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\n\t\tOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.\t<\/p>\n
Sports fans don\u2019t make picks or play fantasy sports in a vacuum.<\/p>\n
They text the group chat, argue through halftime, send screenshots when they win and go a little quiet when they\u2019re wrong. Open most daily fantasy apps, though, and that energy disappears. What\u2019s left is a user, a line and a transaction.<\/p>\n
Jordan Rothstein thinks that\u2019s where the industry lost the plot. And when he talks about where sports gaming is headed, he tends to start somewhere unexpected: a Las Vegas surgeon and an FBI raid.<\/p>\n
In January 1985, federal agents swept through 45 locations across 16 states<\/a> in pursuit of a betting operation whose offense, as far as anyone could ever prove, was being right too often.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Computer Group had come together five years earlier, when an orthopedic surgeon named Ivan Mindlin met Michael Kent, a mathematician who had worked on nuclear submarine systems. Kent had developed a computer model designed to beat point spreads, and Mindlin had the contacts to get the bets down. Together, they built one of the first syndicates to use computers to beat bookmakers at scale<\/a>, reportedly wagering $40 million a year at its peak and hitting 60.3% of its college football picks in a single season.<\/p>\n The government pursued the group for years, but the case eventually fell apart. No one was convicted.<\/p>\n Mindlin was Rothstein\u2019s grandfather.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople read about the Computer Group and see this huge piece of betting history,\u201d said Rothstein, CEO of SmackTok. \u201cFor me, it was family history. I grew up hearing how my grandfather saw technology changing sports long before most people did. It made me curious about what the next shift would look like.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Photo credit: SmackTok<\/em><\/p>\n That curiosity eventually led him into product design.<\/p>\n Before SmackTok, Rothstein had spent much of his career building products from the outside in. He founded King Tide, a Los Angeles venture studio and product-development firm that helped turn early ideas into consumer products across ecommerce, financial technology and real estate. His work touched companies including Price.com, Eco and Findigs, but sports gaming hit differently.<\/p>\n It was a category he understood first as a fan. But as a product builder, what stood out to him was how much of the experience had been designed around the transaction.<\/p>\n \u201cMost fantasy products are built around the moment someone makes a pick,\u201d Rothstein explained. \u201cThat moment matters, but it\u2019s not the full experience. Roughly 70% of new users are gone within 90 days, and it\u2019s not because they stopped liking sports. A lot of them just weren\u2019t given enough reasons to open the app again. The game starts before the pick and keeps going long after it \u2014 we wanted SmackTok to live in that window.\u201d<\/p>\n