Investing Billions - E112: Jake Paul: How to Build a Multi-Billion Startup

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Jake Paul and Joey Levy, Co-Founders of Betr, sits down with David Weisburd to discuss Jake Paul’s bold vision for the future of sports betting and how the company seeks to become the market leader in the space.

What drives you? What makes you so ambitious, Jake? Challenges excite me. Seeing what I can accomplish and how far I can push my own self. Becoming a world champion in the sport of boxing is my goal. But on top of that, you also want to be a billionaire and build one of the largest sports gaming companies. So you're already rich, you already have your boxing. Why start a sports betting company? Probably one of the hardest things to do in the world is to create a billion dollar company. So it's one of my goals just to say that I was able to do it. Roughly half of billionaires attribute a lot of their success to psychedelics.

Do you attribute psychedelics as a source of your success? 100%. No question about it. Well, Jake, Jake Paul, Joey Levy, co-founders of Better, among many other things. Great to have you guys on the podcast. Welcome to the Element of Partner podcast. Yeah, great. Great to be here. Appreciate you having us on David.

Yeah. Thank you. Excited. Thank you. So as I was telling you before the show, I spoke to a mutual friend of ours and NBA head coach, Mike Brown, who last year won one NBA coach of the year. And he said, Jake, what you accomplished in boxing last three years is one of the greatest sports he's ever seen in history.

How are you able to accomplish what you were accomplished going from amateur to being an elite fighter in three years? Wow. That's like, well, that's a crazy statement coming from Mike. So Mike, what's up? Cameron, Eliza. What's up everybody? I miss you guys.

Hope you're doing well, but yeah, I don't know, man. It's just, it's believing in yourself and self belief and not letting others constraints of what they think is possible in reality, limiting your own beliefs and it shows what's possible with extreme dedication for 16 hours a day and surrounding yourself with the best people at the highest level. And just manifestation, visualization, and truly believing within yourself that you can do something and being a disruptor, coming in with a different skill set at the right time. I mean, this is all about venture capital

and investing and all this stuff. Everything's about timing. And I came into the sport when it was dying on its way out and to gave it this breath of fresh air. And I saw the opportunity to do so. And I saw how much help the sport needed. And I saw a lot of room to make changes. And that's really what's happened.

I like that answer. But I was with you at Komodo after the fight. Me and Jessica, you were kind enough to host us at the last DS fight. And you were still zeroed in. You had just won. And everybody was partying. You had Dave Grumman. You had Purple. You had all these guys. And you were still zeroed in. You had just one and everybody was partying. You had Dave Grumman, you had Purple,

you had all these guys and you were still zeroed in. I've never seen somebody so focused in. What drives you? What makes you so ambitious, Jake? I would say challenges excite me and seeing what I can accomplish and how far I can push my own self is a really fun game to play.

And just getting better every single day gives me something to continue to work on and having purpose and setting very, very high goals for myself that are super far fetched. Like becoming a world champion in the sport of boxing is my goal right so if I beat Nate Diaz that's great and all like yeah maybe celebrate a little bit but that's a spec on what I want to actually accomplish in the long run so

yeah everyone's partying at Komodo but actually I'm gonna choose to remain sober because that's gonna help me get to my goal faster. And I just choose my moments where I wanna have fun, but I just have so much to prove and have two chips on each shoulder. And just, that's a short summary of what drives me. There's so much more, but yeah. And also just following up on that.

So you wanna be world champion boxer, which by the way, a year and a half ago, everybody was laughing at you and thought that that was a crazy goal. Now people are like, can he do it? Can he not do it? Which is a huge evolution. But on top of that, you also want to be a billionaire and build one of the largest sports gaming companies.

