He Takes Every Risk and Hears No One: Inside Gurhan Kiziloz’s $400M Solo Build

Gurhan Kiziloz didn’t opt out of the startup playbook halfway through building his company. He ignored it from day one.

No pitch decks. No advisors. No investors. No interest in conference stages or founder panels. His company, Nexus International, reported $400 million in revenue last year. It’s aiming for $1.45 billion by the end of 2025. Not a single outside dollar has been raised along the way.

“If it fails, I start again,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

Kiziloz doesn’t reflect much. That’s not part of the system he’s built. There are no Monday strategy meetings or off-sites to discuss culture. The team is expected to move fast. The ones who can’t, don’t stay. “Not everyone is designed to take a ride in a rocketship,” he says. “We don’t slow down.”

He’s spoken openly about his refusal to raise capital, not because it was unavailable, but because it was unwelcome. “I’m too proud to borrow money,” he says. “I don’t want anyone else’s fingerprints on this.” There’s no sense of missed opportunity, just avoidance of interference.

He applies the same thinking to board structures. “I prefer to make decisions without outside noise,” he says. He doesn’t say it for effect. It’s simply how he runs his company. Decisions don’t go through committees. Ideas don’t get voted on. “Give me an idea. I like it. Go get it done.”

It’s a leadership style that cuts both ways. The upside is speed. Nexus moves from decision to execution quickly, without layers. The downside is isolation. Kiziloz accepts that. He sees the trade-off and still chooses to keep full control. He doesn’t want optionality. He wants certainty, his own.

“I get it wrong all the time,” he says. “But the few times I get it right? Those are big enough to wipe out everything else.” He compares it to Babe Ruth. “They asked him what he thinks about when he strikes out. He said, ‘I just think about home runs.’ Same here.”

This mindset extends beyond business. After his father passed away, Kiziloz didn’t slow down. He doubled down. “I became more of a monster,” he says, without flinching. Emotions, by his account, don’t belong in the day-to-day. “I haven’t got time for that. I’m at war.”

Nexus, for all its revenue and growth, doesn’t operate like a company trying to build goodwill with media or investors. It doesn’t publish internal culture slides or make long-term roadmaps public. Its flagship platform, Megaposta, is growing in a complex and regulated market, Brazil’s online gaming sector, where others tread cautiously. Kiziloz hasn’t. He’s simply kept moving.

The people who’ve worked with him describe the pace as exacting. The company doesn’t scale through systems; it scales through decisions. And every decision comes from the same place.

There’s no formal succession plan. No partner firms. No visible leadership bench beyond him. That’s by design. Whether or not that holds at $1.45 billion is still an open question.

But for now, Gurhan Kiziloz continues to build the same way he started, without advisors, capital, or applause.

And he seems perfectly fine with that.

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