Odys Podcast: The High Stakes Growth Show

Mark Flores Martin says the AI models that haven't been publicly released yet, once their safety guardrails are stripped away, can already break into almost any company. He built his career as the AI guy on stage, then walked away from the label because he says most of what gets sold as AI is a thin front end bolted onto someone else's model. In this conversation he explains why he tells every cli...

Today MiCA enforcement came into force across Europe - and approximately 800 operators with outdated VASP licenses lost the ability to process crypto payments. For iGaming operators who had been quietly running volume through unlicensed providers, the exposure is only becoming clear now. Dave Pulis co-founded ZBX Exchange in Malta in 2018 and spent seven years building compliance infrastructure be...

Malta's headline corporate tax rate is 5%. What's less advertised is that expat operators coming in from Dubai or Singapore often access that rate while the Maltese founders competing in the same market don't.   In this episode, Sean Bianco and Jean-Michel Azzopardi break down what the Malta business environment actually looks like from the inside: the government VC fund that's easier to access on...

Michał Suski built Surfer SEO from a side project in 2017 to $13M ARR — bootstrapped, without VC money, with under $1M in total marketing spend. By 2025, the company had been flat on revenue for two years, was carrying debt from a co-founder buyout, and sold to Positive Group in a SaaS market where multiples had dropped sharply from their 2021 peak. This is his first public conversation on the acq...

35% of the internet is blocking AI crawlers right now — most of it by accident, through default CDN settings that site owners never touched. Stephen Burns is the Web Intelligence Lead at Common Crawl Foundation, the nonprofit that crawls 2.3 billion pages per month and provides the training data used by GPT, Claude, Llama, and most major LLMs. He covers harmonic centrality - the algorithm that det...

Google decimated traffic to entire categories of websites. But some sites gained 300 to 500 percent. Cyrus Shepard studied over 400 winning and losing sites to figure out what separates them, and the patterns are specific: 93% of winners had proprietary assets, the winners enabled task completion instead of just publishing content people read, and the sites doing the most aggressive SEO lost the h...

Latin American gambling markets exhaust themselves in 12 to 18 months. One operator holds 75% of Mexico. Brazil was a gold mine until the government taxed it into the black market. And Argentina is emerging as the next target because its players already hold US dollars. Martim Roll, who runs affiliate operations across Latam and Southern Europe through Plat Media, maps out where the money is movin...

What happens when your AI agent makes a purchase you never approved? Who is accountable when a machine goes rogue with your money? Jonathan Llamas, Sealcoin, builds the infrastructure designed to answer those questions before they become expensive problems. His NASDAQ-traded company injects wallets and identity directly into silicon chips - the same semiconductor technology already inside Cisco ha...

King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne are demographically identical. Same age, same country, same bracket. And that is the data most marketers use to decide who sees what. Demographic targeting performs about as well as random guessing. Sarah Pokorna is a psychologist who has spent years applying personality science to digital marketing. She makes the case that demographic targeting is statistically no b...

Most founders have been ignoring crypto. BlackRock, NYSE, and Goldman Sachs have not. Marcin Kaźmierczak left Google Cloud at 25 and built RedStone - the second-largest blockchain oracle, securing $8 billion in on-chain assets for the largest financial institutions in the world, with zero downtime or pricing errors in their history. In this conversation, recorded at Consensus in Hong Kong, he expl...

Koray Tugberk Gubur built a 40,000-person community, sold over $1 million in courses in 48 hours, and got advisory board invitations from billionaires. He never ran a single ad, never sent an outreach email, and never planned any of it. In this conversation, Koray walks through how publishing nearly 200 transparent case studies created a movement around topical authority that the SEO industry trie...

The biggest names in traditional finance are moving assets on-chain, and the infrastructure handling those transactions is already at capacity. This conversation with Graham Ferguson, recorded at Consensus Hong Kong, covers what that shift means for anyone operating in capital-intensive markets: how compliance went from a cost centre to a competitive edge, why the roughly $40 billion currently tok...

