Bartosz Skwarczek Podcast Transcript
Bartosz Skwarczek joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Bartosz Skwarczek. Bartosz Skwarczek, an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in business, a mentor, and a motivational speaker. Privately, he is passionate about sports, animals, and the psychology of achievements. He is the President, Owner, and Founder of G2A.COM, the world’s largest global marketplace for digital products such as games, gift cards, and software. G2A.COM is used by over 25 million users who can choose from 75, 000 digital products offered by retailers around the world.
Well, good afternoon Bartosz. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:50] Bartosz Skwarczek: Welcome Brian. Thank you very much for having me. I’m really excited on this conversation.
[00:00:56] Brian Thomas: Awesome. I love this. And I appreciate you making the time, being seven hours difference in time zone, but these are the most favorite podcasts going international and you’re hailing out of the great country.
Of Poland. And like I said, before we hit record on the mic, I had a lot of great experiences in the e- Sports gaming world and also meeting some great people from Poland. So again, thank you for making the time today.
[00:01:18] Bartosz Skwarczek: Thank you very much, Brian. I appreciate that.
[00:01:20] Brian Thomas: All right, Bartosz, we’re going to just jump right into the questions here, and get your story going. You’ve got quite the career as a coach, trainer, a serial entrepreneur, and now the Founder and CEO of G2A. com. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:40] Bartosz Skwarczek: Thank you, Brian. I think motivation is my stronghold and it has always been when you were born in Poland and you fly to New York on Shanghai or New Delhi you always hear this question.
Hey, where are you from? And then you are set from answer. I’m from Poland. And then you hear the second question always literally “from Holland”? And that was something that were always very motivating for me. And this motivation and being an entrepreneur, that was my dream or aim from the very beginning, from my high school, later on, when I was a coach and mentor, I wanted to inspire people to inspire others, and I wanted to prove that.
You can start from very scratch, from not a wealthy family, from regular school, from post communism country, with zero money and just being extremely motivated, determined, open minded, and definitely hungry for growth, for life, for education. I wanted to prove that the limit, and that you can inspire people that they can build a fully global business.
A leader of the industry that you can study at MIT or Harvard and you can work with the best companies in the world. We called ourselves G2Anians, so to say, and I believe we created G2A this amazing environment for people from different countries, very diverse, honest. I would say in one word, motivation from the very, very beginning.
And On the inspiration side, it’s very personal question, but at the very beginning, my parents, my father, entrepreneur who died way too early, my mother, amazingly dedicated woman, and I think I was blessed later on to meet great people around me, I was always very, very hardworking guy, hardworking student, and I believe that when you are a best student, You can always find the best teachers around.
And like I said, I think I was blessed with meeting best teachers and then the rest is the history, I think.
[00:03:52] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you have such an inspirational story. I appreciate you sharing having that dream in high school and taking that forward. A lot of times as we get into our college years and beyond, we lose that dream, and I can certainly hear it in your voice.
You still have the enthusiasm of all these years. You bet. Bartosz, we’re going to jump into the next question here. The gaming and e sports space holds so much promise. With the integrations of so many new technologies like AR, VR, AI, blockchain, et cetera, right? Where do you see the next big breakthrough or innovation from your perspective?
[00:04:27] Bartosz Skwarczek: Many of the technologies mentioned here are still in development and are yet to be actually implemented on the large scale. The exception may be the VR technology, which has already found its niche as a peripheral controller for PC and PlayStation games, though it still has a very high cost of entry.
And I think there is hope for a wider scale of use. Of this technology in connection with AR artificial reality or extended reality. XR solutions. I’m talking about the newest products from Apple as well. Vision Pro. It connects the VR design with many intuitive tech solutions like facial gesture, emotion recognition.
Giving the user much control over the display and the device by simply reacting to what they see. Now, it also opens a lot of room for business to create mixed reality displays and 5G digital. So, mixing physical and digital worlds. Some offers on this front, however, still, in my opinion, the price is the killer, very difficult adoption with such high prices as we have today.
So that would be on this VR front. I think the next potential breakthrough looking at the current trends is going to be the implementation of. Artificial intelligence algorithm. Of course, ChatGPT from open and AI or Bard Google video games. In my opinion, AI solutions can help with both the creation and the development of games.
Right now, many companies, including G2A.com are experimenting with using AI engines. To help in this creative process by generating ideas and pitches for creative teams as well as with creating the realistic immersive experience for the gamers themselves. And this recently several developers, let’s say Ubisoft among them informed that they will be using AI to generate an immersive experience by making.
NPCs react and dynamically to your action in game and issue different responses. Each time players interact with that. There is also this practical application of AI and the previously mentioned this intuitive tech solutions and we can found or it can be found not only in gaming. It can also help people with special needs.
A great example of that is project game face. A new way of controlling a cursor with your hand and face gestures. It can be a great help for people with motor disabilities. The project is led by Google. They have all the assets to deliver the outcome. So, fingers crossed. I think it can be very helpful.
[00:07:19] Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you sharing lot of that technology with us today. Obviously, there is a cost to some of these really cool and immersive technologies. You’d mentioned Apple’s product. There’s going to be a balance at some point. They’re going to find a way. And maybe some of that has to be built on the backend so that maybe it’s a low monthly subscription for the end user or the gamer.
But I really appreciate the stuff you’re diving in, which is a segue into my next question, Bartosz. You’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging technologies in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:07:53] Bartosz Skwarczek: Yes, I think I can say a few things on G2A side.
