Why the Top 2 VCs in Silicon Valley Are Betting on This Company | EO

[gentle music] I woke up one morning, April 15th, and I sat down at my computer, and there's a big seal of the Department of Justice, the DOJ, on the website.

And what had happened was overnight they had banned all online poker within the United States.

All of the websites are down.

You can no longer play online poker in the United States.

All of the payment processors are down, so you can no longer move money between or do anything, and it was just like overnight, like [snaps fingers] that, the industry was just gone.

And I think those were the first times where you said, "Okay." You saw the reach of, of sort of policy and government sort of impacting you in your real life.

When you're a kid, you don't think about it too much.

When you're a young adult, you don't think about it.

But it was the first time of I need to literally move where I live to my entire life and its sort of career just got taken away from me.

Uh, and so I think that really grounded me early on in kind of like the libertarian ethos of crypto and having something that, uh, was bigger than a single jurisdiction, was bigger than a certain, like, given regulatory regime, uh, had the ability to become something more.

For the first 24 hours, I just spent feeling sorry for myself, which I think is like a kind of natural reaction.

You're just like, "Oh man, my, my career is over.

All my money is gone." Like, you know, you don't really know what to do.

But then immediately after that, like the next day, I woke up and I was just very...

I saw that the world was changing very quickly, and so one thing that I noticed was that all of the main poker sites were now gone, but there's a bunch of smaller, kind of shady poker sites that still existed, and that everybody was gonna go and sign up on those because they needed to continue to make a living.

And I knew all of the highest stakes poker players in the world, so I created an affiliate, and I signed up all of my friends to all of these sites, and I found them the best deals, and I negotiated these things.

And it went from me making, you know, no money to me making, like, 20, $30,000 a month within a couple of weeks, right? And so very quickly I saw that a changing reshuffle of a landscape created an opportunity, and then that really drew me to entrepreneurship in general.

I think that was the first real catalyst.

I grew up in a town of 900 people, right? Like very, very small village, not a lot of opportunity, not a lot of anything.

And so I really valued for most of my life a meritocratic environment.

I didn't go to Harvard or MIT.

I didn't go to, you know, amazing school.

I didn't have any connections.

I was a poker player who dropped out of college, right? And so what I really valued was the ability to, to just do something where I could earn my own way or, like, prove my own value over time.

So poker was a perfect example of this.

[gentle music] I woke up one morning, April 15th, and I sat down at my computer, and there's a big seal of the Department of Justice, the DOJ, on the website.

And what had happened was overnight they had banned all online poker within the United States.

All of the websites are down.

You can no longer play online poker in the United States.

All of the payment processors are down, so you can no longer move money between or do anything, and it was just like overnight, like [snaps fingers] that, the industry was just gone.

And I think those were the first times where you said, "Okay." You saw the reach of, of sort of policy and government sort of impacting you in your real life.

When you're a kid, you don't think about it too much.

When you're a young adult, you don't think about it.

But it was the first time of I need to literally move where I live to my entire life and its sort of career just got taken away from me.

Uh, and so I think that really grounded me early on in kind of like the libertarian ethos of crypto and having something that, uh, was bigger than a single jurisdiction, was bigger than a certain, like, given regulatory regime, uh, had the ability to become something more.

For the first 24 hours, I just spent feeling sorry for myself, which I think is like a kind of natural reaction.

You're just like, "Oh man, my, my career is over.

All my money is gone." Like, you know, you don't really know what to do.

But then immediately after that, like the next day, I woke up and I was just very...

I saw that the world was changing very quickly, and so one thing that I noticed was that all of the main poker sites were now gone, but there's a bunch of smaller, kind of shady poker sites that still existed, and that everybody was gonna go and sign up on those because they needed to continue to make a living.

And I knew all of the highest stakes poker players in the world, so I created an affiliate, and I signed up all of my friends to all of these sites, and I found them the best deals, and I negotiated these things.

And it went from me making, you know, no money to me making, like, 20, $30,000 a month within a couple of weeks, right? And so very quickly I saw that a changing reshuffle of a landscape created an opportunity, and then that really drew me to entrepreneurship in general.

I think that was the first real catalyst.

I grew up in a town of 900 people, right? Like very, very small village, not a lot of opportunity, not a lot of anything.

And so I really valued for most of my life a meritocratic environment.

I didn't go to Harvard or MIT.

I didn't go to, you know, amazing school.

I didn't have any connections.

I was a poker player who dropped out of college, right? And so what I really valued was the ability to, to just do something where I could earn my own way or, like, prove my own value over time.

So poker was a perfect example of this.