3 Blue Collar Side Hustle Ideas From A $40M Founder

**Sam Rattner** (0:00)
Can I just read you the menu of Shady Gators? Would you guys be interested in that?
Be very interested.

**Shaan Puri** (0:05)
Tell me all the variations of Tater Tots.

**Sam Rattner** (0:07)
You mean Gator Bites? Ultimate Tater Tots or Loaded Tots?

**Shaan Puri** (0:24)
We have got Sam Rattner. By the way, Sean, I don't know Sam that well. I think you think that I know him.

**Sam Rattner** (0:29)
Well, yeah, because I don't know him. So I'm like, how did this guy get here? He's here because Ari talked to him on the phone. We do these pre-calls.
And Sam, I got to say, like out of, I don't know, every 10 pre-calls we do with people that we don't know, eight out of 10 are kind of like, hey, probably not a good fit for the pod.
She talked to you and she was like, you got to have this guy on. So I don't even know what you did, but you did something and you have some kind of story or energy or ideas that she liked.
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**Shaan Puri** (1:37)
Yeah, basically what I know about you is, by the way, you're like shockingly young. How old are you? 27, 26?

**Sam Rattner** (1:41)
Yeah, I just turned 27

**Shaan Puri** (1:44)
And what I know about you is you had this company that was a sports betting site. You sold it for around $40 million to Fubo TV, like I think before it even launched.
But you've also done all these other strange things. Like I think you bought, did you buy a riverboat casino or a riverboat? Like you bought a bunch, like you're into a lot of really strange things. And for such a young person, you've done like a lot of odd. I mean, just the fact that you've done a startup that you sold for a lot of money, that's already impressive. But even amongst the impressive people, you've done a lot of like strange and unique things, right?

**Sam Rattner** (2:14)
All right, so let's start with that. You drop out of college and you start a company that you end up selling for, can you say how much you sold for? Yeah, it was $40 million. Okay. So you drop out of college, you build a company, you sell it for $40 million. At that time, you must have been pretty young. How old were you when you sold? 23 Okay, great. So 18 to 23 ish.
What was the idea and how did you make that happen?
So I had gone, I was actually at the University of Missouri for a year.

**Shaan Puri** (2:41)
Nice, Mizzou.

**Sam Rattner** (2:42)
So I was at Mizzou.
Enjoyed my time there, was not for me though.
Always wanted to kind of start a company.
When I dropped out, I didn't really have the exact plan yet, but I did always play a lot of online poker. I was very active. I was the kid with 12 monitors playing online poker in the dorm rooms. So I kind of knew the community a lot.
And started hearing whispers of them legalizing gaming nationally here in the United States, lifting the federal ban, if you would. And I thought the market would evolve, it shouldn't evolve much differently than it does overseas, where it's very part of the culture. You can bet when you're 18, sometimes 16, you're betting at the Arsenal game inside the stadium. But here, there was like a stigma to it. If grandma says she buys a lottery ticket, you're like, you don't think anything. But if she says she took the bear's spread, you're like, grandma, what the hell are you doing? So I thought if that would be the case, I just sat down and essentially just wrote out for hours how I thought the market would evolve. And my conclusion was that there will be early players, you'll have DraftKings and FanDuel, they have audiences and fantasy, but that it really would end up being dominated by either the brick and mortar casino companies or the media companies, which is now just playing out with ESPN and stuff.