0:00:01 - (Matt Widdoes): Welcome to another episode of growth at Scale. I'm your host, Matt Widows, founder and CEO of Maven.com. and today we have a very special guest. We're joined by Nigel Eccles. Nigel was the CEO and co founder of Fanduel, a massively successful fantasy sports and betting platform. He's gone on to found four companies since, sits on the board of a number of companies, and his most recent venture, Bet hog, is a seed stage casino and sportsbook. Welcome to the podcast.

0:00:26 - (Nigel Eccles): Thanks for having me.

0:00:27 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, I'm super excited to chat. We met a long time ago when I was in real money gaming. Early days, very early days of Fanduel and draftkings, and it's been amazing to see the growth that has happened there. And I was in it. Even when we were still fighting, there were question marks on whether or not it would remain viable through legislation. So good to see you again. I'm excited to kind of dive into your background and maybe just as a. As a kicking off point for. For people who I'm sure are familiar with. It's hard to under a rock if you haven't heard of Fanduel, but let's talk a little bit about your background. Like, where'd you grow up? All the way to where we are today.

0:01:04 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:01:04 - (Nigel Eccles): So, like, I'm originally from Northern Ireland, so I was brought up there, actually, on a farm. So it's sort of as far away you can get from New York as you possibly could. Studied in Scotland, studied pure mathematics, always had a real interest in probability and gambling. And so very early in my career joined a startup which became flutter Entertainment, which is one of the. Is today, like the biggest. One of the biggest sports books in the world, but then was a 50 person. Well, at 1.30 person startup.

0:01:38 - (Nigel Eccles): I joined it and then laterally did a few other things after that, but laterally started the company that became Fandil in 2007.

0:01:48 - (Matt Widdoes): Wow. Okay, great. And that came pretty quick. And since then, and remind me, how long were you at Fanduel?

0:01:56 - (Nigel Eccles): Fanduel? I was there, so started. We started in 2007. I left at the very end of 2017. So ten years.

0:02:04 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And it was such a big innovation. I feel like at the point there had been. Historically, people had done. Had been playing fantasy, but they were mailing in. Well, and they weren't doing daily fantasy, they were mailing in their rosters or maybe.

0:02:17 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah. So fantasy had been around since about at least the seventies. It blew up in the. It started to take off in the early nineties. People did it by fax machine, crazily enough. And then the Internet just was a massive accelerant for it. And the innovation we brought was really three things. One was made fast, daily. We made it mobile, optimized. And when we kind of, we basically centralized the pricing before to sort of all handle. You had a commissioner who didn't pay you and all this stuff.

0:02:47 - (Nigel Eccles): So we kind of handled that and we brought those three things together, and that became the new format, DF's, which was, like, exploded.

0:02:55 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Well, now there's a whole side industry around supporting that. I actually knew Cal Spears, who I guess I should say still know, but who started Roto Grinders, who was a great resource for that type of stuff. I actually knew him when he was running a company called Pocket Fives that was similar.

0:03:12 - (Nigel Eccles): A lot of people came over from poker to DF's. It kind of had that same. It was. They liked. It was kind of a puzzle. People thought that they wanted. It wasn't even so much. They were into sports, and nearly all of them were, but they wanted something. They could challenge them and they could compete with other people. And so we did see a lot of crossover from poker.

0:03:33 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, and at the highest levels, it's super data driven. It is very much a skill game, just like poker. You're dealing with equity trade offs, so you might have a sense for who you want. But then the price, if people are familiar with fantasy, you might say, well, I like them, but I don't like them at that price.

0:03:48 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:03:48 - (Matt Widdoes): And somebody else is like, oh, it's Tom Brady. Like, go put Tom Brady. It's like, well, nope, you can't do.

0:03:52 - (Nigel Eccles): That because I suck at DF's, but I still see that it is. I just don't have the depth of knowledge that I don't follow sports club closely enough. But I love talking to users and understanding just the depth. Like they were, you know, they would have spreadsheets, figuring out time on court. And, you know, I just find it fascinating. I understand that whole concept, that solving puzzle concept. I also felt that a lot of our users were very entrepreneurial. Like, a lot of them, like Cal, like, they went on set up businesses. There's a bunch of people, you know, in this space that in a way, on, like, say, casino games, that they were entrepreneurs, right? Like, they weren't just the, you know, the sheep to be harvest or whatever. The sheep's not the correct term.

0:04:40 - (Matt Widdoes): The fish. I think in the casino, they were milked.

0:04:43 - (Nigel Eccles): You know, they were. They, you know, they were competitive and they wanted to, like, you know, show, you know, their success. And, yeah, there seemed to be a very natural overlap between the people who played it and the people who got into crypto, people who went on become entrepreneurs.

0:04:57 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah. They're speculators. They have. They're looking for edges. They're. They're trying to apply their own analytics and reasoning to. It's like any sports betting you mentioned, you were kind of fascinated that in the early days.

0:05:10 - (Nigel Eccles): That's right.

0:05:11 - (Matt Widdoes): The people who predict, like, over unders and stuff for Vegas are like the best mathematicians in the world. Cause you're just like, how can they do that every time they're so betting.

0:05:21 - (Nigel Eccles): I've always felt, like, teaches you so much that's sort of useful in the real world. Like, it's. It's interesting. We see it today in the prediction markets wherever I. It's very clear that people cannot understand that someone who is maybe they're 80% in the prediction market and they don't win. And they're like, the prediction market was wrong. And I'm like, it doesn't work like that. It means that eight out of ten times that they win, but two out of ten times they don't win. And that's actually what it said. Like, if it was 100% and they didn't win, I would say the prediction marker is wrong, but they don't.

0:05:55 - (Nigel Eccles): And it's interesting, I think sort of my background embedding, like, you kind of have that sort of, you develop. Anybody who's that back in betting develops that sort of intuitive understanding of thinking probabilistically, whereas the general market. And you see this prediction market, they just don't get it. Like, in 2016, when Trump win and not Trump was the underdog right up until election day, and they were like, well, you know, Nate silver was wrong. And I'm like, Nate Silver said that Hillary was a favorite.

0:06:24 - (Nigel Eccles): Favorite doesn't always win. So I just find that always fascinating and kind of. I think it's really useful to anyone to kind of understand probability and odds and how these markets work well.

0:06:34 - (Matt Widdoes): And it's like, you have. It's like saying, this is what an actuary does, right? So it's like, okay, so what? We were wrong to insure houses on the coast of Florida. It's like we baked in the possibility of that happening into the price. That's what we've done, right? Cause we know that it's wrong.

