For Karolina Pelc, success has never been a matter of waiting for a lucky break. From navigating the high-stakes world of online gaming to executing a multi-million-pound tech exit, her trajectory has been defined by a deliberate philosophy.
“I don’t believe in luck in the traditional sense,” Pelc tells London Loves Business. “I believe in creating the conditions where opportunities become more likely to happen. For me, engineering serendipity has been a recurring pattern throughout my life.”
To the casual observer, Pelcโs achievements might seem like a series of fortunate strokes. She climbed the corporate ladder at breakneck speed, becoming the youngest person in the boardroom, raised investment from little more than a pitch deck, and built and sold her technology company, BeyondPlay, in less than three years. Most recently, her book scaled the Amazon charts without the conventional backing of an established author platform.
“From the outside, each of those moments can look lucky,” she says. “What people don’t see are the years spent building relationships, taking risks, putting myself in unfamiliar rooms, sharing ideas publicly, creating opportunities, and consistently showing up. They don’t see the thousands of conversations, the failed attempts, the rejections, the experiments, and the willingness to keep moving before there was any guarantee of success.”
For Pelc, this is the core of her methodology: increasing your surface area for opportunity. “It means acting before certainty arrives. It means creating enough momentum that when an opportunity appears, you’re already moving towards it. I wrote this book specifically to decode that process – to prove that luck isn’t a lottery; it’s a discipline you can intentionally build. Luck rarely arrives as a lightning bolt. More often, it arrives disguised as the outcome of hundreds of actions nobody noticed.”
The Unconventional Classroom
Long before she was pitching venture capitalists, Pelc was honing her business acumen in a very different environment: dealing cards on casino floors. It was an unconventional foundation that gave her a distinct advantage in executive spaces.
“Casinos taught me more about business than any MBA ever could,” she says. “When you’re dealing cards, you’re constantly reading people. You learn how to assess risk, manage pressure, handle difficult personalities, and make decisions while everyone is watching.”
By her twenties, she had already developed a fierce emotional resilience from handling high-pressure situations and intimidating clients. “A boardroom is a much less intimidating place when you’ve already survived that environment,” she says.
Ultimately, the experience revealed that business is a game of human psychology, driven by emotion rather than pure logic. “Whether I was pitching investors, negotiating partnerships, or presenting to a board, I was still doing what I had learned years earlier on casino floors: reading people, understanding incentives, and adapting my communication accordingly,” she says. “The cards changed. The people didn’t.”
Stripping Away the Startup Gloss
In writing her book, Pelc was determined to bypass the typical, polished Silicon Valley narratives. She wanted to capture the messy reality of the entrepreneurial journey, emphasising that her time as a founder was only a fraction of the story.
Instead, she traces her survival skills back to a mosaic of raw, unrelated experiences: cruise ships taught her adaptability, corporate life taught her execution, and living across different countries taught her reinvention.
“None of those experiences looked like standard startup preparation. Yet they became the most important tools I relied on while building a multi-million-pound company,” she says. “I wanted to tell a different story. Not a Silicon Valley fairytale. Not a founder-from-the-garage myth. I wanted readers to see that a non-linear path, an unconventional background, and a late start do not disqualify you from success. In many cases, they become your greatest advantage.”
Her book serves as a toolkit for reinvention, urging business owners to bet on themselves before the world gives them validation. “You don’t need permission, a perfect CV, or a flawless origin story to completely change the trajectory of your life and business.”
The Strategy Behind the Exit
When discussing BeyondPlayโs rapid multi-million-pound acquisition, Pelc is refreshing in her honesty. “The honest answer is that there is no secret. And there certainly isn’t a copy-paste playbook,” she admits, noting that building and selling a company is far too situational for a simple formula.
However, she emphasises the importance of getting the foundations right from day one by identifying potential acquirers early, solving a genuinely painful problem, and creating active market demand.
“Most importantly, you need to build a powerful narrative around your business,” Pelc says. “Acquirers don’t simply buy products; they buy markets, momentum, strategic positioning, talent, and future potential. Long before acquisition conversations begin, you want your company to be front of mind when industry leaders think about your category.”
Instinct, Psychology, and Whatโs Next
While leading her company, Pelc says she relied heavily on instinct. It was only later, when diving into neuroscience and psychology for her book, that she understood the science behind her intuition.
“What neuroscience has given me is not necessarily better instincts, but the precise explanations for them,” she says. “It has helped me understand why certain fears appear, why some people embrace risk while others freeze, and why cultivated self-belief matters far more than baseline competence.”
This understanding has fuelled her advocacy for structural changes in the UK investment landscape, where she pushes for equal access over mere “representation” for female founders. “Too much investing still happens through lazy pattern matching,” she argues, calling for more women holding the purse strings in venture funds. “Female founders are not a diversity initiative or a checkbox exercise. They are high-growth entrepreneurs building immensely valuable companies.”
Now based in London, a city she credits with completely shattering her rigid, risk-averse upbringing in post-communist Poland, Pelc is entering a new chapter. Armed with the freedom of a successful exit, she is leveraging her book to build a global platform focused on international speaking, investing, and thought leadership.
“The book is the foundation of that journey, not the destination,” Pelc says. “In many ways, I’m still doing exactly what I’ve always done: betting heavily on possibility before I can see the outcome.”
- Her Play: Make Your Own Luck by Karolina Pelc is available now.
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