The moment OneHazel stopped being an idea

I was sitting by the sea in Thailand, talking to two CEOs from Southeast Asian gaming companies. Different companies, different markets, same problem. One of them turned to me and said: why hasn't AI solved this yet? I said: give me six months.

First 24 hours: what actually happened

No ads. No PR. Soft launch. 10 sign-ups, 4 meetings booked, 195 website visitors. That is what happens when the problem is real and the product speaks for itself.

Why I do my best thinking in Gozo

Most of my best thinking happens on my balcony in Gozo. Greenery, sea, birds, the occasional goat. No screens visible from where I sit. It forces a different kind of thinking — bigger picture, less noise.

The Integration Tax: the £300K problem nobody names

Mid-market iGaming operators are quietly paying £300K–£600K a year in engineering and compliance overhead just to manage fragmented vendor stacks. Nobody calls it the Integration Tax, but that is exactly what it is.

What Entrepreneurship 101 taught me about Malta founders

We built Entrepreneurship 101 around a single idea: that the lessons which actually move the needle only come from people who have lived them. Not theorists. Practitioners. What I saw in that room gave me a lot of hope.

Compliance-native AI is not a feature. It is the foundation.

The instinct to bolt AI onto existing compliance systems is understandable. In regulated markets like iGaming, it is also a liability. Compliance has to be designed in from the start, not retrofitted after the fact.

The Aristocrat moment and what it says about iGaming talent

When Aristocrat announced it was closing its white-label operations in Malta, I saw two things simultaneously: a genuine loss for the community, and a signal about where the industry is heading. The talent does not disappear. It redistributes.

What a VC Lab fellowship actually teaches you

I joined VC Lab to build Gaulos Ventures, a fund focused on AI in iGaming. What I did not expect was how much the process would sharpen my thinking on the operator side of the market — and why most funds are missing it entirely.

AI agents do not replace your compliance team. They make it bulletproof.

The fear I hear from compliance officers in iGaming is that AI will make their jobs redundant. The reality is almost the exact opposite. The teams that adopt AI agents earliest will be the ones regulators trust most.

Most iGaming operators are deploying AI fast and building on sand

Operators are moving quickly on AI. Very few are thinking about what happens when a regulator asks them to explain a decision made by their model six months ago. Speed without auditability is a liability dressed as progress.