In this interview, Evan Fisher, COO & Co-Founder of Sparket, discusses how his experience at Google shapes his innovative approach to technology and operations in the igaming industry. He explains how The Social Betwork® democratises live event wagering by empowering users to create content and participate in dynamic betting pools across sports, reality TV, and alternative events. Fisher highlights Sparket's technological innovations, including a robust backend built on serverless AWS architecture and early GLI-33 certification for regulatory compliance. He also addresses the challenges of integrating with partners and scaling the platform to enhance user experiences.
Gaming Eminence: Your background spans operational roles at Google and ventures in sustainable energy. How have these experiences influenced your approach to technology and operations at Sparket, and how have they shaped your vision for leveraging technology within the gaming industry?
EF) "During my 8 years at Google I was in operational roles, the last 4 years of which was on the product side. It's a big change going from one of the largest companies in the world to the smallest, but my experience there has definitely been crucial to being able to lead these functions at Sparket. On the product side, you have to be obsessed with the end user. You can do a lot of surveys, setup UI tracking, and speak to customers, but most important is to watch your customers actually using the product in real time and see where they get stuck. For operations, one of my directors at Google lived by the 80/20 rule. That is: what can you do to achieve 80% of the impact with 20% of your effort. This means not overdoing it with processes, spreadsheets, etc. until it is absolutely necessary."
Gaming Eminence: Sparket aims to democratise live event wagering through The Social Betwork®. Can you explain how your platform achieves this democratisation, and what technological innovations underpin this approach? How do these innovations set Sparket apart within the betting industry?
EF) "Our vision with The Social Betwork is to tap into the power of communities. Sports betting today is largely about content created by the sportsbook where you bet against the house. Sparket introduces a concept where trusted users can generate the content and wager in pools against each other. This has unlocked experiences in alternative categories like reality TV, alternative sports, and more which have millions of passionate fans but get lost in the traditional sports betting format. Our pool wagering technology enables this by leveraging a form of parimutuel system, where odds are set dynamically based on the volume of wagers rather than being fixed. Users earn ratings and build trust via inputs, and ultimately we can create a self-sustaining ecosystem of predictions, odds, and result confirmations all via the power of the crowd!"
Gaming Eminence: Handling content offerings from traditional sports to reality TV and alternative events presents significant technological challenges. What emerging technologies does Sparket utilize to manage this diversity, and what obstacles have you faced in scaling and integrating these offerings?
EF) "The breadth of content, much of which doesn't have historic data, does indeed present unique challenges. We've built a robust and modern admin system on the backend which enables content owners to directly control their pools, starting odds, and see analytics in real time. This allows our content and data partners like Alt Sports Data and Pro League Network to provide more real time updates and have the latest information for setting up pools. We do some of the other events in house: we have scouts for reality TV and pop culture which are looking at the latest trends and inputting data manually where data feeds don't exist today. On the tech side, we've had to build in unique controls into this system to clearly display to end users how much participation various pools have and how the odds are changing. We've built this in a way that scales across new events as we onboard them."
Gaming Eminence: Integrating free-to-play white labels with real money gaming involves complex technological and regulatory hurdles. How has Sparket addressed these challenges to provide seamless, secure, and compliant solutions for your B2B sportsbook and casino partners?
EF) "Even though we've largely started on the free to play side, we knew early on that building robust tech was crucial in a regulated industry. That's why we built our product to GLI-33 standards and received certification well before we needed it. This has positioned us very well to transition to real money offerings and has made our free to play offering one of the most secure on the market. We've also built a unique whitelabel 'groups' system with a mix of global and client-specific components which enables us to more efficiently spin up customized products for our clients, rather than building elements from scratch each time."
Gaming Eminence: In light of Sparket's rapid growth and recent partnerships with PENN Entertainment, Casino Pauma, and Soboba Casino and Resort, how is your technology infrastructure adapting to support this expansion? Can you discuss the strategies and innovations that enable seamless integration with these partners while ensuring an enhanced user experience across various platforms?
EF) "We've built most of our tech on serverless AWS architecture which allows for better scaling as we grow. This does raise some challenges in a regulated industry as many states require physical server deployments. We've prepared some 'infrastructure as code' to prepare for such deployments going forward. We've also learned a lot about integrations in this space. It's an interesting challenge as some of our partners have more legacy technology stacks, and integrating these two systems can be difficult. We've created an 'integration guide' to ease the process and have leaned on some of these principles in our integrations with GAN and Aristocrat for example."