Superbet founder Sacha Dragic and investor Marc Samwer share the incredible story of building a billion-dollar company from Romania, overcoming startup challenges, and seizing global opportunities.
Their conversation shows how determination, smart pivots, and customer focus transformed Superbet from a small company, founded 2008 in Romania, into a global powerhouse that today employs some 5,500 people across 15 offices worldwide.
“My first reaction was very negative”, Dragic recalls, remembering his initial encounter with sports betting. “I didn’t know anything about the business. I was just feeling that it’s a shady business, you know, so I was not very happy.” But friends convinced him to take the leap.
Customer retention became a competitive advantage for Superbet, Dragic says. “The industry standard was around 40% of customers being active in the second or the third month. And in our case, we had, like, 85% of the customers in the second or third year. So it was a very big difference.”
Marc Samwer celebrates Dragic’s success as a “great example that anywhere out of Europe, you can start a
billion dollar company, a unicorn.”
The continent needs more role models and similar success stories, the investor says – because “we in Europe need to wake up”, he warns, “if we don’t want to become a museum, eventually, where the Americans and Chinese come and have a nice holiday.”
