Following the Customer

 

How Matt Kalish brought together a love for sport, a growth mindset, and deep customer empathy to build DraftKings into a platform that forever raised the bar for the experience of sports.

 

Episode Notes

Matt Kalish saw an opportunity to bring avid sports fans like himself closer to the sports they follow. And out of that opportunity came DraftKings, the ubiquitous platform that has been a leading player in the growth of fantasy sports gaming.

In his talk with Jesse, Matt describes the conditions, insights, and strategic moves that positioned DraftKings for success. He discusses his early years as an entrepreneur and gaming enthusiast, the importance of product-led growth, and the innovations that DraftKings is bringing to the fan experience across sports leagues; all while offering advice on how to build in line with your own purpose.

(4:42) Matt’s early years before venturing into corporate America

(9:43) Discovering how to build products for “skin-in-the-game” fans

(13:16) Scaling from Daily Fantasy to other offers and experiences

(18:28) Using customer data to push advertisers, networks, and leagues to embrace experiential innovation

(21:46) Turning competency and passion into opportunity

(27:00) Keeping the customer at the center of everything

Guest Bio

Matt Kalish is President of DraftKings North America. Kalish co-founded DraftKings in 2012 and is accountable for all North America revenue, bringing together all marketing, operations, and related analytics functions.

Kalish has led his team to go beyond the industry standards by finding ways to improve DraftKings’ customers’ game experience by introducing more sports and ways to play, driving DraftKings towards offering the most comprehensive platform for skin-in-the-game sports fans available in the US. Moreover, he maintains a strong focus on DraftKings’ consumer protections to ensure the company maintains high standards of integrity and responsibility.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Matt Kalish: Everybody doesn't have to be a CEO or an entrepreneur who's starting something and leading it and building everything on their back. People are all different types of personalities, skillsets. I often tell people, in a million years, I would never be the CEO of a company. It's not me.

So you have to be honest about what role you want to play, what you're good at, and don't be afraid to say, "This isn't right for me. This is too much, too little." Try and find that spot where you can sustain over the long term and be happy with what you're doing.

[00:00:35] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas, fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal, head of brand at Qualtrics, builder, coach, storyteller, and your host.

Just a quick heads up that we had some challenges in the recording of today's guest's audio. So the sound quality isn't the A+ resolution that you're used to, but the message is well worth it. Few brands are more synonymous with breakthroughs in the experience of sports than DraftKings.

The company got started in Boston in 2012 with daily fantasy sports games. And now, 10 years later, it offers hundreds of betting experiences across dozens of leagues in just about every sport. How'd they achieve such scale and category leadership so quickly? To find out, I wanted to talk with Matt Kalish.

Matt is one of the co-founders of DraftKings and the president of DraftKings North America. In our conversation, we hit on the hustle that Matt displayed in his early years, his journey from corporate jobs to entrepreneurship, how he sees DraftKings as a way to experience sports, how the company continually innovates for its audience, how DraftKings has forced TV networks and sports leagues to rethink their own audience experiences, what it's like to build a business and a brand around a personal passion, and Matt's best advice for new entrepreneurs. We got things started talking about the regard Matt has for one particular GOAT named Tom Brady.

[00:02:11] Matt Kalish: Yeah, I'm really in a good place with Brady. I think because I grew up when it wasn't always so good in Boston with sports in the '90s. And then I had this extreme spoiled phase where from, whatever, 2001 up until even present day really, things have been great in Boston. And Brady was really the crown jewel of our sports world, so I owe him a lot of really good feelings.

And then, seeing him go to Tampa Bay and succeed, almost kind of like break free from that identity of the Patriots and Bill Belichick, I think that really says a lot about out what he's going to do with the rest of his life. Really, really excited to watch his progression.

[00:02:49] Jesse Purewal: You're a couple years younger than me, which means you must have a discernible memory of where you were for the tuck rule game in the blizzard against the Raiders. Where were you when that happened?

