Why Alex Monahan has students lining up between classes to pitch him their startup ideas
By the time Alex Monahan sold his sports betting startup OddsJam in a deal worth $160 million, he had entered the rarefied category of founders whose names travel with a number attached.
But what makes Monahan so interesting isn’t just the number – it’s where (and how) he chose to show up after the headlines faded.
The bootstrapped startup he sold for $160 million
In December 2024, Monahan agreed to sell Odds Holdings, the parent company of OddsJam, to Gambling.com Group in a deal worth up to $160 million, including $80 million upfront and up to $80 million more tied to performance through the end of 2026. The acquisition then closed as planned in January 2025.
It was, however, far from an overnight success story. Founded in 2021, Monahan much of his 20s turning OddsJam into a serious business in a category where speed, pricing, and trust all lived on a knife edge.
Gambling.com described it as a fast-growing tech platform for real-time odds data, and industry coverage around the announcement pointed to the strategic value of adding a more recurring, data-centric product line to Gambling.com Group’s portfolio.
But by the time the acquisition closed, Monahan had already become associated with a particular style of building. He was determined to be highly online, relentlessly public, and unusually comfortable turning the process itself into content.
Betting Startups News’ coverage of his reflections after the sale described a founder who kept “streaming deep into the night” even after landing a nine-figure outcome, still feeding the same content engine that had helped fuel OddsJam’s growth.
That post-exit detail mattered because it changed the shape of the story. The deal did not place him behind glass as a finished success case – it left him visible.
And in the months after the acquisition, that visibility started showing up on college campuses, especially UCLA, where Monahan filmed conversations with students pitching business ideas.
What Alex Monahan is looking for
His social media posts documented the sessions in a way that felt closer to field notes than polished thought leadership – part pitch review, part public coaching, part talent scouting. In one post, he wrote that he had gone to UCLA and asked students to pitch startup ideas, and said that while most had ideas, only a few were actually building.
He added that he also became the first customer for two of them.
In another post, he said he gave $1,000 to the student with the best startup idea after spending the day hearing pitches and giving feedback, framing the whole thing as both useful and “fun content to make.” That combination – money, attention, and distribution – became a recurring theme in how he showed up.
His posts also reveal what tends to grab him. One widely shared clip and transcript excerpt highlighted a UCLA student who brought more than a physical sample, pricing logic, customer acquisition thinking, and a waitlist of 6,000 customers.
Monahan’s commentary around that interaction emphasized the difference between talking about a startup and arriving with evidence that one had already started.
Seen together, those moments gave his “giving back” a sharper texture than the phrase usually implies. He was not simply appearing for a photo-op, nor limiting himself to broad motivational advice.
He was using the habits that had made him effective as an operator – pattern recognition, pressure-testing, traction-first thinking, public distribution – and applying them in front of an audience that could learn from the exchange in real time.
When founder leverage gets passed down
Monahan has also been unusually open about the journey, sharing reflections on growth, due diligence, and what life looked like after the sale – which make his campus sessions feel even more compelling.
The person across from the students had already crossed a finish line most founders never reached, yet the interactions he shared publicly kept returning to very real, very early-stage questions.
Who is this for? What have you built? How are you getting users? What proof do you have that anyone cares? At the end of the day, those are unglamorous questions, and they are usually the ones that decide who and what survives.
Even still, there is something fitting about that continuity. With OddsJam, Monahan had lived in a world where tiny informational edges and timing mattered just as much as how the difference between signal and noise could be measured.
The post-exit version of Monahan that emerged across interviews and social clips seemed to carry the same instinct into a new arena. To this day, he appears to be growing more and more interested in students who were already in motion, especially those willing to show rough work in public and improve under scrutiny.
Taken together, the arc read less like a clean ending and more like a transfer of leverage. The sale gave him resources and credibility at a different magnitude, his online presence gave him distribution, and the student pitch sessions now give him a place to deploy both.
