foreign episode of the igaming show presented by Paramount Commerce I'm your host varad Mehta and in this podcast we analyze gaming industry Trends with experts from various gaming organizations in today's episode we'll be exploring how eye gaming and sports betting operators in the province are working to adapt to the evolving preferences and behaviors of online gaming players with Stephen sauce the CEO and co-founder at rivalry so without further Ado let's get the show rolling uh so Stephen ho
w we begin this podcast is by asking you a few fun questions so the first question I had is do you think that by having a good or practical understanding of mathematics someone can be a better problem solver uh yeah definitely I think it's just a great way to understand how to um I guess like logically parse information that has absolute truth because math is I think the only thing that has absolute truth um so you know when um I suppose like you know that you've done a good job problem solving
at a hyper simplistic level because uh you're able to get to the correct answer and even able to get the correct correct answer I think just like the framework of how to tackle a math problem is something that um can add like a lot of like calm like emotional calm and rigor into how you just like deal with even your day-to-day life so yeah um my second fun question for you is as someone who appreciates martial arts could you name your favorite three favorite MMA fighters and your all-time favori
te martial arts movie I guess I'll start the movie Bloodsport because I think only my generation with like Jean-Claude Van Damme yeah kind of grew up on that movie I guess a little bit I'm watching so many times I don't really understand at the time because I was kind of young I guess but yeah I love I love that movie I still love that movie um yeah I like Nick and Nate Diaz with the Diaz brothers okay just because they're just total uh yeah it's like gangster fighting on you know let's explain
it like just like it's just it's like they seem like they have only people that go in the ring to like really fight and I just kind of love like the the rawness of it um yeah then maybe uh I love like early generation like first generation Chuck Lidl kind of early UFC just um yeah again a style that now he would get absolutely annihilated but back then it was like you know UFC won and even for UFC one before they were numbered it was like it was like the BJJ guy would go against like the boxer a
nd they only had like one skill set whereas now obviously they all kind of mix and match everything and it's a maybe a bit more of an even Dynamic but I kind of love that early where you know the brawler the guy with like you know happy hands like Chuck Liddell could just kind of um yeah dominate but uh yeah it was just a very different kind of error it was a lot of fun uh and then maybe probably like early BJ Penn as well also before BJ Penn kind of fell off the wagon um but I kind of love yeah
early BJ pen I'm probably mentioning these guys just because yeah like I I was really into UFC um like 2000 I don't know 2006 2007 2008 era so like that early early UFC and then before that Pride I had a lot of Pride as well it's all like most most of the pride stuff is amazing yeah yeah those are wonderful choices I like those and Bloodsport what a throwback I haven't heard that in a while and um my last question is this could I could be absolutely wrong on this one um but if you could give a
piece of advice to the young Stephen who made it on the Dean's honor list back in 2008 2009 what would you tell him and is my information correct yeah where'd she even get that I'm gonna pull a nardware and say you're Steven we have to know yeah yeah I was actually thinking third one that's funny [Music] um yeah I think the big one is like compartmentalization I think as I've as I've gone on the Rivalry Journey I don't know everyone always talks about discipline which I think is really important
because especially because you got all these kind of like Goggins Bros out there and all this kind of stuff um Jocko will look Bros but yeah I think that that stuff yeah just matters and I think there's maybe like a excessive emphasis on it like when I really have personally like studied history and studied people that I really review are going back 100 years 200 years whatever it may be I think the thing that I've picked up on like somatically and what I've most benefited from and I'd say I've
only really learned in the last one to two years myself even like just admittedly is compartmentalization in a way I think is like probably the best skill for both inks in general like being successful in life however you you define it like being able to kind of have something happen like earlier in your day that may like totally throw you off and be jarring get like a message from somebody that pisses you off or whatever and being able to like um instantly kind of Turn the Page and then turn y
our attention to the other task at hand as if that thing didn't even happen it's actually very hard to do because you know someone will say something like pisses you off and it bothers you and you're all riled up and but to be able to kind of like Snap and that thing is gone as if it never exists in your full energy and attention to the next task that is like I think the way you can um really get the most basically don't um don't let anyone Define your day right know how to switch it off yeah ye
ah especially like because even for like my job like it's gonna see it was like filter for the most problems right so there's stuff that I'll wake up to stuff in my slack from things that I hope it overnight in a different time zone that me of even five years ago when still kind of just getting the company started it would really kind of like throw me off a little bit and emotionally maybe like annoy me whereas now I I see that stuff and I can kind of like blink and just move on to the next thin
