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- [00:01]
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- [00:40]
Jeff Berman
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- [01:37]
Amy Howe
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.
- [01:55]
Jeff Berman
Amy Howe was at the helm of Ticketmaster in 2020 when the COVID pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt. Thousands of concerts canceled overnight. Pro sports paused customers demanding refunds. As Amy shepherded Ticketmaster through the unprecedented chaos, another company noticed her steady hand. That company, FanDuel, the fantasy sports startup turned sports betting juggernaut, was looking for a seasoned leader. Suddenly, Amy had a real decision.
- [02:27]
Amy Howe
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.
- [02:50]
Jeff Berman
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, 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 strategies for prediction markets. Navigating an evolving legal landscape and the increasingly prominent place of gambling in the
- [03:17]
Interviewer
lives of millions of American. Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale.
- [03:25]
Amy Howe
Thank you. It's so fun to be here.
- [03:27]
Interviewer
I'm so excited to have you, especially super bowl week, having this conversation. Why did you take the job at FanDuel?
- [03:33]
Amy Howe
So if I rewind the clock to set the scene, it was Covid. At the time I was running Ticketmaster, we'd just kind of gone through the digital transformation. And I'm guessing you remember where you were when the world shut down. The NBA suspended their season. Do you remember that?
- [03:49]
Interviewer
So I was on a week long retreat 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 rip and winkle.
- [04:05]
Amy Howe
I'm sure your text was blowing up, right?
- [04:06]
Interviewer
Yeah. Crazy.
- [04:07]
Amy Howe
Yeah, but it was. So it was March 2020. 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 54,000 events that were live on the platform. L. They all went. Were either canceled or postponed. And you've got everybody and their brother asking, how do they get their refunds back? And 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. And so we're just managing through the crisis, trying to be a empathetic leader who nobody gives you a playbook, as it turns out, for how you manage during a pandemic has never happened to any of us.
- [04:49]
Interviewer
It's been a hundred years. Certainly hard to run the same playbook,
- [04:51]
Amy Howe
certainly to the live entertain. And fast forward several months and somebody from fanduel reached out and said, 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, I knew that sports betting was taking off. 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 I could come in professionally, professionalize the industry and bring a lot of the pattern recognition from having been a partner in McKinsey for so many years.
- [05:32]
Interviewer
You were not hired as CEO, but you became CEO very quickly. How did that come to pass.
- [05:38]
Amy Howe
Well, I was hired as president. Matt King, at the time, was looking for somebody to ultimately succeed him. And after a few months, I'll never forget, 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 finally met Matt York. And Matt decided it was time for him to move on, and he had an opportunity to go work for Michael Rubin at Fanatics. And I stepped into the interim CEO role. 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.
- [06:15]
Interviewer
What was it about the team that made you so excited to work with them?
- [06:18]
Amy Howe
When I met the top team, when I met Christian and Matt and so many of the other folks, Andy Giancamelli, who was COO at the time, I could see myself day in and day out. Right. I mean, 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 FanDuel, 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 going to win with integrity. We say thank you. So these principles are not just on a nice placard that are on the wall, but they literally drive the behavior of the top team and the entire organization. And that was meaningful to me.
- [07:13]
Interviewer
For someone who spent 15 years at 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?
- [07:27]
Amy Howe
Well, FanDuel, if you think about the online sports betting industry, gosh, has it gone through a lot of twists and turns, and many of these predated me. But 2016, the Daily Fantasy sport business. This was before real money wagering was legal, but the entire industry was almost shut down, and the New York State legislature saved it at the last minute. And then Fast forward to 2018, when, ironically, the Supreme Court repealed what used to be a federal ban on online sports betting. And that opened up the market. But a lot of these folks were there from the early days. And when you meet them, 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 came into the organization, a lot of CEOs want to come in and change things, and I knew what was important. I was not an expert yet in online sports betting, 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 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 you're in rooms with partners who may have been there for 20 years, but they hire 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 FanDuel are our people. We have nearly 5,000 people all around the world, and we hire them for a reason. So I think it's important to kind of 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.
- [09:28]
Interviewer
It is not easy to come in in a president or CEO role, or president and 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?
- [09:45]
Jeff Berman
You start a new job, you think
- [09:47]
Interviewer
it's one thing, and you're like, oh, my gosh, why'd they put raisins in this? That makes no sense, right?
