WEBVTT - Matt Kalish 0:00:01.160 --> 0:00:03.200 What's going on everybody, and welcome back to a brand 0:00:03.240 --> 0:00:05.800 new episode of season two of the Big Money Energy 0:00:05.840 --> 0:00:08.800 podcast here on I Heart Radio. This is the podcast 0:00:08.880 --> 0:00:11.320 where I talk to people who literally went from nothing 0:00:11.480 --> 0:00:16.120 to something and how they did it. We talked to founders, influencers, celebrities, 0:00:16.120 --> 0:00:18.840 anyone that I'm inspired by who I think their story 0:00:18.880 --> 0:00:22.520 could inspire you as well. Today we have Matt Kalish, 0:00:22.600 --> 0:00:25.320 who is one of the three co founders of Draft Kicks, 0:00:25.760 --> 0:00:31.960 the biggest online spantasy sports and sports betting website ever. 0:00:32.200 --> 0:00:35.800 And Matt is awesome, like down to earth, super nice 0:00:35.840 --> 0:00:39.440 Boston guy from Lowell, grew up outside New Hampshire, just 0:00:39.600 --> 0:00:41.440 like me right when I used to take summers in 0:00:41.440 --> 0:00:44.360 New Hampshire. Really really really cool story and what we 0:00:44.479 --> 0:00:46.640 really hit on is not just the origin story which 0:00:46.640 --> 0:00:49.240 we go through, but how having that one solid idea 0:00:49.360 --> 0:00:51.919 and knowing yourself honestly and knowing what you're good at. 0:00:52.040 --> 0:00:53.280 That's what I want you all to listen to it 0:00:53.360 --> 0:00:55.600 so you can hear from someone who's done it, how 0:00:55.840 --> 0:00:58.960 you too can figure out what you're good at and 0:00:59.000 --> 0:01:01.640 what's your things could take that idea and take it 0:01:01.640 --> 0:01:14.000 to the stratosphere. So welcome to a brand new episode. 0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:17.280 They kind of want to go through like the origin. 0:01:17.480 --> 0:01:20.399 So you and a couple of guys were working at 0:01:20.520 --> 0:01:24.200 Vista Print, right, that's correct. How long did you work there? Well, 0:01:24.240 --> 0:01:27.480 even before that, I met the current CEO of DraftKings, 0:01:27.560 --> 0:01:31.000 Jason Robbins, at Capital One, which was it was my 0:01:31.080 --> 0:01:34.160 third job in corporate America. But I was maybe two 0:01:34.200 --> 0:01:36.040 years out of college. I had a couple of short 0:01:36.120 --> 0:01:38.880 jobs and then Capital when I settled in, I had 0:01:38.920 --> 0:01:43.520 an analytics role nice in the American dream. Yeah, analytics 0:01:43.520 --> 0:01:46.160 at a bank. Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly, credit It was 0:01:46.760 --> 0:01:51.120 lending business. So yeah, we were doing heavy numbers stuff 0:01:51.160 --> 0:01:55.080 like Excel models and all this kind of data analytics 0:01:55.080 --> 0:01:58.320 and trying to make recommendations to you know, marketing teams 0:01:58.320 --> 0:01:59.960 and stuff like that. So we were a couple of 0:02:00.080 --> 0:02:01.920 is into our career when we met, and we had 0:02:01.960 --> 0:02:04.520 a lot of things in common, like fantasy sports. We 0:02:04.600 --> 0:02:07.520 both played poker, and then you know, just like softball 0:02:07.600 --> 0:02:09.640 and things like that would play together, so we spent 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:12.160 a lot of time together in addition to just being 0:02:12.160 --> 0:02:14.399 on a lot of the same projects in the company. 0:02:14.480 --> 0:02:17.119 So Jason was like my closest work friend pretty much 0:02:17.200 --> 0:02:21.280 coming up at Capital One, and then after three years 0:02:21.400 --> 0:02:24.519 or so, that business shut down and then we moved 0:02:24.520 --> 0:02:27.800 to visits that part of the business at Capital One. Yeah, 0:02:27.960 --> 0:02:30.519 they had like a specific lending business that we were 0:02:30.560 --> 0:02:32.600 a part of, and they just kind of wounded down, 0:02:33.160 --> 0:02:35.120 and so we ended up at Vista Print and that's 0:02:35.120 --> 0:02:38.160 where we met Paul. Paul Lieberman was our you know, 0:02:38.280 --> 0:02:41.280 third piece of the puzzle that really brought together the 0:02:41.360 --> 0:02:43.920 team that started DraftKings. Now what did you go to 0:02:43.919 --> 0:02:48.360 school for. I did computer science and economics and a double. 