Last updated: February 16, 2024
Thomas Winter, the founder of Golden Nugget Online Gaming, leaves DraftKings after its acquisition, marking a significant change in the online gaming industry landscape.
Thomas Winter, founder of Golden Nugget Online Gaming (GNOG), is leaving the company that he started 18 months after DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) bought it. Winter started GNOG ten years ago and saw it grow from a small privately held company in New Jersey to a publicly traded giant in the state’s online gaming industry that DraftKings eventually went after.
Thomas Winter, the founder of Golden Nugget Online Gaming (GNOG), recently wrote on LinkedIn that he was leaving the company. Winter thought back on his ten-year journey with GNOG, including the company’s successful IPO and subsequent purchase by DraftKings Inc. It was clear that he wanted to focus on getting a better work-life balance in the next part of his life.
After a reverse merger with Landcadia Holdings II, Inc., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) run by Tilman Fertitta, GNOG went public on the Nasdaq in December 2020. The GNOG Group is one of the biggest online gambling companies in New Jersey. They also do business in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
Winter said nice things about Tilman Fertitta, calling him “the smartest and most impressive businessman” he had ever met.
GNOG wasn’t a public company for very long. Eight months after it went public, DraftKings made an offer to buy it for $1.56 billion in stock. For every share of GNOG that an investor owned, they would get 0.365 shares of DraftKings.
And DraftKings made a smart move by making the deal. The company is now one of the leaders in the US iGaming market share. Some experts think that by 2030, the market for online casinos and sports betting in North America could be worth $42 billion.
Frost said that DraftKings was smart to know “the benefits of a multi-brand strategy and trusted that GNOG was the right addition to deliver on it.”
Before starting Golden Nugget Online, Winter was CEO and director of Betclic and Expekt, two European online casinos that were part of the Betclic-Everest Group.
Some people in the gaming industry think that Winter’s leaving is bad for DraftKings, possibly because there aren’t many good iGaming employees. Chris Grove, a businessman and investor in games, said on X (formerly Twitter). Having Winter taken away from DraftKings leaves them with a huge hole to fill.
The impressive success of DraftKings’ online casino, according to Grove, is a mix of GNOG’s history and DK’s own skill with the product, which is also very strong. But adding Thomas and his team to DK’s online casino was a clear example of how the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts.
Still, there is hope for iGaming as a whole. Analysts and business owners are optimistic about the future of online casinos because legalization at the state level is still a long way off (it’s only legal in a few states right now). It also has a higher profit margin than sports betting because people who bet on it tend to stick around longer and spend more money than people who bet on sports.
Marilyn Chavez is an associate researcher at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, where she studied the mathematical probabilities and aspects of casino games like slot machines. She’s written several case studies which have been published by multiple problem-gaming institutions to help spread awareness about the dangers of online gambling and gambling addiction. She also presented a 2019 Ted talk on the topic of gambling among minors.
