Everyone in this industry has a number.
You know the one. It lives somewhere in the back of your head, quietly running in the background of every decision you make. The liquid cash target. The exit valuation. The moment the wire clears, you can finally exhale.
I have mine. I’ve had it for years. A specific liquidity figure — cash plus equity — that I’m methodically working toward. Everything I earn gets reinvested back to zero. I live modestly. The plan is clear, the path is mapped, and the milestones make sense.
And yet the most important thing I’ve learned about that number is this: hitting it won’t do what you think it will.
I know this because I’ve spoken to enough people who got there. And I’ve been close enough myself to understand what’s waiting on the other side. It’s not the celebration you imagined. It’s not peace. It’s not freedom.
It’s a void.
A dopamine hole so deep and so dark that the only way out is to go back to building something. Because the thing that was keeping you going wasn’t the destination, it was the chase. And once the chase is over, you realise you never actually prepared for the silence.
This industry is full of people who will relate to this and say nothing. Because admitting it feels like ingratitude. You made the money. You hit the number. You’re supposed to be happy. What kind of person complains about that?
The kind who built their entire identity around the pursuit of it. Which, if you’re honest, is most of us.
There’s a second trap inside the first one that nobody warns you about either. When you’ve had a meaningful exit — when you’ve run something at real scale, with real numbers — and then you start again from scratch, the early figures don’t excite you. They embarrass you. You’ve seen bigger. You’ve operated bigger. The revenue in month one of your new business is a rounding error compared to where you were, and your brain knows it. The same drive that made you successful makes rebuilding feel like regression.
So you have two problems. The void left by hitting your number. And the recalibrated baseline that makes starting again feel pointless. Congratulations. You’ve earned both.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve come to believe that the mistake is running with only one Northstar. A financial one.
The financial Northstar is necessary. I’m not going soft on you here — I still have mine, I still chase it, and I think you should too. Money creates options. Options create freedom. This is real. But if the financial target is the only thing driving you, you’re building a very expensive trap for yourself. Because wealth without a higher purpose isn’t a destination. It’s a trapdoor.
The Russians have a word — umirotvorenije — that translates roughly as a deep, settled peace. Not excitement. Not the high of a big month. Just a quiet, grounded sense that what you’re doing means something beyond the P&L. I spent a long time in this industry without that feeling. Honestly, the industry doesn’t make it easy. iGaming is one of the most transactional environments I’ve ever operated in. Every introduction has a silent price tag. Every favour is a deposit into a ledger that everyone pretends doesn’t exist.
Finding something genuinely non-transactional in that environment took me longer than I’d like to admit.
For me, it came through teaching. Mentoring people in the industry — some experienced, some just starting out. My Telegram is a mess of messages. I answer what I can. I give a voice note here, an introduction there, sometimes just a direct answer to a direct question. None of it converts to revenue. Most of it has nothing to do with business at all.
And it’s the most valuable thing I do.
Not because of some noble idea about giving back. But because it’s the one part of my week where I’m not calculating the return. It’s the thing I do purely because it matters. And that distinction — between what you do for money and what you do for meaning — turns out to be worth more than most assets on your balance sheet.
So here’s the question I’d leave you with. Not the one about how to hit your number — you already know how to work. The one worth asking is what you’re going to do when you do.
Because that answer will determine whether the number is the beginning of something or the end of it.
Most people in this industry never ask it. They find out the hard way.
Don’t be most people.
