Do you know the secret to investing? Dmitry Belianin does. Driven by a desire to "give back" Dmitry has developed a uniquely personal, hands-on approach to investing. By offering personalised mentorship and guidance to the founders he backs, he's empowering the next generation of industry leaders. But scaling this model has presented challenges - Dmitry has had to find ways to maximise his productivity and empower founders without micromanaging. His secret? Seeking out visionary, risk-taking doers who aren't afraid to learn from their mistakes. If you share that entrepreneurial mindset, Dmitry's expertise could be the catalyst your career or business needs to reach new heights.
0:00 Investment Journey and Personal Approach
5:39 Managing Multiple Investments and Scaling
7:27 Key Attributes of Leaders in iGaming
10:47 Balancing Mentorship and Scalability
14:04 Empowering Leaders and Avoiding Micromanagement
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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.
So many people on iGaming are afraid of failure. Failure is something which makes you better and stronger and the other work with someone who failed a lot in the past and knows the cost of these mistakes. 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 AI-powered data analytics platform Blask and supported by Ted Jovian affiliate and media company already media. Lava starts the leading casino partnership program and next.io, the world's iGaming community. Hello and welcome back to 15-minute mastery. Dimitri again is back in the hot seat. He's developed a unique approach to investing, building a personal investment fund organically through direct personal investments and taking on equity in an advisory role. He's got a really hands-on mentorship driven style that sets him apart in the investment world and Dimitri, we're really excited to dive into your investment philosophy today. So to kick things off, can you walk us through how you started investing in iGaming businesses? What motivated you to take this more personal hands-on approach when you're investing also? I think this whole investment journey started as my giving back to the industry kind of approach because I'm so grateful for everything this industry gave to me. The industry changed my life completely and I came across so many amazing people which helped me throughout my career and my personal life as well. So I just really wanted to give back no matter what and I think it all started with me helping friends and ex-colleagues who were onto their entrepreneurship journeys because I've been there myself and trying to help them no matter what with either advice or sharing some of some of my expertise of the situations I went through myself previously. It all started when a friend of mine just gave me equity because some of my advices were so helpful to him and his business and helped him to improve his business pretty much dramatically and I was like okay and how can I apply this on the scale right? I'm a person who likes to build processes and systems and frameworks so I was like okay how do I multiply? How do I use my knowledge to help not just one set of people but multiple set of peoples but this is where I think I was wrong at some point as well where I realized that my time has been the biggest constraint and some of the things I'm building they have a very personal mentorship kind of approach where I'm not being able to provide the same amount of time and attention and value you know whether it's like one company five companies but I won't be able to do this for 20 companies so now I think my approach towards investment was a very personal one a very in-depth one where I'm helping founders not just like as the founders and entrepreneurs but helping them to become a better human beings a better you know a better people and their families and you know sharing all my expertise I can to be able to change their lives completely. And given the personal nature of your approach and I've I've seen your challenge with this personally having worked with you day in day out but how do you manage to stay involved with all of these multiple investments give this personal approach give lots of mentorship be hands-on where needed how do you do that without spreading yourself too thin and are there key highs you look to make first to kind of help you spread your knowledge and scale your knowledge without being too hands-on. That's a great question and you know I live and learn every day of my life and working probably the best way and how you can learn faster than anywhere so the approach is completely unscalable right now and this is what I realized you know since day one and I got myself into the situation where it's impossible to provide the same quality of mentorship and help you know the same way I've done it for one or two companies with now this being like you know eight companies plus so I think there is no work way balance in this journey right now but I think it's coming and the way it's coming it's also being a journey which I then can help applying to all these companies we work with right now because most of the founders they keep forgetting about the house they keep forgetting about the families they keep grinding no matter what but this is where the biggest the biggest failure is coming from you know you being exhausted making you an inefficient founder and making you and a very inefficient entrepreneur you becoming tired you becoming stressed you becoming you becoming set to fail in every step of your journey so this is probably one of the biggest learnings for me is this coming with hires yes but finding a right set of people with the right mindset with the right chemistry and the right attitude to grind is a very tough challenge right and it's it's it's more about you know finding right people with the right mindset rather than a skill set nowadays especially you know for for all the entrepreneurs I'm chatting with right now I think the skill gap in the like gaming was was always very big but now it's it's becoming thinner and people are more looking for like-minded people rather than professionals of what they do it's like you know if you found someone who is who is the right partner in crime in a certain manner this is where it's so much easier to you know bring him up to speed with the professional side of things as well and probably the the very last bit here is about you know a very hands-on approach which you've mentioned this is impossible to do on the scale right and I've never done this previously in my life and talking with you know some of the smartest people in this industry like Jeffrey Haas team hit Sanford from Walkwell you know all these guys helped me so much to understand how to do things right how to be able to utilize and scale my impact and my knowledge so I think this is where the biggest learning of this year is coming for me personally how to be able to utilize this approach and how to be able to scale it without any you know loss of quality and you talk about an important aspect of this process being finding people with the right mindset what is the right mindset for you what does that look like in a leader of the business that you're working with I think taking risks is probably one of one of the biggest and if you look at you know that the companies within portfolio and the companies I'm willing to interact with they're all changing the game in their own aspect you know whether this is like a SEO affiliate it's changing the game on its own way if it's a marketing agency then it does something very different from from what rest of the market is doing so I think all these people were taking this very calculated risks and not being afraid of failure because so many people in our gaming are afraid of failure and failure is something which makes it better and stronger and the other work with someone who failed a lot in the past and knows the cost of these mistakes was from money perspective and personal damage perspective then with someone who did a great job you know five times in a row with with the success means that the first time he fails could be the risk of you know running the business once and