Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Hi everyone, welcome to the deal.
I'm Jason Kelly alongside of my partner Alex Rodriguez. All right, Alex, we're going to get to a really interesting interview in just a second with sport Radar founder and CEO Carston curl So. Sports Radar it's a huge information provider in the world of sports betting. They work with all the major sports leagues and betting platforms to make data analytics much more accessible.
But before we get to that, I guess you.
Want to know why I'm in yet another nameless, faceless hotel room. I'm actually in Dallas, and you're not going to believe who I got to sit down with. I'm so excited for you to hear this interview when it comes out in a couple of weeks. The Hunt Brothers, Wow, Ark Hunt, Dan Hunt arguably one of the most influential families in the history of American sports. I think you would agree, not American sports, global sports. I mean they
are the north Star. I mean they really are admired and respected by all.
Yeah.
So it was fascinating because what we realized was this was the founding family really one of the founding families of the NFL, and by the way, the MLS too. I mean this was you know, American soccer didn't really exist until they and your friends, the Crafts, really got involved in it have really propelled it forward. Now soccer is headed for this huge moment in the United States in twenty twenty six, between Kansas City and Dallas alone,
they're going to host sixteen games. Nine of them are going to be here in Dallas at AT and T Stadium is obviously going to be the centerpiece of all that. The other amazing thing that we talk about in this interview, which will come as a surprise to you, Taylor Swifts. Oh, Taylor Swift had a tremendous impact on the Kansas City Chiefs FANDI. Yes, winning back to back Super Bowls was big, but really the biggest thing that happened in terms of you know, we talked about the zeitgeist all the time,
was Taylor Swift and Travis Kelcey starting to date. And I'd tell you Clark Hunt and Dan Hunt both told incredible stories about the impact that I was going to have so excited for you to hear about that. We've got a story that we're gonna rune on the Bloomberg. We recorded a TV interview as well. My partner in that case was Julie Fine, the Text Spirit chief. So we've got a lot of cool stuff coming up.
There, Jays.
Let me add one thing to that, because, first of all, I'm so excited to see this interview. I've admired the Hunts for a very very long time. What they keep doing over the last many decades is just keep setting the bar higher and higher.
And I got one quick story.
I recently was at a convention where Roger Goodell spoke and on that day the baseball schedule had come out in Major League Baseball for twenty twenty five, and ironically, they asked them, how do you think about the network? How do you think about went to position games for better ratings? And he said, we wait to the very last minute. And this was interesting because it ties into the Hunt family in Kansas City Chiefs. They said, Kansas
City did huge numbers. Obviously they're a great team. Homes Kelsey, but Taylor Swift, her name come up again and one of the things they said is they're looking at her global schedule to see when they can schedule the NFL games to make sure that she is there, and I'm just like, this is incredible. The NFL waits for her global concert to go out so they can set their games so hopefully she's there and the numbers can go up.
That's unbelievable.
I mean, and to that point, the audience expansion that she brought to the Chiefs and to the league. I mean, they're figuring out the best ways to measure it. But anecdotally, one of the things Clark Hunt told us was he just had people coming up to him saying, my ten or twelve year old daughter wants me to tell her every single time the Kansas City Chiefs are on TV because she's gonna watch.
That is amazing.
That's it.
It's a literal game changer. When we think about game changers, watch what I'm gonna do here. Sports betting has obviously radically changed the landscape.
There's a BusinessWeek.
Cover story that is out now and it is all about the world of sports betting. I got the opportunity to head down to South Florida. You were away so we couldn't hang out, and I was up the road
in Fort Lauderdale. I met up with several current and former Dolphins who talked about from the player's perspective, what this huge increase in legalized betting has meant for them both as players and also, I think importantly, and something you can understand far better than I what it means to be the product that's being bet on and sort of the implications of all of that. Obviously, fantasy has
been a huge driver of both interests revenue. So it is a world that I'm not sure any of us could have imagined when we were kids because betting was not legal, and now it is and it is a booming business. So Carlston Girl is a fascinating guy. I mean, this is an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. And one of the things I loved about this interview that we're about to play is, you guys, we are sort of like swapping notes on what does it take to you know, really have that have that right stuff right.
