 Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California with a special guest, dialing in remotely Paul Martino, the founder of Bullpen Capital, and also the producer of an upcoming film called The Inside Game. It's a story about a true story about an NBA betting scandal. It's really, it's got everything you want to know. It's got sports, it's got gambling, it's got fixing of games. Paul Martino known for being a serial entrepreneur and then an investor investing in some great growth companies and now running his own firm called Bullpen Capital, which bets on high growth companies and takes them to the next level. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for spending the time. Good to see you again. John, always good to see you. Thanks for having me on the show. So you're a unique, you know, individual, you're a computer science whiz, investor, entrepreneur, now film producer. This story kind of crosses over kind of your interest. Obviously in Philly, you're kind of like me, kind of a blue collar kind of guy. You know, you, you know, hot stars you see when you, when you see it. You also were an investor in a lot of the sports gambling, betting kind of online games that we've, we talked about in the past, but now you're crossing over into filming movies, which just seems like very cool. Honestly, we're living in a day of digital media where code is software, code is, is content. Obviously we believe that. What's this movie all about? All the buzzes out there inside game. You're done sports radio all the time. Give us a scoop. Why inside game? What's it about? Give us the, give us the 411. Yeah. So, so John, I mean, this is a story that picked me. My, my producing partner and this guy named Michael Pierce, who made a bunch of great movies, including The Cooler, one of the best gambling movies with William H. Macy. And he says, sometimes the movie picks you and sometimes you pick the movie. And I wasn't sitting around one day going, wow, I want to be a movie producer. It was just much more that my cousin is the principal in the story. My cousin was the go between, between the gambler and the referee. The three of them were friends ever since they were kids. And when they all got out of jail, Tommy called me, Tommy Martino. He said, hey, Paul, you're about the only legitimate business guy I know. Could you help me with my life rights? And that's how this started almost six years ago. And how, what progressed next? You sat down, had a couple of cocktails, beers. Okay, here's what we're going to structure it. Was it more brainstorming? And then it kind of went from there. Take us through that progression. It was a pure intellectual property exercise. And this is where being a startup guy was helpful. I was like, Tommy, I'll buy your life rights. Maybe we'll get a script written. We'll put it on the shelf so that if anybody ever wants to make this story, they have to go through us, almost like a black blocking patent or a copyright. And he's like, okay, cool. And so I said, I have no delusions of ever making this movie. I actually don't know that, I don't know anybody to make a movie. This is not my skill set. But if anybody ever wants to make the movie, they're going to have to come deal with us. And then the lucky break happens, like anything in a startup. I have this random meeting with a guy named Michael Pierce who's at a firm called WPS Challenger out of London. And we're down at Hillstone in Santa Monica. And I say to him, I say, I got this script written about this NBA betting scandal. Would you do me a favor? He literally laughs in my face. He goes, a venture guy from Silicon Valley is going to hand me a script. What a bad, anyway, as it looked to, I'm a good guy, I'm a good guy to have OU a favor. So just read this dang thing. About eight hours later, my phone rings. He says, who the hell is Andy Callahan? This is the best script I've ever read in my entire life. Let's go make a movie. Andy Callahan was a friend of a friend from high school who wrote the script. He actually once beat Kobe Bryant when he was a center at Haverford when Kobe Bryant played at Lower Marion here in the Philly suburbs. So it's kind of this local Philly story. I'm a local Philly blue collar guy. We put the pieces together and I'll be danged. And now six years later, the film is in the can and you're probably going to see it during the NBA finals this year in June. All right, so there's some news out there. It's on the cover of ESPN Magazine. The site is now launched. I've been hearing buzz all morning on this in the sports radio world. A lot of buzz, a lot of organic virality around it. Reminds me of the crazy rich Asians which kind of started organically. Similar kind of community behind it. This has really got some legs to it. Give us some taste of what's some of the latest organic growth here around the buzz. Yeah, so think about this. This happened primarily in 06 and 7. They were sentenced in 2010 and were in jail in 2011. It is 2019 and the front page story on ESPN is what Tim, Tommy and