SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, I've got an awesome interview for you today. Mojo CEO and co founder Vinny Bharara is on the program. Mojo.com is a stock market to bet on athletes, it just launched this week, they've already raised $100 million. And we're going to get into all the nitty gritty of building a stock market from scratch and how they're handling liquidity. And it's a killer product demo. This is going to be the future of wagering gambling and investing all of this is coming together and with your passions for sports here in America, thanks to some Supreme Court legislation that passed. And it's a really great, fascinating interview, you're going to see the future today. It's going to be a great episode. So stick with us. This week in startups is brought

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SPEAKER_04: really excited for our next guest today here on this week in startups. As many of you know,

SPEAKER_08: I'm a huge fan of Preet Bharara. Did I get it right, Vineet? Bharara. You got it right. Bharara. I got it. Vineet is Preet's brother. Now, are you the older

SPEAKER_12: brother or the younger brother? I hope you can tell that I'm the younger brother. Who knows? Who knows at this age? We're old. Look at me.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you do look a little younger. So, um, Preet's company was called Cafe and had the incredible domain name cafe.com. I loved his pockets. I love iconic plastic thinkers, people who maybe have, you know, form their own opinions from first principles. People always ask me, hey, what are your favorite pods? And on the top of that list, top five is Preet's pockets, which you produced and you started the company. Uh, there's Stay Tuned with Preet, which is a free version. Then there was Cafe Insider, the paid version. Um, and your brother was, he ran the Southern District of New

SPEAKER_17: York's, uh, for the Justice Department. It was a pretty big deal.

SPEAKER_19: Yep. He was the U.S. attorney here in the Southern District of New York.

SPEAKER_20: Pretty big deal. Famously sort of fired by Trump, maybe.

SPEAKER_21: Not sort of. No, not sort of. Yeah.

SPEAKER_20: Fired. Fired by Trump.

SPEAKER_21: Banned by Putin, he likes to say.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I always loved the pod. You were the producer. I actually, you don't know this, but I was always talking to your brother. Hey, I love the

SPEAKER_23: pot. Are you ever thinking about taking investment? Let me know. I'd love to put a million dollars into this thing. I think it's going to be successful. And sure enough, last year, uh, in

SPEAKER_17: the spring, you sold to my friend, Jim Banker, who coincidentally bought Weblogs Inc. from me, um, and, uh, Cafe got bought. So congratulations on that. Maybe before we get into your new company, uh, we could talk a little bit about that experience of starting a podcast company and selling it. What was the origin story of, uh, stay tuned with Preet and cafe.com?

SPEAKER_25: Yeah. Well, even when Preet was still, you know, uh, the U S attorney of the Southern

SPEAKER_27: District of New York, after I had sold, um, with Mark Laurie diapers.com to Amazon, we waited there for a couple of years and worked, um, at Amazon. And then when we left, uh, you know, I wanted to start a media company and I would always talk to Preet about, you know, whether he would ultimately at some point join, cause I knew he would be great. Like, it's not surprising having grown up with him that he would be a, a tremendous media, media personality. And so we would always, you know, get together and talk about what it would look like, what it could, you know, how he could join, what, once he left the office. And then, like you said earlier, he got fired. So it was premature. And right away, uh, we, we started brainstorming again and we decided, you know, let's start with a podcast. Initially we're thinking, oh, maybe we'll do video or we'll figure out, you know, what kind of media company we would do. And he started decided he wanted to start with a podcast and we pitched it to a bunch of different folks and we created stay tuned with Preet in 2017.

SPEAKER_23: But you decided to go independent at that time. I guess podcasting was kind of just starting to get the networks going. Why did you choose to go independent? I mean, you're

SPEAKER_34: an entrepreneur, so I kind of understand and he's kind of an independent thinker, but did you get offers and they just kind of sucked from the other podcast networks or they didn't bring

SPEAKER_36: a lot of value and you just thought, let's just go acoustic here?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, no, we wanted to create our own. So we already had our own company. And like you said,

SPEAKER_25: we're entrepreneurs, we wanted to have all the ownership with our investors. And so we did produce it with a company called Pineapple Media. I don't know if you know. Oh yes, I have heard of them. Yeah, terrific, terrific producers. So they helped us do it, but they weren't owners, you

SPEAKER_27: know, in cafe. So that was a, uh, standalone entity. In fact, just the details of it is I had had a pre existing media company called some spider. At some point, once we created cafe studios, I spun that out as it's a separate entity. And that's when pre, you know, became a significant

SPEAKER_40: owner of that company, cafe studios.

SPEAKER_23: Now, uh, cafe.com is a hell of a domain name. That's a million dollar domain. Anything in the

SPEAKER_17: English language, um, that's, you know, six, seven words or letters or less. And it's in the dictionary, it's going to go for six figures, possibly even seven. How did you get cafe.com? And how much

SPEAKER_44: you pay for that?

SPEAKER_27: Yep. So if you, uh, for a longest time, my, my co-founder at my last company, my best friend, Mark Laurie, who, uh, who I grew up with in New Jersey, all the companies we've started like to have

SPEAKER_19: very good, easy to remember short domain names. That's been a founding principle in some ways for us creating a brand.

SPEAKER_48: Why? Why?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, I think it's important because I think, look, it's so hard to break through. And one of the things, in my opinion, you want to do is you want to have people be able to talk about your company. And when they talk about it, the person hearing it knows what it is and doesn't have to ask any questions. Like, how do you spell that? Or what was that again? And because then they tell other people and they tell other people. And so you definitely want a name that's easy to remember and easy to spell. In my opinion, to the extent you can, obviously it costs capital, like you said, that's just been something we've tried to do with all of our companies.

SPEAKER_52: What did cafe.com cost? What did that go for?

SPEAKER_53: Yeah, so cost 240 grand. Great deal. Not bad. Right?

SPEAKER_54: I would have paid 500 without an idea.

SPEAKER_55: Not bad. I would just pay 500. I have inside.com. I had 20.com. I've had annotated.com. I've had a lot of good domain names in my day. How much did inside cost?

SPEAKER_34: I got that for 60k, seven, eight years ago. From the Guardian. That's very good.

SPEAKER_62: I would have paid a million for that. That's a million dollar domain name. They didn't know that, did they?

SPEAKER_34: Probably. What happened was they had bought a company. There was a media company in New York in the 90s called Inside. That was a magazine. And then a friend of mine, Rafat Ali, another Indian entrepreneur, he had worked for me at Silicon Island Reporter, worked at Inside. He wound up buying it when that company went default from a guy named Steve Brill, who had owned content.com, if you remember that. Of course. And then Guardian bought paid content, the newsletter that Rafat had started. And then I tried for

SPEAKER_17: multiple years to buy from Guardian. Then at some point, they wanted to sell assets and I was able to get it from the Meta.

SPEAKER_66: Great deal. I had a great deal. They didn't know. They didn't know you'd pay a million.

SPEAKER_27: That's what you got to do with these domains.

SPEAKER_17: At that time, I would have paid 250. But you got diapers.com, that's a million dollar domain.

SPEAKER_71: Yeah, diapers we got, I think, for 600 grand.

SPEAKER_17: God, I love it.

SPEAKER_73: I got Yeah, I just love buying great domain names.

SPEAKER_06: Um, yeah, so we think that's great about it is it do and I'm curious if you agree, it will make the stature of the company in the eyes of a consumer go way up in an age where people are, you know, a little cynical of new products and services, maybe they're a little cautious of online brands. You come out with diapers.com. It's like, well, they've got to be good at selling

SPEAKER_23: diapers and kids stuff or they wouldn't have the domain. You got cafe.com. It's got to be legit. It legitimizes and reduces cynicism.

SPEAKER_38: Exactly right. That's, you know, to be funny about this or honest, we actually started out with

SPEAKER_25: 1-800 diapers when we first started. Uh-huh. So we, and we didn't, we didn't, in the very beginning, we didn't have diapers.com. Once we

SPEAKER_19: got some traction is when we went out and, and bought, uh, the actual diapers.com domain name.

SPEAKER_83: Amazing. I mean, can you imagine if they had taken a little bit of, uh, equity? Oof. Yeah. No.

SPEAKER_85: I had the founder of, of calm, the meditation app on my podcast in 2014. Wow. And I said, how'd you get calm.com? And they had gotten it for under a hundred K. Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: And I was like, can I invest in your company? Because, and I, then I told them privately, I was like, the fact that you got calm.com and you figured out how to get it, to me, makes you investable.

