When the New York Giants drafted Prince Amukamara in the first round of the 2011 NFL Draft, he had no idea how to secure endorsement deals or build a personal brand. But he had a hunch that his friend Blake Lawrence, a former teammate at the University of Nebraska, would be able to help. An early adopter of Twitter, Lawrence quit football in his junior year after suffering a series of concussions and launched a startup with another teammate, Adi Kunalic, to help small businesses grow their social media presence. They ran the company, called Hurrdat, from their dorm rooms, and were tweeting, blogging, and posting to Facebook on behalf of a handful of clients. 

“Blake took that competitive fire that he had on the field into the academic and business worlds,” says Amukamara. “He just had so much focus. I knew he was going to cook something. I just didn’t know what.” 

With Lawrence’s help, Amukamara gained thousands of Twitter followers during his rookie year in the NFL. Then, the Giants won the 2011 Super Bowl. Amukamara started attracting more and more offers from brands, so Lawrence built his friend an app to help him organize his deals and track his earnings. The app turned into a new venture that Lawrence and Kunalic launched in 2012 called Opendorse. Within four months, it was functioning as a marketplace, with professional athletes on one side and businesses looking for big names to endorse their products, appear at events, or act as spokespeople on the other. The company’s first client, Amukamara, persuaded teammates to sign up, and word slowly spread among other NFL players. 

Lawrence and Kunalic didn’t know it yet, but eventually their work with pro athletes would help pave the way for college athletes to earn money off their names, images, and likenesses—also known as NIL. But getting there would take years of hard work, and a little bit of luck.

From 2012 to 2014, Kunalic and Lawrence ran both of their companies, with Kunalic taking on most of the Hurrdat duties and Lawrence heading up Opendorse. They outgrew their small Lincoln, Nebraska office and moved into the basement of a Mexican restaurant, where they had to compete with the sound of the staff banging on the counter making tortillas. To explain the noise during calls, the co-founders said they were remodeling.

In August 2014, Lawrence and Kunalic sold Hurrdat to an Omaha-based marketing firm and devoted all of their time to Opendorse, where Lawrence took on the title of CEO and Kunalic COO. The company steadily persuaded pro athletes and brands to join its marketplace, but the pair found the process of working with NFL players frustrating. The startup would reach out with an opportunity from a brand and the player would need to loop in a whole team of people, including agents, marketing representatives, financial advisers, and family members. “It was stupid,” says Kunalic. “We were like, ‘This should not be the way.’”

The founders came up with a goal: To make signing off on an endorsement deal as simple as possible. They refined their clients’ contracts into a uniform set of documents and built a platform that allowed athletes to see brands’ offers and the proposed social media language. With the click of a button, agreements would be signed and social posts would be scheduled.

“They solved the problem of making sure the athlete gets it done at a certain time, and that kept the brands happy,” Amukamara says. “It suddenly became seamless.” 

Within a month of launching the new feature, Lawrence was flying to meet with the NFL Players Association and sign a deal for an official partnership. The deal attracted hundreds of other NFL players and gave Opendorse credibility with brands. Other major athlete unions soon followed, leading to deals with the players associations of Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL, the PGA, the LPGA, and the U.S. Olympic Team. Still, Opendorse had a volume issue. By 2018, it had 6,000 pro athletes on its platform, but there were only about 10,000 pro athletes in North America who could move the needle with brands. 

In 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom signed the Fair Pay to Play Act, allowing college athletes to make money off their NIL rights. A handful of other states followed with similar legislation. Then, in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA was violating antitrust laws by denying college athletes the ability to earn NIL income. A week later, the NCAA announced it would immediately stop enforcing the rules that prohibited student-athletes from making money from NIL deals. 

That meant game on for Opendorse. The company began calling universities offering to roll out the platform for their student-athletes. Most passed. “We were very early to the space—almost too early,” says Kunalic. “Some schools said, ‘We’re not getting involved. We can’t even believe you’re doing this.’” 

For college athletes, most of whom don’t have agents to vet offers and handle contracts, Opendorse brought a sense of structure to the Wild West that was the world of NIL. In just three months, Opendorse added nearly 50,000 college athletes to its platform. By the end of 2021, the company was handling more transactions per month than it had in the first five years of the company’s existence. It was a moment every founder dreams of, according to Lawrence: “A regulatory change that creates a billion-dollar market overnight and, in terms of being an experienced provider, you’re standing there alone.”

Opendorse co-founders Blake Lawrence (left) and Adi Kunalic. Photo: Nicholas Calcott

LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne has made $9.5 million in NIL deals during her college career, while industry tracker On3 estimates Duke basketball star Cooper Flagg’s yearly value at $4.8 million. Smaller transactions are far more common, however—a few hundred dollars for a tweet supporting a local sneaker shop or $1,000 for an Instagram post hawking a protein powder. For most, the money means car payments, savings, or plenty of beer money. 

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