Letting It Ride: Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani at Stake headquarters in Melbourne. “It’s not ROI-based at all,” Tehrani says of their massive spending spree. “I feel like when you have people’s attention, you should invest everything you can to hold onto that.”Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani parlayed Stake’s success into launching a streaming platform, sponsoring an F1 team—and billion-dollar fortunes.an old-school online video game, to wager on fights between them using in-game digital gold coins.
“We’ve taken two of the most controversial technologies and industries and combined them,” Craven says. “So it’s always been an uphill battle for us to beat public perception of what the company may stand for.” In search of young, risk-tolerant customers, Craven found a new breed of willing pitchmen: content creators. Stake began paying some of them $1 million per month or more to gamble on the livestreaming platform Twitch, often wagering funds seemingly provided by Stake. When the pandemic lockdowns more than doubled Twitch’s viewership, it “put rocket boosters on the operation,” Craven says.
Stake has chosen the path of regulation, going on a major hiring spree of legal and compliance staff, beefing up its customer verification processes and opening regulated, noncrypto operations in the U.K., Portugal, Italy and Colombia. In the United States, Stake operates a “social casino” run on valueless digital coins. The strategy will undoubtedly cut into its profitability, but Tehrani says Stake is “starting to grow into a corporation” that could last decades.