Origins I: Following Roads Without Maps
The questions that refuse to leave are the ones worth pursuing
Sometimes, a road appears before a map does.
We are taught to plan. Pick a destination. Study the route. Calculate the risks. Wait until the uncertainty disappears.
But looking back, every meaningful turn in my life happened in exactly the opposite way.
I didn’t know where the road led. I simply couldn’t stop following it.
At twenty-three, I thought I had a fairly good idea of how my life would unfold. I was studying economics in Turkey and preparing to begin my Ph.D. in the United States. My plan was straightforward: Earn a doctorate, return home, become a tenure-track professor, conduct research, teach students. Nothing unusual. Nothing dramatic. Just the path I had spent years preparing for.
If you had asked me then what questions I expected to spend my career answering, they would have come from economics, and not from law.
Then I received a letter from Los Angeles.
Before that letter arrived, all signs pointed to Penn State. I had also been admitted to Boston College and Georgetown, but Penn State was firmly in the lead. Comparable programs, but Penn State ranked slightly higher, and–most importantly–the offer came with a full scholarship. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t flush with cash either. The financial aid mattered.
UCLA, on the other hand, was a borderline top-ten program, the kind you don’t expect to get into. Yet months earlier, when I first looked at UCLA’s admission requirements, I felt something I couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t confidence exactly, and it wasn’t ambition. It was a sense of belonging, as if I fit there in a way I didn’t feel with any other school; that feeling stuck with me. So when the letter from Los Angeles arrived, it didn’t just change the calculus–it felt like something that had been quietly waiting for me to catch up. UCLA suddenly became the better choice, academically and personally.
My father disagreed.
To him, Penn State was the obvious answer. A full scholarship at a respected program wasn’t something to take lightly. He went to boarding school at eleven. He learned to manage his life and money early. He wasn’t being stubborn or unreasonable. He was being responsible.
I saw it differently. The question wasn’t the cost of one year’s tuition. It was what that investment might become over the next twenty or thirty years. UCLA was one of the top economics programs in the country. If I was right, the additional cost would eventually become insignificant.
Fortunately, you could reason with my father; he would listen to what I had to say. He worried about an endless pit of expenses, but I was thinking long-term and I really wanted UCLA. Neither of us realized it then, but that conversation would become one of the defining moments of my life.
The compromise? I made him a promise. “Give me one year, and I’ll work my way into my own scholarship.”
He thought about it for a few days and came back with: “One year is all I can afford at the moment. If you don’t get it, you may need to come back home.”
Deal.
At the time, I viewed it as an admissions decision. But it was more than that. It was a consequential step I took on a new road without knowing where it led. I could only see a few hundred feet in front of me. The rest was all fog. I didn’t have a map. I didn’t know the final destination, if there ever was one. I just knew I had to follow the road as it revealed itself.
A few months later, my father and I touched down at LAX.
Everything about Los Angeles felt new. I had never lived on my own. My father helped me find an apartment, set up utilities, and navigate a city that felt impossibly different from anything I had known.
The first year was difficult. Let me correct that: Horrendous. I knew exactly one person in California–my friend from college who had also been admitted to UCLA. I didn’t speak English well. Growing up, I had gone to a German school, so English was my third language. I certainly knew the academic language well because I had studied economics in English, but my conversational experience was lacking. Demand and supply curves don’t get you very far when you are at the grocery store, neither do the kinds of phrases you learn from textbooks: How to ask for directions to the post office, or how to declare goods at customs. Why they even teach that, I still don’t know. Ordering food, asking for the check, or understanding basic slang would have been more helpful. Deutsche Schule Istanbul was excellent, but reruns of Friends and Seinfeld were far more useful to me than what I learned in high school.
Graduate school was demanding, and I felt the pressure more than the others. Many had scholarships. Some likely paid in-state tuition. If anyone else was flirting with a one-and-done scenario, I didn’t know it. For me, going home after my first year was a real possibility.