Jimmy Batista did. The three guys, the gambler, the ref and the go-between. And this is a front page story on ESPN all these years later. So we know this story has tremendous legs. We know this movie has a tremendous built-in audience. And so now it's just our job to leverage all those marketing channels at places we pioneered like Zynga and Fandle to get people who care about this story into the theaters. And we're hoping we can really show people how to do a modern way to market a film using those channels we pioneered at places like Fandle and Zynga. You and I have had many conversations privately and here on theCUBE in the past around, you know, startups disruption. And you know, it's the same pattern, right? You know, no one thinks it's a great idea. You get the rights to it. You kind of got to find that inflection point, that magical moment, which comes through networking and just hard work and hustle, right? And then you got everything comes together and then it comes together and then it grows. As the world changes, you're seeing digital completely change the game on Hollywood. For instance, you know, Netflix, you got Prime, you got Hulu. This is essentially a democratization. Well, first of all, you've made some money so you had some dough to put into it, but you know, here's a script from a friend and you guys put it together. This is now the new startup model going to Hollywood. Talk about that dynamic. What's your vision there? Because this I think is an important signal in how digital content, whether it's guys in the cube doing stuff or cube studios, which we have a vision for. This is something that's real. Talk about the dynamic. How do you see the entrepreneurial vision around how movies are made, how contents made, and then ultimately how their merchandise in the future? Right, there's a whole bunch of buckets. There's the intellectual property bucket of the story, the script, et cetera. Then there's the bucket of getting the movie made. You know, that's the, you know, on the set and that's the director and that's the post-production and then there's the marketing. And what was really interesting is even though I had never made a movie, two of those three buckets I knew a tremendous amount about from my experience as a startup investor. The marketing and the IP side, I understood almost completely even though I'd never made a film. And so all of the disruptive technologies that we learned for doing disruptive things like marketing a new thing called Daily Fantasy Sports, we were able to bring to bear to this film. Now I had fun on the set and meeting all the actors, et cetera, but I had no delusion that I knew about the making of the movie part. So I plead ignorance there. But of the three buckets that you need to go make something in the media space, 66% of what I knew as a startup guy overlapped. And I think this is what the future of media is because guys like me and you, John, we actually know a lot about this because we're startup people as opposed to that we have to learn about it in terms of how to market and how to get an audience. I mean, my last company, Aggregate Knowledge, designs custom audiences for ad targeting. So we know how to find gamblers to go see this movie. I mean, that's literally the company I started. And so that's a thing that I'm very, very comfortable with. And it's exciting to then work with the producer who did the creative and the director. And I say, hey guys, I got this marketing thing out of control. I know how to do it. Oh, by the way, the old head of marketing from Fandle, he's a consultant to the project. So we got that. You got that. And the movie's being made. That's also, again, back to entrepreneurship, risk. You got to take risks, right? This is all about risk management at the end of the day and navigating as the lead entrepreneur, getting it done, this heavy lifting and cost involved in making the movie. How did you, that's like production, right? It's like, you know, build a product. That is ultimately the product when it has to get to market. How did that go? What's your thoughts on your first time running a movie like this from a production standpoint, learnings, observations? I learned a tremendous amount. I must admit, I was along for the ride on that piece of the puzzle. The product development piece of this was all new to me. But then again, I mean, think about it, John. I started four companies, a social network and ad targeting company, a game company and a security company. I didn't know anything about those four companies when I started them either in terms of what the product needed to do. So learning a new product called Make a Movie was kind of par for the course, even though I didn't really know anything about it. You know, if you're going to be a startup person, you got to have no fear. That's the real attribute you need to have in these kinds of situations. So I got to witness that first hand. And you know what? Now if I ever make a movie again, I kind of know how to make that product. Yeah, well, look at