my casino days.

Yevhen Krazhan: Can you tell us a little bit about your current business and what you do? I know you have written a big book, like a full encyclopedia of things. I want to read it myself if I can get an autograph. That would be my table book tomorrow. Thank you, that would be good. But keeping scarce capacity also creates a better deficit, so please try to promote us as much as possible because I think this industry needs systems. It doesn’t need talks. It needs systems.

Karolina Pelc: The book is a system, actually. It was an answer to the question people started asking me when I sold the business. Everybody wanted to know: how did you do that? How did you manage to achieve success in such a short amount of time?

I always knew the answer: it wasn’t three years. It wasn’t a short amount of time. It was the 20 years of grind behind it. But I didn’t know how to put that answer in a structured way that was easy to share with others. I also had this dream or goal to become a keynote speaker, where I could go on stages and share advice. That’s where the book came into the picture, because I revisited my own journey and understood that really it’s about mindset more than practical advice.

Going back to what you said about working in a land-based casino, my product BeyondPlay was very much built on what I learned in land-based and cruise ship casinos. It was a product that brought people together and had them interact in a social environment, treating gaming as entertainment more than just the chase of losses and wins. That is very much based on observing real people in a real gaming environment.

You’re spot on that whatever I learned 20 years ago was behind my success with this product, or with whatever other products we added to the portfolio years later.

What I do now is mostly advise early-stage founders. I don’t have a lot of confidence yet to position myself as a mentor for startups at scale because I never reached that point with BeyondPlay. We sold before we reached that level. At the same time, I think people forget that I worked in corporate for many, many years. I worked for LeoVegas, where we bought companies that were scale-ups. I worked for William Hill. I was part of many M&A transactions on both sides.

Yevhen Krazhan: So real operations.

Karolina Pelc: Yes. So I can advise scale-ups as well, but at the moment I focus on early stage because I think that is where the advice is very much about mindset. It’s one thing to go out to people and tell them exactly how to calculate valuations, what type of shares to design for your team, and how to reward advisors. But that differs between industries and businesses because each one has a different nature.

When it comes to mindset—how to help people reframe the fear of failure, reframe rejection, not get discouraged too early, and understand how much work goes into this—that’s universal.

Yevhen Krazhan: I believe throughout your career, you have seen many of these moments, ups and downs. I think it’s a combination of luck and little baby steps that you do consistently, systematically.

Karolina Pelc: It’s a combination of luck, risk, and hustle. Those are exactly the three elements I would quote.

Yevhen Krazhan: What’s your biggest success? Probably family is always the biggest success in our lives, but writing a book, selling a company, or acquiring a company could also be something. These are wonderful achievements in your life. But talking about really hard moments, when we were speaking with Eman, he shared that something like Covid could destroy everything completely, but one little step he took actually gave him a huge boost. Is there anything like that you remember?

Karolina Pelc: Listen, I remember all of them because I just wrote a book about the ups and downs, and I was very transparent and vulnerable in sharing all the difficult moments in my journey. Even when we come to the most recent times and the startup, it was a roller coaster ride. I would say it was a roller coaster mostly going downward. Every time you thought you were at the lowest point, it would kick you harder.

I always laughed, saying I had the company for three years, but enough things happened in it that I can talk about it for the next ten.

Covid was not a hard moment for me. Just to refer to what you said about Eman, I actually raised money then. Covid, as bad as it sounds, was an amplifier for our business because we had a shared online experience. Covid made people realize that this could work.

But we faced a lot of difficulty raising capital because we were focusing only on regulated markets. This meant we had a very narrow pool of investors, and even those who were interested in those markets would become disinterested when we brought them on board with how many KYC and compliance checks there would be. There were moments where people would pull out at the very last stage. There were moments where we risked not getting the license because certain documentation could not be provided.

I would say I cried more in those three years than I have throughout my whole lifetime. I had also never managed such a big team directly. It was a hard realization that being a leader and managing people in such a fast-paced, up-and-down environment is very, very hard. If you thought you were a great leader before, you know nothing. When you’re a startup CEO, you learn from the beginning.

Yevhen Krazhan: You can rely on the team that is backing you up. Some things maybe you can start delegating and learn from actually interacting.

Karolina Pelc: Which is also a skill you need to learn because not everyone, especially control freaks and perfectionists like myself, finds it easy to delegate, although it is crucial.

Yevhen Krazhan: But your recipe seems to be successful. You overcame all these hardships, your team did not desert you, and you ended up in quite a good position after putting in so much work and energy. It pays off.

Karolina Pelc: I think it’s less of a recipe, and more that I was just a very good firefighter.

It would be arrogant to say that I have a recipe I could now apply to another business and it would work equally well. I would never have that confidence, which is why you’re not seeing me doing another startup just yet. I really learned how to extinguish fires fast and prioritize between the big ones and the ones that will not burn as fast.

