
Noah Bernstein, co-founder of the Locker DFS app, pines for those blissful NFL Sundays on the SAE Cal Beta house couch.
“They were like this religious holiday,” remembers Bernstein of those days at UC-Berkeley. “Forty guys sitting in the front room, hung over, watching the games, talking, and hanging out all day. And for me, my favorite part of that was sitting next to my buddies and kind of talking s–t and joking around with them while the games are going on.”
They weren’t all that long ago, really. Bernstein is 23. Those afternoons formed not only memories, but a kernel of an idea for a soon-graduating electrical engineering and computer science student who was already a burgeoning tech entrepreneur.
How a Fan-Focused Vision Became an Innovative Reality
As Bernstein and his friends approached graduation, they pondered if tech could make these moments last.
“We took a look at the online gambling industry, and everybody has done a phenomenal job of opening up the markets,” said Bernstein, “from sports gambling companies to DFS companies, opening up that market, shoveling out products for you to start gambling.
“And we didn’t see a product that really focused on digitizing the watch experience with your friends.”
“Once I graduate, I don’t get to see these guys anymore. So how can we digitize that experience?”
The idea coalescing between pizza and beverages and taunts of his fraternity brothers was not entirely unique. The notion that fans, bettors, and Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) players still crave the social aspects of watching sports has long been hashed over in the boardrooms of major U.S. gambling companies. But Bernstein and collaborator Hugh Roberts just two years later landed on something they saw as unique by synthesizing multiple in-game contests.
While the DFS and sports betting industries grope for the next evolution, Bernstein and Roberts may have created something revolutionary in Locker. This app combines elements of both with a dash of trivia and the premise behind social casinos.
Bernstein thinks it would play well at the Beta house.
“What we landed on was kind of the intersection of fantasy, gambling, and gamification as a second-screen platform,” he said. “So while there’s a live game going on, leveraging gamification, socialization features so that you can be in a pool with your buddies, talk with them throughout the game, and kind of compete against each other throughout the game.”
If Locker is successful in its first full NFL season, it could mint California fraternity house couches as a new sports tech incubator. Two years ago, a cohort of Sigma Nus at UCLA concocted and launched Wager Wire from much the same experience.
How the Locker DFS App Works
The Locker app features a few fun ways to join the action. Locker Picks, Leagues, and Contests offer sports fans a variety of game types to choose from.
Locker Picks: Players can register for free-to-play or monied accounts and choose whether certain players will exceed or fail to reach listed statistical levels in a multiple-choice format, similar to traditional pick ’em DFS.
Leagues: In these season-long games, scores from the Locker Games contest accrue to determine a champion.
Contests: This is broken into two categories: Primetime and 50-50 Blitz. In each quarter, contestants predict player performance in real time on a drive-by-drive basis. These contests resemble trivia because each drive has multiple options for contestants to choose from, such as which player will have more yards or catches during a given drive.
The Locker app is currently available in 31 states.
Q&A with Locker Co-Founder Noah Bernstein
Gaming Today sat down with Locker co-founder Noah Berstein to discuss this new social betting app and learn what fans can expect from the innovative platform.
Q: Is anyone else doing this?
Noah Bernstein: It is pretty unique. And I think that’s what we’re going for as young entrepreneurs, is we really want to innovate. The other companies in the space are phenomenal. They do a killer job. They’re running really tightly. Going head-to-head against one of them with horizontal integration and kind of shelling out the same features sounds pretty difficult.
So for us, it was all about pushing innovation and trying to really merge that intersection of socialization, gamification and fantasy sports.
Q: You can play for money or for free on the Locker app?
Bernstein: We have a league system that we built out. I like to see them as fantasy football leagues, but for our product and tailored for our product. And one thing that we didn’t like about fantasy football is there’s a 12-person cap. We wanted to make leagues where everybody can compete against each other. We have a large-size cap and people can go through and create them themselves. You can go on the app and you can basically register a jackpot size for your league. We do have a disclaimer that if your league doesn’t sell, we refund people the money. You have a timeline to get it filled, but as the commissioner, we incentivize people to come on and start leagues on Locker.
So if you go through, create that league, every time an entry fee comes into your league, you get a revenue share of the entry fees that come in. So it’s really us trying to create a creator economy within our league system to help incentivize influencers and fan clubs to come on, convert their audiences playing these games and maybe make some good money off of it.
When you’re playing in the contest for free, those points count toward your league scores. So it’s like you can go through and play every contest for the entire season for free, build up your league points within your league, and for those jackpot prizes, starting Week 5.
Q: Does Locker have room to grow in the current betting and DFS landscape?
Bernstein: Definitely. It’s very early stages for the online betting market and fantasy market. And so my perspective on it is a lot of these larger companies are still going to be focused on the total adjustable market and expansion. For DraftKings, as states open up, it’s about executing, opening up that market, onboarding their users, and retaining that market share that they have. But I think as we continue along that path, it’s bound for innovation and bound for gamification and games that have a little bit more of a mass market appeal.
I think one thing that I struggle with for sportsbooks that I think the DFS industry has done a really good job of is you can go on one of the [sports betting] platforms and it kind of feels like the stock market. There’s a lot of numbers, complicated lines, jargon. There is really a barrier to entry for a casual consumer common fan. They go on one of those platforms and feel a little overwhelmed.
We wanted to push out a product with mass-market appeal. So it’s trivia questions. It’s a game where my 96-year-old grandma can watch the NFL game and a question will pop up on her phone and she gets to select a trivia question and partake in that.
Q: How do you navigate the legality of DFS in different states?
Bernstein: If you’re going to sign up to start a company within this space, it’s a lot of work, and you have to make sure that you follow and abide by every constraint on a state-by-state basis. That’s no easy task.
But for fantasy specifically, at its core, it’s peer-to-peer, pool. There’s competing against users, guaranteed prize pools.
You know what you’re getting for what you’re buying into, and fixed statistics. So you can’t have a user winning money based off of one outcome like a sports bet. It has to be multiple player outcomes from multiple teams, and a collection of events that stack up. If you’re orbiting around that, to me, you are fulfilling the legal kind of key points of the DFS and fantasy sports product.
And I understand the sports gambling companies’ perspective. I would be pretty annoyed if I was operating in a state and I had to buy a multi-million-dollar sports betting license and another company gets to come in and do it for free.
I think the states that we’re operating in allow for it right now. We’ll see how the legislation changes based on those specifically-DFS pick ’em products. For us, we push largely on our contests and our peer-to-peer innovative products. Those are the ones we’ve been able to obtain licenses for and operate in states where you need a license. As for the other ones, as long you have your KYC provider and abide by the federal kind of definition of what a fantasy product is, you operate and if the states reach out to you and request changes, then you make the changes.
So far, so good on that.
Q: Do you hope to evolve into a sports betting company eventually?
Bernstein: We’re not done innovating yet. I think the first phase for the company is we want to push out the second-screen products for pretty much every sports league that exists. So if you’re watching a game and you’re feeling a little bored or you’re watching a game alone and you want to get some socialization, you want to be a part of a community, you can open a Locker and hop into a social fantasy peer-to-peer pool, compete against people that are fans of your team, fans of the opposing team, friends, whatever it may be.
First, we need to execute on that goal and stay focused on it. That’s the driving focus for right now.