Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) The Player's Lounge

Episode Date: June 24, 2023

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On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another portfolio profile episode of the TechMeme Ride Home podcast. It's been a while since we've done one of these, maybe two months or so. I'm super excited about this one because this is maybe one that you would think,

boy, that's kind of a zag for the ride home fund, maybe not our typical investment. But it's right up my alley. And by the way, the ride home fund is just, interested in good ideas and good companies. So even though this is not a SaaS company necessarily, whenever it is in the creator space and it's in the sports space and you all know I love sports. Today we're going to be talking to Keith Marshall, who's the founder of The Players Lounge, which you can find at the Playerslounge.io. Keith, first of all, welcome to the podcast. Absolutely. I appreciate to have me on, man.

And give us the sort of two-minute elevator pitch of what the players' lounge is and does. And then let's dive right into it. Absolutely. So a little bit of background on me just quick to provide little context. I played football at the University of George from 2012 to 2015. Had a pretty decent career. One of the things that has been a recent development is now these student athletes have the ability to get compensated for their name, image, and likeness.

So that happened in July of 2021. It was brand new. These kids are now making all sorts of money. And so with the Players Lounge really looked at that opportunity and said, there's a new opportunity to rethink the traditional kind of value change that student athletes were a part of. So think content, think experiences. And just refigure those in a way such that athletes got compensated for the value that

they brought to those exchanges. So what the Players Lounge does is we are a, we call ourselves, a new media fan engagement platform. We connect fans with student athletes and the universities they follow through exclusive content, digital engagement opportunities, in real life opportunities, and then that sense of community that's so core to collegiate sports. And we've had a great, great run at it so far. You know, a lot of the content we do is athlete-centric. So there's this idea that's been pervasive at the professional sports level of the new media. So, you know, having athletes not go on the traditional ESPN or Fox Sports or NFL network, putting them on their own platforms where they can

speak freely, really share their perspectives. Then on the business side, obviously, they get to own the distribution of that content, they get to monetize it. And our belief is that it provides a much more immersive experience for the fans. And so part of what we're doing is bringing that model to the collegiate sports space. So we talked about this online, but let's assume that some of the audience is unfamiliar with the idea that for what, 100, 150 years, collegiate sports was supposed to be nonprofessional, whatever, but we all know there's a shit ton of money. in collegiate sports.

And so that, as you said, that changed in recent years. So what does that mean in the sense that now athletes in college sports are able to participate in the value that's being created? Like, what does that mean if I'm a college freshman, you know, going into any sport or whatever? Like, what it, what, first of all, what sort of money am I able to make? What sort of control do I have over like my compensation and my value in entering this? So traditionally, I mean, think of it's similar to professional sports. You know, colleges sell jerseys.

They sell tickets. They have TV contracts. You know, there's so much, you know, there's so much of a kind of a mini economy. It's not even a mini economy. It's a 20 billion a year economy that's around kind of sports. And again, a lot of that was driven by student athletes. And so like when I was in college, the example I look at is I was a fairly prominent player, but my co-founder, Aaron Murray, he's the SEC's all-time leading quarterback and touchdowns, yards,

all of those, you know, sexy statistics. I mean, he sold millions and millions of dollars of jerseys or the university did on his behalf, and he didn't get a penny from it. You know, he had events where the university would take him, say, we're going to do a signing with Aaron Murray for our special supporters. And, you know, people would pay $10,000 to be able to have a group of people come to that experience. And Aaron didn't get a penny from that. And so those are the opportunities that now because of NIL athletes get to monetize.

And they can go actually seek those opportunities out. And so, you know, it's very empowering from the perspective of an athlete. I can give you many, many stories, even myself, of people who were in prominent positions in college, you know, demanded a lot of audience, but they end up getting hurt or their professional careers just didn't pan out. And they never really got to cash in on me. Right. And then again, this is dating me, but like, you know, in the 80s and 90s, like this would be like, okay, after your career, you go back to your locality and like maybe you do commercials for the local car dealer or something like that or you buy a restaurant and yeah,

put your name on it and things like that. But so what it is is that right now, do the athletes have to share with the universities? Like what's the sort of structure in terms of what can happen? So that's actually a great question. And now you're getting into the complexities of NIL. So it's still very new and the legislative and exactly how does it work. and where do the universities get paid versus the athletes? A lot of that is being worked out currently. And so one of the challenges in NIA has been around IP. And so, like, for example, at the University of Georgia,

the G itself has a lot of value because fans associate that, you get to leverage the goodwill of the university. So now they're trying to figure out well for an athlete's in a promotion, and he has the Georgia G on that. What percentage of that should go to the university versus what should stay with the athlete? And we've been central to a lot of those conversations. It's extremely exciting.

and I'm glad that student athletes are finally at that table, but it has not been by any means fully defined. So that's something that the industry is still working through. And what does NIL stand for? Name, image, and likeness. But I typically tell people is like, think about a sponsorship deal. When you go to the professional sports, everybody sponsored by Nike, Under Armored Dides, what have you, whatever drink comes. It's the same thing. It's just collegiate sports.