Florida. You got great instincts as an entrepreneur. Love hanging out with you. I got to ask you a question kind of. I talked to a lot of young people, my son and other his friends. And I see people coming out of business school, all the stuff, you know, every college has a entrepreneurial program, music, film, whatever. They all have kind of bolted on entrepreneurship. You're essentially breaking down that kind of dogma of that you have to have a discipline. Anyone can do this, right? So talk about the folks that are out there trying to be entrepreneurial, whether you're a musician. This is direct to consumer. If you have the skills as an entrepreneur, it translates. Talk about what it takes to be an entrepreneur if you're a musician or someone who has, say, content rights or has a content story. What do they do? What's your advice? We have lived through perhaps the most awesome period of the last five to 10 years where it got cheap to do a startup. You know, when we're doing our first startups 20 years ago, it costs five million bucks to go get a license from Oracle and go hire a DBA and do all that stuff. You know what? For five grand, you can get your website up, you can build, you can use your iPhone, you can film your movie. That's all happened in the last five to 10 years. And what it's done is exactly the word you used. It's democratized who can become an entrepreneur. Now people who never thought entrepreneurship was for them are able to do it. One of our great examples of this is Ipsy, our cosmetics company. You know, Michelle Fan was a cocktail waitress working in Florida, but she had this YouTube following around watching her videos of her putting her makeup on. And you know, when we met her, we're like, you know what, you're the next generation of what entrepreneurs look like. Because no, she didn't go to Stanford, she didn't have a PhD in computer science, but she knew what this next generation of content marketing was gonna look like. She knew what it was to be a celebrity influencer. You know, that company, Ipsy, makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year now. And I don't think most people on Sand Hill would have necessarily given Michelle the chance because she didn't look like what the traditional entrepreneur looked like. So it's so cool, we live in a time where you don't need to look like what you think an entrepreneur needs to look like or went to the school you had to think you'd go to to become an entrepreneur. It's open to everybody now. And the key success just, you know, again, we've talked about this privately all the time when we meet, but I want to get your comment on the record here, but I mean, some of there's some basic blocking and tackling that's independent of where you went to school. That's, you know, being creative, networking, networking, networking, you know, and being, you know, good hustle and being obviously good judgment and smart. Do your thoughts on the keys to success for as those folks saying, hey, you know, I didn't have to go to these big fancy schools. I want to go out there. I want to test my idea. I want to go push the envelope. I want to go for it. What's the tried and true formula from your perspective? So when you're in the early stage of hustling and you want to figure out if you're good at being an entrepreneur, I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. Every meeting is a job interview. Now you might not think it's a job interview, but you want to think about every meeting. This might be the next person I start my company with. This might be the person I end up hiring to go run something at my company. This might be the person I end up getting money for from to start my company. And so show up, have some skills, have some passion, have a vision and impress the person on the other side of the table. Every once in a while I get invited to a college and they're like, well, Paul, you know, life's easy for you. You're, you know, you started a company with Mark Pincus and your friends with Reed Hoffman and it's like, well, how the hell do you think I met those people? I did the same thing I'm telling you to do. When I was nobody coming out of school, I went and did stuff for these guys. I helped them with the business plan. I wrote the code of tribe. And then now all of a sudden we got a whole network of people you can go to. Well, that didn't happen by accident. You had to show up and have some skill, talent and passion and then impress the person on the other side of the table. And guess what? If you do that enough times in a row, you're gonna end up having your own network and then you're gonna have kids come in and say, wow, how can I impress you? Be authentic, be genuine, hustle, do networking, do the job interview, great stuff. All right, back to the final point I want to get your thoughts on because I think this is your success and getting this movie out of the gate. Everyone, first, everyone should go see Inside Game. InsideGameMovie.com is the URL. The site just went up. This should be a great movie. I'm looking forward to it and knowing the work that went in would follow your journey on this. It should be great. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Digital media, your thoughts because we're seeing a direct-to-consumer model. You got the big companies, YouTube, Amazon, others. There's kind of a huge distribution with those guys, the classic web 2.0 search kind of paradigm and portal. But now you got a whole another set of distribution around network effects. Your thoughts, because you were involved in, again, social networking before it became the monster that it is now. How is digital media changing? What's your vision of how that's happening and how does someone jump on that wave and be successful? Yeah, we're in the midst of disruption. I mean, I'm in the discussions and final negotiations right now on how we're going to end up ultimately doing the film distribution. And I am very disappointed with the quality of the thinking of the people on the other side of the table because they come from very traditional backgrounds. And I'm talking to them about, I want to do a site takeover across Zynga. I want to do a digital download on FanDuel of a 20-minute clip of the film. And they're like, what's FanDuel? Who's Zynga? And I'm sitting there and like, guys, this is the new media. By the way, there's a sports app called Wave and Wave is where the local influencers in the markets who want to write the stories are and we want to do a deal with those guys. And oh, by the way, the CEO of that company was a buddy of mine I met years ago, right? One of those kids I gave advice to and now I'm going to ask him for a favor from, right? That's how it works. But it's amazing when you have these conversations with traditional offline media companies, they don't understand any of the words coming out of your mouth. They're like, Paul, here's how much I'll give you for your film. Thank you, we'll go market it. I'm like, really? Seriously? Yeah. I got the former CMO of FanDuel going to help me out on this. You don't want to talk to him? Yeah. And so this is where the industry is really ripe for disruption because the people from the startup world have already disrupted the Apple Card. And now we've just got to demonstrate that this model is going to continue to work for the future. And be ready when the next new kind of digital trans media thing comes along and embrace that as opposed to be scared to death of it or not even know how to talk the language of the people on it. Well, you're doing some amazing venturing in your kind of unique venture capital model. And bullpen capital certainly isn't your classic venture capital thing. So I'm sure people are going to be talking to you about, oh, Paul, are all VCs going to be doing movies? I'm sure that's an area that's out there. But you're not just a normal venture capital, you certainly invest. So venture capitals have reputation issues right now. People talk about, well, the group think, they only invest in who they see themselves. You mentioned that comment there. The world's changing in venture. Your thoughts on that, how you guys started your firm and your evolution of venture capital. And is this a sign that you'll see venture capitalists go into movies? Well, I don't know about that part. There have been a couple of venture people who have done movies. But the part I will talk about is the, you got to know somebody, it's an inside game. Ha ha, we'll play double entendre on inside game here. 20% of the deals we've done at bullpen, we've done over a hundred. 20% of them were cold emails on something like LinkedIn or a business plans at bullpen.com, 20%. Now there's this old trope and venture, if you don't get a warm intro, I won't even talk to you. Well, 20% of our deals came in and we had no idea who the person on the other side was. That's how we run the firm. And so if you're out there going, I'm one of those entrepreneurs in the Midwest and I don't know anyone, I'm not in a network. Send me a plan. I'm someone who's going to look at it. It doesn't mean I'm going to be an investor, but you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you a shot. And I don't care where you're from or what school you went to or what social click you're in or what your political persuasion is. As a matter of fact, I literally don't care. I'm going to give you a shot coming to my office. And that I think is what is missing in a lot of firms where it's a, we only do security and we only look at companies that spun out of Berkeley and Stanford. And yeah, there can be an old boys network in that. But you know what? We like to talk to everybody. And the more blue collar the CEO is, the more we love them at bullpen. That's awesome. Talk about the movie real quick on terms of how you're, how Hollywood's handling it. Expectations in terms of reaction. Was it positive? Is it positive? What's the vibe going on in Hollywood? Is this going to be a grassroots kind of thing around the fan duels and your channels? What's your plan for that? And what's the reaction