BRAD SMITH:
Niccolo, I believe the last time you and I spoke, we were in Nashville, Tennessee, and now that I’m thinking about all of the other endeavors that you’ve had your hands in over the year ,when you think specifically about the growth areas in online gaming and betting, what comes to mind for you?
NICCOLO DE MASI:
Well look, its early days, Rush Street is actually the number one casino business. So there are other companies like DraftKings that are the number one sports betting business. We have a sports betting position at Rush Street, but we’re actually the market leader in standard, traditional online gambling.
We think there is a permanent shift going on and behavioral change obviously that will favor online casino over other categories. This is a management team that’s done it before. What I really love about this business is that the ownership is very long-term centered, Neil Bluhm, Greg Carlin and Richard Schwartz, who founded the business, are going to own still over 80% of the business post the merger with my SPAC. And so, they’re really here to build a long term, super public company. And they’re making all the right decisions to be methodical about how they do that and how they invest the gross capital I’m bringing to their business to really make the business compellingly profitable and continue growing at a phenomenal rate in the next decade.
BRAD SMITH:
You’ll have to forgive me, it was Austin, Texas, now that I think about it, that we were speaking in previously, but neither here nor there. What effect did seeing DraftKings’ success in the public markets really mean for this particular deal?
NICCOLO DE MASI:
Yeah, so I mean, look, there’s been many online gaming companies that’ve been successful in the public markets, I mean there’s Glu Mobile, there’s obviously Take-Two that my friend Strauss Zelnick runs that you were just talking about before my segment, and I think what’s different today is that DraftKings obviously went public with a SPAC. It was well received despite, actually, I would say the cash burn and the marketing dollars that go in there.
What we love about businesses like Rush Street Interactive is they’ve been very capital-efficient, they don’t burn cash. They have a much higher ARPU in the casino space than in the sports betting space, they have more profitable unit economics, and much faster payback periods and marketing spend. So, it’s a business that I feel like I can add a lot of value to. We know how to grow it, I’d say exponentially quickly, not only as states legalize, but also in ramping up things like social casino and ultimately their digital user acquisition spend, which is something which they’ve been very modest about as a private company. But I think with more growth capital, they have an opportunity to grow existing markets for user acquisitions and obviously continue entering new markets in Latin America and new states in North America.
BRAD SMITH:
And so, profitability on the unit economic scale versus profitability kind of at large, how does this kind of help you evaluate this company going forward? Is it profitable already beyond just the unit economics?
NICCOLO DE MASI:
It is, it is actually. You can’t get to sort of build a two billion dollar market cap public company on 50 million dollars of invested capital if you’re not probably profitable overall. They’ve been operating for eight…eight or nine years. There’s no doubt that there’s plenty of investment to be made in entering new markets, growing customer care, optimizing a product, building some brand recognition. They actually operate a number of brands underneath the Rush Street umbrella. But when I think about the 35 acquisitions I’ve made as a public company leader, some of the things that strike me as powerful vis-a-vis forecasting the future, are items like operational excellence, showing that you can do more with less capital, showing that you know how to really bootstrap a business and generate competitive advantages and moats around your business above and beyond simply spending more money. And so I look at compelling metrics like long-term value retention, payback velocity on the small amounts of marketing spend they’ve had and you think, this is a phenomenal business already, imagine what it could do with an extra 235 million dollars on the balance sheet. That’s fundamentally what we’re providing with dMY Technology is expertise, capital, and an accelerated path to becoming a public company.