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Today, we're bringing you an interview with Gene - he started his career in marketing data analyst role, with his last role being as a Head of (External) Operations at a Gaming company.
Hello, my name is Eugene Arkhipov (Gene). I was born in Russia and lived and educated in the USA. I graduated from RIT with a degree in International Business Management and Administration and a minor in Russian. I was also an NCAA student-athlete (Lacrosse). After graduation in 2009 I decided to take a year and travel and work abroad since the job market at home was still recovering.
I landed in Russia since I had a free place to stay through family, and I hoped to find a female life partner here, a partner closer to my heritage. After working as an English teacher for a few years I was approached by a guy I played basketball with at the US Embassy in Moscow. That same guy is the head of the NBA in Europe, but before he was that he worked for a small holding company that controlled a few iGaming sites (online gambling). He asked if I wanted a side hustle doing some social media work remotely. So, I started as a Social Media Manager at that holding and would take care of all the posts on all platforms as a second job to teaching. Teaching was very fruitful financially and socially so I wasn't really looking for a change. However, since the future head of the NBA in Europe was leaving the holding, and nobody else spoke English on a native level, I was offered a promotion to a higher position.
It started with Marketing duties, including localizing sites, gathering data on user site behavior, keeping track of ads/ad spending/campaigns, customer support, due diligence with identity documents, looking at gaming trends and which of our games to advertise, etc.
At that time the leadership was a card player that played in the Soviet Union and won quite a bit. He invested that money into a land casino, and when land casinos were banned in Moscow, he received his share of the liquidation. A few years down the road (when I joined) the company was slowly deteriorating since the owner wasn't a businessman, he was a gambler, and unfortunately just throwing money at issues and doubling down on bad decisions hoping for "a better hand" wasn't enough in this type of business. It was his business and his right to do what he wanted with his money, but ultimately, when there was no more money left, the owner understood he needed to find an investor that could save the business.
During this downfall a new investor came who had business experience, he was one of the ex-majority owners of alcohol brands such as Stolichnaya vodka and others. This was an honest man who knew people and knew business. After he came to the company my role expanded to more than just Marketing. I was responsible for any and all external communication, all messages, emails, thoughts went through me before anybody wrote anything. By default, all contracts and negotiations fell in my lap, any and all external business dealings was my responsibility, licensing and regulatory approvals, security audits, which was all also inline with my education (Administration).
Data-wise I was mostly using Excel as it was all I needed. Our customer database used SQL and our programmers would make software that we can use to monitor game statistics, financial data, etc. So at this point I was already working with the software engineers, I learned SQL from looking at their queries in our work tracking system, and would use Excel for the majority of visualization and calculations. Any large datasets were narrowed down to an "Excel-manageable" level, so I never really had to learn programming since it was not my scope of responsibility, and I was instructed to use our 15+ software engineers to make what I need to keep track of whatever I wanted. So by this point I was already in a leadership position with limited technical skills (no python, no R, only Excel).
After keeping my head down and doing good work, the Investor with Business experience promoted me to Head of (External) Operations since I was already doing that in my scope of tasks, and the guy with the job before me actually wasn't doing anything and was called out for it. Once I got in the Operations role I made an immediate impact by cutting costs for my departments under my control about 85%. Under my supervision, and with the help of another Director who controlled Internal Affairs of the Company, we made our first sustained profit in the 8 year history of the firm (at that time).
Unfortunately the Investor left due to the risk of sanctions on him and his money and we were stuck with the old card player owner, who took the half a million Euros in profit we made in a year and made it all disappear using his ownership rights. That was essentially the end. Covid hit, then regulatory actions from the jurisdictions we were licensed in, as well as a lack of funds to pay programmers to update games, integrate wallets and so on.
I stayed on remotely to finish some tasks I started and slowly transitioned out of that role. So at that point I had enough money to retire in Russia and and focus on what I really love, which is Lacrosse.