So you're already rich, you already have your boxing. Why start a sports gaming company. So you're already rich. You're already have your boxing. Why start a sports betting company? You know, life is a game and we're playing real real life monopoly. And since I was 17 years old, I was surrounded. I went to Silicon Valley with my friend for about a week. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. the challenges of these startups, getting to go around. I went to Uber, Google, Twitter at the time, and I saw all of these people working towards these goals. And the feats that they were achieving, I think when I went to Google, they were like, first experimenting with AI or like quantum computing or some crazy

thing. And I was like, I couldn't even comprehend it as a 17 year old from Ohio. I saw these people changing the world, the challenges they were facing, the levels they were surmounting to. And I think that has been within me. And I was, and I saw these people and I got to talk to these CEOs. And I was like, they're really no different than anybody else. Like if they can do this and achieve these huge things, then then so can I. And to me, it's fun.

It's, it's literally real life monopoly. You have to play all these pieces on the puzzle. Um, and the, and the challenge of getting to that level, I think is probably the hard, probably one of the hardest things to do in the world is to create a billion dollar company. So it's one of my goals just to see and to say that I was able to do it. When you were playing Monopoly as a kid,

who won you or Logan? It was probably a back and forth. I say I can't play Uno with my friends because I just get so pissed off. It's a common thing in startups, Peter Thiel apparently when he loses chess, he throws over the chessboard, according to David Sachs and other venture capitalists.

But you mentioned visualization, working 16 hours a day as a source of your success, but ultimately you only have 24 hours a day. You talk a lot about psychedelics. I know from personal experience, roughly half of billionaires attribute a lot of a lot about psychedelics. I know from personal experience, roughly half of billionaires attribute a lot of their success to psychedelics. Do you attribute psychedelics as a source of your success?

100%. No question about it. I think you have to understand yourself and go inwards and work inwards and emotional intelligence and all of these things before you can really master everything. Business is all about relationship, team, understanding everyone else, working together in this way. Psychedelics actually gives you opening into that world, those energies, how to be a part of a community, love, push, pool, being a good leader.

All of these things kind of get opened up and you allow you to see things from a different perspective. And then just the amazing ideas that come from it, right? It's like Steve Jobs created the iPod off of some acid because he was like, why can't I bring the music with me? Absolutely. Steve Jobs even created Apple back in the day from his LSD experiences. Sergey Brin and Elon Musk are on the record as being big proponents of psychedelics and

crediting a lot of that for their success. We have a show, we have some of the top venture capitalists in the world that come on and they're funders and we have some very smart marketing people. But Jake, I think you are one of the most underrated marketing geniuses really in the world. And the reason I say that is because you found a way to be successful from platform to platform, from Vine to Instagram to TikTok. That's almost unprecedented. So I have to ask you this whole problem child persona, this whole fuck Jake Paul thing, is this a marketing gimmick? Is this how you get fans? Can you spill the beans on that? Good news travels fast, bad news travels faster. People like drama, they like controversy,

they like the things that are different. People want to see something that they've never seen before. And to cut right to the top in news and gossip and drama, it's like ruffle feathers. And then that was the strategy from day one to break it to be a social media star. How did I first break into the mainstream media? I had all of these ideas and it was roughly in feathers. And I can play that character and be the bad guy and be the villain. And that's kind of how people have painted me and that I embraced it. And it was like, okay, cool.

This is where we're going to go with this. But it works way better in the long run than than just being the, you know, person with no opinion one way or the other. And we see that a lot of times now is like not choosing a side is is choosing a side. So definitely very strategic and thoughtful around all this. And it just perfectly aligns with boxing and, you know, having opponents and, and shit talking and all in the world. I mean, it's one thing, you know, I saw you, it's one thing to say you like playing the villain,

but actually doing it. I saw you come out and Dallas and everybody booing you. And you just had the most stoic face and just said, we're so internally focused. It was inspiring to be honest. It's very cool to see kind of in practice. So let's go to Joey. So Joey, you did what? To be completely frank, I had never met Jake. I've been really impressed by Jake in person. You know, I think he has the same persona as a unicorn founder without all the social media and all the boxing. I think you saw that too, but you put your money where your mouth is. You gave half of your company to, on a crazy bet on an influencer, however famous, but

