Those who follow the media interest in PartyGaming (formerly iGlobalMedia) will have observed the amount of attention recently focused on founder Ruth Parasol. Apparently, escaping the limelight though is the company's co-founder, Anurag Dikshit, Parasol's long-term business partner and PartyGaming’s operations director and largest shareholder.
As those in the industry know, Parasol pulled back from the day-to-day running of the business some time ago, while Dikshit is regularly seen burning the midnight oil close to seven days a week. Usually sitting along side him is PartyGaming CEO Richard Segal, who is well-known in the U.K. gaming and entertainment sector, having most recently led the successful buy-out of Odeon Cinemas. Since his recruitment, Segal has made a swift impression on the business and has wasted no time in bringing in additional experienced executives to strengthen the management team.
Why, then, is Parasol stealing the limelight? In addition to being a successful woman in a male-dominated industry, Parasol also has a "colorful" past that has garnered a lot of attention. Her first business ventures were working with her father, Rick Parasol, in the adult telecom industry. It was during this time that Parasol, a California native, learned how to run an online business, grappling with the likes of affiliate programs, high-speed bandwidth and graphic compression--skills she subsequently put to good use in setting up PartyGaming.
Parasol abandoned the adult entertainment industry in the mid '90s to pursue her vision for an online gaming business, and the rest, as they say, is history.
While Parasol was building one of the world's largest online gaming companies, some of her former business colleagues in the world of adult entertainment, such as Ian Eisenberg, Seth Warshavsky, Peter Knobel and Mark Cohen, have from time to time attracted the attention of law enforcement authorities. In Cohen's case, this resulted in a prison sentence for fraud.
Parasol, on the other hand, has maintained her unblemished record throughout and seems to be benefiting nicely from her timely exit from the world of adult entertainment. The success story of PartyGaming, meanwhile, is likely to become required reading for business school students for decades to come. The key ingredients appear to be a mix of hard work, guts, timing and, of course, a little bit of lady luck.
In 1997, after Parasol launched her first online casino site, she had a chance meeting with Dikshit, who ended up writing the software for her casino site in his spare time. This led to Dikshit writing the software that subsequently launched PartyPoker.com. Born in India and having worked across the globe, Dikshit, like Parasol, has now made Gibraltar his home. His technology grounding seems to have been acquired in a more conventional way than Parasol's, having graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi). Indeed, the Indian Institutes of Technology, India's elite body of higher learning, have become known as the so-called "Star Factories" and have produced CEOs for the likes of Citigroup, US Airways Group, McKinsey and Sun Microsystems, as well as some of the most prominent entrepreneurs and inventors in the world. These Institutes seem to be doing something right and remain a regular source of new executives for PartyGaming.
The fusion of West and East seems to have created a successful recipe for PartyGaming. Whether others will follow in the footsteps, we shall have to wait and see.