From the beginning of coming to Russia I was also involved in growing Lacrosse from a hobby to a National Team. I became the founder and President of Russia Lacrosse. We started with 5 people in a park and ended with multiple teams for men and women as well as children, travel teams, a National Team (captain) and a Russian National Lacrosse Championship. When I stopped working full-time at "the casino", we were getting ready for the 2020 European Championship, then Covid hit, then the war started.
As a person who is against war, and who speaks out about it, I understood I couldn't live in Russia without avoiding significant trouble. So I decided to move to Vietnam to wait it out.
While waiting I realized there's not going to be a quick end to the war, so I'm going to need to refocus my life, and get back into the workforce. My friend and teammate from high school offered me a temporary job at his mergers and acquisitions firm to help them set up their data team and workflow. It also was only work dealing with Excel/Google Sheets, and mostly was organizing the team of 13 researchers we had from Central America. After this job I realized that if I wanted to get back into the data world, I'll have to update my skills. So I decided to take some online courses on Coursera. I took the courses, learned R, then Python and then started to think about a project I could do to show my skills.
Luckily enough I had a lot of my Lacrosse data from the Moscow Lacrosse Club from over the years, and I decided to do something with it. It's not much use to anyone outside the international lacrosse growing community, but it also served as a great learning experience for me and a way to showcase my skills that I've learned. It was not all in one place, I had financial statistics in Google Sheets (which was fairly easy), but the Attendance information was on a social network that had more data on the event page site itself then from the API or anything else that was available from it. So I created a bot to scrape the data from a site that's not really friendly with scraping, even though it was my data. I gathered the data, cleaned it and then learned how to make a webapp with Python and Streamlit and deployed my app.
Next step is to move to Denver and find a job in a Data role, Leadership role, Administrative Role, or other.
I'm not sure what it is, maybe it's obsessive compulsive behavior, but I like to deep dive into data, manipulate it, find some insights from it that put decision makers on the right path. The biggest reason people make mistakes is usually because they are uninformed or misinformed, not dumb, so I like to get down to the truth of the matter (from the data available).
Also, the high from completing an assignment successfully and deploying a product into the world is a good feeling as well.
The iGaming sector is really fun, I really liked working with people from all over the world and having connections in this industry is great. It's challenging but fairly lucrative if you can make the right decisions.
iGaming in my opinion is mostly about presentation. The games themselves are just RNG (random number generators) with cool visuals. There's no real difference in the essence of the games. Roulette is roulette, poker is poker, but where is the best place to play? Usually people will go to places that are honest and swift with money and transactions, show good graphics, have good customer support, and give plenty of bonuses.
My day's tasks changed with my role, but I can give you an example of something towards the end of my time at "the casino":
I get to work and check the dashboard about what happened when we were not at work, how much did we make/lose, which games, which players, who wrote to support, what payment systems are used, do they all still work? Then I made sure that any technical issues were relayed to the team, and at that point I would make sure to facilitate our work tasks (tickets in our work tracking system). So after I'm convinced that the technical side is nominal, any support issues dealt with, I would move on to the tasks that are not "routine". That all would take up the first half of the day depending on what's going on.
The non-routine tasks would be preparing our company technically for a security audit we needed for one of the jurisdictions, emailing back and forth with new e-wallets and payment processors to set up integration, game development/testing/deployment, marketing strategies and implementation (delegated to a new English-speaking employee at that point), contracts, negotiations, networking.
I had 3 small offices with staff in 3 different countries so at certain times of the day (depending on where the office is located) I would catch up with what is happening in their office, and deal with whatever that needs to be done. They sometimes had things I would need to do, but it was mostly just making decisions. i.e. need new server hardware in the datacenter on an island on the other side of the world, and making the arrangements to have it replaced/fixed.
