Do you want to excel in your professional and personal life? Look to Klen-Kristofer Kaljulaid, a portfolio manager at Yolo Investments and Estonia's judo representative at the Olympics. Klen has found a way to blend his professional and athletic pursuits. His secret? Unwavering dedication and a strong mindset.
Klen’s success is no accident, he advocates that if you truly want it then it isn’t difficult to find the required balance in your life. He embraces the grind, treating both business and judo with equal passion, and his disciplined approach lets him excel without losing himself. With the right mindset and commitment, you can reach the top in multiple fields.
0:00 Combining professional sports and business
1:00 Embracing the grind and loving the process
2:07 Discipline and mindset in high-performance careers
5:31 Leadership lessons from sports and business
7:25 Investing in founders and providing guidance
9:01 The value of mentorship in the investment world
10:31 Startup funding: Yolo Investments approach
13:30 Advice for startup founders
Join the 15-Minute Mastery newsletter: https://newsletter.15m.com/subscribe
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/15-minute-mastery
Or follow Dmitry directly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitrybelianin/
Watch this show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@15-MinuteMastery
Welcome to “15 Minute Mastery,” the ultimate show for iGaming professionals, hosted by industry veteran Dmitry Belianin. With over 17 years of experience, Dmitry brings unparalleled insights and wisdom from top industry experts in just 15 minutes. Each episode delivers actionable strategies from all iGaming verticals to improve your personal and business performance. As the founder of Belianin, Dmitry also shares his expertise in nurturing high-potential iGaming startups. Subscribe to “15 Minute Mastery” for concise, high-value content and stay ahead in the competitive world of iGaming.
Don't get stuck to what you do, so I guess, I guess the saying is that have strong beliefs, loosely held. You're listening to 15-minute mastering, a show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the EI-powered Data Analytics Platform Blask and supported by Ted Driven affiliate and media company Already Media. Lulla Stars, the leading casino partnership program and next.io, the world's iGaming community. Hi everyone and welcome to 15-minute mastery. We got Glenn Christopher Kailite here with us today, a portfolio manager at YOL Investments. Glenn is an incredible individual and one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. This sentiment extends to the majority of folks at YOL Investments, who are simply awesome to collaborate with. But what makes Glenn especially noteworthy and places him in our special guest category is his one unique achievement. Glenn will be representing the Estonian Judo team at the Olympics this year in Paris. To the best of my knowledge, and by the way we should fact check this, he's the first and the only top iGaming executive who has managed to combine a professional career with excelling at the highest level in sports. I'd even say he's the paragon of what it means to balance both careers successfully. So, hey Glenn, it's really good to have you with us today. Hi, I actually know that there's one person who has competed at the Olympics and is working in the industry. But I don't think anybody has done it at the same time that they're actually working. Yeah, awesome. Thanks a lot for the fact checking. So, for this conversation, I think it's really fascinating to hear your story about especially the transition from sports to business. How did you experience as the professional Judo fighter shape your approach to business management and entrepreneurship? Yeah, I guess at the end of the day, they're one and the same. So, I've always went into everything with the knowing that I'm not naturally talented. So, I have to build a lot of effort in. And to do so, you have to set some goals. So, for me, it's always been setting very simple goals. Like easy example would be the Olympic Games was like a longer-term goal for me. And then I just make it into smaller pockets, a good example again. Olympic Games' big goal, smaller steps, is the competitions that I have to do. And then I go down to the like micro and macro level. So, what I need to do this week to achieve that long-term goal. And if I bring the same parallel over to the investments work, then like the long-term goal for all of us here is to make fun to a success. And then it goes down to smaller steps, which is to create a funnel that we get great deal flow. And then it boils down from that to actually the day-to-day effort that we have to put in to actually get this deal flow and to make this a success. I think if you go back in time to some of the world's largest companies, I absolutely love what folks at Google did with the OCR system. Guys at Intel did the same with the OCR. I think your approach of getting it down to a small bit is essentially anything which you can apply in any industry, any niche, probably even any function in any company. And it gets me to the point where I think, you know, you started applying some of the things, like you learn that sports especially, I think the disciplines, like discipline itself as you mentioned. So what key disciplines or mindsets from your judo career have you found the most beneficial in your role as the portfolio manager at your investments? It's impossible to wake up every morning and think you have to get to the Olympics. It's much more easier to just think that you have to get to the training and to like 30-minute run, 30-minute gym, whatever that is. And the same applies in business. But I think like a big switch happened for me when I realized that the only reason to keep doing what I do is when I love it. And after that, I