Her Play

Name: Her Play
Price: 53.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781918271195

Make Your Own Luck

Karolina Pelc

$53.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Unicorn Publishing Group
09 June 2026

Autobiography: business & industry; Business strategy; Business innovation

Forget polished playbooks and sanitized lessons. This is a business memoir and career journey rooted in lived experience, not theory. It's the raw, unfiltered story of a woman who began as a casino dealer and went on to sell her startup in one of the fastest exits in the industry.

What if the greatest gambles are not on the cards, but on the life you dare to build?

Karolina Pelc wasn't born into boardrooms. Her story started on the casino floor in post-communist Poland, launching a non-linear career that took her across countries and continents through the global gaming, entertainment, and technology industries — before she founded, scaled, and sold her disruptive startup to FanDuel, the number-one gaming brand in the U.S., in under three years.

But Her Play: Make Your Own Luck is not a startup manual or a how-to guide.

In this fiercely honest leadership memoir, Karolina plunges readers into the realities of career and chaos, power dynamics and personal pivots, bold decisions, and private reckonings that shaped an unconventional path. From gritty encounters and psychedelic insights to building a career while navigating profound personal challenges, she shares raw stories from high-pressure environments in a male-dominated industry.

Before she built and exited her company, Karolina navigated a world of sustained pressure, uncertainty, and scrutiny. From casino floors where every decision was visible to the complex dynamics of international business, gaming, and technology, her career unfolded far from predictable paths. Alongside the visible hustle ran the private battles: doubt after public setbacks, heartbreak behind closed doors, ambition, and the audacity required to keep moving forward when outcomes were anything but guaranteed.

As this business memoir and career journey unfolds, Karolina reflects on inherited beliefs, broken assumptions, and the risks she took before knowing whether they would cost her everything. From sailing the globe on cruise ships to taking early leaps into the emerging world of online gaming and tech, Her Play lays bare the experiences that forged her leadership mindset.

More than a chronicle of professional milestones, Her Play explores the internal mechanics of risk, confidence, and decision-making under pressure. Drawing on Karolina Pelc's original mindset framework, the book offers a reflective lens on how setbacks can be reframed and how opportunities are often created long before they appear. It is an inspirational leadership memoir about learning to trust your instincts, rewrite the rules on your own terms, and practise the art of engineered serendipity — making your own luck, one bold decision at a time.

This book is for readers who:

● Are building ambitious careers without a clear or linear map — and feeling the cost of it

● Have taken risks that came without guarantees, applause, or safety nets

● Are navigating leadership, identity, and pressure at the same time, often in silence

● Want insight, not instruction — and lived experience, not templates

By: Karolina Pelc
Imprint: Unicorn Publishing Group
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781918271195
ISBN 10: 1918271194
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 09 June 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Karolina Pelc is an entrepreneur, investor, author and keynote speaker who spent twenty years operating inside the most competitive, high-stakes sectors of global technology. Her career includes senior leadership roles at industry giants including Betsson, LeoVegas (MGM), and William Hill Group. She later moved into executive positions and served as a board director for a publicly listed technology company. In 2021, Karolina founded BeyondPlay, a disruptive software company that she led through a high-stakes exit in less than three years, following its acquisition by FanDuel (Flutter Entertainment) in 2024. Post-acquisition, she served as Vice President at FanDuel, integrating her vision into the number-one gaming brand in the United States. Today, Karolina is a sought-after advisor to VCs and founders, specializing in M&A, growth strategy, and the ""no-gloss"" path to leadership. Recognized as one of iGaming’s Top 10 Most Influential Women and a Top 40 Under 40 Emerging Leader, she is a dedicated mentor and investor in the next generation of unconventional leaders and female-founded ventures, with an active presence in global investment ecosystems, and is an active investor in the next generation of unconventional founders. Her debut book, Her Play, was unveiled on Necker Island at an event with Sir Richard Branson in attendance. As a global keynote speaker, Karolina is dedicated to reframing the fear of failure, understanding the mechanics of risk, and deconstructing the misconception of the role of luck in business and life. She is driven by a single, guiding question: What if you fly?

Reviews for Her Play: Make Your Own Luck

""Karolina Pelc rejects luck and embraces movement. From casino floors to tech founder, Her Play: Make Your Own Luck chronicles decades of deliberate choices under pressure. Raw, precise, and unflinching, this memoir is a testament to endurance, instinct, and the calculated courage to build your own odds - one bold decision at a time."" — Entrepreneur UK, Business & Leadership Magazine ""Anyone building something should read this book. It’ll teach you, make you laugh, and leave you in awe of the grit behind a true rise against the odds, the kind that reminds you luck is often made, not found."" — CP Pascoal, Best -selling author and award-winning tech founder “Building at scale under real pressure exposes who you are. Karolina never flinched. Her epic journey at the forefront of gaming and tech reshaped an industry. Raw. Uncompromising. Self-worth, lived.” — Robin Ramm-Ericson, Unicorn founder of LeoVegas Mobile Gaming Group ""From a family history shaped by the Gulags of Siberia to the card rooms of Warsaw and the late-night buses of London, Karolina’s rise is extraordinary. Her Play is a gripping account of ambition, resilience and sharp entrepreneurial instinct — a compelling story of triumph over adversity that I found impossible to put down."" — Mark Blandford, Pionnering Founder of Sportingbet and serial technology investor ""One of the most impressive founder trajectories I’ve witnessed. Karolina’s bold belief, disciplined execution, and self-conviction prove extraordinary outcomes are engineered — not wished for."" — Lisa Winning Bestselling Author, Founder & Exited Tech Entrepreneur