MetaBet Founder Linking Discovery to Sports Betting
Mark Phillip traces his company’s roots to an error he made as a Jets fan over two decades ago.
New to Austin and feeling homesick, he turned off a Monday night game when the New York team was losing by a lot and went to sleep. The next day, he learned the Jets had pulled off a comeback that entered NFL lore.
The upset left him with a simple takeaway: fans need better tools to know when it is worth watching a game in real time rather than the highlights.
Phillip later framed that experience as the start of a longer effort to make sports discovery less reliant on chance and chatter.
The project became Are You Watching This?!, built to identify live games likely to matter even before they become headline clips.
From Discovery Product to Betting Business
Phillip thinks personalization in sports is often handled too crudely, and products treat fandom as either total commitment or no interest at all.
He explained how that assumption shows up in most sports apps.
Too often, the first question asked is “Who are your favorite teams?” If you select a team, you get drowned in alerts. Don’t select a team? You hear nothing.
Instead, his team built a model that ranks games by intensity. It lets different users receive alerts at different thresholds depending on how invested they are in a league, team, or matchup.
Phillip’s product ideas start with the habits of a longtime sports fan.
By the early 2010s, the product had paying customers across major US sports media. But even with proof that discovery worked, it was hard to translate into a profitable business.
Phillip has described the 2018 repeal of PASPA as the turning point that made his sports discovery work commercially viable.
The product already proved it could identify “can’t-miss” games in real time, but it was difficult to turn that insight into scalable revenue without a larger ecosystem around it.
Once more states began allowing regulated sports betting, he moved to connect those alerts to wagering options, aiming to match bets to the specific moment fans were reacting to.
Phillip laid out the logic behind the pivot:
We’re combining excitement data with gambling data to not just recommend which game to watch, but which wager to place along with it.
MetaBet launched in 2019. The platform packages the company’s real-time sports context as an affiliate product for sportsbooks and media outlets.
Rather than pushing the same offer to every reader, the approach centered on what a fan is likely to care about at that moment.
A Push for Curation as AI Content Scales
As industry attention shifts to microbetting, prediction markets, and AI in 2026, Phillip’s focus remains on a more basic friction point: fans increasingly struggle to locate the game.
Phillip framed that strategy as a trust-building exercise. He contends that discovery is often what casual fans want first, not an expanded menu of markets.
On AI, Phillip has emphasized restraint. The MetaBet founder argues that generating more content is not the same as helping users make better choices, and that curation remains central to trust.
