Artie Baxter comprises the thin — make that exclusive — overlap of gambling tech entrepreneur, real estate agent, and actor with an IMDB credit for “threesome guy” in an episode of The O.C.
He supported himself as a bookie, had a line in a movie with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson called Gridiron Gang, and now sells high-end diaper bags.
Eventually he and partners Ryan Magrum and Ben Ramirez got around to Golden Camel, a bets and odds aggregation site whose odd name was inspired by a line from Spies Like Us.
“I took left turns, you know, career-wise,” Baxter said.
So many.
Wasted road trip not wasted after all
The spark for Golden Camel ignited like many bright ideas in gambling and life in general: with friends on a roadtrip. This was helped by Baxter’s penchant for being within proximity of interesting people. So it was on a junket to Levi’s Stadium in 2015 to watch the San Francisco 49ers.
“Handily, we have these friends that are in way higher tax brackets than us. And one of them owned a suite at Levi’s Stadium,” Baxter recalled. “And the other one had a plane. And the other one owned a Michelin star restaurant. So we got invited.”
Trouble was, this “group of degenerates,” as Baxter describes it, spent much of the afternoon flipping through the multitude of offshore sportsbooks apps on their phones, bemoaning their bets as “Colin Kaepernick was throwing grounders to his receivers.” They hadn’t needed to fly from Los Angeles for this. Even though the ride was nice.
“The day was like the ultimate men’s Sunday football day,” Baxter said. “Got to fly private to San Francisco. Got to sit in a suite. Got to go to a really swanky restaurant afterwards. And came home depressed. It didn’t help that we lost all of our bets.”
Back home, waiting for an Uber outside of Magrum’s house, a thunderbolt.
“One of us was like, ‘What if there was an app that just put all your bets in one place, kind of like an E-Trade, and you weren’t glued to your phone?” Baxter recalled. “‘You could just look at it and be like, ‘Oh, green, red, account balance. Super simple, super efficient.’
“We weren’t present at all while we were on this trip. We were glued to our phones. We were kind of ahead of our time. And now that gambling is legal and taking off, we decided to take a stab at it three years ago.”
What’s Golden Camel?
Golden Camel allows bettors to sync their sports betting accounts to create one place to track bets, balances and odds comparisons. If they absolutely needed to check those after flying to Santa Clara, Calif., on a private plane, while watching the Niners from a suite, and before eating at a Michelin-star restaurant, they, in theory, would at least have more time to enjoy themselves.
For a fee of $5 per month or $50 annually, bettors can follow all of their betting accounts on a single app.
Baxter on what he feels is the Golden Camel advantage: “The tech stack is the thing that separates us. We just have a simpler presentation. We wanted to be a Chipotle menu, not a Cheesecake Factory menu. We wanted to be simple, sexy.
“Then we built a scoring engine. You can see lines. You can see news. You can see everything. During the [research and development], we also built a prop scoring engine.”
Baxter on the theory: “We want to sell fun, not that you’re going to beat the house. That’s where we feel like we’re different. We want to sell the excitement.
“Think about being in a sportsbook in Vegas with your friends and the highs and the lows. We want to sell the entertainment of gaming, not that you can be this crazy handicapper and you can quit your job and do all this stuff.
“We have a point of view that if you gamble, you lose over time. There’s very few people that can scale it. I’m sure different people get there over time. But until I see it firsthand, I’m not going to believe it.”
Artie Baxter: actor, bookie, bad broker
Baxter expected to graduate from Arizona State and become a stockbroker. He even scored an internship at Merrill Lynch. Then he realized it wasn’t going to happen for a multitude of reasons.
“I was cold-calling. I was looking at the guys [in the office]. They’re smoking cigarettes. They’re balding. And they seemed so stressed out,” Baxter said. “And I was like, ‘This is not for me. First of all, I know nobody with money. Who’s going to hire me?'”
On a spring break trip to Cabo San Lucas in 2002, a woman approached Baxter on the beach. He assumed initially that she’d been put up to it by his buddies. She was actually a movie producer. Baxter didn’t want to be an actor, but prospects were thin, so off he went to California after graduation, $5,000 saved from bartending in his pocket, set to live on a futon for three months. It was a scene fit for a montage in the kind of coming-of-age-movie he hoped to land.
Baxter won some parts but often found himself in casting offices staring at a group of dudes with much the same look: Kellan Lutz, who went on to appear in the Twilight Saga, Travis Van Winkle (Transformers) and Travis Fimmel (Vikings).
Scrapping for roles, Baxter became a bookie on the side. Realization of the difficulty of the acting path had been setting in as he watched his coach of 3 1/2 years grope for work.
“I watched this person move from apartment to apartment to house. And he directed me in a movie, which you can’t find anymore on the Internet,” Baxter recalled. “And he’s like, ‘Artie, stick with it. Stick with it.’ And he was probably about 12 years older than me. And I was looking at him, and I’m like, ‘You haven’t even hit it yet. How am I going to do this? I’m in my early 30s. How am I going to do this?'”
The coach stuck it out: Taylor Sheridan is an actor/writer/director best known for co-creating and acting in the Yellowstone TV series.
Of diaper bags and opportunity
Messiness became the mother of invention for the diaper bag business.
A friend with whom he and his wife had been dining in a restaurant one particular day in 2017 rushed back to the table and furiously began scrawling on a napkin. The restaurant didn’t have changing stations in the men’s room and the friend, actor AJ Buckley, had been forced to change his four-month-old, Willow, on the bathroom floor on the shirt he’d removed from his body. Buckley had found inspiration in defecation and began real-time designing what he wished he’d just had in the bathroom. It became the prototype of what would eventually become the basis of a Papercliplife business they still own.
It didn’t seem like a good idea to Baxter at the time, though.
“I was like, ‘I want nothing to do with that,'” he recalled. “And he was like, ‘Please, please come with me. I feel like this is is a billion-dollar idea.'”
Baxter acquiesced after his son, Bear, was born a few months later.
“Before we knew it, we were on a plane to China vetting factories. And I kind of just took the lead organically and became the CEO of the company,” Baxter said. “We got a patent on our changing station. So we developed this diaper bag that folds out to a changing station.”
Baxter helped cobble together a partnership group for a company that was growing but, partly because it was selling just one product, Papercliplife was floored by the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. It shut down and relaunched in 2022.
If Golden Camel was going to happen — specifically the expensive tech and coders behind it — there would need to be an infusion of cash. So he began selling luxury real estate.
Baxter, Magrum and Ramirez mined connections to find tech providers until a version of Golden Camel was ready to test in January 2022. They bought a recreational vehicle, drove east to Ohio for football season and began showing off the app to a state of avid bettors.
“We branded [the RV] super loud. We would spend Saturdays at Ohio State. We’d either travel to Cincinnati on Sunday or travel to Cleveland on Sunday,” Baxter said. “And we quickly realized that our users, the younger audience, was attracted to our brand. And while we were doing the R&D, we realized that everybody loves betting props. Being the house before, I was wrong. I thought prop bets are not the most bet things.
“Obviously, the industry has changed. And so we saw that that’s what our users were doing.”
That led to the development of Golden Camel’s prop-evaluation tool.
What’s next?
As a man with a predilection for a pivot, Baxter would seemingly be scanning for oncoming opportunity. He admits that if Golden Camel is successful and some gaming company slides a large offer across the table, the founders could be tempted to sell.
But mostly, he has dreams for what could be with this company. He wants to see Golden Camel’s logo on a Formula One car. And he’d love to become the house again, gaining licensure as a sportsbook at some point.
“We may dream big,” he said, “but you only live once. So I’m going to give it a good shot.”
