MGMT Boston - W12, Q3 23 - PredictionStrike // Pablo Bello, Product Leader
PredictionStrike // Pablo Bello, Product Leader
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 580+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
PredictionStrike - a simulated stock market that allows users to invest in "stock" of their favorite professional athletes
Thanks to Javier G. for the intro to PredictionStrike
Pablo Bello, Product Leader - an outside of the box product leader who learned to go on offense through a defensive learning experience. He has served as a co-founder, built a product team from scratch for a successfully acquired neobank, and is plotting his next move to a growth stage startup
Thanks to Sheila C. for the intro to Pablo
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - e-mail me directly to learn more!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Snyk, FeatureByte, Neural Magic, Notable Systems, Akooda, Posh AI, Propify, Klaviyo, UptimeHealth & Scroobious
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Alexa Murray / WHOOP, Kieran O’Driscoll / AtScale, Max Milhan / Rhino, Ries McQuillan / Vested, Dave Barron / HubSpot, Sam Richard / ngrok, Ben Katz / Appex & Wyatt Bramhall / Perch
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
PredictionStrike
Founders: Brad Chabra & Deven Hurt
Founding: 2018
Mission: Turn fan’s specialized knowledge and love for the game into real money, without gambling
Employees: 13 & 15% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $14.7M raised
Investors: Bullpen Capital, MaC Venture Capital, Correlation Ventures, New Age Capital, Elevate Capital, Gaingels, HighSage Ventures and Sixty8 Capital
Key Customers: Passionate Sports Fans
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $32M (announced in the $10M Q3 ‘23 Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
PredictionStrike is a simulated stock market that allows users to invest in "stock" of their favorite professional athletes. Founded in 2018 by childhood friends Brad Chabra & Deven Hurt, they had an idea, got to work, and the rest is history right? Well, not exactly.
Deven & Brad are from New York. Which we will not hold against them. They went to elementary, middle, and high school together. Then, each went their separate ways. Deven came up to Boston to go to a small Crimson colored school in Cambridge and, as part of a junior deferral program, did a two year stint after undergrad before attending Harvard Law School right down the street. He was determined to build a career in cyber law. He contracted with the NBA, doing cybersecurity work for stadiums, and then went to work for Nike out in their Portland HQ. Brad built a digital health business out of Harvard’s iLab and also spent time working as an accomplished venture banker in New York.
When Brad & Deven would catch up with their crew around fantasy sports seasons, Brad would complain about losing money in the stock market. You ain’t alone Brad. Why couldn’t he just put money on LeBron and invest in athletes instead? So, in 2018, they wireframed and glued an initial concept together for their fantasy football league. The guys loved it.
In 2019, they released a public beta. Mind you, Deven and Brad are both working full time. But this felt like it could be a company. Then the pandemic hit. Every sport, including the NBA, went on pause. And yet, as the fanless seasons restarted, PredictionStrike began to take off and saw their highest period of growth to date with people at home and not much else to do.
They had raised an angel “friends and family” round to help pay the bills and next went out to raise an initial venture financing in the spring of 2021 through New Age Capital and MaC Venture Capital. Game on. Both Brad and Deven transitioned to work on PredictionStrike full time to invest in themselves and make this new company their primary focus. Congrats on graduating from law school too, Deven!
PredictionStrike is a fantasy sports stock market where you can buy and sell shares of pro athletes. Prices move as if they’re stocks, based on an algorithm that closely tracks the projected fantasy performance of individual athletes as well as the transaction flows of buying and selling shares in those athletes. Don’t look at Aaron Rodgers stock right now Jets fans..
PredictionStrike aspires to be the pinnacle of fan engagement where fans can see how their favorite athletes are doing and participate in the upside of their performance. As the barriers continue to fall in terms of the space of connection between athletes and fans, their platform gives a really interesting and compelling way for fans to build relationships with athletes and have “skin in the game”. They’ve built direct partnerships with UFC fighters and plan to expand to all professional sports in the quarters ahead.
