3

Lesley’s Promise

Edinburgh, Summer 2014

 

It was Lesley’s friend Lucy who invited her to the weekly scrapbooking club, which gathered at a home tucked away on a winding, tree-lined cobblestone street. A small group of mothers arrived clutching boxes of old photographs and craft supplies, desserts and bottles of wine, seeking a night away from their breathless city lives. This will be good for her, Lucy thought, because if anyone could use more wine in her life, it was Lesley.

In the group, Lesley was always the odd duck. For starters, among lawyers, teachers, and stay-at-home moms, Lesley had a job that no one quite understood, other than that she was an entrepreneur. As the women cut and pasted photographs and other keepsakes into albums while Lesley talked about this new company that she and her husband had started—something to do with online games in America—the others in the group did their best to avoid staring at her as if she were a circus carny. What, exactly, was this American thing called “fantasy sports,” and how on earth did someone like Lesley get roped into it?

Lesley was also not into crafts like the other mothers, nor was she as naturally artistic as they seemed to be; still, she always looked forward to the nights out and to trying something new, and despite barely being able to find time to shop for groceries, she made sure to fit this group into her schedule. Soon after Lesley joined, the group’s leader suggested an activity she thought could add some spice to the nights through a fun, harmless exercise: a little competition in which all the mothers would have thirty minutes to create a page inspired by a theme—vacations, holidays, children, Disney characters, and so on. They would vote on a winner, and the winner would receive a set of spanking-new scrapbooking supplies.

When the competitions started, the others chatted on about kids and the latest new restaurants and the books they were reading, but Lesley put her head down and went to work on her book. If they’d looked over at her, the others would have seen someone intensely focused on the task at hand, but they couldn’t possibly know just how much winning meant to Lesley. They couldn’t know that to Lesley free craft supplies were in fact a very meaningful reward, given that she had three little ones and her family had been in such a bad financial state in the early years of the company that she hoarded coupons and shopped at secondhand stores and was too afraid to even glance at the monthly bank statements, so that she could avoid the reality of their lives: after pouring all their savings into this hopeless startup of theirs, she and Nigel were flat broke.

For Lesley, there was another motivation: the competitions were a chance for her to prove that she belonged in the group, to show the others that even though she had joined as an outsider, she’d become a worthy member of this club who in fact was just as skilled as the others in the art of scrapbooking—and after weeks of honing her craft, maybe now even better than any of them. And so when time was up, Lesley’s albums were always the most complete and comprehensive. The odd duck in the group won the weekly competitions just about every time.

Then one day the leader of the club reached out in an email to tell Lesley and Lucy that the club would no longer be meeting. No explanation was given.

A few weeks later Lucy received a phone call from the mother who had led the group, telling her that the club had actually started meeting again. But there was a catch if Lucy wanted to rejoin: at the behest of the others, Lucy couldn’t bring along any acquaintances this time around, and she couldn’t bring Lesley.

When Lesley was back home on Wednesday nights—and back on the living room couch with her laptop, working, as she faced her impossibly endless list of daily responsibilities head-on—Nigel was disappointed for her because, for the first time, she had found an outlet from her new job. Then again, the truth was that when Lesley had begun to talk about these competitions they were having at the club, Nigel had begun to sense trouble. They’d been married for nearly ten years, but in these last few years since they’d started the company together, Nigel had seen new layers to his wife. It wasn’t just that she had turned out to be a shrewd entrepreneur in her role; he also saw a resilience and determination and, yes, a cold-eyed competitiveness that he’d never seen before.

Nigel, more than anyone else, knew that whoever got into a winner-take-all game with Lesley sooner or later found out what, exactly, they were up against. Nigel knew that Lesley was always going to do everything in her power to win, and it didn’t matter whether it was a weekly scrapbook competition or a race to become a billion-dollar unicorn.