Most importantly, I had a promise to keep. Sure, going home with my tail tucked between my legs would have been bad. But breaking my promise? That would be the real defeat. Most kids want to show their parents they can do things. I was no different.
Failure wasn’t an option. I poured everything I had into my studies. No bars. No nightlife. No distractions. The shiny lights of LA could wait, I had a promise to keep and a measurable obstacle to clear: A 3.50 GPA. That was the prerequisite to qualify for a scholarship.
When the final report card printed, it read 3.52. Earning the scholarship I had promised my father required every bit of effort I could muster and every brain cell I had to burn.
Barely, but successfully, I kept my word.
By my second year, life started to settle. I made friends. Ebru–now my wife–eventually joined me in California for her MBA prep, and later in Los Angeles, for her MBA at USC. Graduate school was progressing and an academic career still seemed like the natural destination.
There was only one problem. I needed a dissertation topic.
I had ideas. Technical ideas. Respectable ideas. The kind economists are supposed to have. But none of them excited me. They felt like answers in search of a question rather than the other way around. I felt like I was spinning in circles.
A social network model for the telecommunications industry was what I was pursuing. If that sounds boring to you, you are not alone. The idea was literally putting me to sleep.
Ph.D., in some ways, is similar to marriage. The question isn’t whether the choice, your spouse or your idea, is wonderful. The question simply is: Is it a good fit? Theoretical social network models for the telecommunication industry may have worked for others, they just weren’t a fit for me.
Entering my fifth year, I knew this wasn’t going to be my job market paper. The pressure mounted. I needed a direction. I needed to find a significant question; one that I could not only answer, but one that was a solid fit for me.
Then came the Vegas trip.
July 2004. My good friends Levent and Mehmet–Ph.D. students in economics and finance–and I, planned a road trip to Vegas. This wasn’t the time to worry about dissertation topics. We were going to catch up, play card games, and enjoy ourselves.
Like many road trips, the conversations drifted. One particular conversation landed on sports betting. Could one make money by locking in price differences across sportsbooks? Were there arbitrage opportunities?
Levent argued yes. With so many sportsbooks operating around the world, prices would inevitably diverge. Enough difference, and you could lock in profit. He believed there would be an opportunity to make money.
Mehmet, a believer in market efficiency, was having none of it. He argued that such opportunities would either be extremely short-lived or wouldn’t exist at all and any easy money would disappear instantly.
I sat in the back seat listening. Instinctively, I leaned toward Mehmet. Financial markets were generally considered to be efficient. Why would sports betting markets be any different?
But I wasn’t sure. Maybe there were some differences; peculiarities? Frictions?
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. A spark had erupted into a raging fire.
Two smart people were debating a real question and I was genuinely interested. I realized: This is what a dissertation topic should feel like. Early on, I had recognized the importance of listening to my gut instinct. There was no doubt this was one of those moments. This didn’t become my dissertation question, but it certainly opened the door.
Back from Vegas, I felt energized, rejuvenated even. For the first time, the Ph.D. didn’t feel like a chore. It felt like… playtime.
I explored the arbitrage alley, but it led nowhere. While differences did exist, they were small and transaction fees ate the profits. Another application of market efficiency wasn’t going to excite anyone.
But, this exploration led me to something else: Betfair. A peer-to-peer betting exchange where there was no house. Lower commissions and a different model. Betfair wasn’t your counterparty when you placed a bet, it was simply a platform where you would be matched with another bettor that had the opposite view. Because of that, Betfair did not care about the outcome of the game. Their model insulated them from the risk of losing money if the bettors piled up on one side and ended up being correct; the nightmare scenario for sportsbooks. Betfair simply cared about maximizing the transaction volume.
