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Dennis Algreen of SBC Gaming on Knup Sports Show (Episode #225)

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Welcome back to the Knup Sports Show! In episode 225, host Ryan Knuppel returns after a summer break spent at the Lake of the Ozarks. Ryan is excited to kick off the new episode with a special guest, Dennis Algreen from SBC. Dennis shares insights about SBC’s upcoming events, including the massive SBC Summit in Lisbon happening this September.

Ryan and Dennis discuss the importance of these events, highlighting the opportunities for networking, learning, and experiencing the iGaming industry. With big-name speakers like Tony Hawk and top-notch venues, the SBC Summit promises to be an event like no other. Don’t miss out on this exciting episode where they delve into what makes these events so special and why you should attend.

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Ryan Knuppel

Hey, what’s going on, everybody? Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show, episode 225. Welcome back. It’s been a long summer. I have had a, I would say, a month or two break from this show. It’s always nice to kind of disconnect. And we spent some time at the Lake of the Ozarks boating and fishing and just getting away from work, enjoying the summer. Hopefully you got a chance to do that too and get out there and enjoy life a little bit. But now we’re back at it. Show 225. We are, man, we are moving fast. Moving up and moving forward, and today I’ve got another amazing guest, one I’ve been itching to talk to.

We’ve talked to some others from this company, and now we get to talk to the man himself. But we’re going to waste no time. We’re going to go ahead and bring him on today. We have Dennis Algreen of SBC. Dennis, how are you, my friend?

Dennis Algreen

All right, I’m good, thanks. Pleasure to be here.

Ryan Knuppel

Yes, awesome. I’m excited to have you here, my friend. It’s been a long time coming. I know we’ve chatted and kind of been acquainted for many, many years, so it’s a long time coming having you on the show. Thank you very much. How are things going in your neck of the woods? Going good this time of year?

Dennis Algreen

Yeah, absolutely. This is, of course, a busy time. I mean, with our massive flagship event coming up in Lisbon, this is probably the busiest we will get. It’s not like we’re not busy on a regular basis, but at the moment, there is a lot just because of the upscaling and everything that we’re trying to do with this event. It adds a lot of kind of new stuff to it. So as we’ve done so many years in a row now, we tend to kind of jump feet first into this and then work very, very hard to make it work, you know.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah, for sure. I’m excited to dive into the event. And if you don’t know which event, we’re talking about SBC Summit Lisbon, which is coming up in September. We’re going to dive in. We’re going to really talk a lot about that event here in a bit. But Dennis, I want to get to know you a little bit first. I’m sure the audience is wanting to get to know Dennis a little bit further. So tell me a little bit about you and your career path leading up to SBC and kind of what got you into this crazy event space in the first place.

Dennis Algreen

I mean, I’ve been now with the company for just about eight years. Actually in August, it’ll be pretty much exactly eight years since I essentially moved from Copenhagen to London. And that was for the job. It was a bit of a left turn for me in the sense that I worked a lot with marketing and sales at different companies in Denmark before. And my education background is in marketing. But it was essentially because I know our CEO Rasmus from earlier when we were younger. And he kind of said, you know what we’ve got this thing brewing. I’d love to get some competent marketing set up for it and asked if I wanted to come try my luck at that. And then it’s been, I think, reasonable to say it’s been a roller coaster ever since.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah, I mean, I can’t imagine. That’s crazy. So you didn’t, like, come into your career, like, I want to be in the event space. It was more of a, like, okay, I guess I’m in this space now.

Dennis Algreen

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I have, you know, touched upon and I’ve certainly been sports betting for the majority of my adult life, but very casually. And it was never something that I necessarily dreamt of moving into neither that nor events. And to be fair, I mean, our company also grew from something that was not necessarily as events focused, but we very quickly realized the potential here. I think we found a little bit of a gap in the market, if you will, at the time and kind of grew from that.

Ryan Knuppel

Crazy, crazy. You mentioned Rasmus. I think we had Rasmus on, I was just looking before this, mid-May 2019 he was on this show. So we’re talking over four years, five years. Holy cow. It’s back to those pre-COVID days that are so, because it really changed a lot, right?