5,000 players from the NFL, NBA, MLB, MMA & soccer (MLS & the Top 5 European leagues) are supported on the platform today. The platform acts as a market maker, taking a 2.5% transaction fee on each trade, and also monetizes through a subscription program which gives users lower fees, faster withdrawals, and access to exclusive content.
Now, the team is excited to announce they just closed their $10M Series A led by Bullpen Capital, FanDuel’s first investor alongside participation from most of their previous investors. PredictionStrike has done $60M in transaction value to date with 200%+ y/y growth in transaction volume, year to date. They’ve also reached 175k+ users across almost 40 states. A key area of focus in the coming quarters will be to build their presence in strategic, big time sports cities. Hey, I know one of those..
Operators to Know:
Daniela Calvo, Senior UX Designer
Brad Chabra, Co-Founder & COO
Nico Christie, Head of Strategy
Ken Cramer, Senior Engineer
Robert Fournie, Social Media Manager
Nikki Fremming, Software Developer
Michael Gibson, Head of Growth
Dave Greer, Lead Engineer
Deven Hurt, Co-Founder & CEO
Reyna Javar, Backend Engineer
Nicholas Sleeper, Software Developer
Edward Smith, Senior Engineer
Rosa Sun, Senior Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the PredictionStrike team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What will be the main uses of capital from the brand spanking new Series A fundraise?
Which main platform product features will be prioritized in the quarters ahead?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team into the “growth company” stage?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add into 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about PredictionStrike you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team let more consumers put their money where their mouth is on behalf of their favorite athletes. All fans applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Pablo Bello, Product Leader
Career Summary / Wireframing Concepts / Career Learnings
Pablo Bello is an outside of the box product leader who learned to go on offense through a defensive learning experience. He’s served as a co-founder, built a product team from scratch for a successfully acquired neobank, and is plotting his next move to a growth stage startup.
Growing up in Miami, he comes from a family of small business owners who immigrated from Venezuela when he was young. Pablo’s parents built an international trading business, his mom trained as an accountant and his dad a former architect. Pablo’s dad taught him to beware of paradigms & fixed ways of thinking. “Always invert your problem solving” he would urge.
Pablo loved math, science, history, and of course engineering. His love of technology took him north to Boston and MIT. As an undergrad he competed in MIT’s 2.007 design competition. A class where the students build robots and compete in a “battle bots” type competition, the MechE’s take this class very seriously. The course acts as a general engineering challenge to test the students and, ultimately, demonstrate problem solving capabilities.
Pablo learned that in years past the most successful robots had a defensive strategy. Statistically, defensive robots yielded better outcomes than an offensive & defensive balanced one. Like a product manager, the competition was about solving problems better than your opponent. Pablo completed the task well, scoring 2nd in the entire competition. A flagship accomplishment of his MIT years, he even got to travel to Japan after his podium placement.
The summer before he graduated, Pablo interned at Tesla in the Bay Area as the company went public. This experience reinforced his love of technology and opened his eyes to the careers in and around engineering focused organizations. He learned he didn’t just want to be an engineer.
Upon graduation, he and some MIT friends partnered with a doctor from Mass General to create a “smart shirt” with meta sensors that helped track sleep. They soon pivoted to a monitoring device for babies, brought on a new CEO, and then Pablo jumped to a new more software focused project.
Alongside another MIT classmate, they started a last mile logistics alcohol delivery company called DrinkIn (before Drizzly!) that was vertically integrated in the mold of DoorDash. As they attempted to scale, many investors weren’t receptive to their capex heavy business and didn’t invest in alcohol related startups. DrinkIn eventually ran out of money, but Pablo loved what he had learned about logistics.
Local food company Walden Local was simultaneously solving a “last mile” logistics challenge scaling their local produce, meat, eggs, etc. supply chain. Pablo joined the team after a trial basis as the Lead Product Manager, their first technical hire, helping to build out their back end operations.
