When you traveled the world as a professional athlete, you taught yourself how to code. Why?
I like to create things. Adding some technical skills to my experience in business has always felt like the right thing to do. The rhythm of life of an athlete also gives you some freedom. I remember that once when I flew to Japan and was awake for more than 35 hours, I spent almost the entire time coding. My first project was to develop an app, which I did together with a friend. Apple had just released the programming language Swift and I thought that it was a good time to start learning the language.

Did you always want to become a pro volleyball player?
I didn’t know in the beginning. I started quite late, with 15 years, but I was getting encouragement because of my physique. In my early twenties, I struggled to reconcile everything I did, sports training, studying, and playing online poker at night. As a result, I temporarily reduced my efforts in sports. Then I dropped out of university to found my first startup. After it failed, I traveled the world as part of the Elite Swiss national team and started my pro career in earnest.

Why did you play poker at night?
I always loved mathematics and saw limit poker as more of a mathematical challenge than a game. It was also the time when playing poker over the internet was a new and exciting thing. I played and learned, and soon I was producing educational content for an online poker school as well as building an affiliate network for other professional players. With all of this, I did very well financially and was able to invest in several startups via Verve Ventures at that time.

What are the most important lessons you learned from sports and poker?
Sports has given me a sense of achievement and inner confidence. Winning a game gives you satisfaction. But you can’t avoid defeat for long. So I also had to learn not to identify myself with failures, and this is a very good lesson for life. The same is true for poker. Some days you win, some days you lose. You cannot change that, but you can analyze your decisions thoroughly and become aware of what your skills really are and when you made errors. One important concept playing poker taught me is that of expected value. It is calculated by multiplying the possible outcomes of an investment with their respective probabilities. I am happy to take and accept risks when the expected value is high, not just in poker and investing, but also in the choice of my career as an entrepreneur. Funnily enough, people in Switzerland seem to shy away from taking risks, although the potential downside can be precisely calculated and stretched because of the stable environment and opportunities to earn some money or get support if needed.

Maybe you have just a higher risk appetite than others. Most people prefer a stable job to trying to become a pro athlete, playing poker or founding a startup, and most people prefer to protect their money with safe investment products that have low returns instead of investing it in high-risk projects such as startups.
True, I don’t know many people with such elevated risk appetite. On one hand that’s just personality related I think. But people also tend to compare themselves to their peers all the time. They want to minimize deviations from the norm. They want to make sure they’re able to afford the same nice apartments and exotic holidays like everybody else. Not being able to afford this would negatively affect their self-perception, this is why they have to follow preordained career paths and can’t risk pursuing projects that might fail. It’s hard at times and I fully understand not everyone is masochistic enough (laughs). Since summer I’ve sublet my own apartment living with my business partner and his family due to the current liquidity situation. I’ve decided to make sacrifices and stepping out of my comfort-zone a habit. I learned to enjoy the benefits of gaining lateral experiences by not letting fear take over and not coupling your satisfaction with the current ease of life or luxury but purpose.

Let’s talk about risk in the context of investing. At a young age, when your poker business was flourishing, you started to invest in startups via Verve Ventures. Why not buy a sports car or other status symbols with that money?
For me, money is a means to drive things forward, either own projects or those of others, with a long term view. If you consume it, it’s gone quickly. I don’t say that people shouldn’t enjoy money and spend it, but investing is a way I saw to get closer to an important goal in life.

Which is…?
To be able to live financially independent for the rest of my life and support projects and people where I feel true passion. This is what I would call freedom and joy. And I will not get there if I stand in line for another corporate job. Besides, I would miss the challenge of entrepreneurship. It is a process rather than a status, and it offers you the full range of emotions from ups to downs. I wouldn’t want to have a life that is too linear.

With a diversified startup portfolio, you’re sure to have ups and downs. Some startups are successful while others are a complete write-off. What hurts more, losing money at a poker table or losing money with a startup?
It hurts differently, perhaps, but not too much, because it is part of the game and hopefully, you’ve learned something in the process. If you’re getting into these things, you need to be ready to accept losses. Diversification is a good way to hedge your bets, of course. But becoming too emotional because of a loss or judge based on short-term outcomes only is a suboptimal reaction. You can see that behavior more prominently with people that invest on the stock exchange. They change course rapidly depending on the market conditions, and many times they do that at the wrong time. With startup investments, you’re forced to sit on your investments for many years, you can’t make that mistake. But you also can’t sell your shares if you need the liquidity.

Just recently, you co-founded a new startup called Athlyts. Anything you can share already?
Every young athlete dreams of winning a world championship, but the accepted reality is that only very few progress to their full potential. Also most of them fight chronic or acute injuries since early age. We’re developing a tool that helps athletes and their coaches improve the training outcome effectively and use both the expertise of the coaches as well as machine learning to continuously analyze all relevant data. We achieve this by collecting a large mix of objective and subjective parameters on a daily basis. Our secret sauce is that we truly connect with the sports and create an app that both the athletes and the coaches love to use day by day.

So you already have a usable prototype out?
Yes, and even it is still an early product – we started the project in October 2019 – we already have crossed the 200 users mark, and they keep recommending it to their peers. It is very satisfying to experience such strong pull from a market that feels like home to me.

Aren’t there many solutions that track this kind of data?
Of course, there is software coming from hardware firms that manufacture fitness trackers, and there is software that offers forms to fill out that is used in sports clubs, and there are many monitoring tools, but there isn’t a solution that makes the users happy and creates new habits. Also many of them are data silos and leave out subjective aspects of wellbeing although they’re scientifically relevant. Our goal is to develop an all-in-one data intelligence platform that serves the athlete and the coach to sustainably improve performance and reduce injuries.

What are your next steps?
We want to further strengthen the bond to our existing users and prepare for additional growth but we are very mindful about the team and people that support us. We look for exceptional personalities which can truly contribute to our vision. Just throwing resources at this prevents you from building up true quality. With the right mindset and insights, we believe, a dozen of people can be enough to build up a world-changing software company.