FanDuel Group Chief Executive Matt King watched sports evaporate in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, sapping away the events that the sports-betting world relied upon.
But major sports have returned, culminating with this weekend’s Super Bowl, one of the biggest sports events in the world and a branding opportunity for sportsbooks competing for market share. The American Gaming Association predicts more than 23 million people in the U.S. will bet $4.3 billion on Super Bowl LV with a record number of people doing so online.
FanDuel kept hiring despite the pandemic—as more states legalized sports betting and leagues returned to play—growing by about 40% to about 1,500 people. The company now operates mobile sports betting in 10 states.
Mr. King, 41 years old, has led FanDuel since 2017. He talked with The Wall Street Journal this week from his home in snowy Chicago. Here are edited excerpts from the interview:
WSJ: What is FanDuel expecting for betting this weekend?
Mr. King: What we’re seeing so far is significant growth year over year, and obviously some of that is, we’re operational in more states. But even in the states that we’ve operated in both years, we’re way up.
WSJ: You can’t bet on the game. But are you rooting for a team?
Mr. King: I will watch. I will have my phone and computer open to make sure everything’s going well from the game, all at the same time. I root for a good game, because at the end of the day, the best experience for our users is that things are close.
WSJ: Is the Super Bowl a money-maker for FanDuel?
Mr. King: It doesn’t matter. Some years it will be. Some years it isn’t. It’s certainly one of the days where you’re going to get the most number of people betting on sports, and so the most important thing is that they have a good experience.
WSJ: How do you rate yourself as a sports fan?
Mr. King: When I joined the company, I was not a huge sports fan. I grew up in a family where none of my family was really sports fans.
I really like sports as a business. If you think about the fan avidity, and the fact that people measure their love of their teams or fantasy or betting in decades. It’s a really incredible cultural phenomenon. Over time, I’ve become much more of a sports fan. I have found others’ love for it to be contagious.
WSJ: So do you play sports?
Mr. King: People ask me what sports did I play in high school. I say, I was good at math.
WSJ: What have you learned as CEO navigating the company through the pandemic?
Mr King: I’ve seen new heights of creativity from the team. What we focused our team on, even when there was no sports, was, how do we entertain our users? At the end of the day, we’re an entertainment company.
The second thing, from a hearts and minds perspective, it reinforced the importance of talking openly about what you know and what you don’t know. When people are going through something like the pandemic, there’s lots of unknowns. You don’t want to fall in the trap of giving false precision. But at the same time, you have to give confidence about how this will likely play out.
WSJ: What is your biggest challenge as CEO looking ahead?
Mr. King: My biggest challenge is continuing to maintain and strengthen our culture. We’ve grown head count by 40% in Covid. So 40% of our population has never stepped foot in one of our offices.
WSJ: What has pandemic life been like for you working from home?
Mr. King: I travel a ton, and my wife does as well, so the fact that we had to spend a year together is amazing. I am an extrovert, so I want to get back in the game. I want to get back to a place where you can be meeting people and be at events.
WSJ: Is competition for sports-betting customers getting more heated?
Mr. King: We are seeing more and more people try the product and are constantly setting new records for single-day acquisition. Certainly, I think the size and scope of peoples’ ambitions has increased as people have understood how big this market’s ultimately going to be. The stakes are bigger. And I think people are coming to realize that.
WSJ: When will you return to the New York office?
Mr. King: Probably late April or early May.
You have to avoid the illusion that things are going to totally go back to normal any time in the near future. Our offices were typically so tightly packed in, from a people perspective, we can’t have all of our people back in the office until you don’t have social-distancing requirements. That’s probably not going to be at least for another six months, if not the end of 2021.
You’re probably going to end up with getting a Covid shot every year, right alongside your flu shot. This is never going to go away, and life’s never going to be exactly like it was. Starting to seed that message, I think, is important to managing peoples’ expectations.
Write to Katherine Sayre at [email protected]
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