SPEAKER_87: Yeah. Like period, full stop.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. A lot of people don't believe in like what you, what you and I seem to agree on that these domain names are worth it because some folks will say, oh, you know, the.com is irrelevant.

SPEAKER_21: The.com is going away. People are, it's less, it's less important than it used to be. But to your point, just that not only the memorability and the word of mouth factor, but like you said, that the legitimacy when you're trying to break through and create that credibility at the outset is important. So it depends on the owner. There's no market in some ways, right? It just depends on, it's, it's like kind of a scarcity thing. It's whatever you and the seller agree on.

SPEAKER_94: Yeah. It's pretty interesting. I do like some subdomains. I got

SPEAKER_17: founder.university and angel.university. I teach two courses, one for founders, one for angel

SPEAKER_06: investors. And I just love the .university. You got any other subdomains that you like of the new ones? A lot of kids love the .co, the .io.

SPEAKER_97: Yeah. You have one you like? Yeah. No.

SPEAKER_68: I still like it. You're .com. You're old school. I'm old school. I'm 51. I'm old school. Oh, you and I are the same age. How old? Wait, so your brother Preet's what? 54, 55?

SPEAKER_71: He's 53. He turns 54 in October. Yeah. I just turned 51 about three days ago.

SPEAKER_30: That's so amazing. My brother Jamie is like two years, a year and a half older than me.

SPEAKER_94: And we're right behind him. And we're also, we grew up in Brooklyn. You guys grew up in Jersey, am I right?

SPEAKER_21: New Jersey. That's right. Near the Jersey Shore by Asbury Park.

SPEAKER_94: Exactly. And now you guys grew up, or at least your brother, with a huge love of the boss, Mr. Bruce Springsteen, correct?

SPEAKER_38: Yes. Def. I like the boss. Preet is obsessed. He's obsessed.

SPEAKER_27: He's obsessed. He is obsessed. I don't know how many concerts he's been to. I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert with Preet in Connecticut. And during the concert, Springsteen actually called out Preet's name.

SPEAKER_106: I don't know. I heard it. He talks about this. Yes, I was there.

SPEAKER_94: I heard the clip. I was there. That's unbelievably next level. I was there.

SPEAKER_06: My mom, a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, at the age of 12, 13, 14, she would regularly take us to the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey, the Meadowlands. Yeah. And we saw Bruce, I think the first tour I saw was Born in the USA, which must have been 84 or 83?

SPEAKER_110: Yeah, 84.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And that was the arena tour, which eventually he then came around after doing the arena tour. That album was so big, he played the stadium. So he played Giant Stadium, the old Giant Stadium. And I saw him there too.

SPEAKER_111: So you're a big fan too, Bruce.

SPEAKER_94: I'm a huge fan. I, in my older years, I have become a Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits fan.

SPEAKER_06: So I was always Bob Dylan, Bruce, Dire Straits. Then it went like, and then I just had the collection of Dylan. I had seen Dylan so many times, I kind of needed a new obsession. And I kind of got into Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits, which I talked to your brother about just a week or two ago in LA. We were both in LA for a conference, code conference. And I started telling him like, you know, you got to look at this period from 78 to 88 of Mark Knopfler.

SPEAKER_17: Because Knopfler was producing Dylan at the time, Infidels, etc.

SPEAKER_24: Bruce was involved with Dylan on the margins, obviously a huge influence on him.

SPEAKER_34: And Knopfler got introduced to Dylan, to Springsteen. And he heard like, Across the River and some of these songs. And then you, if you listen to Telegraph Road, um, your latest trick, you start to hear Bruce's influence as a contemporary of Mark Knopfler's.

SPEAKER_115: He started writing long 10 minute songs, which they both obviously got from Dylan.

SPEAKER_21: Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_115: Yeah. I'm down the rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_21: You know who I saw in concert a couple of weeks ago? Duran Duran.

SPEAKER_118: Fantastic. I mean, underrated. Duran Duran? Underrated.

SPEAKER_17: You know, I haven't gone to the residency, but he was my favorite. In the early 80s. I started seeing all the Billy Joel concert. That led me to Bruce, Dylan, and Dire Straits. You know, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_121: There's an entry point for everybody. It could be Neil Young, could be Jackson Brown.

SPEAKER_122: Jackson Brown. Yeah, I love Jackson Brown, too.

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SPEAKER_41: Now, your brother, and then we'll get off your brother for a minute.

SPEAKER_127: Yeah, I do love the fact that you have this collaboration with your brother. Easy to manage? Because you had to run the business.

SPEAKER_25: Very easy.

SPEAKER_127: Hardworking?

SPEAKER_25: Very hardworking.

SPEAKER_21: We didn't get into one fight. Not one? I think not one fight. I'm trying to think how long we worked together. I think it was four years because we sold it last year and not one fight, not one argument.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, we didn't always agree on everything, but there was never a time when there was some sort of,

SPEAKER_89: you know, hang up the phone or close off the zoom, no blowout.

SPEAKER_31: I kind of feel like there should have been an argument about emergency pods. And I've talked to your brother out there.

SPEAKER_34: I feel your brother could work a little harder.

SPEAKER_89: Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: I feel Preet needs to do an emergency pod when things break. Yeah.

SPEAKER_89: Well, I managed him with kid gloves. I mean, you know, you can't, he was a talent and there was no way. He's talented. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: It was, you can't ever mess around with the talent. The talent is king. And so I knew better than to kind of ask him to do something he didn't want to do. I mean, you know, there was plenty of times when maybe some of the other team wanted,

SPEAKER_21: like you said, to do an emergency pod or something else.

SPEAKER_137: What was his objection to the emergency pod? No, he would do, you know, he's a busy guy.

SPEAKER_21: He wants to be prepared. Is that it? Let me tell you where we would really, where if we would have come to blow, it would have been on video.

SPEAKER_27: He never really wanted to do these pods like you do with video. And every once in a while we would do it. But that was the thing I could never really get him to do on a regular basis. He's handsome.

SPEAKER_140: He looks great in a suit. He's in great shape. He's fit.

SPEAKER_25: I know he is, he is, he is, but he just, you know, I know he didn't want to do it. It looks great. He didn't. Yeah, exactly. He didn't, he didn't want to do that. And so that was maybe the only thing. I know why. I have a theory.

SPEAKER_118: You tell me if I'm right. Yeah. He wants, he is a very crisp communicator.

SPEAKER_144: Yeah.

SPEAKER_118: You know, he's, he's not like Howard Stern, Joe Rogan.

SPEAKER_23: He's thoughtful. Yeah. I can tell he's got papers in front of him. He's well prepared. He might have the glasses on. He might ask for two takes. He doesn't want to be on camera trying to be like, you know, um, real time or, you know, politically incorrect or whatever.

SPEAKER_41: He doesn't want to be a performer like that.

SPEAKER_27: No, no. And he could wake up, you know, 10 minutes, of course, during the COVID time with 10, 10 minutes before go to his basement and get right to it.

SPEAKER_149: Yes.

SPEAKER_34: You don't need to take a shower. That is the other thing being camera.

SPEAKER_149: I mean, maybe he was taking it, but anyway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: Great success on that. Yes.

SPEAKER_151: Uh, do, do now, do they own the cafe.com domain name? They own it. Ah, God damn it. I would have carved that out.

SPEAKER_21: I, I hope I transferred it from GoDaddy, but I, they should.

SPEAKER_17: And you, I hope you got a lock on that one because that's it. You don't want to lose a four letter domain in today's era.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah. Which we have one again here.

SPEAKER_69: You do. And let's get to that. Yeah. So, uh, mojo.com, m-o-j-o.com is your new company.

SPEAKER_21: That's the website. It's an app, but we have again, the.com because we think it's important.

SPEAKER_69: So tell me, what is the new company? Why did you start?

SPEAKER_25: Yeah, well, it's a sports stock market. And very simply, when I say sports stock market, what I mean is the everyday fan

SPEAKER_27: can use his or her sports knowledge to invest in the careers of athletes like stocks. So we'll say sometimes it's where Robin Hood or Coinbase meets DraftKings. And instead of, you know, looking it up and investing in an Amazon or a Google, you're a sports fan. You know, you can invest in LeBron James or Joe Burrow or Patrick Mahomes, and we can get

SPEAKER_21: into exactly how it works, but it's, and we'll show you some of the sort of the, that the product and how beautiful I think that the product is that the team created, but in its

SPEAKER_19: simplistic form, it's a sports stock market.

