11

The Most Miserable Man at the Super Bowl

San Francisco, Winter–Spring 2016

 

One afternoon, Nigel had an idea: to list, on paper, all the ways they could die.

He sat down and began:

• California AG next to come out negative

Then he continued:

• Payment processors pull plug

• Criminal—NY AG

• Boston FBI investigation

• Tampa FBI investigation

• Class action suit

• Pro leagues pull support

• IRS defines player winnings as gross revenue, not net

• Pulled from Apple app store

• Run out of cash

There, he stopped.

Nigel was not a self-help kind of guy, but he had been persuaded by acquaintances to try a popular meditation app; after a handful of sessions, however, his conclusion was that even a year in the Himalayas wasn’t likely to give him balance in his life, let alone ten minutes in a dark closet with his earbuds in. He went on long runs, seeking to clear his head, but during his jogs through Edinburgh’s Stockbridge neighborhood, when he reached the stretch of houses called “the colonies”—small two-bedroom houses, built in the 1880s as affordable housing for working-class families and struggling artisans—the man who months earlier was celebrated as the CEO of a unicorn and hailed as “Northern Ireland’s Newest Billionaire” by one UK newspaper now found himself looking at the small row houses and thinking: When we go broke, this would be a very fine place to live.

The exercise of listing all the ways they could die was his latest attempt to regain a semblance of control over his life. The list he was now staring at was not having the intended effect.

Through all these last harrowing months for the daily fantasy sports industry, Nigel was among the ones who hadn’t cracked. After the New York Times headline, he’d found those weeks last fall—with the hands-ons with fearful employees, the crisis strategy planning with the executive team, the meetings with investors wondering why they shouldn’t kill their million-dollar partnerships—strangely energizing. He was, for starters, as focused as ever. Back when Nigel was a teenager in the army cadets in Northern Ireland, his troop had conducted a casualty simulation: a casualty, dressed in rags, would stumble straight to him, and he would, out of instinct, approach the casualty, calmly walk him to a bed, and patch him up with bandages. His captain would later tell him that to do so was a mistake; with his attention focused on this one casualty, others in his brigade, he was told, had died. Nigel thought of that simulation during those weeks in the fall of 2015 during the crisis: “What I realized is, one of the things that was going to kill us is that everyone was going to focus on the crisis—and people forget that they have a day job, we’ve got customers to serve, we’ve got products to develop, we’ve got a marketing plan. You can’t just focus on the crisis in front of you.”

A sense of purpose, a survival instinct, kicked in. He believed that no one in his company had done anything wrong or broken any law, but he also understood that while there had been no engagement from the FBI, there was no reason to hope that the crisis would just fade away; investigations like these had no finite end and were fishing expeditions that could lead in any direction. Nigel also had no idea what skeletons might be in the closets of rival fantasy sports companies; FanDuel’s fate, however, was inextricably tied together with theirs. Within FanDuel’s halls, he kept a calm face, a picture of cool rectitude. In the first all-hands meeting in the days after the New York Times story, Nigel stood in front of the company and took a moment to welcome a wave of new hires who were joining FanDuel as part of a massive expansion that had been set in motion before the company was under fire. “Well, I hope you like running into burning buildings,” he quipped. The night before the New York State Supreme Court hearing over the request by Eric Schneiderman for an injunction to shut down FanDuel and DraftKings in New York, Nigel called up FanDuel’s general counsel, Christian Genetski, who had spent a miserable, sleepless week preparing arguments for the hearing. “You know, I was just thinking,” Nigel said. “I want you to know that I’m totally comfortable with whatever the outcome is. We believe in what we think is right, and we still believe it. We’ll make our best arguments, but if it turns out we’re wrong, we’ll fold it down. I’m at peace with that. You should be too.”

Christian was struck by Nigel’s calm and thought, He’s the one with the family, the one who’s spent the last six years of his life building this thing . . . but he’s telling me to be calm!

But now it was February, and the drip drip drip of states shutting down the company through a bitter winter—the count of attorneys general who had deemed them illegal gambling operations was now at seven—was wearing Nigel down. One night he lay in bed and experienced a vision. They had just moved to their sparkling new office in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, a sprawling two-floor space that would accommodate the expansion that the company had experienced over the last six months and that, they once believed, they would see over the next six. In his dream, he was almost floating as he moved toward the center of a sparkling office atrium, to the railing at the top of an open space that was as tall as a cathedral, a perch from which he looked down at a grand, glittery space as vast as an ocean. Every wall was made of glass, every corner illuminated brightly by chandeliers. Looking down, he saw everyone’s faces, all of them gazing up and staring at his, everything hushed in silence. He stepped up to a railing, knowing that they were all waiting for him to speak.

