A few short years is all it’s taken for the educational poker platform Octopi Poker to grow from an idea to a main stage sponsor of the WSOP Main Event.
Fusing poker coaching, hand analysis, an online community, and more, Octopi Poker was the combined brainchild of co-founders Nick Schulman, Phil Shing, Victoria Livschitz and Andrew ‘LuckyChewy’ Lichtenberger. The goal was to reinvent how poker can be studied, making the game easier to learn and understand.
Yet while the intricacies of Texas hold’em may now be easier to comprehend, the management changes at Octopi Poker have been arguably harder to follow. In late October, co-founder Livschitz posted notice of her decision to part ways with the company entirely.
Several weeks later, that decision was reversed in a fairly sharp u-turn, as Livschitz publicly announced that, rather than step down from Octopi Poker, she would now be stepping up - to the role of CEO which was previously held by co-founder Lichtenberger.
For his part, Lichtenberger posted a gracious acknowledgement - below - but the unexpected u-turns in the boardroom resulted in more questions than answers.
In a bid to answer some of those questions, PokerOrg spoke with Victoria Livschitz herself, and we now present her take on events below, in her own words.
Watch or listen to Craig Tapscott’s full interview with Victoria Livschitz here.
‘If the group is successful, you’re going to have these changes’
I’ve started 12 companies over the years, and the vast majority of them have had some dramatic changes in the founding team as time went on. Octopi certainly fits that scenario, but it’s not infrequent in the business world.
When we started the company, we decided that Chewy [Andrew Lichtenberger] was going to be the CEO; he was very interested in learning the ropes, and I was there to help him. We often spoke before that we had this interesting barter: I would help him become a business leader, and he would help me become a high-stakes poker player.
For the better part of three years, that’s exactly what happened, and I will treasure that experience above all; it’s been a remarkable journey, and Chewy is a remarkable person in every possible way. I learned a lot from him, and I really enjoyed teaching him as well.
Needless to say, it’s an uphill battle to become a world-class tech company CEO, even if it’s a poker company. It’s probably a more complicated journey than for someone like myself to become an elite poker player.
Along the way we had fun, and we were making progress, not always linear. I won’t put words in Chewy’s mouth, but as the time progressed, he was having less and less fun with it. It increasingly led to more discussions about his vision of the company versus his vision of his own path and track, and my vision of the company. And we were not always aligned on those things.
About a month and a half ago, Chewy came to the realization – probably first of all of us, that we now all share and appreciate – that change was badly needed by all. The first version of this change was Chewy asking me to step down and step out, so he could lead the company towards the path he saw for himself and the company. I agreed, but then very quickly, in grappling with the reality of what that actually meant, Chewy had come to realize that was probably not the right answer.
So we all kind of got back to the drawing board, and it was decided that it was Chewy who wanted to step down and pursue other things personally, and then it was very natural for me to step up to the plate and continue the journey – very much along the path that I thought we were set out to travel from the beginning.
Of the six founders that started the company two and a half years ago, we have three that are very much here and three that have left. That’s not atypical or unusual; it’s the reality of what this day-to-day grind is like. And the obligations you take from the community, from investors, from everyone else; and the amount of sacrifice you need today as a professional poker player is immense. I think a lot of these departures have to do with the fact that people couldn’t accurately predict the scale of commitment.
I know that Chewy almost practically stopped playing poker. He played poker during his CEO tenure, but significantly less so, and there’s conflict between 'what a growing company needs from me' versus 'here is what my life is; I’m a poker pro first and foremost,' which has been at the heart of the frictions and eventual departures.
But at the same time we have new people who have joined. The more the company grows, people come together, some leave, new people join. If the group is successful, you’re going to have these changes.
The most exciting addition has been Stevie Chidwick. He joined around May as an ambassador and very quickly became a board member of the leadership team. He has incredible ideas and is an incredible person to work with. He definitely shaped the trainer, and pretty much all the product features we’ve put out in the last five months and that are coming down the pipe have been helped by him.
I want to say a word about Johan [Schultz-Pedersen]. His contributions have been incredible. He’s a very young man, but very wise, smart, and experienced beyond his years. He’s definitely a big driving force. When Andrew was CEO, I was chief product officer. Now I’m CEO, Joahn has stepped up to own the product.
Max Gorbunov is our founding sixth musketeer and founding CTO. He’s the tech magician, the solver whisperer. Then we have more people that recently joined. We have an incredible team.
