Speaker 1: What's going on everybody, and welcome back to a brand
Speaker 1: new episode of season two of the Big Money Energy
Speaker 1: podcast here on I Heart Radio. This is the podcast
Speaker 1: where I talk to people who literally went from nothing
Speaker 1: to something and how they did it. We talked to founders, influencers, celebrities,
Speaker 1: anyone that I'm inspired by who I think their story
Speaker 1: could inspire you as well. Today we have Matt Kalish,
Speaker 1: who is one of the three co founders of Draft Kicks,
Speaker 1: the biggest online spantasy sports and sports betting website ever.
Speaker 1: And Matt is awesome, like down to earth, super nice
Speaker 1: Boston guy from Lowell, grew up outside New Hampshire, just
Speaker 1: like me right when I used to take summers in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire. Really really really cool story and what we
Speaker 1: really hit on is not just the origin story which
Speaker 1: we go through, but how having that one solid idea
Speaker 1: and knowing yourself honestly and knowing what you're good at.
Speaker 1: That's what I want you all to listen to it
Speaker 1: so you can hear from someone who's done it, how
Speaker 1: you too can figure out what you're good at and
Speaker 1: what's your things could take that idea and take it
Speaker 1: to the stratosphere. So welcome to a brand new episode.
Speaker 1: They kind of want to go through like the origin.
Speaker 1: So you and a couple of guys were working at
Speaker 1: Vista Print, right, that's correct. How long did you work there? Well,
Speaker 1: even before that, I met the current CEO of DraftKings,
Speaker 1: Jason Robbins, at Capital One, which was it was my
Speaker 1: third job in corporate America. But I was maybe two
Speaker 1: years out of college. I had a couple of short
Speaker 1: jobs and then Capital when I settled in, I had
Speaker 1: an analytics role nice in the American dream. Yeah, analytics
Speaker 1: at a bank. Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly, credit It was
Speaker 1: lending business. So yeah, we were doing heavy numbers stuff
Speaker 1: like Excel models and all this kind of data analytics
Speaker 1: and trying to make recommendations to you know, marketing teams
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. So we were a couple of
Speaker 1: is into our career when we met, and we had
Speaker 1: a lot of things in common, like fantasy sports. We
Speaker 1: both played poker, and then you know, just like softball
Speaker 1: and things like that would play together, so we spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time together in addition to just being
Speaker 1: on a lot of the same projects in the company.
Speaker 1: So Jason was like my closest work friend pretty much
Speaker 1: coming up at Capital One, and then after three years
Speaker 1: or so, that business shut down and then we moved
Speaker 1: to visits that part of the business at Capital One. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had like a specific lending business that we were
Speaker 1: a part of, and they just kind of wounded down,
Speaker 1: and so we ended up at Vista Print and that's
Speaker 1: where we met Paul. Paul Lieberman was our you know,
Speaker 1: third piece of the puzzle that really brought together the
Speaker 1: team that started DraftKings. Now what did you go to
Speaker 1: school for. I did computer science and economics and a double.
Speaker 1: Should have done that. I would have totally failed out
Speaker 1: of college, but that's what I should have done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had. I had like a two point seven g
Speaker 1: p A. But I took like heavy corselow. I always
Speaker 1: felt like I was wide and not too deep on
Speaker 1: any of my courses. So I got decent understanding, but
Speaker 1: it never failed anything. I got a D plus in
Speaker 1: there's a class called graph theory. I got a D plus.
Speaker 1: That was like my senior year. Remember that is still there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the teacher wrote a poem about graph theory and it
Speaker 1: was just like he was so hardcore and I just
Speaker 1: didn't take it as seriously as he wanted us to.
Speaker 1: It's memorable. You remember you're talking about it to this day,
Speaker 1: Oh man, that you should n f t that that
Speaker 1: thing is probably still out there. And so were you
Speaker 1: entrepreneurial as a kid. Did you ever want to start
Speaker 1: your own business or build something or do you go
Speaker 1: to school and think, Hey, I'm gonna go get a job. No.