0:02:48.720 --> 0:02:50.799 Should have done that. I would have totally failed out 0:02:50.800 --> 0:02:53.000 of college, but that's what I should have done. Yeah, 0:02:53.240 --> 0:02:57.520 I had. I had like a two point seven g 0:02:57.680 --> 0:03:00.800 p A. But I took like heavy corselow. I always 0:03:00.800 --> 0:03:03.760 felt like I was wide and not too deep on 0:03:03.800 --> 0:03:07.520 any of my courses. So I got decent understanding, but 0:03:08.320 --> 0:03:10.880 it never failed anything. I got a D plus in 0:03:11.360 --> 0:03:14.000 there's a class called graph theory. I got a D plus. 0:03:14.480 --> 0:03:18.640 That was like my senior year. Remember that is still there. Yeah, 0:03:18.760 --> 0:03:22.519 the teacher wrote a poem about graph theory and it 0:03:22.639 --> 0:03:24.840 was just like he was so hardcore and I just 0:03:24.880 --> 0:03:27.200 didn't take it as seriously as he wanted us to. 0:03:27.560 --> 0:03:30.240 It's memorable. You remember you're talking about it to this day, 0:03:31.000 --> 0:03:33.520 Oh man, that you should n f t that that 0:03:33.560 --> 0:03:35.400 thing is probably still out there. And so were you 0:03:35.560 --> 0:03:38.920 entrepreneurial as a kid. Did you ever want to start 0:03:39.000 --> 0:03:41.040 your own business or build something or do you go 0:03:41.080 --> 0:03:42.880 to school and think, Hey, I'm gonna go get a job. No. 0:03:42.960 --> 0:03:45.120 I always like wanted to find ways to make my 0:03:45.200 --> 0:03:48.880 own money. My family was both my parents met in 0:03:48.880 --> 0:03:52.040 the Navy. They didn't go to college, and after the Navy, 0:03:52.200 --> 0:03:55.160 my dad was a corrections officer and worked in a 0:03:55.240 --> 0:03:59.800 prison for twenty seven years, maybe twenty eight years, and 0:03:59.800 --> 0:04:03.280 then retired. My mom was a hairdresser and then she 0:04:03.360 --> 0:04:05.640 worked for a parks and recreation department, you know. So 0:04:05.680 --> 0:04:08.400 they had these sort of blue collar jobs. And I 0:04:08.640 --> 0:04:10.400 never had that much money going around, so I was 0:04:10.440 --> 0:04:12.960 always looking for ways to make money. The first thing 0:04:13.000 --> 0:04:16.240 I did was, um, I just started mowing the lawn 0:04:16.360 --> 0:04:18.560 of I lived right next door to a seven eleven. 0:04:18.920 --> 0:04:20.840 I just like mowed the lawn one day, and then 0:04:20.839 --> 0:04:23.760 I went over and talked to the owners and was like, Hey, 0:04:23.760 --> 0:04:25.560 if you need someone to mow your law, just let 0:04:25.560 --> 0:04:28.120 me know. I'm around. I live right next door, and 0:04:28.240 --> 0:04:30.240 so I started doing that and I was making like 0:04:30.320 --> 0:04:32.200 twenty dollars a week. Then it's I got like a 0:04:32.240 --> 0:04:34.719 little older. I found you know, a few little like 0:04:34.760 --> 0:04:37.279 I was doing restaurant jobs and things like that. But 0:04:37.360 --> 0:04:39.200 by the time I got to college, what really caught 0:04:39.200 --> 0:04:41.960 my attention was poker because I was like, this is 0:04:42.000 --> 0:04:45.640 a much more like intriguing way to make money to me. 0:04:45.960 --> 0:04:50.800 It's it's math, it's strategy, it's game theory. I thought 0:04:50.839 --> 0:04:52.880 it was fun. So the way I found out about 0:04:52.920 --> 0:04:56.800 poker was Matt Damon's movie Round Round. I saw that 0:04:56.839 --> 0:05:00.280 movie right before I started my freshman year of college, 0:05:00.960 --> 0:05:02.800 and I was like, I'm gonna be in trouble because 0:05:02.800 --> 0:05:04.520 I'm not gonna be going to class much. I'm just 0:05:04.520 --> 0:05:09.719 gonna play internet poker. So I got to college freshman year, uh, 0:05:09.720 --> 0:05:12.840 and I was