A founder left University of Missouri after one year and sold his company for $40 million by 23. He predicted online poker would go mainstream and rebuilt legacy betting platforms for mobile, positioning modern tech to brick-and-mortar casinos instead of cheap foreign white-label products.
You drop out of college and you start a company that you end up selling for— can you say how much you sold for? Yeah, it was $40 million. At that time, you must have been pretty young. How old were you when you sold? 23. What was the idea and how did you make that happen? I was actually at the University of Missouri for a year. Enjoyed my time there. Was not for me, though. Always wanted to kind of start a company. When I dropped out, I didn't really have the exact plan yet, but I did always play a lot of online poker. Started hearing whispers of them legalizing gaming nationally here in the United States. I just sat down and essentially just wrote out for hours how I thought the market would evolve. And my conclusion was that there will be early players. You'll have DraftKings and FanDuel. It really would end up being dominated by either the brick-and-mortar casino companies. And to date, all the technology had been built overseas because it's been around for 50 years, but it was like built in the early 2000s where you had like these desktop applications to place a bet. And then to get to mobile, they just like compressed it into a mobile experience. So I said, what if I just rebuilt all that and then called these big companies and said, hey, don't white label this garbage from Sweden and pay some huge Sure, what if we just do a deal?