Speaker 1: I always like wanted to find ways to make my
Speaker 1: own money. My family was both my parents met in
Speaker 1: the Navy. They didn't go to college, and after the Navy,
Speaker 1: my dad was a corrections officer and worked in a
Speaker 1: prison for twenty seven years, maybe twenty eight years, and
Speaker 1: then retired. My mom was a hairdresser and then she
Speaker 1: worked for a parks and recreation department, you know. So
Speaker 1: they had these sort of blue collar jobs. And I
Speaker 1: never had that much money going around, so I was
Speaker 1: always looking for ways to make money. The first thing
Speaker 1: I did was, um, I just started mowing the lawn
Speaker 1: of I lived right next door to a seven eleven.
Speaker 1: I just like mowed the lawn one day, and then
Speaker 1: I went over and talked to the owners and was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you need someone to mow your law, just let
Speaker 1: me know. I'm around. I live right next door, and
Speaker 1: so I started doing that and I was making like
Speaker 1: twenty dollars a week. Then it's I got like a
Speaker 1: little older. I found you know, a few little like
Speaker 1: I was doing restaurant jobs and things like that. But
Speaker 1: by the time I got to college, what really caught
Speaker 1: my attention was poker because I was like, this is
Speaker 1: a much more like intriguing way to make money to me.
Speaker 1: It's it's math, it's strategy, it's game theory. I thought
Speaker 1: it was fun. So the way I found out about
Speaker 1: poker was Matt Damon's movie Round Round. I saw that
Speaker 1: movie right before I started my freshman year of college,
Speaker 1: and I was like, I'm gonna be in trouble because
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be going to class much. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna play internet poker. So I got to college freshman year, uh,
Speaker 1: and I was splitting my time between I was running
Speaker 1: track classes, and then poker and poker just started taking
Speaker 1: out more share of my life. You know. So I
Speaker 1: see like Giovanni Rabisi and boiler Room, you know, in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night running like his underground poker
Speaker 1: den down there. Yeah, a lot of the people I
Speaker 1: would talk to. This was back in two thousand through
Speaker 1: two thousand four, and so it's like a O L
Speaker 1: instant messenger was a thing. And yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: my friends I would meet them playing poker, meet some
Speaker 1: people from New York and we would meet up and
Speaker 1: just talk on aim while we're playing, and then would
Speaker 1: meet up for games on Long Island and things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was started by learning limit hold him because that
Speaker 1: was what was popular in two thousands. Then it wasn't
Speaker 1: until like oh three when Chris Moneymaker won the World
Speaker 1: Series of Remember that Women Hold Them? Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: so I was learning a little bit of everything. And yeah,
Speaker 1: by end of college, I was really thinking like should
Speaker 1: I play poker? Should job? Was that that was like
Speaker 1: a real thing. Yeah, I almost like didn't get a
Speaker 1: job and played poker. And then did you think you
Speaker 1: might like move to Vegas and just like do it
Speaker 1: real or you're gonna do internet poker. I was gonna
Speaker 1: do like internet poker, got it and I probably would have,
Speaker 1: but my mom I just thought like wouldn't have really
Speaker 1: thought very highly of that. And so I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep playing, but do it at night and
Speaker 1: get a real job. So I had a few jobs
Speaker 1: that I didn't like. One was an engineering one was
Speaker 1: it was kind of like operations, I guess, but it
Speaker 1: was at Fidelity Investments doing benefits because you know, like
Speaker 1: a horizon or something to do their benefits through Fidelity.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like an operation job. Both jobs
Speaker 1: I didn't like. And then corporate analytics though I did
Speaker 1: because it had a lot of the poker you know,
Speaker 1: like you're looking through in complete data, you're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, trends or get insights from data.
Speaker 1: And then that was a Capital one. Yeah, a Capital one,
Speaker 1: and I was good at that because like just poker
Speaker 1: conditions you to like look at the data you have evaluated,
Speaker 1: make quick decisions that strategy. And there's also the accountability
Speaker 1: like you're really making money or you're really losing money,
Speaker 1: and there's like a balance sheet of life there that
Speaker 1: like you can't just be terrible and then you know,
Speaker 1: keep going like you're gonna eventually run out of run
Speaker 1: out of your bank roll if you're not making good decisions.
Speaker 1: What's the most amount of money you've ever made playing poker?