First of all, the way he talks about some of his investors, I mean, he has a wild story or two about Michael Jordan, Mark Cuban, tet Leonses and is wild how these deals came together. And he's going to share something about the day they went ipo. He takes us behind the scenes with Michael Jordan and I'm not going to spoil it and those spoiler alerts here and
just the whole space. I mean, you gotta understand my first love, Jason's baseball, right, and when you talked about gambling anything with the word gambling, gaming or on base for or sports, it was a pariah. It's amazing the paradigm shift, the radical change where now we're getting leagues involved, we're getting players involved, we're getting owners. It's just fascinating, and I think he does a beautiful job of explaining a lot of it.
All right.
Coming up next on the deal, our interview with Carlston Curl, the founder and CEO of sport Radar. All right, so now we're going to bring in Carston Curl. He's the CEO and the founder of sport Radar. Carson, we are so happy to have you here to talk to us all about data sports vetting. It's something that the numbers. This is what we love on this show. Alex and
I talk about it all the time. I want to start by asking you, like, when you get to meet somebody at a cocktail party or at dinner party, and they say what do you do?
What does sport Radar do?
What do you say, Well, we are collecting sport information, we are prosing it, aggregating it, we are selling it to thousand media clients and eight hundred sports betting operators in one hundred and eleven countries. At the moment, we have offices in thirty four of those countries and we have round about four thousand and five hundred employees sitting in those offices.
Wow.
So where does that idea come from? I believe before sport Radar, you started off in the sports betting world in the nineties with a company called b Win. Then you sold that company and started sport Radar back in the early two thousands.
So walk us through what happened.
Okay, it's a long story, but if I'm looking back, So, it was a long night in Switzerland, in a small city, and I was sitting with a friend and I think at two or three o'clock in the morning, we came to a conclusion. I love sport, I love technology, so what can I do to really bring those two things together? And the answer was, let's develop a platform for sports betting in the Internet. Now, that was nineteen ninety six, and whenever I'm telling the story, I'm feeling damn old.
This is something where that took us three years. I programmed that platform together with the colleagues, and then I wanted to sell it and went to England to the big book makers, Labbroks Hills Chorus, you name it, and that I have a fantastic thing. It's a sports batting platform which is doing sports betting over the Internet. And the CEO said to me, well, you sound very passionate about this and it looks pretty cool, but you know what, we are not so sure if the internet is a
sustainable channel. And now, okay, that's the trouble. So I gotta take this. I believe in it. I operate this sports betting platform myself. I went to Austria, I took a license that was one of the few countries which can do it. To cut a long story short, the IPO, the business. It was the most successful IPO I think in the Austrian market. Still today. We have been oversigned
close to two hundred times. But it's a small market there and I, as a very young entrepreneur, got a lot of money, but I lost the control of my business and losing the control of the business and having people telling you what you should do is difficult for an entrepreneur. So I decided to do something new and I founded sport Rada. So I knew that there was a demand on data. I knew that this is international.
It's not so easy to have team names in fifty different languages, including Hindi and Mandarin and whatsoever, in a correct spelling. Even these basic things. There was a need for it, and there was a need how you transmit this and how you're making a market transparent by somehow crawling that informations together and comparing it. That was the origin of sport Rada. We started with four clients. I invested I think one hundred and fifty thousand viewers at
this time. Since then I never invested, and now the business is worth yeah, a bit more than three billion, and I still the major shareholder and the biggest shareholder in there. So that is the story in a nutshell.
Amazing, amazing, and congrats, I mean it's that was an amazing journey. I guess my question is how quickly did you identify with the TAM the addressable market is on a business like this.
As an entrepreneur, you love what you're doing. I love sport and I love technology. At this time, very honestly, I was not interested in whatever TAM. I simply had a passion to say, Wow, what I can do is I can work with the sport which I love, and I can work in a fast growing global market where I know it's a market with the sharpest brains on the planet. Because it's a regulated industry, you need to be very quick, you need to react very quick, and
it's a global competition. And that was driving me saying it's an excitement and it's a pleasure to work there. And I think in the first years we simple progressed in this perspective. It was a startup business without looking too much on the TAMS. Because I financed it by myself.