ultimately a celebrity. What did you see in Jake that made you really give up half of your company to him? Well, first and foremost, I'm a big believer in when you build a business with somebody, not to have this sort of wonky set of incentives where one individual who, if you're truly a co-founder, I think co-founders should have equal amounts of equity unless there's some level of extenuating circumstances where that doesn't make sense. So that's kind of how I wanted to approach this from day one, where if I was going to have a co-founder in this business, because as you know, David, and I don't know if the broader better story is out there, but I started my prior business, SimpleBet, to be a direct-to-consumer company and ultimately

do what we're effectively doing it better. And I was on a mission to spin out direct to consumer from simple bet and go after better. And initially I was gonna do it myself, right? So, but when I met Jake and spent a lot of time with him, and I think you touched upon this a couple of minutes ago, it's not just the 70 million followers across social media, which obviously brings a pretty tremendous unfair advantage from a customer acquisition standpoint. But it's really the marketing genius that I don't think a lot of people candidly have

in this country or globally. And Jake has the track record to really speak to that and just the level of focus and discipline. And I would say one of the things that Jake and I really have in common is the level of ambition we have. Anything less than a $10 billion publicly traded outcome for basically be considered a failure, I think, from our perspective. So I think we just got along really well and have similar goals and objectives and have a very complimentary skill set where, I basically spent my entire adult life, the last 10 years of my life going after the same consumer experience problem in sports gaming. And Jake's been spending the last decade of his life

focused on being arguably the most disruptive marketer on the internet. Sports gaming and sports media are increasingly converging. I think we just have really complimentary skill sets to go after an incredibly ambitious problem and company together and really just an alignment of values that enables us to work well together. Speaking of alignment, one of your investors told me, I'm not going to share who it was, but that originally Jake offered to be 60-40, 60 you Joey, 40 him, and you said no, 50-50.

Again, this is skin the game, this is alignment. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, like I said, I mean, I think it's better to be 50-50 partners. You know, I want, I think it's just for Jake to have the same level of incentive that I do is critical to the success of the company. And I'd much rather own 50% of a 10 or $100 billion company than 60% of something that's

worth $100 million. And I just don't think that you can do this to the level required, particularly with somebody like Jake that has a tremendous level of opportunity cost. There's a whole lot of other things that Jake could be doing than if we weren't both equally tied as being the largest shareholders of this business. Jake, tell me a little bit about that. I see when I went to the Find Dallas and and everything, you're ducked down better. I know you guys also may have tattoos, which we'll go into later, but you're so committed to the business and you're so aligned with it. How has that relationship

been with Joey and how's your relationship been in founding the company together? It's been phenomenal. And like Joey said earlier, sharing that same level of ambition, it's either a thousand miles per hour or not at all. And I'm the first half of that sentiment where it's like, if I'm going to do anything, I'm going to go at it 1000% and give it my best effort every single day, day in and day out and do everything I possibly can to ensure this company's success on a minute to minute, second to second basis. And that's the attitude Joey has, and that's the attitude of the team that we've built has.

This is a do or die. And, you know, at the end of the day, also this, a lot of this company's success, like my reputation is on the line here, right? And I think Joey shares that as well. And so we will make this company a $10 billion company. And I stand on that and it goes down to the finest details of yeah like getting it tattooed or you know it being on every... Also I think you tattooed it from two different sides for the camera angles. Is that right? Yeah so it's on like the inner knee and on the outer knee so that like anytime people take a photo of me while I'm fighting the logo.

A couple of things on that. One is Jake. It's not like you're saying I want to be a billionaire in some vacuum. You're giving up millions and millions of sponsorship of space on the ring of space on yourself on space on your body in order to commit and invest your equity essentially in that company. So I think that's something that's undervalued. The other aspect of that is you guys have not only do you both have tattoos, which I've never heard. I was an early investor in Palantir and they had this cult-like product and cult-like company, but they never had tattoos.

So you guys are beating them on that. But you also convinced employees to tattoo yourself. Tell me about that. I don't even know if we had any. I don't think we convinced. Exactly. Everyone's just down because that's the culture, I guess, that's created. This is people's lives within the company.

