From a Spreadsheet to FanDuel: Lessons on Building, Pivoting, and Scaling as a Founder

At a recent Enrich Founders Series conversation, founders and aspiring founders came together to bring pressing questions to the group, exchange feedback, and learn from one another. 

This session featured Tom Griffiths, CEO and co-founder of Hone and co-founder of FanDuel, who drew from his journey across three startups to share lessons on finding product-market fit, building the right team, hiring early employees, listening to customers, and knowing when to pivot or keep going.

Here are a few of the lessons Tom shared with the group.

1. Test the idea before you perfect the product.

One of Tom's earliest startups spent roughly a year building a social network for groups. The team kept delaying launch because there was always one more feature that could make the product better.

By the time they launched, they had built what Tom described as a “Frankenstein product”—lots of features, but little evidence that anyone actually wanted it.

He took the opposite approach with the idea that became FanDuel.

Instead of building a platform, the team tested daily fantasy sports with a spreadsheet, Craigslist, and PayPal. That basic experiment made more money in one month than their previous product had in years. 

The lesson: Get the smallest possible version of your idea in front of customers. You don't need a polished product to find out whether there's real demand.

These days, AI allows early versions to be much higher quality, but the value prop still needs to be tested - just because you can build something doesn’t mean you should.

2. Pay attention to where customers are already pulling you.

FanDuel wasn't the original business.

Tom and his co-founders had built a play-money prediction market with roughly 50,000 users in 2007, but it wasn't monetizing and they were running out of money.

Then they noticed something: sports was consistently the most active category.

That signal led them to experiment with daily fantasy sports, and ultimately to build FanDuel.

The lesson: When something isn't working, don't just push harder on the original idea. Look for where customers are already showing unusual engagement or willingness to pay. Your pivot may already be hiding inside your product.

3. Listen to customers—even when you think you know the market.

Five Brits building an American fantasy sports company didn't exactly have an obvious competitive advantage.

But their lack of expertise forced them to listen.

While competitors who were avid fantasy players often built products around their own preferences, the FanDuel team took a more analytical approach to understanding what mainstream customers actually wanted.

The lesson: Expertise is valuable, but it can also create assumptions. Stay curious enough to let customer behavior challenge what you think you know.

4. Choose co-founders who align on values but differ in skills.

FanDuel had five co-founders—unusual, but effective because their roles were complementary.

The team brought different strengths across leadership, product, engineering, design, and marketing, with a clear CEO and distinct lanes.

Tom took a similar approach when founding Hone. His product and engineering background complemented co-founder Savina Perez's B2B sales and marketing experience.

The lesson: Look for alignment on character, mission, grit, and ambition — but differences in what each founder brings to the table. You don't need another version of yourself.

5. Hire for where the company is going. Not the résumé in front of you.

Before opening a role, Tom starts with a more fundamental question:

Do we actually need another person?

Could AI do the work? Could someone already on the team own it? If a hire is necessary, what does success look like in 90 days, six months, and a year?

When evaluating candidates, Tom prioritizes people who are smart, get things done, and believe in the mission and culture before focusing on experience and skills.

He's learned that the most experienced person isn't always the best hire. Especially at an early-stage company. Someone hungry to stretch into the role can outperform someone who's already done it several times.

The lesson: Hire for aptitude, adaptability, ownership, and hunger. Today's job description may be outdated six months from now.

6. Your first employees aren't just accepting a job. They're betting on you.

Tom sees early-stage recruiting as having 80% overlap with fundraising.

At that stage, the product might change. The strategy might change. Even the market might change.

The founder is one of the few constants.

That means recruiting can't be purely rational. Yes, candidates need to understand the market and opportunity, but they also need to believe in the mission, the founder, and the role they can play in building something.

Tom recommends defining a mission for every role: what will this person own, what impact can they have, and who could they become by joining the company at this stage?

The lesson: Don't just sell the company. Show great candidates why taking the risk could become an important chapter in their story.

7. Define your culture before growth defines it for you.

At FanDuel, culture initially spread through proximity to the five founders.

That worked until the company grew large enough that new employees were being hired by people who had only recently joined themselves. Tom felt the culture begin to drift.

So at Hone, the founders defined the culture from day one around five Cs: Character, Customer, Competence, Camaraderie, and Compassion.

Those principles became part of both hiring and performance management.

The lesson: Culture can spread through osmosis when you're 10 people. It can't when you're 100. Decide what you want to preserve before growth forces the decision for you.

8. Find the intersection of mission and market.

Building FanDuel gave Tom the experience of scaling an extraordinary company and helped clarify what he wanted to build next.

Tom had studied AI and had long been interested in education. His experience growing FanDuel also gave him a firsthand appreciation for how important leadership and people development become as companies scale. Those interests eventually came together in Hone, a leadership development platform closely aligned with the impact he wanted to make.

That journey also reinforced another lesson: a strong mission and a strong market both matter. Different industries come with different dynamics, opportunities, and paths to growth, and founders need to understand both the problem they care about and the market they're entering.

The lesson: Look for the intersection of a problem you genuinely care about and a market where you can build something valuable. The strongest opportunities give you both a reason to keep going and room to grow.

9. Don't overcomplicate product strategy.

After years of building companies, Tom's product advice comes back to something surprisingly simple:

Talk to customers. Listen deeply. Ship what they value. Repeat.

Frameworks, prioritization systems, and analytics all have their place. But they can also create distance between a company and the people it's building for.

Tom focuses particularly on the best customers in the ICP: How are they using the product? What language do they use? What surprises you about what they value?

Founder vision still matters. Customers can't always tell you what hasn't been invented yet. But vision shouldn't become an excuse to stop listening.

The lesson: Stay close to your best customers, ship quickly, simplify what isn't working, and leave room for a few bets driven by your own conviction.

10. The founder journey doesn't get easier. You learn how to sustain it.

Tom doesn't describe founder life as “work-life balance.” He thinks of it more as integration.

In his twenties, that meant learning the hard way that working constantly wasn't sustainable. Today, even with more experience and a young family, there are still more problems than hours in the day.

What's changed is being more intentional about recovery: protecting a day off, delegating before stepping away, and creating boundaries that allow the company to operate without him.

There's also the example a founder sets for everyone else.

The lesson: Don't wait for the magical stage when the work becomes manageable. Build recovery into the way you operate and remember that your team will follow what you model, not just what you say.

The through line: Notice what’s working. Learn from what isn’t. Keep evolving.

Tom's founder journey hasn't followed one playbook. He has let each chapter inform and shape the next. 

An early startup taught him the value of getting ideas in front of customers sooner. He carried that lesson into FanDuel, testing the concept with a simple spreadsheet before investing in the full product.

Building and scaling FanDuel brought another realization: Tom saw firsthand how important great leadership and people development become as organizations grow. That experience connected with his longstanding interests in AI and education and ultimately helped inspire Hone—a leadership development platform much more closely aligned with the impact he wanted to make.

The lesson: Every chapter gives you something to carry forward. The experiences, insights, and even unexpected turns along the way can bring you closer to the company and mission you’re meant to build.

Want to learn directly from leaders who’ve been there—and bring your own questions to the conversation? Don’t just read the takeaways. Be part of the next conversation. Apply to join Enrich.