[00:02:59] Matt Kalish: So I remember this game pretty well. I can't remember exactly what I had going on, but for some reason I only caught the very end. So I came in the fourth quarter, saw the tuck rule play, thought that they were just dead, then they weren't dead. Then we had the Vinatieri snow kick, and that was kind of the emergence of Adam Vinatieri as well, who now is a total hero in Boston.

I was in college during this time. I was at Columbia, so I wasn't watching it out of the Boston area with a bunch of fans. I was in my dorm room. It was also in New York, so that a couple years later with the Red Sox, it was all Yankees fans around. And I hardly got to enjoy the Red Sox busting off their championship.

But incredible time there in sports where Patriots went from really just nobody thought anything was really going to happen to next thing they're like this dynasty that is one of the beacons of sports over the last 20 years really. They've held up that bar.

[00:03:53] Jesse Purewal: Who's on your Mount Rushmore of Boston sports? It doesn't have to be four people, and it doesn't have to be males either, but who are the icons for you?

[00:04:02] Matt Kalish: I have a strong appreciation for what Larry Bird did, but maybe moreso like Paul Pierce, I would say. He was a little bit more contemporaneous with me being really aware of sports. So I would probably put Paul Pierce and Larry Bird up there. I'm a big Celtics guy. Of every Boston team really, the C's are what I follow the most. And then, you got to be on Team Brady all the way. And then David Ortiz definitely was heart and soul of Boston for a decent stretch there as well. So I would say those four..

[00:04:32] Jesse Purewal: Tell me a little bit about where and how early you discovered the entrepreneurial zest. If I had gone back in time and met 11-year-old Matt or 12-year-old Matt, who's the person I would've met?

[00:04:42] Matt Kalish: I think my first job was a summer camp job when I was 11 or 12. I was making $50 a week. And I lived next door to a 7-Eleven as well, so the first job that was paid, other than that, that I ever got was at 7-Eleven. I walked over one day and mowed their lawn. This was in New Hampshire. It's like a, a little bit more of a rural area.

[00:05:01] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I'd say 7-Eleven having a lawn, that's a remarkable experience today.

[00:05:05] Matt Kalish: Yeah. It had like these two strips. And I noticed the owners, they hadn't really been keeping the yard in good shape. So I took the lawn mower over, I just did it for free. And then, I walked in and I asked them, if you want, I can come over every week and do it. They started paying me like 10 or 20 bucks a week just to go over and mow their lawn. I had a bunch of other jobs like being a host at a restaurant. I did room service, a bunch of stuff just to earn money.

Then when I got to college poker really is what took over a lot of my attention. I had this real interest in, okay, I can learn this game, and then I can compete and play whenever I want and I can earn some money. And at first, it was like beer money, trying to win 20, 30 bucks. And then one day, I won $3,000 in a tournament, and that's what really got me like, okay, I want to learn this game.

There's probably a lot of luck is what led to me winning that. But it really hooked my interest. And then I said, "Okay, I want to take this more seriously and learn the game." And then, from that point forward, skill gaming and that sort of thing really took a bigger part of my life.

[00:06:04] Jesse Purewal: So it wasn't like you're out there trying to hack capitalism. You were just more like, "There's some really fun, unexpected, enjoyable ways to go out there and make a buck." And you might lose eight times out of 10, but when you win, maybe that rush from winning big is kind of fueling something.

[00:06:23] Matt Kalish: Yeah. I'd say my appreciation for corporate America really was self-starting and came after college. My parents were in the military, and then my dad worked in a prison. My mom, she was a hairdresser. And so, they had these kind of like blue collar jobs. I didn't have any insight into corporate America really. We were living in New Hampshire, and there wasn't a ton going on to be honest.

And the way I ended up at Columbia was running. I got a call from the track coach, and he explained to me what Ivy League schools were and showed me the campus. I did an official visit and ended up realizing, okay, this is a good idea. I should go to this college. It seems like a good direction.

But when I graduated, I didn't know a lot of people in corporate America, so I really figured out a lot of that on my own. My first job was at Fidelity Investments. I was doing just kind of like data entry, operations kind of stuff for their benefits business. Started meeting more people from corporate America, started getting interested in getting promotions, all that kind of stuff, thinking about my career path. But that was much later in life. I knew I wanted to earn money sooner, and then figuring out corporate America came a bit later.

