Twenty-one years ago, Sportradar founder and CEO Carsten Koerl found himself at a crossroads.

His first foray into the sports data space with startup Bwin had successfully gone public on Austria’s Vienna Stock Exchange, but Koerl lost control of the company he founded shortly after the IPO. Still, the deal made him financially independent, and while he doesn’t recall exactly how much he made from it, it would have been enough for him to retire at age 35.

That thought never crossed his mind, Koerl says. After taking an extended vacation in Australia, he started plotting his next move. His opportunity materialized months later in Norway, where he spent €150,000 (roughly $135,000 at the time) to buy a controlling stake in a nascent sports betting odds and data company called Market Monitor AS in 2001.