What Drives Uri Poliavich’s Long-Term View on iGaming and Innovation

If you spend enough time around tech founders, you’ll notice a common obsession with “the next big thing.” In iGaming, that usually means a frantic sprint after new laws or flashier tech, but there’s a massive difference between moving fast and actually staying the course. Momentum might grab a headline, but endurance is what keeps the lights on a decade later.

For Uri Poliavich, the whole point of thinking long-term is to build something that doesn’t fall apart the second the wind changes. When your foundation is actually solid, you get to innovate on the fly without the entire office turning into a 24/7 crisis zone. It’s about making sure the “new and exciting” doesn’t accidentally break the “old and reliable”.

Why Long-Term Thinking Matters in iGaming

iGaming moves quickly, even by digital industry standards, but regulation adds weight to every decision. It’s a story we see all the time: a new operator hits the ground running only to get tripped up by glitchy tech or a mountain of legal paperwork they weren’t ready for.

They try to grow at the speed of light, but they find out the hard way that real, “boring” stability usually takes a lot longer to build than it does to get people interested in your product.

Licensing alone can take months or years depending on jurisdiction. Platform reliability becomes more complex as traffic grows. Compliance requirements do not simplify over time. These realities reward companies that plan several steps ahead rather than reacting to every new opportunity.

This broader context explains why long-term thinking is not optional in iGaming. It is structural. And it influences how leaders decide where to invest time, money, and attention.

The Architecture of a Mindset

The way Uri Poliavich thinks didn’t just happen overnight; it was essentially engineered through a mix of law books and military discipline. Most people see a law degree from Bar-Ilan University or time in the Israeli army as separate chapters in a life story, but for him, they were the training grounds for a very specific type of “system-level” awareness.

It’s the difference between someone who just sees a business deal and someone who automatically maps out every potential risk and structural requirement before even saying hello.

This background turned “playing it safe” into a high-level strategy. He’s spent his career evaluating moves based on how they’ll look in five years, ignoring the siren song of the quick win. By the time he launched Soft2Bet in 2016, the blueprint was already set: don’t even think about accelerating until the support structures are bulletproof.

It’s a patient philosophy that has quietly turned a startup into a global provider with roots in 19 different markets, proving that a bit of legal-grade discipline is actually the ultimate growth hack.

The Timelines Behind Lasting iGaming Platforms

Although success stories often make growth look instant, progress in iGaming tends to be gradual and rarely follows a straight line. Many platforms take years to stabilize after launch. Multi-market expansion often exposes weaknesses that were invisible at a smaller scale.

Evidence from regulated markets suggests that platforms often attract users well before their operations fully mature. Rapid early growth can hide underlying weaknesses, which is why steady leadership becomes essential once initial momentum begins to test the limits of the system.

From a leadership perspective, this means accepting that:

1. Early momentum does not ensure lasting stability.
2. Technology must prove itself over time in real operating environments.
3. Investment decisions should account for regulatory evolution.

Innovation Beyond Internal Development

Innovation in iGaming is often framed as product launches or new features. While those matter, long-term innovation also depends on what happens outside a company’s own walls. This is where Soft2Bet Invest plays a key role.

Soft2Bet Invest isn’t your typical venture fund. Launched with €50 million, it’s designed to give early-stage iGaming startups the kind of structural backbone they usually lack. Most of these newcomers don’t fail because they have bad ideas; they fail because they get swallowed whole by the complexities of compliance and scaling in a regulated world.

What Makes Investment Discipline Different

In iGaming, investing for the long run often means knowing when to pause as much as when to act. Funding alone does not correct weak foundations, and early-stage companies usually benefit more from guidance, time, and practical industry knowledge than from capital on its own.

Soft2Bet Invest focuses on a few very specific, practical priorities:

• Backing teams that understand regulation.
• Focusing on technology built to last.
• Supporting solutions that integrate easily.

As the rules get tighter the real winners won’t be the ones scrambling to react. It’ll be the people who actually did their homework. If you build for resilience from day one, you can handle a market shift without having to tear the whole building down and start over every time the wind blows.