Rates & Barrels - Bonus Episode: The Athletic’s Small Business Story | Part 2 of 3

Episode Date: May 15, 2021

Part Two of The Athletic’s Origins story for Dell Technologies ‘Small Business Podference’ series. In this episode The Athletic’s co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann continue on about the company’s first steps into the marketplace. The challenges they met selling this idea to investors, and journalists they were trying to recruit, specifically with the expansion into the Bay Area. Writers, Marcus Thompson and Anthony Slater give their thoughts on that process as well. For the complete lineup of episodes, visit delltechnologiespodference.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

we can look a journalist in the eyes and tell them we're going to give them all the resources they need to do the best work of their career. In the same way that the early folks on that Bay Area staff said no, originally, most of the investors that ultimately invested in the athletic said no. And then we had to circle back. Persistence in the face of rejection. I mean, without that, you know, we would have stopped five years ago. Welcome back to episode two of Dell Technologies Small Business Podfront series. I am Jade Hoy, executive producer of the Athletic Podcast Network. As you know, these have been trying times for small business owners across the world.

And for the second year in a row, Dell Technologies has assembled the best podcasters to tell their stories on starting up, scalability, and surviving. In this episode, we will continue our conversation with the founders of The Athletic, Adam Hansman and Alex Mather, as they detail The Athletic's rapid growth over the last five years, how and why they decided on Chicago and Toronto and recruiting the best talent. We will also be joined by General Manager of Content Strategy and Analytics, Akhil Nambiar, who was an integral part of the early years and one of the brains behind the Athletics' early success. Let's start here. Why Chicago, by the way? Why Toronto? Everyone would say go to New York or LA,

obviously, but there's competition. But why Chicago and Toronto? I think we looked at Philly and that didn't pan out. So we said, well, where do we think there's enough teams that can get some signal and test this idea, hopefully pick a market where the teams were having some success or we thought could have some success. So it wasn't some magic formula to say that spit out Chicago. We identified it. We reached out to a couple of people. The first editorial hire that we made, John Greenberg, reached out, had a couple of interesting conversations. Alex and I flew to Chicago and got to meet a couple of people and we pulled the trigger.

And it is another edition of Hoops Adjacent on the Athletic NBA Show. What was really fascinating in the early years was just how random, you know, Adam mentioned someone answering a LinkedIn message. You know, a lot of the market launches were serendipitous in the fact that we got some people to answer our emails. Maybe they were open to a new opportunity. Maybe they had just been let go and we just launched

and we would just take anyone. We were absolutely at that moment. We were like, if you want to cover your launched and we would just take anyone. We were absolutely at that moment. We were like, if you want to cover your team, we're here for you. We'll get you an editor. We'll get you all the resources you need. We'll get you all the data, salary benefits. It was some wild years of one summer, we hired 200 plus people. Our second market and one of our biggest early markets was Toronto and then the rest of Canada. All those early operational challenges, we were moving at such an insane pace. And the thing that sticks out to me as I reflect on it was just when you are a founder, pretty much your number one job is to sell.

Whether you're selling to an employee, whether it's an engineer, a designer, a journalist, an investor, you basically spend your entire day, you wake up and you're at sort of your peak amount of ability to sell. I'm Akhil Nambiar. I am the GM of content strategy and analytics. And I started in January of 2018. I think the thing that got everyone hooked on it was the vision of what they could do here. You know, you're no longer thinking about making money via ads. It's a subscription business. And at the end of the day, subscriptions are all about keeping your subscribers happy and providing them with the best experience. And that marries perfectly with what our journalists and writers love to do. They want to tell the best stories. That's what our whole newsroom wakes up to do.

And I think once you start to show what that looks like, it makes things a lot easier. And I give a lot of credit to our earliest writers, you know, folks like, you know, Scott Powers and John Greenberg and Myrtle and Custance, because they showed that this thing could work. And when you had a writer that was like, is this thing for real? It sounds too good to be true. You can just pass them over to them and they're more than happy to say, here's the experience I had.

