In October 2020, Shalom Meckenzie played poker with his employees on a 58 -meter yacht off the Greek coast, celebrating that his random games software company, SBTECH, based on the island of Man, had merged with draftks to go out through a SPAC in an operation of 975 million dollars a few months before. As the greatest shareholder of Draftkings, Meckenzie became a billionaire that same May, when the price of its shares exceeded $ 25. During one of Paker’s hands, he made a loser bet that would cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars and inspire his next adventure.
One of its main product executives in Bulgaria weighed 137 kilos, but had never been motivated to lose weight. Meckenzie, excited about success, proposed a strong bet. “I told him that if for the 1st of January I weighed less than 100 kilos, I would rise to a yacht of 90 meters through the Caribbean, and that I would choose all those who would go on him, and that he would have the most crazy and most fun week of his life,” says Meckenzie, 48, from his office at home, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel.
The employee, Ian Bradley, accepted the bet. The other executives sitting on the yacht realized that if their colleague won, they would receive a vacation invitation and decided to help him lose weight. Back in Bulgaria, they put a static bicycle in Bradley’s room, threw the junk food of their pantry and hired a chef and a personal coach. The coach was told that he would receive a great bonus if Bradley went down 27 kilos in the coming months. He lost weight and won the bet.
“It was one of the best bets I’ve lost in my life,” says Meckenzie, who is in excellent form for any age, and even more for a man who approaches his 50th birthday. Meckenzie took Bradley and another ten people in a private jet to Dubai, where they stayed in a five -star hotel and were partying for five days. “I think it ended up costing much more than a yacht in the Caribbean,” says Meckenzie with a laugh.
That friendly bet became the proof of Meckenzie concept for its new company, Amp Fitness, based in New York City. It is not the first to think that home training is a big business: the AMP business model is almost identical to that of many failed exercise companies and in difficulties such as tonal, squad and mirror: selling a face face to wealth that customers get bored and leave. He has not worked for anyone else, but that does not stop Meckenzie, who, for now, a large extent the company.
A minimalist version of a cable crossover machine found in any gym, the wall AMP costs $ 2,000; Accessing coaches (both AI and human) through application requires a monthly subscription of $ 23. As AMP has no screen (users log in with their own devices), the initial cost is approximately half of the tonal. AMP, which began to be sold in January, has hired a dozen fitness influencers and minor celebrities as coaches, the most famous of which is Terry Crews, presenter de America’s Got Talent who has 14 million followers on Instagram.
None of this is especially novel, and it is difficult to see how a good idea can be. The household -connected device market is ultra -operative and is highly saturated. He experienced a boom during the pandemic, but now he is full of ghost companies with much better financing and that came to the market much before AMP. Tonal, backed by LeBron James and Serena Williams, raised $ 250 million with an assessment of $ 1.6 billion four years ago. With great liquidity, it was forced to raise additional $ 130 million with a reported valuation of 600 million dollars in 2023, an valuation cut of approximately 63%. Hydrow, a Boston -based rowing equipment led by Justin Timberlake, has suffered at least two rounds of layoffs, but the company states that it is now profitable. Lululemon bought Mirror for 500 million dollars in 2020 before closing it three years later.
Peloton, the bicycle and running companies connected, is the most successful of the group, with 3 million monthly subscribers and an enviable monthly abandonment rate of 1.4%. However, it is deeply unproductive. Last year, Peloton lost 552 million dollars over 2.7 billion dollars in revenue. Although it generated few 3.5 million dollars in Ebitda in 2024, that took more than a decade and billions of dollars in losses, multiple products withdrawal, a new executive director and the dismissal of hundreds of employees. Peloton actions have also fallen 96% since its peak during the pandemic in January 2021. Peter Stern, executive director of Peloton, admitted that the company has a great challenge ahead during the presentation of results of the last quarter.
