From Formula 1 to building mobile games

I’ve always liked the idea of launching my own business: creating my own thing where the impact of the effort you put in is measurable. 

My engineering background led me to the Formula One track, where I joined a Mercedes team on the brink of establishing its dominance over the circuit. I was building simulations to predict the point of failure for engines, helping our drivers identify the right engines for the right race. It was fascinating, but I couldn’t help feeling I was building someone else’s dream. I was itching to bring my creativity to a role that ultimately wouldn’t allow it. 

Around this time, I saw the boom of mobile gaming apps. Gaming felt like the ultimate expression of creativity: a chance to create your own characters, your own narrative, as well as environments on top of which people can create themselves. There’s also a super low barrier to entry, at least compared to other businesses. For a SaaS, for example, you need a proper vision and a plan; with a game, you can just build something fun! This was ideal for me at the time. I didn’t have a big vision, I was trying to figure out where I wanted to be at that time. So it felt like the perfect opportunity to just create something fun, put it out into the world, and see how the world reacts. 

I started off building ‘hyper casual’ games: games with really simple interfaces that are easy to play and understand. I moved to London, launched my own indie gaming studio, built a small team, and raised a little bit of funding. I started to get a sense of the lifecycle of a game: publishing content, growing it, monetising it. 

One game—a binary trading simulator called Rogue Trader—actually started doing quite well, reaching around 10,000 daily active users. At this level, monetisation is so important. And yet, existing advertising solutions were barely fit for purpose. Why hadn’t the gaming world found a solution to such a large problem? 

Pivoting into Web3 & acquiring LandVault

I’m a believer in blue ocean strategy—rather than competing in crowded markets, creating new market space where you can dominate. I was aware that no matter how well we did at Admix, our upside was capped, and we’d always be competing with the scale of Big Tech companies. That’s why I wanted to follow where the waters were running fastest.

My hypothesis—that we’d spend more and more time in virtual environments, and these environments would become more valuable—became increasingly true over the five years of building Admix. To the point where the business opportunity became too large to ignore.

The demand really started from our clients. From the NFT bull market in 2021 to Facebook rebranding as Meta, their interest in Web3 and the Metaverse grew. Conversations quickly turned to advertising and other monetisation opportunities in the Metaverse, and our customers were turning to us for advice. 

It was clear to me that what we were doing with gaming could easily be transported into the Metaverse. The issue was there weren’t enough people in the Metaverse to generate revenue from advertising. We had to be more creative, building engaging new virtual experiences that brands could possibly monetise in the future. Ultimately, we were a tech business, not a creative business. I knew that to do this properly, we had to find the right partners who were not only metaverse native, but could also help us grow creatively. 

LandVault popped up as a suggestion in a Discord server I used—and I quickly realised they were the creative partner we needed for this next stage in our journey. All these businesses who’d made money from NFT launches during the NFT bull market were now paying them to build metaverse activation. Each time I spoke to the founders, they seemed to be doubling in size. They appeared to have cracked the code for finding high quality metaverse builders, as well as attracting the best metaverse projects. 

What became apparent was that it was more than just a simple partnership: this was the direction I wanted us to head in. Our leadership and board members quickly came on board to the size of the opportunity to diversify and grow our revenue. And in June 2022, we announced that we’d be acquiring the business and merging under the name LandVault, with me as CEO. 

Merging two businesses is no mean feat. We cut half of our team, and subsequently brought in another 100. Letting those people go was incredibly challenging—these were the people who’d helped me build Admix, and they’d done nothing wrong, it was simply reflecting the strategic change in direction of the business.  

Since then, we’ve built culture from the ground up. It was a chance to bring real structure to our new colleagues, who until that point had just been growing in response to demand, and had no HR, no culture, no finance. In a way, this made things easier as we didn’t have to undo anything in their culture. Quickly, the teams have integrated well and our success is evident in the numbers.