You can kind of have this dream too. It's the most rewarding part of this entire story for me personally, and I'm sure it's up there for Adam, which is we can look a journalist in the eyes and tell them we're going to give them all the resources they need to do the best work of their career. And then when they do that work, it's going to have a meaningful impact on our business and that we're going to continue to fuel that over the years. Certainly was aware that the athletic was being very aggressive about

hiring people. Yet still the landscape was changing. The way people were and still are consuming media has drastically changed. More than ever, content from the sports world was being served in quick bursts. Shorter and shorter, faster and faster. Sham Sharanya, one of the best NBA insiders in the country. Yeah, I'm not surprised that he ended up staying in Milwaukee.

Congratulations to our next guest calling in right now. From The Athletic, Bay Area columnist Marcus Thompson. How are you, Marcus? What's up? I'm a little excited today. So, Ethan Strauss writes and covers the NBA for The Athletic. He writes long columns, digs very deep, and he always gives you a story or an anecdote or a nugget

that people in his sport miss. They have a blind spot. He finds that kind of stuff, and he always gives you a story or an anecdote or a nugget that people in his sport miss. They have a blind spot. He finds that kind of stuff and he makes me think. I like writers that make me think. What was it that was integral to the success at The Athletic that pushed it further into relevance? Breaking news was surprisingly interesting to the overall business. It was really impactful to our brand. Not something that we would have guessed early on. We thought of breaking news as sort of a commodity.

A lot of the ways that sports fans interact with a brand is learning new information. And so when we can uncover new things, that was a fascinating component. A lot of what we think about here is what does it mean to be a sports media subscription service? And I think one of the things we've realized and something that we're thinking through is that articles are a great medium for people to consume all the wonderful reporting and work that's happening across our newsroom. But there's a lot of other stuff that we could do as well. Like if you're a YouTube person, if you're an audio person, long form articles like shorter snippets, however you consume sports, there should be an athletic version for that. And how do we get that to happen?

What are all the different ways that people want to consume sports and how do we provide that experience to them so that regardless what you want, you can get it within The Athletic. For us, it came naturally in a subscription model, which is your customer is a reader that is a sports fan. And we could relate to that. And that was really powerful. But customer, customer centricity, the trick of it is customers oftentimes don't know what they want. And so if we would have told a bunch of Chicago sports fans in 2015, hey, there's going to be this thing, it's going to be called The Athletic, it's going to be the best digital journalism product that you've ever experienced, you just have to give us $60. Most people would have said, they would have had the same reaction that an investor would have. Just going out and proving it to our customers every single day, listening to them in the form of just like talking to or being data-driven in terms of where your customers are at. I think that's just everything. I think for just entrepreneurs, whether it's a

tech company or a small business, being distracted by press or investment rounds, even your own... You're doing a podcast like I am here. The thing at the end of the day that matters is serving your customers and hiring exceptionally, exceptionally well. Problems never go away. Hiring poorly, you know, it never sort of like works itself out. You can compound success or you can compound the opposite of that, which is just debt. It's okay as long as it's a good story that gains traction because there is no deadline.

Deadline is just kind of like a word that gets thrown around and the difference between print and online, but it made my work better and my life just a lot easier. My life just a lot easier, to be honest. From an outside observer, someone who had been a fan of the athletic before I started working for you all, is the Bay Area felt like a sort of a growth.

Like you hired the best, you had the best talent, it's seemingly in the Bay Area, almost immediately. Can you kind of take us through the initial decision to go to the Bay Area, the people you were trying to grab, the statement you were trying to make,

and maybe why specifically the Bay Area? I think what happened was we talked over over a year before the folks joined. It took us a year of recruiting. And there was an interesting aspect to that, which is, you know, living in the Bay Area, we were able to consume the media personally and hear from people on the ground on a daily basis of who are the must haves, who are the folks that you read or listen to every single day. And that those opinions formed over many years. And, you know, our goals to hire those folks early on were spurned by them. We were turned out one by one. I wasn't actually sure. It was much more idea when I joined. Marcus Thompson, senior columnist, The Athletic.

Blackest dude at The Athletic. How about that? I know the app looked pretty. Like I liked the way it looked. I liked the presentation of it, especially coming from a newspaper where I hated the website. It was so clunky and all these ads were all over the place.

But it just felt more like an idea or a concept or a dream than actually something real. I knew the newspaper thing was coming to an end. We were having all kinds of meetings about, you know, how dire it was and how we needed to make these moves, etc. So we knew something was coming. I just wasn't sure that this was it. I approached it with the utmost skepticism.

