What Uri Poliavich’s Journey Teaches About Building a Global Business

I keep running into Uri Poliavich’s name. Industry awards. Conference stages. A documentary feature on Reuters. The Jerusalem Post naming him among the Top 50 Most Influential Jews. For someone focused on building rather than self-promotion, he’s been hard to miss lately. So I decided to dig in and find out what the story actually is.

Here’s what I found.

Uri Poliavich is the founder and CEO of Soft2Bet, a gaming platform provider that’s grown from a single small office to 19 licenses across 12 countries. He just picked up Executive of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards EMEA. The accolades are impressive, but what caught my attention was his origin story. Born in Soviet Ukraine in 1981. Grew up with what he calls “grayness” everywhere. Moved to Israel at 14. Studied law. Then made a series of unconventional choices that turned a newspaper job ad into an international gaming operation.

The line that stuck with me: “I remember the feeling of hunger the most. Not just hunger as a kid, but the hunger to change your life.”

The Newspaper Ad That Changed Everything

Poliavich spent years building legal expertise. Bar-Ilan University law degree. Commercial and real estate practice. International M&A specialization. The kind of resume that opens doors at established firms and keeps parents happy. Safe, respectable, predictable. Then he saw a job posting for a business development role in Central Asia. No connection to law. No obvious career logic. He applied anyway, got the job, and found himself managing a hundred people in a completely unfamiliar context.

Most people would call this reckless. I’d call it pattern recognition. He understood something about himself that the safe path was hiding: he needed to build, not advise.

The lesson here isn’t that everyone should abandon their career for random opportunities. It’s that sometimes the thing that looks irrational is actually the first honest decision you’ve made. Poliavich’s legal training wasn’t wasted. It gave him the M&A knowledge he’d later use to structure deals and work through complex regulations. But staying in law would have been the real waste.

Gaurav Tiwari

Author

Betting Everything on the Business

After Central Asia, Poliavich worked at Playtech, expanding their Eastern European presence. Good job. Growing company. Valuable experience.

But he wanted to build his own thing. And here’s where the story gets real. He had some savings. Enough for either a down payment on an apartment or seed capital for a business. Not both. He chose the business.

I’ve seen plenty of founder origin stories. Most involve venture funding or family money or at least a safety net. This was someone choosing entrepreneurial risk over housing security. That’s not a calculated bet on expected returns. That’s a statement about what kind of life you want to live. Soft2Bet launched in 2016 from a small office. No fanfare, no press coverage, just someone who decided building something mattered more than owning something. That distinction matters more than most people realize.

The Counterintuitive Regulatory Play

Most gaming startups target loosely regulated markets first. Makes sense on paper. Fewer barriers. Faster revenue. Figure out compliance later when you have money to burn on lawyers. Poliavich did the opposite. From day one, Soft2Bet pursued licenses in heavily regulated jurisdictions. Longer timelines. Higher costs. Slower initial growth.

But here’s what that approach actually bought them. When you build compliance into your foundation, you’re not retrofitting later. You’re not scrambling when regulations tighten. Every new jurisdiction becomes easier because you’ve already proven you can meet rigorous standards. Today Soft2Bet holds licenses in jurisdictions including Ontario, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Romania, Spain, and Sweden. The platform integrates content from over 100 game providers. The slow path turned out to be the only path that scales. This applies way beyond gaming. Whatever industry you’re in, the question isn’t whether regulation is coming. It’s whether you’ll be ready when it does.

Building Products That Change Behavior

In 2024, Uri Poliavich-led Soft2Bet launched MEGA (Motivational Engineering Gaming Application). The platform won Product Launch of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards EMEA 2025, which speaks volumes about how the industry received it. But the interesting part isn’t the award. It’s the approach. Instead of competing solely on game volume or bonus offers, MEGA created marketplaces where players trade features with one another. Social mechanics are layered onto individual gaming. The product succeeds because it understands what actually drives engagement, not just what players say they want.

I see this pattern constantly in successful products. The winners don’t just add features. They identify the underlying behavior they’re trying to create and design systems that make that behavior natural. Poliavich calls it motivation engineering. Whatever you call it, the principle applies to any product: understand the behavior first, then build the system. Most companies do it backwards. They build what seems logical, then wonder why users don’t engage.

What Actually Scales

Uri Poliavich’s leadership approach for Soft2Bet is simple enough to describe: hire talented people, support them when they need it, then get out of their way. Every founder says something like this. Few actually do it. The tell is in the organizational structure. With operations across Malta, Cyprus, and multiple regulatory jurisdictions, micromanagement would be impossible even if Poliavich wanted it. The company has to run on distributed decision-making because the alternative doesn’t work at that scale.

Building that capability from the start meant the organization could grow without the founder becoming a bottleneck. This connects to the regulatory strategy. Building the hard stuff early, whether compliance infrastructure or autonomous teams, costs more upfront but compounds over time. The companies that cut corners early end up paying for it for years. The companies that invest early wonder why everyone else is struggling. The company also emphasizes organizational diversity as an operational advantage. Operating across multiple jurisdictions with different languages, cultures, and regulatory requirements means a multicultural team isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s necessary for understanding each market properly.

Industry Recognition

The industry has noticed what Poliavich has built. Recent recognition includes Executive of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards EMEA 2025, Leader of the Year at the SBC Awards 2024, and ranking among the Top 100 Most Influential People in iGaming. As I mentioned in the intro, The Jerusalem Post also included him in their Top 50 Most Influential Jews list. Awards are just awards. But when they stack up like this across multiple organizations and publications, they signal something about how peers and industry observers view the work.

The Takeaway

URi Poliavich’s story isn’t a template. Soviet childhood, Israeli military service, law degree abandoned for Central Asia, savings bet on a startup, regulatory strategy that contradicts industry convention. None of that is directly reproducible. But the principles underneath are worth stealing. Choose the hard path early when it builds capabilities you’ll need later. Understand that compliance and quality aren’t constraints on growth but foundations for it. Hire people you can actually trust and then actually trust them. Build organizational capability that doesn’t depend on you being in every room.

The kid who grew up in Soviet Ukraine now leads a gaming company with global reach and industry-wide recognition. The distance between those two points was covered by consistently choosing the harder, slower, better path. There’s something in that for anyone trying to build something that lasts.

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