for all so I think that's number one the second is probably a little like initiative driven people I really like people who are you know thinkers but at the same time they're doers so people who are initiative enough and people who want to you know take a chance and to be able to utilize their mindset and to be able to utilize their skillset and knowledge and do things rather than talk about things so I think initiative is something which is really you know missing in this world right now and people they especially the ones who are coming from from the big companies background are not initiative driven enough and they just wait for you to come and say something so this is not kind of people I'm really a big fan of working with together because this is where you need to you know micromanage a lot and I think micromanagement is probably one of the worst of all scenes of entrepreneurship because this is where you cannot really focus on the higher picture and this is where you you're not being able to trust people fully enough because you know once you start micromanage then it's a very hard road to get rid of it so this is probably number two and number three I think vision so someone who has a vision on how to do things right on how to like I mentioned changing things so how to change things right right and to understand how this industry operates on a very granular level are you know my type of people because combining a right set of game changing techniques into one big ones energetical one is a very rare talent and you know I mentioned Tim yet I mentioned Sanford I mentioned you know all these guys I was so grateful to work with together and these are the people who are visionary of our time and these are the people who can connect things which were never connected before so I want to work with these kind of people and you know this is a very rare talent and this is that kind of people I really want to have in my organizations and earlier you mentioned that you've had to kind of step away from being so personal and you perhaps made the mistake early on from being two hands on yet you still lead with this mentorship driven approach and it seems you've struck a bit of balance obviously there's always room for improvement but what does it look like practically for you now to offer this mentorship driven investment to a business yeah I think I'm a crazy productivity person in a good way so every single new productivity tool when it comes down to the market I'm testing it immediately you know I've read so many productivity books I've tested so many productivity frameworks and tools and I think I found my own balance on how to you know run my life and routines so this is where I think I started finding a right approach to making this whole thing more scalable you know I've talked about some of these things earlier in in the news weathers but it all come down to less calls probably this is this is the most important one this is where you use your time in a very inefficient and unscalable manner if you're still present on the call but you're out there wondering you're out there replying the messages you're out there thinking about something else you're being unproductive so I think cutting the amount of calls cutting the amount of you know people I also interact with without any result has been probably one of the biggest things I've done this is where my time and a lack of focus has been transitioned into the right things where I make a difference and where my time and my input are so much more valuable and probably the biggest one is the personal task management framework so I'm using a set of tools which are helping me to track my messages, track my tasks, tracks my projects, tracks the progress of all these items and this is where I understood how to you know with the same input of like you know any human being you know could be multiplied dramatically on my end how to make one hour per day you know making the impact of like 10 hours per day of any other human being so this was probably one of the biggest discoveries I came up with and you know a lot of people are asking me like how you can you know run the newsletter how you can reply messages how you can you know build all these greatest businesses and by the way we've managed to you know build more than 150 mill under under management right now right and probably it's going to be more than 200 by the end of this year so how can I combine all of these things you know and you know stay productive the reason is why you know you need to implement the right frameworks watch how your body operates watch how your mind operates understand where you do most productive understand you know what kind of things are dragging your attention away and to try to cut them down dramatically and ruthlessly so this is what I was working on probably most of my time this year and I see a huge progress and this is what I also try to you know implement into the companies we work with together and especially with the founders and their wives because you know they're the people who drive the business and if they're inefficient it doesn't matter how effective and efficient I am if if the projects are not yeah that's really interesting Dima and I've seen that personally with you over this journey how you've implemented these things you're constantly trialing new tools new techniques and you could seem to get a lot more done with your time than the normal person but I want to go back to the aspect of empowering leaders again you're an experienced manager you we're running massive teams at some of the previous businesses you were in but right now it's almost it's a very different dynamic because you have more at risk you have more skin in the game and potentially more to lose right so it can be very easy to dive into micro managing people how do you empower leaders that you're that working in the businesses you're involved in but still allow them to make their own mistakes even though you know you can see from your own experience that you know this might not work so I think the power of listening people is underrated and everyone is not trying to speak try to get under someone's skin trying to understand how their minds are thinking but doing it in the wrong manner right I think you need to listen to the person more than speak yourself as the mentor right you need to make person speak through his own thinking speak through his own mistakes make his own assumptions and make it a very guided diving process rather than you know you running the ship and you running you know this car for these people so I think you mentioned the word empowering I think this has been in the heart of organizations since day one not to control but to empower not to advise but to listen more right and this is where you can create a new generation of leaders by allowing them to you know make these mistakes but if sometimes you can see that you know this leading to a wrong direction this leading to a catastrophe this is where you can step in and this is where your feedback will be guided and valuable the most because you know if you think about you know human and in organizations everyone is different so much different that you you won't be able to come up with the right you know framework feeling into every leader and every organization so this is where I think you know empowering listening and providing the right feedback at the right time is probably the biggest way in how to empower and build the new leaders of this generation and I really like working with younger people because as I mentioned you know everyone learns a lot on their followers and this is where younger people they probably never went through the same amount of failures someone with you know five companies behind could have done before so I think you know finding a right people who can listen learn from their mistakes is the right way. Dima this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation I'm a little bit sad that we have to end it now but thanks again you've absolutely delivered so many great insights there that I'm sure are going to be really helpful to people so thank you. Thanks Arjun, thanks for having me. [BLANK_AUDIO]
