All right, everyone, we will break from the lunch break here and just keep things rolling. I do believe this is going to be our best-attended session, likely of the day. That's because of who I have sitting next to me. So, it's my pleasure to welcome Jason Robins, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of DraftKings. Jason- Thanks for having me. Welcome. So, you know, I think, also in the audience or throughout the day, we have, your new Chief Financial Officer, Alan Ellingson. Alan? Yeah, where's Alan? Yeah. There he is, he's back. He's back there, So somebody is lucky enough to be sitting next to him. No, no secret questions on the side, guys. So, what we would love to do, Jason, is just get a run-up. I mean, it couldn't possibly be a better day for us to be starting this, and I know you might be thinking a little differently, depends on how much caffeine we have going on. But, you still have a few hours ahead of you, and then tonight is obviously the kickoff of all things NFL. So, yeah, maybe just give us, you know, just give us the softball to start. How are you feeling? You know, what are you excited about going into into football season tonight? Well, I mean, this is, you know, the equivalent for us of, like, our holiday season. It's where we get a ton of new customers, we reactivate a lot of customers. Usually, you know, it's a great time for us to really get a sense of, like, what the next year is going to look like. I almost wish we started our fiscal year at the beginning of NFL season. But, you know, it's definitely, very exciting, but also a very important, and, you know, high stress in some ways, time for the company, too. We're shipping a lot of product. Over the last week, we basically shipped more product than we probably did in the last couple of months because so much of what we do is planning for what we want to launch right before NFL season and at the beginning stages of NFL season. Obviously, you know, we're very focused on making sure we compete and do well against our competition. So, you know, everyone's looking at the metrics, tracking how many new customers, how much handle's coming in. We're getting, you know, moment-by-moment updates from the team on this. So there's a lot of excitement, but also, you know, a lot of like, you know, nervousness. I hope everything, you know, comes in better or than we thought, or at least as well as we thought. So overall, I'm feeling great, though. I think our product's in the best place it's ever been. Overall, I just think the company is in the best place we've ever been from a customer and competitive perspective. So feeling really good, but, you know, a lot of it is going to come down to execution, as always. We have a great plan for this NFL season, we just need to execute it. All right, well, give us a little insight into the war room. How often do you actually get updates on what's going on in terms of- All day, every day. How frequently can you find out new customer adds, you know, FTDs? Like, what are you actually, yeah, you know, just tracking and seeing? So, I have stuff that I just pull up and look at for the basic metrics, like how many new customers. That is pretty close to real time. It's refreshing every thirty seconds or so. So that, I haven't been able to because I've been in meetings here, but the second I get out of here, I'll be checking it every five minutes for the rest of the day. It's like, almost like watching the stock ticker or something. Yeah. It's like, it's a little addictive, but you know, also really important to know how we're doing, and then the more nuanced stuff I get through message updates from the team, so more of the color behind how they're feeling about how things are tracking in terms of the overall projections, how we feel like we're doing against the competitors, things like that, and that's just also throughout the day. On a day like today, I'll probably get, you know, 50 text messages or more from people on the team telling me how the numbers are tracking, and even more on Sunday, but it's fun. Like I said, this is kind of like the time of year when everything goes up, so it's fun to watch the numbers right now. You know, product was the place probably to start. Let's just keep going down that path a little bit. You know, you talked about shipping product, what type of features, what things are new, going to be new to bettors, to the, you know, DraftKings audience for the fall? What are you most excited about for football? So, I think one of the big things that we're doing is launching BetVision, which is the low latency NFL feed, and that'll be alongside an improved interface for the live betting experience for NFL. So that's a big area of focus, is just driving live betting for us, and I think that having that BetVision integration will really help. There's also a lot of back-end stuff we've done to just improve the overall experience. We made significant upgrades to things like page load time, crash rate reductions. We've also increased our market uptime and availability on cash out and on all of our live markets to, I think, what is clearly now best in industry in terms of those metrics. You know, those are things that are harder for the customer in the immediate term to see, but really matter. If you're going and trying to make a bet and it's not available, or you want to cash out, and it's not there for a particular market or it's not available, those are things that, you know, at worst, will cost you volume, but, you know, could potentially, you know, lead customers to go to other products, too. So over time, I think it matters, but it's not the same as being able to say, "We've launched this new feature," or something like that. I mention those things because our team puts a lot of focus on it, and I think everyone wants to talk about what's the consumer-facing feature, but so much of what makes the product so competitive and complex, and makes these things so important, is there's just so many moving parts. Think about live betting. Somebody was actually asking me earlier today, "Why don't you have more parlays in live betting that you pre-pack?" Well, we're working on it, but there's a tech constraint because you have to literally recalculate all the odds, like, every second to show a live bet like that. It's different than a pre-match parlay. So there's, like, all this complicated back-end technical stuff that goes into ultimately creating a smooth customer experience, and I think a lot of our focus has been on those journeys and on making sure that when people want to have things to bet on, they're there, and we have the best availability in the industry. So let's rewind a little bit, right? 