Five years later, DraftKings readies for its second act
In early 2012, after months of working part time on their idea for a startup company, Paul Liberman, Matt Kalish, and Jason Robins decided to get real.
The trio left their jobs at the Lexington e-commerce company Vistaprint, where they had learned the finer points of online marketing, and set up shop in Liberman’s house. After years as a season-long hobby for both casual and stats-obsessed sports fans, fantasy sports was morphing into a fast-moving daily game with big cash prizes, and the three entrepreneurs saw an opening for a big business.
“Estimates are that there are something like 30 million fantasy sports players, and only about 50,000 of them have tried daily so far,” Kalish told the Globe at the time. “That’s a huge opportunity.”
Their startup, DraftKings Inc., launched its first contest a few weeks later. Entries for that baseball game were free, and 160 people signed up for a chance at $100 in total prizes. The first-place winner scored a cool $50.
Now celebrating its fifth anniversary, DraftKings has logged some impressive stats of its own: It has signed up 7 million customers, who collectively have submitted more than 680 million contest entries, and some of DraftKings’ biggest games offer prizes of $1 million or more. And DraftKings has raised more than $830 million from investors, emerging as one of the signature Boston tech startups of its generation.
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