Sprinkle in board meetings, technical issues, software updates and maintenance, regulatory body reporting, some HR responsibilities, visiting conferences, finding new business partners for games, payments, cc/dc acquiring issues (we were one of the businesses that used Wirecard before it got in some hot water).
As far as what drives insights, it's all a numbers game. Which game is profitable and fun, who plays it, where is it played, what payment system was used, where did they find the site, how did they hear about it, how much does an affiliate charge for traffic to your site, how profitable is that traffic after the affiliate gets their cut? You can have the most interesting, best game in the world, but if you don't know how to get it out to the masses and make it understandable, you'll lose more money on the maintenance of it than any profits. I've seen bingo sites do better than sites with 200+ different games from different providers.
Moreover, as time went on, less and less companies had a structure like ours with multiple programmers making proprietary software, and more and more white label solutions. So for example, you can buy a white label site for 50K and all you need to do is market it. All the games are there, the technology is there, all you need to worry about is guiding traffic to your site. A lot of sites use the same 3rd party games anyway, so the only difference is how it looks, and how you do your customer support.
Another example is playing with limits. For example, a roulette bet limit might be 500 EUR and minimum of 10 Euros. Seems fine, but another site is offering 1000 EUR max and 5 EUR min. Why? Because it's much more difficult to run a Martingale strategy with such a small betting range, therefore decreasing the chances that someone will win big and withdrawal before losing it again.
One more example is with geolocations. We saw that some people from some countries liked Roulette and some liked Blackjack, so it's important to know who plays what and where because if you put out a general ad for Roulette to everybody, you've just missed more than half of your target market. However, if you localize each ad for the country, you'll have much more success. i.e. put a Roulette ad on a site that is visited by traffic from a country that loves Roulette.
On a side note, I would just say to not use online casinos for gambling purposes. RNGs can be manipulated by bad actors to make the odds forever not in your favor.
As a leader you have to be able to take responsibility and accountability for you and your team. Sun Tzu said that when giving orders, you have to make sure they are clear and make sure that they were understood the way you meant them before chopping any heads off.
So make sure you can communicate with the software engineers and the members of the board, understand how each of them talks and mimic the language so you're on the same page. Your endless technical monotone banter about coefficients and loops are worthless to a board. On the other hand, if you don't know the technical side of it, understanding how it works to explain later will be highly difficult.
As banal as it may sound, you have to embrace strategies/tactics of managing people and resources. Therefore you need to read up on some theory, put a few audio books on when you are driving or exercising.
Half of these were suggested by CEOs at lectures when I was at RIT:
Art of War - Sun Tzu
The Prince - Machiavelli
The 48 Laws of Power - Greene
The Book of 5 Rings - Musashi
The Art of Peace - Ueshiba
Memoirs of Hadrian - Yourcenar
Meditations -Marcus Aurelius
I'm sure I forgot some others, but these are all time-tested books that will give you the power of wisdom, which will help you see things happen before they do.
One of the most important things to keep in mind is who is on your team. This is the engine to your concept car of a strategy. You cannot go forward with people that are a detriment to the team. You can ignore it, tolerate it, but they will keep bringing down everything around them to their level until you deal with it. Being lenient and tolerant is one thing, letting chaos roam free will get you fired, and they are usually the ones that keep their job or get your job when you're out. If you can't trust someone on your team, cut them loose and don't worry about it. The parasite will find another host, but your reputation and your company might have irreparable damage.
Before I start going to interviews and talking about what I can do, I want to make sure I can do it first. Not for everyone else, but for me. I don't want to bullshit any employers, and I sure don't want to bullshit myself. Also, I had this data from the Moscow Lacrosse Club and I didn't want to have it go to waste. Usually, I'd have it done by someone in the organization (Russia Lacrosse), or outsource it, but the task and skills needed aligned exactly with what I needed to know for data jobs and what I've been studying on Coursera. It all kind of aligned perfectly so I decided to learn it all myself and just do it. Plus it's something I'm proud that I accomplished myself and it gave me the confidence to know that the majority of the holes in my data domain knowledge have been filled and updated.
