Howie Joins The Degenerate Economy...In Boston!? ...And The Sports Betting Boom

Good morning from Boston, Nevada!

I am at the Encore hotel (a mini replica of the Vegas Encore) in Boston this morning.

I had no idea that Boston had a Vegas like casino.

I was surfing for a room on ‘Hotel Tonight' and the price was right and the hotel was 20 minutes from Fenway Park where my meetings and event were taking place so I grabbed a room. I grabbed this picture of an empty Fenway from the meeting rooms atop the outfield:

I was invited to town by the ‘Drive’ by Draftkings partners (thanks Meredith and Kiki) for their founder and investor day at Fenway. It was a great event and I was there with Jimmy from Grass Clippings to catch up with the DraftKings execs and see how the industry is progressing.

Here are the three Draftkings founders - talking about the early struggles:

My biggest takeaway and one that I have been harping on here as I write about ‘The Degenerate Economy’ is that there are no existential threats to a Draftkings at the moment (Jason even mentioned this in his talk). They survived the legal hell of 2016 and the sports shutdowns of COVID. People love to bet on sports and gamble and the government likes the money from taxes.

I had Jason (co-founder CEO) on the ‘Panic’ podcast back in September 2020.

I figured I would also run into some local friends from my investing world and sure enough last night I got to catch up and spend time with Kevin Colleran who is a partner at Slow Ventures (a great venture firm he helped build). Kevin was employee number 10 at Facebook and I think the fist salesperson and had great restaurant recos for me (Zuma and Panza).

Have a great day.

PS - Shout out to my good pal Ryan Spoon who has joined Yahoo as President of Sports. Ryan ran ESPN digital and was COO of MGM Bets in the past. All of a sudden I am pretty connected in sports media and gambling!

PSS - He should have just resigned…

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Good morning everyone.

I hope everyone had a great weekend….