So technology is one of the most important success factors of G2A. Definitely. We put special pressure on constant growth and the development, and our tech stack is evolving in a really fast pace. I think I can safely say that we are ahead of the trends in the IT industry. Contrary to other companies who focus on DevOps approach.
We opted for the platform approach. A few years ago, when we started with that, it was a risky, not so obvious. So, in the past, we noticed that newer technologies would be even more, more burdening for our development teams. And in time it would negatively influence the marketplace growth. So, our answer was to build our own platform, which will reduce cognitive load on developers.
And increase this efficiency of tech teams, which I think everybody is looking for right now. And today I can see that it was a great decision. Currently, more and more companies start talking about this approach and we are already there. What does our platform give us to be very straight?
One platform for all G2A.com services, one platform for all dev teams, which allows for setting up environments, for dev, for stage, for production, and start creating a product and creating it very fast. Dev teams don’t need advanced tech knowledge. It’s all in the production team, which delivers an easy product and one platform with standardizes and automizes all processes.
I think this is also very important. Another technology implemented as a part of our tech strategy is our own searchlight data platform. It allowed us to change the data management structure from centralized. To disperse so data mesh architecture and the result of that was the change in data awareness in our depth team.
Even though we are in digital business at the end of the day, there is always a human. Since the ownership of data was moved to them to our teams that increased both their quality and the usage and all that points towards me confidently claiming that we are a data driven organization.
And last but not least, apart from both. We are constantly very dedicated towards improving on our security tech Ecommerce in general, and all digital marketplaces, I think, in particular are vulnerable to outside attacks and foundation was to develop all the procedures. in our business procedure systems and the teams needed to provide a safe environment to dozens of millions of dollars spent over almost 14 years of constant improvement at G2A.
And on top of that, one of the ways for us to increase our security level is working with top security companies on the market, Akamai, Qualys, Ravelin, many of them, dozens of them. And to give you an example, Ravelin uses machine learning, expert rules, so to say, and graph networks to help online businesses reduce.
Losses to fraud limit abuses to return policies, et cetera. And that technology helps very much to find compromise accounts and spot inceptive abuse. Maybe to technology language, but. In general, it helps a lot to fighting fraud and to increase the security standards of every platform and maybe also a little tease about the new tech project we are working on here. I cannot say too much about it apart from the fact that it’s connected to Web3, and it will be a jump to the next level digital marketplace. But we will be releasing more info soon. So today I cannot say too much. Please stay tuned.
[00:12:04] Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you. And you, talked about some of the stuff that you’re doing as far as innovating and using the latest tech to improve your platform and one, obviously a big one with cybersecurity, which is most important.
So, thank you for continuing to move in that direction, but I’m really intrigued by the Web3 that you’re going to release here in the future. So, I’m going to be following you very closely. Our platform, our publication is the first publication built on Web3. So, know all about blockchain, love this. We should have another podcast down the road and talk more about it.
[00:12:34] Bartosz Skwarczek: I’d love it. I’d love it.
[00:12:35] Brian Thomas: Bartosz last question of the day. Can you share something from your career experience that would be helpful for those listening today, looking to grow their career in either gaming or entrepreneurship?
[00:12:46] Bartosz Skwarczek: With pleasure. I started being an entrepreneur during my university. At the last year of my university, I started my first company, and I can surely say that being an entrepreneur requires a few very important traits. One is full responsibility. Since there is no boss, everything is on you.
You need to be responsible as entrepreneur for actually everything what is happening in your business. You need to like this feeling of being responsible and it may weigh a lot. So that is the first thing you really need if you want to be entrepreneur. The second thing is crazy work ethic. The work is really hard.
I’ve been entrepreneur 20 years and most of that time my working week has been 100 hours. Before COVID, I was doing 200 flights per year. After COVID, when we moved to more digital online meetings, it’s 10, 14 hours of meetings or teleconferences daily. And you need to be physically and mentally ready to that level of intensity for years.
And you need to love it. Otherwise, you will be suffering. Being entrepreneur is amazing thing. It gives you freedom. It gives you vision. You can go where you want, but also it requires few things. Two, I mentioned, I think another one is resilience to stress, especially on decision making side, you have to take decisions, make decisions.
Under pressure of time under pressure of people under pressure of resources with not enough data. Most often, there is never 100% data to take a difficult decision and you have to be ready to take risk sometimes playing all in. That’s the nature of being entrepreneur. And the last, but definitely not least, I would say vision.
You need to be brave, to have a clear, very clear vision. Where are you going and why you are going there? Because if you have the strong why, then you can move forward and forward. So, this is what I would say on this entrepreneurial side and gaming industry. On the one hand. It has amazing vibe, very cool people around and very modern and progressive industry.
Gaming industry is like G2A, it’s gate to adventure. So, it opens the gate to a lot of adventures. And this is something super amazing and bringing you and giving you really the fantastic emotions. There is also the other side. When you want to do business in gaming industry, it can be very hermetic.
It can be difficult to break through, but when you do this, when you achieved this, it can be also very fruitful and very open. So, there is always this bright side and difficult side, but my advice would be, don’t be scared, be brave and. If you want to be entrepreneur and you really feel it, that this is something for you, then it will be the best journey that you can have in your life.
[00:16:10] Brian Thomas: Bartosz, thank you so much. I appreciate you breaking that down, both on the entrepreneurship side, which I agree is a lot of hard work, and then on the gaming side as well. I certainly appreciate the gems that we’ve extracted from your podcast today and we’ll share with our global audience. Bartosz, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:16:31] Bartosz Skwarczek: Thank you very much, Brian. really appreciate your invitation and thank you very much. Talk to you soon.
[00:16:37] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Bartosz Skwarczek Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
