FanDuel co-founder and former CEO Nigel Eccles; and co-founder Rob Jones are leaving the world of daily fantasy sports for an esports streaming startup called Flick. Jones and Eccles are the last of FanDuel’s original five co-founders to leave the company.
Jones’ departure from the daily fantasy sports giant came as something of a surprise to industry watchers as it was buried in the scrum of end-of-year news and events. In an interview with Sunday Herald in Scotland, Flick is based in Edinborough, Jones talked of his decision to leave FanDuel saying:
I decided to leave before Christmas after seeing Nigel and all the other co-founders leaving too. The question for me was do I build something myself or with one of the others. I was hoping to take some time off but then Nigel approached me and said he wanted to build something in Edinburgh.
With all of the co-founders out of the business, FanDuel is now being run by private equity backers.
Jones and Eccles are leaving daily fantasy sports for esports, a market that’s similar, but still quite different than what they’re used to, a fact Jones alluded to recently saying:
The first time round with FanDuel, the market we were looking at – daily fantasy sports – was relatively small. This time we’re going for an extremely large market – eSports – and we want to make something that is more social.
Flick is billing itself as a “social streaming platform” which, this case, means that end-users can log on to the site, pay a small fee, and watch esports players in action. As of this writing, Flick is still raising funding and hiring engineers to get its product off the ground. No launch date for Flick has been announced.