As sort of the fall of the following year, everyone just like the stars aligned where everyone's like, let's just jump together. And it was really a big moment for us in which probably the first time where we were able to get enough people at once to have a really big launch. Definitely. And that's where we started to feel the sum of the parts was greater than the individual. So historically, we'd hire a lot of people one by one, maybe add a few people in the market and then come back later and fill it up. And definitely, the launch of the Bay Area, having Tim, Marcus, Anthony, Bags, like sort of a rapid succession or sort of really right there at the beginning told us that having a bundle.

And so for some fans, it is like, just give me the best Bay Area coverage. And for others, they're into college sports or they've adopted a team in the Premier League that they want to support. And as we've kind of gone market by market, getting that footprint going, eventually you look back and you're like, wow, we've created a really powerful bundle. And I think that's where we've really hit the accelerator. Anthony Slater, Warriors writer at the Athletic Bay Area. I knew we had to have some meaty stories right away.

I remember Marcus, i believe our first story marcus was like out at a golf tournament with steph curry and i believe got an exclusive with him which was big and then kevin durant had just returned from india i had been trying to get him on the phone he had taken a pay cut which was surprising at the time was between his first and second warrior seasons and the pay cut had allowed the Warriors to keep Andre Wadala and Shawn Livingston. It seemed like he, I remember, it seemed like he wasn't going to do the interview. I'd been trying to get it for a week,

and then suddenly one morning, I just got a call, and he was not only interested in doing the interview, but wanted to ask me about the athletic. Before we even did the interview, he was curious about, okay, so this story's going behind a paywall, blah, blah, blah, and then he gave me some really good quotes about why he took a pay cut.

I remember subs were coming through that being like, okay, yeah, you start to feel a rhythm. And the idea that we had been talking about for months was being executed numerically in front of me. And I thought it was cool. And I will say, back to my earlier comment on like just always selling and never like burning bridges, you know, in the same way that the early folks on that Bay Area staff said no, originally, most of the investors that ultimately invested in the athletic said no. And then we had to circle back and probably with one or two exceptions, you know, that's just persistence in the face of rejection. I mean, without that, we would have stopped five years ago.

I think there's always some challenge anytime you're doing something ambitious. There are a few writer pitches I did where the writer then ends up telling me why this thing won't work. Personally, I get energized by that because I think if everyone tells you an idea is good, it's probably not a very good idea. You need a bunch of people to say it's stupid for it to be something that's ambitious. So, you know, whenever you're at a startup, whenever you're doing something that's a bit new, you know, the default is people kind of doubting you and thinking that this thing isn't going to work. And the easiest thing in the world is to go on Twitter and say, here's 30 reasons why this thing is going to fail. and say, here's 30 reasons why this thing is going to fail. If you get the right people together and there's enough focus and grit, I know it sounds very simplistic,

but I'm so proud of the way we've overcome all these challenges. Welcome to The Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. We're back to normal, which is not normal. Yeah, I know. That's what's kind of funny. It's like, this is the normal setting. It was so funny. Even when we were sitting there doing the live show.

You have to be pretty irrational to believe it's going to work because no one's going to believe in you. And if you're counting on other people to give you validation, they're not going to give it to you no matter how much they love you or not. So you kind of have to really, really believe. And I operate with a ton of optimism. And it's my version of like seeing the future. You really have to be intentional with your culture. And that doesn't mean, you know, assimilation. It just means, you know, culture helps you hire good people, right? People that align with the values that you set forward and be really intentional with the type of values that you set forward.

In terms of the athletic, it's like being a pioneer or moving forward fearlessly. We don't ask for permission to do things here. And that's an important aspect to our culture. If you want to do something, I don't want to hear about it just go do it right and if you don't have a company full of the people that you want acting the way that you think is in the best interest of the company it's pretty crazy how quickly it can go off the rails this episode is just one of many podcasts included in the small business pod friends Go off the ramp. Go off the ramp.

This episode is just one of many podcasts included in the Small Business Podference presented by Dell Technologies. A podcast conference to get inspiration on topics like fundraising, building teams, or managing a business in our current environment. From top podcasts like Mandy Woodruff and Tiffany Elish, Brown Ambition, Rhett and Link, Ear Biscuits, and Gretchen from Happier with Gretchen Rubens. Visit DellTechnologiesHodfords.com. I'm Jade Hoy for The Athletic Podcast Network.