Jason Robins, chief executive officer of DraftKings (DKNG), spoke with Quartz for a special video interview.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): What is DraftKings doing to make this year’s March Madness Tournament even more exciting for bettors?
JASON ROBINS (JR): This year we have a ton of new products that we’ve launched since last March Madness. We’ve also dramatically improved the uptime availability of our live markets, our cashout availability, our same game parlay offering. So we have a ton of new things and also a lot of real performance improvements that I think customers are going to notice. So I’m really excited about that. We have some great promotions planned, which we’ll be announcing in the coming week and excited about those as well. So it should be a really great tournament and looking forward to seeing what happens. I have to say, this is the first time I went to Duke and I graduated in ‘03, and we won a national championship while I was there, but this is the first time since then, even though we’ve won one since then, it’s the first time since then that I actually have felt like this team is gonna go all the way. So, probably won’t now that I said that, but hope springs eternal. I feel really good about the team now. I’m excited for it.
AM: Live betting is becoming a big deal for you guys. How are you seeing users engage with it differently than traditional bets?
JR: Well, live betting really comes in different forms. There are people that are betting on micro bets. We call them things like “next drive” or “next play”, “next pitch”, “next at bat”, “next basket”, those sorts of things. And then there are also people that maybe miss the start of the game and come in and want to make a bet. And there it is, there’s a live line ready for them. And maybe other people who made a bet before the game and during the game, their hypothesis changed, or maybe they want to double down on it so they go in and make a bet. So we look at it very differently. Somebody who is checking out the lines at halftime isn’t the same as somebody who’s following it along with the game and engaging in every moment. And we have to treat those experiences differently. So, I think really we look at it almost more like the person who’s coming in casually once or twice during the game, maybe during halftime to check the odds and maybe check on their own bets. That person, you almost treat their experience similar to how you treat the pregame. And then somebody who’s more engaged in every play, every moment, and is looking for different bets throughout the game. I think it’s a different sort of experience and a trickier one because you have to deal with things like the fact that the broadcast isn’t synced up, it’s usually behind our data feed. So one that we’re still trying to perfect, but I think there is a lot of opportunity there.
AM: What’s the next big innovation that is going to change the game for DraftKings?
JR: Well, there’s a lot of cool product stuff we’re working on this year, but overall I’m very excited about the potential for AI. And we’ve been investing in machine learning for many years. We have a great framework around how we do it. We make sure we’re investing responsibly and doing it in a way that takes into account the dangers of AI as well. But I really think that the opportunity set is enormous. Everything from changing the way that we all do work. My co-founder said to me the other day, he goes, I think our jobs are all gonna evolve into managing teams of AI, not even managing teams of people anymore. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need the person to do it. You just need somebody to maybe have a little bit of a different training and way of looking at the world. So I think that transformation’s gonna be fascinating. We hope we’re helping to really be a steward of that. And then from a consumer facing standpoint, I think the way that people interact with products, it’s going to change. Think of what ChatGPT has done to search. Search used to be you type in something that’s like a string of words that you’re hoping yields a certain result of pages and now you’re actually having a conversation and that’s how you’re thinking about search. So it’s a totally different thing and it’s gonna continue to evolve. This is just the beginning. So this is a really big moment, not just for us, but for all industries across the world and across every form of technology and non-technological industries. I think it’s gonna be absolutely transformational in the same way that the internet was.
AM: AI is really exciting. Is there anything about it that scares you?
JR: Oh, of course. I’ve seen “The Terminator” like everybody else. So I think that if you’re a doomsday theorist, then this is the beginning of the end, right? But I like to think, while certainly there are dangers that people understand, that this is a great technology, that that really has a lot of positives, but also can carry some real risks. And that we need to be careful with that. And I think we have some of the smartest minds in the world right now thinking through those issues and helping to craft solutions to them. I know here even at our kind of micro-level, we take that risk very seriously. As soon as we started to utilize AI, we put together policies and procedures throughout the company to ensure that we had some controls in place over how different teams are implementing it. But also we want people to have freedom to innovate. So, figuring out how do you put the right controls in place, but also viewing that as that actually opens up teams to be able to say, okay, now that I know the rules of the road and how I have to do this, I can go and I can figure out almost any way to make my customer experience, make my part of the business better. And I think that really that’s how it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna be hard to drive top down, but I think if we have an environment where people feel like they understand the benefits and they understand what the rules are, then I think that we’re gonna be able to really drive that forward and be a leader in the industry.
AM: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So where do you see DraftKings in, say, 10 years from now?
JR: Well, first I think we’ll be, right now we’re only in about half the country for sports betting, a little over 11% for iGaming. I think it will be in far more states, I don’t wanna say everywhere, but I think most states will have some form of sports betting and iGaming. I also believe, I mentioned AI earlier, I think that a lot of what our product will look like is really going to be a reflection of what overall technology developments occur between now and the next decade. So, to give you an an analogy, if you think about how everyone uses it today through an app on the mobile phone that required the smartphone and the invention of the app store and all those things to occur beforehand. And we were there and we were actually the first ones in the app store, the first ones both with the fantasy product and with the sports betting product in New Jersey, we were the first to market. So we were always, I think, ahead of the curve in understanding where we needed to be. But you know, those technologies were what enabled that. So as I think about 10 years from now, it’s really gonna be dependent on how technology itself develops. So, we talked about AI, no doubt there will be significant advancements in AI and those are things that we need to stay at the forefront of and make sure that we leverage. And really that’s how we look at innovation as a whole. We’re not trying to invent things from scratch. We may come up with original ideas, but in terms of technology, we’re not trying to invent technology from scratch. What we are trying to do is make sure that we are on top of whatever the latest trends are, we know what’s out there and we’re ready to employ or deploy those technologies as quickly as possible so that we’re the first in our industry to be making use of them in generating value for our customers with them. And I think that’s the skill that we’ve built over the years. A lot of what I think it’ll look like 10 years from now depends on how the technology world develops, but you can be assured that we’ll be at the forefront of it.
AM: When you were little Jason Robins, did you go to your mom or dad and say, someday I want to be the CEO of a sports betting company?
JR: No, I mean, like every kid, when I was a little kid, I thought I was gonna be on the field and I figured out as I got a little older that that wasn’t gonna be what I could do. Then I thought, hey, I want to be the general manager or coach of a team. So that was my thing. And then as I realized those are pretty hard jobs to come by, too, and a lot of those people were former players, which, we just figured out I’m not gonna be able to do. Then, I actually for a time wanted to be a lawyer until I realized how much reading lawyers had to do. And then finally in my teens I figured out I wanted to go into business. But, I didn’t ever really think about being the CEO. It was more, I want to start a company with some friends and build it and I wasn’t thinking as much about who would do what. But I did really have a passion for technology. I taught myself the program when I was like 12 and I grew up when the internet was exploding, so it was a great time because all of a sudden the connectivity of the world was just multiplied over and over again. And I was always there wherever it was, early days, like I was on Prodigy before AOL (VZ) was really a thing. And using FTP sites before the worldwide web was really how people looked at the internet. And that was something that I think always stuck with me. Like I knew that technology was going to unlock opportunities because there was just so much new stuff coming out and if you look at most industries, that’s what ends up, if there is disruption disrupting them is new technology. So I always kind of knew it was important to stay up to speed on that. And I liked it. It was always interesting to me.