FanDuel CEO Amy Howe: ‘My whole career has been sliding doors moments’

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1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. It was the biggest crisis that I've ever managed through in my professional career.

1:43 Right to think about your entire business being shut down, you have no revenue coming in, you have a massive burn rate, and you have thousands of employees who are all looking at you. Amy Howe was at the helm of Ticketmaster in 2020 when the Covid pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt. Thousands of concerted overnight, pro sports paused, customers demanding refunds. As Amy Shepherd Ticketmaster through the unprecedented chaos, another company noticed her steady hand. That company.

2:15 Fan doll. The fantasy sports startup turned sports bebbing juggernaut was looking for a seasoned leader. Suddenly. Amy had a real decision to make. My whole career has been sliding door moments, right? Those unexpected turns that take you in one direction. And I think one of the things that's been really helpful for me is I was always willing to walk through doors that were open for me that I wasn't necessarily planning on walking through, but once I did. It opened up a whole new world.

2:49 This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host, and this week on the show, Amy Howe. She's the CEO of FanDuel, the market leader in sports betting. With a market cap of more than$25 billion, it's at the epicenter of a rapidly growing and somewhat controversial industry. I spoke with Amy about her strategy for prediction markets, navigating an evolving legal landscape, and the increasingly prominent place of gambling. The lives of millions of Americans. Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale.

3:24 Thank you. It's so fun to be here. I'm I'm so excited to have you, especially Super Bowl week, having this conversation. Why did you take the job at Vendel? So if I rewind the clock to set the scene, it was covet. At the time I was running Ticketmaster. We'd just kinda gone through the digital transformation. And I'm guessing you remember where you were when the world shut down. The MBA suspended their season. Do you remember that? So I was on a week long retreat.

3:52 with no access to the outside world. And as I came out of it, they told us that March Mattis had been canceled, the NBA suspended its season. Being offline for seven days was as if I'd been ripping winkle. I'm sure your text was blowing up, right? Crazy. Yeah. But it was so it was March twenty twenty. The NBA suspended their season and then, you know, from there the dominoes fell. Right, and I was running Ticketmaster at the time for North America. I think we had fifty four thousand events that were live on the platform, literally overnight. They all went were either canceled or postponed. And you know, you've got everybody and their brother asking how do they get their refunds back. And you know, we went through a period of time where it was just you're in crisis mode, right? The live entertainment world and obviously the sports world shut down.

4:37 And so we're just managing through the crisis, trying to be a empathetic leader who Nobody gives you a playbook, as it turns off, for how you manage during a pandemic. And fast forward several months and somebody from Fandle reached out and said, you know, hey, we're looking for a president position, we'd love for you to come over. And long story short, after hemming and hawing and saying, Well I'm not sure I can leave Ticketmaster right now.

5:09 I knew that sports betting was taking off. Right, you couldn't go to a sports industry conference at the time without hearing about just this explosive growth of online sports betting. And so it was a little bit of a leap of faith. I knew that, you know, I could come in, professionalize the industry. And bring a lot of the pattern recognition from having been a partner in McKinsey for so many years. You were not hired as CEO, but you became CEO. Very quickly. How did that come to pass?

5:37 Well, I was hired as president. Matt King at the time was looking for somebody to ultimately succeed him. And after a few months, uh, I'll never forget this remind you, this is during Covid, right? I hadn't met a single person face to face. I did all my interviews over Zoom, and I think I I finally met Matt in in New York. And you know, Matt decided it was time for him to move on, and he had an opportunity to go work for Michael Rubin at Fanatics. And uh I stepped into the interim CEO role when when he left. I was still very new to the industry, right? This was A few months after I started, so I was still coming up to speed.