g and but it takes a very long time to be able to to get to that point but I think if you can compartmentalize really well um it benefits you yeah and kind of anything you're trying to do even if you have like other Hobbies or or passions you have to be able to kind of turn off whatever happened in your day and then move on to that other thing and not be kind of carrying any weight of that into that next task so yeah I think that's something I would have told my earlier self to practice that a l
ittle bit more probably that's a good one actually I don't think people really take that into account because something can affect your day and then you somehow let that slip into everything you do during the day maybe you don't have the same energy as you did like you know at whatever 9 A.M in the morning so I like that one um now going away from the fun questions as much as I know you love them but I'm just okay um but uh let's talk about what we're here to talk about and it's about understand
ing you know consumer Behavior Trends and how operators such as rivalry apply them to you know acquire customers um but just maybe understanding from your perspective I'd love to know that what sort of behaviors or patterns have you seen from uh consumers within the first year of Ontario's regulated eye gaming market and you know are there stuff related to age or you know demographics what have you seen yeah I think the start of the market was somewhat close to what we predicted I remember we we
re talking in the press a little bit before the market launched that we felt it would be almost like launching a U.S state in terms of like the the the Dynamics as in where we operate wrestle worlds as well southeast Asia South America et cetera these are like much more mature betting markets where even though some of them yes are like great markets and others are regulated markets or even Australia we have a license but there's like a very deep betting culture that kind of exists in them not sa
ying Ontario wasn't a large grammar Market before regulation happened but in terms of like how the operators then launched in this market like DraftKings FanDuel Bet365 who switched to a regulated license et cetera it it turned into a lot of what everyone saw in the US on a state-by-state basis which was people got absolutely bombarded and overwhelmed with offers and bonuses and for the the initial competitive environment was going to be very driven by that by that Dynamic we were kind of cheeky
in the Press before saying you know Roger's going to have the worst and least competitive offer in the market so if you want to get some juicy bonus don't come to us which was true um because like we weren't going to play that game because it's just it's you can't ever like get off of it becomes like an impossible kind of hamster wheel and it's just like again it's like the thesis of the entire company but even like I remember I was in the covers Discord the Ontario Discord before um the market
launched it was like the biggest Discord for Ontario better is when I was switching to a regulated market and I remember like one of the mods or one of the main people that Discord was saying like the day before the market launch goes to there was thousands of Ontario betters in there basically saying hey you know everyone this is where the money is going to be made where companies are going to be overpaying for customer acquisition that's literally what they said like the customers were saying
it to each other as in like the bonus and offers were going to be kind of you know um bathing and free money from operators which is exactly what happened so I think the initial like observed Dynamic was it was actually hard to tell what the the dynamic was because it was audited by free money everywhere and people were kind of just um running around having multiple apps multiple accounts just getting as many of the bonuses and offers as they possibly could I think now actually it's like settle
d into like a bit more of a classic Dynamic a little bit more where different competitive angles are coming out we've got the ones that are very like Casino focused you've got the ones that are very um you know focused more on uh still like bonus and offer driven or whatever maybe and Slots has become a huge category in Ontario which maybe surprised us a little bit just how how popular slots has become but yeah I'd say like a bit of a non-answer because outside of like that initial bonus Dynamic
there wasn't anything that was too surprising for us and then we continue to focus like rivalry is very focused on like Esports and and I'd say like under 30 demo in terms of like the brand how we approach things so for us I'd say maybe like we we had a feeling that the market here was was a bit immature relative to our um more International markets in terms of an under 30 demo that watches content creators on Twitch and there's a fan of Esports and then betting on Esports being able to make al
l those connections whereas like the cultural proclivity for sports betting and other markets among under 30s is um a bit stronger more historical and they can easily kind of make that connection between watching a competitive thing and then being interested in betting on the competitive thing because in Ontario for us specifically we have found that like the market here is I guess I'd say like as nascent as we anticipated around Esports betting as in like a 24 to 30 year old that has been a fan
