Nigel Eccles is best known for being the co-founder of FanDuel, a company that pioneered the daily fantasy sports market in the US.
You may have seen their high impact commercials on TV, heard of them becoming one of the few unicorn $1bil startups to come out of Europe or their eventual sale to Paddypower/Betfair for $465mil. You may have even seen him featured in the infamous John Oliver “This Week Tonight” episode covering the industry he helped to create!
It’s safe to say – there are not many people on the planet that have the experience that Nigel has – after starting & selling multiple companies – he’s been around the block & back as a serial entrepreneur.
At Fanduel his experience includes raising $400mil+ in venture capital, competing with their closest rival, Draft Kings who raised over $1bil+, to investing hundreds of millions of dollars in customer acquisition on channels like TV, radio & paid digital.
In this revealing conversation, he opened up to share his perspective on:
- how to come up with business ideas in the first place
- raising venture capital vs bootstrapping
- how to accelerate paid customer acquisition & measure your marketing effectively
- building a high growth team
- the highs & lows of selling a company & lessons learned
- why founders & early employees might not always make a return from a sale because of preferred vs common stock
- creating a new market vs capturing an existing one
- why “going viral” isn’t a good strategy for paid products
- what to do if you’re a non-technical founder
- the process of taking an initial idea & evaluating its business potential
- applying the same logic to his new company, Flick, going after the podcast market
Subscribe to watch the episode on YouTube here).
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