Why I started Gain Partners.

After ten years working in product and growth across some of the best tech companies in the world (King, Activision Blizzard, Scopely, Oracle NetSuite), I was in a privileged position. Comfortable, well-paid, doing work I was good at. And I couldn’t see how staying in that world was going to serve me much longer.

That’s not a polished founding story. It’s just the truth. I had an itch to build something. So I took a few months off, did a triathlon, and started thinking about what was next.

The paths I didn’t take

The first idea was leadership training. In the tech companies I’d worked in, the quality of managers varied wildly. The strongest teams I’d been part of had brilliant leaders running them. The weakest had people who’d been promoted into the role without the support to do it well. Some were brilliant individual contributors who hadn’t been set up to lead, or who were stronger as ICs than they were as managers.

I’d always cared about getting the most out of individuals and teams. I grew up playing a lot of sport, and that instinct sticks with you.

But when I sat with it, I couldn’t see how to build a viable business around training alone. The market was crowded, the pricing was tight, and the impact was hard to measure in the way I wanted to measure it.

The second idea was a SaaS product. A close friend came on as the technical cofounder. We explored medtech (we even found an investor) and agritech. We did the discovery, talked to customers, mapped what the build would take. In the end, we didn’t move forward.

The accidental beginning

Around the same time, I’d been reaching out to founders in my network, offering a pair of steady hands on whatever they were building. Operations, AI implementation, strategy questions, content that wasn’t moving. I wasn’t marketing anything. The work came through pure referrals.

I helped where I could. And something interesting happened: the work felt right. The ROI for the founders was measurable and positive. They couldn’t justify hiring one or two full-time employees to think alongside them on strategy and operations, but they could afford a fractional partner. That was the demand signal I hadn’t been looking for.

I’d been so focused on building something new that I’d missed the thing that was already happening.

A senior product manager is a mini CEO

Here’s the part that took me longer to see than it should have.

In my last role at Scopely, I was leading product across multiple teams. The job, stripped down, was this: align the strategy, get engineering and design and the business pulling in the same direction, make everything measurable, ship, learn, adjust. You’re holding the whole picture and connecting dots across functions that don’t naturally connect.

That’s the same job a founder is doing inside their business. And it’s the same job I do now as an embedded partner. The questions barely change. What’s the strategy? How are we going to get there? How do we measure success? What’s the offer? What does pricing look like? Have we done the customer research? Have we done the market research?

It might look like a strange pivot from gaming. From the inside, it isn’t a pivot at all. It’s the same operating muscle applied to a different scale of business.

Backing the mavericks

The other thing I noticed during those early referral months: I really enjoy founders. The ones who didn’t go down the well-travelled path. The ones who decided to build something they believed in rather than climb a corporate ladder. In life generally, I admire people who go against the grain and back their own conviction.

That’s a values thing more than a strategy thing. But values shape who you want to spend your professional time with. I wanted to spend mine with the mavericks.

Why this felt right

By the time I’d done a few months of this work, the answer was obvious. The commercial side worked. The economics worked for the founders. The work was using everything I’d learned in product, growth, leadership, and tech, in service of someone whose business actually depends on it landing.

And it didn’t feel like a slog. It felt like the right shape for what I want to do with the next stretch of my career.

That’s the honest version. No big “aha moment” pinned to a single day. Just a few months of trying things, paying attention to what kept happening on its own, and recognising the signal when it was already in front of me.

If you’re curious about what the work actually looks like inside a founder-led business, that’s the subject of the next piece.