 

They made the walk together every morning, from their house with the blue front door and past the black sandstone facades that always made it feel like dusk in this city, over the ancient bridge and through the park called the Meadows, along the paths lined with cherry blossoms. Just beyond the trees was the room in the university building where the founders assembled every day and attempted to crack the puzzle of fantasy sports, but every morning, before Lesley and Nigel walked into the building and joined the others, they stopped at the red corner café, took a table by the window looking out onto a quiet street, sat down with their bacon rolls and tea, and just as they did on this late summer morning in 2014, planned out the day.

But this day was different from the others. A month had passed since DraftKings’ acquisition of DraftStreet, and it was now a race between two companies, weeks before the start of NFL preseason games. Word was getting around that Nigel was about to make a countermove, that a monster Series B, led by Shamrock Capital, was imminent. Within the investment world, a number had been going around, a guess as to how much money Nigel had been able to raise. The rumor was $40 million. Before that round was finalized, DraftKings made a splashy announcement of the amount they’d raised, in the aftermath of the DraftStreet acquisition, from venture capital firm Raine Capital: $41 million.

Nigel laughed. You have to hand it to them, it’s a pretty fucking good troll, he thought. Others shuddered. The number was a warning shot.

This day was different for Nigel and Lesley because a meeting of the FanDuel board would soon convene inside the Edinburgh offices to set out a game plan for the upcoming season and, specifically, to get approval for the ad spend for the rest of the year. As their deal was closing, Nigel had given Shamrock a number that represented the projected ad spend during the NFL season. In Edinburgh, with everyone in person, they would finalize their plan.

Six years had passed since their lives changed completely, when Nigel decided to quit his job to start a company with Lesley. One morning in 2008 the two of them were in the car together and Lesley looked over at Nigel and saw a miserable human being. Nigel had been like this for years. Stuck in a consulting desk job that didn’t inspire him, Nigel would sit at home with the Sunday Times, read a fluffy profile in the business section about the latest success-story entrepreneur, and growl, “I could do that!” Nigel was like a tortured writer who always talked about penning a great novel but never actually sat down to write a sentence. After a decade in London, where both he and Lesley had worked for most of that time as management consultants, they had relocated to Edinburgh to less chaotic environs. They immediately felt at home, but in one critical way nothing had changed: Nigel was still a ghost. The downside of Nigel’s walking away from his high-paying job would be immense, as they’d just cleared out their bank account for a massive mortgage on a new house and Lesley was on maternity leave, having had their second boy months earlier. But there were worse things than financial insecurity.

That morning in the car, Lesley looked over at Nigel and decided she couldn’t take anymore. “Just do it,” she told him firmly. “We’re going to be here ten years from now, with you giving me that look that I was the one that stopped you. So just do it.”

Now, their jobs remained as they were at the start. Nigel’s job as CEO was to raise funds. Lesley’s job as head of marketing was to spend them. Nigel went into rooms full of investors asking for money. Lesley went into rooms to tell investors how she intended to turn the money into paying customers. Working in tandem like this was never part of a grand career plan—they were the type of couple that was utterly incapable of planning a vacation more than a week in advance. Not that they had time for any vacations. Things were moving at a dizzying speed: after years of banging their heads against their desks, trying to crack the puzzle of daily fantasy, they suddenly had thousands of customers and tens of millions of dollars of funding.

The upcoming 2014 NFL season would be their chance to pull away from the growing number of competitors in the space. “Okay, let’s do this,” Lesley said to Nigel as they finished up in the café, and now, on this day in August, it was time to present their plan to their new ­investors.

The number Nigel had given to Shamrock only two days earlier of the projected ad spend for the upcoming NFL season was different from the number that Lesley now had in her head of how much she needed to crush their rivals. Nigel knew that the board, led by a group of private equity sharks from LA, was going to fight Lesley on that number.

But he also knew that these sharks had no idea what they were up against.