I didn't need any kind of investors in there. And I still recall after four or five years, we had the first management meeting on a big, big whiteboard moderated by a friend of mine and one of my colleagues draw on that whiteboard versus three meters to four meters high, so really big, draw a number in saying how target is eighty million revenue. That was in the year number five, probably year two thousand and five, two thousand and six.
Today our revenue is more than one point one billion, and for the eighty million revenue target, we didn't believe that we ever get there, because we have probably at this time fifteen or seventeen million yearly revenue from that market. That shows you we grew with this market. The industry by itself had a tremendous growth that was accelerated, of course by the Internet, and all the things which you
saw then coming live got more and more appealing. The live coverage is much more important that things which I see now in the US I see in the early days of sports betting. Here it's the same kind of learning curve which I saw in Europe. So you realize that betting while the match is running is so more repeating, so it's so much more engaging. You have all these emotions, you have all those things which you see and then
you place your bet on this. So it's the thing which was driving this industry and worldwide, I would say it's the same phenomen around the globe. You see a constant development. Now you see more development into player information. I'm a big believer that the players are making the game.
Even if some of the teams are seeing this different the players is really where the people follow, the fans are with them getting more information about the players, putting betting prepositions out there, using AI, using computer vision to put that in a correlation is fairly complex. But this is so engaging. And if you make a complex story simple, that's where we are heading. If you hyper personalize this, you have all the ingredients is for the future sports consumption.
We are sitting on the crossroad here, and I see sports betting more as a technology enabler for all these adjacent markets.
But I want to get back to one of the very core elements of this is and honestly, you know, Alex, this is very reminiscent oddly enough of Bloomberg. Candidly, you know, in terms of like creating a place where the data.
Are all sort of collected.
I want to ask you a very basic question, Carson, which is, how do you get all this data together? Where is it living that you're able to collect it? And how do you do that?
Yeah, I'm sitting here in Bloomberg, and we had a time, Jason, where we called ourselves to Bloomberg of sport to cut it short, and it's an information transmission to a highly classified and qualified audience. In all case the sports betting operators, and on the beginning that was crawlers, and if those crowdits are extracting information from the Internet, you begin to
validate this. We very quickly came to the conclusion that we're going to need to have a highly specialized sport agency to really validate the information to be right with the information. It sounds easy, but it's not so easy. If you have a tennis tournament, you get the order of play in the morning from the organizer, and then sometimes the matches are quicker, sometimes not. Sometimes matches are starting quicker than scheduled, so you're going to need to
validate this information. Nowadays, it's fast video access. It is coverage on the ground. We operate a network of twelve thousand sports journalists around the globe. They're going live into the arenas reporting with our application and we cover the data. We do this, by the way, for the NBA, we do that for UEFA, and we are quite sophisticated on this. The better thing is you have this data production in a controlled environment, so you have fast video feits and
that goes into one of our operation offices. We have four of them. Imagine them as a kind of call center for monitors on one table and they we have a fast video feed in there, and we have a situation of four people are operating one match or one to one situation. In American sports, it's usually one to four because you're going on very detailed data to pick and roll and all those kind of things. Five years
ago that started to get into a computer vision. And with computer vision, you extract the player, and you extract the ball, and you extract the information from the referee. It's only a question do you have the camera angle that you can do all those things. But what it is doing is it is more accurate than a human being, and it's faster than a human being, and it gives
you so much more data points. For tennis, I know now the reaction when the ball is leaving the record from the other side, from the other player, how quickly is the knee reacting into this direction? Is it less than twenty milliseconds while the player is in a good shape physically and mentally in the match. We can aggregate this over the match, and we can use it for predictive models. So this is possible with technologies and we don't need human beings anymore for this. A trouble still
is team sports. There is much more complex to applied computer vision. But I'm pretty positive that we will see the same development like we saw in record sport in player sport with the team sports, and that gives a lot of additional applications.