splitting my time between I was running 0:05:12.839 --> 0:05:17.320 track classes, and then poker and poker just started taking 0:05:17.320 --> 0:05:19.640 out more share of my life. You know. So I 0:05:19.720 --> 0:05:22.599 see like Giovanni Rabisi and boiler Room, you know, in 0:05:22.600 --> 0:05:24.800 the middle of the night running like his underground poker 0:05:24.839 --> 0:05:28.200 den down there. Yeah, a lot of the people I 0:05:28.200 --> 0:05:31.000 would talk to. This was back in two thousand through 0:05:31.040 --> 0:05:34.320 two thousand four, and so it's like a O L 0:05:34.400 --> 0:05:37.800 instant messenger was a thing. And yeah, a lot of 0:05:37.800 --> 0:05:40.400 my friends I would meet them playing poker, meet some 0:05:40.440 --> 0:05:43.960 people from New York and we would meet up and 0:05:44.000 --> 0:05:46.000 just talk on aim while we're playing, and then would 0:05:46.040 --> 0:05:50.119 meet up for games on Long Island and things like that. Yeah. 0:05:50.320 --> 0:05:53.400 I was started by learning limit hold him because that 0:05:53.480 --> 0:05:56.560 was what was popular in two thousands. Then it wasn't 0:05:56.600 --> 0:05:59.320 until like oh three when Chris Moneymaker won the World 0:05:59.400 --> 0:06:04.360 Series of Remember that Women Hold Them? Yeah, yeah, and 0:06:04.400 --> 0:06:08.560 so I was learning a little bit of everything. And yeah, 0:06:08.760 --> 0:06:11.520 by end of college, I was really thinking like should 0:06:11.560 --> 0:06:14.400 I play poker? Should job? Was that that was like 0:06:14.560 --> 0:06:17.320 a real thing. Yeah, I almost like didn't get a 0:06:17.400 --> 0:06:19.880 job and played poker. And then did you think you 0:06:19.960 --> 0:06:21.640 might like move to Vegas and just like do it 0:06:21.760 --> 0:06:23.719 real or you're gonna do internet poker. I was gonna 0:06:23.720 --> 0:06:27.680 do like internet poker, got it and I probably would have, 0:06:27.800 --> 0:06:30.280 but my mom I just thought like wouldn't have really 0:06:30.279 --> 0:06:34.080 thought very highly of that. And so I was like, 0:06:34.040 --> 0:06:36.320 I'm gonna keep playing, but do it at night and 0:06:36.360 --> 0:06:39.120 get a real job. So I had a few jobs 0:06:39.120 --> 0:06:41.720 that I didn't like. One was an engineering one was 0:06:41.920 --> 0:06:44.800 it was kind of like operations, I guess, but it 0:06:44.880 --> 0:06:47.840 was at Fidelity Investments doing benefits because you know, like 0:06:47.920 --> 0:06:51.120 a horizon or something to do their benefits through Fidelity. 0:06:51.320 --> 0:06:53.680 It was kind of like an operation job. Both jobs 0:06:53.680 --> 0:06:56.760 I didn't like. And then corporate analytics though I did 0:06:56.760 --> 0:06:58.640 because it had a lot of the poker you know, 0:06:58.880 --> 0:07:01.560 like you're looking through in complete data, you're trying to 0:07:01.600 --> 0:07:05.400 figure out, you know, trends or get insights from data. 0:07:05.480 --> 0:07:07.760 And then that was a Capital one. Yeah, a Capital one, 0:07:08.520 --> 0:07:11.920 and I was good at that because like just poker 0:07:12.080 --> 0:07:16.280 conditions you to like look at the data you have evaluated, 0:07:16.440 --> 0:07:20.400 make quick decisions that strategy. And there's also the accountability 0:07:20.440 --> 0:07:23.200 like you're really making money or you're really losing money, 0:07:23.280 --> 0:07:25.680 and there's like a balance sheet of life there that 0:07:26.080 --> 0:07:28.760 like you can't just be terrible and then you know, 0:07:28.880 --> 0:07:31.200 keep going like you're gonna eventually run out of run 0:07:31.200 --> 0:07:33.880 out of your bank roll if you're not making good decisions. 0:07:33.880 --> 0:07:35.800 What's the most amount of money you've ever made playing poker? 