0:06:51 - (Nigel Eccles): You could have mispriced it. You can't do it. But after the fact on one data point, and saying the model's wrong, you need a lot more data to tell you whether you're wrong.

0:07:00 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And that's where those edges are built, is that you were right more than you're wrong, and that the times that you're right, because maybe you were more right for a bigger number are bigger than the times that the additive of those two come out. And this is. We see this a lot. Now, I have a background, a fairly deep background in poker. I. And you see this now with sites like Gtowizard and things like this that are very deep.

0:07:24 - (Matt Widdoes): Crazy. The latest mathematics and the goal of those machines is essentially not to kind of go too far down this path. But I think it's interesting for people to kind of think through probabilities as it relates to the latest data science around a game like poker, which is a very complex game, not equal access to information, very similar to. Because nobody knows what a human is going to do at the end of the day.

0:07:43 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:07:44 - (Matt Widdoes): But what they've essentially done to, like, summarize that, is you bring in an AI bot to say, learn this game and come up with the perfect strategy. You clone it and say, you do the same. Now, you guys all play each other, and over billions of hands and multiple simulations with very deep data science, as well as very deep computing power, the bots are meant to come up with a game plan where over many, many, many hands, billions, billions. Things that you could never do in the real world, that all of them essentially break even.

0:08:13 - (Matt Widdoes): Okay, then there is your Nash equilibrium optimal strategy, which is essentially what you're looking for, is indifference. And that kind of is where a lot of the actuaries go. They're like, I don't care if it hits or it doesn't hit, because I'm indifferent. I've already balanced that through this strategy. And so then you've defined game theory, optimal strategy, and then the amount of money that you can make using that against any opponent, not. You don't have to play against computers.

0:08:39 - (Matt Widdoes): The amount of money you'll make is based on how much mistakes another player will make against that. And then if somebody is doing something really crazy where you're like, that is so far off the decision tree that it's clearly massive, massive mistake. Like, an example would be folding every hand except aces. Well, against this guy, I am still a human. I can reserve the right to say, well, yeah, I mean, against a normal, unknown opponent, I would do this set of strategy inside opponent. I folded every time. He raises. So that's called exploitive. Play, right? Yeah.

0:09:10 - (Matt Widdoes): And so, yeah, I think a lot of those actuaries, all the. Basically anybody going against the other side, because it's essentially two sided. When you're talking about daily fantasy or you're talking about betting on the Lakers to do something, you're basically saying, how big of a mistake do I think they have made against my model? And I'm looking for those opportunities of arbitrage where I'm like, I think they've made a wild mistake, and therefore I'm going to do this, or I think it's a marginal mistake, and therefore I'm not even going to touch it.

0:09:38 - (Matt Widdoes): It becomes too close of a coin.

0:09:39 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:09:40 - (Matt Widdoes): So you went on from Vandal to do a number of other things. You've had a ton of learnings along the way, I'm sure. And you have a deep background in mathematics as well as product and stuff like that. I'm curious, if you think about the lessons you've learned and product design process, et cetera, how do you think through. It's a common problem that we see, so I wanted to chat about it, and I'd love to go into bat hog a little bit, but, like, what are kind of some of the considerations?

0:10:11 - (Matt Widdoes): I don't think anybody has a perfect playbook, but, like, as you're building, how do you go about ensuring that what you're building before you get a chance to test it so you don't go too far down the rabbit hole, potentially, is going to, like, resonate with the audience, especially passionate fans in things like gaming and entertainment.

0:10:25 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:10:26 - (Matt Widdoes): And, you know, I'm just generally.

0:10:28 - (Nigel Eccles): It's a really good question. It's like a multi billion dollar question.

0:10:31 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:10:32 - (Nigel Eccles): Like, the first answer is consumers. Really hard. Like, you know, even, like, shortcuts, which is like, ask consumers what they want.

0:10:41 - (Matt Widdoes): Right.

0:10:42 - (Nigel Eccles): You know, in, like, b two b circles, you know, you can identify a problem. Here's a problem. Okay, well, fix the solution. If I can identify good customers, these are people who have a problem, clearly see it as a problem, and have money to pay for it. Like, I'm. I'm kind of halfway there.

0:10:58 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:10:58 - (Nigel Eccles): It doesn't really exist so much in consumer. Certainly not consumer entertainment, which I'm in. Like, the huge problem is they're bored. Right. Okay. That doesn't really narrow the problem set. Right.

0:11:10 - (Matt Widdoes): Like, and your competitor may be just Netflix. Like, it's crazy. Like, we're all fighting for the same attention. Yeah.

0:11:18 - (Nigel Eccles): So that's it. That's not helpful. You go and ask, well, how would I make you less bored. It's like asking a kid like, you know, like, I would be less bored. It's like they're not going to be helpful. So there's certain things that you can do to improve. So your starting chances are really bad. Like really, really bad. And if you actually look over the last, particularly ten years in consumer entertainment and gaming, hit rate has been terrible. Like, you know, consumer Internet over the last ten years, how many, you know, how many unicorns have we had? Like, and I would say fandom draftkings are one of a small, small group.

0:11:54 - (Nigel Eccles): You know, there's utility ones like Airbnb and stuff, but there's not, there's not been that many success stories. So the first thing is your odds are really bad. You have to kind of recognize that. And your consumers are not going to help you, right? Because they don't really know either. There are certain things you can do to help yourself and help your chances. One is really know the narrow demographic that you're going after and it's very important. It's a narrow demographic. If you say, hey, this is a product for everybody, it's a product for nobody.

0:12:26 - (Nigel Eccles): It has to be. This is the person that we're going to focus on first and they're going to be like heavy adopters. And so, you know, for Fanduel, in the early days, it wasn't even sports fans. It was like hardcore fantasy sports players. These are the guys that are in like seven leagues that want to play more. In fact, one of the things that we discovered early on Washington, we thought one of the benefits of daily fantasy sports was that it's like, hey, if your team sucks in the middle of the season, then you could swap and play a different one.

0:12:57 - (Nigel Eccles): We discovered that was 100% wrong because the sort of person we wanted, if their team sucked at halfway through the season, they would be like doubling down, trading, trying to like, rebuild, and, you know, get to like, because they were.

0:13:09 - (Matt Widdoes): So committed, they liked that grind.

