Sports Loft Podcast

As far as strategic investors goes, having a direct line into tech giants Microsoft and four-time Superbowl winners the Green Bay Packers is a pretty good starting point! In our latest issue of the Sports Loft podcast, Cordero Barkley, Partner at TitleTown Tech, shares his story from college athlete to early stage VC, and how as a firm TitleTown Tech are supporting the growth of their portfolio companies, including our very own Slate.

Cordero also gives us a sneak peek to where their focus will lie for their second fund, including which aspects of NFTs and the metaverse look post appealing for investment.

Our favourite quotes:

“Leveraging the connectivity that we have in marketplace…, that's one of the perks of having the Packers and Microsoft, you can really get connected to anyone in the world and pick up the phone to call someone to say hey, we have a company that fits your thesis would love for you to take a look at it.”

“The founders are taking all this risk, they’ve been told no 300 times, and here they are still fired up, talking to me. That’s so fun to me to watch - I always say the founders are some of the most courageous people we ever deal with.”

“As a former athlete myself, the competitive nature of identifying talent, finding the right deals to get into, being able to carve out a niche that fits your thesis - it's something that makes the job very fun and it gives you kind of that feel of being in the game again”

The sports media landscape is evolving rapidly, and navigating and understanding that evolution can at times be tricky. With the likes of TikTok driving a push to short form content, but Netflix demonstrating clear demand for binge-worthy episodic series, how should rightsholders be deploying their time and resource to deliver value to fans and partners?

In this episode of the Sports Loft podcast, we are joined by ATP Media's Chief Strategy Officer Nick Bourne as he takes us through his journey as commercial lead at sports media disrupter Copa90 to his position at one of the biggest rightsholders in the industry. He shares his perspective on how the industry should be approaching its content strategy today. Throughout this journey, Nick has brought an outsider’s perspective to the industry, whether through driving a disruptive brand and new content formats at Copa90 or bringing different approaches to the tennis world.

The Atlanta Hawks’ State Farm arena has been ranked as the best NBA Game experience in both 2019 and 2020. With the focus on the game experience in the NBA and heightened consumer expectations, that’s no mean feat – especially when, in the first year they won they award, the team wasn’t doing well: “When the team’s winning, the beer is colder and the hotdogs are warmer.”

So for teams, how can you deliver a better experience for the fans across all aspects of their experience – from before the game, at the venue and after the venue. How do you help them get the information that they need to ensure that they have the best experience? How do teams compete against other ways that people can spend their time?

In this episode, Yanni spoke to Donny White, CEO at Satisfi Labs and David Garcia, Senior Vice President, Experience & Innovation at Atlanta Hawks. They discussed the approach that led the Hawks to be ranked as the #1 gameday experience in the NBA, what David has been able to bring from his background with Amazon and Disney into the NBA and how the data captured by Satisfi’s AI assistant is informing changes to the fan experience at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.

Quotes from this episode:

David - “When fans rate their experience at a game, it’s tied to the amount of information they have before they arrive and the expectations that they come in with. For example, the bag policy doesn’t change from one guest to the next. But the guests that knows you can’t bring a bag will have a better experience than the guest that didn’t know and shows up and has to deal with that.”

It used to be that all the most exciting marketing happened in the B2C space - those were the campaigns that won awards and got featured in industry press. The B2B marketeers were solid, reliable but not that interesting. Not any longer. A world of always-on consumers has forced B2B brands to totally re-think how they talk with their consumer. The B2B tech buyer is the same person who is buying the Vans trainers and subscribing to Netflix. They want personalisation, content relevant to their interests and businesses who share their values. B2B marketeers have had to up their game.

For early stage companies, this is a challenge. How do you deliver the quality of marketing and content across multiple channels with limited resource and budget? How do you build a consistent message when the product is evolving so fast? But equally, in the early days of a startups’ journey, companies are focused on understanding their customer’s needs and building an initial product that they can sell - do they really need a brand at that stage? As they acquire more customers and the product becomes increasingly defined, that’s when the company’s brand – as Jeff Bezos put it, “What other people say about you when you are not in the room” – becomes increasingly important.

In the latest Sports Loft podcast we are joined by the Chief Marketing Officers of FEVO and Greenfly, Betty Tran and Tom Kuhr respectively. They discuss why a brand is important to achieve scale, how their brands are constantly evolving and how building a brand plays into fundraising conversations.

Sports fans have got so many channels that they might subscribe to – and in many cases they are driven by which channel has the rights to whatever they want to watch. However, the experience of watching a game is varying more and more between broadcasters as the channels seek to differentiate themselves – whether it’s through cameras, commentators, interactivity, graphics or studio presentation.

Consequently, the need to innovate (and sometimes innovation for the sake of doing something different) becomes more important for content owners. How can the broadcasters get the fans to watch just a bit longer? How can they provide the fans with a differentiated experience that enables them to have their voice heard or to access more complementary content on their phone? How is interactivity changing the presentation of the broadcast? How do they have to compete (or compliment?) the teams, leagues and athletes who are becoming content producers in their own right? How is on-screen talent being evaluated - is it now as much about the community that they can bring?

