Other People Gamble; We Don’t
Right now, we’re setting up a service out of Costa Rica. It’s a—how do I put it?—it’s a high-risk, high-return investment service for sports fans. So how do I set up something like that? Like any project, with a lot of legwork. I’ve got to get my guy in Costa Rica to set up the back-end servers. Costa Rica’s great because everything’s available right in one building. I call my guy and say, “It’s MIT. I need some stuff.” He just walks down the hall to the ISP, gets servers and backups, and then goes upstairs to the Web developers. It’s out-of-the-box, like calling up IBM Global Services or something. There’s even a little online payment service outfit down there. We like it better than the big ones up here because those guys, they’re better with international currency and security.

After we get all that going, we’ve got to do all the testing. I’m telling you, it’s really not much different than those e-commerce projects I read about in CIO. We do the same due diligence. Same troubleshooting. Same thing with bosses yelling, “MIT, you got that site up yet? Super Bowl’s in a few weeks. Site’s gotta be up for that!”

They ask for some ROI up front, by the way. It’s a little more informal than the way most of your readers do it. They’ll ask, “Ballpark, what do we gotta spend?” I give them a number. They say, “What can we clear in an average month?” I give them another number. I’m not making these up either. I ask around. I mean, that’s cost-benefit analysis right there, right?

Anyway, once that site’s up and running it’ll be a nice little business…for the overseas market, of course.

Even Crooks Need Security
I invest in top-notch security because, believe me, gaming sites are constantly dealing with extortion. Criminals. Not a day goes by when a site doesn’t have some Russian hacker launching a DDoS attack, asking for cash to call it off. We encrypt everything, and we’ve got pretty severe authentication for access. We don’t outsource or contract the security. We keep it in-house. I pay my security guy well. I’d say about 25 to 30 percent above what you’d pay. Met him at the Black Hat conference in Vegas a couple of years ago. I liked him right away because he wasn’t presenting or bragging about what a hotshot he was. He was in the back, taking notes, trying to learn. Quiet. I knew right away he’d fit in.