SPEAKER_23: So I buy a share in, let's say I'm a big Knicks fan.

SPEAKER_118: I got RJ Barrett coming into his fourth season.

SPEAKER_23: Every year he gets 20% better. People don't look at him as an all-star. He's a little quiet. He's just kind of does the work, but he's got work. He's got to do on his, you know, you know, finishing around the rims. You know, he's, he's in development, but I think he's got really good upside. So I can buy a share in RJ Barrett.

SPEAKER_40: That's right.

SPEAKER_80: With actual real money.

SPEAKER_40: That's right.

SPEAKER_21: Exactly.

SPEAKER_80: How many shares when you do an IPO of RJ Barrett are there?

SPEAKER_21: So this is an interesting thing.

SPEAKER_27: There is no, the way we structured this market, there was no scarcity. There's no limit on the number of shares. The fundamental premise here is that when we, when we constructed this market, if you own a share in RJ Barrett, what we guarantee you is we guarantee you a payout based on the end of his career, six objective. Well, we haven't started basketball, but it'll be a certain defined number of statistics. And in that regard, it's not based on supply and demand in the traditional sense, scarcity. It's based on the statistic that you were trying to project.

SPEAKER_160: Yes. So you're doing this first with football players, correct? That's right.

SPEAKER_40: The NFL.

SPEAKER_23: So I'm buying a share of a football player, knowing that their career has an arc.

SPEAKER_162: And at the end of the career, when the person hangs it up, then you get your money back.

SPEAKER_21: Well, two things.

SPEAKER_27: The first thing we wanted to do, so again, we say sports stock market. The first thing I wanted to do was define the stock, like I just did. It's like, if you own stock, you're guaranteed to pay out at the end of their career based on these statistics, which to us was really important because it gives the stock intrinsic value. There's lots of things out there. In fact, we did a business 20 years ago that was a sports card stock market. And one of the flaws was that the customer really didn't know what the intrinsic value of this asset is that they're trading. Now, that's the first thing. But the second thing is the market piece, like the liquidity. And so even though the value is anchored in the career, people don't want to hold stock. Most people don't for such a long duration. They want to be able to trade in and out at all times. And so we also, Mojo has a price that you will always be able to get in and out of, which provides that liquidity. So, and that price is basically sort of what the market thinks, where the career will end. So if that, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_23: Got it. So how do you make money then? You take a little piece of every trade that occurs in the market?

SPEAKER_27: Exactly. Yes. Yes. So the, the primary source of revenue for us is, is as the platform, taking a small transaction fee on every, on every trade.

SPEAKER_23: Now, this is something where it is, uh, wagering. So where is this legal and what does this fall under? Is this a game of skill? Is it gambling and betting? Where does this fall? And I guess this is quite ironic. Uh, yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_168: What your brother has done in his career. But consistent.

SPEAKER_169: I don't know if he's your counsel, but.

SPEAKER_168: Yeah.

SPEAKER_169: Um, where does this fall on the regulatory spectrum? Because we did have a couple of years ago, the Supreme Court, uh, made a judgment.

SPEAKER_17: Hey, listen, it's up to the states to, uh, like many other issues these days. Yup. To make their own decision. A bunch of states have said, oh, wow, we can have sports betting. We have sports book.

SPEAKER_55: We can have wagering, have poker, whatever it is. So the regulatory framework has been cleared up. I think by that.

SPEAKER_25: Yup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a huge thing. So remember I talked about the intrinsic value. I talked about the liquidity. The third pillar is making sure that it's legal.

SPEAKER_27: And to your point, um, very, very important for me, you know, being Preet Bharara's brother. And so when we did this company, yeah, no, when we did this thing 20 years ago, um, with a sports card stock market, we had the same idea. And like you said, online wagering was not legal anywhere. And so our lawyers said, look, if you do this and it's super successful, the way you want to do it, you could be in trouble. And so we, so we created the sports card stock market. We use the trading card as a proxy for the athlete. And then he fast forward 20 years later to about two years ago. And my co-founder and best friend, Mark Laurie, you know, who I started the pit with and I started diapers.com. I grew up with him in New Jersey as well. He comes to me and he says, this idea that we had 20 years ago, I think it's the biggest idea we've ever had. I think we can do it right now. We don't have to do it with trading cards because the regulatory framework has changed and we can do it, um, under the online wagering laws state by state. So that's kind of what happened. Now it's kind of interesting because what the, you know, the, the mechanism here, the, the shares and how it works on our platform, you could argue that maybe we should go to the CFTC to get this regulated, like as a futures contract. And that would have been preferable in some ways because it would have been a federal kind of like Kalshi. If you know, these guys, um, we could have gone that route, but the CFTC says they will not oversee or regulate sports. So they punt that now to the states. And like you said, a couple of years ago, the Supreme court basically said the states could decide if they wanted to make online wagering legal. So that's the path we decided to take. It does mean we got to go state by state, which is hard. And so we decided to go, is it not?

SPEAKER_184: Like if the fact that it takes, it's going to take you two or three years, probably to get to all 50 states or whatever. How many are they? I think it's 35 or 40.

SPEAKER_27: I think it's around 30. Yup. And they're coming fast and furious every, you know, every six months, you got another state coming on. So I agree with you, but it means that you had to raise, you know, a lot of capital, which we did takes a long time and we got to go state by state. And so we decided to petition the New Jersey division of gaming first. They're the most innovative in our view. This product is not so, it's not so obvious what it is necessarily when you come in and it doesn't, it's not, it's not similar sounding right to a conventional bet. This is a long duration. And we're talking about making a market in this thing. So we convinced the New Jersey division of gaming to regulate it under the sports wagering laws. And that's what we debuted today in the app store while it's available to download in all 50 states, but today is the first day at scale. Anybody 21 and over in New Jersey can open an account, deposit, and trade.

SPEAKER_169: Amazing. So you're just getting started. Yeah. Based on my experience, guys in Brooklyn and Jersey, they might like to, you know,

SPEAKER_191: make a bat once in a while. I mean, just, you know.

SPEAKER_58: Yeah, exactly. Well, they can come on over. They can come on over, come on over to Jersey. It's very quick and easy.

SPEAKER_192: Right now. It's so important for founders to save where they can.

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SPEAKER_17: So you raised a war chest, $100 million, $75 million from Thrive Capital.

SPEAKER_21: Thrive was the lead in the Series 8, Tiger, a bunch of other really great investors also.

SPEAKER_169: Amazing. When you raised that last, you raised that in March, right after the market collapsed? We did, we closed it. You must have been in discussions for a couple of months before that.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. I mean, it was, listen, we basically went out to the market in the winter of last year

SPEAKER_27: and it was a very fast exercise. Prior to the market collapsing in some ways, we closed it all up. Or at least that first tranche of $75 million in March. Thank God. And then more recently, we took in another $25 million of capital.

SPEAKER_04: A little top off, same terms as the last round, I assume, you go flat.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, exactly. Market, like you said, you know, had some issues over the summer earlier and we decided to

SPEAKER_155: smarter raise some more capital. So we feel really good about that.

SPEAKER_17: Flat is the new up as we say in the business. A flat round is the new up. Yeah. I got a lot of companies. They're like wishing they could do raise capital at what they raised last year. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_23: Now, listen, I happen to know a lot of the, uh, I'm collecting, I can connect a lot of dots here because I do this for a living. Now I'm looking at Thrive Capital.

SPEAKER_169: Uh huh.

SPEAKER_205: Correct me if I'm wrong. Is this run by one of the Kushners? Thrive Capital?

SPEAKER_27: Josh, Josh and a few other folks. He's, I like, I love Josh. Josh is great. You love Josh. Josh.

SPEAKER_118: Now you love Josh. Uh huh. And Josh's brother is Jared Kushner. And your brother's Preet. I didn't realize that. Yeah. Your brother's Preet.

SPEAKER_209: Yeah.

SPEAKER_169: Josh is not Jared. You're not Preet. But Preet and Jared got beef. Oh, I don't know about that. Preet's been somewhat critical of Jared Kushner and Mr. Trump.

SPEAKER_211: No comment. Does that ever come up in business?

SPEAKER_21: No, it never comes up. It really doesn't. It has never come up once. No, not once.

