Chris Bevilacqua 0:01 

People do business with people that they like and they trust. It's not that complicated. And you sit across three feet from someone, and that's how deals get made and relationships get formed. And yeah, you know, you stay in touch over the years with technology, with digital but ultimately it's like about spending time in person.

David Novak 0:21 

Welcome to how leaders lead, where, every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learnings so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Now, when you think about it, we tend to work and make deals with people we like and trust. Business happens around relationships, and over the next hour, you're going to hear from a leader who's built an incredible career around that insight. My guest today is Chris Bevilacqua, the founder and CEO of simple bet, their enterprise sports betting software is used by companies like Caesars and DraftKings. Before that, Chris worked at Nike and NBC Sports, and he started the first ever 24 hour cable TV network for college sports. With a career like that, you better believe Chris has got some fantastic stories and insights from the world of sports business, and at every step of the way, he takes the time to get to know people, to listen to them and to see what makes them tick. It's Chris's leadership superpower, and I know it's going to help you build more trust and get big things done too. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours. Chris Bevilacqua,

in my research, I learned that you were a two time all American wrestler at Penn State, and are also in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Now I pity the poor guy that picks on you.

Chris Bevilacqua 2:01 

Well, he's, you know, listen, it was a long time ago. All those things happened, right? You know, I'm now, what, 35 years removed from my wrestling career, but it made a indelible mark on my life. And, you know, Penn State, which you mentioned a second ago, I still follow the program to this day, and we got a head coach now by name of kale Sanderson, who has won 10, and that's right, 10 of the last 12. NCA, this guy's in John Wooden territory. It's an amazing, amazing coach.

David Novak 2:35 

Do you go back and talk to the team and give them a little inspiration every now and then? And if so, what do you say? Yeah, as

Chris Bevilacqua 2:41 

a matter of fact, I get back to my brother, who also He's four years younger than me. My brother, Michael, also was a wrestler, and he now lives in in State College. So I get back to see him quite regular. My wife, her family, is in Pittsburgh, so we're we're constantly going through State College, and when I go back, of course, I'll go see kale and the team, and there have been occasions where he'll ask me to say a few words. Of course, a lot of these guys, especially, and you'll hear me, David, talk quite a bit about sports and the impact that sports has had on my life, not only on my life, but as a leader in my business world, and also as a father and as a husband. And you know, there's some really simple lessons that you learn, or that I've learned anyway, that translate into life, right? You know, I come from a family. Both of my parents were teachers and coaches, and I was brought up by, you know, in that environment, I'm the oldest of six kids. And, you know, there's some, you know, very transferable things that you learn, and they're very, very simple. And I try to, you know, not only in business, but whenever I'm talking to whether it's a Penn State wrestling team or my own four children, I'm constantly using, you know, analogs.

David Novak 3:53 

I want to get more into that because, you know, I do, obviously I want to talk to you about what you're doing at simple bet. But let's stay on this topic of wrestling for just a second. You know what comes to mind when you hear the name Mike Langley is Mike

Chris Bevilacqua 4:09 

langlias changed my life, okay? And I've met Mike one time in my life for about seven minutes on a wrestling mat in the Meadowlands, in New Jersey, right across the river here, when I was a sophomore in college at Penn State. So this is 1984 and I was wrestling Mike langlias in the NCAA Wrestling tournament. And you know, it was one of those matches, and I was, I was winning big early in that match, halfway through the match, I was up by 11 or 12 points, and I'm thinking, all right, I'm gonna move on to the next round. And lo and behold, this guy, whatever. Again, I never met the guy before. He's from North Dakota, state now lives in Minnesota, has a landscaping business. I learned over the years I. And he just kept coming at me and coming and he wouldn't, he wouldn't stop. And it was like one of those for a few minutes. It was like, This guy's being a pest. And then all of a sudden, we got a couple scrambles, and next thing you know, the score is tight, and then I'm in the third period, and, you know, scrambling around, and I hurt my ankle, and so, you know, little Chris got a boo boo, and he had to go to the side and catch his breath. And but what I remember about all this is this guy just never gave up. And the match eventually gets close, and at the very end, I end up losing that match. I would wrestle Mike langlias 100 times, and I would win 99 times. And so I walked off that mat, it was like I was shell shocked, and I realized in that moment that there was only one reason I lost that match, and I owned up to it right there. I like to say I lost that match because he out competed me, which he did. But really out competing is just a more elegant way of saying, you quit. You just gave up. And I said to myself, I even get emotional when I talk about this now, like I said, that will never, ever happen in the rest of my life, whatever it is, I will never get beat because somebody out competed me and made me quit. It won't ever happen. And most of the time in life, if you don't give up, you will come out on top, you know. And it's just a lesson that, you know, ironically, there was a biggest, most important lesson of my life, but I learned it on a wrestling mat in the Meadowlands of New Jersey in 1984 and it's a lesson that has, you know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. Is what I like to say.

