In the startup world, timelines are sacred. Founders build five-year plans, pitch decks, and iterative roadmaps meant to attract investor faith and institutional trust. But Gurhan Kiziloz, founder and CEO of Nexus International, doesn’t work on borrowed time, or external capital. His operating model hinges on a different principle: act now, reflect later.
In 2024, Nexus reported $400 million in revenue. That figure wasn’t the result of traditional scaling playbooks. There were no long strategy retreats, no phased product rollouts, no series funding rounds. Instead, the company’s growth was driven by a leadership style defined by pace, centralization, and raw instinct, often described by Kiziloz himself in warlike terms. “I don’t wait for approvals,” he has said. “If something makes sense, we go.”
This approach may draw comparisons to Elon Musk’s “first principles” thinking, reducing problems to their foundational truths and reasoning from there, rather than relying on precedent. But unlike Musk, who often engineers from the bottom up in technical systems, Kiziloz applies the principle operationally. He skips over conventional layers of organizational consensus in favor of immediate action, arguing that speed neutralizes risk more effectively than cautious optimization.
That style has earned results, but also invites scrutiny.
Kiziloz has made it clear: he sees most best practices as optional. “I don’t do reflection,” he said bluntly. And in many ways, Nexus reflects that ethos. The company avoided the traditional route of VC-backed expansion, choosing instead to self-finance from its inception. No investor decks, no advisory boards, just reinvestment and fast decision loops.
While many founders consider boards and stakeholders a source of accountability, Kiziloz views them as speed bumps. “We move fast. Really fast. No approvals, no politics, no waiting,” he said in a recent interview. The comment, while succinct, underscores a deeper belief: that clarity thrives when decision-making is centralized and undiluted. For Gurhan Kiziloz, the fewer the voices, the cleaner the signal – and the swifter the execution.
That approach is not without tradeoffs. Without external checks, the company’s success, or failure, rests disproportionately on a single person’s judgment. Kiziloz accepts this. “If it fails, I start again,” he said. It’s a model that’s brutally simple: own everything, control everything, and move faster than the rules say you should.
The clearest expression of Kiziloz’s fast-moving, principle-first model came with Nexus’s expansion into Brazil. While many gaming companies hesitated to enter the market amid evolving regulation, Nexus moved quickly to acquire a formal gaming license. Megaposta, its flagship gaming platform, capitalized on that head start. Brazil’s post-legalization boom made the risk worthwhile.
For Kiziloz, Brazil wasn’t an abstract growth market. It was an opportunity with timing, scale, and urgency, the three qualities that define his worldview. And the results validated the risk: most of Nexus’s $400 million in 2024 revenue was generated in the Brazilian market alone.
That single-market concentration now forms the basis of a larger plan: to reach $1.45 billion in revenue by the end of 2025. It’s an audacious goal by any metric, and even more so for a company that has raised no external capital.
Kiziloz’s style raises difficult questions about scalability and sustainability. Can a company operating on instinct alone navigate increasingly complex regulatory environments? Will fast decisions hold up under the pressure of global expansion?
These are not abstract concerns. As Nexus moves beyond Brazil, it will encounter new markets with different compliance regimes, cultural expectations, and logistical challenges. Speed may help the company break in, but it won’t guarantee durability. There’s also the internal question of bandwidth. Teams can sprint, for a while. Whether they can keep sprinting without burnout or operational cracks is another matter entirely.
Kiziloz seems aware of the weight of his own model. “Not everyone is designed to take a ride in a rocketship,” he stated. That metaphor may be more than just bravado; it reflects the inherent instability of hypergrowth led by concentrated control.
None of this is to say Kiziloz’s approach is unsound. It simply defies the logic of institutional venture building. Instead of aiming for defensibility, Nexus builds for momentum. Instead of optimizing for input, it optimizes for autonomy.
In many ways, the model is a philosophical inversion of the conventional startup script. Instead of delaying decisions until consensus forms, Kiziloz believes acting early creates the very data consensus needs. It’s risky, but sometimes reward follows those who act before the market is ready to reward them.
It’s too early to say whether Nexus’s $1.45 billion goal is achievable under this model. But it’s equally clear that if it is reached, it won’t be through conventional frameworks. The war on timelines is very real, and Gurhan Kiziloz is not waiting for a ceasefire.
