Skillz Inc. (NYSE:SKLZ) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 9, 2023 4:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Susan Swanson - Communications Director

Andrew Paradise - CEO

Jason Roswig - President and CFO

Casey Chafkin - CSO

Conference Call Participants

Jason Tilchen - Canaccord Genuity

Operator

Good afternoon. Welcome to Skillz First Quarter 2023 Conference Call.

I will now turn the call over to Susan Swanson for opening remarks. Please go ahead.

Susan Swanson

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Skillz First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Andrew Paradise, Skillz CEO; Casey Chafkin, CSO; and Jason Roswig, President and CFO. Note, our full financial results will be published tomorrow and will be available in our Investor Relations website.

Before I turn the call over to Andrew, please note that some of our management's comments today will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities Laws. Forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of words such as will, expect, should, or other similar phrases are subject to numerous risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Therefore, you should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on them. We refer you to these company's SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact future operating results and financial condition.

During the call, management will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures and the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our first quarter 2023 earnings release.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Andrew for some brief opening remarks before we open the call for questions. Andrew?

Andrew Paradise

Thank you, Susan, and to all of you for joining the call. In the first quarter, we continued to make progress on the four strategic pillars that we laid out last year, while we continue to navigate difficult demand and macro environments. We're cautiously optimistic about the progress we're making. And also want to be honest with our shareholders and ourselves that we're in the middle of tremendous change and it'd be premature to say we're out of the woods.

To briefly review the quarter before I turn the call to Jason, let me begin with the first pillar, enhancing our platform to improve customer and developer engagement and retention. Our product team continues to grow and mature and we're seeing positive changes in terms of the rigor and discipline, and perhaps, most importantly, our customers stickiness and engagement as seen in our payback improvements. To this end, to name a few of the product initiatives we achieved over the quarter. We launched and scaled new limited time challenges which have driven improvements in paying user behavior. We also launched a new play screen user interface resulting in positive trends in pro tournaments engagement, as well as pro retention. For developers, we rolled out the Skillz [discord server] (ph) to enhance community support. We updated the SDK release process to provide greater clarity to all releases including OTA and we added site instrumentation to enhance usage in sites inside of our developer console.