The hires that turn a start-up into a scaleup
Most founders do not keep the CEO title for long. When Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman studied 212 American start-ups from the late 1990s and early 2000s, he found that by the time the ventures were three years old, half of the founders were no longer chief executive, and fewer than a quarter went on to lead their company’s IPO. In The Founder’s Dilemma, he framed this as a trade-off rather than a failure. Founders who give up control tend to build more valuable companies, and those who hold on to it keep more say over a smaller one.
That framing shifts the question away from whether the founder should step aside. The more practical question for a growing company is which leaders it needs to add, and at what point. Most of the answers are about operations rather than product, and they rarely come from the place founders expect.
A 2011 start-up on the Black Sea coast
iGaming.com was founded in 2011 in Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, by Lutz Bornschein. Fifteen years on, it is a global comparison and media group in the regulated online gaming sector, with around 300 people in 27 countries. It works remote-first, with hubs in Berlin and Varna. Bornschein remains founder and owner and is still described as the company’s creative head. The day-to-day running of the business, however, has passed to people who arrived with very different backgrounds.
Hire one: someone whose expertise is how companies run
The group CEO, Dr Andreas Ditsche, completed a PhD focused on remote work and has held CFO and CEO roles at multinational companies in the automotive and aerospace sectors. He is also a Full Professor at Kutaisi International University in Georgia.
For a company spread across 27 countries, that profile matters more than deep product knowledge. At around 300 people, the hard problems are coordination, decision rights and keeping a distributed team pulling in one direction. Founders usually learn these lessons slowly and expensively. Someone who has studied them and run large organisations brings them on day one. If you read through the profiles of the group’s leadership team, a pattern stands out: the three people at the top of operations built their careers outside the company’s own sector.
Hire two: operations people from corporate service delivery
Henry Wolf, the CEO, comes from operations, IT consulting and digital leadership, with a track record of scaling international teams and building operating models for projects across several European markets. Bilyana Tsekova-Petrishka, the COO, leads the company’s project managers. She built her experience in
service operations at E.ON, Siemens and Daimler Chrysler. She is also an NLP business coach and was named among the Top 100 Executives in Bulgaria 2025 by the Career Show Index.
Founders often treat corporate process as the thing they started a company to escape. At scale, the opposite tends to be true. Repeatable delivery, clear handovers and agreed ways of working are what let small teams stay small and keep a company of 300 from behaving like 30 separate start-ups. People who have run service operations at large companies have already seen what breaks when an organisation doubles, and they can build the structure before it breaks.
The counterweight: promoting from inside
Bringing in outsiders is only half the picture. Arne Harkensee joined iGaming.com in 2017 in an offpage SEO role and grew with the company until he became Head of SEO, now leading several international teams. Florian Güde joined the group in 2021 and became part of the management team in 2025.
The two routes do different jobs. Outside hires bring structure and a view of how larger organisations work. Homegrown leaders bring the memory of why things were built the way they were and the trust of the teams they came up with. A leadership team made only of outsiders can feel imposed, and one made only of insiders can struggle to see past the company’s early habits.
What founders can take from it
Hire for the stage you are entering. The skills that got a company to 50 people are rarely the ones it needs at 300. Recruit for the next stage while there is still time to learn from the hire.
Pair outside hires with people who grew up inside. Pairing them gives a newcomer context and gives long-serving staff a reason to trust the change.
Decide early what the founder keeps. Wasserman’s trade-off does not have to be all or nothing. A founder can hand over day-to-day management and still own the creative direction, as Bornschein has. Agreeing that split in advance makes the transition a decision rather than a crisis.
Scaling is often described as a growth problem. In practice, it is mostly a people problem, and the companies that handle it best tend to start on the leadership team well before the pressure to change it arrive.
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