David Novak 7:01 

I love that lesson. It's a it's a great one. And you eventually make your way to Nike and become their deal guy with all the top sports leagues in the United States. Tell me how you took the lead on this landmark deal you did with the Dallas Cowboys. I

Chris Bevilacqua 7:16 

got brought on by by Nike in 1995 and they were, at the time, they were this three or $4 billion a year shoe company in in Portland, Oregon. And they knew at the time that they wanted to make a move into apparel and equipment and accessories. And in, you know, in those days, they were a brand that was very pro athlete and anti establishment, meaning, like, you know, they were always fighting with the leagues. And, you know, this was Michael Jordan and Mars Blackman and be like Mike. And they were always like anti establishment and going against David Stern in the NBA, and, at the time, Paul Tagliabue in the NFL. And but they realized that if they were going to grow the business right, they had to get into more formal relationships with the leagues and get into the apparel business, which meant you were going to be licensing marks and logos of all the teams in the leagues. So they needed somebody, because I was, I was working at major league baseball at the time, and I was there at the leagues for like five years in the baseball network, and Nike was one of my clients, and they knew they needed somebody in New York that had a friendly face with all the leagues, right? So, you know, enter me, and I started as kind of the head of the league affairs and grew into the global negotiations director. And during that time, I was also doing a lot of athlete deals. And one of the deals I was working on at the time was Deion Sanders footwear deal. So I was negotiating with Eugene Parker, who was Dion's agent. And Dion had just won the Super Bowl for San Francisco, and he was a free agent. So not only was a free agent with his player contract, but he was a free agent with his footwear contract, you know, so I was trying to work out a deal with Eugene to keep him in Nike and, you know, extend his deal. And he was obviously a real star in the league at the time, and but he was also in free agency, and I get a call one day because, you know, Eugene was, was trying to do his player deal at the same time as trying to do his new shoot deal. And we on a separate and apart from that, we were trying to work out our first broad based deal with the NFL for licensing and marketing. And you know, we were going to get into business in a win, a big way with the NFL. And you know, the way they were doing it at the time was they would put the Nike logo in theory on all the uniforms, right, because that's what the NFL was selling. And then we would have retail rights and and we couldn't get an agreement with the league on what teams they were going to assign us, because they were going to split it up between us and Reebok. And I think it was a starter was the third brand, so we're each going to get 10. 10 teams. And of course, you want all the big market teams, right? Not the small market team. So the NFL, you know, we couldn't agree on the teams, and so we were at a stalemate. So Eugene calls me, he says, he says, well, Dion's decided that he wants to go, go play for Dallas, like for his player contract, wouldn't he be more valuable to Nike in Dallas than San Francisco? And I was like, Oh, I think I know what he's saying. So I call up my guy, you know, Howard Slusher, who I was working for at Nike. And I said, Howard, I just got this call. I explained it to him. I said, Do you know Jerry Jones? And he's like, No. He said, Do you know I said, I don't know him. I said, I'm gonna call him. So I literally pick up the phone again. This is 1995 so this is whatever this is. How many years ago is that? That's 30 years ago. They didn't really have cell phones then. So I pick up the phone and I call the main line on on the cowboy drive or whatever, and the perceptionist answers. And I said, I I'm Chris Bevilacqua from Nike. Can I talk to Jerry Jones? And she's like, one minute, please. Next thing, you know, I got Jerry Jones on the phone. I mean, he picks the phone up. Chris bevelokwa from Nike, I swear I've always loved Nike. And philad, well, he's like. He's just going on and on and on, and I hadn't even said anything yet. And I said, Hey, Jerry, I'm calling because working on the NFL deal with people in the central level whenever I get him. But more importantly, I'm also negotiating with Eugene Parker. Well, I'm sure, you know, and Eugene saying that he wants to come play in Dallas, and wouldn't he be more? And he's like, so Chris, are you going to be in Dallas anytime soon? You're gonna be in Dallas anytime soon? And I said, Well, I'm actually supposed to be there next week. It just was totally ironic. I said, I'm supposed to be there next week for the Major League Baseball All Star game. So we end up going and meeting him, and it's just like you would think it would be, which is a bit of a surreal experience. And Jerry's got all these, these things, these books, laid out on his table, and he had this whole, this whole plan, what they that they were calling at the time, Jerry's world, and how are they going to build this new stadium and do all this like which ultimately became, years later, you know, the, what's the name of the stadium? Now,

David Novak 12:26 

that's the best football stadium in the world. Yeah, at&t Stadium, right? Yeah. And

Chris Bevilacqua 12:29 

they were going to do all this development around it, and they were going to have Fan Fest and all this other stuff. And so, you know, he had this, like, this real vision about what he wanted, not only the Cowboys to be, but what he wanted the future of the NFL to be. And obviously, you know, he wanted to have Dion on the team. So, so the long story short, there is we ended up, obviously, Dion went to Dallas, and we ended up renewing our deal with him. Okay, Jerry said that he took the position with the league that, back to Park Avenue, that there's no way you're doing a deal in the apparel category unless Nike's my partner. Otherwise I'll go blank on my uniform. And he did do that because, you know, the cowboys were the most valuable retail property in all of the NFL. He helped make that happen. Let's put it that way. And there's a lot more to that story, like you said earlier at the top, that I probably can't shouldn't say at this point, even though I've passed the statute of limitations, but that's how we got into the NFL. Was through that deal,

David Novak 13:34 

a great story, and you work closely with the Nike founder, Phil Knight, what did he teach you about leadership? Chris