“We’ve gone bust,” he said. “It’s over. It’s all over.”

Nigel woke up. It wasn’t over. They hadn’t gone bust. Worse: they were stuck in purgatory.

 

“Can you believe we’re . . . here?” Tom said to Nigel, as he took in the scene around him. They were squeezing through the crowd in a pedestrian arcade, closed-off street blocks where banners hung from the streetlamps, bright LED screens flashed and blinked all around them, mascots in larger-than-life costumes sashayed among the mass of fans decked out in sports jerseys in an assortment of radioactive colors, and music blared from the soundstage at the other end of the block. Tom turned to the sad-sack bloke next to him, the man with the hollowed-out face that even in this California sunshine was somehow colorless and solemn as a headstone. This man who seemed oblivious to the party around him.

Through the years, as the two FanDuel cofounders had become darlings of the sports business world, they had lived the fantasy life of any fan: soaking in the World Series in seats behind third base; sitting courtside for NBA All-Star Games; and attending countless other events in the pampered comfort of VIP suites in venues across the country, the guests of CEOs from the media world, team owners, league honchos. Still, at least as far as Tom was concerned, this weekend in San Francisco, where they’d come as guests of an NFL team owner to the biggest sporting event of the year, was taking the cake as The Best Weekend Ever—even if their company was on the verge of going bust and any of its executives, at any moment, could be indicted by the FBI.

“This will be great—Peyton Manning, man!” Tom said, trying to get Nigel to forget the troubles of the moment.

Nigel looked blankly at Tom, a look that said only: Peyton . . . who?

Since moving to New York and adopting the Giants as his home sports team, Tom had become a true NFL fan. Nigel, who had been living inside a shell these last months and had yet to be converted into a fan of American sports, could barely keep up with the headlines in a world gone mad—rumblings of a Brexit back home in the United Kingdom, a preposterous presidential election playing out in the United States—let alone name the starting quarterbacks in the Super Bowl. He also wasn’t exactly in the mood for a party. He and Lesley had planned to be here long before the Times story, for this weekend of Napa wine tastings and dinners in San Francisco, including one with the team owner of one of their NFL partners, the Cleveland Browns, at one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world; given the circumstances, Nigel and Lesley had lost their appetite for the $400-a-head dinner at French Laundry as Nigel began to schedule a series of meetings with investors and partners who held the fate of the company in their hands.

Nigel’s head was still numb from an early morning meeting he and Christian Genetski had had in the offices of one of FanDuel’s payment processors, in San Jose. PayPal, one of the services that FanDuel relied on to process the accounts that customers deposited online, was thinking of ending their relationship with FanDuel because, well, just about everyone was having second thoughts about their relationship with a company that was being compared to a Mexican drug cartel. It was simple: if the payment processors pulled the plug, they were dead in the water.

Stay with us, things will turn around, Nigel told them. Things look bad, but there are too many people invested in this to let it fail. The meeting with PayPal had gone better than expected, but now, as he walked with Tom through the Super Bowl circus, his attention turned to his next meeting, one in which he’d face some of the most influential figures in the sports universe, all in town for the Super Bowl but also possibly eager to hear why they shouldn’t abandon what was sure looking like a sinking ship.

“What are we going to tell them?” Tom asked, referring to the partners in the upcoming meeting.

Nigel said: “How about that Peyton Manning!”

The evolution of the daily fantasy industry began with networks finally, in 2014, accepting advertising. Then it was getting the professional leagues on board. Jason Robins’s 2013 marketing partnership with MLB was a watershed moment because it was the first daily fantasy partnership with a professional sports league, but it also was a ghost deal—at MLB’s behest, there was no press release at the time, simply DraftKings signage popping up in major league ballparks and DraftKings banners on MLB.com sites, a professional sports league just dipping its toes, a way to gauge reaction to a sports league doing business with a gaming startup. When Jason signed away an equity stake in the company, some early employees who knew the details of the deal were taken aback by the size of it, but what it did accomplish was to give the industry legitimacy and also give DraftKings an inside track to a bigger deal, which was announced in the spring of 2015. DraftKings’ MLB deal paved the way for an exclusive partnership between FanDuel and the NBA, and by mid-2015 both daily fantasy operators had partnerships with more than a dozen professional sports teams.

“Someday we were going to have to become legitimate,” said Nigel. “There was going to be a day where this gets all called into question, and if the leagues are on our side, we’re fine—and if they aren’t, we’re dead. Any time we had these league discussions, it was kind of an insurance policy—what kind of value would I put on a league supporting us? If shit hits the fan, well, a tremendous amount.”

Shit had hit the fan, and as he arrived at a conference room at a San Francisco hotel, Nigel knew he needed the support of the owners and executives in the room. Nigel looked up and saw a propeller plane in the air, dark clouds surrounding it, rain coming down in sheets. The image was being projected onto a screen in the conference room. They were all looking up at the words on a slide that read A PERFECT STORM. WE WILL PERSEVERE. A perfect storm: yes, between the billion-dollar valuation and the $500 million carpet-bombing and the Times story and the media firestorm and the headline-hungry attorneys general and the lawmakers, that’s what these last months had felt like—a perfect storm of elements that had caused those on the plane to wonder if there would be any survivors after they all went down, together.

Nigel knew why these men had not jumped out of the plane, parachutes at the ready, during the fall. He also knew that they were not there in the room simply to show their support to an embattled CEO out of the goodness of their hearts. These new online fantasy games that FanDuel and DraftKings had popularized had entered the sports landscape at a critical time—a time when, it could be argued, the leagues needed fantasy sports as much as the fantasy sports companies needed the leagues. As clueless as he was about quarterbacks in the NFL, Nigel by now had spent enough time in rooms with the most powerful people in American sports to understand the complicated dynamics in their industry and the immense challenges they faced. For the men in the room, their own reckoning was coming. Sports was still a booming business, and there was no better barometer of how big a business it was than the rights deals between the leagues and the networks. ESPN was months from striking a number of deals that signaled a booming business—they would pay nearly $2 billion a year for the NFL, nearly $1.5 billion for the NBA, and over $500 million for the College Football Playoff—but even as rights fees were exploding, as the leagues were stuffing their pockets with unprecedented money, something unexpected was happening: fans were beginning to cut the cord on cable packages and viewership was dropping, fast. Dropping TV ratings backed up this trend: the NFL’s ratings were down 15 percent, and even the ratings in the NBA, a league exploding in popularity, were falling. Baseball’s revenues had doubled since 2000, but part of that revenue was from massive deals that local and regional cable networks had struck with teams, and the value of those deals was tied to the very cable bundles that were about to see significant decreases in paying customers.

Nigel knew that all of it was part of a new reality for networks and leagues: sooner or later, just about all TV would be streaming TV. Soon, the billions made from the cable packages would run dry. The biggest bubble fueling sports was about to burst. The professional sports leagues were suddenly faced with a future of great uncertainty as they, along with the media companies, began to realize this truth: if any of the big shocks to the TV rights market fees came to pass, as many believed they would, if the bubble was indeed about to burst in the sports world, they needed something that would generate enough money to stop the hemorrhaging.

There were two things that were going to save the leagues. One was fantasy sports. The other was gambling, which was not legal—not yet at least.

At the Super Bowl, in a room full of investors and partners, Nigel found himself in a delicate position. He had to tell his investors, Everything’s good, we’ll get through this! while at the same time turning to the partners he owed money to—the NFL owners and network executives—and saying, But not so great that I’ll be able to pay you on time!

“We’re confident in fantasy sports as a future, for DFS as a future, we just don’t know what 2016 will look like,” Nigel told the room. He told them a plan was in motion, but there was a long road ahead for his small army of lobbyists and lawyers, the men on the front lines like Jeremy ­Kudon and Peter Schoenke, and the state-by-state route was long and full of mines. He told them that money hadn’t necessarily been earmarked to go toward the fight on the regulatory side but that now they would have to view the extraordinary legal and lobbying costs as an investment in the long-term surety of the business. “We were a small unregulated market—we became a very large unregulated market in a very short period of time,” he said. “Two or three years ago we said, ‘We are going to become regulated.’ We knew it was going to happen. We just didn’t know how it was going to happen.”