 

A month earlier Lesley had been feverishly preparing for a biannual marketing meeting—where she would present plans to the whole team in New York and lead a brainstorming session of new ideas for marketing during that upcoming NFL season—when she put aside her work to spend the weekend with her parents in her hometown of Forfar, where her mother was undergoing an operation. The drive north from Edinburgh and into farmlands and to Forfar snaked through the land’s gray rocks and verdant hills and iron bridges over the rumbling waters of the river Tay and into the small town, where rows of brown shoebox stone houses lined narrow cobblestone roads. The journey always took her away from one world and brought her back to another. With each passing mile away from the city, she felt herself detaching from all the work drama as the memories of childhood came rushing back: of growing up in a household where every penny was counted and saved; of hiding behind the sofa with her younger sister when the bill collector came; of having had a sense of never wanting to live a life controlled by uncertainty and fear. The daughter of a carpet salesman and a stay-at-home mother, Lesley was naturally an introvert, but she recognized early on that things were not given to people in this world, that if she was going to get anywhere, she would have to push herself out of her comfort zone. And she did, in ways that surprised even herself, as she went out for the school play, ran for student council, and then was the first in her family to go to university. At St. Andrews, she majored in languages and spent her days in libraries with her head buried in ancient German texts—Hartmann von Aue, Goethe, Brecht. Her senior year she sat in the career services offices wondering what one does with a modern languages degree, and she felt lost, unsure of what she was now going to do with the rest of her life.

It was at St. Andrews that she met the tall, lean captain of the shinty team. This was not love at first sight, not for her at least. The night they first met, at a ceilidh, a traditional Scottish dance, Lesley saw a problem from the start: this boy Nigel was, for one thing, much too young. Two academic years younger, to be precise, and Lesley could sense instantly that he was a restless twenty-year-old with commitment issues. But there was something about this young man she’d been introduced to through a friend that she found magnetic. Nigel—sarcastic, wry, charming, with short-trimmed blond hair and boyish looks—spent his days diligently working toward top marks as a math major and spent his nights and weekends playing sports and holding court at the pub. She found herself excited and elated by the differences between them, but it would be their similar worldviews that sustained them past their second and third dates.

Nigel had also grown up away from the city, on a dairy farm in county Tyrone in Northern Ireland, the youngest of four brothers, and he too had a seemingly innate understanding that there were no guarantees in life, no safety net. Nigel’s father passed away when he was five. He had no memory of Sam Eccles, only the hazy image of eating cake at his funeral. What he would never forget were his early memories of his mother, who was left to raise him while still overseeing the daily operations of the farm and working a day job as an elementary school teacher to make ends meet in a house bursting at the seams. In those early years of FanDuel, Lesley often thought about Nigel’s mother on the farm, how she was able to somehow make it work. Lesley thought of her own mother too. Not only the way her mother was there for her every moment of her childhood, but also how she and her father, after Lesley had gone off to college, opened up an inn outside of Forfar, to make ends meet for their family. Early in their relationship, Nigel and Lesley spent nights during weekends and holidays working the front desk at the inn, seeing firsthand the day-to-day grind of running a small business.

Her parents couldn’t tell you the first thing about fantasy sports in America, only that they were immensely proud of their daughter’s business. Bruce Tyrie saved every newspaper clipping in the Scotsman and the London papers through the years and called Lesley whenever he saw FanDuel signage in the background during sporting events on TV. Her mother, Beryl, was proud of the kind of mother Lesley had become. The couple’s decision to stay in Scotland had delighted Lesley’s mother, who was always worried about how far Lesley would push herself in her career, working those unsustainable hours.

Soon after she and Nigel arrived in Forfar, she knew that she would have to cancel the trip to New York for that biannual marketing meeting. Something had gone wrong with her mother’s operation and she had taken a turn for the worse. Over the next four days Lesley didn’t leave her side as she, her sister, and her father watched her mother struggle painfully, and in delirium. Lesley felt like a child again, helpless against the larger forces at work. They turned off the machines at eight in the morning on a Friday. Lesley buried her mother the next week. Devastated, Lesley took two weeks off. Nigel assumed that she’d need more time to herself when the Shamrock investors were due to arrive.