think like the first thing I know this was that everything became much easier. So if you actually love the process, it isn't like work. It's enjoyable. So I've told this to Tim many times that I would do this work here for free and I feel the same about judo. So the first thing is you need to love the process. And after that, it's quite easy to structure everything around it. So in my case, I wake up at seven in the morning to come to training. I live one minute from the office, which was a conscious decision. I never cook because it takes too much time. I never thrive. I just use both to go everywhere. So it's just a lot of sacrifices that I've made. But I don't think of them as sacrifices because that's my decision to do them. So I very much enjoy what I do and I just structured it around so that I can do those things. I don't think it's limited to me. Like I think anybody who wants to do this could do this. Well, I absolutely love what you just mentioned. And I think Bill Gates, he once mentioned exactly that saying, he sacrificed everything beyond work, not thinking about cooking, not thinking about what things you were, not thinking about cleaning the house. And I think this is where it allows you to really kind of shape up your, like a pure performance mindset and to be able to extract the maximum amount of value of yourself. And it gets me to the point, like you mentioned, it is a suffering, right? But do you think there is a way, like a healthy way, I guess, on how to balance, you know, both of these like high-performance career? You know, whether in your case this is like sports and business at the same time, but, you know, for many people listening out there, this could be like, you know, multiple projects at the same time or, you know, work-life balance or probably, you know, career and the family life. So what could be your advice and how to balance, like, two high-performance careers at the same time? If you want it, like if you truly want it, then it's not that hard to balance things. I don't think it's, you don't need, as I said at the beginning as well, I'm definitely not talented in any sense. Like, when I started off in Chura, I was never winning, I was, I would say, average. And the only thing that actually separated me from the others was consistency. So a lot of people can put in massive amounts of work in one week or maybe one month or maybe one year, but I did it for 20 years, and I would say like, for 15 of those 20 years, people would have said that I would never get to the Olympics, that I just don't have what it takes. But it's just like compound interest over time, you just at some point reach a level where you are good enough. Your mindset and, you know, this like pure embrace the grind approach is the right way forward. And I think, you know, like your persona and the way how you kind of embrace the leadership, you know, not really thinking about, you know, like, okay, I want to, you know, like do something, but you know, you want to be the best, you want to be able to, you know, to be able to kind of perfect some of the moves you're making, right? You're trying to, you know, perfect the business strategy, you're taking approaches you're taking, et cetera. So I think it makes you like a great leader. And I think you're one of the, you know, probably the upcoming leaders of the iGaming industry and I wanted to hear your thoughts on like how you can share like inside, can you share insights on how the leadership in sports compares to like leadership in business and what are the common challenges and how do you overcome them? Yes, there's a great book by Simon Sinek called "Start With Why" and what makes that book so great is that usually you have to read through the book to get the nugget, but with this book you can just read the title and you basically get everything you need. And I guess that goes back to the love of the things. So I think you can make anybody happy doing what they do if you find the right game for them. So if they stop thinking about it as like an obligation and start enjoying what they do, I think all you need to provide after that is guidance and mentoring and everything else just flows naturally. And I think the second point here is that, I think the saying is that when all is said and done, more is always said than done. I've never looked up to people who talk a lot but don't do much, so I think leadership should also be leading by example. And here at Jolo, I think it's very evident that when you look at Tim, for example, he's like the biffany of what a leader should be. He's actually here in the trenches with us while he doesn't have to be here for a long time already. Yeah, definitely. I think this part of your story is still an exploit for us in this episode. So I really wanted to hear your other part of this story. So working with the goats of the industry such as Tim, he's obviously taught you a lot of skills and probably a lot of hidden skills which are not easy to obtain especially, you know, understanding the business track story, understanding the problems of the business. So I really wanted to hear other part of Glenn, with your background and working with these many beautiful startups and companies. What you find, probably the strategies, you find the most effective for guiding the new startups for the greater heights. I guess at the end of the day, the most crucial stage for VC is to find the right founders. So that's the first decision point there. Do I want to own the equity of this founder? And I think if you nail that part right, then everything else is quite easy. So of course, once we do invest, we bring a ton of experience, a ton of failures, pitfalls that the startups can avoid in the future. We also bring a very large commercial network which means that we can open a lot of doors and I think this goes back to Tim again. I think he's always had