The New York Times
By: Joe Drape

BOSTON — As with many start-ups, the idea was born from trivia that suddenly did not seem so useless — the statistics of professional athletes.

Even in his youth, Jason Robins was in touch with his inner Billy Beane, drafting and trading baseball players in fantasy sports leagues. He was a marketing professional at Vistaprint when he and two colleagues, who also had teams in numerous fantasy leagues, discovered an underdeveloped niche: daily fantasy sports websites, which let players put their Moneyball skills — and cash — up against others’ while compressing the grind of a season into a single day.

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