0:07:36.040 --> 0:07:42.840 Oh god, k yeah, never anything too insane. So then 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:45.360 Capital one that division you're working at shuts down. You 0:07:45.360 --> 0:07:48.040 guys go to Vista Print. You need the third party 0:07:48.480 --> 0:07:52.080 to your like fabulous trifecta. But did you know that 0:07:52.120 --> 0:07:54.840 you were going to start your own company or you 0:07:54.920 --> 0:07:57.240 were just hey, this is the next job, And like 0:07:57.280 --> 0:08:00.320 what was that genesis? When did that conversation happen? Yeah, 0:08:00.440 --> 0:08:02.880 like we we knew we were going to do something 0:08:02.960 --> 0:08:06.720 for sure, and Jason and I and then I wasn't 0:08:06.760 --> 0:08:08.760 that sure if Paul Paul had like a higher bar 0:08:08.880 --> 0:08:11.680 to actually quit. And where I stood on it was 0:08:11.920 --> 0:08:15.000 I was almost thirty years old. I had done seven 0:08:15.080 --> 0:08:18.440 or eight years in corporate America. It was my fourth job. 0:08:18.880 --> 0:08:21.040 And I was, you know, if you just do your 0:08:21.400 --> 0:08:25.480 balance sheet again of life, I was like, Okay, I'm 0:08:25.520 --> 0:08:30.240 making whatever, seventy thousand dollars a year. Then there's taxes, 0:08:30.320 --> 0:08:34.000 then you know, house um, all this stuff, like you 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:36.400 start taking it all out and you're not really saving anything. 0:08:36.600 --> 0:08:38.440 I was paying off student loans and I had nine 0:08:38.440 --> 0:08:41.920 thousand dollars and I was like almost thirty years old, 0:08:42.080 --> 0:08:45.199 and so Jason and I were like, the corporate thing 0:08:45.360 --> 0:08:47.679 isn't really going well. You know, we don't feel like 0:08:47.679 --> 0:08:50.120 we're getting where we want, and we also just had 0:08:50.160 --> 0:08:52.280 that drive to do something on our own and we're 0:08:52.320 --> 0:08:58.040 waiting for the right idea. Paul jumped in, um, you know, 0:08:58.200 --> 0:09:00.760 very similar. He was just waiting for something like special 0:09:00.880 --> 0:09:03.600 enough that it was worth it. So you know, he 0:09:03.640 --> 0:09:06.600 wasn't going to quit and start like a fast food 0:09:06.600 --> 0:09:08.800 franchise or something that just like wasn't where his head was. 0:09:08.840 --> 0:09:12.439 That he wanted like something that could be big. And 0:09:12.520 --> 0:09:15.560 so we we started talking about this idea for draft kings, 0:09:15.600 --> 0:09:19.280 which was fantasy sports. It was right after internet poker 0:09:19.360 --> 0:09:22.480 kind of fell to the side in the US. We're like, 0:09:22.559 --> 0:09:26.160 fantasy sports is really interesting because people love doing these drafts. 0:09:26.360 --> 0:09:28.640 You can do it potentially every day. What if you 0:09:28.720 --> 0:09:32.280 just like reformatted it a little where you're drafting every day, 0:09:32.480 --> 0:09:35.080 you're playing just for one day, and you're playing against 0:09:35.120 --> 0:09:38.120 your friends or maybe against like thousands of people for 0:09:38.200 --> 0:09:40.560 big prizes. You know, it's pretty cool. And here's an 0:09:40.640 --> 0:09:44.080 inventing this in conversation. Yeah, like just like a total 0:09:44.200 --> 0:09:46.960 what if situation. Yeah, it was like, what if we 0:09:47.040 --> 0:09:51.080 just built this thing that was you know, not not 0:09:51.800 --> 0:09:55.000 easily solved, like kind of a skill game around fantasy 0:09:55.040 --> 0:09:56.760 and so the thing we talked about the thing, The 0:09:56.880 --> 0:09:59.640 thing is the website, right, and then put the machine 0:09:59.679 --> 0:10:02.760 behind did and you're the computer engineer. It's what you 0:10:02.800 --> 0:10:05.120 went to school for, but it's a three of you. 0:10:05.240 --> 0:10:08.040 Like at night, you're going to work during the day 0:10:08.040 --> 0:10:10.680 and then at night you're coding. Is that what's really 0:10:10.679 --> 0:10:14.040 started it? Yeah. We fell into rules really quickly, which 0:10:14.120 --> 0:10:18.480 basically all of us learned something relatively new. Paul wrote 0:10:18.520 --> 0:10:22.960 the code for site. Paul was like not a software