Speaker 1: Oh god, k yeah, never anything too insane. So then
Speaker 1: Capital one that division you're working at shuts down. You
Speaker 1: guys go to Vista Print. You need the third party
Speaker 1: to your like fabulous trifecta. But did you know that
Speaker 1: you were going to start your own company or you
Speaker 1: were just hey, this is the next job, And like
Speaker 1: what was that genesis? When did that conversation happen? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like we we knew we were going to do something
Speaker 1: for sure, and Jason and I and then I wasn't
Speaker 1: that sure if Paul Paul had like a higher bar
Speaker 1: to actually quit. And where I stood on it was
Speaker 1: I was almost thirty years old. I had done seven
Speaker 1: or eight years in corporate America. It was my fourth job.
Speaker 1: And I was, you know, if you just do your
Speaker 1: balance sheet again of life, I was like, Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: making whatever, seventy thousand dollars a year. Then there's taxes,
Speaker 1: then you know, house um, all this stuff, like you
Speaker 1: start taking it all out and you're not really saving anything.
Speaker 1: I was paying off student loans and I had nine
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and I was like almost thirty years old,
Speaker 1: and so Jason and I were like, the corporate thing
Speaker 1: isn't really going well. You know, we don't feel like
Speaker 1: we're getting where we want, and we also just had
Speaker 1: that drive to do something on our own and we're
Speaker 1: waiting for the right idea. Paul jumped in, um, you know,
Speaker 1: very similar. He was just waiting for something like special
Speaker 1: enough that it was worth it. So you know, he
Speaker 1: wasn't going to quit and start like a fast food
Speaker 1: franchise or something that just like wasn't where his head was.
Speaker 1: That he wanted like something that could be big. And
Speaker 1: so we we started talking about this idea for draft kings,
Speaker 1: which was fantasy sports. It was right after internet poker
Speaker 1: kind of fell to the side in the US. We're like,
Speaker 1: fantasy sports is really interesting because people love doing these drafts.
Speaker 1: You can do it potentially every day. What if you
Speaker 1: just like reformatted it a little where you're drafting every day,
Speaker 1: you're playing just for one day, and you're playing against
Speaker 1: your friends or maybe against like thousands of people for
Speaker 1: big prizes. You know, it's pretty cool. And here's an
Speaker 1: inventing this in conversation. Yeah, like just like a total
Speaker 1: what if situation. Yeah, it was like, what if we
Speaker 1: just built this thing that was you know, not not
Speaker 1: easily solved, like kind of a skill game around fantasy
Speaker 1: and so the thing we talked about the thing, The
Speaker 1: thing is the website, right, and then put the machine
Speaker 1: behind did and you're the computer engineer. It's what you
Speaker 1: went to school for, but it's a three of you.
Speaker 1: Like at night, you're going to work during the day
Speaker 1: and then at night you're coding. Is that what's really
Speaker 1: started it? Yeah. We fell into rules really quickly, which
Speaker 1: basically all of us learned something relatively new. Paul wrote
Speaker 1: the code for site. Paul was like not a software engineer,
Speaker 1: but he knew some stuff. I think he did electrical
Speaker 1: engineering and he was an analyst, and he just started
Speaker 1: reading books and figured out how to write code. He
Speaker 1: wrote our prototype it was C plus plus or something,
Speaker 1: and then we started doing investor pitches. Jason Robbins had
Speaker 1: to learn how to go do like a fundraise, so
Speaker 1: he went out and started like building a pipeline. So
Speaker 1: you immediately wanted to raise money. Yeah, yeah, I would
Speaker 1: say within three or four months, we figured out if
Speaker 1: we don't raise money, we're never getting this off the ground.