[00:07:31] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. And I've heard the trappings of the founding story of DraftKings, that is that you take this idea to Jason and Paul and you say, "Okay, here's kind of what I think this could look like." And by their tellings, or what I've read of their tellings, it's kind of like, yeah, that sounds like it could be onto something.

[00:07:47] Matt Kalish: Yeah. Jason, who's our CEO, I worked with him in corporate America and I actually had two jobs across six years, I think, before DraftKings. And we had a lot in common. One of the things we having common was corporate America is really frustrating. We felt like we were working really hard. We were growing, advancing, but it's a hamster wheel that can be very, very frustrating at times.

So come like 2011, we were both managers at VistaPrint. I think I had like $9,000 in the bank. Jason had probably something similar. I don't know exactly. And every year I'd go into my review and the review would be like, "You're doing great. Six months, you'll probably get promoted. Maybe you'll get another direct report. Maybe you'll get some project in six months that'll be interesting," whatever. It was just not enough.

So we were very aligned that we wanted more, we wanted to do something entrepreneurial, and we had talked a lot about different ideas. DraftKings was the idea that made us actually go start doing nights and weekend. And the idea here was what if you could draft every day, like fantasy, but every single day you can come on, pick new teams? That was something we shared in common, and we both realized the experience of being a sports fan in the U.S. just really isn't that good. So this idea of, "Hey, what if you draft every day, you can compete with your friends, you can compete for big prizes against the whole world and we'll build that platform where you can do that," that was the jump off point.

[00:09:17] Jesse Purewal: Were you back in the day playing weekly fantasy and getting out the Sunday paper and looking up the stats and seeing who won after the week? Were you guys into this as hobbyists and had that notion of, "Oh my gosh, internet, more availability of data?" Was it out of personal conviction and experience? Or was it a little more like, "This is a big problem that a whole bunch of people are having, and let's see if we can go do something with it?"

[00:09:42] Matt Kalish: If I was a customer of DraftKings, I would be our best customer for sure. And we're building products that me, Jason, Paul, people like us would like, which is we call it the skin in the game sports fan, which is somebody that doesn't just want to sit there and watch the game. They want to make predictions. They want to compete, play. They like having something on the line, some risk reward there. That's what makes things interesting. And there's a lot of outlets for that. We saw fantasy as a really good example though of here's a way to make sports more engaging, more fun. And nobody was really doing this concept at any real scale. So we felt like our skills were A, we're big fans of these games, but also we're direct marketers. We're analysts. We can write code. We can really operate a business like this. So it aligned really well with interest, but also what we thought we did best.

[00:10:33] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Yeah, it strikes me that DraftKings in some ways is really about reframing sport away from a product and towards more of an experience. It's not about spectating or appointment TV. It's actually, "Let's go have an experience around following a player, following a team, smack talking with friends, getting involved with people in some ways that you find a new on-ramp." Is that notion of, "Let's make this an experience," versus, "Let's just make this a consumable product," part of how you thought about how you build customer base and build community around this?

[00:11:09] Matt Kalish: Yeah, that's the gift, I think, is everything becomes an experience really. What DraftKings has become over the years is initially, our first product was Fantasy Game, but we've realized it's not that, it's understanding the lifestyle of people like me, like tens of millions of people really in the U.S. And how is it that these things all seem to become experiences or things that you can predict or wager on? And how do we then bring those products to market in different ways? Just by like following the attention of our audience really and seeing what's going on with them at any given time.

[00:11:44] Jesse Purewal: Before we go to audience and experience again, I want to hear a little about your perspective on the journey to the mainstream. You start out with this one to one baseball competition. You get into daily fantasy. You get investment from MLB. You're starting to get deals at ESPN and then sports betting opens up a little bit. And it just seems sequentially, there's these series of singles, doubles, triples, [inaudible] you keep sequentially hitting. And from the outside in, it feels like, "Oh, maybe this was the plan all along." But I bet from the inside, it's a little bit more stressful and more complex than that. So what's that journey been like from first product into this platform and community that you've created?