2023 was an exceptional year for DraftKings. It felt like product-wise, you narrowed the gap, you hit exit velocity as it relates to profitability, you know, flow-throughs accelerated. It kind of all these pieces came together. You know, momentum definitely felt like it continued through, you know, probably the tail end of football this year. And then in the second quarter, you know, that maybe, maybe it was sports mix, maybe it was a little bit on the product roadmap, but, you know, some of those gains we were seeing, you know, at least relative to the market share, were not quite the same for DraftKings. So, you know, walk us through as we sit here today, you know, do we think that some of that, that growth, some of that, you know, relative performance can reaccelerate? Is it gonna be things like BetVision, like some of these new products that are gonna get us there? And maybe just in your own view, you know, kind of how would you encapsulate, you know, the Q2 performance? Yeah. So I think, here's how I would describe it. I think that some of it is just seasonality of the business. We typically do our best during NFL and also, you know, have historically trailed our top competitor in NBA. So, when NBA, you know, is kind of coming to the end and there's no NFL anymore, I think that shows up a little bit more in some of the numbers. And I think then there are a few things that we could have done better. I think that we took our eye off the ball a little bit on hold rate and parlay mix. We are focusing on Early Win and other types of things, which is good at driving activity, but we didn't have the right cocktail to drive up that parlay mix in the way that we were hoping to. So I think we've since course-corrected that and are seeing excellent numbers to start off this, and so far at least on the Thursday night game. Good numbers last week on college last weekend, excuse me. But you know I think in Q2 we probably could have done a little bit more there. And then there was some sport outcome stuff too that happened in Q2 as well. So those are a number of things, but the big positive in Q2, which in some ways looks like a negative on the P&L, but we're very excited about, was the customer acquisition. We had over an 80% year-over-year increase in customer acquisition at something like a 40% or 50% lower CAP. Really exciting and, you know, should bode very well for future quarters and years. That said, new customers usually are because of the contra revenue coming from the new customer promos, usually are negative revenue and certainly negative EBITDA in the first several months that they're around. So when you have a big influx of new customers, it'll suppress those numbers a little bit. But we look at it and say, "Okay, but if I fast forward and look at what I expect these customers to do throughout the rest of the year and going into next year and beyond, that's a really good thing. I'm gonna dig in a little deeper on customer acquisition in a minute, but I wanna stick with the product. You talked about the course correction a little bit. Can we just unpack that a little bit in terms of, you know, is this just the way in which bets were merchandised- Yeah ... and kind of in the right order? You know, was it the bets you didn't have? Like, what, what is it- No, it's merchandising. So it's really- CRM and merchandising. We did some things that drove volume but were not accretive to hold that we have since adjusted. And then, you know, I think big picture, we talked about the seasonality, but again, a year ago, it felt like it was actually those very same improvements in the non-football product. Yeah really drove this kind of like, wow, hey, DraftKings has figured something out. So how much of that is a focus for the company? Obviously, we're gonna see the football results pretty real time, too, you know, over the next, you know, coming weeks and months as it relates to data. But it's gonna be a while until we get back into that sports calendar. So how much of that is a focus of yours? You know, how much are you thinking about already starting to think about, "Hey, geez, we have a big opportunity in NBA. Why aren't we as good at this?" What how do you level set that? I think that's a great point you're bringing up. Historically, we've really been, you know, very good about focusing on NFL and haven't necessarily put as much attention, maybe, as we should on how do we then segue in, you know, into having really strong NBA traction. You know, typically, NFL is still the thing driving more customer, even while NBA is starting, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be paying a little more attention to NBA-specific things. We've focused a lot on cross-sell, but probably less on how we just market and merchandise NBA more during the NFL season. That is something the team's focused on, and I think everyone recognizes that. You said they look at 2023 and say, "Actually, great quarter in Q2. We're looking at sort of what the pattern is of your mix. You know, it should sort of spit out an outcome. You know, I think in general, you have immense work ahead that the opportunity is there for you to improve where you're at to, you know, the gap to the market leader and narrow it, if not entirely close that gap over time. Where do we sit on that today, confidence interval for, you know, kind of that mix? And what should... You know, again, outcomes are gonna come and go, but what should investors know about mix during maybe football versus, you know, kind of non-football? Yeah, I mean, I think what you're bringing up is the most obvious opportunity that, you know, I'd probably eat my words for saying this, but I think is we feel almost a virtual certainty that we can achieve. Because we have a clear line of sight, and we know from looking at FanDuel what, you know, they've been able to get to, and we have a clear line of sight to achieve pretty significant chunk of that just from the things that we know we need to do right now and feel good about executing on. So I do think that we have a lot of upside there. How quickly it'll materialize, we're gonna be careful with overpromising, but I think we have a clear path and line of sight to what we need to do to get hold rate up by at least one or two hundred basis points, if not more. And so that's point one. And then, as far as sport mix and timing, definitely NFL is one of the sports that is very parlay heavy, very player prop heavy. So it's a great time to really drive that change in betting behavior amongst customers. Anytime you have a new sports season, it's sort of an opportunity to reset, like, behaviors and, like, the way that people are experiencing the product. Because, you know, it's almost like, "Oh, new NFL, I'll try that," right? It's like just a reason to sort of versus if you were in your rhythm already, betting a certain way in NBA, it's harder to get that behavior change mid-season. So we view these starts of seasons, including the start of NBA season, as a really important time for us to get step function change in betting behavior in terms of parlays and other sorts of things. And then the other one, we're really gonna be pushing more this year is live betting. So that we think will maybe take a little bit more time