engineer, 0:10:23.000 --> 0:10:26.120 but he knew some stuff. I think he did electrical 0:10:26.160 --> 0:10:29.240 engineering and he was an analyst, and he just started 0:10:29.280 --> 0:10:31.360 reading books and figured out how to write code. He 0:10:31.400 --> 0:10:36.439 wrote our prototype it was C plus plus or something, 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:40.560 and then we started doing investor pitches. Jason Robbins had 0:10:40.600 --> 0:10:43.160 to learn how to go do like a fundraise, so 0:10:43.280 --> 0:10:45.760 he went out and started like building a pipeline. So 0:10:45.800 --> 0:10:48.440 you immediately wanted to raise money. Yeah, yeah, I would 0:10:48.440 --> 0:10:50.839 say within three or four months, we figured out if 0:10:50.880 --> 0:10:53.480 we don't raise money, we're never getting this off the ground. 0:10:53.640 --> 0:10:55.120 Got it? Did you know how much it was going 0:10:55.160 --> 0:10:56.960 to take you to get it off the ground, Like 0:10:57.000 --> 0:10:58.960 how much we wanted to raise at the beginning. I 0:10:59.000 --> 0:11:00.880 feel like a lot of people do this, but we 0:11:00.920 --> 0:11:03.480 had a really stupid model, Like it was we thought 0:11:03.520 --> 0:11:06.679 we needed way less and it was like, I don't know, 0:11:06.920 --> 0:11:09.679 three hundred thousand dollars or something to build the first 0:11:09.760 --> 0:11:12.559 site and kind of get everything running. Yeah, our first 0:11:12.600 --> 0:11:15.480 pitch neck said we need to raise like three k 0:11:15.800 --> 0:11:18.440 and it will be profitable in like six months and 0:11:18.480 --> 0:11:21.040 all this stuff, and then we ended up raising one 0:11:21.080 --> 0:11:25.520 point two million. We did forty pitches. Probably there was 0:11:25.800 --> 0:11:29.000 thirty thirty five knows. A couple of people were like, 0:11:29.080 --> 0:11:31.280 call me back if you have a lead for year round, 0:11:31.320 --> 0:11:32.760 but they didn't want to lead it. This is just 0:11:32.800 --> 0:11:34.559 seed money, right, You're just looking for people to help 0:11:34.559 --> 0:11:36.800 you start. Yeah, just like we were showing them our 0:11:36.840 --> 0:11:39.680 prototype and it's just the three of you. Yeah. And 0:11:39.679 --> 0:11:42.280 what was the prototype like a wire frame? Yeah, it 0:11:42.360 --> 0:11:46.320 was not an app. It was a website and we 0:11:46.360 --> 0:11:48.520 would just load it up. It had a little bit 0:11:48.559 --> 0:11:52.000 of functionality, not much. There wasn't like live data from 0:11:52.040 --> 0:11:54.960 sports pumping into it. It was all like placeholder data, 0:11:55.200 --> 0:11:59.240 just the idea yea logo. Yeah, and Paul I can't 0:11:59.280 --> 0:12:02.240 over emphasis emphasized that he was not an engineer, so 0:12:02.280 --> 0:12:04.960 he didn't really know how to write code, so the 0:12:05.000 --> 0:12:07.719 site would just get the blue screen of death sometimes 0:12:07.720 --> 0:12:11.079 on investor pitches and it was just broken. But it 0:12:11.240 --> 0:12:13.400 like worked enough, and he was getting better over the 0:12:13.440 --> 0:12:16.400 months and just like cleaning up and learning, and so 0:12:16.600 --> 0:12:18.920 it's just the three of you. Yeah, it was just 0:12:19.000 --> 0:12:21.680 the three of us. And then after we got line 0:12:21.679 --> 0:12:23.960 of sight to raising money, we brought on our fourth, 0:12:24.520 --> 0:12:27.520 you know, our first non US employee, and that that 0:12:27.679 --> 0:12:30.520 was somebody named Blake Dunkle, who was an engineer, like 0:12:30.559 --> 0:12:33.320 a real, real, real life yeah, someone who could come 0:12:33.320 --> 0:12:35.000 in and help you bill this whole thing. So when 0:12:35.000 --> 0:12:39.840 did Draft Kings first go live? We want live in April. 0:12:40.480 --> 0:12:44.440 That was for baseball, and it was April, which is 0:12:44.440 --> 0:12:48.240 Paul's birthday. And I think he like deliberately launched it 0:12:48.280 --> 0:12:50.560 on his birthday, even if we could have went sooner, 0:12:50.640 --> 0:12:52.480 he was like, I just wanted to be on my birthday. 