Chris Bevilacqua 13:43 

man, Phil, I remember when I decided to be an entrepreneur and and start the College Sports TV network. That's why I left Nike. And Phil was actually not happy with me, because he wanted me to take over all sports marketing, and they were trying to convince me to stay in Oregon and run on sports marketing for him. And I just, you know, I didn't want to do that. I really wanted to go and try and be an entrepreneur, because I really thought we could do this 24 hour college sports channel. And I tried to get Nike and Phil to do it, and he said, Oh, you know, we don't, we don't sell TV, we sell shoes and clothes. That's who we are. And I just decided I was going to leave. And he was not very happy with me for a while, but the first person I went back to when we were out officially raising money, and I went back to Phil, and I said, this is really something, you know, you taught me a lot. And one of the reasons that I'm, you know, like I watched you, and I know his story going all the way back to Blue Ribbon sports. I recalled him talking about, you know, the banks and how he couldn't raise money. He was literally, this was a guy, literally this all came out when he wrote his book, Shoe Dog, right? But I heard enough of his story, and what I so admired, right? Was even though. Phil was a was a track guy, right? He and Bill Bowerman, you know, like an Oregon track runner, I used to say this to Him, I go, you would have been a hell of a wrestler. You have the mental toughness of a wrestler. What I admired about Phil, and still do to this very day, is his relentlessness. It is like failure was not an option. And he many, many, many, many times throughout the early days of Blue Ribbon sports, which then became Nike, and they were at it for whatever it was, 1617, years before they finally went public in the early 80s. Like he lived, literally check to check. And he did that for such a long period of time, like the the fortitude it takes to do that, and the Mental Toughness it takes to do that, that's really, ultimately what I learned from Phil, and it was buttressed by my, you know, Mike langlias experience, and so the two were almost like one in the Same and, you know, listen, I'm not a billionaire like Phil Knight is, but I like to think that there are many things that that came from my experience with Phil that have translated into, you know, the my business life.

David Novak 16:18 

We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Chris Bevilacqua in just a moment, as you've heard us talk about Chris helped Nike get into the NFL, by the way of Deion Sanders, and these days, Deon is making waves as head football coach at the University of Colorado, I had the chance to interview Deon, and I have to Say it's one of the most inspiring conversations I've had in the years we've been doing this podcast. Here's prime himself.

Deion Sanders 16:46 

It don't matter where you're located while you're leading. You don't have to be the one in front to lead. You don't have to be the highest paid person in the room to lead. You don't have to have the one with the most credentials to lead. Leading is something that's an innate ability that attracts people to you, words and your actions. Go

David Novak 17:17 

back and listen to my entire conversation with Prime episode 178 here on how leaders lead.

You know it takes a lot of strength and fortitude of your own to go out and start this new business. And you started this 24 hour cable TV network, college sports television. Where'd that idea come from, and how'd it do?

Chris Bevilacqua 17:45 

I mean, I suppose I could say, oh, it was my idea, which it was. But I'm sure there are other people that have versions of that idea, even before I did. So the, you know, the punch line there is the hard part is not the idea. The hard part is executing it, making it happen. But my role at Nike at the time, right? Was the leagues, and I was the guy out doing all the deals, and I mentioned how hard it was to get something in place for the NFL. And so the strategy was very simple at the time at Nike, like we said, that if we can't own Sundays, we have to make sure we own Saturdays. So that was literally the strategy. And I spent whatever period of time it was, a year and a half, two years, flying around the country to all the major college programs and buying up as many rights as we could so that, like when you turn on the TV on Saturdays, you see swooshes all over the place, even to this very day. And that's how we you know how we kept scores, so to speak, and as we were well into it, a few years into it. And again, I came from a media background, not necessarily a shoes and clothes background, so I'm sitting there, we're out there. We're buying up all these rights. We're a few years into it. We're dominating in college sports. And I also knew enough to know that, in those days, satellite TV was coming, digital cable was coming, there were all these new forms of distribution getting built out. And so it was easy for me to see that there was going to someday be a 500 channel universe. And, you know, in those 500 channels mean there was a there was a thing called the Food Network. I remember saying to Phil Knight and Tom Clark, who was the president, I'm like, you know, like, we're making this huge investment in college sports, and we're owning all these rights. And not only are we getting shoe and apparel rights, but we were getting rights to, like, set up our own contest. Like, we could take Duke and North Carolina and put them together in a game and stage it over in Ireland. And that would be, we would own that event, everything about it, and we could do the same thing in football and, you know, across all these other college sports. So, like we've already made this investment, why don't we now, with the advent of digital and satellite, there should be a 24 hour college sports channel. Why don't we partner with them? Media Company and created the Nike college sports channel. That was the idea. And that's when Phil said, You know what might be a good idea, but we don't do TV, we do shoes and clothes, and that's what we do. And that's when I decided that, okay, I think there's a there's a real chance to do something here. I want to go try my hat at being an entrepreneur. So I literally, and I told you earlier, like, Phil wasn't happy with me the time, but I was like, I'm dead set. I'm gonna go. I wasn't married, I didn't have children, you know, I was in my mid 30s. Like, if I'm ever gonna do this, now's the time to go for it. So I literally flew back home. I had a share house out in the Hamptons with a bunch of buddies of mine. I taught myself how to do PowerPoint. I put together a little business plan about how to do a 24 hour college sports channel, how it would work, how I would do it. And I started flying around the country on my own dime for about a year. And I went back, and I met with the conference commissioners and presidents and athletic directors, and I sat them all down, one at a time. And I said, Here's my pitch to you guys. You guys are in a one bitter marketplace called ESPN, and the only way you'll ever be able to extract value out of the rights that you own is if you create a real, true alternative to ESPN. There's no other way to do it. It's just how the free market works. Oh, great, Chris, that'd be awesome. Like, how? What do you need from us? Well, I need you to give me all the rights to the programming that ESPN is not utilizing, and then I need you to support me, and I'll go out and do the rest. I'll go out and raise the money and get the dish, you know, like, and if I'm right, five years from now, the rights that are. You're getting nothing for. You'll either get ESPN to pay you a lot more to keep me out, or you'll get me to pay a lot more to keep me in. Either way, you win. And they're like, oh, that sounds like, of course, we'll support you. So the early days, and I remember I got Jim Delaney, who was commissioner of the Big 10, Roy Kramer, who was the commissioner of the SEC and Tom Hanson was the commissioner of the PAC 10. I got him in a room together, and I still have the presentation to this day. Was in november of 1999 I said to all three of them in the Charlotte airport US Air lounge, that's where we met. We left, we literally met. And I had my little PowerPoint, I went through it, and I said, if I do this right someday, and I pointed to all of them I someday. I said, you're gonna have your own 24 hour channel. You're gonna have your own 24 hour channel, and you're gonna have your own 24 hour channel. This was like in the 1999 right? And these guys are looking at me, going, what the heck is he talking about? And my whole point was, you just have to create an alternative to ESPN, and the rest will take care of itself. The free market always works. So that's how it all got started,