“No, I’m coming back,” she said, in a voice that seemed even more resolute than ever. “We have to do this. I have to do this.”

Lesley was back at work in the Edinburgh office. With the NFL preseason fast approaching, with DraftKings coming after them at full sail after their new acquisition and a round of fund-raising, and with FanDuel’s war chest now full of funds to deploy after locking up their deal with Shamrock, what was Lesley going to do—just curl up into a ball and disappear?

Not now.

There was a war to be won.

 

They blustered into the offices, the private equity sharks from America who were here in Edinburgh to meet their new partners. Shamrock was a private equity firm focused on media and entertainment, and as a business on the lookout for areas with growth potential, they’d always been big believers in sports. They believed, specifically, in the value of sports content, because in this new media world advertisers were beginning to move toward live events, one of the few remaining places where viewers were willing to sit through commercials in order to partake in the live viewing experience. Shamrock saw fantasy sports in particular as the future, because they believed that the explosion in popularity of fantasy games had made the NFL, the biggest sports league in the universe, what it was today. Shamrock, which once had a stake in the Harlem Globetrotters and in the past had flirted with the idea of buying a professional sports team, had long been looking for a way into the fantasy industry, but until now it had been an industry that was barbelled: at one end were the behemoths—Yahoo!, CBS, the NFL, ESPN—and at the other were guys in their basement blogging about whether you should start Tom Brady without his top receiver in a matchup against the top-ranked defense in the NFL on the road in a snowstorm in Denver. Now things were changing with the arrival of daily fantasy—fantasy sports on steroids.

The Shamrock partners had always believed that sooner or later their search for the next big thing would lead them to fantasy sports—they just didn’t think it would lead across the ocean, to this ancient city, to a table surrounded by Britons. Mike LaSalle, one of the Shamrock partners who’d made the trip, had also visited DraftKings on a scouting trip, and that office made sense: when you stepped inside their open Boston space, you felt as though some designer had come in and created a set for what a fantasy sports company should look like, complete with employees whose faces said, Holy shit, can you believe we work here? That office embodied Jason Robins’s vision—it represented what he thought the company would be in four years. In FanDuel’s Edinburgh office, you could barely fit a dozen people in the room.

And yet LaSalle had no second thoughts about Shamrock’s choice of horse to back in the daily fantasy race. “Nigel, he’s not like Jason,” LaSalle had told his partners. It wasn’t exactly a knock on Jason; when he met with Nigel in New York, LaSalle simply felt more aligned with Nigel’s cautious, analytical approach. They weren’t venture capital guys who could throw fifteen darts at a target and just need one to hit the bull’s-eye. A private equity firm like Shamrock had just five darts and could only afford to miss once. They wanted to see a pathway to profitability, and soon. But Nigel had clearly found a successful business model. “In 2011,” says Paul Martino, partner at Bullpen Capital, FanDuel’s first U.S. investor, “these guys were making a million-dollar a year run rate with only 10,000 registered users. They were acquiring users for $35. I’d never seen anything like that.”

FanDuel in the early years had been a brilliant model of efficiency: they counted every penny and cherished every additional user. But they’d decided that they needed more financial capital to grow into the company that they believed they could become. Shamrock would give FanDuel—and the entire daily fantasy sports industry—legitimacy, which was huge for an unknown startup with an unproven product. Countless professional investors played key roles in building wildly successful startups, allowing for big IPOs and founders to exit with sweet paydays. But the downside to taking on VC or private equity investors was not insignificant. Through each funding round the founders decreased their ownership percentages; by the C round, investors usually owned more than 50 percent of the company. The founders lost more and more control of decision-making as well.