- [09:52]
Jeff Berman
It's human. Oh, my gosh.
- [09:54]
Interviewer
So what was your process coming in to get your arms around the business, to figure out what you really needed to attack?
- [10:00]
Amy Howe
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 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.
- [10:42]
Interviewer
Yeah. And it strikes me also that in addition to the commitment to dissent, 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. You 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 how they're implemented. Did living with the consequences of decisions that you were making change how you affected things@ticketmaster fanduel as you transitioned from consultant world to operator?
- [11:28]
Amy Howe
Yeah, for sure. And I will say, when I made that initial transition from being a partner at McKinsey to an operating role at Ticketmaster, you learn a lot. Right. 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 this dose of pragmatism right around coming up with a great strategy that is never going to 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 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.
- [12:11]
Interviewer
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're here at super bowl week, so, you know, we need a left tackle. We need it.
- [12:28]
Amy Howe
We need.
- [12:29]
Interviewer
We need a strong safety, whatever it is. You don't want all quarterbacks you can't have them, right? 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 going to mesh the old people with the new people really effectively.
- [12:49]
Amy Howe
First, 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 anytime you're doing organizational work, there's as much art and judgment as 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 is it's always better to do it from a position of strength. If you wait too long, you're playing defense.
- [13:35]
Jeff Berman
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- [14:37]
Interviewer
AI
- [14:37]
Jeff Berman
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- [15:38]
Amy Howe
A lot of people don't even know this, but the original founders of FanDuel, the product, even before became a daily fantasy sports product, was a prediction market product in 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 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 want to do is actually watch my Buffalo Bills.
- [16:15]
Jeff Berman
A bit of a masochistic endeavor, but okay, fair.
- [16:18]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [16:18]
Amy Howe
But you understand why fantasy sports and now sports betting are so powerful because everybody knows everything about the player stats and they're following every move that each of the different players are playing. And so before prop bets were even a thing in the US the daily fantasy sports business was really kind of paving the way for the business that we have today.
- [16:42]
Interviewer
The court issued the ruling it did in 2018. What did it unleash?
- [16:46]
Amy Howe
That was the moment where real money wagering, sports betting and iGaming 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 iGaming. And there were early advocates like Governor Christie, but there were New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Michigan and a number of states that legalized quite quickly. And what we found is that there was just phenomenal demand. And for us, we had a huge advantage because we had a very engaged set of users who were already using our daily fantasy sports product. And so we were able to migrate them beautifully to our online sports betting product. Now, Fast forward to 2026. We're sitting here Super bowl weekend. There are 25 states. 50% of the US can bet legally online, but 50% can't.
- [17:44]
Interviewer
Well, and there are loopholes that are being exploited all over the place, 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 you all and another Company that starts with a D and we'll leave it at that.
- [18:00]
Amy Howe
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 regulate.
- [18:10]
Jeff Berman
Well, you're in competition, right.
- [18:11]
Interviewer
I mean, because the rising tide will lift all boats with a more permissive regulatory framework. So that makes a ton of sense. But you came in 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 I'm trying to remember, 2020, 2021, what customer acquisition costs category, but they were astronomical. What was that like in that moment for you?
- [18:39]
Amy Howe
Well, it's interesting because you're right. In the early days, there was a lot of money spent on marketing, but there was 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 TV versus digital? And I think we brought a lot of sophistication and discipline to that in the very early days, and that served us well over the years.
- [19:04]
Interviewer
So you referenced the emergence of prediction markets. This has been explosive growth over the last year, 18 months. How is that changing? First, the competitive landscape and second, how you're leading FanDuel.
- [19:17]
Amy Howe
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 complementary offering. But it has, it. It shifted the landscape. As a CEO, 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 FanDuel has done a very good job of is there's been uncertainty 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. The nature of what we do 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 in the organization.
- [20:09]
Interviewer
We're having this conversation in the great state of California. I cannot use your core product in California. Why not?
- [20:17]
Amy Howe
So California is a very ripe topic. And let me just to contextualize the question, think about this. There is easily a $10 billion illegal market in California. The demand is there, right? You've got 13% of the population and that's probably a conservative number. The reason you can't is because it needs to be. We tried to get it on the ballot in 22 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 betting in California will be working with the tribes to make sure that we can protect tribal sovereignty. There are well over 100 tribes in the state of California and we learned our lesson in the 22 election. We tried to align with them and we weren't successful coming out of it. 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 spent 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 I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll get there, but we'll do it on their timeline.