[00:12:27] Matt Kalish: Yeah. Starting from the core and building out has really been the approach that we've taken. The first product we launched was Daily Fantasy Baseball. It's a rabid high frequency customer, and serious. People are understanding all of the stats, they're going through and building models. They're trying to understand what the combined on base percent of teams are and stuff like that to figure out how many runs are going to get scored. This is math people. This is game theorists, people that are really into-

[00:12:56] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, that's why I lost in my fantasy leads because the strategy of drafting players, who's 1986 Topps cards I really liked in 2000, like Paul O'Neill, people like that, it wasn't a winning strategy. So I hear you. I'm not that customer, but I played against that customer and lost.

[00:13:16] Matt Kalish: Yeah. We always believed you start with the core, you build a community, you figure out from there, you get insight into the product what is it that people like? What don't they like? Are they retaining or losing interest? And then once you feel like you have a decent formula, then you can scale it out. And then it's just the question of at what scale can you get performance? But ultimately, that's the model at DraftKings is you test cheap and then you scale things as big as they can go. And then once you hit your efficiency, then you slow it down. So we built an initial product with fantasy baseball. Then we started launching in new sports. We realized every time we launch a new sport, it seems to be really popular.

We also realized, "Hey, as more people sign up, the games get bigger, prizes get bigger," and that's also really appealing. So there was a lot of forces all working together as we built and scaled that were all driven by the liquidity on the product or how many people were playing, growing the prizes, which then made them more appealing. Next thing we knew, we had a million dollar top prize every week in football and things like that. So the progression was really just proving the concept and then investing in scaling up to what we thought was an appropriate amount to be spending on marketing.

[00:14:26] Jesse Purewal: So two questions to draft off of that. One is where do you get the high volume of ideas? Are you sitting around going, "Oh, you know what we need is if we added this element?" And are you thinking of dozens, hundreds of ideas a week that go into an idea canister? And then the related question to that would be in following up on the test cheap and then scale and go after what works, if there's 100 things you want to test, how many things work to the point where you actually invest in them at scale?

[00:15:00] Matt Kalish: Over the years, came to this opinion that ideas really aren't worth that much. Early on when we started DraftKings, I actually thought that this was the first time anybody had come up with the idea of a one day fantasy game. Started poking around and we found Sand Duel, we found DraftStreet, we found six companies that had launched a product that was every day you do a draft. And at first, I'm like, "This sucks." I thought the idea was so novel and I thought that I lost a lot of the appeal. And then through some conversations with Jason and Paul, what I realized was idea's this much, and then what you do execution wise is 90% of the game.

So I love coming up with my own ideas as much as anyone. I think it's fun. I also think getting the support of your team, getting people excited about things and getting really top notch execution and commitment to follow through and build things is way more important. So I've become over the years much more comfortable. If I like the idea of something, putting it out there, but having debates and getting behind other people's ideas and throwing my support behind those just as much as my own, it just seems like the better formula to get good execution in the end.

[00:16:14] Jesse Purewal: And how do you get ideas or insights from the customer community, the user community around either things that the folks on the platform that are maybe some of your most fervent customers believe could be good ideas? Do you in any way factor in audience sentiment or audience insight or opinion into the innovation roadmap or the even features you test or new product you deploy?

[00:16:39] Matt Kalish: Yeah, that's the origin of almost everything on the roadmap really. The early days, I would say there were some forum sites, places like rotogrinders.com was a very prominent forum at the time. So it's back in 2013, 2014, this would've been the hub of every serious fantasy player who was on there. So you go on, you're part of the community. You're going to the events, you're in the forums. You're reaching out and talking to players. We are putting on events of our own, different fantasy championships and stuff. We would always just collect so much feedback so much on like, "Hey, what do people want to see next?" And that would directly feed into what our roadmap was. It's always been about where's the attention of our audience going next?