The men in the room asked questions: What was regulation going to look like? A state-by-state process which, if I’m being honest, will be slow. It could take two years, and probably more. What was the ad spend going to be? Significantly lower than it was in 2015. Which, I’m sure, will be a relief to everyone. The room laughed.

Nigel felt better after the response from the investors and partners in the room in San Francisco, which more or less was: We’re not going to throw you under the bus—yet.

One afternoon he was home in Edinburgh, on the phone with Fan­Duel’s chief legal officer, Christian Genetski, who was losing optimism after another attorney general seemed to be turning on them.

The bad news kept coming. Then, soon after he hung up with Genetski, Nigel’s phone rang. “It’s Adam,” the voice said. It was the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver. Nigel held his breath. It had been less than a year since FanDuel had struck a four-year exclusive deal with Silver’s league. The partnership was a turning point: it legitimized Nigel’s still unknown business and a fledgling industry. The very next day, coincidentally or not, the New York Times published an op-ed written by Silver in which he argued that Congress should “adopt a federal framework that allows states to authorize betting on professional sports.”

But that was a year ago, before the negative headlines, when it became an open question as to whether anyone would stand by the two embattled companies. It was great to have NFL partners behind them, but to have the NBA commissioner’s support meant everything.

“I’ll be honest. I don’t know how this is going to end,” Nigel said to Silver over the phone.

“I do,” Silver replied. “With you and me testifying together in front of Congress.”

The NBA, in other words, was still at his side. Nigel breathed a sigh of relief.

 

After those few days in San Francisco, Nigel knew that, no, the company wasn’t going to go bust—not with all their team partners in the NFL and NBA and Adam Silver behind them. And yet the alternative—their new reality—somehow felt worse.

It was his biggest fear—the biggest fear of any entrepreneur, really: that his or her company will become a zombie company. Any entrepreneur will tell you that they will take the quick end over purgatory. With a quick death, an entrepreneur would lose some money and feel a bit of humiliation from losing other people’s money but would move on. A good number of VC-financed entrepreneurs, particularly in Silicon Valley, which was good at ripping the bandage off—selling quickly when it was clear the vision fell short—bounced back from failed startups like basketball players bounced back from missed free throws. Much worse was hitting a series of endless bumps, with no end in sight. Purgatory was a company being funded to grow, but slowly, and so everyone, being in no position to sell, just hung around to create a lot of shareholder value. Purgatory was having a conservative burn rate to last many years and even (possibly) a positive cash flow. Purgatory was not going bankrupt but also having zero chance of ever becoming a high-growth company. Purgatory was a place where no one was happy: not the investors, not the shareholders, and not the founders, who saw no exit.

Purgatory was the New York FanDuel headquarters in early 2016, where it was business as usual but not business as usual. The bright, open space of staircases, large screens, brushed steel, and glass occupied two floors, and with its large windows that overlooked Park Avenue, the offices felt bigger and grander than the DraftKings’ office in Boston. All over the offices were LET’S REINVENT THE WHEEL, PEOPLE posters, quotes from Derek Jeter and Wayne Gretzky. There were focus rooms encased in glass; inspirational quotes etched into the walls; a Ping-Pong table and Pop-A-Shot machine; pantries overflowing with rivers of organic energy bars; reminders of Thirsty Thursdays, the weekly 5 p.m. happy hour; and, plastered inside bathrooms, The Half-Time Report, the company newsletter (Two Truths and a Lie: The founders were originally going to name the company Fanzilla . . . Tom Griffiths and Rob Jones have known each other since they were teenagers). They’d moved here, five blocks north of their old space, in early 2016; months earlier, they had signed the lease soon after their unicorn designation. The company had already grown from fifty employees to four hundred between 2014 and early 2015, and the plan, after another anticipated hiring round of marketers, coders, and engineers, was for the company to have a space ready to accommodate the next wave. Every desk and cubicle would be occupied, every corner incubating a new idea.

But now the feeling inside was of a world frozen in time. After the New York attorney general’s office shut down operations in the state, things took a surreal turn: employees showed up to work every day at an office situated in a location where the games were deemed illegal. With the overall uncertainty, hiring was frozen; now, in the summer of 2016, swaths of the office, which was large enough for five hundred or more, sat unoccupied: rows and rows of empty desks and cubicles. Projects—new variations of daily fantasy games—were put on hold. Given the astronomical legal costs and the revenue lost from the states where their operations had been shut down, the scaling back had been anticipated for months.

