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FanDuel is going to do like $6B in revenue this year. This entire story above happened for three reasons: 1. The CEO made terrible decisions in regards to how
by exogeny 3y ago
FanDuel is going to do like $6B in revenue this year.
This entire story above happened for three reasons:
1. The CEO made terrible decisions in regards to how much and who they raised from. They got in over their hands as the company grew and the entire founding team got fired.
2. The CEO immediately after, who took over an unprofitable business that wasn't growing and was in bad shape after the merger with DraftKings got called off, took a deal that was the best he could do at the time. That CEO was a non-founding CFO before taking over, and was basically put in the C-Suite by KKR as a term of their investment in the business.
3. That deal to PaddyPowerBetfair, now Flutter, was completed about a year before PASPA was repealed and sports betting was legalized in the US. Had #2 happened a year later, or if #2 had happened with that information in mind, the deal terms would have been insanely different and way more valuable.
It's very easy in retrospect to say that the original CEO should have taken different terms, or that the following CEO should have taken a better deal. That's all hindsight.
All that said, I have zero sympathy for the original CEO and founders. I feel loads of sympathy for the employees, but again, if they stayed on after the deal, they're now sitting on an absolute gusher of cash.
- b112 3y agoYou know #3 is curious to me. I wonder what sort of optics the investors had on this, and if there were side deals after the forced sale.
- cellis 3y agoEasy to say they’re sitting on a gusher of cash that was bought with hundreds of millions of ZIRP dollars worth of ads and a time when fantasy everything was nascent. They were in an absolute dogfight with Draftkings and losing iirc. I’m sure things look rosy now but back then there wasn’t really any way to say if they’d win and that’s reflected in the terms they raised at.
- jmuguy 3y agoNot knowing anything about this my first thought was what the hell did they spend that investment on to justify it in the first place? Were they just in a user acquisition war with draft kings and spending a ton on ads?