[sirbetsalot]

Started a startup in Vancouver using Machine learning to automate the sports betting odds generating stack. Got two cofounders one MBA (yah i know) and a fundraiser, both failed badly as I did all the code. ended up doing 40% of the fundraising. fired the MBA for incompetence, 4 coders I had all left when other co founder did a deal where the term sheet was pulled last second. packed up left the company to the fundraiser and used all 12 man years of work to bet on sports. Now a successful sports gambler, completely financially free. Single most deadly killer to startups is a bad cofounder.

[marketmaker]

I have a question for you:

How did you navigate the line between "I should just make money off of my own product and forget customers" vs "I should focus on the product and acquire customers"? Since there's an opportunity cost to doing both, I'm curious to understand how you navigated things with that kind of "fork in the road", so to speak.

[sirbetsalot]

Yes that is an interesting question. My co-founders were so incompetent at this business that I took over all business development. I personally met with a dozen casinos owners in Las Vegas, 4 massive odds tech companies in Great Britain and about 7 off shore, billion dollar gambling firms like pinnacle, william hill and the like.

Not a single one committed on the spot to give me money despite my API being faster (in GPU and C++) smarter (generating 6% ROI on the dollar staked ON TOP of their juice) and better coded (All Haskell, Python and occasionally C). I was floored. Technology meant nothing to these wealthy people.

I realized that the people who ran the sports books were so lazy and incompetent that they would never understand what convex optimization was and that If I instead committed to learning how to bet, I would eventually grind millions of dollars out of their archaic systems. Quite simply, anyone with enough commitment and resources can outsmart the index.

Its not that they were dolts, but that their focus was not on math and better real-time odds; the focus was on bilking very poor bettors out of their money and preying on them as much as possible. These guys just worked 9 to 5 collected fat paychecks, basically work in palaces with sweet perks, and abhorred (and scoffed) change of any kind.

Once I realized that being smart and capable would never sell, it was an elementary decision. I quit, let my investors down, left a quarter million on the table (which my foolish co-founder burnt through and AGAIN got a $3m term sheet pulled at the last minute by the SAME jewish lawyer investor guy lol) and simply said, life is easier when I only have to deal with myself. The rest is history, I surpassed a half million dollars and now sustain an excellent lifestyle. hit me up anytime at @ess2dashizzleC on twitter. (yah I like snoop dogg)

[notastartup]

im in vancouver too. interesting you are in to sports gambling are the odds anything like poker? you should write an article on it.

[sirbetsalot]

I plan to most def, and I plan on open sourcing the machine learning tech once I hit my first million next year. The odds are nothing like poker however, it takes a long long time to understand all the ins and outs of making money in sports gambling and the strategy is much different. FYI: I am awful at poker.

[notastartup]

be sure to tweet it when that happens, i'll check it out!

I've had the biggest temptation during this summer checking out the odds on FIFA games. Although betting on Brazil would've been really bad!