Blake Lawrence launched Opendorse — now the leading NIL marketplace — from his Nebraska dorm room with cofounder Adi Kunalic, nearly a decade before most people even knew what “NIL” meant.

Today, the platform supports more than 100,000 athletes and has facilitated close to a billion dollars in name, image, and likeness transactions — a scale once unimaginable.

“In North America, only about 5,000 pro athletes earn money through endorsements,” Lawrence tells Entrepreneur. This includes everything from social media promotions to commercials and billboards.

“Opendorse stepped in to give those athletes one platform to manage everything: who’s paying them, what they’re getting paid for, their deliverables, contracts, tax documents and compliance.”

Opendorse began in 2012 as a tool Lawrence built to help his former Nebraska football teammate, Prince Amukamara, manage endorsements after he reached the NFL. Lawrence and cofounder Adi Kunalic created an app to automate the process and, essentially, “help him get paid to tweet.”

It didn’t take long for reality to set in.

“When we onboarded Prince, I immediately got a call from his agent asking what we were doing,” Lawrence says. “I told him we were getting Prince paid to tweet, and he shut it down fast: ‘You can’t do that — that’s my client.'”

So Lawrence added an agent workflow. Then payments hit Amukamara’s account, and his financial manager called next, demanding documentation. After that, the NFLPA reached out. One by one, every stakeholder had a say.

At the time, it was exhausting. Looking back, Lawrence sees it differently.

“We were getting our asses kicked left and right by rules and policy changes early on,” he says. “We had to constantly tweak and adjust just to survive. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy — but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

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Half a million athletes. One very complicated marketplace.

When NIL entered college sports in 2021, Opendorse quickly shifted its focus to younger, less experienced athletes who needed more support — and represented a far larger market. There are roughly 500,000 college athletes, making the space 10 times bigger than the pro market.

“When you add college athletes, the scale changes dramatically,” Lawrence says. “But that size also brings added complexity.”

The platform functions the same for college and pro athletes, but the key difference is compliance. NCAA athletes face strict rules around what they can and can’t endorse — no tobacco, alcohol or betting brands, for example. And every deal must be disclosed and approved. These regulations are enforced at both the state and national levels through NCAA policies overseen by the College Sports Commission.

That is far from the only complexity involved with this multi-level marketplace, however.

Serial entrepreneur and self-described ‘industrial athlete’ Steve Denton joined Opendorse a few years in to help scale the business. He had no sports background beyond being a fan. Still, having lived through the early internet era as a businessman, he immediately saw parallels between that moment and the rise of NIL in college sports.

“From a monetization standpoint, the internet did around $400 million in ad sales in its third year,” Denton says. “NIL? $800 million. I’m not saying it’s the same thing, I’m just saying it’s off to a great start.”

When Denton met the cofounders, he saw a winning team with a good business and a lot of potential that just needed some help getting to the next level.

“I’m terrible at zero to $5 million,” Denton laughs. “But if you need to go from $5 million to $100, that’s where I’m comfortable.”

The biggest thing that stood out to Denton was the ridiculous TAM (total addressable market).

“I saw a platform that was moving hundreds of millions of dollars of payments, and was keeping 175,000 kids compliant,” he remarks. “I don’t know the last time you tried to get a hold of an 18-year-old for negotiations, but this certainly makes it a lot easier.”

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A war on two fronts

Opendorse operates on two fronts: the brand side and the athlete side.

On the brand side, the first challenge is helping companies figure out which athletes to work with. Denton calls Opendorse’s matching technology a “fish finder” — it surfaces the right athletes based on a brand’s audience, goals, budget, and safety guidelines.

Once a brand decides to move forward, Opendorse handles everything: sending offers, delivering contracts, outlining deliverables, managing taxes, securing approvals, ensuring the athlete completes the work and handling all NCAA and school reporting.

Since college athletes are balancing classes, practices, and games, they’re not full-time creators. Opendorse’s technology makes the whole process simple and manageable for them.

On the athlete side, Lawrence and his team focus on getting athletes onto the platform — a process that often involves on-campus visits and hands-on onboarding. These sessions walk athletes through downloading the app, setting up their profiles and learning how to present themselves professionally.

Lawrence compares it to building a résumé: why should a brand choose you out of hundreds of athletes on your campus? Schools play a role, too, overseeing deals to ensure compliance.

Plus, it’s a massive boon to participating schools.

“If you’re the first school in your conference to partner with Opendorse, you gain a real recruiting edge — you can tell prospects you’re the only program in the market with a top-tier NIL marketplace,” Lawrence says. “Schools need a partner like Opendorse to give athletes a simple, compliant way to access NIL deals, and that’s how we build the supply side of the platform.”

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Moguls and machetes

Lawrence and Denton complement each other well — one coming from the athlete world, the other from entrepreneurship.

“Blake has forgotten more about NIL than I could ever know,” Denton says. “I didn’t appreciate the complexity of it when I first joined.”

Lawrence feels the same way, calling Denton a mentor.

“As an entrepreneur, even with a cofounder, it’s like you’re in the jungle with a machete,” he says. “You’re hacking away, and at least someone’s next to you, but they don’t know where you’re going either.”

Denton, he says, is the seasoned guide — helping navigate the dense forest of compliance and regulation.

“I can’t say enough about what it means to have somebody who’s done it before and can help us take those steps,” he adds.

By the end of the decade, Opendorse aims to move $10 billion to college athletes. But day to day, the team isn’t fixated on the finish line — they’re focused on execution.

“We want to do really great work every day,” Denton says. “We have to, because the college economy has changed so much in just the last year. You’ve got the House settlement, salary caps, a third-party entity defining fair market value, and the people who made the rules now trying to rewrite them. Congress is being lobbied, payment companies want in — the entire ecosystem is shifting at once.”

Because of this, resilience is critical.

“It’s like skiing moguls,” Denton adds. “You need a strong core and flexible knees. And we’re definitely hitting some moguls right now.”