So Carston, obviously you love sports, you love technology, and you're really good at raising capital. Walk us through how difficult it is or how much fun it is to go out and get a guy like Michael Jordan or Mark Cuban and others to invest into your platform. Is it more difficult than if you were going to a private family office versus a celebrity or former icon athlete.
So I think it doesn't matter do you go to a family office or do you go to private equity or a venture capital or do you go to one of the woodraw rich people which are interested in that sector. The thing which really counts is are you convincing when you doing the pitch? Can you show that the level of engagement but the knowledge there and can you tell a consistent story the numbers of course must fit together,
but you must be convincing. Now. For me, it was never really raising money when I went into private equity. I had to go into private equity with sport Rada because I had two founding partners, two Norwegians, and you know, in every meeting they said, hey, Carson, you know how
those things are going. You're going to do it. And I said, we have now four hundred people, and I want you to challenge me, and I want you to help me to give us structure because doing the decisions only alone is quite a risk in such a growing and hypergrowth environment. And I found a partner with Venture Capital who had an approach which I liked and saying we can help you with this structure and we can help you with experts from outside. It was not so much the money. How I do business is I try
to learn very fast. I try to make smaller steps. I'm not the guy who is saying I need a hundred million. Leave me alone for two years and then I will tell you what I made out of it. So for me, it's more I'm testing things if I see that it's successful, and the measurement of success is money hits your bank account. That's the only measurement. Success is really very simple. A client is paying for a service.
If that hits your bank account, it's successful. If that success is there, I'm ready to go double and triple and all in because I see I have a learning and I see there's a value for me. Was always incremental steps and is always incremental steps. It is a slower story to grow the business you have, not that big bang, but it's for me the much better thing because I have a control and I understand what I'm doing and what we are doing is needed in the market.
There is a buyer that doesn't stop innovation, but you get the feedback of saying is there a value in? And the value is defined by a client is paying you for this.
One of the things we try to do in this podcast is really educate and share our stories that are really important as an entrepreneur. And it's not as sexy as people think it is. I think young entrepreneurs overestimate what they can do in the short term and highly underestimate what they can do in the long term. And you see here a perfect example of really long term thinking. Much like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Yeah, So, I guess one of the things that I'm so interested in, Carson, is this idea of you've been able to become an official partner of just about every major league across the world. What do they see as the business opportunity here, like help us understand the ecosystem that you're building in sort of who has what stake in it?
It's innovation. It's brutally looking for innovation. How can I be better that I'm attractive in the global mark it for the digital sport fan. How can I get my product into the market that it's appealing for them? And the digital sports fan they want a different consumption. Probably you're me. We are looking to the big screen sometimes looking for a match, cheering and being fully engaged during this.
If I look to the audience in Korea, for example, in a generation set that's minimum seven matches which they'll follow parallel, and they want to have the overlay data in and they want you to know what player is interesting and for which player they want to have some additional information. They maybe want to have predictive games, or they want to have some merchandising, and they want you to understand this. That's a topic where you need to use technology, and if I'm looking now to the MBA,
they are an excellent partner for us. Seem like Major League Baseball. We get tracking data from the match. We have the skeleton data of every MBA match, and we have that in real time, so we could make a funny thing out of it. Put the phase of ad on the body of Lebron James and put the parameters in there, or put my face in there to personalize this. But the whole thing is going in real time and it is then viewed in the way like you know,
I want to view the match. This is an understanding of the sport van marrying it with deep sport data to drive the product of the future. And for the smaller ones, the story is more airtime. It's really building awareness. A thing like pickleball is something which is really picking up. It's played by so many people and it's such a fun sport. And of course we can transport this sport from the world of batting into a broader audience and then get all the statistics behind it, the coverage and
all those things. The roles that we can organize the tournaments and help them to do this So every sport, I would say, has different characteristics at the end, its usage of technology and achieving the aim for.
The So one of the things that you know comes up in any story or any conversation about sports betting is the integrity of the game. And my understanding is that you guys have a lot of people devoted to this. You have players who could be tempted by what's effectively insider trading, you know, tipping off who's healthy, who's unhealthy, who's playing well, who's not playing well, et cetera. There's the social impact of betting. How do you think about
that philosophically? How do you guys tackle those issues?