0:13:11 - (Nigel Eccles): They loved it, right? And so what we discovered that when the real benefit was Fandale, Washington, that you could play like 100 leagues in a weekend, we never even really considered. And that user was amazing. So there's this sort of thing, which is, okay, you need to find this narrow demographic that is going to be a par user, a super consumer of your product. That's what you want. So that's kind of the first thing is sort of finding that narrow demographic.

0:13:35 - (Nigel Eccles): Give you another example, which is discord. Discord is built on gamers, people who sit in front of their computers for, you know, 5710, 15 hours a day. And they need, like a way to communicate with their friends. Right? Brilliant demographic to build a product around. I'd say probably one of the other massive success stories of the last 1015 years. So that's kind of first one is you find this sort of poor demographic.

0:14:00 - (Nigel Eccles): The next one I'd say is that don't innovate too much. Right? It's like, you know, a lot of things, like even discord. Discord wasn't the first chat product like we had beforehand. Sky wasn't the first DF's product. What I often see, and we saw this a lot in fantasy, was that people like, we've got a way better product. And it was in their head, it was way better. But the problem was that then when they try to sell it to somebody else, it was like, well, yeah, it's better because it does this and this and this and this and this.

0:14:31 - (Nigel Eccles): What we did with FanDuel was we actually made it a lot simpler, right? We actually took fantasy sports and said, why can't I click on an ad, come to a page, draft a team and play, right? I don't have to find nine other friends and draft. So simplicity is actually what you're really trying to achieve as opposed to feature rich. All of these benefits. That's the second one, which is don't try and innovate too much. Try and find the one small thing with that demographic. It's going to really work.

0:15:04 - (Nigel Eccles): And then the third thing is just very, very iterative development and being very willing to. If something's not working, you just drop it and you focus on something else. I would say probably 60 70% of consumer success stories are pivots. It's not what they set out to do. At the start, Fandil was a pivot from a prediction market. A lot of them, even ones that aren't big pivots or small pivots along the way of how they get there. And you just have to, because you can't know before the fact, like, what's going to work, you've got to just iterate.

0:15:38 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, a mistake. We've seen a lot. I'm sure you've seen it as well. And it's kind of wrapped in the point you just made is essentially like, don't marry your darlings. You think it's going to be really good, consumers tell you they wanted it, you build out all the flows, you build out all the stuff, you launch it to crickets, and then you're like, okay, well, let's like, how can we.

0:15:59 - (Nigel Eccles): How do we add features to make it better as a clown?

0:16:01 - (Matt Widdoes): Exactly.

0:16:02 - (Nigel Eccles): It's funny when you say that pre launch excitement is something that I still get, but triggers a real sense of nervousness in me now because I have almost never launched a product that works at launch. Right? Like, it always kind of, you launch and you're like, hey, are the metrics working? You're like, going to the engineers, it doesn't like there's no users like the metrics number. You know, the tracking must be broken. And they go back and they come back after tracking is working. You know, I can show you. Here's a trust. And you're like, hmm, I can't be right?

0:16:36 - (Matt Widdoes): Like, yeah, what we built was so good.

0:16:38 - (Nigel Eccles): So I kind of know when I still get excited, my launch new products, but then, like, you know, 90% of the time you get, like, rudely. And it's never like, you know, you thought you were going to sign up a thousand users in day one and you only signed up 700. You're disappointed, right?

0:16:55 - (Matt Widdoes): It's like four.

0:16:56 - (Nigel Eccles): You would sign up a thousand and you have one, you.

0:17:00 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah, it was the test clicks, right?

0:17:02 - (Nigel Eccles): It was the task, like, so, yeah, so that's, yeah, I sort of. The experience of better disappointment is the more normal feeling post launch than anything else.

0:17:13 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, and also, you know, going into it with that expectation, I think all experienced product people have, have, there are like two types. You've reached that point through experience, or you will. But like, you know, at some point, you know, you just come to realize.

0:17:26 - (Nigel Eccles): Every so often I run into an entrepreneur, like, they've done it. Like, you know, it was their first startup and it just worked.

0:17:34 - (Matt Widdoes): Yes.

0:17:34 - (Nigel Eccles): And the amazing thing about those people, and it's great, I think I love that. I love that they've had that experience is they are terrible at advice because what can they tell you, right? Because they nearly never. Some of them have the self awareness that there was, what happened to them was very, very rare. Most of them don't. They're like, oh, no, well, what you need to do is like, you know, this totally inconsequential thing.

0:17:56 - (Nigel Eccles): You know, let me tell you how Instagram worked out of the gate.

0:18:00 - (Matt Widdoes): You're like, yeah, yeah, it was fun. It was lightning in a bottle. And they don't realize that they were. Right.

0:18:07 - (Nigel Eccles): Normal, normal icon.

0:18:09 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, we see a lot of that as well, which is risky. But again, they were also on that curve. And eventually, maybe it's their third startup, but they were like, oh, okay. That was, that was, yeah, and some.

0:18:18 - (Nigel Eccles): Of them, like, plenty of them. I know. I've gone on to, like, done other startups and I chat to them, and their second one, they're like, I don't get it. This just worked. I don't, you know, it's like when somebody has an easy first baby and they're like, oh, yeah. You know, you hold baby like this and it just calms them.

0:18:34 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:18:35 - (Nigel Eccles): And just like, screams all the time. They're like, it doesn't, it's not working. It's not working with, yeah, startups are, yeah, like consumer products, you know, out of the gate, like 99% of the time. I guess it's a high nineties. Or just like, yeah, then it's like, okay, what do we do? And then, you know, like, sometimes you manage to, like, figure out some half thing that's kind of working, and then you piece that and you build on that and you get it to work, and then sometimes you're pivoting six months later.

0:19:05 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And I think people who are prepared to pivot and are like, okay, that's not what we thought it would be. What did we miss? Yeah, let's just take the lump. And then it's like, okay, what was the other idea on the board? Like, or let's, you know, you can still have some team kind of try to deconstruct that and do a postmortem and sure, maybe do a tweak. You don't also don't want to give up too fast. And I think people tend to lean towards that piece where they're like, all right, we're going to spend nine months trying to crack this. And it's like, no, that's, I think, a big piece that we follow that I think is really important and others do as well, but is calling your shot. So it's like, okay, this is what I expect to happen. I learned this from a mentor of mine, Bob Lepo, where, and he still does it today. He just did it on Sunday. He sent a note saying, you should get out of stocks and bonds and treasuries and get into gold, basically.

0:19:53 - (Matt Widdoes): And it was right before the crash on Monday. But then we rebound, and he does this all the time where he'll like, he's like, I'm putting 10% of my net worth into this thing, and that thing fails, but he tells you in advance. And there's so many people I talked to who are investing or do whatever, and they're like, oh, man, I just made 20 x on this. And it's like, why didn't you tell me you were going into it before?

0:20:15 - (Matt Widdoes): And there's a certain, the thing I learned from Bob and he told me the reason he does this. One is his position's already in and he lets other people know what he's done. But two, he said it holds him accountable because before he makes that trade, he knows he's going to go tell his closest network publicly. And if he loses all of his money, everyone's going to know. And he said that gives him this conviction where when it starts to do something that he didn't expect it to do, he can get out quicker when it's going his way, he can relish in his ability to predict.

0:20:49 - (Matt Widdoes): And I think when you take that into product and you say, or use acquisition, where I have a lot of depth, you say, okay, this is our hypothesis, it's scientific. This is what we think is going to happen. This is how we're going to observe it. These are the conditions that we need to be aware of and these are risks potentially to the cleanliness that we need to be aware of. And then when the test fails and you're not seeing what you had predicted, you're not Monday morning quarterbacking it. Like to your point earlier, where you run, you say a thousand and it ends up being one, you're like, one's not that bad. One's not that bad. We can turn one into seven and seven turn into 28. It's like, no, right?

0:21:25 - (Matt Widdoes): We have that conviction. We've done that process when we execute and it doesn't go to the plan. Sure, some tweaking, but at some point we have to say, guys, this is way too far off of plan. Yeah, we came up with that when we were sober and in a room, not in the throes of what are we going to do now? We just spent half of our money on that thing. And so I do think it's the teams that are able, not only able to pivot, but are acutely aware that that is going to happen in 90 plus years.

0:21:55 - (Nigel Eccles): One of the things that I've noticed, and I make this mistake as well, is sometimes people's expectations and forecasts are based on what they believe needs to be true. So, for example, I do seed round. They're like, well, I, you know, to hit an a in 18 months, I need this to happen. You know, like, I need to launch a product and x. And every time when I, when I counsel people, I'm like, the market doesn't care what you think needs to happen. Like, yes, oftentimes, like, classically, like, we just closed the, you know, in a seed process with that hog. And, you know, a couple of investors asked for us for forecast, and I was like, nope, I am not.

0:22:33 - (Matt Widdoes): You're just making up numbers.

0:22:34 - (Nigel Eccles): I'll give you a cost forecast. I can control that. But, yes, I am not having us both enter into a fiction that the thing that I put in a spreadsheet or forecast has any sample basis in reality.

0:22:47 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, you have. No even.

0:22:49 - (Nigel Eccles): And, you know, the funny thing is, like, fandale missed its forecast by two years in its early days. Like, we were two years behind budget.

0:22:57 - (Matt Widdoes): Which is actually not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

0:22:59 - (Nigel Eccles): And it's a $20 billion business. Right, right. Yeah. You know, but at the time, we were like, oh, my God, we're like, we're such a failure. This is never, you know, we're going to be a zero. But it was more down to the fact that our expectations were way high. We started with where we need to be and then built our kind of expectations of that. And, you know, probably needlessly, I can kind of needlessly punish ourselves because we didn't hit these arbitrary numbers that we had no ability to forecast in the first place.

0:23:29 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And it doesn't mean, I think, from my perspective, it's like, you still do want to kind of have a target to where you're heading, but accepting the fact that there are, the further we go out, whether, like, if you want to predict a month, I can be pretty good at that.

0:23:41 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:23:42 - (Matt Widdoes): If you want to predict a year, I'm not great. If you want to predict ten years, we're just making up fiction.

0:23:46 - (Nigel Eccles): But particularly that point that's like pre launch. It's like, I have no clue. And the good thing is the market, like, the market we were raising 15 years ago, regularly used to have to produce forecasts. It was nonsensical. The good thing is that I think 80% to 90% of VC's I talked to now, I wouldn't even ask for something like that.

0:24:09 - (Matt Widdoes): They understand that.

0:24:10 - (Nigel Eccles): They know that we know, but neither of us know.

0:24:12 - (Matt Widdoes): So, yeah, it could even be a negative signal that. It's always been a negative signal for me, where they're like, and if we just capture 2% of this market and look at that, Tam. And it's like, guys, you're just 2%. Where'd you go? Why not 3%?

0:24:25 - (Nigel Eccles): Like, it's not that I discovered about tams. Tams I think, should be shot. Like the Tams actually make sense. Maybe in a small number. Maybe if you're like, if it's a hardware business where you're building, like, crank handles for boats, and it's like, well, if you're that market might be that big, and maybe it's really hard for you to build anything else. But in nearly every software consumer business I've seen as a consumer, Tams are ridiculous. Because the Tam for Fanduel, okay, when we started out, investors would be like, well, how big is the market? And I'd be like, we are the market.

0:25:02 - (Nigel Eccles): And you're like, well, you're doing like a million a year. Like, it was like this market. And so. And they're like, well, how big could the market be? And I would go, well, with fantasy. There's x million, 25 million people played it, but they all play season long. So we don't. If we multiply that by $100 a year, that's like two and a half billion a year. Well, there's a market and they're like, yeah, but that's not the market today. Or I could say, well, we converted a bunch of them to sports betting. It's a $25 billion market.

0:25:33 - (Nigel Eccles): What I discovered with regards Toms was that if a VC ever talked about Tomstein when we were raising for Fanduel, we should have just said, it's been a pleasure talking to you. We'll move on. Because we never convinced anybody. Anybody who got stuck on Tam, they all just like, they either believed it or they didn't. There was nothing. We instead, what we did is we did, like, a bunch of research and did a ton of analysis. You brought in all these analogies, did all this work to show them how.

0:26:02 - (Matt Widdoes): Big it could be, all this energy?

0:26:03 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, it didn't matter then. None of them ever got over the line. And, you know, until the next funding round. And they were like, oh, my God, I can't believe we missed you in the last funding round. Absolutely. We'd love to invest in the next funding round. And then we would pitch them that round, and then they'd be like, you want what valuation be back into the same market. Like, you know, like, how big is the time going to be? And you're like, oh.

0:26:28 - (Matt Widdoes): And so when you look at entertainment, gaming generally, as you mentioned previously, very competitive sectors, I'm curious, any lessons or thoughts on navigating super saturated markets? We see this in lots of different industries. And are there any. Can you think of any universal lessons or anything that might resonate.

