The Sports Gambling Talent War in 8 Charts

Two Sundays ago, I made the walk from my parking spot into AT&T Stadium for the Commanders vs. Cowboys game. In that ten-minute stroll, I was bombarded by ads for Kalshi, Polymarket, Novig, PrizePicks, Fanatics, BetMGM, Betr, Fliff, Sleeper, DraftKings, and FanDuel. If you aren’t familiar with these businesses, I hope you’ve enjoyed your 5-year nap.

Together, they make up the American sports gambling ecosystem: traditional sportsbooks, daily fantasy operators, and prediction markets, where users don’t gamble, but instead trade on games.

Kidding.

David Forman, VP of research at the American Gaming Association, calls Kalshi "a sportsbook with a small prediction market business attached to it." And Kalshi's own volume says so: 80% of it is sports. Trading on a game is betting on a game.

I haven't placed a bet in years, but I'm a libertarian on this one. Who am I to tell grown adults what to do with their hard-earned dollars? I'll also say plainly that I'm worried about what this is doing to young men. A growing share are moving investable dollars into sports betting, prediction markets, options, crypto, and other high-frequency speculation.

There is a darker reality underneath this, and it’s financial nihilism. When saving, home ownership, and participation in equity markets feel impossible, a 7-leg parlay that could make you a hundred grand in a weekend starts to look rational. And the friction is gone. If you’ve got a phone, a thumb, and a few seconds to spare, you can place a bet. The consequences can be suffered quietly and alone.

That’s a bigger conversation for another day. Today is about human capital flows, some of the most honest signals in business. Following the people tells us a lot about these businesses: what's in their DNA, where they're strong, and where they might be exposed.

Every talent chart below shows a company's top ten sources and destinations over the past twelve months, via Live Data Technologies. The counts are small, so read them for pattern.

Eight charts. In we go.

Today’s visuals are Sankey-diagram heavy. You’ll notice the thickest flows from finance and crypto backgrounds go two places, Kalshi and Polymarket. You’ll also notice that very few people leave these companies.

Polymarket raised at an $8 billion valuation in October 2025, and at $21 billion one month ago. Kalshi’s $185 million Series C in June of 2025 was done at a $2 billion valuation, and now it’s reportedly finalizing a raise at $40 billion ahead of an IPO.

As Eric Schmidt told Sheryl Sandberg, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.”

While Kalshi and Polymarket raked in huge dollars at mind-blowing markups in the private markets this past year, their publicly traded counterparts felt the pain. A fellow Stanford '20 grad, Edwin Dorsey, made an impressive call in his September 2025 Bear Cave newsletter, "Problems at DraftKings (DKNG)." He wrote that prediction markets are "a real and growing headwind" that would turn an effective duopoly into a competitive marketplace, with DraftKings on the defensive.

Over the past year, DraftKings is down 49% and Flutter, FanDuel's parent company, is down 71%. Both closed September 30 at 52-week lows. Their combined market cap is $22.4 billion.

Kalshi's $40 billion mark is more than every other sportsbook and fantasy operator on this chart combined. Skybox readers will recall from July’s 5 Charts That Capture How The Sports Economy Is Changing that Kalshi’s annual prediction market trading volume has gone from $183 million in 2023, to $1.9 billion in 2024, to $24.2 billion in 2025, to $240.3 billion year-to-date in 2026. That’s a hockey stick with a barely-visible blade.

Kalshi's co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, have résumés that run through MIT, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, and Citadel, and the company's hiring looks a lot like them. It's also pulling talent straight from the sportsbooks, with FanDuel, DraftKings, and Underdog all feeding it. Add backing from groups like Sequoia, a16z, and Coatue, and it's blue-chip logos everywhere you look.

Polymarket is the crypto kid that Wall Street took in. Solo founder Shayne Coplan dropped out of NYU to build in crypto before launching Polymarket from his apartment as a 21-year-old. It has continued to hire from that universe (see: Chainlink, Kraken, Aave). Its cap table now includes Founders Fund, General Catalyst, 1789 Capital, and ICE, the NYSE’s parent company.

The detail worth noticing is at the bottom left: three hires from the National Futures Association, the self-regulator of the US futures industry. That's the world Kalshi and Polymarket live in, and DraftKings is staffing up to compete there with DraftKings Predictions. On the way out, the biggest destination is Hard Rock Digital, with Fanatics Underdog close behind.

Fanatics took twelve people from FanDuel in twelve months, the largest single flow in this entire dataset. It bought PointsBet's US business for $225 million to get the licenses, and FanDuel supplied the people who know how to run a sportsbook. Hard Rock Digital is right behind at nine.

Six of BetMGM's top ten sources are other gaming companies, starting with DraftKings and FanDuel and including its own parent, MGM Resorts. Owned 50/50 by MGM and Entain, it hires people who already know the business, and its departures land in the same places: Hard Rock Digital, DraftKings, PrizePicks, and Fanatics.

The next challengers may come from a different kind of incumbent. Robinhood, with its 28 million funded customers, spent the past year distributing Kalshi's contracts. Then it bought an exchange with Susquehanna, rebranded it Rothera, and started routing contracts there. Event contracts made Robinhood $156 million last quarter, more than stocks or crypto.

Then there's Meta. In June, The New York Times reported it has built a prediction markets app, internally called Arena, that starts with play-money points and hasn't ruled out real money. Meta serves 3.6 billion people across its family of apps daily.

Don't sleep on Robinhood, and never sleep on Zuck.