There is no sport without integrity. If you know the outcome of the match, that's killing the sport. So this is aligning us and it is very bad for our business model. Frankly speaking, if people know the outcome of
a match, you don't bet on it. So integrity of the game is is there somebody who knows the outcome of the match or has more knowledge about this can be a player, can be somebody bribing the players in most of the cases in this way, and the player has a lot of opportunities so no show is something of the things which is very hard to spot. In a tense of a second, you don't do what you
can do. So this is something very early when we had been probably in year number three to four of our business, we had an accident with a German referee who manipulated football soccer matches. The guy was doing it in a way that in overtime we knew there must be a three goals difference. He gave three penates in the last three minutes of a ninety minute match. That was a very obvious thing to detect, and from there we began to develop those algorithms. Now we are seeing
the whole market. We are seeing all line movements and there is always money involved behind them. With the algorithms which we have by ourselves to predict match outcomes, and if we see spread and differences, that gets into an AI exercise in a very sophisticated system. Now this system is used by the European Court of Justice, it's used by COSS, which is the sport court in Lausanne, as an evidence that there is something going on with this. We never can say it's so much money which is
played here. But the thing while we do it, and it's not a profit unit for us. You went on a second topic and saying responsible gaming super important. We work only in regulated markets. That's the only way how you can grow a business. And I think here the state and the regulator has an obligation to protect the people. That's the highest good. So I'm going to have to
protect the people for getting gaming addicted. I'm going to have to monitor those patterns, and I have to build a framework for this, and they have to monitor this. We believe we can do this very well, and we developed the system for this. So far we have managed to sell the system. I'm totally sure in two, three, four years you will see a big pickup because there is a huge need. And the third one where I
think that's needed, and that's for regulators, is taxes. The reason why sports betting is so popular around the globe is it's generated taxes, and those taxes can be used for sport, can be used for developing something in the public, which is good for the people. You're going to need to monitor this in a much better way than it's done at the moment. Putting that all together, you might say that the regulatory service framework, which in every betting environment in one or the other way.
You need to have, Kirton, I have one quick one.
I know that you mentioned IPO in twenty twenty one and being one of the most successful ones. Have you ever thought about taking a private again and maybe pros and cons private versus public.
First for the IPO that was one of the moments in your life. And I've been standing there short after COVID with Michael Jordan and a short story. Hopefully he's not listening to this podcast, but he said to me in the morning, it is a cursten today. I'm your cheerleader and I only smiled. You know that would be pretty funny if you are my cheerleader. And then we had to click on the buzzer and they simulate this, of course, but you're counting down from ten to one.
And when we had been on three, I looked on him and saying, I'm faster than you, and he smiled. Made no chance, and of course I went on one on the buzzer. I was quicker. But he is so competitive, and that's what I get from Michael. He is I think the most competitive person on the planet I know, and learning from him that spirit, I want to win was an is for me a great exercise. And he is a fantastic businessman, which many people don't realize too much.
But the things what he is doing is very well organized. He's very much looking to the details. He's very attentive, and he wants to provide value. He understands sport on the level I'm not able to understand it, and he understands sports betting on a level where we are competing. So I see the directions here and he's seeing that. Think that would be a cool thing to do. That's a perfect mix to engage on a business level. Same story somehow with Mark Cuban, who is so passionate about basketball.
I love that.
I mean one quick Michael story to put a button on yours. Jason, haven't told you this. A few months ago, I was at his golf club in Girl twenty three, me too. Here's Michael Jordan with his business partner and they're sitting there for like four hours going over all these p and ls, line by line by line, and I asked them, Michael, you're playing today? He goes, no, today's my business day. I got to go down the numbers. And he probably does this once a month, right. So
to your point, I have the same experience. He's been a great friend and mentor of mine. So I love Jordan.
I hope you played not against him in his golf club. It's an experience. But he's also, as we both know, a very good and competitive goal for.
Yeah, and he's the fastest golfer.
Him and Mark Wahlberg can play eighteen holes like an hour and a half.