Then another opportunity arose. Airfox, a fintech neobank banking the unbanked in Latin America, gave him the opportunity to be their first PM in a fast growth, venture backed environment. Operating under the commercial name banQi, Airfox grew rapidly as a modern payment infrastructure platform. Operating in Brazil, there was a lot to think about from a product perspective to better understand how to build products for customers that are partly illiterate and have very different needs than a millennial American. Pablo and the team traveled to Brazilian favelas to collect customer feedback and understand the intricacies of the user experience.
They expanded from a single PM to 4 PMs, brought on a Lead Designer, and built out a full support team & processes as they scaled. They built scrum and instituted pods alongside an experienced engineering team. The CTO took Pablo under his wing and he learned a ton while also working with a product coach who had been there and done that before him. After just two years, they announced a huge partnership with Via Varejo, the Walmart of Brazil. When it seemed like they were headed toward an acquisition (which they later consummated), Pablo stepped away.
His dad had gotten sick and, with all the travel, he wanted to take a break to be closer to him. It was time well spent. When his dad passed away, Pablo took the necessary time off to get his affairs organized and more necessary time to heal.
Pablo has since been consulting with startups like coUrbanize, a healthtech project he co-founded called Lilac Health, and most recently with a Miami based fintech platform with Airbox / banQi alums called Onyx Private. The MIT network has more than a few options for talented startup veterans and accomplished battle bot champions like Pablo Bello.
Wireframing Concepts
The concept of building an MVP has changed a lot over the past few years. When Pablo is inspired by new ideas, he’ll start playing with no code application builders Bubble or Adalo to begin testing front end concepts. Then he’ll pair those apps up with a no code back end platform like Xano. All tools you can learn in a week, allegedly..
Either way, being able to deploy logic that can support API integrations, run full relationship databases & scripts, and have something that can be put in front of customers is a powerful way to test your ideas in a more functional way. When Pablo built the first version of Lilac Health, he used these very tools to have something to put in front of potential customers.
In early stage companies, more resourceful and technically minded PMs who want to validate ideas through real deployment can turn these ideas into software and get more rapid learnings from potential customers than ever before. All it takes is a general understanding of APIs, webhooks, and your own technical stack to begin seeing which products and features resonate.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Understand the Pain - “Truly understanding the customer and end user pain points has been an important part of learning in my career. That means doing certain exercises that aren’t necessarily in the product realm, like understanding the decision making units of the product journey. I recall learning when Airbnb offered up professional photography for their initial hosts. Were users going to tell them that they wouldn’t stay at those apartments because the pictures weren’t any good? No, they had to go in there and figure out the intimate stages of the customer buying journey at each step of the process”
Scaling Documentation - “As a team and product grows in complexity and size, documentation should reflect the size and scale of the team. In the earlier days of Airfox, using Google Docs to keep notes on a few key things made sense. Then eventually we needed PRDs, roadmaps, check ins & meetings as we got past 10 people. But, the documentation should appropriately grow with the complexity of the products and team”
Strategy As Top Priority - “Product managers need to do a good job of prioritizing the actions that are going to move the needle. If the goal is to reach ‘x’ number of users to fundraise, then they can take a step back to help build the features that will actually get them to that point instead of more ‘coasting’ type actions like bug fixes, new designs, or week to week sprint planning. Being active, not passive is the key to driving progress as a product manager”
Pablo loves startups, especially the incredible journey of going from 0 to 1. At this point in his career he’s looking to further develop his skills at the growth stage, with startups as they begin to find product market fit. He’s looking to continue to grow as a product leader where he can help lead projects around branding, onboarding, dealing with churn, and more. How exactly will that opportunity manifest itself? We’ll just have to wait and see!
If you’d like to learn more about Pablo, you can find him on LinkedIn or his personal website. In the real world, he’s probably hiking around New England, exploring coffee shops near Cambridge, or rapidly building fully wrapped prototypes to test new ways that technology can help solve our problems. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the products and teams you build in the coming years!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt