Good morning, everyone. My name is Ryan Sigdahl. I'm a senior analyst at Craig-Hallum covering online gambling. With me is Mike Slade, a senior advisor to Genius Sports. He has an extensive career resume, and that is an understatement. Worked at Microsoft, introduced Excel, as well as other Microsoft products, worked as CEO of Starwave, launched ESPN.com, NBA.com, NFL.com, strategic advisor to Steve Jobs. The list goes on, and I apologize, Mike, I probably missed several in the middle, but maybe take us through.
Please do.
Maybe take us through your career a little bit. And what the heck are you doing at Genius Sports?
I mean, in the, to be as brief as possible, I've been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of things just as they were changing rapidly. Like, I got to introduce Excel right after the Mac came out when the PC was kind of migrating from text-based interface to graphical interface, first on the Mac and then with Windows. And then I was lucky enough to be running this Paul Allen-funded company called Starwave. Right as the internet took off, we launched ESPN.com in April of 1995, just as, like, Yahoo started and people started using AOL a lot, and people started using their high-speed connection at work to check out sports scores and stock prices and stuff. Productivity never recovered. It's mostly my fault.
Then, I was lucky enough to work with Steve when he returned to Apple for a long time, which was really, really fun. I'd worked with him before at NeXT, and I got to help him as an advisor. And then since then, I've always done two things. I've done a lot of venture capital work, mostly angel investing in small companies that I'd advise and go on the board of. And then I've also done a lot of consulting with bigger companies, mostly on marketing and strategy and branding. And so, a couple of years ago, I started working with Genius on kind of the intersection of what they were doing and where they were going. And where they were going was, much more tech-focused.
What we're seeing now, and why it's so fun for me, is we're seeing kind of the real first real change in how people are consuming sports, in quite a while as sports and sports video in particular goes digital, finally. Digital in a couple of ways. One is that, some of the broadcasters now are not ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, Fox. They're Amazon and Apple and Google and Netflix. And, that's a big change, obviously. And at the same time, most sports fans now consume sports on a multi-screen environment with their phone out or maybe two devices out. And people now consume sports not just to watch the game, but also to play fantasy or to maybe put a small prop bet on or whatever and have fun. And so there's a lot more interest in the precision of what's going on than just the outcome.
And that's very different than it was 10 or 20 years ago for lots of reasons. You know, we pioneered doing real-time play-by-play on the internet in 1995. And now today, for the first time, we're starting to see that be automated and digitized for the first time. So you're at this kind of convergence of tech, how you're consuming it, how you can analyze it, and what you can do with it that's never really happened before. And at the same time, in the U.S. in particular, the stigma has kind of been removed from gambling. It already was removed in Europe a long time ago. And separate from the actual gambling, it ends up being a thing where people focus on all the precise moments in a game, not just who won or who lost and by how much, which was the way gambling used to work.
And also, that sort of started with fantasy and then light fantasy like FanDuel and DraftKings when they weren't so much oriented towards betting. And now it's a big blur. So in general, you have a, it's as if every sports fan is like a Wall Street analyst, right? They're super focused on every detail, and they didn't used to be at all. And that's kind of the way the world is anyway. We're all digitized. We have our phones on all the time. And, you know, I always laugh that, you know, my kids can get a mortgage from the back of an Uber ride, you know? You know, so that's why I'm here, because it's really a, it's a fun place, and I'm trying to help a little bit in both, strategy and marketing and branding and product vision.
And Genius is an amazing company that's positioned sort of at the center of it. And then the really amazing thing is nobody else really has our strategy, which is super, super cool, which is to be tech-first and to push, beyond just where we're already going.
Nothing better than being compared to a Wall Street analyst, from my standpoint. So, good start there.
What can I say?
It also has this personalization and kind of the transformation moment. I guess, how do you bring, whether it's computer vision, whether it's AI, whether it's, you know, insert other kind of tech buzzword in this day and age, but how do you bring all this together? What's kind of the core competency, and how do you kind of get from here to, you know, where we are in five years?
I think a lot of people in companies focus on features instead of experiences. They go, "Oh, we got a new feature. Look, it does X, it does Y, you know, it measures your blood pressure," or whatever. What you want to focus on is what it does for the consumer and who the consumer is. If the consumer is a hardcore, young, fun, you know, dialed-in sports fan, well, you know, I think myself and a bunch of my colleagues have no trouble understanding that demographic. I've always found that it's easier to do a good job if you can relate to the target market. You know, Steve Jobs pretty much designed the iPhone for himself. I mean, and I don't mean that in a mean way. His target market was him. He'd never used a cell phone.
