Growing up in post-communist Warsaw, Karolina Pelc had never heard the word “founder”: the title given to the visionary who establishes a new business. Starting a company wasn’t presented as a real option.
By her early forties, Ms Pelc had done exactly that. The founder built BeyondPlay, a B2B gaming software company, from scratch, raising over €7million (£6.1million) in funding, and selling the business in under three years to FanDuel and Flutter Entertainment.
The journey from Warsaw to that acquisition was not linear. It wound through casino floors in Leicester Square, a stack of rejection letters from corporate employers, and the kind of grinding, close-to-burnout pressure that startup founders rarely advertise.
Speaking to GB News, Ms Pelc breaks down her journey from a teenager in Warsaw to her business success in Britain, and what future entrepreneurs can learn from it.
Ms Plec spoke to GB News about her business success
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KAROLINA PLEC / GETTY
Growing up, Ms Pelc’s mother worked weekends selling second-hand clothing to supplement the family income, a fact she only recognised later as a quiet model of entrepreneurship: “I just didn’t have the language for it back then.”
What she did have was drive. She competed in academic Olympiads, played competitive tennis, raced in swimming competitions, and by her own account was intensely focused on winning. But the clearest signal that a conventional path wasn’t quite right for her came through rebellion.
“The biggest sign that I was probably not designed for a very traditional path was rebellion. I just didn’t like being told what to do. That became obvious quite early in my teenage years and came as a complete shock to my parents.”
At 18, she left home and moved to London alone with almost no money. The decision was driven partly by opportunity and partly by something harder to define. London, compared to the Warsaw she had grown up in, felt vibrant and full of possibility.
Reality arrived quickly. “I think I ran out of money within my first week,” she shared. What followed was a period of genuine instability. But rather than derail her, the experience gave her something she would return to repeatedly in the years ahead.
“That period taught me one of the most important lessons of my life: that I can. Once you prove to yourself that you can survive uncertainty, future hardships become less intimidating because you already have evidence that you will somehow figure things out.”
Ms Pelc fell into casino work almost accidentally, on her father’s suggestion that it could support her financially during university. What she discovered was an unexpectedly rich education.
Starting out as a dealer at a casino on Leicester Square, she was immediately placed in one of the most psychologically intense environments a young person could walk into.
“You learn very quickly that trust is not built on ideas or charisma. It is built on getting the details right consistently and staying calm under pressure. Casinos strip human behaviour down to its rawest form.
“You see how quickly logic disappears when money and emotions collide: ego, fear, greed, impulsiveness, denial. You realise how difficult people find it to walk away once they get attached, even when every sign tells them they probably should.”
The entrepreneur has become an author
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KAROLINA PLEC
Her Play is sitting book shelves next month
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KAROLINA PLEC
By the time she eventually set her sights on the online gaming industry, she had accumulated something no degree programme could have replicated.
Getting through the door of the online gaming world, however, was its own test. Without a university degree or conventional office experience, the corporate sector kept saying no.
The entrepreneur added: “I applied for what felt like a hundred jobs and got rejected from most of them before finally getting my foot in the door.” She eventually got there, and the industry she broke into would later become the one she helped shape.
When Ms Pelc founded BeyondPlay, she was stepping into one of the most challenging environments a startup could occupy: a heavily regulated industry where earning the cofidence of investors was tricky, and where the technology landscape can shift faster imaginable.
Closing investment rounds was a major milestone — not least because the regulatory complexity of gaming makes due diligence an unusually intensive process — but Plec is quick to point out that the moments she treasures most from those years aren’t financial.
“We were a remote-first company spread across different countries and time zones, and because startup budgets are never glamorous, we usually only managed to bring everyone together once a year,
“Those events stay with me the most because that’s where people stopped being profile pictures on Slack and became genuine friends and collaborators.”
“The biggest obstacle was probably myself, I am very much an ‘all in’ type of person and I struggled to find any sustainable rhythm while building the company.
“As we grew, I carried the emotional pressure of the team very heavily alongside the pressure of investors, regulation, product development and constant uncertainty. It pushed me very close to burnout at times.”
She believes what kept the company moving through those pressures was a refusal to let obstacles feel bigger than the mission. “We never really allowed ourselves to believe the obstacles were bigger than the mission itself.”
BeyondPlay was acquired by FanDuel and Flutter Entertainment in under three years, a timeline that would be considered fast in any sector, and is extraordinary in gaming. Ms Pelc, the acquisition represented something beyond the financial outcome.
“It completely changed my life. Not just financially, but psychologically as well. For a long time, I carried a lot of self-doubt internally. Building something from nothing and scaling it to an acquisition far faster than I ever imagined was hugely validating personally.”
There was no magic formula or ’10 steps to startup success. It was years of industry experience combined with an enormous amount of hard work, resilience, and the ability to adapt quickly when things stopped working.”
Running alongside her work in the gaming sector are multiple other ventures, including her upcoming book, HerPlay, written and published in under 18 months.
Ahead of its publication, Ms Pelc said: “HerPlay is not just a book for female founders. The book is really about resilience, risk, ambition, and engineered luck.”
“Luck tends to find people who keep putting themselves out there. Too many people discredit their own achievements by calling themselves lucky while ignoring the years of discomfort, persistence, and risk that placed them into those opportunities in the first place.”
On imposter syndrome, she takes a characteristically unorthodox position: “I don’t entirely believe in imposter syndrome in the way we commonly describe it. I try to reframe discomfort as a sign of growth instead.
“Stop waiting to feel fully ready before you begin. So many people spend their lives asking themselves, ‘What if I fail?’ But few ask themselves the opposite question: What if you fly?”
Karolina Plec is the founder of BeyondPlay and the author of HerPlay, which will be available to buy from June 9, 2026.