of Counter-Strike for 10 15 years been playing it watching it competitively as well is not as doesn't have the same propensity to make the connection to betting um and even isn't even aware that it exists that you can even bet on Counter-Strike so once we started kind of surfacing that entertainment category within the thing that they already do being Counter-Strike we have seen increasing adoption we've seen a lot of pretty continuous growth every month in Esports betting for us but yeah I'd s
ay like the the relative nascent cultural awareness of betting among the cohort B Target being Esports fans is um certainly has some ways to go relative to other International markets so yeah some of the different things we've observed I guess that's a good one I think then how do you understand what the under 30 audience needs like how do you as an operator understand what they want uh I think Esports is a really good example that you brought on because that is definitely unique but how do you
understand that and then how do you as rivalry you know buying different things and cater it to them so what does that look like in a new Province and as you said that Esports is is growing right it's it's relatively new in that sense so could you maybe explain that it's a good one yeah like the way that we talk about it for all of our markets is about this whole thing we call like crawl walk run so like even our investor material we've been talking about it a lot but it's been like our internal
model for years which is whenever we go into New Market even if it's a relatively mature one it's like I'm actually launching any business you have a lot of assumptions when you start and then when you actually go go in and Robert hits the road things had nothing a little bit different than you expect to get even to these much more mature markets so the way that we always go into it is it's like a bit of like a test alert approaches crawl just means like we spent as little money as humanly poss
ible to bring in some cohort of customers that we're targeting and then to really like dial in and figure out what it is that they want where they exist where they spend their time how can we bring cost to customer acquisition down which doesn't mean again like offers or bonuses and tuning those it means like are we finding the right Pockets where they spend their time and where someone that has a propensity to potentially been on Esports is more likely to to kind of live and then we just speak
to them a lot like we we ran a we do watch parties so there's a bar in downtown Toronto called off world it's a very like gamer kind of centric bar and we we rent it out often we have actually an event coming soon I think August 6th it's like the end of uh I am cologne the big Counter-Strike event coming up but yeah people should go it's free a lot of Eventbrite you can find it but we had hundreds of people show up to the last one that we had a few months ago um all local 18 plus Toronto Counter
-Strike fans there's many of them and we just went we just talked to them when they were there as well to understand what they were doing what their appetites were behavior is how they spend their time what they're interested in all that kind of stuff so it's low cost efforts to tune our own like antenna in terms of like where to point it to get like the signal that makes sense and then we'll like slowly increase the spend when that cost of customer acquisition is coming down because we understa
nd the customer and when the RP with the average revenue per customer is going up to kind of match it and then once those are kind of at equilibrium as in our revenue generated by a customer is approximately equal to our cost of customer acquisition where that in like the walk face um which means we'll start to spend a bit more money because we're starting to the antenna is turning in the right direction and the signal is becoming stronger and um and we're learning more about the customer and th
en we'll like slowly increase that it's kind of like the actual inverse approach of our competitors to be honest where they will maximize spend at the beginning and then try to solve for customer LTV and value later they'll just like bombard the market with promotion advertising and bonus which everyone in Ontario experience we were like all completely like overwhelmed in a somewhat annoying way with gambling ads for most of last year um so yeah it's been our approach and like that's that's how
we've done it in all of our markets because again even the markets that are like much more lucrative because they're more historical and there's more predisposition to it just look at a bunch of raw like you make a bunch of assumptions and some are right and some are wrong so we we test to learn the exact same way and it's been a way also to like Preserve the capital of the company because this is also very expensive industry you can burn a lot of money really quick on marketing we try not to do
that so we want to get to profitability so it's also been a just a healthy business model to sometimes move a bit slower to make sure we really understand the audience and that our product is like effectively tuned to that audience so we know how to get to them in the right way in a way that they actually care and resonates with them and then only then we like start to stagger and increase Bend um so that's what we've been doing to kind of understand what's going on here I'd say that's an inter
esting and then when you look at maybe then uh Esports or sports betting or eye gaming uh maybe we can use Esports as maybe um you know the main reason but are there like specific technologies that you use to maybe acquire customers or make their player experience more better more immersive um has survivorous team been doing that and if so what would that be yeah yeah like we built our whole product from scratch so one of the things that we're somewhat proud of just because a lot of other um a l