Speaker 1: Got it? Did you know how much it was going
Speaker 1: to take you to get it off the ground, Like
Speaker 1: how much we wanted to raise at the beginning. I
Speaker 1: feel like a lot of people do this, but we
Speaker 1: had a really stupid model, Like it was we thought
Speaker 1: we needed way less and it was like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars or something to build the first
Speaker 1: site and kind of get everything running. Yeah, our first
Speaker 1: pitch neck said we need to raise like three k
Speaker 1: and it will be profitable in like six months and
Speaker 1: all this stuff, and then we ended up raising one
Speaker 1: point two million. We did forty pitches. Probably there was
Speaker 1: thirty thirty five knows. A couple of people were like,
Speaker 1: call me back if you have a lead for year round,
Speaker 1: but they didn't want to lead it. This is just
Speaker 1: seed money, right, You're just looking for people to help
Speaker 1: you start. Yeah, just like we were showing them our
Speaker 1: prototype and it's just the three of you. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: what was the prototype like a wire frame? Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was not an app. It was a website and we
Speaker 1: would just load it up. It had a little bit
Speaker 1: of functionality, not much. There wasn't like live data from
Speaker 1: sports pumping into it. It was all like placeholder data,
Speaker 1: just the idea yea logo. Yeah, and Paul I can't
Speaker 1: over emphasis emphasized that he was not an engineer, so
Speaker 1: he didn't really know how to write code, so the
Speaker 1: site would just get the blue screen of death sometimes
Speaker 1: on investor pitches and it was just broken. But it
Speaker 1: like worked enough, and he was getting better over the
Speaker 1: months and just like cleaning up and learning, and so
Speaker 1: it's just the three of you. Yeah, it was just
Speaker 1: the three of us. And then after we got line
Speaker 1: of sight to raising money, we brought on our fourth,
Speaker 1: you know, our first non US employee, and that that
Speaker 1: was somebody named Blake Dunkle, who was an engineer, like
Speaker 1: a real, real, real life yeah, someone who could come
Speaker 1: in and help you bill this whole thing. So when
Speaker 1: did Draft Kings first go live? We want live in April.
Speaker 1: That was for baseball, and it was April, which is
Speaker 1: Paul's birthday. And I think he like deliberately launched it
Speaker 1: on his birthday, even if we could have went sooner,
Speaker 1: he was like, I just wanted to be on my birthday.
Speaker 1: So he you know, lined up all the stuff and
Speaker 1: that's when we went live. And how was that first
Speaker 1: couple of months? It was good. At that time, there
Speaker 1: was probably like six or seven competitors that we knew
Speaker 1: of that we're doing fantasy that we're in the market
Speaker 1: doing something like kind of similar to what we were,
Speaker 1: but nothing was big at all. Maybe like tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people at the most had ever tried like
Speaker 1: ten or twenty thousand, and so we came in and
Speaker 1: there wasn't It wasn't like just get people you know
Speaker 1: who are already in the market to try it. You
Speaker 1: have to literally explain what the thing was to come here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was tough, and so our first day we had
Speaker 1: a hundred and seven registered users. I think we just
Speaker 1: did a free game where we gave away a hundred
Speaker 1: bucks that's all for baseball. And it was a combination
Speaker 1: of like people that had heard of the industry and
Speaker 1: just like stumbled upon social media posts or friends told
Speaker 1: them or we posted on some forearms, but like random
Speaker 1: mix of a hundred seven people that kind of stumbled in,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're asking our friends to spread the
Speaker 1: word and everything and you know, invest any marketing for
Speaker 1: a couple of months, you know, so we were just
Speaker 1: really doing it. Yeah, Yeah, we just start doing emails.
Speaker 1: We had like free games that people could jump in,
Speaker 1: and then we started testing some stuff on you know,
Speaker 1: like Facebook, digital marketing and stuff probably July, something like
Speaker 1: in June or July. So it took a few months,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we had to clean up our product a
Speaker 1: little bit, made some changes, but we felt like by
Speaker 1: July we were okay, investing a little bit and we
Speaker 1: were really just getting ready for football season, which was
Speaker 1: you know, so that's why you did baseball first, because
Speaker 1: you were launching it in the spring, gearing up to
Speaker 1: then bring football in. Yeah, that's it wasn't even that strategic.