6:14 What was it about the team that made you so excited to work with them? When I met the top team, when I met Christian and Matt and so many of the other folks, the Andy Giancomelli, who was COO at the time. I could see myself working with them day in and day out, right? And when you think about it, we spend more time with our colleagues than we do at times, our family and friends. And you really have to like trust and respect that team. But the other thing that really drew me to Fandle, and it was this company lives their principles and the values in a way that I've literally never seen any other company, right? And you know, most people can recite them. We talk about being humble and hungry, which is hugely relevant in today's world where things are changing so quickly, right? We are one team, we're gonna win with integrity. We say thank you. So these principles А на часто на nice плакар даран на вал.

7:06 But they literally drive the behavior of the top team and the entire organization. And that was meaningful to me. for someone who spent fifteen years in McKinsey having looked at dozens, if not hundreds, of companies, how were those values so deeply imbued in not just the company, but in the teams that they weren't just on a wall, but they were lived? And how have you carried that forward as CEO? Well FanDuel if if you think about the online sports vetting industry Gosh, has it gone through a lot of twists and turns and many of these predated me, but you know, in 2016, the daily fantasy sport business, this was before real money wagering was legal, but the the entire industry was almost shut down in the New York State legislature saved it at the last minute, right? And then, you know, fast forward to 2018.

7:49 When ironically the the supreme court repealed what used to be a federal ban on online sports betting. And you know, that opened up the market, but a lot of these folks were there from the early days. And when you meet them, you you'll understand they're high integrity, hardworking, humble people that want to build an organization, they want to be successful, they want to be the number one players, but they want to do it the right way. And when I you know when I came into the organization A lot of CEOs want to come in and change things and

8:20 I knew what was important. I you know, was not an expert yet in online sports spending. So I did a lot of listening and learning and getting up to speed, but I said, these values are great. Why would I change them? But having come from you know McKinsey, which also has a very strong culture, I brought a lot of that pattern recognition as well. And I think one of the most important Principles that I brought from McKinsey was what they talk about is the obligation to dissent, right? From day one when you come in. If you're a business analyst out of undergrad or I came in as an associate out of Wharton, you are taught to have a voice, right? And

8:55 You're in rooms with partners who may have been there for 20 years, but they hired you for a reason and they want to hear your perspective. And that has always stuck with me, right? I mean, I think about our greatest asset as f Fandel are our people. We have nearly five thousand people all around the world. And we hire them for a reason. So I think it's important to kind of create to create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking out, right? That obligation to dissent or speak up if you have a different point of view, because ultimately we get to a better answer and it's better for the company. It is not easy to come in in a president or CEO role or president in the move into CEO role very quickly, even if the values are incredible and the team's incredible. What was your process coming in to get up to speed on what the business really was? I mean Every company's a covered dish. We all know this, right? You start a new job, you think it's one thing, and you're like, Oh my gosh, why'd they put raisins in this? That makes no sense, right? Human. Oh my gosh. So what was your process coming in to get your arms around the business to figure out what you really needed to attack first?

9:59 So when I came in, I think I had Perspective That I wouldn't have had had I not just lived through COVID. I mean, it was the biggest crisis that I've ever managed through in my professional career, right? To think about your entire business being shut down, you have no revenue coming in, you have a massive burn rate, and you have thousands of employees who are all looking at you. That was a crisis, you know, even after th three months when Matt King told me he was leaving, I was like, I'll figure it out. I had a certain comfort with ambiguity. I had a comfort with solving very complicated problems. So my thought process was to actually go back to some of the first principles from being a consultant, but I leveraged my team heavily.