0:12:52.520 --> 0:12:56.040 So he you know, lined up all the stuff and 0:12:56.200 --> 0:12:58.280 that's when we went live. And how was that first 0:12:58.440 --> 0:13:01.200 couple of months? It was good. At that time, there 0:13:01.280 --> 0:13:04.840 was probably like six or seven competitors that we knew 0:13:04.840 --> 0:13:07.200 of that we're doing fantasy that we're in the market 0:13:07.240 --> 0:13:09.600 doing something like kind of similar to what we were, 0:13:09.600 --> 0:13:12.720 but nothing was big at all. Maybe like tens of 0:13:12.760 --> 0:13:16.080 thousands of people at the most had ever tried like 0:13:16.160 --> 0:13:19.680 ten or twenty thousand, and so we came in and 0:13:19.720 --> 0:13:23.560 there wasn't It wasn't like just get people you know 0:13:23.640 --> 0:13:25.480 who are already in the market to try it. You 0:13:25.480 --> 0:13:29.679 have to literally explain what the thing was to come here. Yeah, 0:13:29.840 --> 0:13:31.960 it was tough, and so our first day we had 0:13:31.960 --> 0:13:35.760 a hundred and seven registered users. I think we just 0:13:35.760 --> 0:13:37.680 did a free game where we gave away a hundred 0:13:37.679 --> 0:13:42.800 bucks that's all for baseball. And it was a combination 0:13:42.840 --> 0:13:45.160 of like people that had heard of the industry and 0:13:45.240 --> 0:13:48.520 just like stumbled upon social media posts or friends told 0:13:48.559 --> 0:13:52.400 them or we posted on some forearms, but like random 0:13:52.480 --> 0:13:55.280 mix of a hundred seven people that kind of stumbled in, 0:13:55.559 --> 0:13:57.679 and you know, we're asking our friends to spread the 0:13:57.720 --> 0:14:01.600 word and everything and you know, invest any marketing for 0:14:01.679 --> 0:14:03.520 a couple of months, you know, so we were just 0:14:03.559 --> 0:14:07.360 really doing it. Yeah, Yeah, we just start doing emails. 0:14:07.400 --> 0:14:09.560 We had like free games that people could jump in, 0:14:10.040 --> 0:14:12.560 and then we started testing some stuff on you know, 0:14:12.600 --> 0:14:17.960 like Facebook, digital marketing and stuff probably July, something like 0:14:18.040 --> 0:14:20.520 in June or July. So it took a few months, 0:14:20.640 --> 0:14:22.400 and yeah, we had to clean up our product a 0:14:22.440 --> 0:14:25.680 little bit, made some changes, but we felt like by 0:14:25.760 --> 0:14:28.200 July we were okay, investing a little bit and we 0:14:28.200 --> 0:14:30.520 were really just getting ready for football season, which was 0:14:30.920 --> 0:14:33.080 you know, so that's why you did baseball first, because 0:14:33.080 --> 0:14:36.080 you were launching it in the spring, gearing up to 0:14:36.200 --> 0:14:40.040 then bring football in. Yeah, that's it wasn't even that strategic. 0:14:40.120 --> 0:14:42.360 That's just like when we were when we were ready, 0:14:42.520 --> 0:14:45.400 and it's it's like their strategy, So why do you 0:14:45.440 --> 0:14:48.200 choose baseball first? When they write this story about draft 0:14:48.280 --> 0:14:50.240 kickings sometime in the future, they can say it was 0:14:50.280 --> 0:14:53.160 like very strategic, But it wasn't. So we launched when 0:14:53.160 --> 0:14:56.200 we were ready and that was baseball, and then you know, 0:14:56.280 --> 0:14:58.720 we had a few months to build our football product, 0:14:58.840 --> 0:15:01.600 get that all lined up, and you know, we had 0:15:01.680 --> 0:15:04.840 at that point enough insight into like a little bit 0:15:04.880 --> 0:15:06.960 of marketing that we could turn on the faucet a 0:15:06.960 --> 0:15:09.480 little bit. And by the end of the year, we 0:15:09.520 --> 0:15:11.280 had something in the range of four or four and 0:15:11.280 --> 0:15:14.280 a half a million of revenue in twelve So we 0:15:14.320 --> 0:15:17.800 went from just starting at nothing to a few million 0:15:17.800 --> 0:15:21.160 bucks of revenue. Crazy, And just in case