If you’ve seen Yianni Mavrakis online, you’ve likely felt it: the pace, the conviction, the restless hunger to build. The videos move fast, the ambition hits harder, and the story looks almost too clean from the outside. But in conversation, Yianni is quick to pull the curtain back. Entrepreneurship, he admits, is “truly sort of never ending,” even when you love it. And he does love it. That tension — between obsession and gratitude, momentum and burnout — is where his real story lives.
See also: Unsighted gets real on Gent’s Talk: Joy, rage, and why it’s “worth it”
The dreamer behind the numbers
At 26, Yianni has the kind of online following that makes people assume the path was easy. But when asked who he really is behind the public persona, he doesn’t point to metrics. He points to mindset. “At the end of the day, I’m just like a really big dreamer and a risk taker,” he says. “Anytime I get an idea in my head, like I just… have this burning desire to make it happen as quickly as possible.” That drive, he explains, isn’t a phase. It’s a principle. Even the idea of working for a massive company he admires doesn’t tempt him, because “no matter how small my dream or my project is, it’s mine.”
ADVERTISEMENT |
The entrepreneur started young
Yianni traces that instinct back to his teens. While other kids chased brands, he built one. “When I was 14, 15… everyone in school… was wearing this brand,” he says. “My first taste of that spirit was that I just wanted to make my own version of that.” He bought 50 shirts, then turned it into something bigger: clothing he wanted to wear, friends contributing designs, and the early realization that creating your own thing is addictive. That same impulse shows up today in how he thinks about products: “If I’m going to spend $200 or $300 on a nice jacket, I’d rather just like make one my own.”
Why a bowling alley made sense
The boldest version of that instinct showed up when he bought a bowling alley at 22. Not a software startup. Not a trendy app. A brick-and-mortar entertainment business most people wouldn’t dare touch. He found it through real estate investing and admits, with a laugh in his logic, that he underestimated the challenge. “When I found that deal, I honestly thought it would be a lot easier than it would have been,” he says. “I think a lot of entrepreneurs… have this delusional self-confidence.”
Still, his reasoning was sharp: it’s an experience-driven business with strong margins, plus the underlying real estate value. The surprise wasn’t the business model. It was what the pressure pulled out of him.
ADVERTISEMENT |
Leadership under pressure
Asked what shocked him most, Yianni doesn’t mention revenue. He mentions growth. “How much I would grow… as a leader and within my character,” he says, especially when it came to building teams and learning to “be the spirit in the business.”
The hardest part was earning respect. Many staff were twice his age. “It was a very difficult thing to earn people’s respect… when they see… someone new come in who is half their age,” he says. Over time, pressure forced evolution. “When there’s enough pressure, you really kind of like shape into the person you need to be to get stuff done.”
He also describes a leadership style rooted in belief. Even when people fall short, he looks for strengths: “Someone… might be a little irresponsible, but they can stand up in front of a hundred people. And I take that trait and I weaponize it… You can grow so much.”
ADVERTISEMENT |
The cost of going all in
Yianni is honest about the trade-offs. Balance, he says, is difficult to preach when the biggest wins came from being “relentlessly locked in with zero distractions.” The cost was real: “The price I’ve had to pay is my own mental health, my own physical health for sure.” During the rebuild of a second centre, he posted for 60 straight days, lost 15 pounds, skipped the gym entirely, and averaged four hours of sleep. The reward? “I went from zero to a million followers in 60 days.”
Still, he knows burnout is waiting if you ignore the warning signs. Gratitude helps, but he admits, “I haven’t figured it all out.” Momentum, he believes, is the cheat code — and the trap. “When you are winning… it’s actually really hard to burn out,” he says. The real test comes when momentum stops. “That is the level at which you burn out… 99% of people will get to that point and stop. And I need to be the 1%… that just keeps going.”
How the content actually started
The myth is that creators plan virality. Yianni didn’t. He posted a simple photo carousel on TikTok: “Three years ago, I bought a bowling alley that shut down,” then walked viewers through the journey. He expected his brother to roast it. Instead: “He looked at me and goes, ‘This is awesome.’”
ADVERTISEMENT |
By the end of dinner it had 20,000 views. The next day: half a million. Then three million. “That’s like clearly people care about this story,” he says. When TikTok shut down, he pivoted. Early videos flopped. What kept him going was an “unbreakable goal” to post every day for 30 days — and the fact it didn’t feel like work. “Creating the videos wasn’t work… It was self-expression.”
The romantic part of starting
If there’s one lesson he’d give his younger self, it’s simple and surprisingly soft: “It’s really just about the journey, not the destination.” Because the beginning is where the magic is — even when it’s messy. Watching someone start, he says, gives him “chills,” because “that’s how we all started.” And if Yianni’s story proves anything, it’s this: the cringe, the chaos, the sacrifice, the obsession — it’s not a detour. It’s the price of building something that’s yours.