- [21:32]
Interviewer
I'm just not sure that it's intuitive for everyone. Why legalizing online sports betting would be a threat to tribal sovereignty.
- [21:42]
Amy Howe
Well, if you think about it, their primary existence is brick and mortar casinos. Right. And I think it was one of the eye opening moments for me after we weren't successful in November of 22 was Covid was one of the an existential threat to their business. Right. It was the first time that brick and mortar casinos were I think ever really shut down for an extended period of time. As you think about that and you think about the role of the trade 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 view legalizing sports betting as a potentially slippery slope to legalizing Igaming, which they're concerned could cannibalize their brick and mortar business. And we do have lots of evidence that online gaming does not. However, at the end of the day, they're the most critical constituent in California. And so we've been working very closely with them. But that's really the core reason. Right. And you know, not only do we have to get the tribes comfortable, but it has to successfully have a majority vote in the state of California.
- [22:50]
Interviewer
And when you're working on Something like this, which really is not just a fanduel 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.
- [23:09]
Amy Howe
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 to safely open up the market. So we have an organization that's called the Sports Betting alliance. And most of the legal regulated online operators are part of this. And we work as an organization to safely lobby and work with the key stakeholders may vary state to state, but the role of the SBA is to make sure that we can provide the necessary support and infrastructure to legalize and open up the state. And for the audience that may not understand why is it important to legalize sports betting because this habit has existed for years. I'd say a few things. One is, as a legal online operator, I'm licensed in every state that we're in. We have to verify that you are who you say you are. You can't engage in real money wagering until you're 21 years old. So we're protecting underage gambling. We're providing safeguards to consumers responsible gaming, but importantly, providing revenue for the states. Since PASPO was repealed, or since we started to operate in the U.S. vandals generated over $6 billion in tax revenue for the states. And that goes to causes that are important to the states, whether it's first responders or mental health or education. And that's a meaningful number. But if we were to open up the remaining states, there's easily another $1.6 billion per year that the states could generate. Generate.
- [24:43]
Interviewer
We each have three kids. They're roughly in the same age range. My youngest is now 16. He's my avid sports fan. He obviously cannot have his own account, but I have one and I would rather work with him on what I don't believe is an oxymoron, which is responsible gaming.
- [25:04]
Amy Howe
Yeah.
- [25:05]
Interviewer
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 in this country and taking these behaviors online only 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?
- [25:29]
Amy Howe
Well, I actually thought a lot about it before I took the job and I had a conversation with my husband and I 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 this might go. At the end of the day, the most important thing, we are building a business for the long term. Right. And I'm 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 leagues, it's the teams, it's everybody works in this ecosystem. We're not going to have a successful business in the long run. And I'm really proud of what we've done. 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. If you look at our global parent company, Flutter Entertainment, we've spent easily over $100 million a year on responsible gaming tools, on educating and creating awareness around this. And I will tell you, as 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.
- [26:52]
Interviewer
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 appreciate that perspective as a mom, but male CEOs don't get off the hook on that.
- [27:03]
Amy Howe
Fair. You're absolutely right.
- [27:06]
Interviewer
You are an athlete. You were a competitive athlete growing up. There's remarkable data on the correlation at a minimum between women in the C suite and being involved in competitive athletics growing up.
- [27:21]
Amy Howe
Yeah.
- [27:21]
Interviewer
I'm curious about how your experience as a competitive athlete has informed your professional career.
- [27:27]
Amy Howe
It's 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 10 tennis. And I think you learn a lot from sports. It's one of the things that my husband and I have instilled in all of our boys. I think there is a certain humility you learn when you lose. I think you learn how to win with integrity and professionalism. 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 of course, when you grow up as a professional or a not a professional athlete, but a competitive athlete, you learn that you want to be number one. There's 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 ultimately becoming a CEO. I'd never set out 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.
- [28:37]
Interviewer
Several years ago, my last company, I was part of the team that helped launch a company called Together, where Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Emanuel were our founding 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 more sustained rise in it, which we've really seen over the 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?