0:26:52 - (Nigel Eccles): One is avoid markets where you're competing with well run large incumbents. Aih, I don't know why anyone would start an AI startup unless they started three years ago, right. They're sort of jumping in whenever it became hot. Or another one, even today. I put a tweet out about this morning, prediction markets. Prediction markets are super hot. There's a bunch of them fundraising at the moment. And they are going to be hot for exactly 90 days because post November 5 they're going to be back in the trenches. And I like prediction markets and I do think that long term we're going to see, you know, one or two be successful at a certain level.

0:27:34 - (Nigel Eccles): But the idea of building one now, whenever it's like at the heart of like, you know, right. Hype is crazy. So like, you don't, and the frustrating thing is the best time to raise money is at peak hype, right. If you want to reuse money for AI, you know, like 18 months ago would have been amazing, right. But if you want to build an AI company, this is worst time you want to be building starting today on something that's going to be hot in like two years time.

0:28:07 - (Nigel Eccles): And that's really hard to forecast. But I can tell you if you start, and I have friends who are entrepreneurs who've done this, they've tried to hit the hot one every time and they have a terrible track record because, you know, they try to raise at the peak of the market and maybe they raise a ton, but they are like missing. They're not. By the time it goes off the boil, they haven't really got a really great product.

0:28:35 - (Nigel Eccles): They've got tons of competition. It's a terrible thing to do. It's almost like I joke with people. I say, actually, 18 months ago, I was chatting to a friend, I said, why don't we raise an AI and crypto fund? We'll call it AI and crypto because we'll tell investors it's AI because they're all super excited about it and they want to put money into aih. But really we're just going to invest in crypto because crypto was stone cold and no one wanted to put money into it and we could have got amazing bargains.

0:29:06 - (Nigel Eccles): No, apart from that would have been fraud, so we wouldn't have done it. Of course.

0:29:11 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, it's kind of a joke.

0:29:12 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, it's both, you know, like maybe in six to twelve months time, AI is going to be stone cold and we'll invest in them. But, yeah, so, but the problem is raising for a company, the timing is very different than building it. You want to be building it whenever no one's talking about it. And good example today is like the consumer applications in crypto. There's not many teams building it, there's a few.

0:29:41 - (Matt Widdoes): It's cooled off so much, it's just.

0:29:43 - (Nigel Eccles): Like people were investing in infrastructure and I'm like, who's going to use all this infrastructure? Nobody's building applications. So for me, I am always looking for places where, you know, areas that have unclear regulations, you know, where like the laws haven't really caught up with it yet. I'm not saying that it's illegal, it's.

0:30:06 - (Matt Widdoes): Just like, sure, but AI is in that camp right now.

0:30:08 - (Nigel Eccles): That's a nice thing about AI, but, but you get so much competition. Like, I don't want to go against OpenAI and Microsoft, but if we look at crypto, crypto is squarely there. Like if we think about crypto and we think, well, I don't want to compete with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, because I cannot compete with them as a startup, super well funded, they're not in crypto. The only one who even tried to go into crypto was meta, and they were like three congressional inquiries before they'd even launched a product.

0:30:36 - (Nigel Eccles): And so they were like, okay, we're getting out of this. And so if you believe, as I do, that in five to ten years time, crypto is going to become increasingly mainstream. Like, I cannot think of any other vertical that I would have confidence going to be really mainstream where today only startups are doing it right. Like AI is not that space. AI is getting billions and billions of dollars. All the fine companies are pouring money into it.

0:31:02 - (Nigel Eccles): Exactly the place I would not want to compete as a startup. Crypto is exactly where I want to compete because none of the fine companies can invest in it. The regulatory environment is not great rate, which is perfect. It means that we can build a business with not having to worry about competition from them. And as it starts to clarify, then we're well positioned. And that's what makes crypto one of the reasons make crypto really interesting for me.

0:31:25 - (Matt Widdoes): It's funny you mentioned that because I was just talking with a very close friend about what they're thinking about next. And it is in similar vein of nobody wants it right now and it will for sure come back and be big, which is essentially commercial real estate, and saying like, that's gonna like, there's no, in my opinion, there's no world where 15 years from now everyone's like, yeah, we're still, we're still just not back in the office.

0:31:48 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:31:49 - (Matt Widdoes): Now another friend I was talking to about this joked and he said, well, you might not be in the office because there was another pandemic. And I'm like, oh, that's a good point. There could be more pandemics, but barring another major global catastrophe. Yeah, it's like, what does the future of commercial real estate look like?

0:32:03 - (Nigel Eccles): You have to be right. Like if you're, you know, if the thing that there is actually a long term trend and not cyclicality, then you've got a problem, right? Yes, but you know, that's part of the, I would rather as an entrepreneur be wrong, that this thing that I worked on for several years didn't happen right then, because then I can take that risk. But I know that if I go into something that's hot today, I can, with 100% confidence know that I will not be successful unless I'm the sort of entrepreneur who's like, no, we're going to raise like a billion dollars and we're going to do this. And those startups, I see those startups, every bull cycle we see those startups, I think their success rate is very poor. Like, even though they raise so much money, it doesn't help them, right? Because they don't have, they haven't spent years building a team and culture to properly execute it.

0:33:00 - (Nigel Eccles): They've raised, you know, when they raised hundreds of millions, they have that hundreds of millions of expectation. It's not like they're not given that to say, right, go away and, you know, four or five years time, then you can have something. So I have never been that impressed with those sort of startups. Like, it's amazing some people can raise that sort of money and go and do that. I've never wanted to. I'll give you another example, which was sports betting post Paspa very quickly.

0:33:28 - (Nigel Eccles): And even whenever pass went through, I was like, fandom, draftkings are going to win this market. It's very clear to me because we had, both companies had draftkings started in 2012, so that pending six years, Fanduel had been started in 2009. So they had like nine years head start, they had brand, they had the customer database, they had the expertise, they were all ready to go. It was obvious to me they were going to win.

0:33:54 - (Nigel Eccles): And we saw billions being poured into that market. Like we saw the score bought for 2 billion. Fanatics is pouring hundreds of millions into that market. Caesars has dropped hundreds of millions. There's a long ballys when they all came in late. And where are they all now? At best there are like low single digits market share and that to me is just a further example. Whereas the people that came in early when there was no market and went and built something when it gets hot, they're really well positioned. But coming in late when it's already obviously hot and obvious to everyone generally is a terrible strategy.

