wherever the attention of that fan goes. That's what we want to be building, whether it's fantasy sports betting or even now with crypto NFTs kind of move where the attention is going of our audience. And that's been the one thing that's given us stability.

This is the flavor.

I have an incredible entrepreneur who would have ever thought probably one of the most powerful people in sports. He also hooks up on a show with my boy Gary.

Matt Kailas co-founder and president of graph games. Welcome to the playbook.

Hey Dave, how are you?

I'm so well. Thank you so much for doing this. I just, you know, have been involved in sports for so long. And every time I go into a stadium arena, like this one, and I see your brand.

planted everywhere and millions and millions of people participating in your solution. I pinch myself because, you know, I was a p-rose fan.

And, you know, they kept them out of baseball. I never thought in a million years that we'd be able to not only participate in all the great things that draftings does, but promote it within sports for you in your perspective in business of sports.

Did you ever dream that the adoption would be so a massive and so quick?

Well, 10 years ago, things were a lot different in the US. If you're a sports fan, really, just in the US. There's a lot of countries where, you know, for many decades, Australia, UK, Ireland, you name it much of Europe.

You know, sports betting has been legal, regulated and a huge part of the culture of being a sports fan, you know, for most of the world.

In the US, though, 10 years ago, there really wasn't a lot of ways that fans could really jump in and predict things or compete with friends, play along with the games that they loved.

Things like ESPN season long, maybe in the office pool that you were doing, you know, like a March madness bracket, but there wasn't a time going on. And it was a little unfortunate to be a sports fan in the US.

And a lot of people are also driven to offshore sports books that weren't regulated didn't have a lot of consumer protection. So draft kings over the last, you know, nine almost 10 years now, starting with daily fantasy sports in 2012.

And now more recently with sports betting, really where we've been focused is bringing to the US, like a mainstream adoption of, you know, more options for a skin in the game sports fan.

And, you know, through that evolution, our own personal journeys, I personally went from the corporate world as a lawyer, working for a large company of legal publisher into sports with running the most notable sports agency in the world, Lee Steinberg, that entrepreneurial journey through technology and sports took a lot of courage because, you know, there's a lot of people out there when you're in the corporate world.

And you come up with these sports related dreams, think that it's more about the sports than the business. And you came out of the corporate world and launch draft kings with your friends and co powders.

What was some of the resistance? I always say that people laugh at you, scoff at you and make fun of you when they're jealous of you, pursuing a dream. What were some of the resistant that you faced as you went through this entrepreneurial journey coming out of the corporate world into the romantic world, the exciting world of sports.

Well, you know, what we brought to the table as a founding team, you know, myself, Jason Robbins, who is our CEO today and Paul Lieberman, you know, we all worked together, seven or eight years in corporate America, and we were experts at digital marketing at analytics, and we were also giant, you know, sports fans, we were playing poker, we really were the customer for the type of product we wanted to build.

And you know, still we went out on the market and pitched our business to 40 VCs, and the first 39 were no, and then Ryan Moore at Atlas was the yes, you know, our 40th probably pitch. That's a rough number, you know, not I'm not literally saying 40, but you know, we heard no for months and I would say it came down to a lot of reasons, but in general, it's two things like first as people are really resistant to lead anything, you know, it's always hard to get the first.

You know, the lead investor on board, and then the second thing is I think there's a lot of question about the regulatory, you know, like, is this a team that, you know, build something great, but the regulatory process is slow, or like things don't really open up as much as, you know, what we, what we thought might happen over time.

And you know, that's always a risk, and I think people were looking at markets like poker, where for years, people were trying to get poker regulated, and there was maybe one or two states at the time that actually did it, you know, Nevada, New Jersey, you know, very slow progress, and so there's a lot of a question about what that landscape would look like, and it made the upside, I think, look less appealing.

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