Yevhen Krazhan: Can you say that the deal with FanDuel was your success, your personal and team success?

Karolina Pelc: Oh yeah, absolutely. From the outside, a lot of people could say, “Oh, she sold too early. It was just three years.”

Yevhen Krazhan: That’s what I’m sometimes thinking. Maybe waiting another year?

Karolina Pelc: No, listen, I could have waited, of course. And I know that I would have made this company a success. So if there is ever a rumor that I sold because I didn’t believe in the company anymore, it’s absolutely not true. I believed in it with my whole heart.

But I wasn’t sure whether the whole focus on regulated markets and the challenges we were facing with investors were not going to stop us in our tracks in the next year or two. I was already seeing that we had access to so few people, and those few people were getting quite frankly annoyed with the level of checks we had to do on them. I was worried that when it came to raising a big round, I would struggle to find the source of capital.

Secondly, I was 40 at the time I sold the company. It was a couple of weeks before my 40th birthday. I have many other ideas, and this was enough of a life-changing event for me. Also, I was exhausted and starting to lose hope that this would ever become more sustainable, that I would ever see my son during daytime hours again.

I just figured I should take it as a sign that this was meant to happen right now. These opportunities don’t come frequently. They come and go, and if I didn’t take it then, it might not come for another five or six years. What did I have to lose if I took it then? I knew the team would be secure for a certain amount of time. I knew the jackpot product technology would launch. I wasn’t sure about multiplayer because it was still in an experimental state and unfortunately still not live.

But there were enough great terms in it that I thought no one was being harmed in this deal. For me, I was getting a very comfortable life after this exit, and I could do a million other things. I took it as something that was meant to be, and maybe as something to show me that I wanted to do something else after.

So yes, I would absolutely say it was a success. I would have never agreed to a sale if it hadn’t been on my terms. That’s why the whole due diligence and sales process was so difficult, because I was still running business as usual during the whole process.

Yevhen Krazhan: I don’t know the complexity of the deal, but I guess any merger and acquisition is always quite complex and lengthy. You worked with FanDuel for some time as a VP, right? And then you exited.

Karolina Pelc: Yeah.

Yevhen Krazhan: It was not a long period of time, but probably you were also looking for some rest, peace, and a little bit of shifting.

Karolina Pelc: It was about two years that I stayed with the company, a year and a half officially in a VP role. It was always a loyalty agreement between me and them. I didn’t have to stay, but I felt an obligation to stay for my team because the team believed in me. I also felt that the longer I stayed, the longer I could protect them, which I was kind of right about.

Yevhen Krazhan: What about the book, Karolina? Were you writing the book in parallel, or did you start before?

Karolina Pelc: I started writing the book in January, so a good few months before I left. I was already working a normal nine-to-five job, but I’m not a normal nine-to-five person, especially not after the startup drive. I was so used to working double shifts.

Yevhen Krazhan: Late hours.

Karolina Pelc: Exactly. I was so used to late hours that I almost needed to fill that time with something. I always wanted to write a book, but I never had the confidence as a non-native English speaker. I always knew it was going to be a memoir, but then: what’s the ending? I’m still alive. Why would someone want to read a book?

When the exit happened, I guess that gave me the ending, or the hook for the reader, for why I could now write the book and share my story. I started writing in January. It was very much Necker Island in 2024 that inspired me to write it. People on the retreat said they found the story really interesting. It was not just the industry saying, “You’ve lived in seven countries, you’ve had this many jobs, and you’ve reinvented yourself multiple times. This is an inspiring story.” So I started writing it.

Yevhen Krazhan: The book is called Her Play.

Karolina Pelc: It’s an evolution from the name because my first company was called Shared Play. Then we sold the name and changed it to BeyondPlay. I felt the natural evolution would be Her Play.

But it’s also a framework because Her Play stands for the seven elements I told you about that I feel were the key elements in my success. H is for hustle, E is for execution, R is for risk, P is for passion, L is for luck, A is for adaptability, and Y is for you as your greatest asset. So it’s a dual meaning of the title.

Yevhen Krazhan: It does sound like you are quite honestly a workaholic.

Karolina Pelc: Yeah, I don’t shy away from that.

Yevhen Krazhan: How do you manage this personally? Is it the sense of achievement?

Karolina Pelc: I don’t manage it because at the moment, the workaholism or the perfectionism drives me to places of success, and it doesn’t bring a lot of harm into my life. I’ve accepted that work-life balance is not on a daily basis, and I’m pretty good at making up the time to my son and my family in different ways.

But at some point, I do think I’m going to need a proper break. It’s definitely not yet because I don’t feel the calling for it. I want to do many other things.

