An interview with Nicole Junkermann, founder of NJF Holdings and NJF Capital, on Winamax, Infront Sports & Media and the lessons from building businesses before the investment world caught up
Long before NJF Capital held positions in artificial intelligence infrastructure, fintech and life sciences, Nicole Junkermann was operating inside industries where markets moved faster than conventional wisdom expected and execution separated ideas from outcomes. Her career ran through online gaming, global sports media and private investment before converging in the platform she runs today. We spoke to her about what those earlier chapters taught her — and why she thinks the gap between operating experience and investment instinct matters more than most people in venture capital acknowledge.
How Nicole Junkermann's early ventures shaped her approach to risk and execution
Q: Before you were known as an investor, you were building and running businesses. How much did that shape what came later?
It shaped almost everything.
There are things you only understand from inside a business. How difficult execution actually is. How rarely strategy survives contact with operational reality unchanged. How often the difference between progress and stagnation comes down to solving problems that never appear in a pitch deck.
Those years gave me a lasting respect for founders. Building from scratch is demanding in ways that are genuinely invisible from the outside — and I think that invisibility is part of why the gap between what investors expect and what operators experience tends to stay so wide.
Q: Winamax was one of your earliest ventures. What did that period teach you?
It was an early lesson in how quickly digital consumer behaviour can diverge from what established players expect.
We were operating at a point when online platforms were beginning to change how people engaged with entertainment and competition — not at the edges, but at the centre of their habits. Product, trust, user experience and regulatory complexity all had to be managed simultaneously, without a clear precedent for how to do it.
The core insight I took from that period still holds: when technology changes behaviour at scale, large markets can move faster than incumbents have planned for. The companies that understand that first tend to do better than the ones that treat it as a temporary disruption.
What Nicole Junkermann learned about value creation inside Infront Sports & Media
Q: You later became closely involved with Infront Sports & Media. Why was that chapter significant?
Infront sat at the centre of a global industry going through a structural transition, and being inside that gave me a different perspective on what premium assets actually are and how they compound over time.
Sport was becoming more international and more commercially sophisticated. Media rights were evolving in ways that the traditional broadcast model hadn't anticipated. Distribution was fragmenting. Audiences were simultaneously harder to reach and more valuable when you reached them. Infront's work — including securing and managing rights around major international tournaments — put me close to how those dynamics actually played out across markets.
The lesson about stewardship stayed with me. The most valuable sports properties are not simply monetised. They are protected and developed over years, and the returns reflect the discipline of that approach more than any single commercial decision.
Q: What did sport teach you that applied to business more broadly?
That emotion and economics are not in tension — and that treating them as if they were is one of the more expensive mistakes in the industry.
The strongest sports properties succeed because they generate identity and loyalty that persists across seasons and markets. That kind of connection creates commercial value that is genuinely hard to replicate, because it compounds through the relationship between a competition and its audience rather than through any single product or contract.
The same logic applies outside sport. Businesses that build genuine trust — with customers, with employees, with the communities they operate in — tend to be more durable than those that optimise for short-term extraction. That is not a soft observation. It is a capital allocation principle.
Nicole Junkermann on what operating experience gives investors that finance alone cannot
Q: How did operating experience change the way you approach investment decisions?
It made me considerably more interested in execution than in narrative.
When you have run businesses or worked closely with operating teams, you develop a different set of questions. Not whether the market is large — most pitch decks correctly identify large markets — but whether this team can actually deliver. Whether the customer proposition genuinely matters to the person paying for it. Whether the growth being projected is structurally durable or dependent on conditions that may not persist.
Operating experience helps you separate a compelling story from a real business. In venture, that distinction tends to be the one that matters most over a ten-year horizon.
Q: Did building and running companies make you more comfortable with risk?
It made me more precise about it.
Risk is not a single thing. There is market risk, execution risk, timing risk, regulatory risk — and they behave differently and require different responses. Entrepreneurs encounter all of them, usually at the same time, with incomplete information and limited runway.
What that experience gives you is not comfort with risk in the abstract. It is the ability to distinguish between uncertainty that can be managed and uncertainty that cannot — and to price the difference when you are deciding where to put capital.
Q: What would you say to founders building companies in the current environment?
Stay close to what is real.
The noise around any given technology cycle tends to peak well before the underlying value is clear — and the pressure to perform for external audiences can pull founders away from the operational work that actually determines outcomes.
The businesses that endure are built through substance: understanding the problem deeply, building teams that can execute, serving customers well enough that they come back, and improving consistently across all three. In Junkermann's view, the fundamentals are slower and more durable than any headline cycle — and they are what investors with long horizons are ultimately backing.
Nicole Junkermann is the founder of NJF Holdings, which includes NJF Capital and Gameday by NJF Holdings. Her career has moved across entrepreneurship, gaming, sports media and venture investment, including earlier involvement with Winamax and Infront Sports & Media, before building a broader investment platform focused on technology-driven companies and long-term growth.