It's my life. It's Joey's life. I think one of the only ways to really have a breakthrough dominant company in this space, which is very difficult, very intense. There's big players involved, there's licensing regulations. We have to eat, breathe and sleep this. And I think since the first on early hires, that was just the culture.

And now it's permeated throughout the rest of the company and this is everyone's lives. So let's actually go into the company itself. So better. So from a first principles basis, maybe Joey, tell me about what, what, what, do we really need another sports gaming company? There's a lot of sports gaming companies out there. Why do you guys exist?

Yeah. So I would say this is predominantly around the incremental TAM. That's not, that's being underserved in, in sports gaming. that's being underserved in sports gaming. So for example, FanDuel and DraftKings are worth about 20 and $15 billion respectively. Yet they combined, they only have about 5 million monthly active users, which is a lot for real money gaming. But if you take a step back for a moment,

you'll realize that they're currently in front of 100 million gambling age sports fans. And they'll be in front of nearly double that 200 million as more jurisdictions open up. And I think we can all agree that Vandal and Draft King's don't have a brand awareness problem. They quite literally advertise like car insurance companies, except they're probably not as funny as they are. So they have brand awareness, but there's about a 95% incremental TAM opportunity. And we think it's due to product. I mean, everything we do is better. Really, the primary emphasis of the company is to design sports gaming experiences that are simple and intuitive enough for people to interact with them, even if they've never played fantasy sports before or bet on sports

before. And I think we've accomplished that particularly with the Better Picks product experience, which we rolled out just two months ago on September 5th, ahead of the beginning of the NFL season. And it's immediately become one of the fastest growing products, not just in the industry today, but I think in the history of the US sports gaming industry. And we're excited to roll out, be one of our sports book next year, and really have a sports book business,

a fantasy business that is already very successful and then ultimately expand into other verticals. But really, this is about that incremental tam of the casual sports fan who doesn't know what a minus 175 money line means, doesn't know what a plus five and a half point spread means, doesn't know what a 49.5 O slash U means, doesn't want to interact with a sports book that is essentially an uninterpretable spreadsheet like a movie. As you know, David, I got involved in this category about seven years, really 10 years ago with DraftBot, my daily fantasy business, but in the sports betting category, specifically

about seven years ago when I started a project that ultimately became Simple Bet, because I was a Ivy League educated, daily fantasy sports operator that when the first time I tried to use a sports book, I literally did not know how to use it. It wasn't intuitive to me that minus 175 meant to bet 175 to win 100. And it also struck me that it quite literally looked like a spreadsheet when I thought sports gaming was all about enhancing the consumption of sports and being fun and engaging and entertaining, you know, be analogous to sort of another industry. We view the current products as kind of being the E-Trade, Fidelity,

Charles Schwab's, what those companies were today trading. Nobody's really built the Robinhood of gambling from a UI UX perspective. And that's ultimately why we started, why we started better and why we think there's a pretty substantial market opportunity for this business. And Tam total addressable market, essentially how big the market is. A lot of people passed on Uber originally, because they said the taxi market isn't big enough. And of course, now Uber is bigger than the entire taxi market. I think all power law outcomes, all outcomes that return 100X or the 10 billion, 100 billion dollar companies that you guys aspire to fundamentally have to expand the TAM, expand the market or else they would already

be highly competitive. One of the main reasons that I invested in Better was because of your customer acquisition strategy and how you're able to leverage media in order to drive down your cost. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I think this was one of your customer acquisition strategy and how you're able to leverage media in order to drive down your costs. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I think this was one of the biggest problems we saw in the industry was where are DraftKings and Fandual and maybe some of these other companies, what's their biggest expense and it's marketing? Billions of dollars out the door. So if we can come in and completely flip that, lower that expense tenfold and have better brand awareness with original content, then we're going to be eons ahead of everyone else. And that's where the two divisions of better media and then the sports gaming side come

