Being agile is the key to success in the ever-changing world of gaming and daily fantasy sports (DFS) according to DraftKings Co-Founder and President, Matt Kalish.
Kalish offered these insights on the latest episode of the DraftKings Life podcast, hosted by Rebecca Thornburg and Max Dumortier.
He said: “Because our roadmaps are built off customer insight and trends in the market, things are not always totally predictable. The agility that we have is pretty important and to be responsive to whatever is changing.
“At DraftKings, we want to be in that 10% who are always thinking about what is the new tech, the new trends and how that influences or impacts what we’re doing and adjust our roadmap, be aware and be responsive. The agility I think is exciting because you never really know what’s next.”
DraftKings was founded in 2012 by Kalish, alongside Jason Paul and Paul Liberman and initially had a focus on fantasy sports before expanding its offering to sports betting and online casino games.
Kalish detailed the excitement of moving into sports betting and described the experience of “toasting with champagne” the first sports bet made on the site which was $5 on the St Louis Cardinals money line.
He added: “It was such a great milestone for the company. At the time we didn’t know DraftKings was going to be a leader in the market. At the time, we didn’t know if DraftKings was going to be a leader in the market or if it was going to be one of the European sports betting companies coming into the US.
“We had no idea really how DraftKings would stack up against all of these other types of approaches. As things have turned out, it’s been the fantasy companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, that have performed extremely well in sports betting.”
As a market leader in the US, DraftKings is now an iconic brand name and Kalish revealed he was responsible for coming up with the moniker.
“The whole idea was drafting is the best part of fantasy. You’re drafting every day, you want to be in there making your predictions, and figuring out who’s going to have a good game. And so we thought, that was a really operative word,” he explained.
“There’s something about if you think about the King of beers; Budweiser, King of Pop; Michael Jackson, the status and the aspiration around being best of breed is something that’s always mattered to us. We want to be the best in everything we do.”
DraftKings employs over 4,000 people and Kalish was asked how the company cultivates a positive workplace culture.’
Kalish explained that the key is to have people working on products that people are passionate about.
He added: “I think that we try to put out ways that we want to stand out. We feel like if you just keep a high bar across the board, everybody kind of feeds off each other.
“It creates a nice team-based culture. It’s all very collaborative, very team orientated. I don’t think anything great can be achieved solo, for the most part, you need to be able to fit into a a system.”
