This article was published on September 3, 2013

Fantasy Football with startups – let’s make it happen


Fantasy Football with startups – let’s make it happen

As the UK’s football transfer window closed earlier, two things dawned on me:

  1. It’s funny that massive Premier League clubs do multi-million pound deals using fax machines in 2013.
  2. As someone who doesn’t enjoy football (or soccer, if you prefer), I’d like a little of the excitement of transfer deadline day brought to my life.

So, how about fantasy football for tech companies? Here’s how it could work…

Select a co-founding team made up of a CEO, CTO and CFO (or if you want to be trendy, Chief Design Officer) from the real world, give your startup a silly name and you’re off!

You’d earn points based on the real-world performance of your startup’s co-founders. +500 if their company gets acquired, +1,000 points if they have a successful IPO, +50 points if they finally launch an Android app, -200 if they have a user data privacy scandal, -500 if they go out of business etc., etc.

Now, I know that this would be difficult to score accurately. Unlike with football, there are few absolutely quantifiable metrics that you can score a startup against, but finer minds than mine have come up with enjoyable games that boast complicated rules – just look at Mornington Crescent. There must be a scoring method that would work.

Personally, my fantasy startup would be BarnPals, a ‘TaskRabbit for livestock’ that would feature TaskRabbit’s Leah Busque as CEO (for obvious reasons), Eventbrite’s Renaud Visage as CTO (because he has the coolest-looking name in tech and I’d enjoy seeing it on my staff roster) and Twitter’s Mike Gupta as CFO because, well, Twitter’s expected to announce its IPO in the next few months.

Two questions:

  1. How do we sort out scoring for a game like this?
  2. Who would be in your fantasy startup, and what would it be called?

(and thanks to Gabrielle and Nathan who turned my whimsical musings about a tech blog staff transfer window and a Yahoo startup acquisition window into something a bit more practical)

Image credit: DIDIER PALAGES/AFP/Getty Images

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