Koom Games CEO: Why "never give up" is terrible advice for entrepreneurs

Thanks for joining us, Marko – and thanks for sharing a panel with me at the SBC Summit in Lisbon. How did you enjoy speaking – and the conference overall?

Thanks for having me, Tim. Game design and player psychology are evergreen topics, and having an audience that actively jumped into the discussion made it really fun. SBC was actually my first touchpoint with iGaming a few years back – coming back now and running into familiar faces shows how fast this network grows and speaks to the great vibe of the conference.

Following all our discussions, what are your main takeaways on our big topic: how best to engage players in today's age without crossing the line?

Revenue is where users are, so do what’s good for players and everything else will follow. Casino games should be there to entertain people, not to exploit them. Gamification, both inside and outside the core loop, gives players genuine entertainment; if you do that well, there’s zero reason to cross the line.

More broadly, tell us all about Koom Games and a little about your story, including your time at Google?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. I worked in small businesses before chasing my lifelong dream of working at Google, where I spent 10 years in AdTech leading strategic partnerships and monetisation for mobile game publishers. My favourite pick was a journey from 0 to 1 and then scaling a solution to a multi-million-dollar project. I was architecting Immersive In-Game Ads, imagine rendering and measuring performance in native 3D placements like billboards or ads on bus stops directly inside game environments, all in real time.

Building on that, I teamed up with iGaming veteran and my best man Vedran Karaman to found Koom Games (fun fact: "kum" is best man in Croatian). We spent a year in stealth mode solving real operator pain points. Instead of making another traditional slot, we focus on fresh mechanics, something like burst games with a layer of depth, built for player engagement and commercial performance, resulting in something novel, something you haven’t played before! I am thrilled to share that we're going live with our first aggregator, BF Hub.

What's it like making the leap towards running your own business?

Jokes aside, iGaming is a very hard business to penetrate and among the content providers, there’s plenty of competition. But we didn't launch Koom to offer marginal tweaks to slots and other traditional formats. We received tons of positive feedback and a few pieces of advice that helped us shape a strong value proposal. Our value model delivers across the entire chain: high-velocity engagement for players, stronger retention and profitability for operators, and seamless technical delivery for aggregators. As a business owner, that makes my heart race and is why I’m optimistic about Koom’s future.

Do you have any advice for budding entrepreneurs that might surprise them, or any areas a business owner might not be prepared for?

I'm not sure if I'm the best person to give advice, as I tend to do things the other way around and generally have an unconventional path. But a few lessons I would share are:

1) Capital burn is always underestimated. Whatever timeline or budget you build in a spreadsheet, multiply it by 2x.

2) "Never give up" is likely the most terrible advice you can get. Being able to pivot is a strength of many successful entrepreneurs I know; it gives you energy, time and focus to make the other things work.

3) Build on your strengths instead of trying to fix all your imperfections.

What are your big aims at Koom Games for 2027?

1) Distribution & Market Footprint: I expect to expand our games portfolio in both breadth and depth. We’ve invested in the operational ability to cover more aggregators and operators as well as opening new markets, we’re closely evaluating Romania and Poland at the moment.

2) Reaping the benefits of 2026: 2026 was our tuition year. I keep joking with the team that we’re graduating from the most expensive college out there – starting a new business! Tech savviness is part of Koom DNA; we have applied the learnings and built our own set of rapid-prototyping tools, so we can test any novel game mechanic fast and quickly decide whether to kill it, tweak it or launch it.

Lastly, what trends do you predict more generally for gaming in 2027?

AI here, AI there, AI everywhere. It will lead to AI fatigue and hopefully we'll overcome the volume with quality. The existing trend of regulating markets and sweepstakes will continue to evolve in 2027. But let me finish on a positive note: the casino business is an entertainment business, so what I expect most in 2027 is for players to have fun!