He didn't care, right? He thought they had stupid little buttons. I remember I asked him, I go, "Well, you told me, Steve, you wanted to get rid of all the buttons in that dumb BlackBerry ahead." He goes, "No, I didn't want to get rid of the buttons. I wanted to move them around, you know, like a magician." And so that's an example of, you know, just thinking like out of the box, what does a fan really like? So some of the things we've done are like that in the sense that, you know, like we have this BetVision product where you're—you've got your betting app open, and you can stream the NFL games and other sports to come, and at the same time kind of get sort of like an interactive control panel to see how your bets are doing in real time.
You can maybe tap a player and look what a prop bet might be on that player, and so that's an example of something where there wasn't like some giant market research study. It was more intuitive, like, "I'll bet this would be something people liked," and we really did. The other mistake I think a lot of companies make that we don't make is that the best way to find out things in the internet age is to learn by doing, not by thinking, and so when you try things, that's when you get the best feedback. You don't want to try it in, like, a half-baked way, but once you have something that you're proud of, if you try it, you instantly find out, well, people like this more than they like that, and it's relatively easy to try it.
And so, you know, you need a partner who wants to partner with you and is okay with the risk or whatever. But it's almost always a good idea to try something. And people don't—it isn't like it used to be like, you know, you open a Broadway musical and it flops. You're like, "Oh, no," you know? But, you know, when you try things and roll them out, people are okay with the fact that it might change a little bit, and it might not be 100% done when you first try it. And so, that's kind of how I view the world, is that you—you make an approximation of who the target market is and come up with things that, you know, they might seem impossible until you try to implement them. But you say, "Wouldn't this be cool," right?
You know, "Wouldn't this be what I'd really want if I was the customer?" And then when you can pull them off, you're like, "Yeah, it was pretty easy. It's really cool," you know? So that's kind of what we're doing. And we have this thing where we're using AI and computer vision to do things like automate offsides and stuff. And that'll have a ton of benefits beyond that, where once you have a system installed in a venue, you can capture all this data, what's going on in the field at a level of precision that's never really been done before. And I kind of always tell people that the experience that people will eventually have in consuming sports is the experience every teenage boy already has playing Madden or FIFA or NBA 2K or whatever. And I have two teenage boys.
And watching them play video games, of course, it doesn't look quite as real as live video, but I got news for you. They don't care, right? They just think it's fun. And then this whole thing is like, "Oh, we'll have multiple camera angles. Won't that be cool?" And they're like, "I have thousands of camera angles. I just, you know, zoom around and show me the replay of the goal from seven different angles." And they just take it for granted, you know? So that they're always the target market is the people who've grown up with something. They're like, "Oh, yeah, of course, you know, I got a mortgage from the back of my Uber," right? You know, didn't you?
The player-first mentality is one I think a lot of companies missed, is trying to put yourself in their shoes of what they want and then build it and try it. You mentioned a few things, BetVision, maybe one example of that. I think the first iteration last year, you know, was heavy on the watch. Now it's heavier on the user experience around that. And I think there's a lot more coming potentially there. But can you just talk about ways, you know, and maybe where you think Genius is at with the core technology they have and where they can potentially go with that? Whether that be BetVision or just the broader sports fan engagement and personalization of that viewership?
Yeah, there's a bunch of things that we're working on that will eventually converge. At the moment, they aren't quite converged yet, which is usually the case in technology. So BetVision is really a classic example of this learn-by-doing thing where we had the ability to show customers of some of our partners that had the rights to show people NFL games. And we tried it last year just to see whether it made any difference, to see what people thought about it. And we were kind of surprised by how positive the reaction was to it. You know, you think about it, you're using the app from, you know, one of our partners, and, like, you can watch the game anyway, right? There's other ways to watch it. You get a television, you know, whatever.