Dennis Algreen

Yeah. But yeah. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. So that’s good. So thank you for the background on yourself. But let’s dive into SBC a little bit. I don’t think… I don’t think we got to talk a lot about what SBC as a company is. So let’s dive straight into this next event that’s coming up. I know you guys have put on events. I mean, you’re putting on tons of events these days. First off, give us a recap of the number of events that you guys are putting on. Because as you mentioned several times, you’re growing and these keep getting bigger and better. How many events are you guys running currently now across the world?

Dennis Algreen

So this year, I think we’re down to six. So essentially, we started off with our Rio event back in February. But then since then, we’ve also done our Casino Beach Summit in Malta. We’ve done our SBC Summit North America in New York. We’ve done our Canadian Gaming Summit in Toronto. We’ve had our regional event, SBC Summit Tbilisi. And then now heading towards the last kind of stretch, if you will, SBC Summit in Lisbon, the big flagship, and then our SBC Summit Latino America towards the end of the year.

And then plans, as they’ve already been announced for next year, is that we will consolidate some of these into fewer but then more scalable events. There is a busy calendar of events that people have to pay attention to this industry, and we’re very conscious of that. So while some of these more regional events can have their justification, because they do allow for more in-depth in specific markets, specific areas or topics, I think what we’ve learned is that it is sometimes more convenient for the audience and also, you know, for sponsors and exhibitors to scale these up because there’s simply more you can get done, you know, with not necessarily that much bigger investment and certainly not time investment. Right. So it makes for a more efficient week. Essentially, you can make out of it.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah, it totally makes sense, and it’s cool to see kind of that happen for you guys, right? It’s like lots of little – not lots of little events. There have always been big events, but like lots of these, and then as you go up, you consolidate scale. It’s like you’re doing fewer, but these events are now – 15, 20, 30,000 people. I mean, crazy amounts of people at these things. As you scale them back, you’re scaling them up.

Dennis Algreen

In that sense, I think little is relative, right? Compared to what? They used to feel pretty big when we were doing events for like 2,000, 3,000 people. But then when we are, you know, already last year, we did close to 15,000 in Barcelona with the SBC Summit. It certainly kind of stepped into maybe a different category of what the event is. And that’s essentially the Lisbon version this year. It’s just a continuation of that development, right? I think this feels a lot like kind of the culmination of what we imagined this could be when we kind of wanted to launch this back in 2020. Because we’re getting to the point now where we can offer what I would consider an extraordinary experience. This is something different than anybody’s ever seen before. We’re adding elements in that I have not seen any other industry event do at this stage.

That includes like, you know, very, very large name, big names, keynotes and headliners. We announced just not too long ago, Tony Hawk will present a keynote here. That’s something that we have not necessarily been able to do in the past because that, of course, requires maybe a bigger event to support it. These things don’t come cheap to set up. So it is really important to make sure that we’re making the most of it and making sure that we also present the audience with something that they will be able to walk away from with so many different kinds of value, right? There’s the personal experience for the people that are attending. There’s the knowledge that we can kind of help relay them with. There’s the connections you can make when you’ve got 25,000 people assembled from the industry. I think if people come into this with the right mindset and really try to be efficient about it, there is like we’re talking months and months worth of sales or kind of exploration work that could be done in about a week, right? And that’s really what it’s all about.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah. Yeah. The greatest

show in iGaming. I love how you say that right on the front page. I think the first question, and you guys have probably explained this in the past, but maybe some that are watching are interested, especially ones that have been to this event in the past in Barcelona. Why the move from Barcelona to Lisbon? Is there a strategic move around that? Or tell us what made up that decision and why Lisbon will be better than Barcelona.