10:41 Yeah, and it it it strikes me also that in addition to a commitment to descent, I can't tell you the number of times I've said this to junior members of team, like the three most powerful words anyone can say in most settings are I don't know. Right. And so there's a humility that comes with saying like well I may have my own perspective, but I don't know. I'm curious because one of the knocks on most consulting firms is come in, it's incredibly sharp. analysis, et cetera, et cetera, but ultimately you make a set of recommendations and then you don't live with the consequences of the recommendations you make and and how they're implemented. Did living with the consequences of decisions that you were making change how you affected things at Ticketmaster or FanDuel as you transition from consultant world to operator? Yeah, for sure. And I will say when I made when I made that initial transition from

11:32 being a partner at McKinsey to an operating role, a ticket master, you learn a lot, right? You you learn exactly what you just said, which is at the end of the day, you live with the results. And so you need to very quickly learn there's a dose of pragmatism, right? Around coming up with a great strategy that is never gonna be able to be implemented. It's not that helpful. So being able to really think about okay, at the end of the day, what is the North Star? How do we make sure that, you know, we've got real clarity around what those big bets are, but that we've got an organization who can embrace them and implement them. But I also made some changes in the team, right? As we thought about where's the business going. We were on a rocket ship. And it can be really tricky because the host can reject the organ transplant quite quickly. For another business leader who is going through this transition right now. And who's already locked in their key people, but has identified, okay, these are the roles we have to fill. We we're here at Super Bowl week, so you know we need a left tackle. We need it we need we need a strong safety, whatever it is. And by the way, you can't have all Kobe's. Like you need a team with some Derek Fishers and some other role players on them. What's the advice that you would offer another business leader who's going through this process where they're trying to make sure the host doesn't reject that organ transplant, where they're gonna mesh the old people with the new people really effectively?

12:48 First, I I do think it's really important to bring the team, your top team along on the journey, right? I had a very clear perspective of where I wanted to go, and I could have just drawn the org chart and said, Here you go, here's the new structure. But I knew we would have organ rejection. And so we went through a very thoughtful process. And that was one of the few instances where I actually did use a third party to help because there's always a lot of emotion. And when you're anytime you're doing organizational work there's as much Art and judgment is there is science, right? You can do benchmarks, you can look at other companies, and we did all of that. Work is not the easiest work, but the last thing I'll say on us.

13:28 It's always better to do it from a position of strength. If you wait too long. You're playing defense. Still ahead more with FanDuel CEO Amy Howe on what it will take to unlock legal online sports betting in California. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

14:20 I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Chayubi.

14:39 And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more. on our YouTube channel and be sure to check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.

15:19 Amy says the recent addition of Prediction Markets is a full circle moment for Fandle. a lot of people don't even know this, but the original founders of FanDuel, the the product even before became a daily fantasy sports product was a prediction market product, an exchange. And the reason they ended up pivoting into daily fantasy sports is because the insight was all the volume was a lot of the volume, right, was on sports. And so they ended up pivoting the product to a daily fantasy sports product. And uh it's interesting as somebody who has three boys and they for years have had their daily fantasy sports leagues and you know, on Sunday they're watching Sunday ticket with four different games when all I wanna do is actually watch my Buffalo Bills. A bit of a masochistic endeavor, but you understand why fantasy sports and now sports spending are so powerful because

16:12 Everybody knows. Everything about the player stats, and they're following, you know, every move that each of the different players are playing. And so before prop bets were even a thing in the US. You know, the daily fantasy sports business was really kind of paving the way for the business that we have today.

16:29 the court issued the ruling it did in twenty eighteen. What did it unleash? That was the moment where real money wagering sports betting and eye gaming was now legal and it was up to the states to decide, right? There was no longer a federal ban on online sports betting. So state by state, you could decide if you wanted to legalize sports betting and eye gaming. And you know, there were early advocates like Governor Christie, but there were, you know, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and, you know Michigan and a number of states that legalized quite quickly.