David Novak 22:54 

and you sell the business to CBS, right? Yeah.

Chris Bevilacqua 22:58 

I mean, from that day where I knew I had some support. We then went out and raised I had two other partners that I that I brought in the the classic sports founders who I knew, Brian beat all, and Steve Greenberg, and the three of us started up what, at the time was called ncsn National Collegiate Sports Network, which we then rebranded, eventually into cstv. And that was in 2001 and we went out, we raised about $110 million of private equity money. And then almost two and a half years to the day after we launched the network in April of oh three, we sold it to CBS. But I'll tell you what, it was, a crazy, wild ride in the middle of all that, that, you know, has many, many stories in and of itself, stories of life and death. And you know, there were many days where I don't know if this is going to work. I mean, it's, it's, I remember when my, when I had my good friend said, Okay, Bevy, I guess you decided to be an entrepreneur. And let me give you some advice. I said, What's that? He said. Said, some days are going to be you're going to have the best days your life, and some days you're going to have the worst days your life. And sometimes it's going to be in the same day. That's like, holy shit, you're right, man, because there was some like, ups and downs and sometimes on the same

David Novak 24:16 

day. What was the day like when you sold it to CBS?

Chris Bevilacqua 24:20 

That was a real thrill. So Les Moonves, who ran CBS at the time, you know, CBS has had, you know, long time investment in the March Madness basketball tournament. And was pretty clear even then, this is 2005 that they were in the, in the, not even the middle of a very long term deal that they were losing money on. And our pitch was, hey, you know, Les, you've got $6 billion sunk into the NCAA basketball tournament, of which will never pencil out. But what you can do, you know, you could use that asset to get into the cable business. Because, remember, in those days, they had just broken apart. What used to be called Viacom, and they broke apart Viacom into two. How ironic is this that we're you know, this is exactly what happened in 2005 and all the cable networks went with Tom Freston, so all MTV and VH one, and all the cable networks went to one side Tom fresn, and then the other side was Les Moonves and the broadcast network and the outdoor business. And so there was high growth and low growth. And so the pitch to less was, you know, don't let Tom have all the high growth story you need to tell a story. And cstv is a 24 hour college sports network. It's like a year round Olympics. And so you could take your $6 billion investment and own a cable asset on a year round basis, and literally, from the time we had that meeting to the time we closed the deal, I think it was like 11 or 12 days. It literally was that fast. And you know, I look back on it, and I think about how close everything came to death. We had raised all that money, but we were not only what was cash running low. But our customers, and in those days it was Comcast and DirecTV and our customers were starting to compete against us, right? They were starting to say, well, we could do programming just like cstv could do. We could just own the rights ourselves. So we're getting to the point where our customers were competing against us. But then here was the big issue. The big issue was ESPN. So ESPN was trying basically to put us out of business. Okay? And so when I'm sitting there at three o'clock in the morning and I'm like, we're running out of cash, I'm staring at the ceiling. I got 300 employees. I'm looking up at the ceiling, I'm going, Holy cow, what are we going to do? Our distributors are trying to compete against us. We're running low on cash. You know, ESPN is trying to kill us. And so who do you think, David, who do you think I was thinking about in that moment,

David Novak 26:58 

you were thinking, I need to see Les Moonves.

