Grew up in a small town and had to work extra hard to get my foot in the door working on cool tech startups. My first job at age 15 was fixing iPhone screens in the mall. Then I scooped ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery and bussed tables at a local airport restaurant to pay for college. 

After football practice in high school I'd be learning how to code on CodeAcademy. People thought I was a nerd. 

Fast forward 10 years -- I've built multiple apps, b2b SaaS, internet businesses, websites, and e-commerce businesses that have generated over $100m collectively. 

I got to work remotely, travel to 12+ countries, invest in real estate and stocks and built a fruitful living for myself. 

Learning how to build apps changed my life. Now I’m on a mission to teach 10,000 people how to build apps.

Alim Charaniya

In 2019, I joined PrizePicks as employee #19, Head Mobile Engineer, when the app only had 5000 users.

This weekend, we celebrated PrizePicks acquisition by Allwyn for a mind boggling $2.5 (potentially $4.15) BILLION DOLLARS!!! 

Ready for the story? Let’s go!

At the time I joined, we were regrowing through a hyper-scale phase — and there were no sports on TV.

Post-COVID, my parents thought I was crazy for joining a sports startup when the entire sports world had shut down.

But my little brother and I played $50 worth of PrizePicks… and immediately hit our first entry for a $150 profit.

That was the moment I knew: this thing was going to be big..

I still remember the call with Jay Deuskar  and Adam Wexler :

“Can you rebuild the entire PrizePicks mobile app in 10 weeks before football season?”

I said, “You bet I will.”

For the next 10 weeks, I worked 14-hour days rebuilding the entire mobile app from the ground up. At the time, we had about 2,000 weekly active users, and the business was staying alive through esports action.

We rebuilt:
• The entire onboarding flow
• The monetization engine
• The core mobile experience

The app only had 20 screens.

20 screens.

But those 20 screens powered the next $100M+ in revenue while I was hands on the app, every single day. 

I was watching thousands of users join PrizePicks every day, and our payment processor blasting, via an app that I built with Ziyan Prasla and Adam Blaschke  

From there, it was an absolute movie. A rollercoaster. Every month the chart just went up and to the right.

But what people don’t see are the downturns.

The stress.
The uncertainty.
The moments we could have sold.
The moments we didn’t know how much bigger this could get.

Adam Wexler  is one of the most relentless founders I’ve ever met. A visionary with ruthless conviction over the product. There were many times we could have exited early — but Adam always believed the TAM was bigger than anyone realized.

And he was right.

Over three years, we scaled from a scrappy team of 19 to 300+ employees. I eventually departed when the company had grown beyond the stage where I thrive most.

But that ride changed my life.

It changed my family’s life.

It rooted me in Atlanta — a vibrant, business-forward city where I plan to build for years to come.

I’ve met incredible investors.
Made lifelong friends.
And still to this day, people don’t believe me when I say I rebuilt the PrizePicks app.

I’ll wear PrizePicks on my chest for the rest of my life.

Before signing off, I need to thank:

My mom, my dad, my little brother, and my fiancée — for believing in me when the cash salary wasn’t glamorous and the bet felt risky.

Shoutout to Andrew Steinberg , Aaron Holland , and Robert S Beadle  for making the introduction when I needed a change after my first startup.

And most importantly, thank you to Adam Wexler  and Jay Deuskar  for taking a bet on me.

Shoutout PrizePicks.
Shoutout Atlanta.

On to building the next one. 🚀

Founder, CloserCoach.ai | Scaling Sales Teams With AI | Ex-PrizePicks Early Engineer

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Technical leader and serial founder with a proven track record of scaling orgs, architecting resilient systems, and delivering outcomes across AI, fintech, and edtech.

Having built multiple startups. I bring a rare blend of technical depth and business acumen. As someone who’s owned P&L and led engineering, I build for impact, not complexity. My strength lies in aligning tech with business goals, shipping robust products, and knowing when to optimize for speed vs. scale.

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