And people really liked it because they could do it in real time and go back and forth. And so this year, it was kind of a logical step. It wasn't easy from a technical standpoint because you have to integrate really tightly with your partners to add features that are based around knowing what's going on. So, you know, we know what's going on in the game, right? We get the data feed. And so you can suggest things. And the thing about in-play betting versus outcome-based betting is it's kind of a lighter weight, more positive experience. It isn't like, "Oh, my God, I mortgaged our house," you know, whatever. You know, it's more like, "Oh, I'll try a little lightweight thing to see, you know, how many yards he's going to get in the second half," you know? It's almost like playing fantasy, right? It's just fun.
And so we find, so like I was saying, to do it right, you had to integrate with the partners in a really tight way. And it's worked out incredibly well. The engagement is really high. People love it. And at the same time, we have this other effort going on to automate tracking and analyzing what goes on live in a broadcast in a game with this offside stuff we're doing with the English Premier League. And that stuff is really complicated. It's never been done before. It uses a series of networked iPhones in all these venues. And once it's finally perfected, it will give us this access to a tremendous amount of information at a level of kind of granularity that's never really been done before. And you can do literally anything with it. You can turn it into interactive 3D rendered video.
You can turn it into augmented advertising. You can turn it into automated highlight creation. You can analyze every player's performance to, you know, 10,000 points of mesh per person times 100 or 200 frames per second times 90 minutes times 120 yards times 70 yards. It's like just mind-boggling amounts of information. And because we use iPhones to do it, we don't have to build this gigantic network that crashes. Most of it's the processing that's being done locally on the phone, which is a supercomputer. And it has tons of storage and tons of AI and tons of processing power and great video. And so eventually, you can see how these things will converge because, you know, nobody really knows what the business model of pro sports will be in five or ten years. Will it be ad-driven? Will it be gambling-driven? Will it still be rights-based?
How big will gate receipts be? How much will the operators of the future pay for rights? There's so many different ways to get the fan engaged that you might have a whole different business model in ten years. No one really knows. But one thing we do know is that it'll be super digital. By that time, I'm sure lots of people will be wearing VR headsets and experiencing the game in a different way. At some point, that will become a real thing. It's just obvious that it will. And so having this data infrastructure in place, data capture and data analysis and data infrastructure in place allows you to do basically all those things going forward. And so it's this big forward-looking investment where it's not just about, "Hey, we got to do offsides and refereeing.
Isn't that cool?" It's also about, "Hey, we get to be in this position to provide so much extra fun, interesting, never-before-done experiences to the fans and to the players and to the teams and to everybody involved, advertisers, anybody.
You mentioned kind of the automated network of iPhones, so my understanding is the data capture itself and the screens and whether you're using iPhones or other isn't really the difficult thing. The complex thing is taking all of that and turning it into useful use cases, although I couldn't do the math of how many frames, et cetera, from what you were saying, but I guess, how do you think Genius compares in their ability to not just capture, aggregate, distribute the data, but actually turn it into use cases, and where do you think we're at in that, you know, in baseball?
I mean, that's another example of learn-by-doing, right? Like, the thing about automating offsides, it's never been done before. Our approach to doing it was different than other people's approaches is that we didn't use high-end video cameras. We chose to use iPhones because, you know, the trend is always in computing to push to the edge and use the local processing power so you don't have to rely because the networks always fail, right? They just, I mean, it's just, I've been in tech for too long. They just always fail. A phone never, you know, might overheat, but rarely, right? Having done that, once that's in place, it was really complicated to, it is really complicated to take all that data. Back up. Here's the weird thing.
It used to be like, "Oh my gosh, video is the holy grail," right? But what it really is now is turning video, which is kind of a dumb thing, into data, which is a smart thing. So it seems counterintuitive. You think you just get the data, but no, you take the video and all those frames per second and all that frame rate and, you know, super high res and everything, and you turn it into data. And then you take the data and kind of, I'm not going to come up with the right verb here, put it together, right, in this complicated way with a bunch of phones deployed. The nice thing about gambling, sorry, on committing to phones instead of cameras is that it's pretty clear the thing that will continue to get differentiated in the high-end smartphone market is video, right?
You know, there's not that much else they can change besides the user interface and maybe throwing some AI in there. So the video is getting better and better and better quality. So once the video is in place and we have these infrastructures of iPhones, like in, say, Premier League venues, then the amount of data we can manipulate and do different things with is just endless, right? So like I said, you can do it to automate offsides, which is super complicated and involves kind of forming real-time parallelograms and where's the kick point. And, you know, now it's done in this cumbersome manual way and every goal is reviewed anyway. So it could save a ton of time and also could be, you know, way more accurate. But then there's all these other things you could do with the same data, right?