SPEAKER_213: It's just a business transaction because Josh just got Bob Iger to work for him.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Josh is great. Josh is really, I mean, Thrive is one of the premier. Well, there's, there's really no story, but other than Thrive is one of the best VC and you know, that's right. One of the best VC. They've done a good job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. Great. Great. Josh is great. And he's got a lot of other great partners. Bob, like you said, Bob Iger just joined.

SPEAKER_19: So it's really a preeminent venture capital firm in the country. And, and so, you know, we're, we're thrilled to have them as our lead.

SPEAKER_25: They're good at the, they're good at the series B and C, it seems the Thrive team, but

SPEAKER_169: they are diametrically opposed, I think, to the brothers. So these are two brothers who have completely different political leanings, it seems.

SPEAKER_200: Oh, I don't, again, I don't, we don't, it never comes up. It never comes up at a board meeting. It has never come up, never come up.

SPEAKER_21: Is Josh on your board? No, they're not on the board. They put 75 million and they didn't take a board seat? They're not on the board.

SPEAKER_19: They're not on the board, but, but we're, you know, we're close with those guys. We chat with them all the time.

SPEAKER_21: And again, there's another guy Vince that we, that we love. So Josh, Vince that we chat all the time, but they're not on the board.

SPEAKER_169: Wow. Um, well, I, you know, not awkward for you, but I think at the Kushner household, it could be an awkward Thanksgiving. Who knows? Um, so let's do a product demo here. I'm fascinated by this. And, uh, before we get to right to the product demo, I just want to ask you there, people have tried similar things to this. You must have studied them. The one I remember from when I was a journalist in the nineties was, there was a crazy guy, like a really mercurial guy. Who's now a Bitcoin maximalist.

SPEAKER_34: I forgot his name. I think his name is actually max. I can't remember, but he did a company called Hollywood stock exchange. I'm sure you're aware of that.

SPEAKER_226: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_169: So when you looked at Hollywood stock exchange, they were trying to let people buy and trade, you know, Hollywood careers,

SPEAKER_23: you can buy Tom cruise, you can go short somebody else, but that was done with funny money at the time. Exactly. So what I don't, and that's still operating.

SPEAKER_34: I think what, when you looked and you investigated this stuff, and there was also in trade, which was a futures predictions market. I was obsessed with that one. You could, you could do any kind of a bet there, like bet on, you know, who was going to win the bachelor or something like that. I think these things are very popular in Europe, right? Yeah. So maybe you could set the table of what has failed or had modest success

SPEAKER_118: before and what you learned from studying those.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_27: And like I said, you know, we did one of these, we did a sports card market Right. In 2000, and we sold that to tops. And so that was one of the anchors because we understood how this could work. We had to use this trading card as the proxy. The problem with that, as I mentioned, was that the intrinsic value was, was questionable. Like it's unclear what you own. And so the promise we always want to make to the user is if you know sports and you are right, and you predict correctly, you will make money. When the value of the asset is a little unclear, like what it is, you could know and predict that, you know, Joe Burrow was going to be great last year and buy his card. But the market, because of how that operates and scarcity and other issues, you know, the price could go down and vice versa. So one corollary is the sort of collectible NFT space. That's one. The second one, like you said, is the fantasy space. And there's been these versions, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, there's been a few others. And that's great too. But it's like, it's funny money.

SPEAKER_38: Like you said, it's not, it's either a competition, it's not real money. Maybe there's prizes.

SPEAKER_55: Why is that important that it's not real money?

SPEAKER_23: Because that seems to be without the skin in the game, people make suboptimal decisions. Like when people are, Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, I think it's fun and it's a game and that's great. But when we wanted to create an authentic stock market, where you could deposit, like right now you can deposit $25,000. Ultimately, you should be able to deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a real position in a player. Put in, you know, if you have the capital, 50 grand on a player, $100,000 on a player, and just that player, like you're not competing against somebody else. We wanted to make it as close to the actual stock market as possible. And so these other versions, either again, it's a collectible or an NFT. We know about the issues there, or it's fantasy.

SPEAKER_21: It's not real money. It's a contest. And I think that's great. But it's definitely not the same as, you know, a real stock market where you could put in a few thousand dollars on a player

SPEAKER_27: and have it operate just like it would be an investment you're making in Google.

SPEAKER_23: You think GMs are going to look at this? Because like, if you're a GM, you know there's smart people out there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: A lot of smart people. People start making bets on things because this gets to Moneyball, which I'm sure you're a huge fan of the book, the movie, the concept. Um, I think, you know, when you look at wisdom of crowds, they're, you know, wisdom of crowds, you know, I, I have my doubts. Usually it's, you know, a little bit of chaos, but once you put money on the line, now you've taken the wisdom of crowds down to just skin in the game. Now we're going from Michael Lewis to, uh, Nassim Taleb, you know, well, we got skin in the game. That's a different subset.

SPEAKER_34: That's 1% of the wisdom of crowd. Now you got the wisdom of people making bets.

SPEAKER_27: Uh, I a hundred percent agree. I think once, you know, at scale, when we have hundreds and millions of dollars, you know, being traded and wagered, and you'll be able to see the arc of it, you know, when they're coming in, when they're coming out, what's the most actively traded, what the positions are. I would think that that would be useful information to a GM or anyone else, you know, uh, that's trying to study, um, you know, who to give a contract to or who not to, I'm not saying it's the only data point, but it should be a pretty valuable data point. If you've got a lot of capital going into a player or coming out of a player. So I think that'll be really interesting. Can I short a player? Can I short a player today? You can short a player that was important to just again, for the integrity of this market is there's a, you know, there's an ability to go long and short. And I think that again, gives credibility to the price so that, you know, if you don't like it, you can take the other side.

SPEAKER_241: And you wouldn't want to take the other side. Let's basketball is my sport. So I'll just bounce over to basketball for a second.

SPEAKER_06: You know, you start looking at some of these players who are tall, but injury prone. Everybody gets amped up on Porzingis. Everybody gets amped up on, uh, you know, Anthony Davis, et cetera. And then they play 40 games a year at max. So how does that, cause you said the payout will come from their career. How does ability to stay on the court impact career? Cause you could have the averages, their averages could be off the charts or a unicorn, but if they're not on the court.

SPEAKER_25: Exactly. So remember the price on our market is always the latest projection expectation for where the

SPEAKER_27: career is going to end. Okay. So you look at it and, and if you think a player is, you know, injury prone, like you said,

SPEAKER_21: um, or whatever other reason, you just don't think he's going to have the amount of games. Like that's one of, one of the metrics, right?

SPEAKER_27: Of games played where, yeah, of course games played is going to be a big thing about where that ending price will be. Then the price. Then you should short that, right? Cause like that you should, you should basically take the under. And so the, the career is the great neutralizer, um, really or equalizer, I should say about performance because it's very hard to find someone that has, you know, long duration and isn't a great player.

SPEAKER_23: So you're doing cumulative. Yes. Not just averages. Cause you get sometimes people play 20 minutes, 30 minutes. You look at their like rebounds per game, blocks per game. And you're like, oh my God, they lead the league.

SPEAKER_83: And it's like, yeah, but they're not on the court. So what's the point?

SPEAKER_141: Exactly. I mean, like, let me, let me give you an example. Like in football, right? Like I'm an Eagles fan and Jalen Hurts has been this question.

SPEAKER_21: He's a great fantasy player. Like he's usually a top.

SPEAKER_246: You're from Jersey and you're an Eagles fan.

SPEAKER_21: That's a long story, but yes, I am. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_246: I thought you're supposed to be a Jets fan. I'm an Eagles fan.

SPEAKER_21: I'm a Yankees fan and Eagles fan. Long story. What are your Knicks or Nets? I like, but now I like the Timberwolves, right? But what were you originally when you grew up?

SPEAKER_249: You grew up Knicks?

SPEAKER_53: No, Knicks. Knicks, yeah. Of course. Yeah, I'm Knicks, Giants, Yankees. Oh, there you go. Okay. Well, listen, you got like, you're 2-0 now. 2-0, range. How about baseball?

SPEAKER_251: You like baseball?

SPEAKER_23: You know, I used to watch a lot of Yankees games,

SPEAKER_17: go to a lot of Yankees games in the 90s. I was very blessed to see like some of those incredible games. Cause I knew some people win ownership, yada, yada. Saw all the Michael Jordan games. My dad had season tickets to the Giants forever. But then, you know, life. I wanted to have a career.

