The Untold Story Behind SBC’s Global Rise

Yevhen Krazhan: Welcome to Bet It Drives, the show that drives you into the unexpected corners of iGaming. 

SBC Events is a big name in iGaming, and today we’re joined by the man behind it all, Rasmus Sojmark, CEO and founder. From affiliate marketing to global summits and non-stop news, he’s always ahead of the game. Let’s hear his insights.

Rasmus, welcome to the Bet It Drives show. Hope you have a little bit of time to speak with us. Rasmus is heading the entire SBC show, events, media. Just a legend, I would say, within our iGaming community, and we are really proud to have you here. Today, we will be speaking about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff, something that maybe our audience has never heard or seen before. I hope the show will be nice and smooth, and everybody will enjoy it.

Rasmus Sojmark: It will be. I can tell you we’ve been working on this for a long time, and it’s going to take place here Monday, tomorrow, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The weather is amazing, the setup is amazing, and we have about 30,000 people coming. So, it’s going to be a great week.

Yevhen Krazhan: I think for you, Rasmus, these couple of days are going to be hectic. I’m not speaking about the previous probably hundred days of nightmares.

Rasmus Sojmark: I’m not stressing at all. We spent an entire year preparing for this, and as much as you try to prepare, build all the teams into it, project-manage and plan it out, there’s always something coming up. On top of that, a few months back we started working on the Legends charity game to add that into the mix and introduce an amazing charity event, raising 1 million euros on the Monday evening before the main show.

Yevhen Krazhan: Rasmus, speaking of this Legends football charity match, how did this idea come about?

Rasmus Sojmark: I’ve always had a great passion, and I still have, of course, for football. So I looked at Lisbon. We’re here with our biggest show. What can we do more that makes sense in Lisbon? Lisbon has the World Cup in 2030, so I said, what if next to the summit, the day before, we create this charity event where we bring footballers together, a World Legends team, to play a Portugal team in the build-up to the World Cup? This was the initial part, and then it was like, okay, besides the road to the 2030 World Cup in Portugal, what else can we add to the mix here to give it more of a purpose?

That was the 1 million charity fundraising target, which we then added in. Because you look at the Portugal legends that we put together, like Luís Figo, Pepe, Deco, Nani, Beto, Vítor Baía, and Hélder Postiga. It’s an amazing team. It’s the golden generation.

Yevhen Krazhan: And I reckon this is a wonderful social contribution to the city, to the country, just to bring these famous stars.

Yevhen Krazhan: So, Rasmus, music time.

Rasmus Sojmark: I love music, man.

Yevhen Krazhan: What is the one melody or song that comes across multiple events?

Rasmus Sojmark: Let’s say Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle.” We got fun and games. We got everything.

Yevhen Krazhan: This is my son’s favorite, by the way.

Rasmus Sojmark: That’s amazing. It encompasses all of it. It’s like SBC events — that’s the jungle you want to be in. It delivers, but it also does crazy stuff.

Yevhen Krazhan: I agree. Moving a little bit from the high-energy stuff, maybe something that gives you more creativity. What is that guilty pleasure song that you would like to hear when you’re planning new events?

Rasmus Sojmark: The source of inspiration. There could be a lot of songs, I think, but let’s stick with one. One funny one, I think, is Def Leppard. I would always put on “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” It’s got a good beat, and it’s something you always put on — a bit of sweet hard rock.

Yevhen Krazhan: This is old, sweet hard rock stuff. Back from the 90s.

Rasmus Sojmark: Yeah. This week we’ve got Timmy Trumpet and some of the best DJs in the world coming to the SBC Summit. But I’ve always been a hard rock type of guy, though I moved more into the DJs now as well. I think it could also be a DJ song with Timmy Trumpet or something with David Guetta or Afrojack. There are so many versions of old music coming about again by being mixed by the DJs. But yeah, it’s a good mix of that. Def Leppard has always been an interesting one.

Yevhen Krazhan: We are just a couple of days before the event, and we know events are one of the core businesses of your team.

I believe you are speaking with many owners of the businesses, marketing teams, events teams. All of them are fighting, basically competing, for the best, shiniest, ideal spots.

Rasmus Sojmark: True.

Yevhen Krazhan: How do you manage that? How do you prioritize? Because we all want to know how that is happening.