17:01 And what we found is that there was just phenomenal demand. And you know, w for us, we had a huge advantage because we had a a very engaged set of users who were all already using our daily fantasy sports product, right? And so we were able to migrate them over beautifully to our online sports betting product. Now fast forward to 2026, we're sitting here Super Bowl weekend. There are twenty five states, fifty percent of the US can bet legally online, but fifty percent can't. Well, and and there are loopholes that are being exploited all over the place, which which I want to get to, but that created a dynamic where it emerged that there was effectively a duopoly in the marketplace, right? It was it was you all and another company that starts with a D and we'll leave it at that. Who we collaborate with All the time, right? I mean, we're part of a sports betting alliance, and that's one of the great things, by the way, about this industry is we work together to safely open up and and regulate. I mean because the the rising tide will lift all boats with a with a more permissive regulatory framework. So that makes a ton of sense. But you came in when when it was still functionally a duopoly, what was it like coming into a marketplace where you're going head to head with a competitor where

18:14 I'm trying to remember twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, what customer acquisition costs were in your category, but they were. Astronomical. What was that like in that moment for you? Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you're right. In the early days there was a lot of money spent on marketing, but there's a lot of learnings along the way, right? Trying to figure out what league deals do you need to do, what teams do you want to partner with, what media stations do you want to align with, and how do we think about the role of

18:40 T V versus you know, digital. And I think we bought brought a lot of sophistication and discipline to that in the very early days. And that served us well over over the years. So you referenced the emergence of prediction markets. This has been explosive growth over the last year eighteen months. How is that changing First the competitive landscape and second how you're leading Fandle.

19:04 Yeah, I think the important thing to remember is the North Star is still to legalize and offer our our industry leading sports betting product in every state we can, right? It is a it's a superior offering. We love prediction markets in the states that aren't legal because it gives us a nice complimentary offering. But it has it has shifted the landscape. As a CEO, it's a it's a constant reminder that you have to be able to be agile and pivot as the landscape evolves. And one of the things that I think Fandel has done a very good job of is there's been uncertainty as you know, as we've been talking about through this conversation for well over a decade. And so We know how to navigate that uncertainty. We're in a volatile business to begin with, right? The nature of what we do is is uncertain and volatile. And so there's a certain DNA that we have, but you also have to figure out how to build agility into your business model and the organization. We're having this conversation in the great state of California. I cannot use your core product in California. Why not? So California is a very ripe topic. And let me just to to contextualize the question, think about this.

20:10 There is easily a ten billion dollar illegal market in California. The demand is there, right? You've got thirteen percent of the population, and that's probably a conservative number. The reason you can't is because it needs to be it w we tried to get it on the ballot in twenty two and we weren't successful. We are working very successfully right now with and through the tribes at the end of the day. The most important driver of legalizing sports vetting in California will be working with the tribes to make sure that we can protect tribal savagery. There are well over a hundred tribes in the state of California, and we learned our lesson.

20:47 in the twenty two election. Um, you know, we tried to align with them and we weren't successful coming out of that. We completely rebooted our strategy. I hired folks who came from the tribes and so they're working alongside, but we know we need to, we, you know, spend a lot of time listening. We were on an extended apology tour and we're working with them right now to figure out How do we safely open up California in a way that works for them? And ultimately um, you know, cautiously optimistic that we'll get there, but we'll do it on their timeline. I'm just not sure that it's intuitive for everyone why

21:22 legalizing online sports betting would be a threat to tribal sovereignty. Well, if you think about it, there primary existence is brick and mortar casinos, right? And I think it was, you know, one of the

21:36 The eye opening moments for me after we weren't successful in November of twenty two was COVID was one of the an existential threat to their business, right? It was the first time that uh brick and mortar casinos were, I think, ever really shut down for an extended period of time. is you think about that and you think about the role of the tribes is to make sure that they can provide for future generations. They rightly so, although we have lots of data to refute it, but they they view legalizing sports betting as a potentially slippery slope to legalizing eye gaming, which they're concerned could cannibalize their brick and mortar business. And we do have lots of evidence that online gaming does not However