ot of the products in the industry are some combination of white labels like there's just many publicly traded B2B companies in gambling is there a b2c to use the beb this is so big here we use nothing other than odds feeds like such everybody else and payment providers otherwise we built and own 100 of everything else we do so yeah there's a lot of this is like part of our broader thesis that we talked about uh talk about for building successful consumer products for under 30s generally cutting
or not where the thesis we had years ago when we started the company because myself and my co-founders don't come from the vetting industry most of the companies offer the betting industry they're all um yeah creative types and engineers and consumer product people that we all kind of happen to them and we all have like a passion a shared passion for gaming for sure everyone's kind of gamer or even past Esports Pros that's like the shared kind of thing between everyone but yeah we all just want
to build like a great consumer brand and consumer product for Our Generation that happens to be embedding which I think that angle hasn't allowed us to kind of build driveway in a bit of a different way where we've definitely found successful all the things that we do because we think kind of like The Benchmark for Success now for this category for under 30s which is you know 40 of global population now but again anyone building any consumer product is the product itself now like a web-based pr
oduct or mobile app whatever has to be like intrinsically entertaining in and of itself so if you go back to like 5 10 even 15 years ago consumer products online the one that like transactionally worked best was the one that would succeed you know if you can move money really quick like PayPal was great um now like that's cash remittance in that way is not the same problem to be solved and now it is more like a ux thing if you look at the reason why cash app has been so successful in the US and
taking a lot of market share from venmo venmo exists pre-existed cash app significantly they actually both did the exact same thing because the the there's like a commoditization of just the remains of money it's like e-transfer for us this is not like a thing that this is not a technical problem to solve anymore like it was maybe 10 15 years ago like the new bit of money um it's cash app has one because they've created like a winning brand and an incredible user experience wrapped around to thi
nk that is somewhat commoditized same with like Robinhood in the US are well simple here well simple is like dominant in front of 30s here because versus like an eye trade because if you're going to you can to buy Tesla stock on either app but from a onboarding ux brand support everything top to bottom experience if you're 25 in Toronto and you know save a bit of money or tfsa and you're going to invest it your propensity to like successfully find on board and have like a successful user experie
nce in a well simple from a purely like brand identity and again like a simplistic user experience perspective that felt like it was built for you um will be much higher than trying to go to itrade and then buy stock there it's just not as intuitive so betting is similar we found where um there's a you can place the same bet on many sports books which is why many of them compete with bonuses of offers because there's there's so much qualitization where like or even slots like you or many casino
games um everyone uses the same provider so when you go load the game on one app versus another the loading screen that comes after is the exact same provider like if you go play Cleopatra on any sports app in the entire Province you will see the net at loading screen for all of them because they own that product and everyone is you're playing these literally the exact same product from the same provider so then that's why casino is the most bonus category typically because the only way to possi
bly differential that is who's got the best offer we didn't want to be like in that game at all and felt that you could actually succeed in this category by not doing that so for us like we felt you had to make the product the new Bachelor for success for Consumer products for under 30s for any category is like the brand definitely needs to be tied to the user experience like they both need to feel like one consistent you know composed thread which is actually very hard to do for any consumer pr
oduct and then also like the product itself has to be entertained there's be a reason to be like you know entertained by The Experience Beyond just the transactional thing that you're there to do which is place a bet which you can kind of do anywhere so for rivalry we have like lots of these different like quirks and Easter eggs throughout the product we're constantly adding them so you know two that come to mind is our cash out feature which we call chicken out you know cash out that it kind of
makes sense why it's called chicken out and yeah it's just it's very like fun and entertaining where like you know when you slide the there's a slider of how much of your bet you want to cash out of and it starts as an unhatched egg and then as you slide more of it it turns into like a little chick and then a chicken and then like a roast chicken and then we've like paired all of our marketing with it so we send like jacked guys and chicken suits to Esports events that they run around and they
like show up on the stream then we built this whole like chicken character where we like have a chicken as a piece of our IP that we like it's like a Mafia Boss that like shows up in our marketing it's like beloved in certain regions where we have like uh our Casino product we have this thing called casino.exe rather than going to play again that same third party game which we do have some of these third-party games ourselves obviously rather than just like going to the tab and clicking in there
