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[MUSIC INTRO]
SPEAKER 1: Edward, tell us about yourself.
Did you know you wanted to go into gambling
when you were 10?
EDWARD WRAY: I knew you were going to ask me that.
No.
Beat me to it.
I was always sports mad, actually, so I was keen to do
something around sport.
And like both of these guys, I was sort of an engineer by
interest and training.
And when we set it up at the end of the '90s, even more so
than today, if you didn't have a dot-com idea, I think people
thought there was something slightly wrong with you.
And it was just born out of getting frustrated with
betting in the sort of traditional way, and suddenly
realizing that there was a much better way to do it.
In actual fact, the odds that were given to you were always
going to be given by other people, and you didn't need to
have someone in the middle.
So we just basically cut out the middleman, cut out the
book maker and sort of just did it.
SPEAKER 1: Which is to say, basically turning betting into
a marketplace, just like a financial instrument is in a
marketplace.
EDWARD WRAY: Well, I'd love to say we were incredibly
innovative, but obviously, people have been doing this in
the financial markets for years.
And the key for us was that we suddenly had a technology that
allowed us to go to millions of people and put them all
together at once.
I think that when I really realized this was an exciting
idea was I thought to myself, this would always have
appealed, but we could never do it until today.
And it was that enabling part of the technology that got us
really excited.