22:18 at the end of the day, you know, they're the most critical constituent in California. And so, you know, we've been working very closely with them, but that's that's really the core reason, right? And you know, not only do we have to get the tribes comfortable, but it all it has to successfully have a a majority vote in the state of California. And when you're working on something like this, which really is not just a fan duel challenge, this is an industry wide challenge, how are you interfacing with the other players in the space so that ideally your interests can be aligned and you can work with the tribes for the best outcome for everyone, including the tribes, including your business, your customers, and for Californians. It's a very unique industry, right? Because there aren't that many industries where you are competing Head to head with a number of different operators, but at the same time, you have to collaborate, right, to safely open up the market. So we have an organization that's called the Sports Betting Alliance. And um, most of the legal regulated online operators are part of this. And we work as an organization to safely, you know, lobby and and work with uh the The key stakeholders may vary state to state, but the role of the SPA is to to make sure that we can provide the necessary support and infrastructure to, you know, to legalize and and open up the state.

23:32 And you know For for the audience that may not understand why is it important to legalize sports betting. Because you know, this habit has existed for years. It's you know, I'd say a few things. One is as a legal online operator. I'm licensed in every state uh that we're in. We have to verify that you are who you say you are. You can't engage in real money wagering unless until you're twenty one years old. So we're protecting underage gambling. We're providing safeguards to consumers, right? Responsible gaming, but importantly, we're providing revenue for the states, right? Since

24:06 HASPA was repealed, or since we started to operate in the US, Vandals generated over six billion dollars in tax revenue for the states. And that goes to causes of the you know that are important to the states, whether it's first responders or mental health or education. And that's a meaningful number, right? But if we were to open up the remaining states, there's easily another$1.6 billion per year that the states could generate. We each have three kids. They're roughly in the same age range. My youngest is now sixteen. He's my avid sports fan. He obviously cannot have his own account. Um but I have one and I would rather work with him on

24:47 what I don't believe is an oxymoron, which is responsible gaming. Yeah. But it does give rise to a serious conversation here about the risks here, right? We've got huge risks with addiction. We have risks of people way overspending their means. We're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic uh in this country and taking these behaviors online contributes to that. I'm curious first when you took the job or when you're considering taking the job, how that played in. How do you handle that? Well, I actually thought a lot about it before I took the job and I had a conversation with my husband and I

25:23 thought as a female CEO who has three boys Who, you know, I could see that you know, at the time they were obviously quite a bit younger. They're now teenagers. But I knew how much they loved daily fantasy sports and you could see where, you know, ultimately ultimately this might go. At the end of the day, the most important thing we we are building a business for the long term, right? And I'm

25:47 If we don't continue to earn the trust of our not just our core customers, but all of our stakeholders, which are, you know, the state regulators, it's the leaves, it's it, it's the teams, it's everybody that works in this ecosystem. We're not gonna have a successful business in the long run. And I'm really proud of what we've done. I I truly believe that We're not just the market leader from a commercial perspective, but we are leading the market from a responsible gaming perspective. You know, if you look at Our global parent company, Flutter Entertainment, we've spent easily over a hundred million dollars a year on responsible gaming tools, on educating and creating awareness around this. And I will tell you is

26:28 The mom of three boys, I feel an even greater obligation because I go to college campuses. You know, you go to Texas, that also is not legal. And betting is rampant. Yeah. Grateful that you do that. And I really hope a male CEO would do the same and take that obligation equally seriously. And I I appreciate that perspective as a mom, but The L CEOs don't get off the hook on that. Fair. You're absolutely right. You are an athlete. You were a competitive athlete growing up.

26:56 there's remarkable data on the Correlation. at a minimum between uh women in the C suite and being involved in competitive athletics growing up. Yeah. I'm curious about how your experience as a competitive athlete has informed your professional career. It shaped me a lot as a as a leader, as a professional, as a team member. I was a competitive gymnast growing up. I was a swimmer, I played tennis.

27:23 And I think you learn a lot from sports. It's one of the things that my husband and I have s instilled in all of our boys. I think there's a certain humility you learn when you lose. I think you learn how to win. with integrity and professionalism.