's like nothing there nothing intuitive or uh intrinsically entertaining there when you go to casino.exe on Rival you can go right now in Ontario you boot up like a fake emulated Windows 95 computer that looks like it's kind of Alice in Wonderland very colorful very rivalry brand we have our own version of a Microsoft clippy we built it's this little character it's an axolotl which is like a pink sea creature and it has R says like yeah it's like naked has two nipples and we call Mr nipples and
Mr nipples like talks to you so when you're like it's like clippy's talking to you it's like Mr nipples but it gives you when you're using like the casino product like around with you there's like fake wallpapers we made like a fake old school MP3 player and you can you know play this crappy music that we've you know jokingly kind of pulled together so you like build and then the Mr nipples character naturally as you can imagine appears in lots of our marketing it's this whole like little charac
ter IP we've developed so everything like connects from like a brand and product and marketing perspective and the product itself has a lot of like Quirk and entertainment built into it that like has a reason for you to be there uh and use it rather than like oh here's some free money do you want free money yeah so that's a uh that was obviously my next question um that you know apart from like you know having different Technologies or you know building something from scratch uh with your team w
as there you know a marketing or content angle you use to acquire customers they just have some eyeballs on rivalry because I swear I I don't know where it was but um maybe it's on Twitter or something I saw a gentleman uh you know who had like a six-pack and then they had a yeah that's our chicken chicken mask yeah and I was like I need tasks even like maybe I'll ask what is the idea because you maybe it's not Twitter anymore it's X oh yes yes I'm sorry yes uh correct me uh someone's gonna find
you now yeah um but yeah um maybe you explained that you know you rolled out these different campaigns but um maybe what was the idea behind them like um yeah so I think a good example is I'm just pulling up now one of our partners in Latin America was on a podcast talking about this show that we we've put together with them where it's called next move and it's like large League of Legends personality sitting down in a podcast style format but very like intimate very produced and again includes
a lot of this like character IP we've created so in League of Legends in um uh in South America we have rivalry we created this whole thing two years ago that's like really taken off where instead of rivalry being a bunch of human beings behind a company rivalry is a cult of um goats like the animal so the initial video went completely like kind of viral because we went with like a very large League Legends partner there and he's in like a Gothic style house and then goes in to sign a deal and
it's yeah it's like literally goats like the animal like but like again death kind of zombie cultic ghosts and he signs a blood pact with the company and that's what the contract is and then everything we've done since then if anything we do in League of Legends you sign a blood pact with rivalry rather than you know a contract with the company because I think it goes back to like the demo we targeted the way that we just perceive marketing and advertising now for the generation it's not like Ma
d Men style marketing anymore it's not you know slap a logo Marlboro Man or whatever like it it's like a different kind of affinity people have we're like I think an under 30 demo in My Generation 32. Um just there's a lot of I guess like snark and um you know people don't like a lot of ad block like you don't fall for classic traditional advertising the way that maybe our parents generation did because it was more of like a novel thing the advertising industry then where I was like people don't
have Affinity to brands in such a literal way anymore and they're kind of you know it's weird when you see two like older brands on Twitter that currently got like the Zoomer to run the Twitter account and then they're they're like talk the brands are like talking to each other and it feels like it's like very like dystopian and like weird it's like what are they doing um so we don't think that like slapping our logo on like you know a stream is like enough or like just partnering with someone
like I'm with rivalry now because like there's not like the same thinking that people have around a brand from a brand name perspective anymore in the way that they used to uh but people have affinity for like characters and narratives the storyline and IP so like these animals we've used and like the goat the goat is kind of Representative of like the irreverent nature of rivalry and then like appears as like a piece of Ip that people have really connected to us and like that we're behind so th
en when we launched this like podcast with this guy we it takes place in the same aesthetic environment of like a Gothic style house and then like there's like a goat bartender that comes in and serves some wine and stuff and it's like integrated into kind of the content experience it's been successful from a customer acquisition perspective from us because we can we can see what happens but it was on a podcast basically and he was talking about um he was talking about how we've been like suppor
ter from the beginning of the project and one of the things that's nice is how his experience with rivalry were with him for a while and what we've done this project is he's like the marketing isn't like you know uh bonus like all the podcasters are kind of like engaging in it and it's because like we're one of the few brands that will actually just go in to support a piece of like great content and a piece of great entertainment and from a commercial perspective it's also work for us we can't j