because, you know, we haven't quite tested as much around how to effectively market it. So I think a lot of the early stages will be just testing different things and figuring out what works. Whereas with the parlay mix stuff, we already have tested a lot to say we have a pretty good picture of what we can do. We just need to go out and roll it out during the most important time of year. You know, we've, you've touched on it, like, a couple different times here, both possibility of, you know, live or in-game parlay mix, and then the live betting itself. All of this leads back to an acquisition you just did, which is, you know Yeah which Simplebet, so congratulations on that. Thank you. But, you know, for those who aren't following it as closely, maybe can you give us a couple of the high points as to, you know, why this was the right acquisition and, you know, that balance of build versus buy? You know, what does this probably speed up for DraftKings, that, you know, you might have gotten otherwise, but maybe not as quickly? So I think there's really two ways to look at it. One Simplebet was a vendor of ours that was providing micro markets, still is. And they're also doing that for others and are their B2B company, and those we pay a revenue share on. So purely on the basis of the cost savings alone, this was a very attractive deal for us. But the upside is, can we really continue to enhance our live betting product to a point where we are heads and tails ahead of competition? I actually think currently live betting, we do have the best-in-class product, so I think we're starting from a position of being ahead here as opposed to when we were trying to catch up on same game parlay and all that stuff. So I think there's an opportunity to make it better, but also an opportunity this season to just lean in more to marketing and merchandising it more. We really have never focused on that. But we're sitting here saying, one, we think we actually have a competitive advantage in this area. We think our product is best in class. Two, we know from looking at the UK and other more mature markets, that live betting can be a very meaningful growth lever. And we know we're significantly, US is significantly behind where the UK is now, as an example, in terms of how much revenue and how much volume is coming through live betting. So now it's a pretty good combo if we have high confidence, it's a growth driver, and we're competitively advantaged in it, so we just need to lean into it a bit more, and I think you'll see us do that this NFL season. You know, directionally, there's been numbers thrown around, maybe 40%-50% of mix today in live betting versus, you know, overseas, 70, 80 plus. Right ballpark, you know, kind of- Roughly, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's about right. Kind of where we're at, so- Yeah So still, you know, an attractive opportunity. And then Arguably, the sports because, you know, in the UK, I think something like two-thirds of betting comes on soccer. Obviously, in order to get to that high of live betting mix, you have to get a lot of soccer live betting. I would argue that US sports like NFL and baseball are even better built for live betting because there's so many more pauses during the game that give people betting opportunities. Quick, commercial break, but yeah, we actually have a report where we analyze the downtime of American sports, so we can quantify- There you go. Quantify that for you. So let's go back to the customer acquisition environment you talked about. You know, this was probably the biggest theme, you know, incrementally for investors that came out. You obviously raised your target and, you know, it, it's this double-edged sword. On the one side, you mentioned, "Look, we had that many more players to acquire. These are all gonna be new people who are, you know, betting with us, you know, consistently. There's an LTV attached to that." On the flip side, changes the J-curve math a little bit, and there's upfront investment in that. So, you know, what was just kind of different than you underwrote, let's call it, going into the quarter? Like, what. You know, kind of what, what changed, and then, you know, how is the expectation for that going to carry through, like, the balance of 2024? I'll ask about 25 separately. Yep. So, you know, one, just on customer acquisition, as a total, in the bridge we created of the old guidance to the current, most of it wasn't that. Most of it was coming from, Illinois increasing taxes, launching Washington, DC and Jackpocket. That said, there was, I think, about $20-ish million that came from that, and that was the net impact of the customer acquisition, with also a lift on the retention and engagement side. So if you broke those apart, it would've been larger. So definitely a meaningful part of the story. But, you know, for us, I think it's a good thing. Obviously, you know, there may be some investors out there that don't believe it or just don't care and, you know, aren't maybe thinking about it long term. Who knows? And we can't control that, but what we can control is making good decisions that we think will drive future growth of the business. And so, you know, while on the one hand, yeah, obviously isn't something that we want to see, having to take a guy down or anything like that. On the other hand, we have to do what we think is in the best long-term interest. What I think we need to do as a company, I've talked to the team, is just get a little bit more art, you know, a little bit of art in it, but like get better at anticipating where some of these unexpected things that we might think of as actually good things are and make sure we're building a little bit more cushion in, so that we understand, you know, if it happens, that it's not gonna have to cause us to reset. And that may happen at some point, but I would argue that, you know, if you do a good job of that, you should be able to always make good long-term decisions and continue to meet or exceed the numbers that you put out there. The other thing is that if you look at next year, we had enough incremental customer acquisition and engagement that we were seeing that it offset the entire impact of the Illinois tax increase. So, you know, that was roughly $100 million. So it's not a small number. So I mean, we view that as a positive message, but, you know, I don't know, maybe investors kind of are like, "We'll wait and see." It's hard to know, but we're pretty confident that we have great line of sight to being able to deliver on that. So you know, one of the questions that comes up a lot is, you know, we're at this stage of the game, we're mostly in existing states. Obviously, there's North Carolina, there's a few, Vermont, a few other places, but for the most part, we're mostly in existing states. To see this level of new players, there's then this kind of natural, you know, balance between. But are these the highest quality players? You talked