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DTC POD #311 - AI in Style: Transforming How We Discover and Buy Fashion - Sam Rattner, CEO of Showroom
Transcript
Magic Chat
Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:45
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Blaine Bolus 00:00:45 - 00:01:39
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Blaine Bolus 00:01:43 - 00:01:56
What's up, DTC pod? Today we've got Sam Radner, who's the co founder and CEO of Showroom. So Sam, I'm going to let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys are building.
Sam Rattner 00:01:56 - 00:02:22
Yeah, sure. Prior to showroom, I was in a much different business. I was in the online gambling business. Last company was called Victory. I had dropped out of college to build that business. Essentially, we had sports betting products, we had table game products, blackjack, bachelor, stuff like that. We were an authorized gaming operator of the NBA and Major League Baseball. We had what's called market access in a handful of states the licenses to operate an online sports book.
Sam Rattner 00:02:22 - 00:02:56
We had also gone through traditional compliance and at the time, every legal state. We didn't yet have market access in every single one of them, but we were through compliance. This was kind of at the peak of the market, if you would. There were also the peak of the streaming and gambling wars. You had everyone, like DraftKings and Fanduel and all the streaming companies like Hulu and ESPN. Plus Hulu had been in the market with what it felt like every athlete with Hulu sports doing all those commercials. And so at the. It made a lot of sense to try to align ourselves with a partner.
Sam Rattner 00:02:56 - 00:03:20
We had gone down the path of talking about a joint venture with some larger companies in sports and media. Long story short, made a lot more sense to sell the company. So we sold the company of Fubo TV. I stayed for about nine months to help transition that business. I was the chief operating officer of the gaming division. We opened up our headquarters here in Chicago and then kind of moved on to start showroom. But that's a little bit on the background.
Blaine Bolus 00:03:20 - 00:03:31
And what's your personal background? How did you even get started with the business in the first place? What inspired you to build it? Yeah, just take us back a little bit further to how you guys actually started the business.
Ramon Berrios 00:03:31 - 00:03:34
Well, he was 23 when he sold it, so that was very early.
Sam Rattner 00:03:34 - 00:04:05
Exactly, yeah. I had always played a lot of online poker, so I knew the ecosystem a little bit. I knew the community. The community was interesting at the time. Most of the sites were offshore sites, and so you were essentially in group chats or on the side panel of a poker lobby with people from all around the world. None of it was English. So I plugged in some Google translator plugin thing to figure out what people were talking about. And everyone was talking about how the US was about to legalize online gambling.
Sam Rattner 00:04:05 - 00:04:28
They were saying next year. It was 2017 at the time. This happened in May or June of 18, if I recall. And so I was like, that's interesting. I feel like the market will evolve similarly to what it did overseas, where you bet in Tottenham game stadiums and stuff like that, versus here, where it's, like, frowned upon. I think I said, on my first million, I think I said something. Know, if your grandma buys a lottery ticket, you don't think anything of it. If she's taking the bears, you're like, grandma, what are you.
Sam Rattner 00:04:29 - 00:04:54
There's. There's still a stigma here in the US a little bit, although it's, you know, I think a lot of the major leagues now? I'm not sure. I think Major League Baseball now allows some of these sports folks to know brick and mortar operations at the ballparks. And I know the NBA and NFL are working on it. They haven't done that already. So that was kind of the thought process is I loosely knew the online gambling ecosystem from being in it myself, and then kind of saw a market opportunity.

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