Dennis Algreen

Yeah. Well, I think scalability is the core here, is that we needed, and we saw already last year, right? We’ve gone from now, back in 2021, when we kind of had to scramble, relaunch this flagship event, that was right at the back of the COVID restrictions, travel restrictions. We got, I think, 2,200, just over 2,000 attendees. The following year, just around 6,000. And then last year, over 14,000, right? So it was obvious to us that demand and kind of the hunger for this event is there in the market, right? People find this beneficial. They find it useful. And I do think that we also provide a level of quality that we’ve been able to scale, even up to these kind of larger events. So I think, you know, Primarily, Lisbon offered a venue that has a lot of extraordinary stuff to offer, right? Aside from just 100,000 square meters of space, which is useful when you’re trying to scale things up. We are looking at at least over a 90% sold out floor space already. It includes stuff like an indoor super arena, which is essentially allows us to build a stage and a conference space that I don’t think the industry has ever seen before. We’re taking a lot of inspiration from kind of larger scale events, not necessarily for our industry, but we tend to learn a lot. And this super stage in here, we’re building something that I don’t think anybody’s ever seen at an industry event before, you know. trying to make sure that there’s content in there along the lines of, say, Tony Hawk. We have more of those keynotes coming. Announcements should be out very shortly. But the idea is exactly to create a space where even really, really big scale, big name elements can be introduced and included, as well as the kind of a very wide variety of the normal elements that you’d find at these events, right? You know, at least at an SBC event, it will usually be a good combination of, you know, exhibition, which means large floor space, but divided into relevant vertical themed zones so that you can navigate because otherwise I can tell you navigating 100,000 square meters would potentially be a nightmare, right? The length of this thing is like from one end of the whole venue space to the other end, it’s going to be close to a kilometer. So it’s probably a good idea to make sure that everybody gets a chance to say, OK, if I’m a payment professional, I can go to the payment expert summit part of the show. And that’s where I will find the majority of my value, both in terms of conference content, knowledge, workshops, but also in terms of who I meet. You know, what are the exhibitors there? Who are the delegates that will walk around that floor? That’s pretty important. And I think something that we found out earlier with this flagship event is that creating that SOMS concept is really helpful to the audience. It really makes a big difference. You want to be able to quickly and easily identify who you want to talk to out of 25,000, right?

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah. So moral of the story is wear your comfortable shoes because you’re going to have some walking to do as well. You’re going to be walking up and down this massive venue.

Dennis Algreen

Absolutely. Whenever we’ve got new starters at the company, the first thing I advise them is make sure that you find yourself some relatively nice looking sneakers that you could wear to events. Because that’s my shortcut to not get proper busted up feet is to have nice sneakers I can wear with nice clothes.

Ryan Knuppel

Right. I’ve made that mistake many times or I’m like, Oh, I’m wearing these nice dress shoes. And then by the end of the week, I’m like, Oh my gosh, my feet hate me right now. That was such a bad decision. Should have just wore nice looking tennis shoes or something like that. So.

Dennis Algreen

Exactly. You learn your lessons, don’t you?

Ryan Knuppel

You do. You do. So you’ve mentioned some big names, Tony Hawk. I mean, obviously a monster name. That’ll be exciting to have him there. Maybe I’ll do a little demo or something of what he does. Great. But yeah, you know, we won’t talk about all these speakers, but I wanted to pull up this, this, just this list. And like, it is amazing to me, the amount of support you guys get, the amount of people that you invite in to be speakers. And that’s what I love about, you know, what you guys do is it’s not just, you know, listening to one person speak, you’re bringing on panels and these panels of experts that dive into a topic and they really all have different viewpoints on a topic. And I mean, we can scroll down here and just name after name after name in the industry and people you haven’t even heard of in the industry that are doing great things. And so I just get blown away when I look at this list, especially this one. Like, what in the world? Look at all these people. I can’t imagine from you guys’ end having to set this up. But, I mean, brag a little bit about your speaker lineup. This is amazing what you’ve put together here.

