Welcome to our latest blog post where we dive into a conversation with Novig's newly appointed COO, Dan Rosen.
Congratulations on your promotion, Dan! Could you tell us about your journey within Novig before becoming COO? What will your new role entail?
Dan Rosen: Thank you! I’m excited and ready for the challenge. Because we have such a lean team, Operations encompasses everything that doesn’t have a direct role attached to it - finance, customer support, product, accounting, etc. The biggest change in my responsibilities will be the increased focus on product work, which comes into greater focus as we find product-market fit and hone in on rapid iteration.
Tell us a little bit about your work history.
Dan Rosen: I started my career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, focusing on tech and consumer companies. After two years, I got my MBA at the University of Chicago and then joined DoorDash, where I was the General Manager of New York. This was back when the company had 4% market share there. I experienced how fascinating multi-sided consumer marketplaces are and fell in love with igniting growth in a zero-to-one setting. After three years, DoorDash was a public company and number one in market share in New York.
The entrepreneurial bug bit me again, so I went to lead growth operations for a consumer marketplace in the PropTech space. Then, in December 2022, I found Jacob through YC and immediately shared his and Kelechi’s vision for the future of sports betting. It was an instant match, though it didn’t take much convincing to get me excited to work at the intersection of sports, technology, and finance every day.
What makes Novig different from a sportsbook?
Dan Rosen: At Novig, we're creating a sports betting exchange, which is fundamentally different from traditional sportsbooks. Traditional sportsbooks often have hidden margins in products in the form of poor pricing. The root of the tension is that sportsbooks make money when users lose money.
Our exchange model eliminates these adverse incentives, creating a fair marketplace aligned with our players' success. Novig makes money from our most profitable users, and from large institutions. We are directly incentivized to build a marketplace that enables our users to make money.
That’s what really excites me about building our platform. It represents the future of the industry, and we get to pioneer that necessary disruption.
What does the future hold for Novig?
Dan Rosen: We’re in the earliest innings of exchange wagering, as users, operators, and legislators try to wrap their heads around the implications of this paradigm shift. It’s an important inflection point in an industry that is begging to be fixed. There’s a ton of work to do, but we have an immensely talented team executing on our vision to create a betting experience that not only facilitates better pricing and profitability, but is also intuitive and engaging for every user.
