Between the Lines 

Your debut book Her Play: Make Your Own Luck is out this month – what made this the right moment to tell your story?
I don’t think there is ever a perfectly comfortable moment to tell the story of your life. If anything, the timing became right precisely because I stopped waiting to feel fully ready. For years, people saw isolated versions of my story: the founder, the executive, now the investor, the woman on stage talking about resilience and risk. But very few people knew what sat underneath all of it – arriving in London with almost no money, working in casinos in central London, years on cruise ships, living in the Philippines and Malta, navigating male-dominated industries, and privately questioning whether I belonged in the rooms I had fought to enter. After exiting BeyondPlay, I realised something important. Success has a strange way of editing people’s stories retroactively. Once there is an outcome, everyone assumes the journey made sense all along. It didn’t. Much of it was uncertain, personally costly and, at times, deeply lonely. Interestingly, the book is not actually the detailed startup story people might expect after seeing the headlines around BeyondPlay. The deeper startup-building years will likely form the second book. Her Play is really the story of everything that shaped the founder long before the company existed. There was also something fascinating to me about the timing culturally. Founders, creators and even authors are now expected to build far more publicly than ever before. Writers are no longer simply releasing books; they are building communities around them. In many ways, modern authorship now resembles entrepreneurship. Ultimately, I wrote Her Play because I felt there was space for a different kind of business story. One that talks honestly about ambition, reinvention, class, power dynamics and the emotional reality of following a path without knowing where it will lead you.

While Her Play focuses more on the journey behind the founder than the startup itself, how did your experience scaling businesses shape your perspective on growth?
One of the biggest misconceptions around growth is that it is simply about speed. In reality, growth is about whether your systems, people and decision-making can absorb increasing complexity without collapsing under it. At BeyondPlay, we experienced that very early on. Like many startups, there comes a moment where you move from testing in controlled environments to real customers, real traffic and real expectations. On paper, we believed we were ready. Then live transactional volumes hit. PagerDuty started waking me up in the middle of the night because parts of our infrastructure simply were not scaling fast enough. Our databases struggled. Some queuing systems behaved completely differently under real pressure than they had during testing. Nothing teaches you humility faster than watching reality stress-test assumptions you were previously confident in. What mattered was recognising the risk early enough to act decisively. We fixed the immediate issues, but we also made a harder decision: temporarily slowing aggressive commercial expansion while we rebuilt parts of the infrastructure properly. That is one of the least glamorous but most important lessons in scaling. Growth is not just about winning customers. It is about making sure the foundations underneath the business can survive success once it arrives. What gave me an interesting perspective on this is that although I only experienced the earlier stages of scaling directly as a founder with BeyondPlay, I had already spent years inside companies going through massive transformation journeys. I worked in businesses that evolved from startups into unicorns, expanded across Europe and entered the US, and grew from one product vertical into multiple ecosystems. Before experiencing scaling as a founder myself, I had already observed what hypergrowth does to businesses from the inside. Growth magnifies everything – strengths, weaknesses, communication and leadership alike. The market eventually stops rewarding vision alone and starts rewarding operational discipline. Founders love talking about ideas because ideas are exciting. Scale, however, is often about process, precision and repeated execution over long periods of time.

Which chapter felt the most important for you to write, and why?
Probably the cruise ship chapters. Not because they were the most glamorous, but because they explain almost everything about how I later operated in business and leadership. People often underestimate environments like cruise ships or casino floors because they don’t fit traditional ideas of professional success. But those years taught me more about human behaviour, composure and adaptability than any boardroom ever did. You learn to read people quickly. You learn emotional control while operating in fast-paced environments where mistakes are public and consequences immediate. Cruise ships are fascinating human ecosystems. Thousands of people from different countries and backgrounds living and working in close quarters, often exhausted and far away from home. There is nowhere to hide. That teaches you a lot about coexistence, emotional intelligence and observing people carefully. Those years also forced me into independence very early. I never viewed going home as an option. There were moments where I genuinely did not know what would happen next, but pushing through those situations gave me one of the most important lessons of my life: resilience is trainable. There is also humour in those chapters. Chaos. Absurdity. The casino and cruise world exposes you to humanity in its rawest form – ego, loneliness, wealth, addiction, generosity, escapism – sometimes all within the same evening. It’s also where I met the very first hero, or, with today’s language, ally in my journey. Someone who saw potential and decided to crack the door slightly ajar for me, so I could kick it wide open later. In many ways, the book starts as a memoir about casinos and cruise ships but gradually becomes a broader story about reinvention and learning to trust your ability to navigate uncertainty.

When people finish the book, what do you hope they take away from it?
I hope people walk away feeling less ashamed of unconventional paths. So many people quietly believe they are behind because their careers or lives do not resemble the neat trajectories they were taught to aspire to. Mine certainly didn’t. And yet almost every chapter of my life that once felt confusing later became useful in some way. I also hope the book challenges the idea that successful people move through life with certainty. Most don’t. We consume so many polished success narratives today that people start believing confidence arrives first and action follows. In my experience, it is often the opposite. Another thing I wanted readers to feel is permission. Permission to start before they feel fully validated. Permission to reinvent themselves. The book is not about pretending fear disappears. It is about understanding that fear and action can coexist. If readers finish the final page feeling slightly braver about their own lives or decisions, I’ll consider that meaningful.

This magazine issue focuses on franchising and expansion. From your experience, what most often determines whether growth holds at scale?
The businesses that survive expansion tend to understand exactly who they are, what problem they solve and what standards cannot slip as they grow. In expansion or franchising, clarity is your currency – if a process cannot be clearly articulated without you in the room, it simply cannot be scaled. Scale exposes ambiguity brutally. Small teams can survive on instinct and proximity for a while. Larger organisations cannot. Once businesses expand across markets and management layers, culture has to become operational rather than aspirational. I’ve also seen companies mistake expansion for validation. Expanding too early can amplify weaknesses instead of strengths. A flawed process executed at scale simply creates bigger problems faster. The strongest operators focus less on appearing successful and more on whether the underlying business can withstand pressure repeatedly over time. And finally, leadership endurance matters more than people admit. Businesses rarely break because of one dramatic moment. More often, they erode gradually through poor communication.

What can we expect to see next from you?
The book is only one part of what I want HerPlay to become. Over the last year, I realised people were connecting not just with the business story itself, but with the broader conversations around reinvention, risk, visibility and unconventional career paths. I want to continue building on that through speaking, investing, founder education and curated events. I’m particularly interested in creating spaces where ambitious people can have more honest conversations around uncertainty and ambition rather than constantly performing perfection. That is part of the reason I started hosting the HerPlay pre-launch dinners in London. I wanted to create rooms that felt thoughtful rather than transactional. On the investment side, I plan to continue backing early-stage founders, particularly those from unconventional backgrounds who may not fit traditional pattern-matching models but possess resilience, adaptability and strong instincts. I also think we are entering a fascinating era culturally where founders are no longer simply building companies. They are building narratives, communities and media ecosystems around themselves at the same time. That shift changes leadership entirely and I’m very interested in exploring it further through content, speaking and future projects. Writing the book reminded me how powerful storytelling can be when it moves beyond polished business language and becomes something more human.

The book is now available to order on Amazon and at leading retailers