27:40 You learn how to be a leader of a team. You learn how to, you know, how to figure out how to build a high performing team. as we were joking earlier, you can't create a team of all quarterbacks, that doesn't work. And I you know, then of course you're you know, when you grow up as a profession or a um not a professional athlete, but a competitive athlete, you learn that you wanna be number one.

28:02 Right, there's a a sense of competition and drive that comes with growing up as an athlete. And I think I've taken all of those elements into, you know, ultimately Becoming a CEO. I'd never set out to to be a CEO, but here I am, and I absolutely love it. But I think those early days. of being an athlete were actually quite instrumental. Several years ago, my last company, I was part of the team that helped launch a company called Together, where Alex Morgan, Subert, Clay Chimmans, and Manual were our our founding

28:35 the much more important founders of that company. And we had a belief that this boom bust cycle that we've seen in professional women's sports, we were exiting that and we were entering a a more sustained rise in it, which which we've really seen over the last six, seven years, give or take. I have been of the belief that one of the things that can really accelerate the growth of women's sports is gambling. One, because they tend to be taking place in the off season for the most popular betting sports among men's sports. Has the Caitlin Clark effect been real for FanDuel? How have you seen the growth of women's sports since you've been in the chair of FanDuel? The Caitlin Clark effect has definitely been real. In fact I think that we saw a, you know, several hundred percent increase uh in WMBA betting when she came on the scene. But I think this is, as you can imagine, this is something that was near and dear to my heart when I I stepped into the CEO role. And I think about it as, you know, there's this kind of three different pillars to it. One is

29:34 providing equity in the product, right? So if you looked at our WMBA product years ago, it Was not nearly as good as our NBA product, right? So making sure that we've got a betting product that is as good as the equivalent men product. Second partnering up with female athletes and leagues, right? We were one of the first sponsors of the WMBA. We've had a number of amazing uh female ambassadors that are part of our team. And I will say we still have work to do, right? I mean the if you look at the the data, NFL is a great example, closer to 40% of You know this, right? NFL.

30:11 Consumers are women and we're not nearly where we need to be in terms of the percentage of better that are women. But you know, sometimes the sports betting product is overly complicated, not for just for women, but but for men as well. And so as we continue to really advance technology and think about how we leverage AI and Gen AI to personalize the experience and make it more intuitive and simple. I think that's gonna be a real unlock for targeting more women in the category. And that's a perfect segue as we sit here Super Bowl week twenty twenty six having this conversation. We we almost have to talk about AI. You're in an interesting position in that you can leverage AI to improve your business, improve your products. And also you have to think defensively about the use of AI to game your system, I imagine. How are you approaching each of those? I think you have to approach it with a fair bit of humility that you don't know everything, but a significant amount of intellectuity to make sure that you can provide the right environment for your team to embrace it and learn and you know and get up to speed.

31:12 Some of the areas that I'm most excited about are how we can use the technology to really improve the fan experience. but also build more trust into the product, right? So we've got a just as one example, we've got a product called Ace AI, which is effectively think about it as a a bedding companion. So instead of consumers used to leave the the site or the app and they'd go do all their research on stats and look at odds and figure out What do they want to bet on? What kind of parlay do they want to build? And then they come back into the app. Well, you can do that all within ACI seamlessly and place your bet right within that interface. So that you know, that's just one example. There's, you know, an an infinite opportunity to to figure out how we leverage that technology. But we're also really proud of how we're using AI to do to build trust into the product. And what I mean by that is, you know, we're using what we call real-time check-in tools. So we have built very sophisticated models that are leveraging, you know, large language models and a lot of data and science to say.

32:12 You know, gosh, I'm seeing some signs of change in behavior that that may not be normal, we ought to do a check-in and make sure that everything is okay. Right. And so that's the kind of, and when we talk about at the end of the day, Building a business that is sustainability for the long term, these are the types of things that are are really important. What about defensively? Are you worried about people almost weaponizing AI with regard to your platform? Listen, there's always I mean, you always have sharp customers. The technology is very good for facilitating research and being able to compare odds more effectively across the platform, but we don't think it's gonna give you a mathematical edge. Yeah. I wanna go back to prediction markets for just a a a moment. Are there things that we shouldn't be able to bet on?

