Gurhan Kiziloz doesn’t soften the language around how he runs his company. There’s no board, no outside investors, and no delay between idea and execution. “I’m at war,” he’s said, more than once, and it’s not a metaphor he throws around lightly.
With his self-funded company crossing $400 million in annual revenue in 2024, largely through its gaming platform Megaposta in Brazil, Kiziloz is now eyeing a $1.45 billion run rate by the end of 2025. But unlike most founders operating at this scale, he hasn’t raised outside capital. He hasn’t installed a board. He hasn’t diluted decision-making. Instead, he runs Nexus as a high-speed, centralized operation. His rationale? “If it makes sense, we go,” he stated.
It’s a style that places him firmly in a camp of founder-operators who see the cleanest decisions as the fastest ones. It also suggests a worldview not unlike Carl Schmitt’s political binary, the friend-enemy distinction applied to executive choices. There is no maybe. Only “go” or “don’t.” It’s a sharp contrast to most startup cultures, which favor committee-led iteration and distributed risk.
Kiziloz’s interviews are full of language that reflects this binary ethos. He describes himself as being “at war.” Emotions are dismissed as distractions. Plans are forged quickly, without layered review. There’s an urgency in the way he builds, a need to move before the market changes or competitors catch up. It’s what he credits for Nexus’s ability to seize on Brazil’s regulatory shift in gaming before many global players fully entered the space.
But if clarity is the reward, complexity is the tax. As Nexus moves from single-market concentration in Brazil toward broader ambitions, the risks of this governance model become harder to ignore. Internal velocity, once a competitive moat, could become a liability in more regulated, multi-stakeholder environments. Licensing. Compliance. Talent retention. These are domains that often benefit from deliberation, not instinct.
Still, Kiziloz appears undeterred. He speaks of conviction as if it were currency. Failures are acknowledged, but only in passing. “I get it wrong all the time,” he’s said, “but those few right moments wipe out all the wrongs.” It’s a mentality that’s earned results so far, but also concentrates risk. When one person makes nearly every call, scalability and resilience hinge on the founder’s stamina as much as strategy.
This is where parallels to figures like Mark Zuckerberg emerge. Facebook’s early motto, “Move fast and break things,” reflected a similar belief: that speed itself could be a product advantage. For Kiziloz, speed isn’t just a principle, it’s the operating system. But while Zuckerberg eventually traded that ethos for “Move fast with stable infra,” Kiziloz hasn’t shown signs of adjusting the model.
That rigidity may be part of the appeal to him. In a business environment increasingly shaped by external stakeholders, LPs, VCs, boards, and activist investors, Kiziloz occupies an increasingly rare space: the truly unilateral founder. It gives him clarity, control, and the ability to say no, often and definitively.
Yet such autonomy also raises important questions: What happens when complexity outruns instinct? How does a company grow into new jurisdictions, cultures, and risks when decision-making isn’t distributed? And can a binary framework hold under the weight of institutional scale?
To his credit, Kiziloz doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. He often speaks bluntly, even abrasively, about the costs of his approach. He has acknowledged burnout, detachment, and what he calls “losing people who can’t handle the pace.” These aren’t tradeoffs in his view, they’re collateral.
But for a founder who has already built a $400 million business without outside funding, the track record cannot be ignored. Kiziloz may be playing a zero-sum game, but it’s one where the early scoreboard is in his favor.
The real test lies ahead. As Nexus pushes toward a $1.45 billion target, its ability to retain velocity while managing scale will determine whether Kiziloz’s one-man war room can become a repeatable enterprise, or whether its strength is inseparable from the founder himself.
For now, Gurhan Kiziloz remains the center of gravity at Nexus. And he seems just fine with that.
