A View from the Top: Green Man Gaming CEO Paul Sulyok on dreaming up a business

Paul Sulyok tells Andy Martin about his move from banking to video games – and explains why his business is named after a London pub

Tall, rugged, muscular, stubbly, with a strong handshake, a nose that has been in a few fights, and a dash of derring-do about him, I can see Paul Sulyok as a potential hellraiser in Call of Duty, Black Ops 4 or an unstoppable tough guy in Grand Theft Auto. Or even, possibly, as the CEO and co-founder of Green Man Gaming, which markets these and between six and seven thousand other video games to enthusiasts around the world.

In reality, Sulyok hasn’t, to my knowledge, gone about stealing cars, but he has actually done more than one tour of duty in war-torn, far-flung places. Which has stood him in good stead in the rough old realm of business.

Son of a Hungarian father and English mother, he was brought up in Vienna. Even as a kid, he pinned up a large photo of a British armoured battle group, several hundred-strong, on the bathroom door, thus scaring his mother. After studying economics at Sheffield, he felt he was “too young for a real job”, so he went to Sandhurst and spent six years in the Light Infantry regiment, now known as “the Rifles”.