about, obviously, your CPAs aren't the same either, but how's that formula working today? Are these I mean, these kind of they theoretically have to be lower LTV customers, so w- Not really. Are they not? Like, and why not? Like, why not at this stage has that customer not been discovered? There's two things going on. One, the new states you mentioned greatly outperform, so those are all their own category. But then, which is what I think you're referencing, the outperformance in all of the rest of the states that were more mature. What we typically have seen is that, with pretty good degree of accuracy and precision, and, like, the first interaction, and with a really high degree of accuracy and precision after the first week, we can accurately forecast a cohort. That's how we've been able to forecast the business. We do everything at a cohort level. So we are monitoring this stuff real time, and we have seen everything pointing towards these are the same or better quality as any customers we've ever been getting. Now, what we've also seen, you know, in other states historically, which I think is the reasoning behind that, is that, yes, in the first year or two, you definitely get a higher quality customer, but then it kind of starts to asymptote after three-ish, four-ish years, and the quality sort of just levels out. And so I think that's sort of what we're seeing, is that they're more casuals, but they're no different than the people we were getting six months earlier. It's just there's more of them, and yes, probably on a whole, they are certainly not as high quality as somebody we were getting in our first six months in North Carolina, but they're no worse quality than somebody we're getting in our third or fourth year in any other state. Is there just any work, survey data intelligence that gives you a sense of, you know, why they're coming on the platform now? Is just like a bit broad national awareness. I mean, early, or our first conversation, you may not recall, but I certainly do, you know, national scale- was this big tipping point. We're obviously there now, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't as obvious four years ago. Is it that? You know, what is it that's kind of, Is it comfort level and friends cir- you know, social, the social circles of it? Like, what, you know, what are your people telling you about, you know, who these people that are coming in? Yeah, I think you just hit on the two most important things. I'll start with the second one. There's general momentum in the industry right now. People have more and more friends that are playing, more and more people are interested in trying it out, and then also, we are absolutely seeing the benefit of that national marketing. It really started to kick in, you know, and I think around the start of last NFL season was when we were getting to a point where we said: "Okay, this is, like, pretty much roughly break even." As each additional state has launched since then, it's just continued to be same audience or, sorry, same dollars, bigger audience. And so what that then does is that has this sort of, you know, flywheel effect, where our caps go down, that brings our payback periods down, and we can invest a little bit deeper on top of that at still really good ROI that meets our payback thresholds. And then also, like you said, I think it creates this halo of national awareness and just general momentum in the industry because, you know, people have been seeing these adds for longer, and you go into NFL season, and all of a sudden, you know, maybe if you weren't a new state three years ago, you weren't seeing it, now you've been seeing it for two years, and your state, like North Carolina, just launched, maybe you jump in at a much... I mean, that's the big reason I think that we're seeing such faster penetration in new states as well. Then going back to 2025 and next year, so you mentioned this, you know, $100 million in terms of, you know, this, now, these additional customers and helping you offset, you know, the vast majority of Illinois, if not all of it, in terms of a headwind. But overall, if there's one single pushback we get, I'm sure you feel that this as well, it's around sort of this kind of, let's call it, implied flow-through assumption for 2025 rather than 2024. What I'm really referring to is obviously that that's expected to accelerate versus what you're actually seeing this year. Is that the right mental model or are we just off a little bit? Like, walk us through the, you know, relationship between revenue growth and flow-through, 'cause maybe we're all just a little too financially, you know, overthinking this? No, I don't think you are. It is, it's. The complication is where does the revenue growth come from? So when it's coming from pure handle increase, it's going to flow through at a lower rate than if it comes from hold increase, and both of those flow through at a lower rate than if it comes from promotional increase or decrease, excuse me. So, by the same token, if you have a period like we did in Q2, and like we are expecting to continue for the remainder of the year, where you have outperformance, accelerating customer acquisition, you get the high negative flow-through of the incremental promo. So that's really when you unpack it, how to think about it. But if you look at it on, like, a state-by-state basis, what happens over time is promo comes down. We've been continuing to drive hold up, and also marketing comes down, so all three of those levers are going to, particularly the promo and marketing, flow through at extremely high- extraordinarily high rate. Marketing is 100%, promo is north of 90%. Hold is about 60%. Another thing I would mention is that we have quite a few states that are in, you know, the two, three-plus year range that are already north of our long-term gross margin target. So we've seen in many states that that exact story unfolds, but on a macro basis, if you have a quarter where you have really significant acquisition, it can swing the other way, but over time, it should certainly continue to trend in the way I've been describing. How much is the external environment a factor here? What I mean by that is, you know, there's obviously, you're not operating in a, you know, I know a lot of your decisions are made based on your models, but the bottom line is, you know, it's still a broader competitive environment and, you know, customers are able to, you know, shop across offers and across promotions and across, you know, apps. With that in mind, if other, you know, competitors out there keep a reinvestment rate that's higher than what you might want in other, you know, in another world, how do you, how do you balance that? How do you kind of stay competitive with, you know, within that framework? I think first you have to break it down by new and existing customers. If you take existing customers and increase their investment rate, it's by quite a bit, it's still gonna be