- [29:25]
Amy Howe
The Caitlin Clark effect has definitely been real. In fact, I think that we saw a, you know, several hundred percent increase in WM MBA vetting 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 stepped into the CEO role. And I think about it as, you know, there's kind of three different pillars to it. One is providing equity in the product, right? So if you looked at our WMBA product years ago, it was not nearly as good as our MBA 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 wnba. We've had a number of amazing female ambassadors that are part of our team. And I will say we still have work to do, right? I mean, if you look at the data, NFL is a great example, closer to 40% of this, right. NFL consumers are women. And, and we're not nearly where we need to be in terms of the percentage of betters that are women. But you know, sometimes the sports betting product is overly complicated, not for just for women, 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.
- [30:51]
Interviewer
And that's a perfect segue. As we sit here, Super Bowl Week 2026, having this conversation, 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?
- [31:11]
Amy Howe
I think you have to approach it with a fair bit of humility that you don't know everything, but a significant amount of intellectual curiosity to make sure that you can provide the right environment for your team to embrace it and learn and, and get up to speed. Some of the areas that I'm most excited about are how we can use this technology to really improve the fan experience, but also build more trust into the product. Right. So we've got, just as one example, we've got a product called Ace AI which is effectively, think about it as a betting companion. So instead of consumers used to leave 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'd come back into the app. Well, you can do that all within ACE AI seamlessly and place your bet right within that interface. That's just one example. There's an infinite opportunity to figure out how we leverage that technology. But we're also really proud of how we're using AI to build trust into the product. And what I mean by that is we're using what we call real time check in tools. So we have built very sophisticated models that are leveraging large language models and a lot of data and science to say, you know, gosh, I'm seeing some signs of change in behavior 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 really important.
- [32:44]
Interviewer
What about defensively, are you worried about people almost weaponizing AI with regard to your platform?
- [32:49]
Amy Howe
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 going to give you a mathematical edge.
- [33:03]
Interviewer
Yeah, I want to go back to prediction markets for just a moment. Are there things that we shouldn't be able to bet on?
- [33:10]
Amy Howe
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 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. I'm not going to 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 going to offer. If you offer a market that can be easily manipulated, we're not going to offer the market. Right. So we are consciously choosing maybe to be a bit slower and more cautious to make sure that the markets that we do are legitimate and above board. At the end of the day, the CFTC will determine these guardrails. And we're very excited. We're going to be meeting with the new chairman, Michael Selig, and I think 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 to prediction markets.
- [34:28]
Interviewer
Right. And 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 lose its sovereignty? I mean. And so 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 incredibly trepidatious because, boy, this is all changing really quickly. What's the advice you're giving that young person when they ask you?
- [35:05]
Amy Howe
It's funny because I reflect on what it was like when I was graduating, when you were graduating, and there's a lot of pressure on kids nowadays. My advice is give yourself time to get exposure to a lot of different things. Right. When you're 19, 20, 21 years old, how do you know what you want to do? Right? I happened to go into consulting really, because it was a sliding door moment. I thought I was going to actually go back and take over my dad's family business. That was a terrible business. And so I ended up going into consulting and 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, 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. 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 for me, 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 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. 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 don't know. And so spend the time, be intellectually curious and definitely spend time building a network. Because as it turns out, careers are very long and you never know how those relationships will come back and factor
- [36:49]
Interviewer
in and those human connections cannot be displaced by AI.
- [36:52]
Amy Howe
That is exactly right. That's exactly right.
- [36:55]
Interviewer
Great place to wrap. Thank you, Amy.
- [36:56]
Amy Howe
Thank you.
- [36:58]
Jeff Berman
Thanks again to Amy Hal for joining us. As more and more Americans bet on sports, play casino style games, and wade
- [37:06]
Interviewer
into prediction markets, all from their phones,
- [37:08]
Jeff Berman
Smart Money says this industry will continue its astronomical rise. That said, 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
- [37:23]
Interviewer
on creating sustainable, responsible companies.
- [37:27]
Jeff Berman
I'm Jeff Berman.
- [37:28]
Interviewer
Thank you for listening.
- [37:32]
Jeff Berman
Masters of Scale is a wait.
- [37:34]
Interviewer
What?
- [37:35]
Jeff Berman
Original Our executive producer is Eve Trow.
- [37:38]
Interviewer
Our senior producer is Tricia Bobita.
- [37:41]
Jeff Berman
Associate producer is Masha Makatanina. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Molad. Visit Masters of Scale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter and please make sure to check out our YouTube channel.