Speaker 1: That's just like when we were when we were ready,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like their strategy, So why do you
Speaker 1: choose baseball first? When they write this story about draft
Speaker 1: kickings sometime in the future, they can say it was
Speaker 1: like very strategic, But it wasn't. So we launched when
Speaker 1: we were ready and that was baseball, and then you know,
Speaker 1: we had a few months to build our football product,
Speaker 1: get that all lined up, and you know, we had
Speaker 1: at that point enough insight into like a little bit
Speaker 1: of marketing that we could turn on the faucet a
Speaker 1: little bit. And by the end of the year, we
Speaker 1: had something in the range of four or four and
Speaker 1: a half a million of revenue in twelve So we
Speaker 1: went from just starting at nothing to a few million
Speaker 1: bucks of revenue. Crazy, And just in case anyone who's
Speaker 1: listening doesn't know exactly how how does draft Kings generate
Speaker 1: revenue or how did it generate revenue back then? It's
Speaker 1: just the difference between like entry fees into a contest
Speaker 1: and what gets paid out. So on average, it's like
Speaker 1: around ten percent in fantasy is what our revenue is.
Speaker 1: And then at that time, though a lot of the
Speaker 1: time we would just be we wouldn't get enough entry
Speaker 1: fees and there was like more prizes than the entry fees,
Speaker 1: so sometimes it was even like would run a contest
Speaker 1: that we lost money on. But it was all part
Speaker 1: of just building our audience, building the business up. So
Speaker 1: the two their team is just adding more sports, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we added sports. We a couple of big things. We
Speaker 1: did a deal with Major League Baseball. It was like
Speaker 1: the first league deal in our space, and that was
Speaker 1: the first time in fantasy in your space ever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you guys were the first, Yeah, and we were
Speaker 1: we were thinking like, wow, this is great major League Baseball. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I never would have thought that that quickly we would
Speaker 1: have got support. But the data around fantasy is really compelling. Like,
Speaker 1: people really watch a lot of sports when they're playing fantasy,
Speaker 1: and they watching Yeah, yeah, if you're just watching the
Speaker 1: score and it's forty two seven, like the Patriots last
Speaker 1: week was like forty five to seven, nobody's watching that
Speaker 1: if you just want to know who's going to win
Speaker 1: the game. But like if you're in fantasy, then you're watching,
Speaker 1: like is Mac Jones running up, you know, three hundred
Speaker 1: plush past yards and another touchdown and whatever, and it
Speaker 1: all adds up to your score. So people just keep watching.
Speaker 1: And the league's understand you know, the fantasy players probably
Speaker 1: like their best you know, that's the best sex to
Speaker 1: their audience, you know. So I wanted to make some
Speaker 1: some investments in building up fantasy, and Major League Baseball
Speaker 1: really went first, so we did that deal. Another thing
Speaker 1: was we did an acquisition, which was we were the
Speaker 1: third biggest probably fantasy provider, and we bought a company
Speaker 1: called Draft Street, which was based in New York. They
Speaker 1: had maybe twenty employees. We had probably forty. So suddenly
Speaker 1: we like doubled the team size and we about doubled
Speaker 1: our customer base, doubled our revenue. So by the end
Speaker 1: of we had uh it was like thirty million of
Speaker 1: revenue from four the year before. And you know that
Speaker 1: also meant our prizes got bigger, so it's like more
Speaker 1: attractive of and offering. Uh So that that deal made
Speaker 1: it where it was kind of us and our main competitor,
Speaker 1: Fan Duel, were really rivals from that point forward. And
Speaker 1: what were what was your specific role during this whole time, right,
Speaker 1: like what was like your day to day I've taken
Speaker 1: on a lot of different roles, and all of it
Speaker 1: has always been sort of customer facing in market, but
Speaker 1: early on I was building sort of products, specs and
Speaker 1: operating the games themselves. So literally like I was like
Speaker 1: coming up with the salaries for the players that people
Speaker 1: were drafting, like Tom Brady is eighty nine hundred dollars
Speaker 1: and you know Aaron Rodgers is seventy eight hundred and whatever,
Speaker 1: right like doing that, and I had a team that
Speaker 1: I started building up that you know, had a lot
Speaker 1: of expertise in each of the sports we were doing.
