SBJ Leadership Look-in: Lucra’s Dylan Robbins
Sometimes it’s just time for a leap. Lucra CEO and founder Dylan Robbins has done it a few times now. His first was leaving a banking career for entrepreneurial life, where he helped to found multiple companies, like wine bottle producer Verre Vert and online wine shop Lifetime Vintage, which Convive Wines acquired in 2023. Another came in pivoting Lucra from a peer-to-peer betting app to a B2B focus, producing white-labeled gamified loyalty products (think friendly competitions or minigames with leaderboards), a couple of years ago.
That change for Lucra has resulted in more than 50 brand clients and $10 million in revenue for a company that now counts Dave & Buster’s and Five Iron Golf among clients. Robbins spoke to me about taking chances, the future growth of Lucra, and the company’s recent fifth anniversary.
On Lucra’s five-year anniversary: “We celebrated it at a team retreat in Boston with all 40 of us. And it was great. I walked into the room, and I said to my chief of staff, ‘We have too many seats in here.’ No, this is how many people we have. The ‘aha’ moment of seeing everyone in one room was certainly amazing and making you reminisce about the time when it was three of us sitting at a desk.”
On making the shift to startup life from banking: “I learned what I didn’t want. I want to work somewhere where I can have autonomy at a younger age. I want to find a place where if I’m going to work that hard, I’m passionate about the subject matter. So find a subject matter that I’m excited about and, ideally, want to build something or work where I have autonomy — the ability to make my own decisions. So I think that led me to, ‘Well, where could I find that at 23?’ Very few companies are going to give you that at a corporate company. So that led me to thinking about startups a bit more.”
On Lucra’s B2B shift in 2024: “We got some inbound interest from some brands and leagues saying, ‘Oh, you offer pickleball in Lucra. Can you make a Lucra pickleball app? Oh, you offer go-karting on Lucra. Can you offer maybe us a Lucra go-karting app?’ And we had enough inquiries inbound that made us realize, hold on, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure. We have payments, we have banking, we have geolocation, we have KYC [know your customer], we have leaderboards, we have challenges. We have all the UI, the UX, we have all the security fraud protection. Why don’t we offer this white label to brands? Why don’t we see if they’re interested? And these companies were willing to pay us more than we were generating in revenue the whole year. It was a clear shift of unit economic model.”
On his favorite piece of startup advice: “I got some great advice from a business school professor, which was like, ‘You’re 30. You’re prepared to be an entrepreneur. Let’s say you’re willing to commit 20 years to that. You can start four or five companies in that period. You only need to be right one time.”
On a piece of advice he’d give his younger self: “I would say to myself that it’s going to be much harder than you think ... but I’ve never really had a real moment of being like, ‘This isn’t for me.’ So I don’t think it’s bad hard. I think it’s just hard.”
Periodically, SBJ Tech will feature a content series called Leadership Look-In, where C-suiters in sports tech offer thoughts on their companies, experiences and personnel management. Want to be considered for a future installment? Email me at ejoyce@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