Dennis Algreen

Look, this is now months and months. This process starts maybe even 12 months out. It starts when we went to the Barcelona event last year, trying to make sure that we look closely at what we’re putting together. And honestly, I, of course, cannot take credit. We have a conference production team that puts all this together. They’re the real experts in this. What I can say is that… look, it is really important that the knowledge is shared at these events is valuable. And to do that, you need to make sure that the topics are right. You need to make sure that each panel or session is put together with a purpose, right? So if it’s about a specific topic, it may be useful also to make sure that there’s different points of views on that particular panel, right? And so you want to make sure that maybe the supplier point of view, maybe the affiliate point of view, maybe the operator point of view are good to kind of make sure you’ve got those covered. They may not be the same either. And oftentimes that makes for a more dynamic kind of conversation as well. And then these days, let’s be honest, we put a lot of effort into trying to make sure that we also have some level of diversity, gender, race, whatever, different backgrounds, because one is more interesting, to be honest, to have different points of view that not everybody else. We are, of course, still in an industry where, you know, especially the gender element can be pretty difficult because the industry is not made up 50% of each so there’s some thought put into that as much as it’s absolutely possible we’re lucky enough to have a really good support for instance from several kind of women driven organizations industry organizations and we work with a lot of these external kind of associations and organizations that either have to do with diversity but some of them also just have to do with specific markets and such that is how we build up kind of a portfolio and a rapport with people so that we can put these agendas together the way we can.

Ryan Knuppel

Amazing. Amazing. Dennis Algreen SBC gaming the SBC summit 2024 I want to shift gears here real quick Dennis before I let you go and I want to talk a little bit about why I go to these events because I’ll be honest. Sometimes I don’t get a lot of the education piece because I am always networking. I am always talking to people. And the amount of networking you can do at something like this is overwhelming, to be honest with you, because there’s people everywhere. And there’s so many, especially if you do a little upfront planning and try to get meetings set, you can have meetings all day, every day. And then you’re going to go at night to all of your amazing networking events. And I’m assuming this one, like the others that you put together across the world, I’m assuming this is first class as well. Talk a little bit about your networking events. It looks like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you got events going on. I’m assuming at world-class facilities, just like always, huh?

Dennis Algreen

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, actually, the network already starts on the Monday because, you know, one of the things that I’ve always loved about our events is the SBC Football Championship. It’s this kind of fun five-a-side tournament. We do it at the Benfica Stadium this year. So it adds a bit of spectacle to it. But it’s a friendly competition, essentially, that allows people to not only play, but also spectators, attendees are invited to spectate. And it’s a very nice networking opportunity because sometimes not every single networking element has to have the pumping music in the background. It’s

nice to be able to shift gears in between both. Everybody likes a party and let’s face it, if I’m really honest, we do parties pretty well. And what I can then promise, we’re working on the moment to put some kind of finishing touches on the closing party for this event. So as always, we’ll have our SBC Awards, which has become now an absolute monster in the industry. And we’re hosting that inside the Mio Arena, which is this sports arena next to the venue.

And then after the awards are over, that venue also gets turned into the entire closing party. Sure. That allows us a few things. One, it allows us capacity for a lot of people, thousands of people. And we recognize that one of the things we do uniquely is that if you buy or somehow get access to the full event passes for the events, these parties are included in your access. And we want to make sure that as many people can take part as possible. And what it also allows us to do to use that space is, as I said, we’ve got this super stage in there. That means that we can put on some acts and artists of a scale that we’ve not really done before. We have three world-class, world-famous DJ names lined up for this stage, this closing party. And I think I can promise that this will be a spectacle. Oh.

This one, maybe less so for those business conversations. This is to close out the week and have a bit of fun for sure. But there are plenty of other options for the networking, right? And we take good care of this. As you said, evenings have closed off dinners. They have the official networking parties. there will also be companies that are doing their own stuff and networking throughout this week because there’s 25,000 people in town for it. But we take great care of that and even the daytime networking, right? It’s sometimes the opportunity. So for instance, if you also on the Monday, you go on a tour of the beautiful city of Lisbon. There are arranged tours you can join with other attendees. That’s a unique opportunity to strike up a casual conversation and we know that in this industry those are oftentimes vital for you to explore and kind of just discover new business opportunities some you may not even have been aware of.

Ryan Knuppel

Sure. Sure. Well, if you are watching this I’m sure you’re gonna I’m sure you’re having fomo if you’re not going because you you will miss out on I’m sure the party of a century with what they have put on. I just want to thank you, Dennis, and SBC, because I’ve done some things in my life that I’m like, I never would have dreamed of going to some of these places because I went to your events. I mean, Hard Rock Stadium, MetLife Field, Red Bull Arena, Miami Marlins Field. I mean, I’ve been to some of these places all through your events as networking parties, and it’s like – when you reflect and look back on that, it’s just amazing. It’s really amazing what you guys have done. And I just want to thank you on behalf of the industry for the great job you do with not only the events and the education and all of that, but then also the experience side, because experiences to me in life are everything. And you guys bring that to life through what we do every day in iGaming. And so I think that’s a really cool combo that you bring to life.