Speaker 1: And over time it was less reliant on me, But
Speaker 1: early on I was making them in an Excel spreadsheet
Speaker 1: and then I was like uploading them into a database
Speaker 1: and doing a bunch of that I was doing our
Speaker 1: email marketing personally, it's like making templates and you know,
Speaker 1: filling them in and trying to drive drive interest. I
Speaker 1: spent almost an entire year building and analytics team, so
Speaker 1: we had all just like marketing and operators and uh,
Speaker 1: I pretty much focused entirely on analytics and just building
Speaker 1: up that practice. And then by end off and I
Speaker 1: was back into like a heavy operational like product operations role,
Speaker 1: you know, driving the fantasy business again. Uh. And yeah,
Speaker 1: what that's developed into now is we just keep offering
Speaker 1: more products, so like the role just keeps scaling with
Speaker 1: um not to jump ahead too fast, but it's just
Speaker 1: like quite scalable to just keep keep bringing on experts
Speaker 1: in each of the products we want to offer and
Speaker 1: keep the same core like relationship between Jason Paul and I.
Speaker 1: What does it feel like to go from you know,
Speaker 1: like capital one to having this idea for sports betting
Speaker 1: to now building this massive, massive business that's now public
Speaker 1: where you're known by millions of people around the world
Speaker 1: on top of millions of a millions. Like do you
Speaker 1: ever to sit and think and just say, like, how
Speaker 1: how did this all come to be? Or is it
Speaker 1: just like, hey, we worked really really hard. We had
Speaker 1: a cool idea and it worked. Yeah, weird. It's definitely
Speaker 1: strange to think about the the impact. We have over
Speaker 1: ten million US customers now in our our database that
Speaker 1: we serve, and I just think about the number, like
Speaker 1: that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You think about the scale of how many people have
Speaker 1: ever tried the thing that we built, and that's probably
Speaker 1: the thing I think about the most. It's just like
Speaker 1: a very few companies ever get to the point where
Speaker 1: that many people like try the thing that you've worked on.
Speaker 1: And so you know the fact that we've gotten that
Speaker 1: many people to try the product and that generally, like
Speaker 1: the feedback is so positive, and we have such an
Speaker 1: exciting roadmap to like looking forward, so many ways to
Speaker 1: expand the relationship with our audience. Like those things are
Speaker 1: it's like jaw dropping, but also keep us very busy,
Speaker 1: you know, Like we're very when we think about DraftKings,
Speaker 1: like strategy or what we what we want to do
Speaker 1: next at any given point in time, it always starts
Speaker 1: with one I DEA, which is like, Okay, we have
Speaker 1: a large audience of what we call skin in the
Speaker 1: game sports fans. It's like people that don't just watch
Speaker 1: the TV, you know, they don't watch the game on
Speaker 1: TV with no rooting interest. They like to predict things.
Speaker 1: They're playing fantasy or doing sports bets. They want to
Speaker 1: like bet against their friends, um different forms, Like everybody
Speaker 1: has preferences like parlay bettors or people who like fantasy more.
Speaker 1: But you know, that is our core audience. It's like
Speaker 1: a risk reward type audience, right, And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of things that those people are interested in that aren't
Speaker 1: just what we're doing today. You know, we recently launched
Speaker 1: draft Kings Marketplace, which is like an FT platforms for collectibles,
Speaker 1: and all of this is driven by just insight into
Speaker 1: who our customer is, and we we believe we could
Speaker 1: represent a decent share of like the kind of recreational time,
Speaker 1: the attention that gets sprayed everywhere if we just continue
Speaker 1: to understand our audience and build things that they're spending
Speaker 1: their time. What advice would you give to any aspiring entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: Like what have you learned in your journey now? Right,
Speaker 1: which is now almost basically like this year from when
Speaker 1: you guys started, you know, next year as you're coming
Speaker 1: up on your tenure anniversary right in April two of
Speaker 1: Draft Kings. So you've been this entrepreneur has built this
Speaker 1: massive company over the last nine years. Like what's What's
Speaker 1: something that you've taken away that you wish you had
Speaker 1: known back then that would be good for other people
Speaker 1: to know a couple of things, Like first, just being
Speaker 1: honest with yourself about what you can do, what you
Speaker 1: do best, what you're your interests are in terms of
Speaker 1: what you want to do in the future. For example,
Speaker 1: like I don't want to be the CEO of a
Speaker 1: company ever, so I'm just not who knows, but like
Speaker 1: I don't think I'll ever do that, And I just
Speaker 1: don't think that's an attractive job. And I think it's
Speaker 1: actually kind of awful to me. Like when I look at,
Speaker 1: you know, the job of being a CEO, it sucks.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, I don't want to do that. I
Speaker 1: want to be customer facing. I want to work on
Speaker 1: projects that I think are like awesome. I want to
Speaker 1: be like be the customer, you know, be in market.
Speaker 1: So like, if you're not honest about what you want
Speaker 1: to do, you can find yourself in Like I have
Speaker 1: a great business idea, so I guess that means I'm
Speaker 1: the CEO of it, and like, no, it doesn't. It's
Speaker 1: not what the original idea of doing Draft Kings I
Speaker 1: came up with, right, But I talked to Jason, talked
Speaker 1: to Paul. We quickly norman two rules. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: would never want to be the CEO of Draft Kicks.
Speaker 1: I just wouldn't, you know. I love what I do.
Speaker 1: I have like the best job in the world, and
Speaker 1: Jason has to him the best job. It's like, you
Speaker 1: just have to be honest about the role that you
Speaker 1: really want to play. And if it's not that, then
Speaker 1: don't like you can always team up with the right people. Um,
Speaker 1: I would say, like, if you're a tech business, you
Speaker 1: really want to have a tech founder. That's another thing.
Speaker 1: Like Paul figured this out and we were flying close
Speaker 1: to the sun. But um, a lot of people with
Speaker 1: tech ideas, like they want to create an app or something,
Speaker 1: They're like, I'll outsource the coding. We don't know how
Speaker 1: to do the coding. We have a product idea we
Speaker 1: want to do, try to outsource it. It's just not
Speaker 1: a thing like you really want to have a tech
Speaker 1: founder that you get engaged. Yeah, and the last thing
Speaker 1: is like always be willing to give up some equity, Like,
Speaker 1: don't be afraid to give up some equity to get
Speaker 1: people engaged in your idea. So often I think it's
Speaker 1: like people want to own or whatever of their company,
Speaker 1: and you might end up owning of whatever, like three
Speaker 1: million dollar company, when it could be you own five
Speaker 1: percent of a multibillion dollar company one day. Right, So
Speaker 1: it's like, I know there's different scales here, but if
Speaker 1: you can get somebody committed to like helping you on
Speaker 1: your project, and you think that they can help you,
Speaker 1: and they're willing to do it, and all that's between
Speaker 1: making that happen is some equity in your company, Like
Speaker 1: just give them the equity, you know, give up a
Speaker 1: little bit quitty to get people engaged. And you know,
Speaker 1: what's the draft Kings evaluation right now? Like three three
Speaker 1: three billions something like that. That was when we went public.
Speaker 1: Now we're in the teams somewhere some way off crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been quite nice. But yeah, when we did our
Speaker 1: deal to go publicly that all the media said it
Speaker 1: was like a three point three billion and Indian a year.
Speaker 1: It's quintupled. I mean like it's crazy, Yeah, nuts getting
Speaker 1: sports came back. Yeah, well, I think it's also draft
Speaker 1: Kings have a really interesting profile because it's a giant industry.
Speaker 1: We're serving a customer that is like very coveted, amazing
Speaker 1: customer base, you know, and it's a founder lad company
Speaker 1: where we still drive the operation. The vision that we've
Speaker 1: had is it's not like a private equity company coming
Speaker 1: in and taking it over and executing. And that's what
Speaker 1: a lot of like our our current competition looks like. Right.
Speaker 1: It's it's an entrepreneurial company driven by founders who still
Speaker 1: control eighty percent of the team's report to me or
Speaker 1: Paul or Jason, and we control the roadmap. We did
Speaker 1: go public, but we have you know, we have the
Speaker 1: reins on bringing our vision to life, and I think
Speaker 1: a lot of investors find that really attractive. Like the
Speaker 1: idea of like these founder lead If you think about
Speaker 1: some of the most valuable tech companies in the world,
Speaker 1: for the most part, their founder lead. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: founder lad, founder controlled. So the thinking is like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: if they got their vision here in nine years, what's
Speaker 1: going to happen thirty years from now? It's gonna be
Speaker 1: an awesome company. So as long as you keep being
Speaker 1: sort of right often enough, executing well, having the right
Speaker 1: proof points, building credibility, I think we'll, you know, continue
Speaker 1: to see a lot of success hopefully, you know how.
