Today we launched Pikum!.
It was a quiet affair. No press release was issued, no launch event was held, no champagne bottles were uncorked. No, it's not that we don't know how to throw a party - all that will follow soon. For now, we chose to go live in private (invite only) Beta. As Sean points out in his earlier post, there are still some minor product issues to be ironed out, and the team continues to work hard on these. But our core processes (registering, deposting, playing, creating, scoring, withdrawing) are all stable (for the most part), and the appx. 100 people who signed up in the first few hours have already started to have some fun with Pikum! (I am afraid to say, Bayern Munich's loss to St. Petersburg was a major embarassment to me, and I did really poorly in my first hosted Pikum).
But actually, I thought Day 1 would be a lot worse, and I am pleasantly surprised by how smoothly things have gone.
It feels great to finally be live after more than a year of engineering, planning, complex legal and structural maneuvering, fundraising, licensing, etc. - seriously, if we had known how challenging it is to launch a brand new betting company in a heavily regulated industry, we might never have embarked on the journey. But here we are.
The scope of this launch is limited in several ways.
1) We are only allowing real-money play in the U.K. (other markets may follow, provided we can clear the regulatory and legal hurdles). Anyone anywhere can play for Pikles (delicious!) of course, but sorry, hard cash can only be transacted on U.K. soil for now.
2) We only cover soccer/football and rugby for now (Formula One, Cricket, the big U.S. sports, and even some early non-sports verticals will follow over the summer).
3) We only have a limited number of celebrity hosts (but the ones we have are great - Richard Branson and Helen Chamberlain), and
4) Right now there's only a fairly small inventory of Pikums.
But the idea of Pikum! has never been to push content on our audience in old-media / old-betting style. Pikum! is about democratization and socialization of entertainment through user-generated betting, and the Company's primary role is to provide all the sportsnuts out there the best possible platform to create and play the most fun prediction games available anywhere. We believe, based on the early reaction we got in Alpha and the market research we have done, that our game, while new, is extremely entertaining, competitive, and viral to the max. Based on that, we believe we will see significant uptake and repeat play, and the U.K. is the battleground we have chosen for conducting this experiment. We will see how it goes.
As the first day of Pikum!'s newly live status draws to a close, I am extremely proud of our small, yet global team. The 20 or so of us who make up Pikum! coped well with the challenges associated with building a truly multinational startup from scratch: how Logan and the tech team spread across three difft timezones manages to deal with all the time-difference issues and resulting sleep deprivation is beyond me; the various hurdles we had to climb on the legal and regulatory front seemed unsurmountable at times (we are now operating a fully licensed and completely legal online betting business, which for many months seemed an unachievable goal given our roots in the U.S.); the lack of funding when Series Seed funds were running dry and Series A money had not yet come in was a little scary for some of us; the sucky Skype conference calls across the globe at ungodly hours of the day/night drove us nuts; the unbelievably small, expensive and insufficient office space in London at times seemed to suffocate Per, Araz and Sean's marketing savvy; and the few delays we have had along the line annoyed us beyond belief. But despite these now forgotten challenges, the team developed a real passion for what we are trying to do with Pikum! along the way, and while our mission may not be as important as finding a cure for cancer or enabling mankind's journey into space (Sir R and the guys at Virgin Galactic are working on the latter, though 
), the whole team feels we are contributing our part by providing real innovation by virtue of a superior customer experience in an industry that has not seen real change in years. So my hat is off to our team and its accomplishments.
Thanks for your interest, and pls stay tuned for more updates.