Olya Caliujnaia and the business of keeping play alive

Making a game gives you a world to build. Running the company that makes it gives you a payment schedule. Olya Caliujnaia has spent enough time around both to appreciate how easily the second can interrupt the first. There are characters to design, players to find, salaries to pay, and money that may arrive on a timetable nobody in the studio would have chosen.

Her answer was Sanlo, the company she co-founded with William Liu in 2020. It brought together two parts of her working life: games and financial technology. The subject sounds dry until you consider what is at stake. A financing decision can determine how much of a company its founders keep, who has a say in a game’s direction, and whether a team can afford to reach the audience it has been building for.

There is an appealing absurdity here. A studio can invent an entire economy inside a game, complete with scarcity, incentives and elaborate rewards, while finding the economy outside it much less accommodating. Caliujnaia chose to work on that second economy.

A career with more than one vocabulary

Before becoming a founder, she had worked across businesses that sold rather different things. Her experience included venture capital at BlackBerry Partners Fund, games at Playfish and Electronic Arts, photography at Getty Images, and financial products at SigFig. Her product and growth career also included Wells Fargo.

On her professional profile, she describes managing three social games with a combined daily audience above five million. She also describes turning a struggling Getty Images product into a profitable line by changing its features, positioning and intended audience. Those are her own accounts of the work, and they make a useful pair: one concerns managing something at scale; the other concerns figuring out whom a product should serve.

At SigFig, she lists a product management and growth leadership role spanning 2015 to 2019. Games and financial products have different customers and constraints, but moving between them gave her experience with both the product a customer encounters and the decisions made behind it. Sanlo would need people who could speak comfortably about each.

Start with who

In January 2020, Caliujnaia joined XYZ Venture Capital as an entrepreneur in residence. That gave her a place to work toward a company rather than simply take another operating job. The eventual idea developed through customer research with Liu, as the two investigated the financial information developers needed and the gaps in the tools available to them.

The partnership belongs near the beginning of this story. In a 2024 conversation about entrepreneurship, Caliujnaia discussed growing up in an entrepreneurial family and the trial and error involved in finding a co-founder. She emphasized commitment and complementary abilities. The episode’s premise put the choice of person ahead of the choice of company.

That order has practical force. A business idea can be revised; the person helping you revise it will be there for the uncomfortable meetings. Sanlo emerged from conversations about what customers actually struggled to do. Its early work treated the studio as a business with recurring decisions, rather than assuming that a successful launch would settle everything that followed.

The room behind the game

One early investor, London Venture Partners, described two problems Sanlo was taking on. Financial information sat in disconnected systems. Meanwhile, studios with games already in the market could struggle to obtain money to grow them. Knowing that a campaign might work is of limited use when the budget cannot reach it.

Sanlo’s initial financing product used game performance data to help assess access to capital. Konvoy, which backed the company, described a familiar mismatch: developers might need to act within a short window, while a conventional fundraising process could take much longer. Sanlo also aimed to bring scattered information into a shared financial view.

Caliujnaia made the ownership question explicit in her writing. Publishing agreements, equity investment and bank financing each came with trade-offs. Publishers could bring expertise and distribution while participating in decisions. Venture investment exchanged ownership for money. Banks could struggle to assess a young games business through conventional financial history. Her argument was that developers needed choices suited to their work.

None of that removes the need to build something people want. It does put more attention on what happens when the game has promise and its makers have bills.

Two pots of money

In June 2022, Sanlo announced a $10 million Series A led by Konvoy. It also announced an HCG Funds partnership that expanded its pool of capital for developers to $200 million. The distinction matters. The funding round supported Sanlo’s own growth; the capital pool served a different purpose, providing financing for its customers.

Her announcement described customers with varied needs: attracting more players, expanding a portfolio of games, hiring specialists, or getting a clearer picture of cash arriving from different platforms. It is a revealing assortment. The customer’s next move could involve marketing, people, another product or simply better visibility.

“Our success is measured by our ability to help developers”Olya Caliujnaia, June 2022

She completed that thought by describing developers identifying growth opportunities and acting on them. It is a useful measure for an infrastructure business: whether another person can make a better decision because of what you built. The dashboard itself is only part of the point.

The checkout enters the picture

By April 2024, Sanlo had added a web shop closed beta. Fusebox Games, known for Love Island: The Game, was among its early customers. The offering let game companies build a direct sales channel and track revenue, with Sanlo acting as merchant of record for payments.

The move extended the company’s work from financing growth to handling another part of the business around it. A studio needed to decide where to sell, how to manage payments and how to serve players across markets. Caliujnaia described the expansion as connected to the tools Sanlo had already been building.

Her conversation with Neon founder Chris Faught, published in January 2025, explored the ecommerce lessons available to gaming: checkout design, direct customer relationships, consumer trust and the decision to build or partner. These are ordinary retail questions wearing a game studio’s clothes. They become consequential when a player who wants something cannot comfortably buy it.

The discussion also considered when a direct channel makes sense for a particular game. That qualification matters. A tool earns its place by fitting the business using it, and a new sales channel adds work along with opportunity.

A microphone pointed outward

Caliujnaia also became the interviewer. As host of Story Mode by Sanlo, she spoke with people building, financing and marketing games. The format opened a window onto the questions around her own company without requiring every conversation to be about its products.

With Maliyo Games founder Hugo Obi, she explored gaming in Africa, including player behavior, locally inspired intellectual property and the opportunities and constraints facing developers. With Anuj Tandon, she discussed India and MENA, looking at how audiences and markets had developed and the habits shaping them.

Another conversation, with StartPlaying co-founder Devon Chulick, focused on communities and social followings. It included the practical work of adapting to different platforms, experimenting and showing up consistently. In an industry measured through acquisition and retention, a community still consists of people deciding whether to return.

Her interview with Upptic’s Warren Woodward turned to growth marketing and the game lifecycle. Upptic republished it in September 2024. Across the series, the subjects resist a single tidy explanation for success. Money matters. So do distribution, trust, geography and what players actually do. The interviews make room for the operators who have to reconcile those things.

The person away from the spreadsheet

Her taste in games offers a welcome detour from business operations. She named Machinarium as a favorite, praising its world and narrative. She also singled out Moving Out, a game that finds comedy in a task most people would pay to avoid. Its cooperative and social possibilities appealed to her.

She is equally interested in what makes people stay. Asked which game metric mattered most, her answer was retention, from the first day through much later play. A game has to keep earning a place in someone’s day.

Away from work, her conference biography lists tennis, hiking, historical fiction and trips to the ballet with her husband and daughters. Her reading choices include Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Asked what she would tell her younger self, she recommended confidence, patience and dependable mentors.

These details give the business biography some breathing room. A person who works on the economics around entertainment also has books to read and performances to attend. Enjoyment gets to exist without becoming a product lesson.

Another system to untangle

Her current public work has moved into a different field. Caliujnaia is listed as CEO and co-founder of Ironmist, which builds compliance infrastructure for defense software. Its stated aim is to incorporate security and compliance into software delivery and help teams move through authorization.

The stakes and customers differ from Sanlo’s. The family resemblance is an editorial one: attention to the systems surrounding a product, where administrative difficulty can consume time that builders would rather spend delivering it. Her career has repeatedly brought her close to that boundary.

For the game makers she served at Sanlo, the ambition was concrete. Understand the business. Find suitable resources. Keep enough control to decide what comes next. The enjoyable part might be on the screen, but someone still has to make the next move possible.