0:34:40 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, and in those situations a year to 18 months head start is massive, right? So especially if you're thinking of funding, but even beyond funding, which doesn't do anything, ultimately you have to have the result. Now you've got a bunch of teams that just took in five to 10 million in an a and they're going to spend the next six months building a team to get prototypes out and you're already. So they're playing catch it from day one.

0:35:03 - (Matt Widdoes): It'd be interesting to kind of like, I'd love to have a maybe a separate private conversation sometime to talk about all the things that kind of fit in that camp. And I'm sure our listeners will be thinking about that now given that, that context and it makes a ton of sense.

0:35:15 - (Nigel Eccles): It's just like a framework. Like the first thing is if it's hot, you don't want to be doing that now. Like that's, you know, there's the urge.

0:35:24 - (Matt Widdoes): That's a terrible.

0:35:25 - (Nigel Eccles): Let's, let's ignore that one and start to think of a framework of like what's not hot today. That could be hot in three years time or in five years time. What are the trends? And, you know, that's like crypto. If you see the growth of crypto and you, compared to the Internet, it's like, it's still niche today, but if it continues its growth rate, it's gonna become really mainstream. You know, there's other things where there's actually a.

0:35:49 - (Nigel Eccles): And some VC's are good at that. They see like a platform shift. So mobile phone, like, you know, if you're older, you'll remember every year from 2000 to 2007 was the year of mobile. You know, we're all getting into mobile. This is gonna be the year of mobile. And it didn't happen until the iPhone was introduced and then suddenly it was a year of mobile and it's been every year since then.

0:36:09 - (Matt Widdoes): I.

0:36:10 - (Nigel Eccles): That made multiple billion dollar companies and a lot of VC's did incredibly well out of that. If you just happen to get into VC in that year, that 2008 to 2012 timeframe, it was incredible. Post financial crisis the returns there are just incredible driven by this platform shift. That was why a lot of them are very excited about Meta and VR and AR, because they thought this could be a new platform that didn't pan out.

0:36:38 - (Nigel Eccles): But, you know, their thesis was still like, look, this is really a platform shift, then we should be ahead of it.

0:36:45 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And that was, that followed a similar path. I remember in 2016, it was like, oh, AR VR 2017, same thing. And then now with Meta's recent announcement, it's like, okay, that's, that's going to be.

0:36:55 - (Nigel Eccles): But then, you know, but then the technology continues to improve. And so, you know, like, I would always be like, go back and look at that previous thing that looked at. The funny thing is a lot of the consumer successes of the 2010s were startups that existed in the late nineties and early nineties that were just early Doordash was Cosmo. We actually had these products before, but pets Chewy was pets.com dot. Everyone likes pets.com dot.

0:37:26 - (Nigel Eccles): But Chewy is a very successful business. I, you know, it's not that some of the time thing is like, yeah, you needed broadband. You needed, like, people getting comfortable purchasing online. And so the, you know, the technology moved on and suddenly, you know, now actually, maybe it's a good time to do that thing that didn't work like a few years ago.

0:37:47 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, well, okay, so you're in the middle of that right now with, so let's, let's talk about that hog. So for people. And you've, you're, you know, in the, in the process of closing seed and wrapping that up, it's in crypto. It's in sports betting, casino. What are you thinking? What's the plan?

0:38:04 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, so basically it's a crypto casino and sportsbook. So there's some very big ones in the market, like Steak.com is one very successful. The distinction that we're making with battle, it really is like, who we're focusing on. So battle is very much focused on crypto consumers, people who self custody, cryptic crypto, crypto, first demographic. It's not even people who have money on Coinbase or on Robert.

0:38:29 - (Nigel Eccles): It's people who, it's smaller, but they typically hold a lot of money. We stake doesn't really lean into crypto. You know? Yes, you use crypto to pause it, but their branding isn't around crypto. They don't really understand the whole crypto culture.

0:38:44 - (Matt Widdoes): It's a feature. It's not a feature that they use.

0:38:47 - (Nigel Eccles): Like, it makes payments easy. We want to really lean into it. And we also want to really lean into who the demographic is because the demographic of crypto is actually very similar to daily fantasy sports. It's young, male, risk seeking. Right. And so, and that demographic typically, you know, some of them like sports betting. It's actually, the overlap isn't as big as you'd think, but there's certainly a group there. But they all tend to love EV positive games.

0:39:15 - (Nigel Eccles): So poker, very popular in crypto circles, but there are other games. And some of the things that we're developing are PvP games where they can compete with other players. So that's a word building. We actually have a couple that are in our private alpha at the moment that allows them to compete with friends and other people online where they can actually win and they can be ev positive. You will know this, but for listeners means that they can be winning at it.

0:39:42 - (Matt Widdoes): That's expected value.

0:39:43 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, expected value. Unlike slots where your expected value is negative eight dollar, you're going to win ninety five cents to ninety seven cents. If you're good at poker, your expected value might be like 105, you know, good at. Same with DF's and same with some of the games we're developing.

0:39:59 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And are some of these games, and maybe if you're not in a position to talk about it yet, but are we talking about things like backgammon, games of skill, things like where people can, you know, you have an edge or you don't? I mean, the challenge with that has always been, and we've seen many attempts at that, you always have to deal with. There's this dynamic. You've seen this for sure in anything casino, anything PvP casino like DF's or poker.

0:40:24 - (Matt Widdoes): Especially poker. It's most apparent there is you have like, you have this. And everybody typically hates to use these internally when you're dealing with these types of things. But you have like whales, which are really wealthy and they could be good or bad, but they're usually bad. You have fish who are brand new, they're not good. And then you have like sharks, you have lots of other things you might call there.

0:40:42 - (Matt Widdoes): But what happens is like you need in a game like backgammon, poker doesn't have an elo system like chess or backgammon might, where you have a sense for how good the other person is. So you're getting matchmaking. Correct. But do you need your, we'll go away from the ocean analogies, but you need like a new player to be matched with a new player so that their, their win rates are similar enough to keep the game fun and that they can learn and get better over time.

0:41:09 - (Matt Widdoes): And what you don't want are your best players destroying all of the new players to where it's no longer fun and they come back and you don't want your best players just avoiding each other where they're not, they're not playing. It's bad for the marketplace, it's bad for the revenue.

0:41:22 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:41:23 - (Matt Widdoes): And so you can end up in situations where you have a lot of fraud occurring. Backgammon for anybody that doesn't know one, I think it's probably the best heads up game in the planet. The best two person incomplete game with complete information, but, but still an element of chance. But there are definitively proven correct and incorrect moves given any role in any given board texture.

