Skillz Inc.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 10 Mar 2021

[Operator:]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Skillz Inc. Fourth Quarter 2020 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note that this conference call is being recorded today, March 10, 2021. I will turn the call over to Mr. James Marsh.

[James Marsh:]

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon. Everyone should have access to the Company's fourth quarter 2020 earnings release. The release can be found in the investors section of the Skillz's website at www.skillz.com/investors. Some of the management's comments today will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities laws. Forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of rewards such as will, expect, should and other similar phrases are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially for what we expect.

[Andrew Paradise:]

Thank you, James, and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our first earnings call as a publicly traded company. We're incredibly proud of the strong results that we've delivered throughout this year and I'm pleased to share some highlights. Skillz is the predominant mobile eSports platform in the world, growing rapidly in the massive 2.7 billion gamer market. We continue to strategically invest in growth to deliver an incredible user experience and capitalize on our vision to build the competition layer of the internet. Q4 marks our 20th consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth. During the quarter, we expanded enhancer platform capabilities, added many new and engaging games. And most notably, we beat our revenue forecasts, all amidst the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Before digging into the details, I wanted to take a moment to highlight a major milestone, which successfully went public after closing our merger with Flying Eagle. I want to thank Harry Sloan, Jeff Sagansky and Eli Baker, Flying Eagle. They shared our vision for Skillz. They are amazing partners throughout the process. I also want to take an opportunity to acknowledge and thank our amazing team of Skillz, who designs, builds and markets our platform that enables our game developer partners to achieve success. For all the innovators, the creators that make this possible, we love you and we will always be a shining bastion of the future state of tech for you to go home. I'm also excited to welcome all of our new shareholders to our journey. One of our goals in going public was to make it possible for everyone to own a stake in the future of competition. We sincerely appreciate your support, and we're grateful to have you join us for this journey.

[Scott Henry:]

Thanks, Andrew, and thank you all for joining us on our first earnings call. This is an exciting time in our business, and I'm very pleased to start our life as a public company with such a strong quarter. Before digging into the results, I thought it could be helpful to provide a brief overview of our financial model. We have a transaction based business, where we take a percentage commission on every contest run across our platform. The average entry fee is about $3 per person. So based on a 14% take rate, we're earning $0.84 of revenue for two player contests. We're running millions of these micro transactions each day, which provides us with high revenue predictability.

[Operator:]

Thank you, sir. Presenters our first question comes from the line of Michael Graham from Canaccord. Your line is open. You may ask your question.

[Michael Graham:]

Hi. Thank you, and congrats on getting public and on getting these numbers out. It's exciting. I wanted to start off with a question just about game concentration and revenue concentration. Through your own disclosures, we know that you have a lot of concentration of revenue and a few games. I think that's been by design, just to know sort of marketing around those games to grow the ecosystem there. But I just wonder, if you can comment on your philosophy there in general? And then I believe there was a third-party report out there, suggesting that download activity might be slowing down a little bit in some of those key games. And I just wonder, if you could maybe talk about what you're seeing there? And how that's keeping the business going forward? Thanks so much.

[Andrew Paradise:]

Sure, happy to answer your question. This is Andrew Paradise. So, thank you for that Michael. In terms of developer concentration, I know we're a newly public company. So people aren't as familiar with how our business mix has always worked. Media businesses always have concentration because consumers seek out the best experiences. The most popular content has the biggest audience. But generally, the rising tide lifts all boats. Our previous number one pedals, they've actually all continued to grow in GMV, even after being displaced from their position. The concentration has shifted from developer to developer overtime. So for those listening, who are familiar with Tether, previously, our largest customer, they joined our platform, actually, in 2017, there was the largest customer ahead of Tether impact. In fact, as of now actually bigger on which joined us in 2019, Big Run, changed over to being the number one title on our platform. I can tell you candidly today and in the future, we won't know who will be the next number one title, but we can be certain that it will shift over time, as we've seen time and again.

[Operator:]

Thank you. We do have another question from the line from Drew Crum from Stifel. Your line is open. You may ask your question.

[Drew Crum:]

So, you've discussed the Android as a growth driver for the business. With Google recently updating their terms of service to permit the distribution of licensed gambling applications via the Play Store, is there any update you can share with respect to eSports? And any read through what the implications are for Skillz? And then separately, maybe for Scott, you shared the annual revenue guidance for the year. Can you talk about how we should be modeling or thinking about the quarterly phasing for revenue in '21? Thanks.

[Andrew Paradise:]

Sure. Thanks for the question Drew again. This is Andrew here. So, in terms of the Google Play, so Google recently updated the terms of service to permit the distribution of licensed gambling applications as you reference. This update doesn't actually directly impact Skillz, but I would say, it's indicative of a broader positive trend towards enablement of emerging content categories. I would point out that even without the Play Store, we've been growing Android revenue and our installed base are at twice the rate of iOS on alternative app stores.