Rasmus Sojmark: I will say it does come down to who supported you early on, who has continued with the sizes of the booth and asked for more space. As you grow the event, in many cases you will see those companies, including the likes of GR8_TECH, SoftConstruct, Soft2Bet, SmartSoft, SPRIBE, and others. It is because they’ve been very continuous in their support for us.

So obviously you’ve got to prioritize that as number one, because they put the money behind their products and help you build the business. Without these companies, we would be nothing. How can we grow without the revenue to grow? That means people trust us with the money to be able to use that in a good way and put it into the event. Because compared to many other organizers, and that goes for our industry, we are the only ones that invest back into the events for long. We created the Legends charity game. We are providing everyone food and drinks and everything.

Yevhen Krazhan: It’s been how many years since you started it?

Rasmus Sojmark: I am from back in the day. You can argue I was a co-founder, part of the founding team of EveryMatrix. I left them in 2012, and that’s the time when I started moving more full-time with SBC and started growing the events, realizing that people were willing to put money into events.

I was used to working technology, where sales take a lot longer. You’ve got to get a contract, service-level agreements, testing the platform, and maybe the client finds some issues and they’re not signing for it. Then you’ve got costs for servers, tech, all that stuff.

Whereas an event, it’s like you take a venue, you put some things in there, you tell someone, take a space here, they agree to this one sheet and they give you 20, 30k. Done. It just felt like a revelation at that point, not having to wait for these very tedious long-term contracts. Here was money. So how could you create something more around that? That’s how we started scaling the events step by step, year on year.

Yevhen Krazhan: Speaking about budgets, we know budgets are sometimes well spent, but sometimes budgets are not well spent, and we don’t always 100% know what idea will work and what will not work. So talking about the crazy ideas, obviously.

Rasmus Sojmark: Years back, the industry did some very crazy stuff in terms of operators not having the regulators in the mindset, because there was less regulated business, and some of the marketing back then was absolutely insane. But the industry has grown up.

I think you obviously don’t look at crazy marketing in the context of stepping over the boundaries of what you are allowed to do regulatory-wise, because you will be due-diligenced at some point by some market access. Any marketing you’ve done in the wrong way will come back and bite you in the ass. So we’re talking more about creativity in terms of doing something to promote a product.

Yevhen Krazhan: My adoration of SBC is about the speakerships, the super stage. But speaking of awards specifically, I think this is a very narrow space when you cannot recognize everybody. Maybe there are a lot of nominations that come and come. Have you seen a growing importance of these nominations and awards? And maybe there were some crazy frustrations of some guys that were expecting something but never got anything?

Rasmus Sojmark: We get thousands of nominations per awards. Some categories can have 100-plus nominations, nominees. Obviously, you then go to a shortlist, which means you have to narrow it down to maybe between 20 to 10 companies. Very hard. So the issues start there, that some people are obviously complaining about not being on a shortlist. But how can you keep everyone on there? It’s impossible.

The next step is when you come to the awards evening, you celebrate the winners, they’re announced, and after that, you always have three, four people walking up to you and looking at you and saying, “I’m going to cut my budget next year because you didn’t give me an award.” And I’m like, okay, but what are we supposed to do here? It doesn’t work like that. Every award has about 8, 10 judges sitting there on a very objective level judging.

Yevhen Krazhan: So it’s not you deciding, it’s the judges.

Rasmus Sojmark: Yeah. And it’s a tough one. You just have to take it on the chin because there’s nothing you can do about it. The thing is, next year people want the same. They want the award rather than not wanting the awards. I would be ready to cut the awards to avoid some of this sometimes, but it’s so ingrained now and so important for many companies and ourselves that we continue with it.

But there is a fine line sometimes where you’re about to say, come on, does this make sense if people are getting that upset about not winning? It happens. Definitely.

Yevhen Krazhan: Some of the simple ones, we call this rubric network or no work. Something that you would definitely support or something not a good idea.

Somebody is asking you to push a headline because they just pay you — network or no work?

Rasmus Sojmark: Network.

Yevhen Krazhan: Will you create a new awards category if somebody, maybe a VIP or a good sponsor, asks you? To be honest.