Yevhen Krazhan: Especially if you’re managing it, if you have a deal with yourself. I don’t like this work-life balance statement. It’s more like work and family balance.

Karolina Pelc: Exactly.

Yevhen Krazhan: Or work and yourself balance. But sometimes, work is our life.

Karolina Pelc: I always say that work-life balance assumes that work is hard and life is easy, and it’s not always the case. I don’t believe in that either. I realized very quickly in the startup that if you want work-life balance, you definitely can’t be an entrepreneur because that’s just a dream.

Again, I learned to accept that loving work, thriving under pressure, and thriving in intensity is my superpower and not my weakness. So I’m currently not looking for ways to manage it.

Yevhen Krazhan: The first “network or not work” will be: would you open an investor call with a motivational video?

Karolina Pelc: Yeah, I could.

Yevhen Krazhan: So it’s network?

Karolina Pelc: Network. It’s a way of storytelling. Done well, it could be done.

Yevhen Krazhan: All right. Another one, Karolina. Investing into a project or a founder that you personally don’t stand behind, but they have a killer project, a killer product?

Karolina Pelc: One hundred percent not work. Never. I invest in people. I need to deliver value. They need to like me, and I need to like them for this to work.

Yevhen Krazhan: Good call. Another good one: would you agree to launch a product in a market where regulation is still not clear?

Karolina Pelc: I mean, we all know the answer to that. So yes, network.

Yevhen Krazhan: Still viable. Launching probably before others do, right?

Karolina Pelc: Yeah.

Yevhen Krazhan: Cool. Karolina, it is said that the iGaming industry is predominantly men-driven and taken over by men — men power, men authority. Which prejudice or stereotype about women in this industry do you hate the most?

Karolina Pelc: I would say what I briefly mentioned before: that every woman who stands behind gender diversity in our industry is a hardcore feminist and that we hate men. But something I also talk about a lot is the perception that all these women at the top are very masculine and that their leadership style is 100% masculine.

I get it. When you grow and develop as a person in this industry and you observe men around you, it is a natural assumption that a woman would become more masculine in her leadership style. But I’ve come to understand that good leadership is a mixture of both feminine and masculine power and energy. You can absorb as much feminine power from a man as you can masculine power from a woman.

So I don’t like calling women at the top “bad boss bitches” and things like that — apologies for the language — because there are plenty of women who are very successful and very committed, and they are soft, led by intuition, and don’t have those masculine leadership traits either. That is a stereotype I don’t like. It often brings women to question themselves: whether they are too hard, whether they are too bold, whether they scare people to some extent.

Yevhen Krazhan: I think we are still far away from that 50/50 balance.

Karolina Pelc: Sometimes I feel like we’re not fully ready for the 50/50 ratio. This is something I can quote from my own experience. I really wanted to have a very high ratio of women in my company, and I put in so much effort, from giving recruiters quotas to trying to be a role model and attract women myself. We were very successful in that.

But at the same time, we learned very fast that we were not prepared for any sort of minority in our company. Not just when it comes to gender, but we were attracting different sexual orientations, different nationalities, different races, and different religions. We didn’t know how to deal with that because we were a small company. We didn’t have an HR manager, forget a diversity and inclusion manager.

Yevhen Krazhan: Talking is one thing. Doing is different.

Karolina Pelc: Exactly. What I learned from that is that absolutely, we should all strive for equality and champion minorities. But you need to put action where your mouth is, and you need to have the tools in place to be able to do that. Sometimes, hold your horses and check whether you have the right power behind you to be able to do it.

Yevhen Krazhan: Okay, Karolina, the next one is also quite cool. We call it Confession Lane. This is the little topic that you probably never mentioned, even in your book, but you would like to confess here with our wonderful viewers and audience. Speaking of multiple successes, and I hear you have plenty, what is the one failure that keeps you up at night but you would never try to share? Maybe use this moment to share it with us. What is that failure?

Karolina Pelc: I’m going to be very vulnerable here because it probably is talked about, but I don’t talk about it openly for many reasons. My personal failure is that I never saw the multiplayer product live because I left the company that bought us before it went live, and now it’s out of my hands. I don’t know if it ever will go live.

It was my absolute dream to see the fruits of my work and my team on the biggest operator in the world. So that keeps me up at night, and that is a deep regret.

Yevhen Krazhan: But this is yet something to happen, right?

Karolina Pelc: No one knows. I don’t know.

Yevhen Krazhan: No one knows. But we wish you good luck, and hopefully that product goes live.

Karolina Pelc: I made my peace with it, but it does sometimes wake me up at night — that urge of “I wish…”

Yevhen Krazhan: She’s played her cards, cashed out big, and still finds new games to build. Not every gamble needs chips. Sometimes it’s just betting on yourself, and Karolina showed us exactly how that pays off.