Speaker 1: Proud of your parents, quite proud. My dad actually got
Speaker 1: me into UM. Like, the way I learned a lot
Speaker 1: about math was from my dad, because he would show
Speaker 1: me stuff like blackjack. For example, It's like, here's when
Speaker 1: you hit, here's when you don't. And then we're like,
Speaker 1: why why don't I hit on seventeen? That's not a
Speaker 1: good number. He's like, well, you don't because it's like
Speaker 1: the three cards in the deck are good and ten
Speaker 1: are bad and one is a you know, so whatever.
Speaker 1: He would explain it simple, and then as I was
Speaker 1: getting older, it would be like, okay, I'm actually like
Speaker 1: sixteen point seven percent of this or what to get this? Um?
Speaker 1: So yeah, he would we would go to like watch
Speaker 1: horse racing, we would do um pick them pools at
Speaker 1: his work, stuff like that. So he got me into
Speaker 1: that kind of gaming. That then became how I learned
Speaker 1: math and how to apply math. And then when I
Speaker 1: got into poker, he was kind of like right there
Speaker 1: with me. We were both playing, you know, something to
Speaker 1: talk about. So being like this far along as an
Speaker 1: operator of a business that's like aligned with our passions
Speaker 1: like that, he just absolutely loves it. He lives in
Speaker 1: Seabrook and we have a Draft Kings sports book in Seabrook,
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, so he just like goes hangs out there. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: I just like, hey, my son is like he is
Speaker 1: he's like at Draft Kicks. Yeah. Yeah, my dad's like
Speaker 1: a military guy and was worked in a prison, so
Speaker 1: it's like very He just hangs out with his friends
Speaker 1: who are cops and stuff like that at the sports book.
Speaker 1: It's fun. So yeah, it's become like a decent part
Speaker 1: of the lifestyle of our family. And yeah, really special.
Speaker 1: Like my my last question for you and this has
Speaker 1: been really really awesome, so thank you for taking the time.
Speaker 1: Is what's what's something about DraftKings that people don't know?
Speaker 1: What's something that might have happened in the last couple
Speaker 1: of years or in the process to going public or
Speaker 1: in the founding that like if no one has any
Speaker 1: idea because you haven't told him yet, I don't know
Speaker 1: about something nobody. I wonder if anybody really knows this,
Speaker 1: probably very few, if anyone, But a lot of the
Speaker 1: time when you're when you're raising money, you deals aren't
Speaker 1: like done until they're done, right, Like until it's literally
Speaker 1: like your money's in the bank. Deals aren't done. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember this, like probably five years ago we were
Speaker 1: raising money. It's like our Series C, we probably people,
Speaker 1: we need private company and whatever. So probably like a
Speaker 1: month of runway on the company, we had a deal
Speaker 1: all lined up. Yeah, probably something like that. And we're
Speaker 1: also about to go into football season where we like
Speaker 1: we really want to be in market and testing growing
Speaker 1: our audience. So we're like, okay, rounds in good shape. Whatever.
Speaker 1: Then like Lead dropped out, probably two weeks before our
Speaker 1: runway was out. Jason like somehow figured out a way
Speaker 1: in three days to raise the same amount of money
Speaker 1: at a higher price with two weeks of runway with
Speaker 1: new people. Yeah, with led by yeah, yeah, led by
Speaker 1: a new outside and wrestler and multiple insiders. So it
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, it's just figured out a way to
Speaker 1: still raise the capital on a higher valuation somehow. Which
Speaker 1: is that happened? What would happened in two weeks? It
Speaker 1: would have been fine, we would have probably bridged that
Speaker 1: needed some bridge money and figured it out. But like
Speaker 1: though you never know until it's until it's done, it's
Speaker 1: not done. So it's like a really interesting kind of
Speaker 1: aspect of fundraising. It's probably closing a deal on a
Speaker 1: house to you know, it's like you have it's like
Speaker 1: kind of done, but like things fall apart all the
Speaker 1: time to write and so you have a plan B right,
Speaker 1: and yeah it's insane. Yeah, I've never done. Big Money
Speaker 1: Energy is hosted by me Ryan Sirhan. It's produced by
Speaker 1: Mike Coscarelli and Joe Lorresca and executive produced by Lindsayman.
Speaker 1: Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.