0:41:45 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:41:46 - (Matt Widdoes): And you can train and memorize that. Very similar in some ways to chess, but chess doesn't have the element of luck like back. And so you can have a situation though, where you were so good at backgammon that you were essentially unbeatable.

0:41:59 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:41:59 - (Matt Widdoes): You have to get a new ip account and a new phone every three months so that you can continue to win games and play against people who, where you have a bad elo. And so how do you think about that? And then of course there's fraud. There's also maybe fraud is less concern. But you have things like bots and controlling for the fact that you don't have computers playing against players. How do you think about that? Just generally not necessarily related to.

0:42:24 - (Nigel Eccles): Good question. And black admin is a good point on it. So games of pure skill are very problematic. And we've had games of pure skill for over 20 years and they create this issue which is the very best players just dominate. And then you have to create skill tiers like your Elo rankings, but then you people create multi accounting and then you have to combat that and it's. Yeah, like, and they've struggled. Like people don't know that king.com that created candy Crush originally was a skills game company.

0:42:57 - (Matt Widdoes): Wasn't very big originally a dating company. Originally. Originally I was at King for many years, which you maybe didn't know that.

0:43:03 - (Nigel Eccles): Didn't know that.

0:43:04 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I ran all their user acquisition.

0:43:06 - (Nigel Eccles): Oh, interesting. Well, so, yeah, so they, you know, skills that have gone public, obviously they see, I thought they'd worked it out for a while. Maybe, maybe they haven't. But it's been very challenging. We are very focused on games. And so the games that we're more focused on are more like DF's. DF's, I would say, is the skill parameter is more to chance. So there's a lot more chance elements to it.

0:43:28 - (Matt Widdoes): There's human beings playing on a field, they can break their legal elements.

0:43:33 - (Nigel Eccles): You could have a new player playing against a highly skilled player, and the new player can win. That doesn't really happen much. And probably backgammon.

0:43:41 - (Matt Widdoes): That's correct.

0:43:42 - (Nigel Eccles): The games that were focused on. So one game that we've got is Liars dice. I don't know if you've ever played.

0:43:47 - (Matt Widdoes): Of course. Yeah, it's a great game. So it's an amazing game. Yeah.

0:43:50 - (Nigel Eccles): I would say it's probably 80% to 90% luck, but the skill element is enough to keep bringing you back and enough to kind of. So that's the type of game we're looking at. We've got another game that is a variant, if you've ever played crash, which is you bet on a rocket ship and you have to exit before crashes. The crash is a random point.

0:44:14 - (Matt Widdoes): Oh, interesting.

0:44:15 - (Nigel Eccles): It's a fun. It's more of a casino game. There's no skill involved. It's all per chance, although there's agency. So you think you can decide, but it's all chance. We created a trading game around it, whereas you and x number of other people are competing with each other with a certain amount of money to see who can make the most. It's mostly chance, but there is skill involved in it. And so those are the types of games that are, I would say, obviously predominantly chance, but have a skill element, and that's kind of what we're trying to land at.

0:44:46 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And I think what you're getting at there, in a game like liar's dice, for anybody who doesn't know, everybody gets a cup. You have five dice, everybody shakes it, you slam it down on the table. It's a classic bar game. It's been around for a long time. It's called dudo in Latin America. It has different names and it's a great game. But there is, as you would know, if you play the game, particularly when you get towards the end of the game and the number of dice are limited, or you have asymmetric information, where you have five dice, the other person has one dice. And we. I guess we won't go in the full depth of how liars dice works, but you're essentially, it's a bluffing game. It's a game of incomplete information.

0:45:19 - (Matt Widdoes): It's not dissimilar. It would be like a very, very, very. It's like the kids version of poker or something, right? You can learn it in five minutes.

0:45:28 - (Nigel Eccles): You can learn very quickly.

0:45:29 - (Matt Widdoes): But. But, you know, in a world where I have two dice, you have one dice. We're in the end game, we're heads up out of maybe six people that started. Yeah, we're all competing for like one pool of money because everybody just bought in for a cup, essentially. And that could be any number of betting units or dollars. There can be some strategy in the end game video where. And sometimes it's just as simple as, I have one die, you have one die. I'm going to bid a five and you have to choose to bid a six. Or just call a blind.

0:45:58 - (Matt Widdoes): And like. And then there are nuances of, like, maybe you get in a pattern or you've been discovered as being dishonest in your.

0:46:07 - (Nigel Eccles): See people's playstyles and. Yes, that's what we've been testing even internally. And you start to see that some people have very different play styles and become very tricky to kind of get on them. Like, how often do they bluff? And when they do bluff, how do they bluff? It's really.

0:46:24 - (Matt Widdoes): I love the idea, by the way, of marrying of like, I would love to play a game like liars dice digitally with, you know, in poker, we have things called huds that are heads up displays to kind of act as a facilitator of understanding and processing large amounts of data. But like, yes, understanding bluffing frequency, understanding, like average opening bid in a full ring game or all these things that you. I've never thought about because I've never thought of.

0:46:48 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah. Like, to me, it's. I think it's one game that, again, it goes back to, you know, what's one of the. Some of the cheat codes on consumer take something that's really popular, like Lars Ice is a reasonably popular game. Lots of people have played it. I think it could be 100 x bigger than it is today because there isn't really a place to play it for money online. And that's we're making a bet on. Loads of people really know it. They'll say, oh, liars dice. Yeah, I played it.

0:47:16 - (Nigel Eccles): You know, they can come and play.

0:47:18 - (Matt Widdoes): And a game takes five to ten minutes if you. Especially online.

0:47:22 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, the games are fast like that.

0:47:23 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And they're super big.

0:47:25 - (Nigel Eccles): You know, we. Our design criteria for games, one of the, you know, one of them is social has to be. Social has to be better with friends. But one of the top ones is. Has to be fast.

0:47:36 - (Matt Widdoes): Yes, yes, yes, yes. And backgammon is not fast in most cases. If you're playing a full, if you're playing a full sequence, it's a great.

0:47:42 - (Nigel Eccles): Game, but it's not fast.

0:47:43 - (Matt Widdoes): But it's a game for coffee on the porch for an hour and a half. It is much closer to chess or something like that in its speed, although it is faster than chess if you play chess, anything like me, because I'm not a very good chess player. So cool. Well that's super helpful. And I'm curious, like as you think through, you've built a lot of companies. You've learned a lot of things. If we think through with our audience who are existing CEO's that maybe they're struggling, maybe they're succeeding.