And even things like, you know, your likeness in an NCAA video game for, or from EA sports or something like that. Like those sorts of things are now on the table for individual athletes. So that's actually, so you know, they went away with NCAA my sophomore year. So I think it would have been 2013 because of that because a lot of athletes started having problems with the fact that they were making so much money. We actually got a settlement check. But next year, it's scheduled to come back finally now because there's somewhat of a collective bargaining agreement where each athlete that's featured in the game will get paid. Right.

So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we've alluded to this, but so let's talk about your career as an athlete. So University of Georgia, you and I have talked about this offline. I'm from the University of Florida, so we're technically rivals, but we're both, you know, representing SEC anytime we can. But just tell me about you were a football player, right?

So tell me about your career, your position, etc. Absolutely. So I played running back, a little bit, you know, additional context was a lifetime. Like all I ever thought about as a kid was football. Like, you know, that was everybody knew. Keith. Where'd you grow up? So I'm from Raleigh, North Carolina. My father played professionally. He played with the Denver Broncos prior to me being born. So like I grew up in that environment. He never pushed me towards sports, but it was just a natural like I want to be like my dad. So, you know, as far back as I can remember my identity. All of that was tied to football was a core piece of who I was. I graduated high school as the number one running back in America. I did take an official visit to Florida, but obviously, you know, we ended up on the other side of the tracks. Went to UGA, 2012, got off to a really great start, had 800 yards my freshman year, led to SEC in yards per carry and explosive plays, I was getting hit up by agents here and there thinking I was going to be a first round pick and, you know, started. I'm not going to say I got the big head, but it started to become real. Like that dream I began to be able to see manifest in front of me, and that is, you know, a feeling that is really like no other. sophomore year, I ended up taking an ugly hit against Tennessee in Knoxville, and I blew my knee out,

tore my ACL, MCL, and I was already having some issues with my other knee, so we decided to have double-meat surgery. So I was actually in a wheelchair. It took me two years to get back from that. And that was really an inflection point for me because the idea that football may not, like, I still at that time was like, I'm still going to go to the league, make a whole bunch of money, all of it. That was still the goal, but it did become a reality that football is not forever, and you could be one player. away from having to do something else. So I took that time to focus more on academics. I

transitioned from something that was not as business related to business finance. I got very involved in more of the student athlete kind of advisory committee in different groups that were lobbying for more resource for student athletes. So that period in my life really kind of set the foundation for what I'm doing now because I became more aware of the business side of sports. Let me ask you about that just to the degree that you want to get personal about this. I always think about that with athletes in the sense that it's so intensive, like you give all of your physical and emotional and whatever energy you can to becoming the best in this sort of realm, right? And it can go away with one bad hit, as you describe, right?

I hate to frame it like this, but like a company pivoting from the idea that they want. What is it like for you've spent your entire life going in this direction and you think you have it all mapped out? And it's like, well, in your case, maybe it wasn't like, oh, it's over now. It could this still happen or whatever. But what is it like mentally and emotionally to be like, I've got to shift my focus, or maybe it won't go in the direction that I thought it was? To date, it's been the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And like you said, I didn't deal with it maybe as much in. college, but I spent a few years in a league and, you know, kind of phased out there.

That's when I had to come to the realization that, okay, you're going to have to completely think, what you, rethink what you want to do with the rest of your life. And, yeah, I mean, it was the toughest thing I've heard to go through, you know, from the perspective of like every single day when you wake up, you have meaning, you have purpose, you know, okay, this is how I need to spend this day to get a step closer to whatever it is I'm going to. So having that taken away and you're like, okay, I really don't know where I want to go. You know, I hadn't really sat down and actually sat with the idea of there's something else I

need to dedicate my life to at some point. And so I think, I was fortunate to have a very strong support staff. And it wasn't easy. Like, I had to go talk to people. It took a while. Maybe I'm still going through it, to be honest. But this is not something that's unique to me. I mean, I got so many guys that even didn't make it to the NFL who played in the NFL for 10 years.