this mindset of being a kidney big, so usually our B2C brands or even our B2B brands become clients of the startup as well. So we basically never just give money, but we bring some historical knowledge of what works and what doesn't work. And then we also become clients which gives you very good feedback on the early stage of the product. Well, I think the ecosystem you guys got probably can skyrocket most of the companies from the early stage to at least traction or at least getting it to one of the market's leader positions. And I think you mentioned Tim a few times already, so I think it sounds like his role, not only in the company, but for you personally, has brought a lot of value. So I really wanted to hear, but you think mentorship and growth are closely tied to each other and maybe you can explain a few ways on how you approach mentoring new startups at your investments, you personally are from the team side as well. Yeah, I guess there's many very good mentors here at your investment, so I personally have Evert, I have Steve, I have Tim, I have Julian. So there's many people who are very willing to provide this guidance and I think that's like very important, you can't force one to share their knowledge. You know, from sports that it's often times something that people want to hold to themselves, they don't want to give this secret sauce, but I think it's very important for the longevity to share this. So when it comes to the startups, I think I touched upon that briefly already, that I think compared to other VCs, what we have is actually having been entrepreneurs ourselves, including myself, before I joined here, I did have a startup. And we know what it takes, we know how hard it is to get traction at the beginning and so forth. So we do invest in the founder and his vision, but we're always there to guide him. And is there any particular angle you guys are looking at the most right now besides the founder or his background? Do you look like a traction of the product and the company? Do you work on the visionary side of things or what is the main focus for you guys right now? Yeah, so I guess like the biggest change for us has been that historically we focused on early stage and now with the launch of fund 2, which is 100 million euro fund, we're focused on later stage. I guess that like lying in the sand for us is 1 million in revenues and that does mean that we don't just look at the founders, we don't just look at the idea, but we do look at unit economics as well. So yeah, it depends on the vertical, like I am in the Infintech are very different when it comes to multiples, for example. But yeah, we go quite deep into the unit economics and traction and so forth as well. Yeah, I mean looking at some of the world's most successful VCE and accelerator companies, I'm a big fan of Paul Graham, Anderson Horowitz, all these guys, I think back in 2012, 2016, these guys were so into numbers, understanding cohorts, understanding the user behavior. I think not many companies in iGaming are actually looking this deep into the numbers and it's really good to hear that you guys at the forefront of our industry. So there is one more thing I want to ask you, like you work with all these startup mentors, startups, you mentoring them and you see a lot of like as you mentioned failures, you've seen a lot of successes as well. If there is just one advice you as Klank can give to, like all these startup founders out there willing to get funded by your investments and get on board just one piece of advice you can give to them. Yeah, okay, it's twofold, so it's love what you do and the second thing is that don't get stuck to what you do. So I guess the saying is that have strong beliefs, loosely held. So just to bring like a parallel here from training, I see a lot of guys do the same things over and over again. It's like when you're in kindergarten, you learn to draw the letters, but you stop right, you start to use the letters to create something cool and something creative. I think it's very convenient to get stuck into forever painting these letters, but it's very important to go where it's uncomfortable, where you don't know what's going to happen. And that's the only way you actually push this forward and actually create something that's worth to be a unicorn. Well, thanks a lot for sharing your wisdom. Thanks a lot for sharing all of your thoughts and I'm a big fan of your career. I'm going to be supporting you at the upcoming Olympics and let's give guys give Klank a follow and give all the best and support and best of luck to you during the upcoming trial. So all the best mate and thank you so much for being with us. Yeah, thank you interesting. I remember actually we had a call like six months ago, maybe, maybe even more. And I don't know if you remember this, but I was asking you like a hundred questions. That's how I always approach things. When I find someone smart, I just try to get the knowledge. I hope you weren't too mad at the time. You didn't even know me. I started to ask like a hundred questions, right? No, I enjoy it. Back in the day, I thought, "Okay, so this guy, he has a really long and really successful journey in front of him because not many people, they actually got this courage to ask questions because many people, they don't want to look, you know, maybe you dump sometimes in a way or curious in a way because I think the only way to become better is to find a mentor and to ask him as many questions as possible. Because, you know, I think essentially mentorship is one of the probably biggest ways on how you obtain the knowledge, especially from the ones who already got the same past kind of crossed, you know, and probably getting into the minds of the most successful entrepreneurs and visioners such as the team, like as you mentioned. I agree. Thank you. Thanks a lot, mate. [music] [ Silence ]