anyone who's 0:15:21.160 --> 0:15:23.680 listening doesn't know exactly how how does draft Kings generate 0:15:23.680 --> 0:15:26.760 revenue or how did it generate revenue back then? It's 0:15:26.840 --> 0:15:30.320 just the difference between like entry fees into a contest 0:15:30.360 --> 0:15:33.000 and what gets paid out. So on average, it's like 0:15:33.040 --> 0:15:36.320 around ten percent in fantasy is what our revenue is. 0:15:36.400 --> 0:15:39.520 And then at that time, though a lot of the 0:15:39.560 --> 0:15:42.440 time we would just be we wouldn't get enough entry 0:15:42.480 --> 0:15:45.120 fees and there was like more prizes than the entry fees, 0:15:45.600 --> 0:15:47.800 so sometimes it was even like would run a contest 0:15:47.880 --> 0:15:49.760 that we lost money on. But it was all part 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:59.360 of just building our audience, building the business up. So 0:15:59.400 --> 0:16:02.960 the two their team is just adding more sports, right, Yeah, 0:16:03.000 --> 0:16:06.040 we added sports. We a couple of big things. We 0:16:06.080 --> 0:16:08.360 did a deal with Major League Baseball. It was like 0:16:08.400 --> 0:16:11.720 the first league deal in our space, and that was 0:16:11.840 --> 0:16:14.600 the first time in fantasy in your space ever. Yeah, 0:16:14.720 --> 0:16:17.400 like you guys were the first, Yeah, and we were 0:16:17.440 --> 0:16:21.360 we were thinking like, wow, this is great major League Baseball. Yeah, 0:16:21.560 --> 0:16:23.920 I never would have thought that that quickly we would 0:16:23.960 --> 0:16:27.920 have got support. But the data around fantasy is really compelling. Like, 0:16:27.960 --> 0:16:30.840 people really watch a lot of sports when they're playing fantasy, 0:16:31.160 --> 0:16:35.120 and they watching Yeah, yeah, if you're just watching the 0:16:35.160 --> 0:16:38.000 score and it's forty two seven, like the Patriots last 0:16:38.040 --> 0:16:40.600 week was like forty five to seven, nobody's watching that 0:16:40.680 --> 0:16:42.040 if you just want to know who's going to win 0:16:42.080 --> 0:16:44.880 the game. But like if you're in fantasy, then you're watching, 0:16:44.960 --> 0:16:48.000 like is Mac Jones running up, you know, three hundred 0:16:48.080 --> 0:16:52.080 plush past yards and another touchdown and whatever, and it 0:16:52.160 --> 0:16:54.640 all adds up to your score. So people just keep watching. 0:16:55.080 --> 0:16:58.320 And the league's understand you know, the fantasy players probably 0:16:58.320 --> 0:17:00.520 like their best you know, that's the best sex to 0:17:00.680 --> 0:17:04.000 their audience, you know. So I wanted to make some 0:17:04.000 --> 0:17:07.320 some investments in building up fantasy, and Major League Baseball 0:17:07.359 --> 0:17:11.920 really went first, so we did that deal. Another thing 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:15.440 was we did an acquisition, which was we were the 0:17:15.440 --> 0:17:18.520 third biggest probably fantasy provider, and we bought a company 0:17:18.560 --> 0:17:21.640 called Draft Street, which was based in New York. They 0:17:21.680 --> 0:17:26.600 had maybe twenty employees. We had probably forty. So suddenly 0:17:26.640 --> 0:17:29.240 we like doubled the team size and we about doubled 0:17:29.240 --> 0:17:32.159 our customer base, doubled our revenue. So by the end 0:17:32.160 --> 0:17:35.840 of we had uh it was like thirty million of 0:17:35.840 --> 0:17:39.439 revenue from four the year before. And you know that 0:17:39.520 --> 0:17:41.760 also meant our prizes got bigger, so it's like more 0:17:41.800 --> 0:17:45.960 attractive of and offering. Uh So that that deal made 0:17:45.960 --> 0:17:48.760 it where it was kind of us and our main competitor, 0:17:48.880 --> 0:17:51.840 Fan Duel, were really rivals from that point forward. And 0:17:51.880 --> 0:17:56.160 what were what was your specific role during this whole time, right, 0:17:56.200 --> 0:17:58.359 like what was like your day to day I've taken 0:17:58.359 --> 0:18:01.320 on a lot of different roles, and all of it 0:18:01.359 --> 0:18:04.720 has always been sort of customer facing in market, but 0:18:04.880 --> 0:18:08.080 early on I was building sort of products, specs and 0:18:08.320 --> 0:18:14.080 operating the games themselves. So literally like I was like 0:18:14.200 --> 0:18:17.680 coming up with the salaries for the players that people 0:18:17.680 --> 0:18:21.640 were drafting, like Tom Brady is eighty nine hundred dollars 0:18:21.680 --> 0:18:25.439 and you know Aaron Rodgers is seventy eight hundred and whatever, 0:18:25.560 --> 0:18:27.680 right like doing that, and I had a team that 0:18:27.720 --> 0:18:29.959 I started building up that you know, had a lot 0:18:30.000 --> 0:18:32.240 of expertise in each of the sports we were doing. 0:18:32.680 --> 0:18:35.320 And over time it was less reliant on me, But 0:18:35.400 --> 0:18:38.000 early on I was making them in an Excel spreadsheet 0:18:38.359 --> 0:18:40.720 and then I was like uploading them into a database 0:18:40.800 --> 0:18:42.480 and doing a bunch of that I was doing our 0:18:42.600 --> 0:18:46.800 email marketing personally, it's like making templates and you know, 0:18:46.880 --> 0:18:50.600 filling them in and trying to drive drive interest. I 0:18:50.960 --> 0:18:54.320 spent almost an entire year building and analytics team, so 0:18:54.359 --> 0:18:57.880 we had all just like marketing and operators and uh, 0:18:59.280 --> 0:19:02.560 I pretty much focused entirely on analytics and just building 0:19:02.600 --> 0:19:06.480 up that practice. And then by end off and I 0:19:06.560 --> 0:19:10.600 was back into like a heavy operational like product operations role, 0:19:11.080 --> 0:19:14.760 you know, driving the fantasy business again. Uh. And yeah, 0:19:14.880 --> 0:19:17.520 what that's developed into now is we just keep offering 0:19:17.520 --> 0:19:20.600 more products, so like the role just keeps scaling with 0:19:21.119 --> 0:19:24.399 um not to jump ahead too fast, but it's just 0:19:24.520 --> 0:19:27.760 like quite scalable to just keep keep bringing on experts 0:19:27.760 --> 0:19:29.439 in each of the products we want to offer and 0:19:29.520 --> 0:19:33.199 keep the same core like relationship between Jason Paul and I. 0:19:33.400 --> 0:19:36.199 What does it feel like to go from you know, 0:19:36.960 --> 0:19:42.280 like capital one to having this idea for sports betting 0:19:42.320 --> 0:19:46.680 to now building this massive, massive business that's now public 0:19:46.760 --> 0:19:51.040 where you're known by millions of people around the world 0:19:51.359 --> 0:19:53.879 on top of millions of a millions. Like do you 0:19:53.880 --> 0:19:56.880 ever to sit and think and just say, like, how 0:19:56.880 --> 0:19:58.639 how did this all come to be? Or is it 0:19:58.680 --> 0:20:00.719 just like, hey, we worked really really hard. We had 0:20:00.720 --> 0:20:03.800 a cool idea and it worked. Yeah, weird. It's definitely 0:20:03.840 --> 0:20:07.480 strange to think about the the impact. We have over 0:20:07.680 --> 0:20:10.960 ten million US customers now in our our database that 0:20:11.000 --> 0:20:13.000 we serve, and I just think about the number, like 0:20:13.760 --> 0:20:16.920 that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Yeah. 0:20:17.040 --> 0:20:19.600 You think about the scale of how many people have 0:20:19.640 --> 0:20:22.080 ever tried the thing that we built, and that's probably 0:20:22.200 --> 0:20:25.359 the thing I think about the most. It's just like 0:20:25.600 --> 0:20:27.960 a very few companies ever get to the point where 0:20:28.600 --> 0:20:30.919 that many people like try the thing that you've worked on. 0:20:31.720 --> 0:20:35.040 And so you know the fact that we've gotten that 0:20:35.080 --> 0:20:37.720 many people to try the product and that generally, like 0:20:37.760 --> 0:20:39.960 the feedback is so positive, and we have such an 0:20:39.960 --> 0:20:43.359 exciting roadmap to like looking forward, so many ways to 0:20:43.440 --> 0:20:46.960