[Scott Henry:]

Hi, Drew, I'll tackle your second question about guidance and how you should think about phasing. So, as we indicated 266 million with the revenue guidance for the year. Typically, in our business, we see a fairly significant increase in the first quarter and then we see a flattening out over Q2, Q3, and Q4. There as you see, we're making significant investments. We see as an opportunity to make significant investments to grow share and drive long-term value. And then investments should sip in our longer term revenue growth trajectory, and actually, we’ll be able to see the exit velocity in 2021 will be noticeable from that investment.

[Operator:]

We do have another question from the line of Eric Sheridan from UBS. Your line is open.

[Eric Sheridan:]

Just going back to the answer in the commentary on sales and marketing. Can you give us a little bit with repeated qualification or qualification of how we should think about the way in which in the past quarter, you spent sales and marketing dollars towards a mix of user acquisition and user incentives? Obviously, the user number came in a little weaker than some of us had modeled, but the revenue number was a bit better. So just try to understand a little bit of the dynamics of pushing and pulling on certain levers in the business? And then the second part of it would be leaving the December quarter behind. How should we think about philosophically you think about the mix of those sales and marketing levers, not only in Q1, but as we move through '21? Thanks so much.

[Andrew Paradise:]

Eric, thanks for the question. I think the way to think about is, we're the clear leader in what we see is a trillion dollar market, and now's the time to invest in capturing that markets or portfolio of investments with both near-term and long-term horizons. I'd remind everyone on the call. We built a $230 million revenue business with $128 million of capital employed as of year-end 2020. We're a ROI driven culture and our plan very much for the next $128 million is very similar to our plan for the first.

[Scott Henry:]

Eric, I'll tackle the second question there, right. So, you have to keep in mind, right, we make money from paying users. This is why we focus on growing our paying now, not necessarily growing our now. So in Q4, paying now is up 121% year-over-year, and 13% quarter-over-quarter. So, when we make money for my non-paying now, we'll focus a little bit more on that metric, right. But for now, the driver that really moves the needle in our business is paying attention to our paying now. Engagement, marketing increased privately invested in a variety of different things to test in dry payer conversion. And that's why we were able to hit a record in Q4 of 16% of our users we were able to convert to payers, also from 10% in Q2.

[Operator:]

We have another question from the line of Brian Fitzgerald from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

[Brian Fitzgerald:]

Couple of questions. Maybe first up, it's related to Eric and Drew's questions, and that's on Android, but also iOS. Can you talk to us about the channels for CAC that work best for you right now? And how you see that changing? Maybe they do, maybe they don't as the economy opens? And then also is important. I think we're going to ask this a lot. How does IDFA impact you in terms of iOS? And then the second question -- sorry, was just about how do you feel about your ability to scale the number of players and the number of tournaments and the ability to match like skill sets as you scale users, right? There's some tradeoff between real-time matches are fun, but you want to be matched up against somebody who's a like for like skill set. And so sometimes you step in the game for like saying, we don't have somebody that's of your heck and so, hold and what you got. And we're going to come back to you and so there's a balance between driving engagement, but also driving the matchability, if you understand that? Thanks.

[Andrew Paradise:]

Sure, Brian. Thanks for the questions. This is Andrew again. First, I think is kind of break this part. One question, one is about IDFA, and how about impact advertising? Question two is discussing the data science on the platform in terms of fairness as we scale. So let me hit the first one, which is IDFA. We don't really expect the material negative impacts on our business from IDFA changes. It could be a small positive for our business. In fact, if you think about IDFA, what's happening is making ad targeting less precise. And that has two implications for Skillz. First, you have more limited targeting, which likely means lower CPMs, which challenges ad support business models and actually makes sales monetization even more attractive to the developer community. So, it will actually accelerate adoption for us. Second, IDFA, it's exposing businesses that are reliant on targeting niche audiences. So if you think about us as a platform with thousands of themes, we actually cut across many different demographics. We can buy broad audiences that others can't and in our sector. And we'll be happy to do so at lower prices as other bidders are dropping out of the market. Separately, to answer your second question which was on data science and about fairness, we are only seeing actually faster and fairer matching at continuous scale, actually, the system functions at pretty low levels of daily audience per game, we designed it so that they could auto scale from very small games up to very large ones. And so, as we're seeing games, pushing that headroom and becoming bigger and bigger, we're actually seeing improvements in our ability to deliver a fair outcome, and it's a system I point out to those who are newer to the story. The data science investments in our company have been deep and significant for actually the life of the business. When I came in seven years ago, we were a five person team. We had three data scientists on the team and we've only scaled up from there. It's been I'd say a very important defining feature of Skillz to invest in data sciences and really focused on how to deliver fair, fun, meaningful competition.

[Operator:]

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time presenters. I would now like to turn back the call to the CEO and Founder, Andrew Paradise, for closing remarks, sir.

[Andrew Paradise:]

I just wanted to thank everyone for attending the call today. We really appreciate your time. We look forward to providing you an exciting update our continued progress when we report our first quarter results, and hope you'll tune in then.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect. Thank you for joining us. You have a good day.