A Game of Luck?: A Tech Startup Journey with ZenRise
When Natalie Binns first spoke with with serial entrepreneur Vincent Vergonjeanne, CEO of ZenRise, She realised that he was not the typical B2B Tech Startup founder.
Listen to the Podcast: Available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
In this episode, Vincent shares his journey from building video games at 12 years old to creating a successful board game company and now exploring how AI is changing the way businesses build, market and grow.
Vincent’s story is shaped by curiosity, experimentation and perhaps most importantly, the ability to let go. From raising millions and making mistakes early in his career to selling a company and finding himself unsure what came next, his approach to entrepreneurship is less about having all the answers and more about being willing to test, learn and move forward.
Building from curiosity
Vincent’s entrepreneurial journey started early, at 12, he began programming after discovering a piece of code in a magazine, eventually teaming up with a childhood friend to build 10 video games between the ages of 13 and 19.
Curiosity eventually led to his first video game company, Kubojo, which grew to around 100 employees after raising $8 million. He later moved to Poland to build another gaming company before unexpectedly entering the world of board games through his brother.
What started as an experiment became Lucky Duck Games, with a Kickstarter campaign that generated $250,000, leading Vincent into the physical entertainment industry and eventually growing the company to 70 employees and $20 million in annual revenue before it was sold in 2024.
Learning to let go
For Vincent, entrepreneurship has not been about avoiding failure. It has been about developing the mindset to accept whatever outcome comes from trying.
He credits his father and his introduction to Buddhism with teaching him the practical value of letting go. Building companies inevitably means dealing with setbacks, lost opportunities and unexpected changes, but accepting that an outcome may be different from what you hoped for can make it easier to keep moving.
That mindset has also helped Vincent recognise when something is not working. Rather than becoming attached to an idea because of ego or expectation, he believes founders should be prepared to walk away, take the learning and put their energy into the next opportunity.
From selling a company to finding the next challenge
Selling Lucky Duck Games brought Vincent a different kind of challenge. After years of building the company, the sale meant trading an asset that was constantly growing for cash, while a non-compete prevented him from returning to the board game industry for three years.
That period forced him to think beyond a particular industry and ask what he actually enjoyed doing. The answer was growing businesses and helping talented creators turn their ideas into something that could reach an audience.
That thinking became the foundation for ZenRise.
Building for the AI era
ZenRise is designed to help people who can now build apps and online services using AI, but do not necessarily have the marketing expertise to launch and distribute them successfully.
The platform aims to take users from an idea to a live campaign in around 15 minutes, using automated processes to understand the ideal customer profile, develop creative assets and generate campaigns across formats including static images, video and user-generated content.
For Vincent, the opportunity is not simply about making creation faster. As AI makes it easier for almost anyone to build, the real challenge becomes distribution.
When the cost of creating an app or piece of content falls, the amount of competition and noise increases. Understanding your audience, finding a specific niche and knowing how to get your product in front of the right people becomes even more important.
Finding focus in a noisy market
Vincent believes founders often resist defining a specific niche because they are afraid of missing potential customers. But trying to appeal to everyone can dilute the product and the message so much that it becomes difficult for anyone to see themselves in what you are offering.
His advice is to choose an ICP, focus on it properly for a period of time and become exceptionally good at solving that particular problem. His own experience at Lucky Duck showed him the value of giving focused experiments enough time to prove themselves before deciding whether to continue or let them go.
ZenRise is now going through the same process. Vincent is giving himself six months to establish whether there is genuine demand, working with a small number of businesses and using their feedback to improve the product before taking it further.
For him, success is not necessarily about making ZenRise work at all costs. It is about learning quickly, staying open to the outcome and being willing to move on if the idea does not find traction.
Listen to the Podcast: Available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Listen to the full episode with Vincent Vergonjeanne from ZenRise on Tech Startup Stories, and follow for more authentic founder stories.