ust do that for fun so yeah we've built like a we have a pretty sophisticated creative engine that has solved for injecting brand IP in an organic way that fits with the community and we can support just like raw entertainment that still can translate back to creating like um a certain brand image in someone's mind so when they think about betting on League of Legends rather it comes to mind and the podcaster basically says that where he's like I'm getting bombarded with such like literal gambli
ng ads constantly anytime I ever think about League of Legends all I think about is rivalry because we have such a big presence in that Community there because of the way we've like ingrained and kind of injected the IP an organic way into the community without kind of shutting it down people's throats so I think like that's always been the approach to all the characters all the ways that we create the chicken man that ties the chicken out feature which is our cash out feature there's still conn
ectivity to the product because it has to be marketing um but it's not um yeah it's it's not so literal that it's also like becomes ignored because it just feels like advertising I guess you could say so like we always compare to like the Red Bull models like that as well where I don't know I mean other than that one Red Bull gives you wings out that everyone has seen and that's like still the one they used today most people probably haven't seen Red Bull advertising like what's actually like a
new ad for Red Bull you know but you see Red Bull everywhere like the F1 team they fly you know they do plane Races they build crazy for some in some snowboarders Hometown does some crazy half pipe thing the guy flies down from space like you know they do Red Bulls is an adrenaline product being an energy drink and all they've done is they've just paired it with like adrenaline based entertainment and content and then any time you go to buy an energy drink there's like there's such a like a fixe
d brand image of Red Bull in your mind but they never like sold it to you they never like said like go buy Red Bull it's the greatest energy drink like low calorie blah blah they never do that right yeah but so that's it's conceptually the same thing we we're always trying to do it's a my last question would be is there anything that you are working on specifically maybe you or maybe the Rivalry team in general that you're excited about that we should look out for in the next month next year yea
h in the next month people will see a betting product from us that um it's basically a first for Esports but I think is quite popular in traditional Sports we've been able to to get it working for for Esports from a sports betting perspective so people can start to probably figure out what it is but um I won't say it yet but yeah it will be a first within the Esports category for the major titles um uh it's pretty excited about that the first version of it will be functional and the second versi
on which will come out probably 30 to 45 days later we'll have a casino.exe overlay in terms of like a very um you know again rivalry a reverend entertaining um visual identity I'd say um and I'd say the initial marketing also will be will be will be kind of bizarre in our usual stuff so that's coming the next month um that's a near-term thing and then another one that's probably coming in 45 to 60 days is so I won't say what it is but we build original casino games at rivalry so we got one game
called rushlane there we have a small like Indie Style game development team internally at the company it's like an important part of r d for us because the same thing we found like our demo is you know we don't they're not all the they're not as excited by like the same kind of rapper style casino games that have existed forever and like all Casino floors forever some just want like a more casual piece of entertainment the kind of stuff they do on Twitch so if you ever watch Twitch you know tw
itch people will be like marble races and stuff there's no money and no stake in it but like you're you're passively a participant you're like a marble you show up in the game when they're playing it on stream and there could be hundreds of you but it's just like a shared entertainment experience and Rush Lane is kind of like that is like a very shared um entertainment experience right now where people play with their favorite streamers on a rather and put up like a very small stake but it takes
like three to four minutes to complete so it's not like a you know a slot machine which is more rapid where it's like every few seconds right this is like literally three to four minutes you gotta wait for for something to happen but it's like a very visually entertaining experience we have another gaming building for a little bit that um is getting close to being released um so kind of a Next original game from us that again is like stylistically I'd say very rivalry and very much for our our
audience and the first of more games that we're going to start to kind of push out more rapidly that is like original kind of In-House um game titles from us that yeah I think will be we'll be fine wearing it like low stakes kind of casual but yeah entertaining and very like strong visual identity that will again kind of it connects out with a lot of the other IP and stuff that I've talked about this interview so everything will kind of feel connected from a yeah narrative perspective I love thi