of Hollywood? So it's going to be a lot of all of the above, but PR is going to be a huge component. I mean, part of the reason we're on today is there's a huge front page story on ESPN about Tim Donahue and the MBA betting scandal of 2007. And so the earned media is going to be a huge component of this. And I think this is where the Hollywood people do understand the language we're speaking. We're like, look, we have a huge built-in audience that we know how to market to. We have a story. Actually, in the early days, you asked about risk. Back when I was thinking about if I would do this project, I would do the following little market research. I'd walk into a sports bar. It didn't matter what town I was in. I could be in Dallas. I could be in Houston. I could be in Boston. I would literally walk up to the bar and say, hey, six of you at the bar, ever here at Tim Donahue? It'd be amazing. About seven out of 10 people would go, yeah, he was the referee, crooked referee in the NBA. I'm like, this is amazing. Seven out of 10 people I meet in the bar know about the story I want to go tell. That sounds like a good chance to make a movie. As opposed to a movie that has no built-in audience. And so a built-in audience with PR channels that we know work, I think we can really show Hollywood how to do this in a different way if this all works. And this comes back to my point around built-in audiences. A YouTuber has got a million subscribers. That's kind of an old metric. That means they're like an RSS feed kind of model. That's a million people in that could be amplifying. They're network connections. It is a massive built-in audience. The iteration, the DevOps kind of mindset, we talk about cloud computing can be applied to movies. It's agile movie making. That's what you're talking about. Yeah, and by the way, so we have a social network of all the actors and people in the film. So when it's ready, let's go activate our network of all the actors that are in the film. Each of them have a couple million followers. So let's go be smart. Let's get two weeks before the movie. Let's send some screenshots. A week before the movie. Let's show some exclusive videos. Two days before the film. Go see it, it's now out in the theaters. You know what? That's pretty, that's 101. We've got actors. We've got producers. Let's go use the influencer network we built that actually got the movie made. Let's go on sports talk, talk about the movie. Let's go on places like this and talk about how adventure guy made a movie. This is the confluence of all of the pieces all coming together at once. And I just don't think enough people in the film business or in the media business think big enough about going after these audiences. Oh, we're gonna take ads out on TV and I'm going to see my trailer and we're going to do this and that's how we do it. There's so many better ways to get your audience now. And this is going to change. Just while I got you here cause it's just awesome, awesome conversation. You know, bringing it back to kind of the CMO and big companies, whether it's Consumer or B2B or whatever movies, the old model of we get, here's our channels. There's certainly this earned media kind of formula and it's not your classic. We got a website and we're going to do all this instrumentation. It's a whole nother mechanism. So talk about in your opinion, the importance of earned media vis-a-vis the old other buckets, owned media, paid media, you know, well-defined web 1.0, web 2.0 tactics. Earned media is not just how good is our PR. It's actually infrastructure channels, it's networks, a new kind of way to do things. How relevant and how important will this be going forward? Because there's no more website. It's a media, you're basically building a media company for this movie. That is exactly right. We're building an ad hoc media business. I think this is what the next generation of digital agencies are going to look like. And there are some agencies that we've talked to who really understand all of what you just said. They're few and far between, unfortunately. Yeah, well, Paul, that's what's theCUBE. This is what we do. We love talking to people, making it happen. Again, our model is the same as yours. We open to anyone who's got signal and you certainly doing a great job and great to know you and follow your entrepreneurial journey, your investment journey, and now your filmmaking journey. Paul Martino, general panel and bullpen capital with the hot film, inside game. I'm definitely going to see it. It should be really strong. And it's going to be one of those movies like Crazy Rich Asians where not looking, not really well produced. I mean, not predicted to be great. And then goes gangbusters. So I think this is going to be one of those examples. Paul, thanks for coming on. Love it, thank you. This is CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California, bringing you all the action. Venture capitalist turned filmmaker Paul Martino with the movie Inside Game. I'm John Furrier. Thank you for watching.