When it's time to hang up the cleats, it is a real life transition. Oh, that was going to, that was my next question, is that I always think about that about athletes. Like, when you're a kid and all the athletes are older than you, And they all seem like gods and their whatever. And then you reach this inflection point where all the athletes you idolize are kind of your age. And then you sort of like see them retire. You know, I'm thinking of like, I'm mostly into soccer. And so like, you know, people retire like 32, 35 or whatever, you know.

But I always think about every professional athlete, even if you make it to the, you know, to being a professional athlete, and having like a decade-long career. Like, let's say a good career. You know that there's a finite thing. How do athletes think about that in the sense that even if you're, even if you completely hit the dream, you're going to reach age 32, age 35, where in a larger context of society, that's not over, but for what your life was, it is, you've got to move on to something else.

Like how do athletes, or at least in your experience, what do you think people think about? It's one of those things where it's like you have old people, older guys that play that you look up to and they kind of take you in the meeting, they'll tell you these things, right? But there's some lessons in life that you really can't appreciate until you go through it. I mean, that's how I feel about it. Like, yeah, you know it's going to come to an end. You know, you may be prepared financially. You may have other interests that you begin pursuing before. But when it's really taken away, I mean, I think at some level, we're all just, I guess, an amalgamation of our experience.

And so much that goes into being an athlete perspective, especially as a professional, the way that you get treated when you engage with people, the way that when you, you know, the money that you're getting, the way that you spend your days, the way that you take care of your body, when all of that goes away, it's just like, it's like a death on, I don't know, that may be a little bit aggressive, but... No, it's not at all because it is, like, okay, I'm 45, right. Like, I am... I've been going through, like, the classic midlife crisis of, like,

my kids are getting older. I can see on the horizon they're not going to need me. going to need me anymore. They're going to go on and move on and like you you you wake up at night and you blew your back out in your sleep and shit like that. I feel like that's the point is that because athletes, professional athletes, they are using their body, they experience mortality sooner than if you have a working class job, a white color job where it's like you work for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, or whatever, and like there's always the horizon, but the The horizon hits.

That's got to be a crazy thing. And the crazier thing I would say is for probably 90% of guys, it doesn't hit when you want it to hit. Like, nobody's career ends on their own terms for the most part. One of the examples I give, one of my best friends, we were roommates in college. We were packaged until to college as Todd girl. Todd was obviously all-world, Hall of Fame type of player, took the NFL by Storm. I think it was offensive rookie year, NFL, office of the MVP one year. He was done at 26 years old.

I mean, 26, you're still a young man. You're a baby. You're a baby. So it's pretty insane, man. And I don't know that it is. I just think you have to have a good support team around you, you know, people that have been through it that can lean on it, lean on you and provide, you know, advice, provide that sense of community and support because the other thing that's difficult, and this

is getting somewhat into the weed so we can wrap it and kind of come back is, you know, transitioning out for me was difficult because I felt like I did get to live a lot of my dream, right? And like a lot of the people that I came up with, they had the same dream. maybe they didn't get to that height. So it's hard to go talk to a lot of people. Because I don't want to vent to somebody who- You went further than a lot of people did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Well, again, to bring it back to soccer, like people think about Christiano Ronaldo and like, why couldn't he just hang it up? Why couldn't he go out gracefully? It's like, well, who can? Who can go out gracefully at any stage of life? You know, but God give us the grace to do that.

All right, let's do pivot back to, because here's Here's how we can transition. So what the Players Lounge could do is help folks at that prime and even pre-prime, if they go on to professional stuff, sort of secure a foundation, secure. And it's not just money, because one of the things that, again, in this modern era, as we've already alluded to, and we can go into depth about this, the athletes are, the value, the athletes are the icons, and they can have a direct relationship with the fans that can continue for their entire lives. And so, not to lead you in a direction, but where did

the idea for the Players Lounge come from? So you hit the nail on the head in terms of the two different things that we really want to push forward with the players' rounds. But the idea, to be completely transparent, it was a side project. Like, I was in NBA school. I was geared up to go to McKenzie full-time. A couple of my co-founders, we literally had a dinner in late November of 2021. UJ. Football, obviously, that's home for us. They were killing it, so there was a lot of opportunity. N.I.L. was new. And then the whole Web3 craze was everywhere. And so initially, it was like a site was like, let's leverage Web 3 to create like a new type of digital fan community where fans get to access exclusive content, events, experiences, both digitally

and in person. So that's where it started. And then I think, you know, from that grew the ideas of How can we make this something that's actually meaningful and consistent the test of time and not just being part of this, you know, kind of Web 3 craze that was going on. And so for us, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, two things. One, you put an athlete in this platform where they can monetize their brand now, which for a lot of these kids, it's significant. You know, they may not come from an environment where their parents have a whole lot of money or, you know, some of these, even if it's a hundred, a couple hundred dollars here and that can really help them long term. And then the second piece is while you're in the spotlight, like it doesn't matter if you're the star player at University of Georgia or you're a war. on. There is some level of notoriety that comes with the fact that you wear that G every