And so no one else has really tried this approach. And that's because I think in the world we live in, we're much more of a, we act more like a software company than a gambling company, right? And that's kind of one of the things I'm super excited about is that we are a tech-oriented company. And we know that the way to differentiate and have lasting differentiation is through killer tech. So we've never stopped investing in tech, and it's working. That's the thing. So the thing about Genius that's so interesting to me as a cynical 40-year tech vet is I got there a couple of years ago, started helping them out, started doing more and more. And Mark Locke told me a bunch of things he wanted to do, right?
Like, you know, typical CEO, "I want to do all this great stuff." And we've literally done every single thing he said he was going to do, right? You know, so different than, say, politicians, right? So literally every single thing he told me, whatever it was almost three years ago, that he wanted to do, we are doing or have already done. And I'm like, "There you go," right? That just, you know, that is really rare in technology, really rare in any business.
We hear a lot about Second Spectrum and kind of the head start from a technology, computer vision, AI standpoint. How much of this is, you know, built around Second Spectrum and that core competency that was acquired a couple of years ago and expanded on versus kind of the central DNA of the company and other aspects?
The answer is yes. One of the things that they brought me on to do originally was help integrate the companies because they, of course, came from sort of different cultural places in terms of how they approach the workplace. Integrating a fairly large acquisition, it's not like, you know, two banks merging or something, but it was a fairly large acquisition is really complicated for lots of reasons. Genius is a global company that has offices all over the place. So it took a while to figure out how to integrate the companies exactly. For a while, they kept them separate, which anyway, and then they eventually decided to integrate it more. Once we integrated it more, the synergy between the different kinds of smart people who had different experiences had been just fantastic.
And so I helped in a little tiny way there because I speak all those different languages from my career. But the answer is both sides have worked really well together to integrate stuff together and come up with some of this stuff. Like, you know, you take doing offsides for the Premier League. Well, the idea for the technology came from the Second Spectrum side, but the how to put it together and integrate it came from being already partners with the Premier League, which was the Genius side, right? So the two sides had to work really close together and stop being sides. There's no sides anymore, right? It took a while, but there are no sides anymore. And I have to say, you can look it up. Most tech acquisitions don't go well. They're usually just, you know, I was on the board of aQuantive.
Microsoft acquired it for $6.7 billion and then wrote it off a year later. So that one didn't go well. Worked good for me. I was a shareholder, right? But not so much. So that's an example of something that didn't go well just because they were like, both sides were unwilling to change their cultures to work together. And we've done a really good job of integrating Second Spectrum with Genius. And it was tricky just because they had different cultures. But you have to kind of like go into it assuming that's the problem. As opposed to like, "Why can't you guys get along better?" You have to say, "Well, you come from here and you come from here." And obviously we have these goals. And as soon as you have a project to work on, a lot of the stuff just goes away, right?
You have a project. It's like, "Well, we got it. We're busy here. We're building a house. You know, we got to get going," you know?
Mike, you might be the glue guy to this company where you need the mediator in the middle to kind of bring everyone together.
Well, I don't always say what I think. I don't really give it, you know? I don't really care. I'll say what I want. So that always helps, right? You know, I'm like, "Yeah, sure," you know?
FanHub, ad tech side, how much of that does that utilize kind of AI and kind of a lot of what we've talked about versus the future and the opportunities there?
It does a lot because if you ask somebody like, "Well, why would you go with Genius to help you run an ad campaign or figure out ad strategy?" It's because we understand sports fans kind of better than almost anyone else. It turned out that nobody really had as their distinctive competence. We understand how to reach sports fans and target them in different ways. And so you know, by the way, who's a sports fan? Well, almost anybody, right? So, but there's just lots of different slices. Yeah, it uses a lot of different kinds of technology to effectively target people in clever ways.
And again, this is an example of something where you might have thought a few years ago, "Isn't this kind of out of your lane?" You know, like, "Why are you doing this?" And we learned by doing, right? We did it. Stuff worked. We did more of it. We integrated it together. People from the other parts of the business contributed. Yeah. So the answer is, again, if you have a good idea and you start small, sometimes it works really well. One of the interesting things about Genius, which sounds weird, is that, so you know, at our revenue size, we're not a small company, but we're still at the point where something generates $1 million in revenue. It's interesting to us. It isn't like that classic problem of, "Don't bring this to me unless it's going to be a $1 billion business." We're not really like that.
