Tom Griffiths
Age: 33
Company: FanDuel
Title: Co-founder and chief product officer
Where born: Liverpool, England
Education: University of Cambridge (MA-Hons, computer science), University of Edinburgh (MSc, Informatics)
Favorite way to unwind: Working out.
Causes supported: Children International, The Nature Conservancy, NYCares.org.
Most thrilling/adventurous thing I've ever done: Bungee jump into a New Zealand river.
Person in the industry I'd most like to meet: Adam Silver.
If I could change jobs with anyone for a day, it would be: Larry Page of Google, because of the reach and impact his company has every day.
2015 will be a good year if: The New York Giants make the playoffs, the Knicks get a new roster, and FanDuel grows 4x again.
My fellow Forty Under 40 class members would be surprised to know that I: Was the only Knicks fan in my tiny hometown in Wales in the mid-90s.
ALEX FRADKIN / FANDUEL
s the largest operator in daily fantasy sports, FanDuel now exists as a household industry name. But Tom Griffiths, the company’s co-founder and chief product officer who’s been with the company since 2007, remembers many years when that was anything but true. As recently as two years ago, FanDuel had barely 40,000 paid active users.
{podcast}
SBJ Podcast:
Forty Under 40 editor Mark Mensheha and Executive Editor Abraham Madkour discuss this year's class, some of the more interesting stories in it and how the selection process works.
Fast forward to today. FanDuel has mushroomed to more than 1 million paid actives; it holds a series of top-tier team and league partnerships, including ones with the NBA and seven individual NBA teams; and it closed last summer on a $70 million funding round involving NBC Sports Ventures, Comcast and several other prime investors.
Griffiths, who grew up in Wales and has dabbled in several other technology startups, describes last year as a “perfect storm.”
“I didn’t expect it to explode like it did, honestly, but all the pieces aligned to make it a breakout year,” he said. “The timing was just right. We raised additional capital, got ourselves in some places we needed to be, and were able to convey the appeal of daily fantasy to a much wider audience.”
All of daily fantasy currently makes up just 4 percent of the total fantasy sports industry in the United States and Canada, but Griffiths does not expect that to remain true for long.
“We ultimately believe daily could be as big or bigger than regular fantasy,” he said.
— Eric Fisher