Chris Bevilacqua 27:01 

I was looking at the ceiling, and I was thinking. I was thinking of, I was thinking of Mike langlias. And I'm saying to myself, at three o'clock in the morning, there is no way I am giving up. These guys will have to kill me. I will go to the very end. I will die on that hill, you are not going to make me quit. So what did we end up doing in the middle of all this madness, right? We knew ESPN is trying to put us out of this. So we go to the lawyers and we say, we show the lawyers we got all this, you know, all this evidence that these guys are trying to keep us out of business, trying to put pressure on conferences to not do deals with us. And so we end up going to the we hire a law firm. The law firm says, Oh, I get great good news and bad news for you, Chris, what's what's the good news? The good news is, you got a hell of an anti trust case. I said, Well, what's the bad news? The bad news is, well, you'll never win. You'll be out of money by the time you litigate this. And I said, yeah, that's that sounds right. Said, but we have an idea. So the law firm says, We know some people on the on the hill, and we set up a bunch of meetings. I set up a bunch of meetings with the Department of Justice and the FTC and the SEC, and we go in there and we show them, like, here's what's happening and here's what's going on. And they're like, Wow, that's not good. So lo and behold, what do they do? They open up an investigation, and that word gets around, and, you know, I'm sitting there going, like, they're not making me quit. I'm gonna do whatever I can. And lo and behold, that was really what we needed. And that's when we ended up getting some key rights to college football and college basketball and some conferences and ESPN, had to let it go. And next thing you know, we do a deal with the Dish Network and Charlie Jurgen, and then five months later, we're sitting in front of less Moon beds like that. That's what happened. That's the lesson of perseverance. You don't give up.

David Novak 29:00 

Absolutely. What do you can I ask, what you sold? Sold the business for?

Chris Bevilacqua 29:05 

Yeah, we sold it for $325 million back in 2005 when we, when we, I mean, I guess we closed it in 2006 and, you know, it was a nice return for our investors. And it's now the CBS Sports Network, and it's probably valued a couple billion dollars for CBM, it's worked out well for everybody.

David Novak 29:26 

That's the way, how the best deals should be. You know, you raised a, you said, $110 million to basically start this business and keep it going. What's something you learned in that fundraising stage that would have saved you heartache had you known it earlier?

Chris Bevilacqua 29:41 

Have you seen last dance Michael Jordan?

David Novak 29:45 

Absolutely loved that great documentary. You

Chris Bevilacqua 29:48 

know, Michael Jordan, for my money, and I'm not a huge basketball fan. I just think Michael Jordan is the greatest athlete I have ever seen in my lifetime, in any sport. He was like the combination of i. Perseverance and mental toughness and eloquence and skill, and then just like relentless, like there was no, nobody could out compete Michael so that, like, packages stuff, and I realized, like, even in the early days when we're raising money, that you got to have a hard head, and you get a lot of no's, right? And if you recall, in last dance, like Michael's whole thing was he just needed a boogeyman. Every year he had to have a new Boogeyman. Like, one year It's Gary Payton and George Carl. Another year it's, you know, Isaiah Thomas, you know, another year it's Dan Marley. Like there was always somebody in his head that was driving him, driving him to be better and to not get out competed. And that's, you know, what I learned early on, like, you have to have, you know, some thick skin. You're going to hear no a lot, but you can use that motivation. Like I remembered that day you asked about earlier, like the day that we announced the CBS deal. You know, who I thought of, besides Mike langlias. I thought of all the guys along the way that said no, and I tried to calculate in my head how much, how much it cost them to say no to me, like you just have to be motivated. And that's something that, you know, I used the Michael Jordan last dance example, because it's I show that I try to show that to my children, like, failure is not an option. You're going to make it happen no matter what.

David Novak 31:24 

And here you are. Now. You're the CEO of simple bet. Now give us a snapshot of the business and how you make money.