into play where we've now created this whole content network and ecosystem and talent and original content 24-7 that has grown the brand massively to be bigger and more recognizable and more well known than some of these other companies who have been spending billions and billions of dollars on the marketing. And what that these other companies who have been spending billions and billions of dollars on the marketing and what that allows us to do is have brand affinity, more loyalty to our customers, people may feel more comfortable with our brand and trusting the product. And it lowers our customer acquisition costs significantly. And we've seen that to date be super, super effective. And quite frankly, it's one of our biggest X

factors. Are we talking about 20 30%? What goes on with your CAC? It's an order of magnitude more efficient than the other that meant sort of the average blended CPA that that we've heard the other operators are currently experiencing. And, you know, I think one of the things that you know a lot of respect for Barstool Sports and the endeavor to go after the Barstool Sportsbook. But one of the differences in our approach, I would say, when we decided to launch our

sports gaming business and Penn decided to pursue the Barstool Sportsbook brand is that it's not just about the organic audience to product conversion, but arguably the predominant value of media is that halo effect that it creates around your brand, as Jake alluded to, not just brand awareness, but brand affinity. Right. So when you do paid user acquisition, you have best- class efficiency. When consumers are scrolling on TikTok and there's a better advertisement there, it almost feels like organic content because they're already familiar with the brand, they're familiar with Jake, maybe they're familiar with Derek or one of our other content creators, and they'll stop. They'll ultimately convert with best in class efficiency. So we've been able to strike a really nice balance, I think, between not just the organic

audience or product conversion, but leveraging the brand affinity we've developed predominantly through original short form video to enable best in class efficiency on the paid UA side, which is really scalable, right? Because that's just money, right? If you have a good unit economics formula where you're competent that for every dollar in marketing investment you spend, you're going to get $8 in return for that, which may or may not be what we're currently experiencing, then it's just math at that point. And when payback periods are as tight as we're seeing them

at better, you actually have an interesting dynamic where you can gradually pull forward marketing investment, maintain CAC efficiency, and actually accelerate your path to profitability while also growing the business because the unit economics are so attractive. Is better a media company with a betting arm or a betting company with a media arm? It feels to me like it's more of a media company. I would challenge that a little bit at least. We're first and foremost a gaming business and if you look at how we monetize the company, that really reflects that.

We are monetizing better media independent of better gaming. And, you know, we do work with some great brand partners on that side of the house, but everything we do first and foremost is to develop brand awareness and brand affinity to enable us to have best in class efficiency on customer acquisition for our suite of better gaming products. And the vast, vast, vast level of energy and resource allocation and focus is geared towards monetization via better gaming.

And we're really starting to see that in a significant way with the BetterPix product in particular. It sounds like startup CEOs speak for not wanting to give away your secret sauce. But well, we'll leave it at that. Let's talk numbers. So you guys are doing exceptionally well. This is Q4 2023. Tell me a little bit about your numbers. You might get a little bit more startup CEO speak just in the interest of not speaking out of turn and disclosing anything. We're under a friendly until this launches.

So, yeah, I will launch to a lot of people. I'll give you some, I'll give you some ballpark, right? So we launched Better Initially as a media brand in August of 2022. We then launched our sports book business in early 2023, predominantly with a beta product, micro-vetting focused app to just start laying the foundations of our online sports book business, establish our leadership position, responsible gaming. For example, we're still the only operator to ban credit cards as a depositing method

and restrict the amount young consumers can Deposit on a monthly basis young being 21 to 25 years old because we truly believe that sports gaming is for entertainment value and people should Technically not be able to gamble with money that they don't have only after laying the foundations of our OSB business and establishing our RG leadership position that we want to get into the fantasy sports vertical, which we launched on September 5th. So we launched, we hard launched Better Pick on September 5th, two days before the NFL season.

