He Built a Company Worth Up to $4.15 Billion Without Taking VC Money — Now He’s Funding Music Discovery
Adam Wexler played fantasy football since seventh grade, built his first company out of a dorm room at the University of Georgia, and launched a music discovery platform called Go Rankem before pivoting into B2B SaaS with clients like Holiday Inn, IHG, Home Depot, UPS, and Coca-Cola — all before he ever touched daily fantasy sports.
In 2015, he incorporated Side Prize. When the fantasy sports market collapsed under regulatory pressure that same year, he rebuilt from a shoestring budget and relaunched in 2017 as PrizePicks — built on a “stupid simple” premise: get sports fans in and out of the app in under 60 seconds. He ran it as CEO for a decade and scaled it into the largest daily fantasy sports platform in North America.
In 2025, Allwyn International agreed to pay $1.6 billion in cash for a majority stake in PrizePicks, an initial implied valuation of $2.5 billion — with performance-based payouts that could push the total implied value as high as $4.15 billion by 2029. No massive dilution, no board full of VCs steering the exit. Just a company built to be worth that much on its own terms, without ever raising venture capital.
Rather than ride off into retirement, Wexler went back to where he started: music. He’s now CEO of The Hidden Jams, a nonprofit platform funded by $5 million of his own money that crowdsources deep cuts and hidden gems from artist catalogs — a completely different world from daily fantasy sports, but built with the same instinct for finding overlooked value before everyone else sees it.
There’s a real lesson in the sequencing here. He didn’t need outside money to prove the first business worked. That gave him the freedom to decide what came next on his own terms, not an investor’s exit timeline.
Adam walks through the PrizePicks build and why he’s now investing in music discovery on this episode of Starting Small.
Listen to the full conversation with Adam Wexler on Apple Podcasts