First, they took away the weekly massages, then the breakfast spreads. More cutbacks on perks and benefits followed. And then the layoffs began—one morning in the winter of 2016 employees were ushered into a conference room, and an executive at the front of the room informed them that they were all being let go. Employees sitting outside glanced into the room, through the floor-to-ceiling glass, and tried their best not to stare. “It was like a public execution,” said one of the sixty laid-off employees. Two months later, another fifty were let go.

Through that winter and spring, the days had a strange pace to them. There was still a company to keep operational, but nothing like the daily rush that had coursed through the office in late 2014 and early 2015. One morning that winter the team held a meeting in one of their big conference rooms. It was led by Zack Jenis, their young product manager who, with his hoodie and Michigan hat worn backward, had the appearance of a visiting high-schooler on spring break. “We have LA, we have Scotland, we have NY,” someone said as video feeds blinked on the screens at the front of the room. Sitting around the table in front of their laptops was a mix of men and women, all young and of various races. It was a weekly meeting in which one of the leads of a department would answer questions for the entire staff. Zack’s job was to size the tournaments; how big the prize pools were, and how many tournaments the company was providing, were determined each night, in real time. Filling a tournament was more of an art than anything, and it was Zack’s job to stay up until the wee hours, sizing every tournament until the end. His job had changed with the diminished prize pools and the five states out of operation—still including New York—but it was in some ways more important than ever to be as precise as possible. There may have been a time when overlay in a tournament could be viewed as a marketing expense, but those days were long gone.

“With all the regulation, how is that going to affect the size of contests one month in advance of MLB?” asked a staffer.

“They were 75 percent of the size of what they were on opening day a year ago,” Zack replied.

“When, ideally, do you want a tournament to fill?” asked another employee.

“One minute before.”

“And how much do you look at what DK is doing?”

“We usually post first—so we don’t have that luxury. We see what happens, we post something, and DK comes out and posts a contest two times the size of ours. We haven’t discussed the strategy of how we’re going to change.”

“Yes we have,” a voice from the room said. Andy Giancamilli was FanDuel’s vice president of revenue. “We won’t.”

“And what if a tournament doesn’t fill?”

“It has to fill,” Andy replied. “If we don’t fill, we lose money. If we lose money, we’re not here.” Andy paused. “Not to be doomsday.” Everyone laughed.

During spring and then summer, when baseball was the only game in town, the days could be a slog. One afternoon, on cue at five o’clock, a large flock of employees congregated in a conference room, where they sat down with their laptops at a table, grabbed a beer from the stash at the center of the table, and logged on to a Swedish online game site. As they kept one eye up on the screen that projected the real-time data from that night’s tournaments, the eight employees, dressed in hoodies, caps, and long-sleeve T-shirts, clicked on their trackpads, furiously navigating through virtual Google maps as they tried to locate where in the world they were, based only on the clues visible to them. Every so often someone would rise from his seat, arms raised, and yell out, as if he’d gotten bingo. Employees, now banned from playing any daily fantasy games, restricted from the biggest office pastime, had found a new way to entertain themselves.

They’d all become numb to the headlines, because none of them these days were good. One afternoon the news was that the two companies would no longer provide games in college sports—a chunk of their revenue wiped out, just like that. One day brought news that another state was shutting them down; this was happening so frequently that Justine Sacco, the head of PR, decided that she didn’t need to bother sending out press releases when they received another cease-and-desist from the latest attorney general. It was impossible to know where the next hit was coming from, only that another one was coming. As Genetski, who had joined FanDuel in 2015 only months before the storm hit, said, “We were getting punched from one side just as we got our hand up to defend ourselves on the other side.”

But there was a football season coming up, the first season since they had become a nation’s punching bag. It was time to reboot. One afternoon, in one of the glass-enclosed rooms, the company’s new vice president of brand, wearing a gray hoodie and jeans, grappled with a question: What, exactly, is the story of FanDuel now? Dan Spiegel had joined FanDuel in 2014, during the company’s big expansion. Coming from big advertising—his clients included Coke—he discovered something entirely different and unknown when Nigel Eccles hired him away to join FanDuel’s marketing team.