Stake consistently holds the #1 position for "online gambling" across algorithm updates, and the term doesn't appear in a single page title on their site. The ranking is driven entirely by schema architecture and entity association. Peter Macinković, Head of SEO at Stake, explains how he designed schema templates for 12+ page types that automatically produce site links on Google results, why most...

Most founders think they're diversified. They own stocks in different sectors, maybe some bonds, maybe some crypto. Then the market drops and everything crashes together because none of it was actually uncorrelated. Evan Szu manages portfolios that beat Bitcoin, gold, stocks, bonds, and silver over five years with zero drawdown years.  Sounds impossible, you find out what's actually in it. Evan is...

Google dropped a site from position one to page eleven after users started closing their browsers instead of returning to search, and the owner had GSC data showing exactly when it happened. Lefteris Soulas, a data scientist who built Keyword Cupid after working inside Fortune 500 engineering teams, explains the satisfaction signals Google now weighs more heavily than backlinks: click-through comp...

A web agency in Switzerland paid students €50 each to walk into phone stores, open Chrome on every display model, and search their client's brand name. The next morning, the client ranked #1 and stayed there. That's the opening tactic in a conversation that covers the full spectrum of click and traffic manipulation in 2026. Leo Poitevin breaks down the real mechanics: why bots get filtered but hum...

The average bank deposit rate in developed countries sits under 1%. In DeFi, stablecoin lending rates track US Treasury yields at 4-6%, and yield-bearing stablecoins built on strategies like delta-neutral perpetual funding push 8-15%. One protocol, Ethena, crossed $10 billion on this approach alone last year. This is the first crypto episode on Odys Podcast: the High Stakes Growth Show. It exists...

Competitors clone entire websites overnight, file fake DMCA claims, and flood rival pages with manufactured traffic to tank their engagement metrics. That is the day-to-day reality of iGaming SEO. Darko Brzica, founder of Occam Digital and co-owner of Presswhiz, breaks down how link building actually works in a vertical where operators burn hundreds of thousands with no strategy, where PBNs functi...

The Dead Internet Theory predicted that bots and AI content would overtake human-made content online. According to Robert Niechciał, that's already happened. In this conversation, Robert explains what's really running under the hood of AI search and why the fundamentals of SEO haven't changed as much as the buzzwords suggest. He walks through how to build AI automation pipelines that produce stabl...

Most B2B companies have identical products, no marketing budget, and a founder who believes the product will sell itself. S Surya Palli consults iGaming platform providers, payment companies, and game studios on exactly this problem. He keeps finding the same pattern: founders who invest in product and tech teams but treat marketing as something they'll do once they already have revenue. In this c...

Index construction solves 80% of SEO problems - that's the claim Pavel Klimakov makes in this foundational walkthrough of the complete semantic SEO framework. Pavel is an admin of the Holistic SEO community and a semantic search researcher trained under Koray Tugberk Gubur's system. He covers how Google organizes knowledge into domains, why source context (what your business actually sells) anchor...

Kyle Roof has run more controlled SEO experiments than almost anyone in the industry - over 750 single-variable tests, including ranking a page of Lorem Ipsum text. In this conversation, he lays out which ranking factors actually move the needle and which ones the industry has been wasting time on for years. He explains the specific mechanism behind why AI-generated content gets devalued by Google...

Most casinos post a bonus graphic, count the likes, and never check whether a single player who came from social media is still active 30 days later. Henk Wolff has audited social media operations for 22 casino operators across 10+ countries and keeps finding the same gaps: no player database uploads to Meta for VIP retargeting, no LTV tracking by channel, no segmentation on retention ads — slots...

Nemanja Mirković spent years building Sleep Advisor into one of the largest affiliate sites in the mattress niche, got hit by a Google update that wiped out 50%, hit 12 million monthly visitors, and then sold the whole thing. In this conversation, he gets specific about the scaling bottlenecks that nearly killed the business, the automation sequence that broke them open, and how brands quietly ste...

Most founders who approach PE funds for funding have a number in their head that is, in Dmytro Bondar's words, "pretty much randomly calculated." In this conversation, Dmytro walks through what actually matters when a PE fund evaluates a company: cash flow over projections, realistic timing over optimistic promises, and a question most investors never ask, what does the founder do with their money...