32:57 Yes. Absolutely. When we set out to think about how we wanted to enter prediction markets, one of the important things for us was we wanted to make sure we had a partner that was philosophically aligned and had the same core principles as us. And that's why we ended up partnering with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And I can tell you, Terry Duffy, the CEO of the CME group. And I spent a lot of time talking about that. You know, I'm not gonna comment on what other players have decided to offer or not. What I can tell you is. What we are doing is bringing the same level of integrity to the markets that we're gonna offer. If you offer a market that can be easily manipulated.

33:38 we're not gonna offer the market. Right. So We are consciously choosing maybe to be a bit slower, more cautious to make sure that the markets that we do are legitimate and above board. At the end of the day, you know, the CFTC will determine these guardrails and we're very excited we're gonna be meeting with the the new chairman, Michael Seelig, and I think we can there's a lot of value that we can bring to those conversations because we've been operating in a market for a very long time with Proper safeguards for the consumer, but also an ecosystem that can manage the integrity of sports betting. And I think we can bring a lot of that thinking.

34:13 to prediction markets. Right. And and it I think the corollary to whether it can be easily manipulated is what are the consequences of it being manipulated? Are there life and death consequences? Will a country's sovereignty? I mean And so I I appreciate that these are real conversations and that the answer to that question is that there are some things that we should not be able to bet on. your oldest is in college, you go visit and one of the classmates says, I'm really like excited about entering the workforce and I'm also be incredibly trepidatious because boy, this is all changing really quickly. What's the advice you're giving that young person when they ask you? It's funny because I reflect on what it was like when I was graduating, when you were graduating, and there's

34:58 A lot of pressure on Yeah. My advice is give yourself time to get exposure to a lot of different things, right? When you're Nineteen, twenty, twenty one years old, how do you know what you want to do? Right. I happen to go into consulting. Really, because it was it was a sliding door moment. I thought I was gonna actually go back and take over my dad's family business. That was a terrible business.

35:22 And so I ended up going into consulting and you know, lo and behold, got exposure to a lot of different things. When you're young What you don't have is exposure and pattern recognition yet. And so finding ways to figure out, get you know, give yourself some time to figure out what you want to do. For me, consulting was great because I got a lot of exposure to different industries, different types of problems. You get your learning curve is very steep. But there's a lot of different ways to have a career. The other thing I would say is, you know, for me, uh I'm sure for you as well, my whole career has been sliding door moments, right? Those unexpected turns that take you in one direction. And I think one of the things that's been really helpful for me is I was always

36:05 willing to walk through doors that I that were open for me. That I wasn't necessarily planning on walking through, but once I did, it opened up a whole new world. And so sometimes you might know. Exactly what you want to do and that's great and that's the path you're on. But a lot of times You know, you don't know, and so spend the time, be intellectually curious. And definitely spend time building a network because, you know.

36:29 It's As as it turns out, careers are very long and you never know how those relationships will will come back and and and factor in. And those human connections cannot be displaced by AI. That is exactly right. That's exactly right. Great place to wrap. Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Thanks again to Amy Howe for joining us as more and more Americans bet on sports, play casino style games, and wade into prediction markets all from their phones. Smart Money says this industry will continue its astronomical rise. That said.

37:01 To get through this without exacerbating crises, we will need experienced leaders like Amy who are poised to lead us into that future. With a focus on creating sustainable Responsible companies. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

37:18 Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro, our senior producer is Trisha Bobida, Associate Producer is Masha Makatanina, Senior Talent Executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holliday. Our head of podcasts is Letal Mulad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode, and to subscribe to our newsletter. And please make sure. To check out our YouTube channel.

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