That fall, his first football season, Spiegel was a bystander to what he, like many of the employees in New York, sensed was a campaign gone horribly wrong. “I felt like I was on drugs,” he said, describing the experience of watching the ad barrage and feeling no control over the messaging. Now, he said, “people have such a low opinion of us—a really, really, really low opinion.” An internal focus group reported that 10 percent of the people liked the ads from 2015; 90 percent hated them. “There was no middle ground,” said Spiegel. Additionally, the hundreds and maybe even now thousands of promo codes that they’d created had become their own punching bag in the public eye, but had also, Spiegel thought, lost their original function, since the daily fantasy companies no longer lacked name recognition; therefore, giving a promo code credit for people coming to the site was akin to saying that the guy who nudged the vending machine before the candy bar came out was the reason why the candy bar fell, after dozens and dozens of others had been pummeling the machine for weeks on end.

Now they were intent on reintroducing the company to America, and Spiegel was in charge of coming up with the concept for its marketing. Spiegel was directing the company’s shift from direct-response ads to brand advertising, which was focused on creating awareness and shaping perception; in his head, he had three concepts he was playing around with. The first was a cinematic approach—a “brand” ad that was a radical departure from the direct marketing ads they’d become known for. “Think Ryan Gosling in Drive,” he suggested. Spiegel knew for sure that the new ads could not have anything to do with winning money. They had to be about the love of following sports and connecting with other fans. The second concept tapped into that childlike ebullience inside every fan. Spiegel cited a recent video that had gone viral, one of Stephen Curry sinking a shot at half-court during a Golden State Warriors practice and a fan coming out and hugging him; watching that, he felt the raw emotion that was the essence of sports. He wanted to tap into that feeling, but given the negative public image of the company, he hesitated. “I just don’t know if we have that right,” Spiegel said.

There was a third option, he said, one that would essentially turn the mirror on themselves. One that showed some self-awareness: “Yup, we were the guys—and we’re back,” Spiegel said. The ad would have to tell the story of this startup. But what, exactly, was the story of FanDuel?

“Right now we have to ask ourselves a question,” he said. “At our core, who are we?”

 

FanDuel and DraftKings had been ridiculed, humiliated, shamed—but they were still here. The rocket was still in flight, wobbling through the air now, if not exactly screaming toward the heavens. They’d all made mistakes along the way, and as existential threats still loomed—if they remained shut down in New York State for the rest of 2016, through the NFL season, they were dead. There was plenty of blame and finger-pointing to go around. For the leaders of the companies: How could they have been so blind as to let their own employees play their own games? “We looked at the employee play issue before,” said Genetski, “and it struck me as odd that people played. Shame on me, for not realizing the extent of how much people played. I thought that people were playing one contest a week on DK, and who cares? I didn’t have the full sense of it.” For the investors: how could they have been so short-sighted, flooding an unregulated industry, one with an utterly unproven product, with hundreds of millions of dollars, and then allowing the company to burn through it all? “Shame on us,” Mike LaSalle said that winter, “for letting it happen. Nigel and Lesley were right in 2014—they earned it. But then the 2015 race accelerated what should have been two or three years of growth into just a few months, and neither company was ready for it.”

Both companies had made plenty of mistakes. The industry as a whole should have begun the regulatory fight earlier; developed relationships with lawmakers in key states; done everything it could to get bills in motion. In hindsight, LaSalle thought, as a board they should have simply been more vocal. More vocal about the way the brand of daily fantasy sports was being presented in a $500 million carpet-bombing. More vocal about having a brand agency helping with what that brand was. More vocal about having different creative approaches on the commercials. More vocal about what they were seeing: that every company has a DNA, and the DNA of the two companies, as much as they were unwilling to admit it, made them direct marketing businesses. Yes, the companies, at the start, had gotten from A to B as shrewd direct marketing businesses, but the next step—becoming a transformative sports media company—well, that was a different thing entirely.

Now the board could be more vocal—and they would be. They would take more control because how, they thought, could they let the company make the same mistakes again? Now, in the aftermath of the near-collapse of their business, it was happening: a power shift from the founders, who were there from the start, to the outsiders, who’d joined and turned the company into a billion-dollar unicorn.