way, way below what the new customer reinvestment rate is. So no matter what, as new customer mix continues to decline as a percentage of the total pie, you're going to see a decrease in promo rate. But coming back to your specific question, while you're right, we don't typically base decisions on that. I'm sure some factor in how people behave and ultimately coming back to, if we're still making decisions on if this is ROI positive, do it, may affect that. We haven't typically really been able to tie it too much to that. If anything, I think that we've sort of felt like, you know, particularly on the customer acquisition side, the more marketing, the more, you know, is happening in the overall industry, it actually benefits us, doesn't hurt us. But we haven't really seen much to say that the promo environment performance, or sorry, that our promotional performance will increase or decrease based on what competitors are doing. It tends to be way more, did this thing work to achieve the business metric we want? So, you know, I can't sit here and tell you that that doesn't happen to some degree. It's just not something that we really, you know, typically have seen, and we don't have great quantitative evidence to suggest that we should be reacting competitively. So the other big theme out of the second quarter, and we've alluded to Illinois a little bit, was the tax surcharge idea. And I don't wanna beat this idea too much, but just I am interested as an executive, you know, this was an idea, you kind of floated it out there to the markets in sort of a creative and open-ended way. Market kind of responded, and you changed. What did you kind of learn out of that? You know, what other angles might you have to, you know, kind of, you know, work on the idea of what I think the tax surcharge was attempting to do, which is, you know, protect your, some of your unit level economics, but balancing that with some of the forces that ultimately came in to, you know, to make this particular proposal not work out? Yeah, I mean, I think that there is something, that maybe isn't exactly this, that I think could be a solution, and you know, the bottom line is, at some point, I do think that, you know, overall, there will be some... Well, I guess it depends on what happens in other states, but I don't think that, you know, in perpetuity, it will make sense for anybody to completely just eat any tax increase that happens anywhere. That said, clearly, you know, this was something that our customers didn't like this type of solution. Our thinking behind it was, well, we can invest more in promo and you and other things, because we're gonna be collecting more upfront, but we got, you know, feedback that people didn't like this particular solution, so we changed it. But there might be some other sort of solution ultimately that we pursue that it does get a more favorable response. And I think back to the original point you're making, we have to always, as a business, not be afraid to try things and throw things out there. I think the way that we did this was actually quite good because you know, we always talk about whenever we're taking risks or trying new things as a business, you know, how reversible is it, and what does it cost you if you're wrong? And so this was one where we were very deliberate. We said: Look, we're not gonna implement it right away. Therefore, if there is a cost and we're wrong, it's not gonna be, you know, hopefully not any cost at all because we'll actually have never done it. And two, it's very reversible. We haven't launched anything. We can always say, "We've changed our mind, we decided not to do it." So we decided to throw it out there, see what the reaction from customers was, see what the reaction from state governments was, and after analyzing that, determined it wasn't the right thing at this time. But I do think that the way we went about it, I'm very proud of, because I think it was disciplined, well thought through, and in the end, we were able to get the information and feedback from the market we needed without actually costing ourselves anything. So maybe putting kind of these three pieces together. So customer acquisition, the tax, you know, environment, the surcharge idea, and ultimately, you know, kind of this flow-through concept. A lot of this leads back to, I think, a balance that's difficult for somebody in your seat, which is growth at the stage of your industry and the stage of DraftKings versus profitability, right? It's sort of this never-ending technology debate. So where do you. You know, I know you've looked up to and admired any number of, you know, technology people. We had this conversation again, you know, a number of years ago, but, like, where would you kind of gauge your own journey on that? How are you kind of balancing that as a leader, you know, kind of in terms of what are the orders out there? Is the priority still growth at, you know... Like, how do you balance those two every day when you're making some of these decisions? I think first is, you have to emphasize throughout the company that we should always do whatever we believe is the best in the long term, in the best long-term interest of the business. So, that's something we can't compromise on. At the same time, you have to be able to recognize that, you can talk yourself into, "Oh, yeah, we'll just, you know, make money on that later," for a long time, and we've all seen that story too. So you have to have, some focus and discipline and understanding that, that can't just be an excuse to not make money and to not deliver some sort of, you know, reasonable flow-through. So we've really challenged our team to say, "Our expectation is we do both." We think we should, in 99% of cases, be able to do both without any sort of trade-off between the two, meaning drive growth and drive profitability. But where there is a trade-off, such as this customer acquisition thing, we're gonna do what we think is in the best long-term interest of the business, and we try to figure out how we anticipate those things that are investments that we should be making so that we don't have to change our guidance. But in absence of that, we still have to make the best long-term decision for the business. So there's really two things that I told my team. One is always make the best long-term decision for the business. Two, you still have to recognize that you need to focus some attention on both growth and profitability, and that 99% of the time, those things should be not, not only not in conflict, they should actually be complementary to each other. But just make sure when you have that 1-2% of the time where it's not, we're having a conversation about it, and in the end, philosophically, we should land on whatever is the best long-term interest. And then, you know, in terms of overall focus, you're asking steering the ship. I think it's kinda- it's a great question, and this is something I think about all the time, which is