They knew the risk: the moment they let these private equity sharks in their door, there was no turning back from what was a grow-grow-grow strategy in a race to become a billion-dollar company. The move to bring in private equity investors didn’t necessarily clash with the founders’ initial vision of the best-case scenario for their plucky startup: in job interviews for their earliest hires, they told would-be employees that they were all in—for a few years at least, until they could sell their company or reach an IPO.

The Shamrock investors were also in the game to win it, and they’d assembled in Edinburgh to make a game plan. The big question entering the fall was the ad spend, and when he stepped into the offices of FanDuel, LaSalle had a number in his head of how much the budget was going to be. That number, much discussed with Nigel days after the funding round had closed—only days before this meeting—was just over $21 million. This was a staggering figure for a private equity firm typically uninterested in unprofitable businesses. But from the beginning Shamrock knew its investment in FanDuel was unusual for them because, initially, the business was going to show losses. It was something they were willing to swallow if the upside was as high as believed.

The founders and the board, which included Martino from Bullpen Capital, all settled into their seats in the conference room. After a few words from Nigel, Tom Griffiths and Rob Jones—the two genial and sharp tech geeks who were clearly passionate about their sleek product, which by then had already been showered with awards—spoke next, introducing the product’s new features for the upcoming season. Then it was the chief marketing officer’s turn to take the floor to present the ad spend for the NFL season.

Mike LaSalle had never met Lesley Eccles, but on this day he was about to become well acquainted with her. Lesley began to tell the room how the daily fantasy world was changing. She painted a picture of the unique dynamics of this particular season: after years of staying away from this space because of the legal concerns, ESPN was going to open the category—the biggest advertiser in sports was now in play. There was a second factor: the emergence of DraftKings.

“We’re going to have to be aggressive here,” Lesley said, then changed the slide, which presented a number for the ad spend: $43 million.

It was more than double what the Shamrock partners had expected. After LaSalle processed what was happening, he spoke. They could go up from $21 million—but surely, he thought, there was a compromise between that and the $43 million that Lesley was proposing.

Lesley looked at him and said simply, “Forty-three million. It has to be $43 million.” There was a stunned silence in the room. Then back-and-forth. As they ran the numbers, the board’s demands inched up to meet Lesley’s.

At one point the two sides were negotiating over $1 million. But Lesley wouldn’t budge. From his seat at the table, Nigel shot Lesley a look: Are you really going to do this?

“There’s no negotiation here,” she said. “It has to be forty-three. We have to do this,” she said. “Not a penny less.”

 

Money and time: this is what Lesley always said she needed to win the war. Money and time. It had taken her six years to get to this point. Six long, maddening years to create the machine.

She needed the money: $43 million. It had been Lesley who had built the machine, she who knew better than anyone else in that room about the customers up for grabs, she who knew better than anyone how to acquire them: $43 million. That’s all the board needed to know. Sure, she could have told them why $43 million—she could have told them that Brian Schwartz’s realization had always been correct, that it all came down to customer acquisition, that no company, up until now, had been better at customer acquisition than FanDuel. What Brian saw as a weakness of FanDuel was in fact a strength, an advantage in this battle over customers. Being a sentimental fan caused him to be blind to the products’ obvious problems. Lesley, clinical in her approach, saw the world with fresh eyes.

She could have explained the details of why every penny of that $43 million was absolutely essential. She could have begun with the nitty-gritty basics of the cost per acquisition model that she had spent years banging her head against the wall over, the basic model that others learned in Econ 101 while she was off reading Goethe, the basic model that was one of many she learned from Google or one of the many books she would read late into the night in her crash course in marketing. The CPA model explained that you had to pay a certain amount of money to acquire a customer; that CPA was just the start, the foundation for everything else; and that there was also the LTV, the lifetime value of the user; and that as long as your CPA was lower than your LTV, then you would make money. She could have also explained that that model was impossible because LTVs were impossible. Because fantasy players were unlike other customers in other industries because every year players came back. (In surveys, when players were asked if they expected to give up fantasy, the most common answer was never.) And daily fantasy was not like, say, a cable service, where everyone was largely of the same value; instead, it had one of the most enormous spreads in customer value of any industry in the history of the world, because high-volume players were worth so much more to the business than hundreds and maybe thousands of players who were going to click on an ad and on a whim play once or twice, which is why finding and then catering to high-volume players was of paramount importance to survival.

