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Affiliate Monitor Escape velocity
Escape velocity
● Better Collective ’ s extraordinary journey ● How did we get here ?
● De-risk ● Perception is all
PART ONE
BETTER COLLECTIVE ’ S EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY
One of the most well-known location-based jokes is about the tourist in New York who asks ‘ how do you get to Carnegie Hall ’?
The answer , of course , is ‘ practice ’ and it is perhaps in a similar spirit that we can answer the question of how it is that Better Collective came to dominate the affiliate gaming sector .
It took nearly 20 years and over 28 acquisitions is the short answer .
But investors in the company were offered the longer and more detailed version during the near four-hour capital markets day presentation it provided in late March .
And it was during this marathon session that the company ’ s management team , still led by founders Jesper Søgaard , currently CEO , and , by his own admission , the lesser spotted Christian Kirk Rasmussen , who fulfils the role of COO , laid out their vision for how Better Collective would become a “ leading digital sports media group ” within the next 10 years .
HOW DID WE GET HERE ?
The question of what set Better Collective on this course is a fascinating one . Rasmussen told the assembled analysts that he sees Better Collective ’ s history as consisting of three parts .
First , there was the startup era , which dates back to the early 2000s . The second was the organic growth phase , which he suggested was between 2009-2016 . And then the M & A phase , which runs from the period of the IPO in 2018 through to the present .
Notably , during the second part of this journey , Rasmussen observed that Better Collective itself was a target for competitors “ who at that point were much bigger than us ”. Significantly , though , neither Rasmussen nor Søgaard liked the thought of “ giving up control ” and , seeing the “ huge opportunity ” that lay ahead of them , Better Collective embarked on its own M & A spree .
The true spark for the subsequent growth , however , was the IPO in 2018 . As Søgaard pointed out , since then the company has gone from a market cap of SEK2.2bn to one with a market cap of SEK10bn and nearing 1,000 employees spread around the world .
It also gave it the capital to iGB Affiliate Monitor