Entrepreneur adds online poker to his portfolio
First he developed the employment website Jobbi in 2007. Now, Lawrence Vaughan, 30, is out to change the way people play poker as the co-founder of Real Gaming.
Vaughan, a Summerlin resident, developed a poker platform that functions on various media services. He began his company, RealGaming.com, in his basement. It now employs 50 people.
In late 2011, the idea for the platform began taking hold. That was about the time that the industry was abuzz with possible regulations coming down the pipeline. At the time, online gaming had been legal, but there were no regulations for it. And those parameters were key to how the application functioned.
"This was the most complex project I've ever worked on," Vaughan said. "When you (look at) it from the outside, you think poker is an easy thing. But the actual 'how you play poker' is 20 or 30 percent of the product. The other 70, 80 percent is the back end, the regulatory aspect. So there are things you don't think about: how the card shufflers work, number generators, the reporting, the segregation of duties and how geolocation works. We invented our own geolocation technology for this. So this was an enormous project. I don’t think people fully realize how sophisticated it is."
Real Gaming, backed by the South Point, 9777 Las Vegas Blvd. South, is the first company to receive an online poker license in Nevada. It sought to allow players the ability to play online using any mobile device, anywhere in the state at any time. Featuring patent-pending geolocation technology and HTML5, Real Gaming nixed the use of plug-ins, downloads or installs for what it deems a "seamless online gaming experience."
"I've known Michael (Gaughan, owner of the South Point) since he was about 14," said Lawrence Vaughan, Real Gaming's chief marketing officer, "and he's always had a very entrepreneurial spirit. He's probably the smartest person I'd met in those 17 years. He knew what he was doing. He had a plan, and he had a road map."
Mikovits worked with Gaughan for 17 years before joining Real Gaming. How often did people approach Gaughan?
"Multiple times a day. There was a line like Grand Central to see him," Mikovits said. "And he's a very accommodating man. He'll listen to a lot of people, and he's a straight shooter. He said it's better to get a quick 'no' than a long 'yes.' "
He said other people approached Gaughan with ideas similar to Real Gaming, but "I just didn't feel they were the right fit," Mikovits said.
From his own experience, he described Gaughan as an innovator in the gaming industry, so teaming up with him on this venture was a logical step.
"He's not someone you think of on the forefront of technology, but he has been," Mikovits said. 'He opened the first casino, the Suncoast, with all ticket-in, ticket-out machines. It's commonplace now. But when it opened, and I was on the launch team for that; that was crazy. People didn't like that change, and now it's commonplace in the industry. That was 15 years ago. He had the foresight to do that, and going back even farther, he was the first to have a players' club, a loyalty club for slot players, and that was 20 or 30 years ago, so he's always been on the forefront of technology."
Vaughan relied on state regulators in setting the platform for the correct path for Real Gaming. The regulations were seen as a guide for what the technology had to do. As Vaughan set up the technology, he broke from the established way of doing things, which most slot makers follow and, instead, his company created its own model.
That instinct to create his own path became apparent at a young age. In high school, at both The Meadows School and Faith Lutheran, he said he was "pretty rebellious, I really didn't conform, which I think is good because here, that's sort of how we approach things. We look at things and (ask ourselves) would we do it that way just because that's the way it's always been done?"
Vaughan never went to college, another example of breaking from convention. He said he knew he wanted to carve a career path that was out of the norm, including nothing repetitive.
"I just didn't know in what capacity," he said. "For me, this business gives me an incredible opportunity as the first domino in a new industry. I think poker is going to be a pretty big industry over the next 20 years."
He partnered with Gaughan under the advice of Mikovits.
"I went in and explained what my vision for it would be and what a partnership would look like, and we worked out a deal in a few days," Vaughan said. "... If you look at his reputation over the decades, it's really about the customer. You can see it in our vision, such as how we deal with customer support. Our competition outsources it offshore somewhere. Ours is out here in Summerlin. So our players who are loyal know that they can call us and talk to us. It's a Nevada business, and that's something he's been known for, that type of culture."
In three or four years, Vaughan said he expects the platform to be in more jurisdictions with more game types "as things open up. That's more interesting to me than just traditional poker. And I think that as different jurisdictions open up ... you'll see hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of people on the site. California is one we're excited about. That's huge. That's over 10 times our population."
Looking back, he said he would have made some software tweaks, but mostly he would have been more aggressive with how he got things to market.
"You second-guess yourself a lot," Vaughan said. "In certain things, we could have gone with our gut more."
— To reach Summerlin Area View reporter Jan Hogan, email jhogan@viewnews.com or call 702-387-2949.