s um Stephen thank you so much for joining us and I hope whoever listens to this podcast can understand the importance of you know Tech the importance of marketing that we you know spoke about so in detail and uh Stephen provided some wonderful like amazing examples um whether you know it's Red Bull or even rivalry in general and all of their amazing uh you know tactics and plans that they're applying to the market and uh yeah thank you so much you know it's always amazing to have an expert uh o
n the podcast and you know I learned so well I'm gonna go out and uh you know apply to my job as well so thank you Stephen and uh yeah you're awesome thank you yeah I appreciate it I'd say if I was gonna like end with anything because they maybe connect Stephen the math com at the beginning to kind of like bookend it would be um remember I saw this like um this was like years ago like 10 years ago but there's like a somewhat obscure Steve Jobs speech that is not one of the many most people have
seen you can find on YouTube it's called like uh Steve Jobs if you search like Academy of achievement you want this like I don't know what the the academy achievement is but anyways just audio it's not that well known but it was that was one that like really resonated with me like my early 20s and kind of changed my approach to kind of learning and how I went about my own life a little bit um was saying he was giving advice where he was explaining that if you go about things the same way or have
like a narrow focus on just the thing that you're doing which I think when you're younger you have like the hustle kind of grind mindset you you focus 100 on like just the company You're Building or just the thing that you're doing and you and and then all the material you read is like things that are only tied in some way to the thing you're doing and it's like also like uh early to late 20s trapped that people fall into like in the in the hustle culture trap which is like you feel if you're n
ot reading a thing that you can in a very direct and linear way tied to your work that it's not a good use of your time um which actually ends up making you uh it's gonna work against what I think most people National culture are trying to do I'd say but and the way you described it is essentially like if you do that then your kind of bag of knowledge then kind of talks like a bag of knowledge you're only able to make very like linear connections and like the same ones that any of your peers abl
e to make because you've all read the same and done the exact same thing for me at the time I was like studying for the CFA because I was working in finance and I ended up dropping the CFA but um I was looking around like everyone else is studying the CFA so like if I do it and they're all doing it then like what will I'll we're just all going to be like going up at the same level I'm not gonna have any kind of LeapFrog here and then it gives the advice he gives the audience is like rather than
do that kind of thing that I just described he's like take a year off and he says like go to Paris and become a poet and fall in love with two people talk about like that because Steve Jobs and says like that um but basically explains then you'll come back though with like a bag of experience that is somewhat discontinuous it appears but you'll be able to make novel connections because you'll have such like random things in your brain that you can then make um yeah Innovative connections between
things because you're not just studying linear things so I found that like my own experience in rivalry yeah looking at things or understanding things like math my free time or reading stuff again that has like absolutely nothing to do with my job or my industry or anything like that even fiction I find I find Fiction's been like way more beneficial than non-fiction in my life in general um than like a business book and I think very few people do this and often I find it's a pretty Common Threa
d behind more Dynamic and interesting and successful people is they've been able to make connections from very disparate things that seem totally unconnected and then that's how you do something uh more novel so yeah not saying to study math I'm just saying to don't get stuck in the you know um Business book uh Loop and being so literal with only understanding and spending time looking at things that pertain in an exact and direct way to your job because if that is the case and you'll never it w
ill be impossible to do something novel because you literally will not have knowledge that will allow you to make novel connections because you only know one thing um so yeah that'd be my book added advice to this conversation I love to meet someone who who loves learning and who advises others to learn and experience other things so that is really cool that's something interesting about you should do a podcast called learn things with Stephen I'm not even joking I think people would enjoy it I'
m not even joking because it's so interesting um you know whether it's math or you know whatever your interests are your examples are non-industry related as well so I appreciate that knowledge that you shared with us and you know others and even myself can you know benefit from that so again awesome stuff thank you Stephen thank you so much thanks appreciate it whether it is new technologies or interesting marketing tactics operators in the province are working hard to reach out to a new genera
tion of online gaming Players I Want to Thank our guests today Steven salz the CEO and co-founder at rivalry for joining us today and providing his expertise if any questions for us or Steven please do comment them down below don't forget to like share and subscribe to our YouTube channel for the episode transcript and more content please visit paramountcommerce.com thank you so much for tuning in to the igaming show presented by Paramount Commerce I'm your host vodad Mehta and until next time k
eep gaming foreign
Comments