Three Things I Learned in SaaS, Sports Tech & Live Events 4.17.23
Recession hits sports and why we don't notice, the necessity of self-disruption and Hulk Hogan's $100m mistake
Three Things I Learned In SaaS, Sports, Tech & Live Events
Fate and a George Foreman grill. Did you know Hulk Hogan was offered what would eventually become the George Foreman grill? Hogan had the first choice between the grill and a mixing device. Only problem was, he wasn't by the phone for the call. George Foreman was. He picked the grill. A $100m mistake by Hogan. Work/life balance matters. A lot. But the best ability, is still availability. The world doesn't wait for us. The sooner we learn, the better off we are in this dog-eat-dog world. Sometimes, you just have to take the call. As my co-founder would say "If you can't reach me, you're not trying." A big part of our early success. We are available to our customers and partners at all times.
"They only show the golfers who are winning." We're in a recession right now, and even the NBA feels the pain (so do the other leagues not-named-NFL, they just haven't had that story told….yet) Sports have exploded and seem to have had no signs of slowing down. Well, kinda. The NBA announced this week there would be hiring freezes and cutbacks on expenses in fear of a coming recession (it’s not coming, it’s already here). Fact is the league is talking to the same sponsors we are and the lagging numbers don’t look good. In honesty, numbers really haven’t looked good for awhile and were just artificially inflated by the inflow of new categories of gambling, crypto and VC funded company deals - two of the three of which were never real deals in the first place. That money is gone and there isn't anything new to take it's place. Sponsorship goals are usually lagging indicators, which means a whole lot of teams are missing a whole lot of numbers this year. The reason it doesn't seem that way? We pay all our attention to the winning outliers. The NFL. The Taylor Swift's. The F1 races. The Masters. Meanwhile, the middle-of-the-road teams are drowning. And we need more than just the Washington Generals to play against.
Boxing, Horse Racing, Baseball and Blockbuster Video. Nothing is disruption proof no matter how it feels in the moment. Many years ago I sat in a keynote with Bob Bowman, then top person at MLBAM. He espoused baseball’s success in staying relevant by citing “the three top sports in 1955 were baseball, boxing and horse racing.” Each sport is still plenty lucrative, but boxing and horse racing don’t have the same place in the zeitgeist or anywhere near it. His boast was baseball still does. Nobody saw the NFL coming. Nobody believed in the UFC. This excellent quote from Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph this week "If you are unwilling to disrupt your business, there will always be someone willing to do it for you." So who's next? PLL? Pickleball? LIV? Maybe. But it's likely something we're not even considering right now. Kudos to baseball for disrupting themselves with widely loved rule changes. Easy to overlook how big a risk they took now that it worked out.