Chris Bevilacqua 31:32 

So simple bet, I got into it, as I mentioned earlier. It was almost coming upon six years ago, and I had a couple of my old one of my old partners from cstv, Scott Marshall, who, you know, we had stayed in touch over the years, and I had actually backed him in one of his previous ventures, and he had exited, and he said to me at the time, oh, I've been mentoring this young guy. His name is Joey Levy, and, you know, he's Columbia. Just got out of Columbia, actually, he dropped out of Columbia. He ran a daily fantasy business that, at the time, got shut down because of the cease and desist by Eric Schneiderman on Daily Fantasy. So this is back in late 2017 early 2018 and remember, in those days, sports betting was illegal. You couldn't do it, right? Chris Christie was in the middle of suing the leagues, and he was going to the Supreme Court to help overturn the paspa. Again, these guys come to me and I don't like, All right, well, I meet Joey, and Scott says, You got to meet doing this sports. I go, Well, what do you want from me? He's like, Well, you know, we'd like your money and your access, meaning, like, well, you could help us with all the leagues and the sport I said, Well, I don't know anything about sports betting. And, of course, yeah, I've got a good network of investor investor network. I could help there. Yeah. So I said, let me learn a little bit about sports betting. And I realized I how much I didn't know, and it was mainly because it was mostly over in Europe and Asia, where it is, you know, legal in certain jurisdictions. And trying to figure out, like, Who the hell does what? I have some guy come in and show me on a grease board, like, can you just explain the industry to me? And you know, he has, like, up here, he's got the casino operators here, he's got mobile sports book operators here. He's got a list of data providers here. He's got a list of affiliates, and, you know, pricing teams and tech platforms and, like, he has this whole thing mapped out on a grease board. I'm like, Holy shit, this. Like, this is like, alphabet soup here. Like, who the hell like, can you be a favorite? Can you just pretend I'm sitting in Barcelona and I've got $100 bet on Real Madrid to beat Barcelona? Can you just show me the waterfall of, where does that $100 go? Where does that bet go? Who makes money on that? And it's like, this convoluted, and you realize, like, holy cow, like, there's got to be a lot of inefficiency in this. Like, if somebody could figure out how to make this more efficient, then there might be something here. I mean, that's kind of the extent of my knowledge at the time. So I then spent a bunch of time with all my friends at the leagues, and went around to the leagues, and I like, Okay, what's really going on here? Chris Christie is suing you guys. Do you really, like, do you really want that to happen? And it was pretty clear that having a bunch of those discussions, they definitely knew something was going to happen, and they just wanted to have it uniform, and they wanted to have it regulated. And, of course, they wanted to make money. Wanted to make money off of it, right? Like, so I knew enough to know that there was probably some big opportunity here, but I didn't really know about how to go about it. I decided, all right, we're gonna start this company. I'll put up first money. I only have one request. And they were like, what's that? I go, I'm not running the company like. I already have another business, and I've already been an entrepreneur, and I know, hard, I mean, but, and there might be a great opportunity here. I'll, I'll get the capital. I'm certain that we have the right idea. I can find the capital, and I'll open the doors. I'll be like, more like the chairman of the board type thing. That's sort of how we started the business in April of 2018 and then a month later, paspa got repealed. Chris Christie won his case. And all of a sudden, sports betting, it wasn't legal, but it was now not illegal. And then it just was a matter of, all right, each state's going to now, you know, open up under their own set of rules and regulations. And that's here we are, five years later, and there's now 3738 jurisdictions that are now legal, and it's now, you know, basically a mass market. So all that did, in fact, happen, but it was complicated and crazy, and here we are our place where we landed in the middle of all that was we knew that US sports was going to be a different kind of sports betting product than it was over in Europe, because Europe was mainly soccer and cricket and Europe and Asia, and those are different kind of sports than, say, football, basketball and baseball, the three main sports here in the US. It just the US sports market was going to be, while much bigger and potentially much more lucrative than any other market. We also knew was much different in terms of product and user base and how it was going to work, especially in mobile. And so we said, we're going to double down in the US market with us sports and we're going to build a product that we believe that the US sports betting ecosystem really wants. And that was really how we arrived at doing what we call in play and micro betting. So what we've spent the last five years doing, we've invested, you know, over $100 million heavy investment in machine learning and automation and our technology. We're enterprise software. We sell our technology to DraftKings as a customer. Bet 365 as a customer, Caesar as a customer. And those consumer facing sports books use our technology to power their in play micro betting feature, so you can bet on every pitch and every at bat in a baseball game, or every play and every drive in a football game, every shot, every possession in a basketball game. There's millions of occurrences across 1000s of games that our technology drives betting activity through. But

David Novak 36:57 

you said that you didn't want to run this. You wanted to be more like the chairman of the board now your CEO. How'd that happen? Chris, oh

Chris Bevilacqua 37:05 

man. Well, just like any other startup, right? You hit the potholes. We got about a year, year and a half into it, and it wasn't going well. And I just said that, guys, we got to make a change here, and we got to re, re architect this. And, you know, to be fair, at the time again, I didn't know what I didn't know. But, I mean, I knew going in, I knew what I didn't know, but I going in, I also didn't know what I didn't know. And as I got about a year and a half into it, I realized that we were trying to be the jack of all trades, and we were the master of none. And we were straddling as to whether we should be a direct to consumer. In other words, compete directly with the fanduels and the DraftKings of the world, create our own sports book, and we were also trying to be in order to build that product. The technology didn't exist to build it. So we said we got to build the technology first, so we were kind of doing both things, and so that was the big mistake, and that's why I just said, We got to re architect the business. I'm not a believer that you can out compete FanDuel and Draft Kings. They have too much money, too much resource, but what we can do is build a state of the art technology platform that built a product that serves those customers, right, A, B to B, and not have the customer acquisition and not have the risk of we don't take bets, right? We just, we license our technology, and the Draft Kings of the world take the bets, and they're the ones that have to manage the cash, right? So you, you

David Novak 38:35 

enable, you enable this, you know, in game betting with your technology, and that's playing right into this trend of short attention spans. Let's make, you know, want to be in, you know, get an immediate payout one way or the other. Are you developing anything new on the horizon that's going to take advantage of that trend that's obviously just getting more and more prevalent? Yeah.

Chris Bevilacqua 38:56 

I mean, we are. Not only have we developed it, but like, we're the only ones that can do what we do at scale, right? So if you think about like baseball as an example, there's 2430 games, there's 750,000 pitches, there's 175,000 at bats, and there's dozens of markets. So there's 1000s of markets per game that we create, we suspend, we reprice, and we result them all at scale like nobody can do what we do. So that's why we're getting the product out and getting distributed. Now the next horizon, I think what you're going to see over the next few years, and this is these are areas that we're working on, are real innovation, where you now get into what we would call more like contextual or bet discovery type information. So in other words, they know you're David Novak, and they know it's you, and they know you like the New York Yankees, and they know you like betting on Aaron judge at bats. And so we can surface contextual information in real time that says, Hey, David, Aaron's up to the plate right now. You might want to bet on us at bats. Click Here, and boom, you're there. Like, that's kind of the next iteration of how you create new product and product innovation. And then you go a little further out, which is right on the horizon, also, which is now you take, instead of looking at your static Draft Kings app while you're sitting or your hard rock app while you're sitting there in West Palm Beach or North Palm Beach, and you're looking at essentially a spreadsheet with a bunch of odds on it. You can now have live video, live low latency video on the top of your screen, and the betting markets under your screen with the bet discovery. And that now, all of a sudden, it's a whole different product experience. And so that's the kind of stuff that we're working on, bringing to our customers. You know, over the next couple of years. That's

