Andrew Paradise and the business of one more game

Andrew Paradise learned to program at seven by hacking a video game with a hex editor. Before there was a company to run, there was a game to take apart. He later wrote a game in Pascal. It is a pleasingly practical childhood introduction to software: find something absorbing, then discover which numbers make it behave differently. The score was only part of the entertainment.

Years later, the habit was still visible. In 2017, his Bubble Shooter record stood at 3,363 wins. Skillz employees were expected to play at least 35 games a week; extra play could win a chance to choose Friday’s catered lunch. The office had found a way to put both product research and lunch under competitive management.

Today Paradise leads FIRY, the public company formerly called Skillz Inc. Skillz remains inside it, alongside advertising technology business RZR and game infrastructure platform Beamable. The scope has widened considerably. Yet the recurring interest is familiar: what happens around a game, who gets to compete, and who earns enough to keep building the next one.

A checkout line leads to a tournament

His education combined English literature at the University of Massachusetts with commerce and economics at the University of Auckland. Those subjects make an interesting pair for someone who would spend years explaining a new way to pay for entertainment. One studies how people tell stories. The other asks what they value enough to exchange.

Paradise began his professional career in private equity and venture capital, including work at The Watermill Group and Fort Washington Capital Partners. He moved into founding companies, building Double Picture in advertising technology before selling it to MPA. Mobile self-checkout company AisleBuyer followed. Its proposition was concrete: shoppers could use a phone to purchase goods without waiting through the conventional checkout process.

Intuit acquired AisleBuyer in 2012. That year, Paradise and fellow AisleBuyer executive Casey Chafkin founded Skillz. Their subject changed from shopping to playing, while the phone remained central. AisleBuyer had addressed the moment when a customer wanted to pay. Skillz would address the moment when a player wanted a contest.

The connection is useful for understanding his career. Paradise’s companies have repeatedly worked on the machinery around an activity: advertising, payment, competition. A game can have delightful art and satisfying controls, but somebody still has to arrange the match, manage the transaction and make the result trustworthy. That surrounding work became the business.

A place at the table for ordinary players

Skillz supplied developers with software for competitive play. A studio could add tournaments to its game and give players a route to compete for prizes. The company’s pitch brought the structure of organized competition to mobile games, including familiar forms such as solitaire and bingo. A player did not need a professional esports career to understand the invitation.

Paradise described the idea through comparisons with chess tournaments, road races and golf competitions: entrants fund an event, and performance determines the result. The appeal depends on the rules being intelligible. People can accept losing a fair contest. Asking them to pay for an experience they cannot trust is a much harder proposition.

In 2017, Skillz reached the top of the Inc. 5000 ranking. In December 2020, it became publicly traded through a SPAC merger. Those milestones put Paradise in a different arena, with public shareholders examining a business that had once needed to explain why a casual phone game could support a competitive economy.

The developer mattered as much as the player. Paradise’s early argument was that a studio should be able to earn money from competition around its work. That makes Skillz a business serving two sets of expectations at once: a player wants a worthwhile match; a developer wants an audience and a reason to keep making games.

Benjamin Franklin joins the management team

For a founder working in mobile esports, Paradise chose a rather analog adviser: Benjamin Franklin. In 2018, he explained that Franklin’s thirteen virtues had helped shape Skillz’s company values. He admired the printer, inventor and civic organizer as someone who understood delegation, networks and raising capital. Franklin, in this reading, would have recognized a management meeting.

Paradise’s adaptation included a blunt cultural rule: “no jerks allowed”. He also argued for employees to treat company money with the care they would give their own. The underlying demand was collaborative work with financial discipline, even when a business is surrounded by the excitement of fundraising and growth.

He described a similarly deliberate operating system in a 2019 interview: short planning cycles, daily standups and objectives with measurable results. The approach extended beyond engineers. Communications work could be planned in sprints, too. He gave an example in which the communications leader, rather than the CEO, decided whether he should accept an interview.

That example gives his account of delegation some texture. Authority has to accompany responsibility. Otherwise the person accountable for a result spends the day waiting for permission from the person above them. Even a company devoted to competition needs people who can finish a task without constantly returning to the referee.

“Honestly, the specific tools matter less than the mindset.”Andrew Paradise, on AI, July 2026

The rules become part of the product

Fairness has remained a persistent theme in Paradise’s public comments. In a 2024 interview, he argued for a broader movement against deceptive practices in gaming. His concern was that players needed to know they were taking part in meaningful competition. The person selling the contest also carries an obligation to make its promises hold.

That concern became commercially consequential in Skillz’s litigation against Papaya Gaming. In July 2026, a federal court entered a judgment of $719 million in disgorgement, plus approximately $10 million in fees and costs, after a false-advertising trial. FIRY subsequently reported that Papaya had sought a court-supervised payment arrangement in Israel and filed a Chapter 15 petition in Delaware.

A judgment and cash collected are different entries in a company’s story. FIRY said it would pursue its legal rights. For Paradise, the dispute also put his fairness argument under a brighter light: the credibility of a competition platform extends beyond its own interface to the market in which it operates.

His patent portfolio reflects the less theatrical side of that work. FIRY’s biography credits him with more than 90 issued patents spanning matchmaking, fraud detection, real-time competition and gaming infrastructure. Those are the backstage subjects. Players tend to notice them most when something goes wrong.

Three businesses, one developer

In June 2026, Skillz Inc. changed its corporate name to FIRY. The new ticker began trading on June 22. The three portfolio businesses retained their own identities: Skillz for real-money mobile competition, RZR for performance marketing, and Beamable for game backend and live operations.

The arrangement follows a developer through several jobs. RZR helps attract players. Beamable supplies services for running a live game. Skillz provides competition and related systems. The proposed advantage is that businesses serving the same customer can learn from one another. Whether that produces durable growth remains an operating question.

Paradise’s immediate interests also include artificial intelligence. In July 2026, he described using AI to test strategic ideas before discussing them with his team. FIRY has made AI fluency part of its hiring expectations. His emphasis was on how employees frame problems and direct the tools, alongside how quickly the work can be executed.

Financial results keep that ambition grounded. FIRY reported second-quarter revenue of $31 million and a net loss of $24.5 million in 2026. RZR passed $10 million in quarterly revenue and recorded its fourth consecutive profitable quarter. A growing part of the portfolio and a consolidated loss can coexist. Paradise has to manage both.

The next round is in Las Vegas

The company moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Las Vegas in 2023. Paradise has since talked about building a local technology workforce through student co-ops and stronger university connections. His plans include a closer relationship with UNLV and keeping talented graduates in the city. The ambition gives the corporate story a geographical address.

He has also described FIRY in terms of a hundred-year future. That is a generous time horizon for a business whose customers may decide within minutes whether a game deserves another session. It puts everyday execution beside an aspiration that no quarterly report can certify.

October 2026 brought more immediate arithmetic. FIRY sold its entire Exit Games stake back to that company for $55 million in cash, following a $50 million investment in 2021. On October 15, it completed redemption of the remaining $49.671 million of its secured notes. The transaction removed those outstanding notes before their December maturity.

These are quieter events than a stock-market debut. They concern proceeds received, principal repaid and room to make another decision. For a founder who began by changing a game’s code, the work now includes changing the financial conditions under which several businesses operate.

The childhood experiment and the holding company sit a long way apart. Between them are a checkout app, a co-founder who carried on to the next business, millions of contests, company rules borrowed from Franklin and a continuing argument about fair play. Paradise is still occupied with the conditions that make people willing to take another turn.