It's the big Super Bowl weekend and fifteen billion dollars in sports betting is about to get even bigger. For more on the sports betting business and how the Super Bowl plays a role, we're joined by Jason Robbins from DraftKings. Jason, you're the chief executive of one of the largest sports books out there, but you're also facing some tough competition, especially from those that are actually using contracts linked to sports games but aren't the traditional sports books. I'm talking
crypto dot com call sheet. What kind of competition are you seeing.
Well, I think a lot of different forms of gaming right now, and those aren't exactly gaming. They're classified as I think financial contracts. But a lot of different forms of gaming are appearing. Those are in the regulated market. There's actually a much larger illegal market. It's competitive with us, and they're much more difficult to compete with because they
don't have to follow any rules or regulations. So definitely a lot of competition out there right now, but we feel like we have the best product in the best customers experience, and in the end, we think that'll win the.
Day and regulator after regulator, you convince, Jason, what are the winnings for you this weekend. Do you think how many bets will be placed? What are your takeaways?
Oh, I can't really say what I think the numbers will be. But each year the Super Bowl gets bigger and bigger, so I expect this to be our biggest day ever the Sunday, I should say, to be our biggest day ever. Hard to know exactly what the numbers will be, and right now it's a pretty balanced line, so you know, in some ways that's good because that means it won't be as volid ale. Although right now, because we have so much money on player props, it's
much bigger deal. Whether you see Saquon Barkley, Jalen Hurts and Travis Kelsey get in the end zone and who actually wins the game.
Don't get our producers started on parlaying as well. But I'm really interested, Jason more broadly on what this means for your marketing efforts. Ultimately, this must be a massive draw for people to then come back time and time again.
Well, Super Bowl is not only the biggest betting day of the year, it's our biggest day of the year for customer acquisition activation. So it's a huge day for us marketing wise. We have a ton of stuff going on all week leading up to the game and obviously throughout the game, so big time for our marketing team,
and they've done a great job each year. We've won the customer acquisition battle the last two Super Bowl I think the last three Super Bowls, so we're very confident in them and feel like we're gonna have a great showing this year too.
There's another thing that's taking more people to their televisions to watch the NFL. That's Taylor Swift. She's driven major viewership since she's dating one of the Chiefs players, and I'm curious DraftKings is capitalizing on this increase viewership in any way.
Well, more viewership always is better for us, and I think it's sort of this positive cycle where people bet more and they tend to watch the games more and they watch longer, and then more people watching needs more opportunities from them placed wagress with us. So that's a really good thing for our business. Obviously for the ratings of the NFL. And I don't know how much Tailor is contributing to it, but if she is, and thank you, I'm.
Not much of a gambler, But what can you tell us about your current user base. Have you seen any major shifts in who is putting wagers online?
You know, it's definitely been growing in terms of female audience obviously, you know, for us, that's an important vector because right now our audience is largely male, so we think there's a lot of room to grow on that front. In general, though the demographics haven't changed a whole lot. Typically tends to be you know, on average age in the mid thirties to late thirties, lots of people we think, you know, coming from technology and educated backgrounds, typically a
you know, higher income consumer. So those tend to be the demographics we see and that really hasn't changed since we launched, but definitely seeing more women betters coming in, which is a great thing.
I'm interested in sort of the fundamentals of the business in large part not dictated by you, But how what the outcome of the games are, I mean, customer friendly wins with something that hit the numbers and the last time that you came on and discussed them, So how do you managed to navigate that and control your own destiny?
Well, there is always that, and you know this is a business where we are taking a side of the action, so there's going to be volatility in the results over time. That normalizes. So the things that we can control or what we focus on, which are making sure we provide a great, great product for our customers and trying to create more ways for them to bet and more ways for them to engage, and you know, making sure we have a really great back end operation to our trading.
Risk management is a plus, using our marketing to help drive parlays and other forms of betting that we think are good for margins and good customer So those are the things we focus on and the outcomes will be the outcomes. There's been some years that we've had good years. In twenty twenty two, we had a good year. Last year, you know, twenty twenty four wasn't. But it definitely can vary year to year and that's part of the business.
But overall it doesn't really change fundamentals or the trajectory of our business.
Well, growth drivers going forward for Generative AI, of course is being kind of the key driver for a lot of companies out there. How is Draftking starting to incorporate this across the business? Any chance we could see any tasks taken over by AI versus a human.
In the short term, we think generative AI is a huge opportunity and it's really more about getting better outcomes for our customers. Efficiency internally is simply a means to an end for that. So everything from how do we make sure we have great customer service and using chatbot and AI do that, to making sure that our products are as interactive as possible and easy to use as possible, lots of areas for us to play AI really across
the entire business. A good chunk of our code. I think I read a memo recently about fifteen percent something like that of our code right now is being written by generator of AI. So we really feel like we have a long way to go, but also are seeing some great traction with internal adoption.
Jason Robbins has been great having you on thirty one buys on the stock zero Sells, and I'm sure you might be having a great time this weekend. Jason Robin draft King, CEO, thanks for stopping by.