Andrew Paradise

Early life and education

Paradise was born on April 10, 1982 in Acton, Massachusetts. He learned to program at age 7 by hacking a video game with a hex editor and later wrote his first game in Pascal. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, summa cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his Bachelor of Commerce in Economics from University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Career

In 2008, Paradise founded Photrade, a web 2.0 digital media and advertising company. While at Photrade, Paradise created patent-pending advertising technologies, forged business development partnerships with companies such as Apple, and led the eventual sale of Photrade to publicly traded, MPA, Inc.

In 2010, Paradise founded AisleBuyer, a virtual shopping assistant that lets retail customers bypass checkout lines by paying on their mobile phone. He invented a technology which allows shoppers to scan a bar code, allowing them to read product details and customer reviews and then make a purchase on the spot – either in-store by skipping the line or online by opting for home delivery. Shoppers could also browse a retailer’s entire product catalog from within the app. Paradise sold the company to Intuit, the maker of Quickbooks and GoPayment, for a reported price of up to $100 Million in April 2012.

In 2012, Paradise, along with fellow AisleBuyer veteran Casey Chafkin, founded Skillz in stealth mode under the name Lookout Gaming. Skillz provides an SDK for mobile games developers that allows users to compete against each other for real money or virtual currency. In May 2014, Skillz reported hosting 50,000 micro-tournaments everyday across 150 different games. Founders Casey Chafkin and Andrew Paradise are trying to democratize eSports by enabling eSport competitions for all players.