In the latest Sports Loft podcast, we are joined by Michael Bucklin, Vice President of Digital Content at Fox Sports, who leads the development of content to complement Fox’s rights portfolio such as the Super Bowl and FIFA World Cup, as well as studio shows such as Fox NFL Sunday. We are also joined by Tagboard’s President Nathan Peterson, whose clients include content owners such as Fox Sports, NBC, NFL Media and MLB. 

When we meet with the founder of a prospective Sports Loft company, we are very focused on product – what exactly is it that you’re building? Who has the problem that you are solving? Why is your product better than the alternatives out there? What have you done to make your product as simple to use as possible? How are people using your product? Are users returning? Will anybody buy it?

This product focus is vital in the world of sports, media and entertainment. Why is the fan going to choose this product over all the other options they have? How can the product be applied to the workflows of a major event or the constant “always-on” of a league season? What can teams, leagues or sponsors achieve with this product that they couldn’t do before?

In this podcast, we are joined by Slate’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Horton whose clients include teams across every major US league, the Premier League and major sponsors, and Tagboard’s President Nathan Peterson whose clients include the likes of Fox Sports, NBC, Turner and NFL Media. They discuss what they have learnt from building tech products for the sports and media industry, the importance of the people in the product building process and how their products have evolved from their earliest iterations.

One of the things that we look for in the companies at Sports Loft is a management team that operates with a global mindset. We want to see companies who have products that can be successful in multiple geographies and sales teams that want to embrace the fact that whilst national differences exist, sport and media is a genuinely global business. 

However, growing a global operation is not easy. Should you build in your domestic market first and then think about selling internationally or should you go global from the start? Can you sell from your home base or do you need “boots on the ground?” How do you get to really understand the cultural differences between college basketball, international tennis and IPL? If you don’t expand globally quickly enough, will local copy-cats interfere with your global ambitions? What people do you need? Will the value in your product be perceived differently between Canal+, NBC and Foxtel?

In the latest of the Sports Loft podcasts, we are joined by Pumpjack Dataworks' CEO Nick Goggans whose clients include World Table Tennis, Williams F1 and Miami FC, and Covatic’s CEO Nick Pinks whose clients include media owners such as Bauer Media. They discuss their experiences of building global sales operations, the cultural differences in the sports industry between US, Europe and Asia and whether operating internationally will necessarily increase your cost per sale.

The financial results of many sports organisations in the last 18 months have clearly shown why ticketing revenue is so important. Whilst pre-pandemic, many teams and events almost took their ticketing revenue for granted (we’ve got a waiting list for season tickets, we don’t need to worry), that complacency doesn’t exist anymore. Fans in attendance make the TV product better and amongst many of the teams and events that we talk to, there is a clear desire to deliver the best fan experience possible so that the fans keep coming back.

So, for teams and events, how can you deliver those “Instagrammable” moments that the fans will remember? How do you get the fans’ attention in an environment where they have so many other ways to spend their money?  How do you deliver a ticketing and event experience that is at least as good, and hopefully better, than anything they can get from Amazon, Netflix or Instacart?

In the latest of the Sports loft podcasts we are joined by F1 Miami Grand Prix’s Josh Young, who is building the ticketing operation for F1’s new race in Miami, and FEVO’s Colin Casey, whose clients include the LA Dodgers, NY Giants, Nascar and many others. They discuss how teams and events are leveraging technology in the ticketing process, the importance of the gameday experience and whether you’ve got your pricing wrong if you sold every ticket.

Athletes are at the heart of everything that happens in professional sport. The best players deliver the biggest moments which in turn drive the audiences, the media rights and the highlight views on YouTube. The fans want to know everything about their lives, what they do and what they think. Many players now have bigger followings than the teams they play for. 

Technology, and social media in particular, is enabling the athletes to by-pass the traditional media and engage directly with their fans. This provides a huge opportunity to get their point of view across and to define themselves beyond what happens on the pitch, but it also comes with risks. What they choose to share, and how they manage what they post, has become hugely important.

In the latest of the Sports Loft podcasts, we are joined by KIN Partners MD and Founder, Simon Oliveira who manages a roster of talent including David Beckham and Neymar Jnr, and Greenfly’s co-founder and CEO Daniel Kirschner whose clients include NBA, MLB, Real Madrid and PSG. They discuss how athletes can build their brands and whether it is reasonable to expect the athletes to be role models, how both teams and players can benefit from an athlete’s increased profile and what David Beckham’s Instagram numbers would have been if he was playing today.

Achieving “product-market-fit” is one of those terms that you frequently hear in the startup-world. Sought-after by founders and eulogised by investors, it has become an almost idealistic concept of that moment when all that hard work comes to fruition and it just clicks – the product sells itself. But what does it actually mean? And when do you know if you’ve “found it”?