I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask because I initially was on a International Business Management and Administration path and ended up doing work in data. I knew Excel but I learned SQL just by seeing the pull requests that our database guys would write, it all made sense and it wasn't that hard to learn so I picked that up fairly quickly. Mind you, I couldn't write a query from scratch without looking at some resources, but I could understand everything I saw, and could edit the queries if I saw something that needed to change. The rest was more of the same (Excel/SQL) until I took online courses. So if I were to give general advice, I would say to use the skills you currently have to leverage yourself into a position at a company that you can do and work up from there.
If I were to give advice from this point in my career (between retirement at 32 and unretirement at 37), I would say to definitely do projects, use online certifications as a proof of concept and to make sure you like what you're doing. Do some projects for yourself, you'll put more care into them. Everyone can copy a project from a youtube tutorial, but if you can find something you're interested in, your results will usually be better than if it's just some project you need to do to get a job.
For example: hate dating? gather data about your data and break it down, expand on it. Like sports? do an analysis on your favorite team or player. Nobody really cares about logistics rates and times personally unless you own the company, do something you actually care about.
I can, however, give a bit of insight from the employer's perspective. The things we looked for was results. Can you do this? Can you do that? I don't really care what school you think you got some prestige from (if any), I don't care what you got on your gender studies exam. I'm worried about what you can actually do.
Anything you'd like to highlight, or add? Something that not specified above but you hear a lot? Or would be helpful for people to know?
People go into interviews and into a job with a mentality like this is the best thing in the world, looking all hopeful like this is your only option.
Then after 3 months, the guy has his feet up on the desk and never comes on time. Don't be that guy, just be real or improve yourself so that you're not that guy.
Be authentic, as a team leader I want to see who you really are. Not because I'm going to judge you, but because I need to know your behavior patterns and what to expect from you.
As a colleague, if I see you act one way with your boss and another way with me, I'll think you are insincere.
Just be real, be honest, own up to mistakes and congratulate others. If you don't like it there, don't stay there.
The money isn't worth you being unhappy at your job, and you're closing the door on opportunities that you didn't see because you were soft quitting.
The opportunities I had in my life were mostly given because I took risky, and sometimes brazen steps that were motivated by something I wasn't satisfied with.
Now I'm not saying walk around being unsatisfied because you raised your expectations beyond reason, and jump ship at each sign of being uncomfortable, but you should really have a minimum expectation level, that if crossed should be a huge red flag. The quality of everyone's work will be reflected in the product which in turn will be reflected on the bottom line.
Well I have a friend that is a senior developer at Microsoft, and he tells me they are building everything with "AI in mind", it's a new policy for them.
AI will just be another tool, albeit maybe one of the best, but still just a tool.
I think it enhances the work. Half of my project was done without AI (because it wasn't available) and half with. I can say that it saved me 10x my time to figure out how I wanted to program my app. Building the scraper without python knowledge on just stackoverflow took as much time as all the other tasks combined (cleaning, processing, exploratory analysis, visualizations, webapp).
One argument is that I didn't learn as much because something else did the work for me. Well yes, but I believe AI tools will be like a digital calculator vs one of those ancient ones with little moveable balls on a string that you can move left and right. Yeah, you could do some calculations with that old thing for sure. But the calculator can do it easier and faster and I'm not sure we'll ever go back to a more difficult version of our work.
It seems that it is in our nature to make things easier and more automated, which suggests that the future holds a lot of no code programming. Because it does really take a lot of time to learn and code and test and debug without someone or something that can guide you, and not everyone can spend that time.
However, with AI tools, even people like me can now do tasks that could only be done by some with mid-level software developer experience 5 years ago.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugene-arkhipov-65001916/
https://github.com/Unclegeenoo
russialacrosse.com
moscowlacrosseclub.streamlit.app
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