Co-Founder & CEO at Pelago
Sekip Gokalp
Şekip Can Gökalp is a repeat founder with two 8-digit exits in consumer and gaming. He co-founded Mobilike (acquired by Opera), ran AdColony as COO through critical turnaround at $500M+, grew Coda to $25M ARR, and as CEO of Fusebox drove a 10x rise to $50M ARR through to its sale to Nazara. Now Pelago’s co-founder and CEO, he applies a proven zero-to-scale playbook to AI wellness.
Questions & Answers
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
One of the most distinctive achievements in my career was bootstrapping Mobilike, selling it twice—including ultimately to publicly traded Opera, which also owned AdColony—and then reverse-taking-over AdColony during our earnout. My team and I cut $120M in annualized OPEX, integrated 11 acquisitions across geographies, and stabilized the business in a tumultuous time—work that set the stage for AdColony’s eventual $400M acquisition. Later, I turned Fusebox around from near-bankruptcy to 10x revenue growth, reaching $50M ARR in 12 months and selling it to Nazara. I’ve also had failures, like with Coda, which taught me as much grit and resilience as my successes. Operating in fast-moving, complex environments and finding value where others see chaos has been the throughline of my career.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We’re operators and product experts who’ve already won in one of the toughest consumer categories: gaming. Will scaled titles from $20K to $850K/day, while I ran AdColony, a $500M global ad network. We learned our trade through direct execution across $1B+ in performance marketing spend, $500M+ consumer revenues generated, and over 2,000 product tests run. Here’s the key: in the old paradigm it took 3–6 months and a big team to launch a single wellness app with a ~10% hit rate. With AI, it’s like ChatGPT servicing dozens of use cases—we can identify and validate a new market (e.g. male fertility), spin up a specialized coach or new app in weeks, and launch a revenue-generating product from v1 with far higher success odds. Our gaming studio DNA makes this rapid-fire, parallelized approach possible, giving us a massive edge over incumbents stuck in old habits and startups betting on just one slice of the market.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
Our big aha was realizing we don’t have to bet the house on a single idea. With our framework, we can identify almost any marketable wellness opportunity and validate it with a real, paying product in weeks—super fast, low cost, and with confidence. Our very first bet, launched just three months after founding, and scaled from zero to a $1.4M run-rate in six weeks. At the same time, we launched a second app already pre-validated for customer demand and conversion, proving we can run multiple plays on goal in parallel. That’s when it clicked: we’re on a massive wave—AI is rewriting what’s possible in consumer apps, wellness is the mega-consumer-trend of our time, and our team is the perfect fit to ride it.