SPEAKER_06: I got a family. I just said, you know what? That's it. I'm just going to focus on my Knicks and then my local team, Warriors. And I just gave up the other sports. Cause it's just too much to, it's too much.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Well, so you're a Warriors fan too, huh?

SPEAKER_06: Well, here's the thing. I live here. Some friends of mine own parts of the teams. I go to a lot of games and then I became friends, friends with Draymond.

SPEAKER_252: Yeah. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_06: David Lee, Bogut. And you know, I became good friends with those guys and play poker with them, hang out with them. And so it's just, it's hard to not be a fan of the Warriors. They're just, they play such an elegant form of basketball. And it's like, I feel like my life is blessed. I got to see Jordan versus Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, and all of those players in my twenties and thirties living in New York.

SPEAKER_253: And then I got to watch Steph, Draymond Clay during this era and everybody they played. And I got to do it, you know, in some of the best seats in the house.

SPEAKER_21: And he didn't miss anything. And he didn't miss anything with the Knicks.

SPEAKER_253: Well, yeah, that's for bringing that up. But yeah, I don't know, maybe, maybe your guy, Laurie can, uh, put it together a part of the syndicate. We can buy the Knicks, get them.

SPEAKER_255: That's a bit of a problem for us.

SPEAKER_253: Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_06: Listen, I think I get it. So now these GMs are going to start looking at this data. You're going to have some interesting data there. People are going to now hold on a second. Now I got to think about the gambling lines, the betting lines here, how this affects that. And then I wonder if, because it's going to affect betting lines and this data. And then I wonder if the GMs, if they had access to this information and they were making bets on this.

SPEAKER_260: What if a GM went in here and started placing bets on careers? They're going to be banned from doing that.

SPEAKER_27: No, I, I don't know if they can do that, to be honest. If, uh, I think because they have information. Yeah. Talk about a hedge.

SPEAKER_166: That's all restricted. Yeah. That's all restricted. As you can imagine.

SPEAKER_17: There's some, there's some, uh, what do you call it coming up? It's a documentary about Tim Donahy. I don't know if that's out yet or not. Oh, really? Yeah. Remember that guy who was.

SPEAKER_264: Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: He wouldn't. Allegedly, he didn't, um, bad off. He didn't affect the game in terms of like giving fouls to different teams. He just gave the mob.

SPEAKER_90: Who was going to ref the games ahead of time because they didn't release that data. So then they could place games. That. So you have to think through every permutation of this. Holy cow.

SPEAKER_25: We do. Yeah. We're that similar to, to, you know, remember we're regulated as a sports book.

SPEAKER_21: Sports books got to do that too. Yeah. And so we have to have the same processes and procedures in place.

SPEAKER_40: And so compliance for us is super important and we got to just do it like everybody else. Best in class.

SPEAKER_23: Well, if anybody named Annie Dange sets up an account on the system, you got to flag that. Okay.

SPEAKER_211: Danny Dange is the best, he's the best, most sharky GM in the business. Oh my God. Whatever bets he's placing on Mojo. Yeah.

SPEAKER_58: Mark it down. We'll, we'll have to be on the lookout for that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_273: You've got the email address because that guy is fleecing everybody this year. All right. Let's do a demo. Yes.

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SPEAKER_118: Take out the e for excellent. I'm super fascinated by what you're doing. Let's see the product here. What are we looking at? What am I seeing here?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. So right here, right? Hopefully this looks a little bit more like Robin and you see the athletes, right? This is, I'm just, this is the page where, yeah.

SPEAKER_25: So you search and like, as you can imagine, right? This is priced high to low.

SPEAKER_27: Right now we started with the NFL and predictably who's number one. It's Tom Brady, right? Tom Brady, cause this is about the career. Right. And, um, we can go into Tom Brady here for a second and you can take a look at it. I'm going to look at his, his, uh, this is like a graph showing his. Now we back tested some of this, obviously we weren't live. So this is a simulation of what his price would have looked like on, on Mojo. But this is the kind of thing, right? He would have debuted at around 327 as you see it. And now he's almost at 180. There's your 60 X.

SPEAKER_284: Does everybody debut at the same number?

SPEAKER_27: No. So everybody debuts always at what the expectation for how his career is going to end. So our view would have been, you know, what was he? I'm trying to think if he was a sixth round pick, I think, or was he a third round pick? Six round pick. And you know, at the time, right? Nobody, people thought his career, what? I mean, this guy is even going to make it in the league. So he's low.

SPEAKER_241: Those are your value stocks right there.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, exactly. So this is, this is the kind of guy you get your fourth, fifth, sixth round guys. They're going to be super low. You hit that right. And obviously this is an iconic, um, you know, iconic player, but you get this kind of, you can see where you can get the 60 X. And you can also sort of see, you know, sort of the ups and downs of, of this is over the last year of, of, of kind of, again, the price is changing based on what we think the end of his career is going to be. You got someone like Patrick Mahomes. Similarly, he right now, his price is 117.89. And again, that is a projection of where he's going to end his career. If you look at his last month, he's up 24%. You know, the prices are telling you what the expectation for the career is going to be. And you can see it moving as they play. You know, let's actually look at the top movers just because, you know, yesterday was kind of interesting and if you look at it, right, unfortunately, Trey Lance went down yesterday, you know, for the year and he's down, looks like almost 15%. And that's just because of course, and you can see it actually during the game problem. If we go to the 24 hours, you see how he dropped, you know, right there during the game, that steep decline. Yeah. So we actually, you can, you can, you can be trading during the game here. And it's, it's kind of like live odds on the career. You know, um, you look at, uh, the wide receivers here. So if you're a Jets fan, uh, you know, you could see, um, Jets fans. Well, you could see the incredible, the incredible move there by the Jets receiver there. Right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_292: Uh, the Jets are terrible. Garrett Wilson.

SPEAKER_294: I mean, are they the worst fan base in football? What's that? They're the worst fan base in football, right? The Jets? Oh, the Jets fans are horrible.

SPEAKER_89: Oh, my co-founder, Bart Stein is a Jets fan. So I don't know. That's the guy in the room right now. He's with you. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_34: Just tell him to put his shirt back on and do not write. Nobody needs to see a 40 year old man write the word Jets across their chest at the Christmas game and they all bring vodka in there like water bottles. The worst fans in the world. I, well, Pete would always have a giant jet games in preseason. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: And if the Giants were the home team, we just sell the tickets because all the jet fan come, jet fans come to the arena and they're just horrible.

SPEAKER_21: Well, you know, most people would say that I've, you know, the Eagles are the worst fan. Even though I'm an Eagles fan, I love the Eagles. But if you recall when they won the Super Bowl, I was in Philly at the time. Yeah. There were some folks that were eating poop.

SPEAKER_118: Um, that's, that's true. Yeah, that guy, yeah. You could cut that out. No, I think you'll leave it in. They're deranged. Um, they're deranged. I just think on average, if you had to sit next to a fan,

SPEAKER_06: yeah, that's a tough one. Like if you, would you, which fan would be worse to sit next to in a playoff game? Yeah, you're probably right. Eagles fans would probably be a little more insufferable. So here's the two co-founders, right?

SPEAKER_25: We, we basically root for the two worst teams. It's pretty terrible. Well, here's Garrett Wilson, right? So Garrett Wilson, right? We're launching injured jets. Huge, you know, uh, pick for the, for, for the jets.

SPEAKER_27: Last year in the first round pick 10 pick. And you can see yesterday, he had a breakout game and he's up almost 11%. So this is the kind of thing, even though it is a, an investment, a prediction about the career, you can see the volatility that happens week to week. I'm actually going to go back. The other thing is some people will say, oh, there's not going to be a lot of volatility in your veterans. Let me go to Aaron Rogers for a second. Let's say I hit trade. And remember here, you can go long or you can go short. Like I said, if you go long, we have this thing here called multiply your returns. And this multiplier allows you, we try to add volatility for a user. They want some more action on the veterans that you can get a 15 X. So let's say for example, his normal movement is going to be, you know, one, two percent. Now you do the 15 X and you're, and you're sitting there and you can, you can kind of get this a 25, 30% action. So our objective is to leverage.

SPEAKER_307: Is that what that is?