Rasmus Sojmark: If it’s a good idea, we’ll consider it. So it’s in between.

Yevhen Krazhan: What is the craziest headline that you probably remember out of the hundreds that you post every day?

Rasmus Sojmark: If I tie it in with legacy cool stuff and things we’ve done, I’ll actually say it’s only a few days ago when I managed to work with our great partner at GR8_TECH to get Usyk to come and play in the Legends charity game. We issued the press announcing Usyk himself, the boxing heavyweight champion, an idol of me and many others, that will actually go and join the World Legends team and play with some of the best footballers in the world against the Portugal legend.

I think that headline is insane. Amazing. How would I ever think I would create something like that and put it out into the media? So let’s go with that one.

Yevhen Krazhan: Wonderful. At the same time raises the benchmark, and who could do better than that?

Rasmus Sojmark: See how excited I get? And this is only just happening tomorrow.

Yevhen Krazhan: Wonderful. Is there one confession or some story that you would like to share with our audience from the event? Something that you have known but never could share before? Is there something on the top of your mind?

Rasmus Sojmark: I’ll probably address it back to our discussion about champion things. I’ve always been torn a bit between how you deal with perfectionism, and I think my perfectionism often caused me to not actually seek the limelight and just shy away from doing stuff.

For many years, I’ve just been finding excuses not to do stuff because I didn’t necessarily like it if I didn’t feel very prepared. So there’s a degree of not feeling comfortable in situations and not doing it because you don’t want to fail. That’s what perfectionism is. So I worked a lot on making it into my favor, getting the better side of it.

But I often stepped away from the limelight because I don’t necessarily like it. I like to be private in some cases and focus on my work and deliver. Whereas other people are seeing the limelight all the time because it’s important for the business that they can be seen and heard.

I, for instance, rarely do podcasts like this. Rarely. Because it’s something I do like and appreciate, but it’s also something I feel unless I come prepared.

I do worry about the outcome. So I am, in a way, a little bit nervous to be here, even though maybe it doesn’t look like it. I do a lot of talking to myself before I go. It’s just a habit. I don’t know.

But I managed to deal with it in a good way, to harness more of the competitive element in a good way out of it. But it’s been a struggle for me for years, finding ways of not making excuses for yourself. So I think maybe people wouldn’t think that. They probably look more at this side and think I’m always ahead of things. It’s not always like that. You do have your struggles. Definitely.

Yevhen Krazhan: I can relate to that, too. And I know you have a little bit of military background. And definitely that is some significant portion of every man’s life. I believe that you also bring some of the training, drilling skills from that and probably still try to exploit and maybe apply it into your daily life.

Rasmus Sojmark: Yeah, absolutely. I was a sergeant back in 98, 99. I wasn’t more than 18, 19 years old, and it was an early age. I didn’t actually want to be a sergeant, but I got forced into sergeant school.

I was told I could go a couple of years sailing instead if I didn’t want to go to sergeant school. To be honest, what I learned is training privates and working with people with live machine guns and pistols and hand grenades and stuff isn’t the most straightforward. And it’s a lot of responsibility.

So dealing with this on the psychology side is a lot of things that actually taught me about leadership. It’s the only real leadership training I ever had. I never had any leadership training. I didn’t train to be a CEO. I’ve done a lot of sales, like you. We like sales. I like marketing. That’s my background.

And now you end up in a role where you’re managing a lot of people, and you have to constantly deal with risk and politics and moving into all sorts of parts of the world, finance and banks and whatever else. You realize actually what you learned back in the day gives you composure and understanding, and a foundation that probably made it possible to do what it is you do.

So I will give a lot of credit to the military. Absolutely. For my early days, it was probably a defining part of me and understanding leadership. Yes.

Yevhen Krazhan: And relating to the champion of mode: never give up, relentless consistency.

I think this is lovely. And on this positive note, Rasmus, thank you for hosting SBC. Thank you for accepting our invitation. And probably our audience will thank you for the wonderful interview or conversation that we just had this morning.

Rasmus Sojmark: Can we go and get a pastel de nata now?

Yevhen Krazhan: Yes, let’s do that. 

Rasmus isn’t made for the passenger seat. He drives iGaming forward. Can’t wait to see what’s going to be next. See you soon on the Bet It Drives Show.