I mean, that's way too much stress for me. I'm not that good.
Same for me, Alex, same for me Carston.
Before we get too far away from I mean, I would love to know how did you and Jordan get linked up? You know, it's not like he's sort of like out there. You don't just like text me and be like, hey, bro, are you interested in this? Like how does that deal come together?
It's all about networking knowing people. In this case, there is a third person which is involved in here, and I'm very grateful for him. He has helped me on the very beginning. In the US. That's Tad Leon this. I think he owns the most of the teams, and Ted is so well connected. I told him the story what I want to do, and he was the first thing, Okay, I'm backing this, I'm investing into this. I'm very grateful for this, and I learned a lot and I got
a lot of connections from Ted. So Ted connected me with Michael. Michael played for him, so that was an easy way to go.
Well, I'm glad you said that because Ted is coming on the pod next month.
That will be an interesting part.
I mean Ted is a great partner obviously in the NBA, but I'm also going to pick a bone with him, Like, how can you not call me for this great investment you called Michael.
Yeah, look, you should pick on him on this one. So trust me. T is a fantastic person and very visionary if it comes to technology, sports, sports batting. He understood that as one of the first and he's a great ambassador for US sensational.
Well, it's interesting too. I mean, if you think about it, just talk about Ted for a second. I mean, through AOL, he saw the collision of sports and technology and information and being able to aggregate that in real time. And I mean when you guys first met, to have been a lot of overlap in terms of even sort of the underlying philosophy of what you were trying to do.
Look, that was such a quick thing. So we talked and is that well, we understand the direction which this should take. And he understands or understood at this moment in time everything about the US and I was a very starter. And even now I would say I probably have ten percent of his knowledge if it comes to the details in the US and what happens here in the sport and technology. So I'm good in the sports
batting sector. I'm good in sports technology sector. But Ted has an overall knowledge and he has that for multiple sport and he has a track record which is hard to beat. And that was easy. So if you meet somebody who's talking the same language, who has that expertise, who has the network and connection, that was a fairly simple thing to do.
All right, So let's do the lightning round. This is our favorite part of this. So we're going to go quick. We're going to go back and forth. I will start, so you know, give us the first thing that jumps to your mind. We may have already talked about this, but I'm going to ask it anyway, what's the best deal you've ever made?
Carston created my own business.
What's the best piece of advice you've received on deal making or business.
Two small steps, prove them, and then accelerate and double and triple down.
What's the worst advice you've ever been given?
Invest the fortune from people not your own money, and don't have the right cadence.
What's your best advice for someone who's listening wants to be an entrepreneur? What would you tell them, especially maybe in a moment where they're not sure that it's all going to go their way.
Every good entrepreneur I know and have a few friends. The older you get, the less you have, but they all have the same experience as an entrepreneur. You might run bankrupt once or twice. You're going to need to believe in yourself, but you need to find the point when something is not working. Don't put all the passion in. Be realistic on this. It happens to everybody that you struggle sometimes, and the skill is to detect it. I know it was not a quick answer, but it's an important point.
What's your hype song before you go into a big meeting?
Cold Play?
Oh?
I like Chris Martin?
Yeah, well I don't know him, but I love it, and probably a sky full of stars.
Okay, love it all right, So, Carson Curl, thank you so much, CEO and founder of sport Radar.
You told us some good stories. Listen anytime, Alex.
We get a good Michael Jordan's story and a good Ted Leons the story. Like I feel like that's a successful episode right there. So Carson, we're very grateful for your time.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and me Jason Kelly. This episode was made by Stacey Wong, Annamasarakus, Lizzie Phillip, and Victor Eveez. Our theme music was made by Blake Maples. Our executive producers are Kelly Laferrier, Ashley Honig, and Brendan Newnham. Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Additional support from Rachel Scaramzzino and Elena Los Angeles. Thanks for listening to the Deal. If you have a minute, please subscribe, rate,
and review our show. It'll help other listeners find us. And remember, if you're a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely add free on Apple Podcasts. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel and connect your Bloomberg account.
I'm Jason Kelly. See you next week.