And I'd say one example early on was launching Fantasy Golf, also Fantasy NASCAR. These were products that really just didn't exist at all. But just by following the attention of our audience, these were real gaps. People felt like over the summer after football season, there's not a lot of interesting stuff going on in sports. Basketball ends, not everybody's a baseball fan. It's a dead period. But golf, NASCAR, these are the things that take a lot of attention. So just following the audience and where they're going, what they want to see next really formed our plans on these products. And we ended up launching them and that's how we picked up a lot of market share and fantasy was just understanding what's next a little bit better.

[00:18:07] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. And how have you, in a sense forced or encouraged the sports leagues or the advertisers or the networks or others in the traditional sports experience ecosystem to innovate their own platforms or their own products based on things that you have done?

[00:18:27] Matt Kalish: Yeah. Fast forward to 2021, you see more and more understanding of what viewers want in terms of live sports broadcast. If you turn on USC, who's one of our close partners today, you see odds integration, they'll show you each fight, who's the favorite, who's not, different probabilities of different events happening, all of it framed in a sports betting context. That's how people want to consume that info.

If you go back 10 years, this was not a thing. Nobody was doing this. I think the viewer and the culture around wanting to predict what's going to happen in the game, wanting to understand those sort of things has always been there. And in many countries for decades, that's been embedded in the culture, in the broadcast like UK, Ireland, you name it. But in the U.S, media companies and the leagues were just a little behind to maybe where the viewers were and where some other countries were. So we were really part of that education process.

We were bringing to the table like, "Hey, here's ways that you can embed more fantasy insight into your broadcast." We were doing integrations. Sometimes they were organic. Sometimes they were marketing agreements that we had where we would provide different things like salaries for players in the fantasy game or sports betting odds. And over time, what we saw was more and more broadcast would experiment with that and see really positive response from their viewers, see more engagement then they wanted to go deeper and deeper. That's got us to where we are today, which it's pretty main stream in terms of, you see a lot of sports betting everywhere.

[00:20:07] Jesse Purewal: Have there been explicit dialogues that you've had with leagues or with networks or with other partners where you have shared audience insight, or you have shared trend or a point of view on the way things are going and have sort of experienced them, have to realize that there's this different path forward? Or does everybody realize that the viewing experience is going to continue to always evolve and it's just a matter of doing it the right way and avoiding the who moved my cheese problem of trying to hold onto the legacy way of doing business?

[00:20:40] Matt Kalish: Yeah. The data is so compelling, on the brights side that it was always a really easy sell because we would go in with data that was like, okay, 40% of our fantasy basketball players never watched basketball before playing fantasy on drafting. And they're like, "How'd you do that?" Well, people come in on football and then the football season ends and then what's next is you jump into basketball. That's how it worked. And historically people couldn't do it because season long basketball draft would've been in November and you already missed it, New World is like, you can jump in at the end of football season and start playing. So we are showing this data that was like, okay, now 40% of all NFL fans are jumping into basketball, we want to support that, we like that behavior for our sport. More integration, more of that kind of support for fantasy and the consumer behavior around it was always a really easy sell, just using the real data.

[00:21:35] Jesse Purewal: What is special about being able to build a business? Not just around an underserved need, but around a personal passion?

[00:21:45] Matt Kalish: We had it even better than that in my opinion, which was, there was a clear unmet need. It was a passion of Jason, Paul and I, but also the competencies that we would have need it to be successful, like engineering, digital, direct marketing, analytics. These were all our core competencies that we thought we were the best at. Beyond that there was also this macro trend of things weren't so great as a sportsman 10 years ago in the U.S and there's a macro movement towards that's going to change. So we had four things working for us. And I think it's rare to find that perfect, being in the right place at the right time, inviting off the perfect opportunity. At a minimum, I think something that you love doing, that you love building, that you have a passion for, that fits in unmet need is a really good start. And then whatever else boxes you can check, other than that, I think are bonuses and maybe just add to your probability of success.

[00:22:45] Jesse Purewal: If you took me inside the Matt Kalish playbook, if you're sitting down with an enterprising young person and you wanted to kind of impart to them the top two or three kinds of things you've grokked or observed or experienced over the last 10 or so years on this journey, what would be a couple of those things?

