In a sweaty palmed meeting, Jackpocket CEO Peter Sullivan broke the news to his staff that a major investor had backed out and funds had dried up.
Their response, he says, startled him.
“So what?” his staff replied. “We’re gonna stick this out.”
This was two years ago, when the WeWork Soho member learned of the broken deal after a weekend of revelry at WeWork Summer Camp. It was a Sunday night, and he dreaded the subway ride into work Monday morning to hand out pink slips to the team behind the online lottery app.
“The worst part was, we had signed the term sheets with this investor,” Sullivan says. “It was a family that ran one of the largest lottery companies in the U.S. that would’ve given us validation.”
When nobody headed for the door, Sullivan took a good look at his team. They weren’t going to get paid for months, but they didn’t care. They trusted in his leadership and the team dynamic to grind it out.
“You take away everything, and companies are about getting great people to work together,” Sullivan says. “Once you have those great people, you can get through any wall that comes your way. My team sat behind me, and we made sure a hurdle wasn’t going to stop us. At the end of the day, they pushed me.”
Sullivan says he was lucky to have found his motley crew of coders, tech gurus, and senior level executives. He recalls a chance encounter with a man who was sitting across from him in a WeWork Labs years ago. That software developer is now Jackpocket’s chief technology officer.
“My CTO was sitting across the table from me,” Sullivan says. “And with the little money I scraped together from investors previously, we got a prototype working.”
Jackpocket’s nine-member is no longer scraping by. Funding is plentiful, and the company is headed to Silicon Valley to raise another round of investments. And Jackpocket launched in app stores in late September.
“The new round of funding will allow us to continue to build the product, grow the team and enter new states and territories,” Sullivan says.
The timing wasn’t accidental: Sullivan says it was timed to coincide with a Powerball drawing worth $300 million. In the few weeks since its launch, the app has helped users garner $83,000 in winnings.
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen