N
ot only has Lesley Eccles had a front-row seat to the meteoric rise of daily fantasy sports that has been one of the industry’s foremost stories of 2015, but she also is half of one of the leading husband-and-wife teams in the business.
One of FanDuel’s co-founders and the company’s executive vice president of marketing, Eccles has played a central role in making FanDuel a household name with sports fans, thanks in part to key partnerships with the NBA, a large group of NFL and NBA teams, and SiriusXM Radio, among others. Her active involvement in the earliest, often difficult, days of the company has given her a critical view into the challenges facing her husband, Nigel, FanDuel’s chief executive, and vice versa.
“If we hadn’t been in it together from the very beginning, we’d probably be divorced by now,”
Lesley Eccles
FanDuel | Co-founder;
Executive Vice President, Marketing
she said. “But we both know innately what the other is facing every day, and all of us founders have each had a clear role to play.”
FanDuel this summer closed on a $275 million Series E round of venture capital funding, designed in part to take the company and daily fantasy at large to even greater heights.
“People often say ‘Congratulations on the last year,’ and my thought is ‘Congratulations for what?’,” Eccles said. “Our work is not nearly done, and we have so much further to go. I think we’re only at the tip of the iceberg on making daily the default way to play fantasy. There is still a lot of consumer adoption to be had, and the world is going to look like a very different place in just a few months from now.”
— Eric Fisher