Dennis Algreen

Appreciate that. Thanks. We just want to make sure that people come away with a fulfilled promise of when we say this is the greatest show in gaming.

Ryan Knuppel

Yep. Yep. There you go. So let’s talk about how to go, how to get there, how to sign up. If you guys have not got your tickets yet, it’s still time. I mean, it’s not till September, right? September 24th to 26th. You can go out to SBC events dot com. And I mean, there’s probably links all over. You want to talk a little bit about timing of that and all of the above about signing up for this event?

Dennis Algreen

Yeah, sure. I mean, look, tickets are, of course, available by the website, spcevents.com. It’s very easy to find the SPC Summit. And right now, the option is there with an early bird discount. I advise making use of that. You can save your finance team about €200 per ticket. That’s worth doing. And also, I think what people sometimes forget is that the earlier you book these, the easier it is for you to make the preparations, right? Because the more people that are signed up, the easier it is for you to identify who else has signed up. And you also get access to an official app where you can start planning those meetings out while you can start approaching. You can schedule the meeting straight on the app. It’ll give you AI driven suggestions for who you probably want to match up with. So I think that would be my advice. Right. If you want to make the most of these experiences, don’t don’t. Do it last week before the event. Also, by the way, Lisbon is not that big a city, right? It is about half a million only, which means that the later you are with hotel booking and getting your stuff booked in, the further you’re going to be away from the venue, essentially. So for your own convenience, get your tickets booked, get your flights booked, and then get your hotels booked. We do have offers for that on the event page as well.

Ryan Knuppel

Awesome. And we have a little promo code, NOOP. new partner VIP down here that we put that will get you that discount that Dennis was talking about. So make sure you put that in. As proud media partners of SBC, we always try to promote that to our people.

Dennis Algreen

Yeah, that’s a good point. Actually, they should do that because they get a better discount with your code than they do with your version.

Ryan Knuppel

There you go. So use our new partner VIP code. That’ll get you the best discount that you could possibly get. Well, Dennis, this has been amazing. I cannot wait for this event. Any last words, anything we missed, anything you wanted to say that maybe we didn’t touch on before we let you go here?

Dennis Algreen

No, I think we’ve covered it, to be honest. I mean, this is the event of the year. You don’t want to miss this. I’m not kidding. I’m not just being marketing when I say that this is an event experience like you’ve never seen before.

Ryan Knuppel

Well, I’m excited and I’m excited for all the events to come, you know, here in the United States. I’m really excited for your announcement that came, you know, earlier about the kind of the merge of events here. And there’s going to be a massive one like that in the United States next year. Super excited for that and everything to come from you guys. So I wish you all the luck with this event, Dennis. And if there’s anything I can do to help, you know, I’m just a phone call away. But thank you for your time today. And we’re excited to see where things lead for you.

Dennis Algreen

Thank you very much for having me, man. I’ll see you there. Have a great one.

Ryan Knuppel

All right. That was Dennis Algreen, episode 225. You guys have to make sure you make this event. It’s going to be the event of a lifetime SBC summit, Lisbon. I’ll put that back up there. September 24th to 26th. Make sure you go grab your tickets, get signed up, get the best discount you can, get your accommodations all booked up. Yeah, I think you will not regret it. You will not regret it. Whether you’re networking, you’re learning, or you’re just there to have a good time and take in this crazy industry that we’re all in. Whatever your reason, I don’t think you’ll regret it.

All right, that’s it for this show, guys. If you have any other guests you would like to see join me here, please let me know. I love to bring on amazing people doing amazing things in this industry. So please just connect them with me. I’m Ryan Knuppel. You can find me out on any of the channels, KNUP. And that’s it for this one. So until next time, take care, stay safe, and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

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