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.
I joined VC Lab to build Gaulos Ventures, a fund focused on AI in iGaming. The programme is rigorous, structured, and genuinely difficult. It is also one of the most clarifying things I have done professionally.
Not because it taught me how to raise a fund. I had a reasonable grasp of that going in. What it taught me — unexpectedly — was how to think more clearly about the operator side of the market I was trying to invest in.
The investor lens
When you are building a company, you think about your own problems. When you are investing, you are forced to think about the structure of an entire market — where the value is being created, where it is being captured, where the structural gaps are.
The VC Lab curriculum pushed me to map the iGaming AI landscape with a level of rigour I had not applied before. Who are the buyers? What is their real willingness to pay and why? Where is the structural problem that no existing solution is addressing adequately? Who are the realistic acquirers in five to seven years?
The investor lens forces clarity that operator mode often obscures.
What I found when I looked
The more I mapped the market, the more clearly I saw the integration problem at its centre. Operators were not struggling to find good AI tools — they were struggling to connect them to existing infrastructure without creating compliance gaps and engineering debt.
That observation, sharpened by the VC Lab framework, directly informed what became OneHazel. Not a new AI model, not another point solution, but an infrastructure layer that makes all the existing solutions actually usable in a regulated environment.
On building Gaulos Ventures
Gaulos Ventures will focus on pre-seed and seed stage AI companies operating in regulated markets — iGaming, fintech, and adjacent spaces. The thesis: companies building compliance-native AI infrastructure for regulated industries are the ones that will matter in the next decade. The fellowship gave me the framework and the network to pursue that thesis seriously.