FOCUSON FANTASY
Football season now means big money — in fantasy leagues. In a loft space on Goose Island, Highland Park childhood friends Todd Heyden and Ross Karel are working to build a platform centered around what made this kind of gaming so big in the first place:
Q. How is Sports Lock’ s fantasy play different?
We set out to build the first truly social platform in fantasy sports. Each round, you draft heads-up against your opponent. If you advance to the next round, you start all over and draft against your next opponent.
The rounds of each bracket can last one day (for sports like baseball, basketball, hockey) or one week (football). That means we can have a 16-person bracket start at Week Six of the NFL season, and the winner of
that bracket will be decided Week Nine (16 to 8, 8 to 4, 4 to2, 2 to 1).
The big daily companies that everyone has heard of— since they spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising— offer a completely different game play. They do all their games in one week or night, they pick their teams via a salary cap (not a real draft), and they compete in a lottery type of game where you are playing one vs. the world.
In the yearly formats, well, those are just that— yearly.
And we think that makes them stale, archaic and not built for millennials.
Q. What’s next? A huge joint venture with
ESPN Chicago: 1,024 players starting Week Eight of the NFL season. The winner gets an all-expenses-paid trip to the Super Bowl.
Over the next 30 days, we will release our NHL, NBA and NCAA basketball games. I’m a basketball nut, so this makes me smile.
Lastly, we’re launching an
Android app, in addition to our existing iPhone app.
We are in talks with multiple parties about our next round of financing.
Q. What’ s the story of your company logo, the goat? The goat stands for the Greatest Of All Time— GOAT. We felt the GOAT (currently named The Goat) could play a much bigger role than just being the face of the business. For instance, how do you determine who is the GOAT among your friends? Or who is the GOAT in your office?
Q. How are you getting Sports Lock’ s name out to your target audience—on college campuses? One of the biggest pain-points we all had in college was there were not enough opportunities to get handson experience about how to build, market and grow a company. The entrepre- neurial side of us said we could fix this issue with college students. Every week, we have missions that are exclusively offered to students in the program, and whoever has the most points come Feb. 1 is the winner. That student gets $25,000 in cash. Students can earn additional cash by completing certain missions, get exclusive access to other entrepreneurs through our speaker series and have an opportunity at internships and jobs.
Q. You and your colleagues invest in Chicago and intend to stay here. What are you doing locally?
We don’t think there is a better sports town in the world than Chicago. Ross and I grew up here. Everything we do has a trace of Chicago in it. Our general counsel is also a partner in our business and operates a law firm called Troglia Kaplan that represents a lot of the talent here in the city (from restaurateurs to producers to entrepreneurs). We are working with some other local entrepreneurs to open a restaurant and bar right across the street from our office.