She could have gone on to explain how the machine she built was fueled and how it hummed and operated. How radio, at the start, was her secret weapon in beating DraftStreet, and how she cold-called countless so-called expert consultants, so many that Tom kept a running list of them on a whiteboard as a joke and crossed them off when Lesley would inevitably declare them useless. Eventually she began working with a consultant in the state of Maine, of all places, who taught her the ins and outs of radio, a man who didn’t have one hundred thousand Twitter followers but actually knew what he was talking about and who showed her the secret passageways of radio marketing. She tested relentlessly, changing messaging within the script based on these things called promo codes, setting out three or four different ways of describing what FanDuel was but always making the same offer, each time with a different promo code: megabonus, NFL2014, bearclaw, or any of the hundreds of promo codes that showed them which ads worked, and at what time of day, and which ads didn’t. With that knowledge, she deployed ads on a turn-on, turn-off basis, like a spigot, so that they weren’t committed over a long period if they weren’t working one week; the ads could either be quickly shut down or revved up when they brought users rushing out like water from a hose. She could have explained to these investors that radio shaped the company’s marketing ethos going forward, that they were slaves to the numbers and analytics and relentless testing, that the promo codes would be used on TV. She could’ve shared all the odd quirks and surprising preferences of customers, what worked and didn’t work: that female voices always tanked and male voices always performed better; that cities in the Northeast were particularly strong, California was less so, and many of the southern states, like Texas—the heart of football country—were complete duds; that on Facebook every­thing hinged on the image and not the words, black and white was always a disaster, and nothing worked until a silly little image in one of the Facebook ads of a pig that was a football somehow brought users to the site in droves. She could have showed them the power of carpet-bombing during preseason and the first few weeks of the NFL season—a concept that the DraftKings guys had totally dropped the ball on—and explained why advertising outside of those first few weeks was like selling Christmas trees in June. She could have told them how she was just beginning, now, to understand TV, and how focus groups and ad agencies might love the more cinematic approaches but even if you got Martin Scorsese to direct your brand ads, nothing drew customers in better than those confessionals that looked like Hair Club for Men ads, which she agreed looked like cheap ads, but what did it matter if, as the data was telling them, they worked like gold?

She could have told them what it was like to be a woman in Scotland writing radio scripts for guys named Opie and Carton to read on the air to their rabid listeners. Lesley got so good at channeling the preferences of football fans in the Deep South, creating scripts that were so authentic and pitch-perfect for this demographic, that she received a cease-and-desist letter from Jim Rome’s radio show in the United States for trying to impersonate him, which of course was preposterous. She didn’t have the slightest clue who Jim Rome was.

But there was no need for Lesley to explain anything to anyone—because now it was about money. It was about $43 million. Her promise here in that moment was that if they gave her the money, the machine would do the rest.

Just a few weeks after that first meeting with the Shamrock partners, the founders and the board reconvened. They sat in their same seats but this time it was Lesley opening the meeting.

It was just a few weeks into NFL season, but the data told tell them how much money they were going to make through September. The first slide in her presentation would show the customer acquisition costs, over digital and TV. The numbers matched Lesley’s projections almost perfectly.

But before turning to that slide, Lesley took a moment to look at one of the board members at the table—the man who was becoming her biggest foil. Before turning the screen, she said, “Mike, this slide is for you.”

