024: The World's First Sports Stock Market - with Deven Hurt

Meet Devin Hurt

Devin is the co-founder and CEO of Prediction Strike, a fantasy sports stock market that allows users to buy and sell shares of pro athletes as if they were stocks. Starting in 2018, Prediction Strike has already completed over $5.5 million worth of transactions on their network. Prior to co-founding his company in 2018, Devin worked for Nike as a cyber security analyst. Deven is a 2018 graduate from Harvard with a degree in bioengineering. Join Deven and host Will Jurgensen as they discuss the world's first sports stock market, its creation and its future! 

Is Prediction Strike the next Facebook?

I think it's bigger than Facebook. Bigger than Facebook. Facebook died one day. And it's been replaced by all these other social networks. Yes. I don't think sports are going anywhere. And so the sports and most importantly, this idea that fans are invested in their favorite athletes. Maybe there wasn't a literal money way to do it. But you people always cared no as well. So let's be bigger than Facebook. I like him. Definitely cooler. Okay, well, then that leads to the actual question itself. 

Who's going to play you in the prediction strike movie that's coming out here in 2025?

Oh, that's a good one. Um, you say you're well, I'll give you my okay, if we want. Like just the most ridiculous story possible. We definitely need the Rock or Kevin Hart.  I think I could take a like maybe like Jaden Smith or Michael B. Jordan. 

As I have taken some time to look at Prediction Strike, there's no question. It's unique. It's different. It's unlike anything that we have seen from fantasy sports slash gambling slash professional sports. Combo punch. So why don't you take us through what prediction strike is first, and then we'll kind of get to how it ever came to be. 

Yeah, so the simplest way to explain prediction strikes is to sport stock market. So imagine you can buy and sell shares of your favorite pro athletes as if they were stocks that people were kind of like, well, was that me a stock price move? It's like, okay, so the price moves based upon two factors. One is how the athletes perform in games. I mean, that kind of makes sense, right? You're a pro athlete. If you're doing better, your stock should be worth more, and then the second factor is, are other users buying and selling those shares. So if you're the most popular athlete, and everyone's buying those shares, and you got in early, you, as a user, should be rewarded for that. And so we do, you'll get some money off that, or maybe an athlete does something and just becomes unpopular, and everyone starts selling off, that should jog the share price as well. 

Compare it one more time to the stock market itself.  How do players get value?

It's meant to be a simplified version of the stock market. And kind of as you allude to the stock market is super complicated. People have this like, general idea. And that's kind of we want to play on those general ideas like, oh, this company is doing well, if stocks worth more. Everyone wants to buy this company stocks, the stocks with more Okay, right. So it was like, Okay, how do we bring those into a platform? And that gets us gets to kind of the heart of your question, how do players actually get IP owed, usually to a rookie? Sometimes players get brought out for things midseason, but the vast majority of them it's going to be rookies. And the way that works is player is going to we're going to look at how the players projected to perform for that upcoming year and say, Okay, I don't know fictional Player A is supposed to be the best player in the league that year, and they're going to score 10,000 fantasy points. So now we look at some random rookie who's gonna score say 1000 fantasy points, we'll say alright, let's standardize the best players projections to 10,000 and then we'll kind of scale linearly so that random rookie might be priced at $1 and now they get a chance to come on board make their career start playing some games start getting some popularity and then start having their share price reflect that. 

So is it similar in the sense also then that there can be short term rewards as well as the long term reward of sticking with a player from the rookie season through their career?

Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Like we want you to be able to invest in that rookie and say, I knew so and so is going to be huge way back when or you can or it can also be that hey, I think the starters out this person's gonna have a great week month year it's really however you want to play it so the week to week so someone gets injured right 

Aaron Rodgers. I'm a Wisconsin guy. You're coming to us from New York but Aaron Rodgers the lifeblood you know there was some offseason drama I think right now he's valued at like $11. Let's just say for conversation sake it is valued at $11 Right. So walk me through how someone could ultimately make money on Aaron Rodgers and for that matter, how could someone lose money on Aaron Rodgers. 

So you deposit your money into your account. Like you said, Aaron Rodgers is $11 a share. You want to buy your 10 shares that's $110. Now you spent $110. You have your 10 shares of Aaron Rodgers. Game week rolls around when the Packers play Sunday this week. I don't know. So the Packers play the Chiefs this Sunday. Now Aaron Rodgers just absolutely smokes it. He's been having a killer season. So I don't know. He throws five touchdowns 400 yards and the Chiefs defense is horrendous anyway, that actually might happen. So now his stock is gonna go up because what's gonna happen is the way our algorithm works, we're going to look at how it was actually projected to do in that game, your projection considering that just kind of flat out always predicts to have 300 yards, one and a half to ourselves. He has 500 yards, five touchdowns, he said, it's going to go up. And the more you beat your projections by the more your share price goes up. And then the converse is true the other way, say he finishes with 100 yards. Three picks does nothing I don't know as the worst game of his career is everyone's gonna fall. And so that's one way you can make money just game performance. Others are people buying and selling, are people gonna look at Aaron Rodgers say that chiefs defense is bad, bad, bad, and then start buying shares. So you might make money just off of that.  I've actually had it with you guys. I'm not playing this Sunday. And people are gonna be like, alright, well, I guess I'm gonna sell like, are you retired? What is all this drama over here? I don't know, people start selling. Now you're gonna lose money. And in that situation? So is the idea here, right? Because a lot of these things are talking about right putting, trying to put value on players before games, right? I mean, the correlation between fantasy football is very similar, right.

And much much more….