The Startup That Wasn’t Meant to Scale: A Conversation with Sophie Vo

By Michail Katkoff who definitely could use a moment of tranquility but can’t seem to take a break from the rat race. If you’ve worked in games long enough, you’ve likely seen Sophie Vo ’s name float across your LinkedIn feed. Maybe you listened to her Rise and Play podcast .

Maybe you followed her journey building Voodoo’s Berlin studio. Or maybe, like me, you worked with her and got to witness, up close, the intensity, curiosity that’s defined her career. But the Sophie I spoke with recently is different.

She’s still sharp and self-aware as ever, but also deeply grounded. No pitch deck. No hype.

Just a clear-eyed entrepreneur who walked away from the startup hamster wheel and built something… that actually feels like freedom. Her latest venture, Orin Retreats , isn’t a game. It isn’t a tech startup.

It isn’t even scalable in the traditional sense. ” Naturally, I had to ask, how did she get here? The Version of Success That Broke Her Before Orin, Sophie was chasing what she now calls the “programmed” definition of success: the VC-backed company, the big title, the billion-dollar exit.

She’d grown up reading French business magazines that celebrated CEOs like rock stars. “I thought that was the path,” she told me. ” But during her last real run at that dream, fundraising at GDC for a studio in Vietnam, something cracked.

“I was exhausted. Depleted. Living in emails and CRM systems.

I asked myself: Do I want to spend the next 10 years like this? ” Even when her next project, an AI coaching app called Olivya, started gaining traction, she felt something was off. “ We had investors reaching out to us, which never happened before.

And I was scared. Not excited. Scared.

” The fear wasn’t irrational. It was the realization that taking money meant locking herself into a decade-long sprint in a game she didn’t want to play anymore. ” She’s not against ambition.

But she’s seen what happens when smart, capable people sign up for the venture-backed script without understanding what they’re actually committing to. “You don’t get to run your company how you want. You don’t often get to choose your co-founders.

” Founders chase “freedom” by building businesses that make them feel even more trapped. They take money before they have conviction. They bootstrap only because they couldn’t raise, and call it a strategy.