you can't have 50 messages out to your team at once. That doesn't tell them where to focus and prioritize. You have to really keep it simple and have one, two, maybe three messages tops out there. And at any point in time, that means you have to sort of shift the pendulum a little bit between how much emphasis you're putting on this particular thing versus this particular thing, and you always have to be tweaking and adjusting that for where you're at. So if I feel like at any moment, it is more important right now for us to say, "Let's go find the next 5% revenue growth," and if a little bit less of that than we want, it drops to the bottom line. We still need to have a good chunk of it drop to the bottom line, but if it's a little bit less, that is more important than a little bit less growth but more flow-through, then you want that message out there. And it really has... it's not just what's the environment, it's like looking at your own company and saying: Do I feel like we've become a little too focused on A or B? And it's amazing how that happens. Like, you hammer efficiency and profitability for a year, and at some point, people go too far on that, and you have to dial them back a little bit the other way. Then you hammer growth for a while, and people, you know, and so, you know, again, what we've tried to say is, you can't look at those as two different things, you have to do them together. But the truth of the matter is, if there is a trade-off, you have to, you know, always say, do the thing in the long term, and then you also have to recognize that there will be, they're people, and there's only so much you can sort of message to people at once and have them be able to really understand how you want them to behave and act. So we've talked a lot about sports, product, the competitive environment. Let's hit on iGaming for a minute. This has been a. Look, broadly for the industry, I think it's been one of the biggest upside surprises, you know, to date, right? It just continues to clip along, same state, 20%-25%. Mm-hmm You know, growth, you know, year in and year out, you know, quarter in, quarter out. So, you know, based on share statistics, though, I think what we see is, you know, others have accelerated a bit more. Last year, I think, was your, was your big year here. You know, what's kind of going on here? Is the, you know, is the environment in that, you know, piece of the business stable? And, you know, kind of how does GNOG fit into your bigger plans, Golden Nugget, you know, for the, as a possible second brand for how the, how this fits into your plans right now? You're right, iGaming has been such a great story. The only thing that could make it better is if we had more states, which certainly I think is being worked very hard on, I think there's a ton of upside there. I mean, still almost 90% of the country we don't offer iGaming to. It's been a great story on the same state basis. Even New Jersey, which is more than a decade into the industry now, is still growing north of 20%, which is absolutely incredible. Really, really great story. We've also done very well. We have the number one position in iGaming in the industry, and we feel from a product perspective, we're the leader of the pack there, too. So we think we're playing from a great position of strength. And you know, really, like I said, we just want to get more states, and I think there's also so much to do on the product side still there. There's just a lot of things that you can do to really enhance the experience, make it more interactive, make it feel more like you're in a casino, particularly with the live dealer type stuff. So a ton of opportunity there on the product side as well. And then, sorry, what was the last part you were- Golden Nugget So where do we sit with that deal and- That's another one, very exciting. I mean, Golden Nugget has been a great story for us. We migrated them onto our casino platform, about a quarter or two ago, and ever since then, it's been like. I mean, we had the theory, so it was good, but it's always nice to see when it actually plays out. Literally, as soon as we migrated them, the growth started to go up, and it hasn't slowed down. Again, it shows you how important product is. It's so important. Same brand, same marketing strategy, same everything, and just improving the product has been really a great story for them. So we're trying to figure out, how do we lean even more into growing that brand? And also, now that we have Jackpocket on board, how do we maybe take that two-brand strategy and say: Can we get more juice out of having this third brand? And I think certainly, their early New Jersey results have been interesting, and that's on, you know, somebody else's product platform, too. We haven't migrated them over to our online casino platform. But you would think that lottery customers cross-sell pretty nicely with iGaming, so we think that could be an interesting vertical to grow out the Jackpocket brand around as well. Is it it's still largely a cross-sell narrative moving, you know, from OSB or even DFS, OSB into, you know, into the iGaming vertical? Or are you finding, you know, a home, and this is where the Golden Nugget piece comes along, for a iGaming first customer? 'Cause this is probably the one place where we are starting to see a little cross kind of overlap from more of the traditional gaming industry. I think Caesars is starting to put up some interesting numbers, and that. Because this is the area that, yeah, really, that customer looks and feels a lot more like the brick-and-mortar customer that many of us have studied for a long period of time, you know, on the analyst side. So, you know, are you seeing more of that iGaming first customer and, you know, what portal do they come through, or is it still that cross-sell? It is still. So, yes, absolutely. We have seen an increase in direct customer acquisition. Still, of course, most of it comes from cross-sell, just due to the sheer magnitude of it, but the trend is certainly more and more coming from direct casino-first or casino-only customers. Golden Nugget has definitely been a big part of that story, but we're also seeing it on DraftKings brand, too. We're seeing both. It's probably a little disproportionately higher on Golden Nugget, but I think as DraftKings' reputation for having a great casino product gets out there, more and more people, I think, are thinking of us as not just a sports brand, and we're having more and more success acquiring directly into iGaming on both brands right now. And then, you know, you alluded to Jackpocket a little bit. Obviously, a sizable acquisition at $750 million. You know, it felt to us a lot like this was sort of the DFS strategy for iGaming in a way- Mm just providing some of those, you know, that existing state, the new states before, you know, the proclivities are gonna be, you know, you're ready for that customer, and then if the states open up. But barring