[00:23:04] Matt Kalish: I'd say a couple things are people are typically a little bit too averse to... they're worried about dilution. So typically a little too averse to give up something, give equity, to get somebody involved in their company that can really help them. And it's the problem of, do you want to own 90% of something that's not very big or 5% of something huge. And I think that's a common bias I've seen come up a lot of, "I don't really want to get deleted and give up equity to raise money or to get somebody involved in my company," and then you look back a year later and the company's dead and it could have been something great.

[00:23:40] Jesse Purewal: Yeah.

[00:23:40] Matt Kalish: So think just being more comfortable with giving up something in order to get people committed and involved in your idea has always been really important. If it's a tech business, I think having a tech founder or somebody who can write code who can really just go in there and drive and spearhead the engineering side is really important. And in terms of talent, when you hire somebody, especially early on, I would say such a big impact on the culture of the company and they can set such a tone for a lot of people around them, not only their own performance. And so being extremely selective with who you let into the company early on in terms of right culture fit, really driven, high caliber talent, especially that first 10 to 30 employees. You really just don't want to have a lot of missteps there because I think it can steer the company towards a difficult direction.

[00:24:32] Jesse Purewal: Well, it seems like you've taken the opposite of missteps in that regard if I look and see for example, Inc. Magazine rates you as one of the best led companies here in 2021. As a leader that kind of thing is quite an honor, I imagine?

[00:24:48] Matt Kalish: Yeah, it feels great to get recognized. I mean, I think it probably says more about Jason as a CEO, is one of the truly elite tech CEOs in the country, just because it's a newer company that's only been around nine years and it was his first CEO job. I think a lot of people don't give credit for that sort of thing very lightly and because he's 40 years old. But if you look at the track record of just consistently being right really often on roadmap, being really effective at capitalizing the company, making the right strategic moves, building a big scalable organization. And so having that sort of leadership at the helm and then the combination of Paul and I with Jason, I've always been much more customer facing from the product development, product operations, marketing, VIP management, that side of the world and Paul has always been more on the, how do we build something for scale, building our engineering team out, building our product delivery out.

So we've always had a really great relationship as well, where all three of us have complimentary roles and we all respect what each other does. I think that's really set a good base, but then from there we only do so much. We do our whatever 60 hours a week of work and then there's thousands of hours of other leaders throughout the company. So I would point to everyone from Jason Park, our CFO, Graham Walters, who's our Head of HR, who spearheaded all of our hiring, recruiting everything, Jenna Aguiar, our Compliance Officer, Stanton Dodge, our Chief Legal Officer, all of these people have come in and set the culture and built giant organizations and have equal or more to do with that recognition, as do their frontline managers and everything. So we take this much credit for that, but it's definitely been nice to have a founding team that's stuck together.

[00:26:40] Jesse Purewal: How do you make sure that audience centricity, that customer centricity stays at the center of things that you do, things that you build, the work that the teams do? What are some tips or tricks you've seen as you've gone to scale to make sure the customer stays at the center of what you're doing?

[00:26:56] Matt Kalish: So I would say we've had a lot of different phases on that front, but combination of a few different things. When we hire, we have this combination of a few different things. Like when we hire, we have this thing we call Act Like an Owner, which basically means we're going to give you equity in the company. We want you to treat the customer interactions like they're your customer for a family business. We want you to treat your economic decisions like it's your money. Act like an owner. That's the motto and so that's a big part of what we look for when we're hiring. And then we have a, a pretty robust training quality side, where really, when we are engaging with customers or when we're giving them an experience on the site, we really want to understand what is the quality of that interaction, give really good training. Sometimes even things like educating our teams more on details of the product and how things work, or how consumers think about different products on our site.

Those education moments can help them with more empathy and I think ultimately good service just comes down to matching someone's tone and empathy. Most often you want to put yourself in their shoes and understand why somebody might not be pleased with an experience they had. Understand how they're coming to you with tone and just try to to the best degree possible, just solve that. Those training efforts never end. We're trying to operate at a scale of 3000 employees now and so it's become quite a big part of our focus, is just make sure that that bar is always really high.

