The Skillz to Conquer Inside this year’s fastest-growing company
ANDREW PARADISE and CASEY CHAFKIN Skillz → Three-year growth 50,058.9% → 2016 revenue $54.2 million
YOU WON’T WORK at Skillz unless you commit to something that could get you fired almost anyplace else: playing lots of video games on your phone. At your desk or after hours, Skillz doesn’t care, as long as you play at least 35 times per week. Play 50 times and you’re entered into a raffle to choose the menu for Friday’s catered office lunch. Play 500 times week after week, like Don Kim, a recent Harvard grad on the Skillz developer partnership team, and a co-worker will gush, “Oh, my god. He’s a beast!”
Andrew Paradise, Skillz’s twitchy, 35-year-old CEO, never struggles to hit his quota. He was weaned on MUDs (multiuser dungeons, a kind of old-school text-based computer game). As a kid, he’d lug his desktop and monitor to a neighbor’s house that had three phone lines, where he and his pals would dial in together and trash-talk one another across the room while they played. These days, he’s into Cube Cube, one of the thousands of games on Skillz’s platform. For a brief and shining moment in early 2015, he was among the best in the world at Bubble Shooter.
