This Bracelet Winner Ubaby gamesed Poker Winnings to Launch a Multimillion

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Table Of Contents

• From Bracelet to BloomNation
• Whippy It

Most poker players dream of winning a World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet and riding off into the sunset with their six or seven figures in winnings. David Daneshgar had the opportunity to do just that when he won a bracelet and $625,443 at the 2008 WSOP. Instead, he applied to business school.

Now a venture capitalist and founder of two successful start-ups, Daneshgar, who has $2.5 million in Hendon Mobearnings, has poker to thank, at least in part, for his entrepreneurial success.

It was during a poker game that he met Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who he convinced to write his letter of recommendation. And after that, Daneshgar used cash he won in a poker tournament as seed funding for his first company, BloomNation, which would go on to raise tens of millions.

Daneshgar spoke about his experience at length in the latest episode of the PokerNews Life Outside Pokerpodcast, which dropped today.

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From Bracelet to BloomNation

Daneshgar, who discovered poker pre-Moneymaker Boom as a college student at University of California, Berkeley, won his bracelet at the height of the Poker Boom after quitting his finance job to pursue the game. The gamble paid off as he won the $1,500 buy-in event that drew 2,693 entrants, including household poker names like Vanessa Rousso (44th - $10,660) and eventual two-time bracelet winner Dan Heimiller (3rd - $275,695).

Despite the six-figure score, Daneshgar knew full-time poker wasn't in the cards. When he met Lakers owner and well-known poker enthusiast Jerry Buss during a poker event in Los Angeles, he took his shot and asked if he could be the general manager of the pro basketball team. Buss said no, but he did write Daneshgar a letter of recommendation that got him into the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

As he prepared to launch BloomNation in 2011, which he described as "the Airbnb of flowers," he played a poker tournament at the Commerce in Los Angeles in hope of securing seed funding for his floral start-up.

"When we first started the company, we needed like $50,000 for the development, because none of the three of us (business partners) were technical," Daneshgar said. "And we look, I think probably on PokerNews... and it's like (there's a tournament at) Commerce Casino ... And we're like, that's perfect.

"So we went to the casino (and) literally I'm playing on a poker table, and there's some empty tables in the tournament room, and they're designing and mocking up the website."

He won the tournament for $27,205, though there was some initial confusion as the opponent had misread the board. Daneshgar walked over to his business partners and gave them the good news.

"(I) said, ' Don't worry, boys, it's flower time.'"

He kept his word and launched the Santa Monica, California start-up that would go on to generate billions in sales for florists.

Whippy It

Daneshgar later founded a second start-up, Whippy AI, in 2021. By the time he left BloomNation, which has been featured in the Los Angeles Timesand Wall Street Journal, the start-up had raised $20-$30 million in private funding.

In between launching start-ups, Daneshgar still competes at the poker table. He most recently cashed in the 2024 WSOP Monster Stack and said he plans on playing at this summer's festival.

Check out the full conversation with Daneshgar on the new episode of Life Outside Poker, where he also spoke about teaching a college poker class, cheating in private LA games, parallels between poker and business, AI and poker and more.

_{*Photos courtesy David Daneshgar}