that, because the legislative roadmap is not very clear, what makes, you know, Jackpocket work standalone, and what can the integrations look like in the journey along the way, excluding, you know, a big hit on a new state? Yeah. So, one, I think the lottery market itself is a big market, and they are still so low penetration. I mean, they are less than 1% of total ticket sales, so ton of room there. They just launched scratchers in a few states. We haven't ramped that up. I think we're only about 25% of the states that we're in for draw-based games. We also have scratchers, so that absolutely can ramp up. That is a higher frequency product, and there's also a ton of room to improve that product. Right now, it takes about 10, 15 minutes after you buy a scratcher to actually be able to do it. We need to get that down to 30, 60 seconds, something like that. So I think ton of room there. More coming back to what you were saying on the cross-sell and synergy piece, you're absolutely right that our initial thinking when we looked at it was, this is similar to DFS for iGaming. As we unpacked it a bit, we saw that there was also pretty strong cross-sell potential into sports betting, so I don't think it's just an iGaming story. Obviously, it could be very valuable there, too, but I think the sports betting cross-sell will be material as well, and, you know, we have to get a little lucky on this one, but we're getting close to a $1 billion jackpot. I think we're in, like, the mid-seven hundreds now, and if it goes another week or two without hitting, it should get there. If that happened, that would be absolutely perfect timing, because what we see is there's this huge inflection in customer acquisition that occurs once you get north of a billion. It's like all this, you know, every local news station is talking about it, and- Yep it just becomes, like, a viral thing. You know, you probably remember these moments. Everyone runs out and gets a ticket then, right? So to have that happen in the first week or two of NFL would be awesome timing because we'd be able to bring all these new customers on the platform at the absolute perfect time to be able to cross-sell them into something. So I'm very optimistic there, but we will know a lot more in the next week or two. We closed that deal in the middle of the seasonally slow sports period, so a lot of the... I mean, we hit or exceeded all the cross-sell metrics that we thought. My team is telling me cross-sell is the thing they probably feel has, you know, even more upside than what we thought amongst all the different metrics for Jackpocket. That said, we haven't gone into NFL yet, and so I think the next week or two, we'll really see if that's playing out in the way we think it is. Yeah, I grew up in North Carolina, and when the jackpots got big enough, they didn't have lottery in North Carolina, so you had to. So everybody would dr- Whatever. would drive, one fraternity brother would drive to, I think he went to Duke, right? Yeah, well, from Chapel Hill, somebody would drive to the Virginia border and buy a bunch of tickets so that, you know, like, everybody would throw in a few bucks into the hat. You're a Chapel Hill guy. Yeah. Oh. So, I love it. You and MJ. Not bad company. Great company. With a little bit of remaining time, just a couple on the financial targets and goals. I want to go back to, you know, back in the day, there was an original bridge, and I know this is wildly dated as to be, you know, in need of update. But we used to talk about things like gross margins, kind of in the mid 50s for the business, and then EBITDA margins in the low 30s. Can you help us just think about any kind of, you know, updates we need to do, given some of the tax shifts, Illinois and New York is a much bigger piece of the pie at a different tax rate than probably contemplated back then. What are the net effects, and are there other offsets that maybe we're missing? Things like, you know, what you're able to do on the supply side Simplebet or, you know, customer access down the line, or, you know, market access along the line, things that could help, you know, keep that, you know, keep a lot of that bridge still in check. Yeah, I mean, I think that, so a couple of things I'd say. One, you're right, that, you know, Illinois was not built in there, the tax increase, and New York mostly was, but New York also has, you're right, been, you know, a little bit outperforming, or has outperformed a little bit relative to other states. So that mix has shifted a bit, from what we originally thought. But that wouldn't change it much. It would really be if, you know, more new states, or sorry, more existing states raised taxes, and then newer states had much higher than average taxes. That said, I do think that, you know, at some point, and obviously, we talked about this earlier, the surcharge didn't play out, but at some point, you know, you have to figure out a way to mitigate that if that's happening. So we feel one way or another, we're going to get to that margin target. In the short term, maybe there'd be some, you know, things, if there are more state tax increases that hold it back, that we got to figure out how to plug, possibly. But I think that coming up with, if it's not the surcharge or something like that, that we can implement, you know, I think will help us get there. It could be less promo. There's multiple levers that we can pull. But our objective is to get to that gross margin or better, and I think that outside of state taxes, we feel really good about doing that. But, you know, that is obviously the wild card. I will say that there are quite a few states that are already well north of that, that are, you know, some cases only two, three years old and other cases older. So we have a high degree of confidence that we can get there over the long term. But, you know, obviously, we need to make some adjustments if we see additional state tax increases. And, you know, maybe on that, if we'd been having this conversation, you know, three months ago, the only thing we'd probably be talking about are tax increases- Yeah just given, you know, the timing and the magnitude of what that meant. I mean, if we fast forward, you know, obviously, the legislative calendars tend to be different in the fall than in the spring. But what's kind of your early, you know, kind of calendar look like? How concerned should investors be about that next phase? More proposals. Hey, you know, the industry maybe didn't push back on Illinois the way that, you know, the way that we would have thought, so therefore, why can't other states do this? What's kind of what's the real roadmap? Because I think some of us who study the industry do well know that Illinois is also a special case on the other side. They've been a very volatile tax regime. They need the money in a very different way than other states, so it may not be the best market to draw conclusions from, but... I think you just nailed it. You