David Novak 40:41 

awesome. You know, you mentioned that when you became CEO, one of the reasons why you took that on is that the company wasn't that focused. What are you saying no to Now, Chris,

Chris Bevilacqua 40:53 

like I said earlier, you can't be the jack of all trades and the master of none. What we have to be careful about right? Is spreading our resource too thin, and if you think of it at a high level, here in the US, which is our main focus, and we have those five sports, right? We have NFL, college football, NBA, college basketball, and Major League Baseball, and we just added live golf, and we're now just starting to work on hockey, right? And you know, I remember saying time and time again when we were starting the business, like those three sports, or those five sports, when you include College, is something like 92% of all of the betting handle. So here today in the US, so you could then take on 50 new sports, but it's only going to add up to the other 8% so let's not get distracted right let's build the best specialty store we can build right now and focus on those five sports, and then there'll be a day where the specialty store is going to become more like the supermarket, where you could put up more products on the shelves, and someone that might come in to see something all of a sudden, you know, that's what we see in our for example, we see in our some of the data that we collect, we can see when someone comes in and is betting on NFL, and then the game is over at 11 o'clock, and then, oh, you know what, There's a baseball game. There's a this was amazing. There was, I think it was opening night of NFL last year. So this would have been September a year ago. NFL game is the Thursday night. It ends at whatever time. It ends at 1130 East Coast time. And there's a meaningless baseball game between the Oakland A's and the Chicago White Sox, there were both 30 games out of first place at that time. And lo and behold, we had the highest handle baseball game that we've ever had. Because people were like, wow, I'm in the store. I'm shopping. I just, you know, I just bought my NFL product before I go home and go to sleep, maybe I should try this baseball thing out. And, like, amazingly, that game became the highest handled Game of the Year, because it happened to be a baseball game on at 1030 at night on the West Coast, or 1130 at night, there was nothing else on, and people were loving engaging with a baseball game. Like, how's that

David Novak 43:21 

amazing, you know. And Chris, just getting to know you a little bit in this conversation, you've obviously have relationship building as one of your superpowers, there's no doubt about it. I mean, what do you do that's intentional? On that front,

Chris Bevilacqua 43:36 

I say to kids today when they when they're coming in and asking for advice. Like, you know, you have to really work at a relationship, like, invest in it, and like, you have to look somebody in the eye, and you have to listen to them, and you have to care about what they're saying and so, and maybe some of this is just my personality, but I can remember when I was 2324 years old, and I had that job at NBC, and I'm making $6 an hour. I can remember intentionally sitting down and getting to know people. Like, where are you from? What do you do? Like, what makes you tick? You know, investing in getting to know people and having a real relationship with them. And you know that matters. Like I always used to say to my friend, we always talked about writing a book called The last three feet. Like people do business with people that they like and they trust. It's not that complicated. And you sit across three feet from someone, and that's how deals get made and relationships get formed. And, yeah, you know, you stay in touch over the years with technology and with digital but ultimately, it's like about spending time in

David Novak 44:38 

person. I love that the last three feet, you need to write that book. That's a hell of a title. You know, Chris, it's been so much fun, and I want to have some more with what I do this lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Yeah, let's

Chris Bevilacqua 44:50 

do it lightning round.

David Novak 44:52 

What's one word others would use to best describe you?

Chris Bevilacqua 44:55 

Fair?

David Novak 44:56 

What would you say is the one word that best describes you? I.

Chris Bevilacqua 44:59 

Grinder. Who would play you in a movie? Robert De Niro,

David Novak 45:05 

if you could be one person for a day besides yourself? Who would it be?

Chris Bevilacqua 45:09 

Probably Phil Knight,

David Novak 45:12 

your biggest pet peeve,

Chris Bevilacqua 45:13 

this is one of my kids hear about all the time being late.

David Novak 45:18 

You're the two time all American wrestler in college, and you win an Emmy for your role in the 88 soul Olympics. What are you most proud of?

Chris Bevilacqua 45:25 

Oh, my, my wrestling days.

David Novak 45:29 

What's one of your daily rituals? Something you never miss my workout? What's something in the gambling industry that you would only know if you were in it. Oh,

Chris Bevilacqua 45:41 

geez. The probably the way data rights ecosystem works. It is super complicated.

David Novak 45:49 

If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear,

Chris Bevilacqua 45:52 

Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger.

David Novak 45:56 

What's something about you? Few people would know?

Chris Bevilacqua 45:59 

I guess I'm a softy with my kids.

David Novak 46:04 

That's great. That's the end of the light. You're well done. Good job. I just got a few more questions, and we'll wrap this up. Okay, you're married and you have four kids. How do you lead at home?