Up until this point, no one—not the CEOs, who led their companies into the middle of the storm; not the investors, who simply kept throwing money at an unproven operation; not anyone at the FSTA, who were too slow in the regulatory process and somehow did not see that a tsunami was coming; not any employees, who played on the sites and may have preyed on their own unsuspecting customers; not the professional players, who targeted inexperienced and unwitting minnows; not Ethan Haskell, who started this mess with his post—had been held responsible. All of them, even the ones who’d been there since the beginning, were still aboard the rocket—a rocket that was about to explode and shatter into pieces. There were still open FBI investigations. There were open lawsuits—casual players who’d lost thousands of dollars and contended that they’d been preyed upon by the sharks were still going after the companies for false advertising. There were attorneys general who had yet to come out with decisions on the fate of the operators in their states. There would have to be changes at the companies. New regulations and new safeguards, for starters. Limits on the number of entries for players. Any sniff of employees playing the games, and they were out. And of course, there would have to be assessments of leadership.

The reality was that the founders at both companies had been ceding control and power for months and even years; with each round of massive funding, they were further diluted financially, and with each expansion, further layers upon layers of people were brought in under them. At the time of the Super Bowl in California, the founders of FanDuel knew that big changes were going to have to be made—all the way to the top of the company. What those changes were going to be, they couldn’t say. The founders already sensed a shift in power taking place, with the board being more vocal and the growing number of executives around the founders taking more control of decisions. They’d always known, in a sense, that things were headed this way. From the moment they’d taken money from Shamrock Capital in 2014 and then KKR in 2015, they’d known that the private equity infusion of cash would allow them to reach a fantasy of being a billion-dollar company, even if they were running the risk of losing total control of their business—their baby.

The morning of the big game, Nigel and Lesley had boarded a bus in downtown San Francisco for the one-hour drive to the stadium in Santa Clara. Nigel spent the drive chatting up team executives on the bus. Next to him, Lesley was fast asleep. It had been an exhausting weekend—an exhausting twelve months, really. Lesley awoke as they rolled up to a gleaming monolith. Lines snaked around Levi’s Stadium; security was everywhere. As they walked toward the entrance and passed an agent with the letters FBI emblazoned on his chest, Nigel took Lesley over, and together they posed with the agent. Their friends received a text with the line: “They finally got us!”

They were in no rush to go inside. They walked around the grounds, just the two of them, and found a patch of grass removed from the stadium, where they sat down. Nigel’s phone bleated.

“Put that away,” Lesley said.

They both stared at the sky, cloudless and endless. It was, if they allowed it to be, a perfect afternoon.

“How did we end up here?” Nigel said, exhaling for the first time all weekend.

During Nigel’s presentation in front of the NFL stakeholders, Lesley had looked at him and seen his face hollowed out as she’d never seen it before. He’d always been the most optimistic person in every room, always quick with a quip to lighten the mood, but these last few days and months had made him miserable. For the first time in the years that she’d known him, she looked at him and saw someone broken.

“You know, when this is all over, after we’ve sold or walked away, you’ll be back to being a nightmare again,” she said.

“No, no. I’ll be chill . . . for like three hours,” Nigel said. “Then I’ll be fucking miserable.”

They’d been together now for more than twenty years—a duration that stunned even them. Not long after they’d started dating, they worked together running the front desk at Lesley’s parents’ inn, just outside of Forfar. The inn was in the Scottish countryside, hidden beneath a canopy of trees, a place that felt worlds away at this moment. When Lesley was young, her parents struggled to make ends meet, and opening up an inn, of all things, hadn’t seemed like the wisest venture. But the business, while grueling, saved her family. Lesley would say that from that moment a work ethic had been instilled in her. A belief that if you put your head down and put in your work, you’d be rewarded. Nigel and Lesley worked the weekends and filled in when Lesley’s parents couldn’t be there. So much, and yet nothing, had changed from those years. They were still together, still partners, best friends, all in, together.

“I do try to remind myself,” Nigel said, “well, this is what I always wanted to do. I worked so long, and this is what I wanted.”

“If we went back to the beginning of this and someone told us we’d be here,” Lesley said, “we’d be blown away.” It was one of the rare moments when the two took a moment to reflect on what they’d built. It could have been easy to dwell on the missteps at various points over the last year and to conclude, after all the public scrutiny, that they’d been a failure.

A loud roar came from the stadium. Kickoff was nearing, and pregame festivities were under way. All eyes—100 billion viewers worldwide—were on their screens. The big game was about to begin.

“We should go,” Nigel said.

“No—let’s take a moment,” Lesley said, holding him back, just this once. “Let’s have this moment.”