summarized like, I'm personally cause anytime you see something that isn't within your control entirely, that's going to have that material, an impact on your business, like, that's not a great feeling. So, I'm obviously concerned about it, but I also have heard arguments on the other side that, hey, this is probably going to only be confined to a handful of states. Maybe there'll be a few more, but really, there's not a long list of candidates of states that we think are highly likely to raise taxes, so we'll have to see, but I do think that, you know, it works itself out one way or another. You know, as I was saying earlier, if it doesn't become more and more states doing it, then great. And if it does, then there's going to have to be an adjustment of some kind that we make. Maybe it won't be exactly the way we proposed doing it earlier, 'cause customers didn't react as well as we had hoped to that. But at the same time, you can't just ignore it. So I think it'll work itself out one way or another, but that is something that may create some headline risk for the industry in the next year or so. And as far as our game plan, you know, one thing that's nice about any moment like that is it lights a fire under people, and it gets you thinking differently about, like, what could we have done, in terms of lobbying, in terms of how we're positioning policy to, you know, not have this happen? What did we do wrong? What could we have done better? And I think there's been some notable adjustments behind the scenes. We lobby together with several other companies, including FanDuel, BetMGM, and Fanatics, and all of us sort of got together and said, "Okay, like, this didn't go the way we thought. Let's take a look at why. Let's figure out how we can do better next time." So I think, you know, our playbook for combating these types of things is going to be significantly better this coming legislative season. I will also say we had three proposals, and we're able to... You know, we only had one that ended up passing. So, you know, obviously, it stinks that it was one at all, and especially that it was a big state. But, you know, we're not starting from a bad place where we had dozens of proposals and five of them got. I mean, we're talking about three total throughout 25 states we're operating in, plus DC now, and only one of them actually passed. So, you know, that would be the counterpoint to my concern that it might be a bigger issue. But like I said, we'll have to sort of see how it plays out in one way or another. I think it resolves itself. And last question with our remaining time would be, let's talk about you know, M&A. It comes up on virtually every call, but obviously, the business you know, inflecting to free cash flow positive changes your opportunity set in terms of, I think, the way you can think about you know, some of these. But on the flip side, we've done Jackpocket, we've done you know, Simplebet, and now and I think Sports IQ was a small one that was that was tucked in there as well. So where does that take us? I mean, a little bit on the B2C, actually, a decent amount on you know, kind of B2B and some and some things you're doing on the technology front. Where are you thinking about allocating you know, those dollars? And you know, particularly, you know, what would check the box for DraftKings? Yeah, I mean, I would say, M&A is not explicitly a focus of ours. It's more, what are the business things that we need to address, and what is the best way to do it? And in some cases, that might be M&A, in some cases, it wouldn't. Take, for Simplebet and sports IQ. Those were deals where we said we absolutely could build this stuff, but here's how much it would cost us, and here's how long it would take, and here's the other things we couldn't do, and here's the money we could save from any third-party fees in the interim, and that's how we backed into this is what it's worth to us. Those types of analyses, I think we can do, pretty easy on that type of deal. I think something like Jackpocket is a little bit more of a swing. It was a well-informed swing. We did tons of diligence, we researched the market, we did, you know, a blind match between customer bases to estimate cross-sell and overlap rates. So we did a ton of homework to feel really good about it, and we are performing at or better than virtually all of the KPIs that we set out to with Jackpocket. So it looks early on, like, that underwriting case is going to be a good one. But, you know, that's something that's, you know, probably less of a slam dunk. It requires more work 'cause it's a new product, new thing to integrate. So we're gonna be super selective about doing anything like that in the future, and it's also gonna be based more on what our strategy is. So coming back to what I was saying earlier, if you think about it, what are you trying to solve? I'm just using this as an example, not saying we're doing it. If at some point we say, "Hey, we really want to expand internationally," then I think the question is, okay, is M&A the right way to do it, and what markets, whatever. But you don't look at it the other way around. You don't look at it as like, should we go buy somebody? And then it's more, what is the right strategy for us? What is the right area of focus for us? And then what are the different routes there, built by other sorts of, you know, things that you can look at. And if M&A ends up being the right route, then I think that's a good use of capital, but it, it not always. And the last point I'll make on this is M&A takes work, too, to integrate, to get the deals done. So we're also mindful of every time we do something like that, there's a cost, and that our people have to spend some of their time and some of their mind share on how I'm integrating this thing, how I'm making sure we hit our underwriting case, all that sort of stuff. And, that is definitely factored in how we think about it. And you're right, we've done a few of these recently. You know, there is definitely some merit to saying, look, if the perfect thing came along, we'd look at it for sure, but, wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we had a little break from M&A while we integrate and see if we're getting the benefits of these things. It's sort of like with GNOT. With GNOT, we waited a while before we just made Jackpocket, and we were already starting to see some of the validation of the second brand online casinos, so we were able to have that in our underwriting case, which was very helpful. Last question: Chiefs or Ravens? The money is on the Ravens right now, so I'm gonna be rooting for the Chiefs unless that changes between now and kickoff. Well, But funny enough, the money is on the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl, so go figure on that one. A lot of us are just rooting for DraftKings. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, Jason. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Thanks a lot.