SPEAKER_27: A little bit, you know, it's kind of like our version of an option. It's not exactly that, but it's our version to kind of allow you to multiply and get, you know, it's, it's just, it's also, you know, you go on the downside too. So if Rogers is down 2% and he took the 15 X multiplier, you'd be down 30%, but we wanted to make sure that ultimately the vision is every sport, every player in the country should be on this market. There should be a price and there should be an underlying price.

SPEAKER_19: And there should be this kind of multiplier on that player. So if you want more action, almost like an option on every end. You want a little juice, because I'm betting on the juice.

SPEAKER_169: Let me see if I can spend, I'm betting on the career. If most games, the players are just going to have, you know, a slight uptick, slight down tick,

SPEAKER_23: that doesn't make it exciting to bet week to week. But if I say, Hey, give me 15 X, whatever the action, the movement is, if on average,

SPEAKER_169: people are moving 2%, well, that's not fun. I bought it at a hundred dollars. Am I going to sell it on Monday after the game for 102 or take a $2 loss?

SPEAKER_83: But if I put 15 X on it, okay, now it could be 130 or it could be a hundred, it could be 85 or something. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_25: And that's, I mean, so you do have, so this is like, I'm showing you right now, the wide receivers yesterday. This is independent of the, of the multiplier, but you saw Tyree Kill, he's up 9%, right?

SPEAKER_27: And so this is,

SPEAKER_199: Ooh, if you had the multiplier on that, oof. Exactly. Yeah, it's an X on that, now you're doubling.

SPEAKER_27: You're getting it super fast. Exactly. So we wanted to make sure that there's an underlying price that ultimately can be used in media and in conversations, which reflects the relative value of all the players. Ooh, yeah. So informationally, right, there should be, there should also be like, you know,

SPEAKER_21: there should be like a CNBC here, right? There should be a whole financial media cottage. Wait, you're a media guy.

SPEAKER_90: Are you going to launch like a, are you going to launch some, some podcasts or shows around this, a YouTube show?

SPEAKER_21: So we are, we have, we have a daily show and we're doing some stuff. I mean, I think ultimately we want the other folks to be covering

SPEAKER_27: us and we run the market and, but in the beginning we're seeding it. And so, uh, just to show how it's done. So we can show you some clips of our show that debuted today. I think it's pretty interesting, but it's just like CNBC, but now it's much more interesting,

SPEAKER_21: right? Because it's players that you see as opposed to stocks and companies.

SPEAKER_23: Well, here's another idea for you. You got somebody who's a great handicapper, right? Now they can make a mutual fund.

SPEAKER_17: So you could start mutual funds on here, a collection of 10 players, 20 players, whatever it is. And I could say, Hey, listen, I'm going to bet. Jake has 10 best players.

SPEAKER_315: And I get like mega action on it.

SPEAKER_314: Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_25: So you can see, and we, you know, we organize this throughout the app on movers daily, daily, um, folks that are up daily, the folks that are down daily by wide receiver,

SPEAKER_27: quarterback. So it's very easy to, you know, use super simple. And I'm like, it overcomplicated. You got the graphs that the one week, the, you know, just go into the NBA players.

SPEAKER_17: So you get a lot of user generated content here. Let's say we got a bunch of Knicks fans.

SPEAKER_06: We're all debating right now, because we got a lot of young guns. We've been incredible at drafting Emmanuel quickly, OB Tompin. Yep. Yep. You know, Mitch, we really quit Grimes. That's why Danny Ainge wanted all our picks for Spider. So we got all these incredible young guns. You know, we could run some sort of, again, back to user generated, we can say, Hey, pick your best five players who are not these vets on the team.

SPEAKER_17: You know, take Derek Rose out. You take, you know, um, Randall out, uh, Jules Randall out and say, Hey, just pick amongst

SPEAKER_169: the 23 and under crowd, 24 and under crowd, who you want to bet. And then you could put a duration on and say, Hey, we're going to make a five year bet. So that's the other thing you could add collections of players and then do a five year bet.

SPEAKER_17: So we could do the draft class of last year and say, let's make a long bet. Let's put a three year. You can't sell for three years. Oh my Lord. Oh, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we plan on introducing college as well, college players, but it's based on their professional career.

SPEAKER_27: So you can have guys on there and you get the, you know, freshmen and it's not based again on his college statistics. It's based on how, if, and when he makes the NFL.

SPEAKER_25: And so those are, again, those are the penny stocks you get in super early. You could correct me if I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_17: You have stock price based on career. I wonder if you could insert other, um, you know, vectors here as in the season. So I could, I could bet on, you know, uh, RJ Barrett season. I could also bet on his career. So you could have like two outcomes in here and you got two different prices.

SPEAKER_27: You could, you could, we wanted to make it, and that comes up a lot. We wanted to kind of set the foundation for it being, you know, like in certain in the stock market, like the indefinite futures, how you should be thinking about these companies, the career we think is the way to do it.

SPEAKER_74: How many people have to own it to make it have liquidity? You know, a player have liquidity. How, how many?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah.

SPEAKER_330: I know you're in the backstop of liquidity with the, with the. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: So in the beginning. Yeah. Think about it in the beginning, right? On day, uh, on day one here, it's us providing the liquidity.

SPEAKER_27: And so at some point in time, we can just, you know, behind the scenes, the transactions will always occur with us and we take on less risk, but there's no sort of magic number in terms of how many people have to own it. That was one of the key things in terms of the value prop to the user. It doesn't matter how many people are on here. There's always going to be this price for you to get in and out. That's key, right? It's not like a ghost town. Some of these other exchanges that you have, it's sort of, you get in and you can't get out and you're waiting for somebody else and it takes two days and then you don't like. So you provide the liquidity.

SPEAKER_83: People want to sell and it's up, you provide it, you take a loss, whatever. Exactly. In the beginning. Exactly. Just to get things going. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty great. How do you create a stock market from scratch?

SPEAKER_24: What did you have to study to understand this? Yeah. Because it's very rare that somebody launches a new stock market. I guess long-term stock exchange, Eric Ries in our industries created a long-term. Yeah. Stock exchange. I don't know if you studied that, but what did you have to study to architect this? And what are the dynamics of starting a market?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: Well, obviously, even before you get to the creating of the market, we had to do this in a regulated way. So that was a whole big exercise with our engineering team and our product team. And there's all these protections, you know, that you'll see with your account, we have reserves and there's responsible gaming practices, you know, you can't log in, you can't trade if you're out outside of your, so there's a whole engineering challenge. But then when it comes to, you know, basically like setting the market, if that's what your question is, in the very beginning, you know, we've launched here with about 280 players and because it's a chicken and egg where, you know, you don't have the user base yet and these prices are being guaranteed by us, we're taking all of the risks. So we have all these market makers and data analysts and quantitative folks making sure that we're pricing it as accurately as possible to project, you know, what the public demand would look like. So that's us doing it. And there's a lot of modeling that goes on here in the beginning, because again, you know, we don't have millions and millions of users, so that, you know, you have that perfect price in advance, we have to do that. Okay, markets get, that's a big challenge.

SPEAKER_00: Markets get, markets get manipulated.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, so for us, you know, for us, there's two things, but there's two huge things here, right? Because you got the intrinsic value, like it's based at the end of the day, like Jimmy Garoppolo, you see him here at 33.29. First of all, you can go long or you can go short. And then secondly, there's that check, because at the end of the day, you're guaranteed the payout at the retirement based on, and I can show you what the formula is, this is the

SPEAKER_25: share price right here, this shows you, this basically, like, there's no way to kind of like

SPEAKER_27: mess around here, because this tells you what you will be guaranteed upon retirement. So you can't mess it up. You know, these prices in the regular stock market can get out of whack. Well, if this gets out of whack, and you can take it both ways, there's going to be a natural market movement to

SPEAKER_00: go the other way. Does that make sense? Yeah. So here you're saying for every 10 yards, you get a penny added to their overall value. Turnovers, you take money away, 40 plus our plays, you get a little bit, what if somebody changes position, you have people maybe who have different

SPEAKER_21: positions? Yeah. Yeah. So these are, these are, these are pretty neutral, because it's yards, touchdowns. Got it. This is not this is not position based. They're not going to become a

SPEAKER_19: defensive player overnight. And if they Yeah, if they do, then yeah, they're not going to hear

SPEAKER_269: accumulate any more value. It's almost like they retired if they just, you know, all of a sudden changed to a defensive player and didn't and didn't have any more. It's interesting. So you studied

SPEAKER_83: all the players and figured out, hey, what would the payout look like for this player in this position over time, and you have the average player, the average lifespan, and this is your version of

SPEAKER_17: handicapping, your handicappers are making this way to get the handicappers from? Where'd you get those

SPEAKER_27: people from the quad? Yeah, so we we have this whole big team, you know, you raised the capital, first thing we had to do not only was create, you know, hire these amazing engineers and product folks, but we had to hire a bunch of quantitative people who know sports. So we've got an army of people that are way smarter than I am doing the math on, you know, setting the initial prices and then moving them, you know, again, in the early days here, to try to reflect where you'll have basically a balanced book, like, we don't want to take the risk, you know, we're long or short something, we're just trying to get to a place where there's equal buyers and sellers on both sides. Love it. And, you know, our

SPEAKER_348: guys got to do that. Where did you recruit those folks from? Oh, we got our head of trading from

SPEAKER_21: Goldman Sachs is from where the head of trading is, and got all these fancy, fancy institutions.