[00:28:20] Jesse Purewal: I got it, empathy at scale. I love it. I know philanthropy, Matt, is core to the mission that Draft Kings and you're committed to inclusive and responsible pathways for people who want to go build and create. Talk about, if you would, the integration of that CSR component to your company and how it was that you were able to establish it, what I would say is still really, really early on, in the life of the company.

[00:28:46] Matt Kalish: Yeah. I think the larger scale we become, as well, the bigger impact you can make and the more meaningful our company is in each community as our user base growth. We have over 10 million customers, so when you go around, there's states we operate in that we have a million users and we want to of make an impact that's commensurate with our operation and the size and scale that we've become. So over the years, our CSR efforts have become much more sophisticated. We recently launched what we call DK Serves, which is like the umbrella program. We make investments across tons of areas, local and national.

Some of our biggest programs include training for veterans who return from service with technological skills, so that we can help with the migration of veterans coming back into good paying tech jobs. So we started that program a few years back and we're getting more and more people through that training effort, getting more people into great jobs when they returned from service. Try to be aware locally in each market, what is going on, what's important to our audience and our consumers. Sometimes it's things that aren't predictable, like a natural disaster. Sometimes it's things that we can plan in. And so we have more of a planned investment, as well as being able to be really agile and respond when something unexpected happens. And so that's been a bigger, bigger focus for us over the years.

[00:30:07] Jesse Purewal: All right, I want you to complete a mad lib for me, if you would. The next five years at Draft Kings will be incredibly successful if ...

[00:30:15] Matt Kalish: I think if we can keep following the attention of our audience, and if we can stay up to date with Web 3 blockchain and every other technological innovation that could become more and more relevant with our audience over the next five years.

[00:30:29] Jesse Purewal: Love it. All right, Matt, I want to flip into a lightning round here. Just get your first response on a couple of these. You ready?

[00:30:37] Matt Kalish: Ready.

[00:30:37] Jesse Purewal: All right. Give me a brand you admire or one that you can't imagine living without.

[00:30:42] Matt Kalish: Red Bull.

[00:30:43] Jesse Purewal: How would you frame your secret sauce? What's that unique blend of stuff that helps you do you?

[00:30:50] Matt Kalish: Not changing how you make decisions regardless of the scale of money or how high stakes or low stakes it is?

[00:30:58] Jesse Purewal: What's the single piece of advice that you have that you think all builders should listen to and act on?

[00:31:03] Matt Kalish: I would say just personally, be really honest about what you want to do. And everybody doesn't have to be a CEO or an entrepreneur who's starting something and leading it and building everything on their back. People are all different types of personalities, skills sets. I often tell people in a million years I would never be the CEO of a company. I don't want to be and I wouldn't. And if Jason got hit by a bus, I would be like, "Okay, let's figure out who the next CEO is. It's not me." Right? So you have to be honest about what role you want to play, what you're good at and don't be afraid to say, "This isn't right for me. This is too much, too little." Try and find that spot where you can sustain over the long term and be happy with what you're doing.

[00:31:48] Jesse Purewal: Love that. Well, Matt Kalish, it's been a pleasure, my privilege and really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much for the time and the wisdom and the candor today.

[00:31:57] Matt Kalish: Thank you so much.

[00:31:58] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review. And tell a friend about the show.

Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios Original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, folks from StudioPod Media in San Francisco and VaynerTalent in New York. From Studio Pod Media, our executive producer is Katie Sunku Wood, producer is Sterling Shore, editing and music is by Ryan Crowther and our show coordinator is Kela Sowell. From VaynerTalent, publicity and promotion support come from Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park, Lindsay Blum and Yvonna Lynn. The shows designers are Baron Santiago and Vinsuka Chindavijak. Our website's by Gregory Hedon and photography is by Christy Hemm Klok.

Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 5Jesse Purewalproduct design, fantasy sports, product experience, matt kalish, draft kings, fan experience, advice for entrepreneurs, boston sports