The Rise – And Epic Fall – of Goalpoker

This is a story that has been filed away in my head, for various reasons, for nearly twenty years.

This is the story of the rise and calamitous fall of ‘Goalpoker’.

Strap in, folks.

In 2005, I was in the death throws of an agency job overseeing the Budweiser account in London’s Soho. Long hours, a paltry (by today’s standards, at least) salary and a disgruntled team meant I was running out of gas. I was relieved of my duties before I could quit and spent the summer taking freelance roles between trips to Ibiza, planning an eventual move to another job – and another life – in Sydney.

One of my contracts was for an online poker startup, Goalpoker dot com. A skin of the high flying US brand Absolute Poker, Goal was led by an erratic, deranged CEO and funded by an equally imbalanced (but significantly wealthy) backer.

I was offered double my then salary to jump on board and, having spent a week checking out my potential life in Sydney via NYC, joined the business as a young, naïve and hopelessly underprepared Marketing Director.

What followed was a year of some of the most batshit insanity I – or anyone else adjacent to this horror show – could ever wish to see in a thousand careers.We built a small team and found an office in a Redhill business park, possibly one of the least impressive dot com HQ in existence at the time.

All the back end, dev and the poker platform were looked after in Costa Rica and Vancouver by the frat boys at Absolute. We were only charged with marketing, mainly brand and customer acquisition. At the height of the online poker boom.

How hard could it be?

It’s been twenty years, so rather than butcher the chronology, I’ve just cherry picked some of the best/ worst stories from this utter shitshow of a business that I’ll release as weekly chapters on LinkedIn and here on my website BrandArchitects.co.uk on Friday mornings.

I won’t be naming names, nor will I be responsible for slight inaccuracies. This is how I remember it, and I firmly believe, in real time, it was much, much worse.

Take from it what you will – but I suggest you at least A/ laugh at the gross ineptitude of all involved and B/ take it as a warning of what can happen in business when ego meets money, ambition and greed.

This is 'The Rise and Epic Fall of Goalpoker' (Sometime between 2005 and 2006).Enjoy!Harry

Chapter 1/ The Average Week at Goalpoker

There wasn’t an average week at Goalpoker. If the CEO showed up in the office at all, he was addled, excitable and wearing shades, usually reeking of booze and clutching some scribblings on the back of a casino napkin pertaining to some new deal he’d ‘negotiated’ over the weekend.

·       Sponsoring Dream Team on Sky for several hundred thousand pounds? Check.

·       Sponsoring a football conference in Dubai (more of that week to follow)? Check

·       Creating a  number 1 hit song (definitely more on that disaster to follow)? Check.

·       Private 737 for the World Cup in Ibiza (there could be a book on that weekend alone)? Check

He’d usually rock up in his green Mustang at around 11 and by midday, the six of us would be enjoying a spritzer in the pub before adjourning to Frankie & Benny's for a ‘strategy lunch’.

We had a lot of strategy lunches.

Sometime in mid afternoon he’d take a taxi to London for ‘meetings’ – usually in one of his three favourite venues:-

The Café de Paris, any number of casinos within a mile of St James or Spearmint Rhino, a famed strip club on Tottenham Court Road.

We got to know Rhino pretty well, not least because the CEO would host our weekly status meetings there.

As Marketing Director, I was joined by the Commercial Director (who was also my flatmate at the time) and the Finance Director. Being a naïve twenty eight year old, I thought this was all fairly normal for a tech start up in the gambling space, so I religiously prepared my marketing strategy and budget, updating it weekly in the hope that one week, our sole investor would have produced the necessary cash to actually pay for some marketing.

It never came.

Which was probably for the best, as I had no frickin’ clue where to find online poker players. My strategies were based on learnings in agency land, and as such weren’t worth a pot of mince. However by the second bottle of Verve, everyone seemed to be pretty excited by what I had planned. And so it continued, for months.

And months.

The CEO brought in new deals (which were supposedly paid for by the investor. Many weren’t). We all updated our plans. We hired new people. We engaged a PR agency. We went to our Christmas Party in a stretched Hummer with a poker table in it and Champagne lining the walls.

It was fun. It was crazy, but in the ‘yay, this feels like we’re building something that could go stratospheric’ crazy. Instead of the ‘padded walls, crayons only’ crazy that it actually was.

Realising that I was about as much use as mirrored shades at a poker table, the CEO decided to send me to Vancouver to meet the founders of Absolute Poker and learn how to find players. It was there that I realised how much trouble I might be in…