SPEAKER_350: Any of them come from sports books? Or did you just go? I don't think we have a person from a book,

SPEAKER_27: I don't think you know, we might have a couple of folks, but most of them are coming from the finance

SPEAKER_19: world. Interesting. You know, yeah, the banks, the hedge funds, and the traders, we've got traders here too. So it's a, again, a fancy group of people over here that are smarter than me.

SPEAKER_83: How do the app stores look at wagering apps today? I know that originally places like Apple and Google were like, no way. And then obviously, fantasy sports, they started letting folks in, the leagues are getting into this, the NBA is talking about this during the game. So my Lord, the regulatory

SPEAKER_17: space, which is quite ironic, I mean, bring up your brother for the last time, but we had to pre shut

SPEAKER_94: down illegal poker, whatever 10 years ago. Now, here we are 10 years later, this stuff's illegal, and it's on TV, they're incorporating the league, they're gonna put a game, they're gonna put an NBA team

SPEAKER_358: in Vegas, something that like the original commissioner was like, no way. Yeah. So I think,

SPEAKER_25: yeah, you know, to your point, even to Preet, you know, that whole thing, this is making sure like,

SPEAKER_27: you got to go through the hoops, and you got to get the license and you got to be compliant with the rules. And so now, the rules are in place, we go to the app store or anyone else, we have to show them, you know, that we're compliant, we have the license. And that gives them the confidence that the customers protected. And I think that's the thing, even with Preet, like, he was shutting down offshore

SPEAKER_25: illegal enterprises that didn't have any protections for the customer, or at least clear ones for the customer. So I think that's the advancement. And it wound up being prescient. I mean,

SPEAKER_17: you had all these scandals in poker. Yeah, where, you know, Fulltail was merging like the player holding accounts and the operation accounts allegedly, and then ultimate bet somebody had God mode. And then there were people who were on various VPNs, IPs, who are sharing cards in tournaments. So you get two people at a table, and they start sharing two cards, man, that's, that could be like all the edge

SPEAKER_83: you need to win a tournament or to just be massively EV positive. So you really do need to have regulations in here. Thank God this country has started to look at this and say, hey, regulate

SPEAKER_17: instead of banning the stuff is when you ban it, all you do is create corruption, and suffering and

SPEAKER_40: consumer harm. Whereas yeah, there's all this underground. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Consumers get some protection. That's right. That's right. And so I think that's kind of how we

SPEAKER_325: approach it with any, anything, whether it's the app store or anybody. You know, this is where you

SPEAKER_24: look at what Robert who gets a little criticism, we were early angel investors in and I still, early angel investors in and I still own my shares and still believe in the company.

SPEAKER_17: We're like, Oh my God, young people betting, young people doing stocks, young people doing crypto stocks. You know what, I feel like this next generation, you know, we were Gen Xers. The idea of us trading stocks, it was like, Well, it's gonna cost you $30. You got to call a broker on the phone every time you want to transact and you're transacting $50 in shares. So you just lost 60% of your position just for making the trade. And, you know, what these new services have done is

SPEAKER_30: made this next generation millennials and Gen Z's are so sophisticated when it comes to thinking about

SPEAKER_06: money and understanding bets. And life is a series of bets, your career, what school you go to, start a company, go work for the man, whatever it is. Life's a series of bets. Let's educate young people. If I had my druthers, every high school kid, day one of high school would have $1,000 put in a stock market account, a betting account, and let them gamble away two grand. And let's see what they come up with at the end of their, uh, four years. They'll learn more from that than they will

SPEAKER_368: from school. Yeah. You'd give them the 2000. Whatever. You give them a little bit of money.

SPEAKER_06: Listen, let's say education costs 16, the public education costs 16,000 a year, I think on average in the United States. So times that by four, you know, whatever, 65 grand, take the 65 grand, we'll give them 10% to put into an account. And if they started each year, they get $100, they get $50 the first year, $100 the second year, $200 second year, and the other 300 the last year. Right. So they get more sophisticated every year at the beginning of the year, they have to make five bets or whatever it is. They make some number of bets, they hold it for a year. At the end of the next year, they have to make five more bets. Literally let them gamble and let them keep the amount of money after four years. Now they've got a financial education and all of that goes towards their college education. That's what I would do. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_372: I would teach kids how to gamble. Are you running for president?

SPEAKER_369: No. Governor? Is your brother going to run? He's going to run for governor, isn't he?

SPEAKER_373: I shouldn't have brought this up. I shouldn't have brought this up.

SPEAKER_213: What are you going to say? I told you last time for pre, you know, I'm a pre-stand. Your brother would be incredible, incredible governor of New York. He would be.

SPEAKER_08: He runs, I'm telling you right now, we will ask it. I'm telling you right now. Are you going to get him on the pod? I would love to have him on the pod. Yeah, I'll definitely have him on. Here's

SPEAKER_06: what I'll do. I'm guaranteeing right now, I will raise a quarter million dollars for your brother. I will come to New York. I will bring my Silicon Valley. You're from here, right? You're from here.

SPEAKER_02: You can do it. I will come in. You can kill the product demo, by the way. We'll do full screen here. So I get your big, beautiful face there. That's Garrett Wilson. I wanted you guys to see

SPEAKER_90: that. There it is. I will raise a quarter million for your brother. I will do a Peking

SPEAKER_169: duck dinner in New York, and I will tell internet people to come, $2,500 a seat. Boom, get a thousand. No, have a hundred of them to come. Boom, raise a quarter million for your brother to run for governor.

SPEAKER_100: That's it, just $250? Just a quarter million? That's all you can pull off? I could probably pull

SPEAKER_165: off $250? I thought you could do more than that. I thought you had a limit of $2,500 a person,

SPEAKER_48: right? Oh, but you know so many people. I could probably get a thousand. Truth

SPEAKER_165: be told, I could get a thousand. I don't know what I'm allowed to do as a super fundraiser, but

SPEAKER_169: if I said, yeah, I'm going to do a thing for Preet, I could get a thousand people to show up

SPEAKER_19: $2,500 for sure. Wow. I think so. As soon as this pod's over, I'm going to call

SPEAKER_384: him and tell him about this. I'll be, listen, your brother is hardworking, honorable,

SPEAKER_30: he's got very sane positions and he explains himself, you know, and he's got like a high

SPEAKER_384: moral ethical bar. Like he really thinks about these things and, and, you know, here we are,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you and I, compulsive gamblers. This became an advertisement for Preet, instead of Mojo. Look at this. Preet got more airtime than Mojo.

SPEAKER_386: It's for, it's for both brothers. Preet and Mojo, I'll take it. Your parents must be very proud of both of you. Awesome.

SPEAKER_362: All right, listen, Vineet, AKA Vinny, I don't know which you prefer.

SPEAKER_388: You pronounce it right. You call me J Cal. Which you prefer?

SPEAKER_251: What are your friends called? I prefer Vinny. I like Vinny. I like Vinny. Yeah. It's more of a Jersey name. Yeah. I'm from Jersey. I like Vinny.

David Friedberg: What was it like growing up? Were people a little racist in the eighties? Towards you guys? Sometimes. Sometimes. We went to a small school,

SPEAKER_251: but yeah, we got, we got some- Private Catholic? What'd you go to? Some, no, it was a private school, not Catholic. It was really small. It was 40 kids in the class.