0:48:08 - (Matt Widdoes): Kind of ambitious entrepreneurs who are kind of considering taking a plunge or whatever, you just kind of think about the various life cycles of entrepreneurs. Any high level advice of like, hey, here's some lessons. Here's what I wish I knew 15 years ago, or these are kind of common pitfalls or be careful here. You know, I think one thing I can tell you from my own experience is like I have found myself as a first time CEO over the last four and a half years constantly riding this razor's, razor's edge of I want to make sure I am scaling fast enough that I'm not leaving something on the table.

0:48:44 - (Matt Widdoes): But my biggest fear is scaling so fast that everything pops and I, and I overextended myself. And so there are some things like that. It's like how do you ride that razor's edge?

0:48:51 - (Nigel Eccles): Or how do you figure different phases of the company? Like they're a pre product market fit company is very different from post. Like their scaling issues. Scaling issues I would nearly say are high class problems. Right? Like they're, you know, cause you actually have something of value. You're just like, how do I capture most of it? And a lot of the time, certainly in the last four years, I'd be working with sort of pre product market fit products.

0:49:18 - (Nigel Eccles): And their scaling is not an issue because we don't have nothing to scale. Scaling is much more fun. Post product market foot, way more fun than pre. Pre is like where you bang your head against a wall every day to like, how do I make people want this product? I would say on the pre stage, I like the first thing I just say is like recognizing that it is really, really difficult. Like you have to like celebrate your small wins and that it's like every day is dealing with the challenge of trying to figure out, understand how people will use your product, how you need to change it, and to try and read the data if it's working, because product market fit is somewhat obvious in hindset, but is not at the time. Like, it's like, I think it's working. I think we could start scaling and then, like, it doesn't scale and you're like, okay, because nobody's sticking around.

0:50:10 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, that first phase is. Yeah, it's very, very difficult.

0:50:15 - (Matt Widdoes): I think what I'm hearing too there, and tell me if you would agree with this, but a little bit of what I'm hearing is recognize that in pre product market fit, you. You are meant to fail. You're supposed to fail. So anytime you win, celebrate that little win, but don't be downtrodden by you.

0:50:30 - (Nigel Eccles): Try will just fail again. And, you know, so for vet hog, we're not going like, liar. Dice is one of our products, but it is one of a suite of products that we're going out and we're testing and we're going to see what we get traction with. And then, you know, we get some traction. We're going to optimize in that game. But, you know, it's very possible in six months time, we're gonna have, like, seven or eight games. One's just, like, killing it, and the other six are just like, you know, we'll focus on that one.

0:50:58 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, it's usually, in my experience, the things you couldn't have predicted where you're like, why does everybody like that? Like, liars, dice is way more fun. It's. It's more fun, it's faster. It has all these elements, but just everybody's obsessed with this. And we had a good friend of mine, he was a. He was still involved, but he was the CTO, co founder of chess.com dot chess.com. i won't give exact numbers to protect the innocent, but, you know, chess.com has been around since, like, 98.

0:51:23 - (Matt Widdoes): And this is Jayce Everson. He also started a company called Gambit, which you may appreciate, which was using bitcoin is in the name to play skill based games against each other, strictly crypto, nothing else in or out. Very interesting guy. Might be worth chatting with him on his experience there. But then all of a sudden, servers start going crazy. They're seeing more users than, you know, they've ever seen. I think I can say that safely by. By a wide margin.

0:51:49 - (Matt Widdoes): And it's a show on Netflix called Queen's Gambit. And they're like, oh, my God, everybody cares about chess again.

0:51:54 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah.

0:51:54 - (Matt Widdoes): And it's just like where have these guys been for the last one year? So you have these little things that.

0:51:58 - (Nigel Eccles): Like then the streamers picked it up. You go onto twitch and you see people playing chess, which is kind of normal, but like each couple of years ago I was like, this is wild. Like, who would have told me the next hit game is going to be chess? Like the amount of money that studios and VC's poured into like new game development and then they switch on twitch.

0:52:18 - (Matt Widdoes): And everything turns out chess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, thank, I know we only had a little bit of time set aside today. Any, any parting advice you'd give any of our listeners, be them kind of growth specialists who are kind of focused on taking something to market or new entrepreneurs. Just kind of a last parting gift.

0:52:36 - (Nigel Eccles): Yeah, like it's just, you know, I honestly, a lot of particularly consumer is trying things, is experimenting. I think the people who I know that are best at it are all inquisitive. They're all like, you know, you'll ask them about one of their competitors products and they'll go, yeah. What I love about it is this, this and this. And I like what they do here. And then, and how do they know that it's because they use them all. Like, you know, I said to somebody, I said, if you're consumer entrepreneur and your phone is not littered with unused apps, then you're not doing it right.

0:53:09 - (Nigel Eccles): Because, you know, like I've got, you know, you know, I'm running like because I wanted any, there's a new app, I want to try it and I want to be like, are they doing anything interesting? Like, could I do that? Like, could I, that seems to work. And let's try this. You know, that's, you just need to be constant learning because, you know, things don't sit still and you kind of need to learn what, what is working.

0:53:30 - (Matt Widdoes): And be a, it's a great piece of advice. And for anything that's at any, especially if they're public and they're not public traded, but they are live in store or currently operating, you can, with some degree of confidence assume that whatever you are seeing has been researched, it's been tested, it's being optimized so you can cut yourself a lot of cost where you're like, why? Like to your point, I'm trying to understand the strategy behind that.

0:53:54 - (Matt Widdoes): Is there signal there that I've missed? Is there a whatever? And like man, look how simple this landing page is. It's like, yeah, is this converting? And it's like, yeah, they're running a lot of ads. Like, I guess that's the best version. And, like, so, yeah, I think there are a lot of. That's a great piece. And I think back to my days deep in gaming and how many hundreds of apps, including our own. Our own apps, that I wasn't a big fan of as a player because I'm just not maybe a match three player, but I'm like, okay, I'm gonna be in there and understand, like, what is fun about this, even if it's not fun for me. What's the hook?

0:54:24 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, thank you so much again for the time, Nigel.

0:54:27 - (Nigel Eccles): No problem.

0:54:27 - (Matt Widdoes): I look forward to the next one. But amazing background, great stories, and really appreciate your perspective.

0:54:33 - (Nigel Eccles): Thank you.