fantasy-sports
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Dream Sports Lost Its Cash Engine. Now It Wants the Rest of the Fan's Day
The company that taught millions of Indians to manage imaginary cricket teams is attempting a harder rebuild: turning one enormous audience into many smaller businesses without the paid contests that once funded the machine.
TJ Ross
TJ Ross is the co-founder and co-CEO of Splash Sports, a peer-to-peer sports gaming platform he built with Joel Milton by acquiring and merging established brands like RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool into a single home for survivor pools, pick'em, one & done and tiers contests. The platform now serves more than two million players and 80,000 commissioners. A Bay Area native who grew up with sports at the center of family life, Ross studied finance and entrepreneurship at USC before working in technology investment banking at Raymond James and Houlihan Lokey, founding the maker marketplace 43Layers, and leading strategic partnerships at STRV. He describes his work as building products that gather people around shared passions, and treats community, authenticity and enjoying the journey as the real measures of success.
Splash Sports
Splash Sports is a Denver-based skill-based sports gaming platform that modernizes the office pool. Fans act as their own commissioners, creating and joining peer-to-peer real-money contests - Survivor, Pick'em, Tiers, and daily fantasy - across NFL, golf, and other sports. Built on the acquired RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool audiences, Splash serves more than 2 million active users across 44 U.S. states and Canada, and in 2026 partnered with Polymarket to run the largest pro football survivor contest ever, with $21 million guaranteed.
FTN (For The Numbers)
FTN - short for For The Numbers - is a Las Vegas-based sports data and media company that turns advanced NFL, MLB and NBA numbers into fantasy and betting tools. Launched in 2020 (when the only live sport was Korean baseball), it now runs a network of subscription sites for season-long fantasy, daily fantasy, and sports betting, publishes articles, podcasts and livestreams, and is the new home of Aaron Schatz's DVOA metric after Football Outsiders closed. It serves both consumers who want an edge in their leagues and B2B clients who license its proprietary data.
Perry Gershon
Perry Gershon is the CEO of FTN (For The Numbers) Network, the fantasy-sports, sports-betting and DVOA data company he bought into and now leads. A Yale-trained molecular biophysicist who spent 25 years as a heavyweight commercial real estate lender, he opened one of New York City's first sports bars in 1987, then walked away from finance to run twice for Congress in New York's 1st District. In late 2023 he took the helm of FTN and led a $3M seed round, betting that the numbers behind sports are a business as much as a pastime.
Sleeper
Sleeper is a social-first fantasy sports and gaming platform that lets friends draft, trade, chat, and compete across the NFL, NBA, soccer, esports and more, all inside one mobile app. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Las Vegas, Sleeper grew to millions of active users with zero ad spend by treating fantasy sports as a place to hang out with friends rather than a transactional web tool. It has since expanded into daily fantasy 'Picks' and prediction markets.
Nan Wang
Nan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Sleeper, the fantasy sports platform built like a group chat that grew to millions of daily users almost entirely by word of mouth. He left a private equity career in Hong Kong to build a sports product that is social at its core, turning a 20-year fantasy league among childhood friends into a company backed by a16z, General Catalyst, and athletes like Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. Under Wang, Sleeper expanded from fantasy football into the NBA and fantasy esports, drawing an unusually large share of women and casual fans to a category long dominated by ESPN and Yahoo.
PredictionStrike
PredictionStrike is a sports stock market where fans buy and sell shares of professional athletes with real cash. Share prices rise and fall based on how athletes perform against their fantasy projections plus supply and demand. Founded in 2019 by childhood friends Deven Hurt and Brad Chabra, the New York company has raised roughly $16M, counts 275,000+ registered users, and has processed over $140M in lifetime transaction volume across football, basketball, soccer, baseball, hockey, and MMA.
Deven Hurt
Deven Hurt is the co-founder and CEO of PredictionStrike, a New York based platform he calls a stock market for sports fans, where users buy and sell virtual shares of NBA and NFL players whose prices move on real on-field performance. A Harvard College bioengineer turned Harvard Law graduate, he ran cybersecurity work touching Nike and the NBA before building the company with best friend Brad Chabra in 2018. He raised a $10M Series A led by Bullpen Capital, grew the platform past 200,000 users and $100M in transactions, and reached per-user profitability in late 2024.