I always thought the Betfair name accurately described its value proposition. Bet, but at better prices. The business model also happened to trigger a set of questions that a Ph.D. student searching for a topic might get excited about: If Betfair truly offered better prices, why would anyone use traditional bookmakers? Would traditional bookmakers like William Hill and Ladbrokes go extinct? Was I in the midst of a transitional moment in sports betting history?
The coexistence didn’t make sense to me. If one product was better, shouldn’t it replace the other?
Now that was a question worth pursuing.
That question became my dissertation topic. It earned me a fellowship. It landed me a job at PwC. And most importantly, it genuinely excited me.
It was the one.
Watching NBA games while working on my laptop, I gathered sportsbook data. This became one of my fondest memories. It created constraints–no Friday happy hours, early evenings at home–and none of it felt like a sacrifice. It felt like building sandcastles.
Eventually, the answer emerged: Betfair was the better option–but only up to a point. Liquidity, or rather, a lack of it, limited large bets. For a $20 bet, Betfair was a happy place because you didn’t need the bookmaker. With wagers around a hundred dollars, the bids and asks on the exchange started to dry up, and the traditional bookmaker started becoming competitive again. When talking $1,000 or more per wager, there simply wasn’t enough liquidity and you were generally better off dealing with the house directly. The models weren’t substitutes, they were complements.
A PwC colleague and friend would later offer me his definition for Ph.D.: Going through years of grueling research to arrive at a common-sense answer. He wasn’t far off. I did indeed end up with a common-sense answer, but one that required years of research to uncover.
A common-sense answer that also laid pavement for a new path.
Peer-to-peer exchanges were new to me. If cutting out the middleman created an opportunity, what else existed? The search began. One industry review had ranked Betfair first among the major exchange platforms. Second was an exchange I had never heard of: AllSportsMarket (ASM).
I clicked.
“The World’s First Sports Stock Market.”
I pondered. A sports stock market?
I understood sports. I understood stock markets. I had simply never considered the possibility that the two could coexist. That curiosity was intriguing enough to pull me in. I opened an account and started trading. The more I explored, the more questions surfaced. Was this gambling dressed up in financial language? Or was it something else entirely?
Those questions eventually led me to Chris Rabalais, the founder of AllSportsMarket. What began as a few emails turned into longer conversations, and then–thanks to a lucky draw that somehow kept landing on my name–a trip to Costa Rica. When I flew down, I met Chris in person for the first time. Over the next twenty years, he would become a friend, a business partner, an occasional sparring partner, and one of the most intellectually influential people in my life.
Chris had arrived at his own question through a very different road. He had worked as a day trader, then later found himself employed by a sportsbook in Costa Rica. Somewhere along the way, a simple thought occurred to him: Why does a stock market for sports not exist? He scribbled the early ideas on a napkin, and ASM was born. The team began placing ads, and suddenly my path–born from a letter in Los Angeles to a conversation on a Las Vegas road trip that led to my dissertation topic on Betfair–collided with theirs.
When I visited the ASM office in Escazu, it was a small unassuming space in a shopping mall. But inside, the energy was unmistakable. Computer screens glowed with real-time trading activity. People were fully absorbed in what they were building. They looked like they had found their own questions, the ones they felt are worth pursuing. They would eventually become mine, too. What should have felt improbable instead felt strangely natural, as if this was simply the next turn on the road I had already been following.
Looking back now, the sequence of events seems almost too unlikely to be real. But at the time, each step felt like the most logical continuation of the last. A letter from Los Angeles led to a conversation between friends on a road trip to Las Vegas. That conversation led to my dissertation topic, which led to a startup in Costa Rica.
Twenty years later, that same road has wound through conversations with professional sports leagues, regulatory meetings, a proposed self-certification, a Supreme Court petition, eight amicus briefs (including SCOTUS), an SEC lawsuit, a deposition, patents in China and Canada, legal commentary blogs, and a newly developed prediction market tracker called LexCurrent–all while fostering new friendships that I had never expected.
I still don’t know where this road will end, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. The map is drawing itself as I go.