SPEAKER_21: I was just telling my daughter had to ask me questions. She's a 17. And she had to ask me questions about 9-11. Oh yeah. Yesterday. And, and she was asking me this and she told me, tell me, take me through, you know, that day and the next few months. And I told her that was the one time someone called me Osama bin Laden. That was the only time I, yeah, back then.

SPEAKER_394: That's crazy. Where were you? Were you in Jersey or are you in Manhattan?

SPEAKER_395: No, New York. I was in Manhattan.

SPEAKER_24: I was in Manhattan too, man. People tell me about that day. How was the scariest day of my life? Where were you? I was on 26th and the West Side Highway. I'm listening to Howard Stern getting ready for work.

SPEAKER_06: I'm about to go to the garment district. And Howard says, oh, look, some dipshit just flew his, you know, little Cessna into the World Trade Center. I live 26th and the West Side Highway. I look out my window downtown. I see the smoke. I put on CNN. Boom. Second plane hit. Yeah. My brother's a firefighter in Williamsburg. He's on the job for less than six months.

SPEAKER_17: He had been a cop. Then he went to be a firefighter. I try to find my brother. Can't find my brother. No. He's at work.

SPEAKER_400: No.

SPEAKER_17: I'm like, oh my God. So I just immediately go into a pale sweat. You know, I'm like, oh my God. I mean, I just, I'm going to lose my brother. I come running downstairs. I come down. The elevator operator in my building is outside. There's people in shock on the streets, guys in suits with machine guns. I'm like, what are guys in shoots and machine guns? It turns out my building on 26th and the West Side Highway had a CIA FBI depot in it for all the equipment, all the trucks and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_34: Anyway, the guy grabs me by the palace. He goes, Jake, we're under attack. America is under attack.

SPEAKER_118: They just got the Pentagon. Man. I mean, it was like a movie scene. And so finally, I find out two hours later, you know, I'm talking to my mom, all the phones went down. People don't remember this either.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah, of course. I was telling my daughter that.

SPEAKER_260: The phone's going down. I finally get word. My brother, his shift was ending at eight. So the

SPEAKER_08: first plane hit 740 something and the second one hit eight something. So he had asked a half hour early because my sister-in-law, Carrie, her car broke down on the Bell Parkway. She got a flat. My brother, who's a probie, he's on probation. He's just starting. Asked his boss, may I go? My wife's on the side of the road. He says, of course, go. You can leave work early. He leaves

SPEAKER_30: work 15 minutes before. He's on the belt going to see his wife. He sees in the review mirror the plane. Amazing.

SPEAKER_08: And the World Trade Center on fire. He starts to turn around to go back. Wow. He has to walk through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to get back there. He spent 30 days on the pile

SPEAKER_06: every other day. Smoked the whole thing. And he's got lung issues now, but he's okay.

SPEAKER_411: Oh, no. Wow. Look at that, man. That's an amazing story.

SPEAKER_382: Crazy story. What about you? What's your story then? What'd you tell your donor?

SPEAKER_27: You know, the funny thing, that story. So I'm down on Bleecker Street. That's where I lived.

SPEAKER_25: We had just sold this company, The Pit. Yeah. We had just sold The Pit three weeks earlier, the sports card stock market. I'm supposed to meet Mark and my other childhood friend, the other founder, Lax, at Tops because we had sold his company and we're supposed to do some meetings. Where's Tops? In town or something? Tops is right there. A few blocks away from, yeah, a few blocks away. And so what happens is

SPEAKER_21: that, like you said, it was a beautiful morning that day. I'm getting ready for work.

SPEAKER_34: The crispest September day ever. Not a cloud in the sky, beautiful air. Perfect.

SPEAKER_21: Amazing. Amazing day. I turn on the TV like you, like so many others. Before I leave to head down

SPEAKER_27: to Tops, I see the one hole in the one building. And so I'm watching television. It turns out, Mark, Laurie, my co-founder, is already down there because he was coming in from Westchester. And so for him, he's down there when the second building fell, you know, obviously the plume of smoke is all surrounding down there. He leaves, he runs across the Brooklyn Bridge with his shirt off to cover the smoke from his eyes. Yeah, the dust was crazy. I couldn't get hold of him. I wind up, funny enough, going back to Preet, he lives on 22nd Street. I live on Bleecker. I walk up Fifth Avenue. A lot of people did, I remember. It was like an exodus. Exactly. And I stayed with him. Thousands of people. Yeah. So I stayed with Preet for the next few days. And of course, the next like couple days, you just didn't know whether we were going to get another attack. It was scary. After the Empire State Building.

SPEAKER_90: It was scary. And they also don't realize they shut down Manhattan. Nobody in, nobody out. That's right.

SPEAKER_169: For a week or two. And then they cordoned us off in sections. So you couldn't. Yeah. I wanted to meet my friends at Pastis in the meatpacking district. I was on 26th. I walked down to 14th Street. There's a cop there. I said, listen, I'm going to Pastis. You're not allowed

SPEAKER_17: in there. I was like, listen, my brother's on the job. Da, da, da. He's my card. He's like, all right, just go there. Whatever. So, you know, but it was, Manhattan was weird. It was crazy. Like there was no cars. And then I don't know if you remember this, but I remember walking by St.

SPEAKER_169: Vincent's hospital. There were ambulances everywhere. Along the West Side Highway,

SPEAKER_90: ambulances from around the country were there. Amazing. Everybody from around the country came to Manhattan. They drove for two or three days. They get there to help. There was no survivors. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: So everybody came to help, no survivors. Uh, it was, it was really tragic and insane,

SPEAKER_25: but we got through it. I was turning 30 and we're going, way off topic. I was turning 30 that Friday, September 14th.

SPEAKER_21: And so my whole, you know, 30th thing got canceled and all the time. I remember spending it with some friends. But you probably sound like you're the same age as me. So you probably also turned 30.

SPEAKER_17: I was, uh, I had just turned 30 because I was born 1970, November 28th. So I was going to be 31. Gotcha. Uh, but yeah, it really is interesting having to explain this to our kids and Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: You're for them. It's like this abstraction. Yeah. And now it's really disturbing to me. Like people are making memes about it or on tick tock, I'll run into a meme about it. I'm like, really this is. Yeah. I mean, it's too soon folks. Like you can't make jokes or memes about 9-11.

SPEAKER_17: Like making Holocaust jokes or World War II jokes. Just don't Vietnam jokes. Like it's not cool. People like have some respect, you know, for what she asked me about it. What she asked me was like,

SPEAKER_27: you know, how New York centric was it? And I said, I just remember that at that time, right? Really Giuliani was the mayor, the whole thing. We all came together in a way that was unbelievable. There was none of this right left. It was super suit. Everybody was getting along for a for a short stretch. Yeah. Yeah. She's like shocked about that. I'm like, look, I don't

SPEAKER_314: can't tell you how the world loved New York. Everywhere. We can go everywhere. Remember that?

SPEAKER_169: Like that was the thing. I remember like in New York, people honk at each other. And I remember like the week after two weeks after shortly after and I'm walking through an intersection and somebody honk that somebody is when cars were lower back in. The guy stopped, everybody stopped and looked at the guy who honk the guy got out of his car, went to the car in front. Like, oh my God. He said, I'm sorry. Amazing. I shouldn't have honked. The guy got out, gave him a hug. It was like the greatest New York moment ever. Yeah. The idea of a New Yorker honking at another New Yorker or in any way displaying anything other than love and a hug because everybody knew somebody who died. Everybody was mourning collectively. The idea that we would be anything other than super compassionate for people. It's a defining moment of Gen Xers life if you're a New

SPEAKER_17: Yorker or anywhere in that area. And then for other people, it's not like people were in California telling me like they felt terrible. They were whatever, but it doesn't define their life. I think for folks like us, it's the defining moment of our lives in many ways. Like our kids, graduating college, all of that is like amazing. But if you just think about an emotional resonance,

SPEAKER_367: like I think about the world before 9-11 and after 9-11. It's like two different things for me. I agree. All right. Listen, this has been a great discussion. Awesome. Thanks.

SPEAKER_83: I can't wait to hang with you and I'll see you when I'm in New York. Maybe we'll catch a game. No,

SPEAKER_46: not an Eagles game. Absolutely not. We could do both games. Maybe when they're playing the Giants

SPEAKER_17: themselves. When they're going to play each other. Talk to my dad. All right. Listen, great job on the company. I wish you great success. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.