And sitting here, we're filming this on November 11th. So just about two months after the launch. And, you know, this is a high eight figure revenue run rate business already, possibly may end the year at beyond 100 million revenue run rate. The company likely does not need any incremental capital on top of our existing balance sheet to get to profitability. Of course, we are exploring ways we can be opportunistic with prospective investments in paid user

acquisition, particularly given we've been able to maintain efficiency despite increasing spend modestly week over week. And we're just about to crack the six-figure mark for active paying users despite launching this just about two months ago. So no specific numbers there, but you have some ballparks that you could work against. I appreciate that. I'm starting to visualize a G5 jet for myself. So I appreciate that.

And speaking of jets, you guys want to be a $10 billion company. I look at your competitors, $15, $20 billion company. I see you guys as significantly better from a marketing standpoint. Is there a path to being a $100 billion company here? Yes. It goes back to that, to the long envelope math that you just alluded to. I mean, I think the fact that Fandl and DraftKings are so valuable, yet only have about 5% market penetration really speaks to the opportunity here. I mean, this could candidly be bigger than $100 billion business.

I described this at the top as kind of the Robin Hood of gambling from a UIUX perspective. And obviously Robin Hood has done a great job from a financial perspective and has resulted in a lot of returns for its earliest investors. But the Robin Hood of gambling will be significantly larger than Robinhood because Robinhood is dealing with a finite amount of public equities that consumers are interested in buying and selling. But there's ultimately an infinite amount of moments of sporting events to enable consumers to bet on, to enable consumers to make player,

you know, statistical predictions on a product like BetterPix. There's other verticals within gaming that we can pursue as well without really requiring a lot of incremental OPEX or CAPEX given we've made the foundational investments in product, technology, operations, regulatory, and government affairs, and then of course, marketing, media, and brand.

So we've made these foundational investments over the past couple of years, and we can keep bolting on new verticals and new products like BetterPix without really meeting a significant amount of incremental capital or time. We should see some pretty interesting economies of scale with this business as we continue to keep our heads down, stay focused, execute against our product roadmap, and rapidly grow our revenue and customer base. What drives you, Joey? We met a couple of years ago.

I pretty much decided to invest after our first dinner. You explained the gaming industry more clearly than I had been hearing from people for five years. But on a fundamental level, it seems evident what drives Jake. But what drives you, Joey? So I dropped out of Columbia University a little bit less than 10 years ago to pursue my first sports gaming startup.

And at the time it was Daily Fantasy, which was the only form of legal sports gaming in the United States with essentially the same vision that we have now, which is that, you know, at the time, FanDuel and DraftKings were also the market leader, but in DFS. And I just felt like their product experiences were fundamentally built for the power user that was using models and was researching for three hours a day and was a high volume user. So I've always felt like sports gaming in this country has been built for the power, high volume user, but there's tens to hundreds of millions of casual sports fans that have not been delivered product experiences that are

simple, intuitive, and entertaining for them. So I went down this rabbit hole about a decade ago when I dropped out of school to pursue my first business. And I've been down that rabbit hole since. And I've had some success along the way and quite the level of financial success that Jake's had. But I've had some a little bit myself and Simple Bet is a valuable business, which was my company before this. And the motivation is

less financial now and more just about winning the category. I mean, my entire adult life has been spent in this category, being told for the better part of the decade that I was wrong about my product vision, ultimately to more recently be proven right in a pretty big way across a couple of different businesses now. And really the motivation is to win the category now. And neither of us are going to stop until that ultimately happens. Yeah, I think it's very common for a first-time entrepreneur to focus on money, second-time entrepreneur on building something really big. Well, I think it's evident where all three of us

are sitting in our office on Saturday. I know Jake, you came from training. Joey's in his HQ. I'm in my office at One World in New York. So I think we're three of a kind. It's been an absolute honor and pleasure to talk to you guys. Jake, I know you're training 16 hours a day. I really appreciate you jumping out of training to jump on a call. And of course, Joey, you're the best. I'm looking forward. I'm inviting myself to the December 15th fight. So I'm looking forward to seeing both of you guys there. Thanks for having us. We'll get the tickets set up and I'll see you in Orlando. We got your tickets, man. All right. Thanks, David. Take care. Thank you for listening.

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