TRADANTS

LARS GOTTWIK

Founder & CEO of TRADANTS

Q How have your priorities changed since exiting JFD Group?

My priorities have changed significantly after leaving the company - however, despite that JFD was a great experience and a remarkable success, I very much enjoy working in a true startup environment again. I founded TRADANTS straight after leaving JFD with the vision to merge the fintech and gaming industries and gamify trading on a global scale.

Q What inspired you to develop your idea?

I got the idea a few years ago while chatting with some friends about the rise of esports and the potential in this industry. I believe trading should be an epic esport where traders and teams can become famous ‘rock stars’ with a global audience and fanbase.

Q What is unique about your business?

What’s unique about our company is that it merges esports, capital markets and skill-gaming. We do not only disrupt those three industries but create an entirely new one through continuous innovation.

Q How did you decide where to establish your company?

Our company’s headquarters are in Germany, and we have a stable branch in Bulgaria as well. Both locations have been a logical choice - all founding partners of TRADANTS are German and Bulgarian and

have an existing network and available resources to kick things off in those countries. We are scaling our IT, Web and Platform Development Teams in Bulgaria, and in Germany, we focus on Sales, Administration and Corporate Actions.

Q What challenges did you have to overcome at the beginning of your new journey?

As usual, starting a company in its first months is a wild ride where everybody does everything simultaneously, yet for the third time in a row. I am used to that, but this time, the most significant difference compared to JFD is the absence of licenced activities, making it fundamentally easier and faster to get things going.

Q How do you define success?

For me, it is to have the courage to do your thing without caring about what others say.

Q How do you plan for your business’s future?

We have a very ambitious roadmap planned for TRADANTS. It includes several further funding rounds and preparing for global expansion. It took us quite some time to define our core values and what we want to achieve by gamifying trading, but now we have a clear game plan in mind. However, we are realistic enough to know that pivoting a business due to unforeseen reasons can (and potentially will) happen at any time.

Q What do you consider non-negotiable in your business?

Our core values - UX first, courage changes everything, dare to dream, stay humble and fail forward!

Q What are the qualities of a good entrepreneur?

For me, those are courage, discipline, and vision.

Q What do you enjoy most about being an entrepreneur?

I ran companies in very different industries - I started in the music and festival business, moved to capital markets, and am now in esports & skill-gaming. Throughout my career, I met many different people with different characters, travelled to many countries, and so far lived a life that has been the opposite of boring or ordinary. This dynamic is what I genuinely enjoy about entrepreneurship.

Q What do you find most challenging about being an entrepreneur?

Well, running your own business can be hard sometimes - you face numerous obstacles and every time you fail, you have to get up and try again and again while you remain focused on your goal. You need to be patient and persistent, and that is quite challenging.

Q How do you manage feelings of doubt?

Can they be managed, really?

Q What have been your most significant failures, and what did you learn from them?

In my early years as an entrepreneur, I was very naive and believed in everything promised to me. However, the biggest lesson from all these years as a business owner is that just a handful of people deliver 100% of what they promise. If you have found a business partner that you can trust, then stay with him - it’s the rarest quality that one can find in business.

Q What makes an effective leader?

I don’t know if I am qualified to answer this, as I am learning so many things every day. Probably it is a mixture of empowerment, leading by example and delivering the ‘why’.