Alex Aloimastianu, former executive director of Town Sports International, a parent company of New York Sports Clubs, and investor in the fitness sector, believes that the fitness industry at home has come to stay, but states that the market is plagued by superfluous devices. “I would not consider it a useless task, but what I have seen so far is that most of those looking for a force team at home are formed with traditional teams,” he says. “I think that smart force teams are a bit like Sharper Image: they have a beautiful design, they are attractive, but they are not really necessary.”
Simeon Siegel, BMO Markets BMO analyst that covers squad, states that the fitness industry is a very complex sector, full of passing fashions and voluble consumers. It is expensive to design and manufacture a product, increase production, attract customers and loyalty. “Bagnet believed that he could grow infinitely,” says Siegel, who believes that Peloton is recovering his land. «They believed that if they developed it, people would come. And the reality is that this audience, the target market size for those who see Netflix, is very different from the target market size for those who get on the bike or the running tape ».
All this skepticism only motivates Meckenzie. “When I started Sbtech, many people came to tell me: ‘Shalom, you’re stupid, you’re spending all the money you have and who you don’t have, and you’re going to get your family in trouble,’ ‘he says. “When people offend me, that’s what drives me to move on.”
AMP, founded by Meckenzie in 2020, recently installed its first batch of 10,000 units, according to Estimations of Forbes, to customers from California, Florida, New York and New Jersey, generating estimated income of 20 million dollars. Its objective is to sell 20,000 devices this year and more than double by the end of 2026. MECKENZIE states that the company is slowly expanding to avoid products withdrawal, such as those suffered by squad, and to guarantee the satisfaction and support of its first customers. “The demand is very high, and I have the feeling that we are building something very big; I would not surprise that it was much bigger than draftkings,” says Meckenzie without irony.
He personally invested about 50 million dollars in AMP. Family and friends have contributed millions more. Meckenzie knows that it is a ridiculous sum to climbing a hardware company, although it resists the idea that AMP is a hardware company. He believes that it is a data and well -being company and claims to be considering a series of serial financing A. Finding arranged risk investors could be a challenge: the total financing for this sector, which reached a maximum of more than 6000 million dollars in 2021, was less than 2000 million dollars in 2023, according to Crunchbase.
“When I started Sbtech, many people approached me and said: ‘Shalom, you’re stupid,” says Meckenzie. “When they offend me, that’s what drives me to move on.”
Meckenzie, born in Tel Aviv in 1976, has a great reason to bet strongly on fitness. When he was 18, his father, a real estate promoter born in Libya, died at 59 years of a heart attack. “That changed my life completely,” he says.
After serving three years in the Logistics Corps of the Israel Defense Forces, in 2001 he founded 10bet, an online sports betting company, with a partner. When he realized that his company could not compete with the large companies in the sector, 10bet focused on offering his customers the best installments. But that only attracted cunning gamblers, who almost led the startup to ruin. (Meckenzie finally sold 10bet to his brother, who still directs the company).
In 2007, he dedicated himself to selling the software that his company developed to establish fees, manage accounts and integrate payments, baptizing the new firm as SBTECH. He sold software to betting companies around the world. Before merging with draftkings and going over through a SPAC in April 2020, Sbtech generated about 110 million dollars in annual revenues and had almost 1300 employees; Among their clients were the Danish lottery, Churchill Downs, the Golden Nugget and Gray Market Operators around the world.
In his 10,500 square feet and 50 million dollars apartment on the avenue of the billionaires, in Midtown Manhattan, Meckenzie shows a visitor a television screen with an NFT that bought for about 12 million dollars – the Cryptopunk “Covid Alien” – and looks out the window, about 50 floors on Central Park. His great bet in sports games gave him the place, which also has a terrace with a view to Columbus Circle and a private pool. But while the sun puts on New York, Meckenzie bets that he can create something as addictive, but not as destructive, such as sports bets.
“Those who bet can lose a lot of money that cannot be affected,” he says. “For those who are addicted to exercise, the worst thing that can happen to them is to injure.”
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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