 

Later, Lesley would often think back to a moment before the war erupted, a moment during one of her daily walks to the office. It was 2010, two years after they’d given up everything for this idea for a silly little game. As they kept trying, unsuccessfully, to attract users, the company’s funding was beginning to run dry. They raised $1.2 million in November 2007. It would be another four years before they raised another dime. For seven years they’d slaved away in that room, on the University of Edinburgh campus, with vomit-colored walls. On Fridays, they went to all-you-can-eat curry, flashing their university IDs for the extra discount. During the winters, the landlord would inexplicably shut off the heat, and they’d all work in fingerless gloves in frigid rooms. The mice they could deal with; it was when the mice died that was a problem.

At the beginning there was no way for them to know what their life would become: that their entire savings would be put into this venture; that neither of them would take a salary for a year and a half; that Lesley would be saving coupons and shopping at thrift stores; that when they’d get to the most desperate times, Nigel, like a sad character out of a ­Dickens novel, would go to the bank to sell off another Krugerrand coin he’d collected as a boy growing up in Northern Ireland, just so that they could make payroll.

She felt like a fool: to think that their silly little game would amount to anything, to think that they—a group of Brits of all people!—could transform the $600 billion American sports landscape, to think that she—a woman living in Scotland!—could crack the puzzle that countless others in the US who lived and breathed this stuff had failed to do. If you’d asked her in that moment, she would have told you that she would be happy to just get their money back, to simply break even on this misadventure. But on this day in 2010, even that seemed like a long shot. She felt as if she were standing at the edge of a beach, and the ocean was moving in toward her, and she was trying to push it back before becoming swallowed by it whole.

Another futile day awaited her, another day of trying to figure out how to attract users, but first Lesley took a rare moment for herself. She stopped, sat down on a bench, and felt herself begin to cry.

A figure approached; it was Nigel, who’d come looking for her. A cold wind whipped through the air; in springtime the Meadows could be the most beautiful place in the world, but now, in the dead of winter, the park felt desolate and lonely.

Nigel sat down next to Lesley. “We’ll be okay,” he said.

“Will we?” Lesley asked.

“This is what we wanted,” Nigel said. When things were bleak, Nigel often repeated those words to Lesley, as a reminder not just that they’d made this choice, but also that it was up to them to make it work.

“Two users a day,” he said. “We just need two users a day, and we’ll be okay.”

In later years, she thought back to that morning as a reminder of just how far they’d come. By 2014, after Lesley’s machine was fed and unleashed, they were now adding half a million new users—on one NFL Sunday. Lesley’s machine worked so brilliantly that the $43 million ad spend became a $70 million ad spend during the season. They closed the year just above $57 million in revenue, up from $14 million in the previous year. Every cent was worth it. Time and money: Lesley was right all along. The markets did open up, and DraftKings, despite their $41 million warning shot, had not made a dent in FanDuel’s market share lead. In fact, FanDuel’s lead expanded over the course of the season. By the start of the next year, FanDuel was nearly twice the size of DraftKings, with a 65–35 market share lead.

When the season was over, Mike LaSalle called Nigel. “We won’t doubt you guys again,” he told him. “What you guys did was brilliant.”

In 2014, across the United States, just over fifty companies had joined the unicorn club, including a car-service company called Lyft, an e-cigarette outfit named Njoy, and a solar-panel manufacturer, Sunrun. Within the startup world, there was new buzz that a fantasy sports company was to join that list in 2015. The world was taking note, in the United States and beyond. A headline in the Belfast Telegraph read: “Tyrone Man Nigel Eccles Will Soon Be Northern Ireland’s Newest Billionaire.”

The next time all the top executives at FanDuel—the founders, the investors, and the board—met again, it was in New York City, as another football season was approaching. They were having dinner together when one of the board members sitting next to Lesley leaned over to her.

“Do you realize how rich you and Nigel will be?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” Lesley asked.

“You guys are going to make $100 million off this.”

The board member leaned in closer.

“Me? I’m going to buy a castle,” he said.

“A castle?” said Lesley.

“With the money we’re going to make together,” he said, “I’m going to buy a castle on an island.

“But you, you and Nigel, will be able to buy the entire island.”