Chris Bevilacqua 46:15 

Really, not much differently than I do in business. You know, do by example, set by example. And I want my kids to, you know, to know that. But I also, I think it's important to listen too. So you want to listen and lead by example, but also be firm. You know,

David Novak 46:35 

you've also brokered some big time deals in your career. What's the single most important thing, the one thing that you try to keep in mind the most when you're in negotiation,

Chris Bevilacqua 46:47 

oh, it's definitely the other side, right? Because you know, when you're in a negotiation, your negotiating partner has objectives too, right? And so I need to know going into a negotiation, what is motivating my I don't want to call them adversary, but my negotiating partner, like, what is it that he or she wants? And I have to put myself in their shoes, and I want to think like they're thinking, right? It's a little bit of a psychoanalytical exercise. And so going into it, I just want to know what the primary motivating factor of that, of the other side is, and then I'm going to try to solve for that. While I get what I need,

David Novak 47:32 

what's the unfinished business you have now? Chris, I

Chris Bevilacqua 47:36 

think it's my family, my kids and my wife and I have this discussion all the time. It's like, you know, there's a lot of craziness in the world these days, and you know, some of it seems nonsensical to me, and I'm just a common sense guy, and if what I do, and you know, my mom, she just passed away a few weeks ago, and sorry to hear that, yeah, she was a great woman, and, you know, I was saying, and I said this in front of the congregation and my and I also made it a point to say to my kids, like, you know, mom was in the business of creating good people. Do the right thing, because it's the right thing to do. Like we live life and we preach life's golden rule, like, do unto others, as you have them do unto you, like don't treat anybody in a way that you one want them to treat you. It's like it's makes it super simple. So my mom, her secret sauce was scaling goodness, right? She had love in her heart, you know, she passed on to her children. And if I could do the same for my children, and then they go out into the world and do it to their and their friends and their colleagues and so forth. Like, if I could do that, that's my unfinished business.

David Novak 48:47 

I love the notion of scaling goodness. I'm going to keep that top of mind. I I'd like to be a part of that, that effort as well. You know, last question for you, imagine you're having coffee with someone who wants to become a better leader. What's the number one piece of advice you'd give them? I

Chris Bevilacqua 49:04 

would say, you know, in terms of leadership, right? You know, just having, you know, and I sort of talk about this, and sort of, what are the key ingredients of being an entrepreneur, but also being a leader. As an entrepreneur, don't get out competed. You can't be afraid to fail, and you want to be curious. But I think when like you're passing on, like you're trying to be a leader, right, I think it's important that you have empathy for others and you understand, you know, because if you're trying to lead the way, right, you want to provide a real vision for you know how the future is going to look and how all the people that are getting behind that vision are all motivated, incentivized, and we're all kind of rowing in the same direction. So I think leadership comes down to that package of things that I just mentioned. And you know, everybody's going to do it their own way, and they're going to have their own style about it, but I think if you stick to to those ingredients, you'll be a great leader, right?

David Novak 49:59 

So, you know, Chris, I got to ask you this, you never give up. Okay, you are a competitor. The worst you're ever going to do is tie, right? You know, how do you manage yourself? Do you ever get out of control on the competitive side of things? I mean, how do you really keep things in perspective? Yeah, you know, that's

Chris Bevilacqua 50:19 

a good question. My wife is very helpful. My wife Kristen, by the way, and she knows me as well as anyone. And there can be times where you go from productive competitiveness into unproductive competitiveness. Sometimes it takes a third party that's that close to say, Well, wait a minute, not sure you're looking at that the the right way. And I think it is a it's a fine line, like, I'm proud of the fact that you just basically have to kill me to beat me, like, and that's just kind of like the way it's going to be, I'll die on that hill. And so now you might beat me because you're better, which is fair. And there are times that I lose, but you're not going to beat me because you out competed in me, or you outlasted me. And you know that some others might interpret that with a word called stubbornness, and there can be a time, you know, times where stubbornness is not productive and that I have to keep in check on

David Novak 51:17 

Perfect. Perfect. Chris, you're a hell of a guy. You're a great storyteller. What a life. Lot of great stuff there. You know? I mean, really good, really

Chris Bevilacqua 51:25 

my wife, they surprised me this summer with everyone hates knows how I hate birthday parties. And they surprised me with the 60th. I just turned 60, and I gave a little talk. What I said was, it is amazing that I've lived the life that I've lived like. It's been an extremely rich life. I got married a little bit later in life, had kids a little bit later in life, so I had a little bit more of a single life before, yeah, I mean, and the way it sort of played out for me, and, you know, I pinched myself, it has been quite a ride. And, you know, I've had my ups and downs like others, but all in all, it's been there's nothing to complain about.

David Novak 52:17 

Listening to Chris today, it's not hard to connect the dots between the success he's had in his career and the relationships that he's built along the way. I love how he talks about those last three feet of business where all our deals and plans and strategies often come down to whether or not we actually like and trust the person sitting across the table from us. It's so easy to barrel through your day knocking out tasks, but don't forget to cultivate real relationships. I'm telling you, the stronger those relationships, the easier it is to accomplish what it is you want to get done. Plus, life is just better that way. This week, I want you to reflect on a major turning point in your career. How did your relationships factor into your success? What can you learn from that situation that could help you now as you look toward your next big win? So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders understand the power of great relationships coming up next on how leaders lead is Ram Sharan, author and renowned business consultant.

Ram Charan 53:27 

You know, in my work with the boards, almost 100 boards now across the globe, this is one of the most critical qualities the directors have. They have this incisive questions. I actually measure them. They have less than 15 words in their question. So

David Novak 53:45 

be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead, where every Thursday, you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business, so that you will become the best leader you can be. You.