We understand that, you know, all $100 million-dollar businesses started as $1 million-dollar businesses, right? You know, so they go. So that's the approach to the various parts of our ad business have been driven by that idea of just, "Let's find a partner, find something that works, do it again, refine it, whatever." All the different parts of the tech contributed. And the successes are just amazing. And by the way, like I said before, because no one really knows exactly how the business model of sports will be in five or 10 years, it could be a huge part of the pie chart.
You've launched a lot of products early on, and you just mentioned every hundred-million-dollar product starts as a million. But where do you think the company is at? Because from my standpoint, the cool factor is there. All the backend data, tech, AI, computer vision, all of it. You have a significant head start in the market leadership. As far as the monetization of it, right now you're kind of getting Amazon, you're getting CBS, you're getting the leagues, you're getting the customers to, and you're kind of getting everyone to utilize Genius's technology in a much bigger way. But where do you think you're at from a monetization standpoint? And how do those other products that you launched kind of, what's the phases of getting that from adoption to monetization and critical?
Well, I mean, like if you take something like SAOT, the offside stuff, right? Well, it's a business unto itself, and we're happy with the business arrangement, but it also enables us to launch all these, plant all these other flags and how big they'll be or how quickly they'll be, how big is sort of TBD, but it's kind of like you're playing with house money, right? You already have the infrastructure built in place, and everybody who's involved, all the partners want this stuff anyway. They all want to have more data and more experiences and try more things, whether it's in-house, in-stadium advertising or different kinds of replays or stuff marketed to consumers after the fact or more augmented broadcast.
And so, I've been very impressed with the management because they do a really good job of keeping their partners in a place where we're all really happy with the relationships and then building on it. So, so far, like I said, you can just look at the results. They kind of speak for themselves. I'm not the IR guy, right? You can kind of look for it yourself. The results just keep getting, they're just keep building and building and building because we have a lot of partners and we work closely with them and they like us and we like them.
You've been at the company for a couple of years. You said everything Mark has wanted to do, you've done that. When you look at the pipeline without getting too specific over the next three years, is there an acceleration in innovation and kind of the core infrastructure that you have and the products that you can launch, or is this getting to a point where you have a lot of that in market and it's now just?
Oh, no, it's what the first thing you said. A lot of things are just starting, right? So, you know, a lot of these things are just, like I would be surprised if in a couple of years we didn't have a lot more things like the Premier League offside thing going, all of which are kind of like core design wins to enable us to try and iterate in a bunch of different businesses surrounding them in addition to helping leagues with refereeing, right? So I think you'll see a lot more of that. Yeah, no, when I say he's done everything he was going to say, I'm not like, well, we're done, we're hitting the beach. I mean, like every commitment we've sort of internally made, we've lived up to and we've transformed the company in a lot of ways.
No, I would say, I mean, of course I would say this, but I'm super excited about the next few years and poised for growth. And you know, for me, at this stage of my career, I mean, the last time I had this much fun was probably either following Steve Jobs around or launching my own company. That was a long time ago. And for me, it's because, like I said, when you're around something that has a high rate of change and you think that, and you like the subject matter anyway, that's when it's really fun because all the rules haven't been written yet, right? So like in 1995, nobody knew what to charge for an internet ad, right? We just made it up, right? We charge Gatorade $30,000, you know, here you go.
So a lot of the things we're talking about here with respect to Genius are like that. The quote rules haven't really been set yet because the market and the business and the partners and consumer preferences are changing still really rapidly, which is the most fun time and the most opportunity, right? You know, why was Apple such a good buy in 2003 and four and five and six? Because mobile computing was about to happen in a big way, right? No one really saw it, but it just went crazy, right?
This is fantastic, Mike. Any last parting words? You have an audience of institutional investors on here. I think we've covered most of the topics I wanted, but I'll give you 30 seconds if there's anything else you want to add.
Every $100 billion market cap company used to be a $2 billion market cap company at some point.
I agree. Very good. Mike, very much appreciate it. Very informative. Thank you, everyone, for joining.
Thank you so much. It was really fun.