Saturday. And so if you're put in a position where you on a platform and you communicate with the fans, they get a chance to know who you are, they get a chance to know your interests outside of and beyond the sport, that can greatly help me when you get done. I mean, it helped me. I was fortunate enough to do some of these things naturally. And then when I got done, I had people hit me up like, hey, you want this finance job or this finance internship, or hey, would you be interested in going to Emory to get an NBA? So I think portraying yourself the right way while you're in the spotlight and sets you up for success long after you're done playing it is it is that uh i can't remember who's the person that first floated this idea but

having a thousand fans that are willing to pay you a hundred dollars a year or whatever like that's you know you can yeah but in also in the sense that again um in this sort of uh crater economy era where if we think of athletes at as the value creators of entertainment or an enterprise that has a ton of money and a ton of value, it allows the, either you want to use the term creator or labor, to take the value with them even beyond the, like you said, the window of when they're participating in. But that was one of the things I still love and think it's powerful about the idea of Web3 and blockchain and kind of like that royalty bearing, like, hey, this thing is valuable as it gets, you know, traded down the line as revenues are generated against it, you always get your cut.

And so that was a big part of the initial go-to-market was like, hey, whenever these things resell, if you're a part of that initial core group, you're going to get your, what I think is 5% royalty for sure. Well, let me, let me, this is, I just wrote this down because you inspired it. I hadn't thought about this before. But in startups and venture capital, there's an idea that if a company is successful enough, at some round, be it A, B, or whatever, the founders take money off the table so that they're incentivized, like originally 30 years ago, no one took money off the table because you're like, you want the founders to always be invested in the company becoming a success. The reason that that change is because, well, if you give a founder $10 million so that they don't have to worry about their sort of current financial stakes, they'll be willing to say, I will turn this down, this billion dollar investment because I think we could be worth $100 billion, right? So have you thought about that as well in the sense that this will allow an 18-year-old kid, a 20-year-old kid to make better,

long-term choices where it's like, maybe I'll turn down that third knee surgery because I'll walk with a limp for the rest of my life. And by the way, I might not be set for life, but at least I got enough money to get me to my 30s or something like that. I think it's absolutely, it's actually hilarious. I think that's happening, particularly like a lot of the non-revenue or not the major sports. So one thing that comes to mind when you say that is the women's basketball, so the ladies that just won at LSU, right? I, I heard them talking, they're like, typically there's just rush to get paid, rush to get to the league. They're like, hey, because of NIL, because of the platforms we have here, we're making more money than they're making the WNBA.

So what does that mean? They want to stay put. And what does that mean? That means they're going to graduate. They're going to have an education. That's fascinating. So, yeah. Yeah, we're thinking because you were playing collegiate football and NFL, we're thinking of the big sports, but think of, I don't mean this in any negative way.

The smaller sports, but the sports that don't have as much money at the end for certain athletes. Like you could be making, your salad days could be in college. You know, like volleyball or track and field or something like that, where that is where you would get the most interest as being an athlete. Yeah. And I think even in some of those, you know, bigger sports like football, we're seeing guys make those decisions because it's like, hey, I know I can make $400,000 here the next year.

Maybe I can go to the league and make a little bit more money, but I can also graduate with a degree that will always be valued. And so now it's not so much of a tradeoff between, money and a whole bunch of money, there's something to bridge that gap. So it's very interesting that you got to that because that is something that I think a lot of people overlook when they talk about NIL and what it's wrong. Okay, so I don't know that we got to this. Where the idea was at a dinner, you were talking to folks or whatever.

So how did you, what was that, 2021 you said? November of 2021, yeah. Okay. So how did you develop it? You've been to business school or whatever, but like how do you put the team together? How do you figure out like what the product needs to be? walk me through from November 2021 to where we are today. Yeah, so I was fortunate to be teammates in conference with some really smart people.

So it was not just my idea by itself. In fact, there was a guy named Ty Fricks is one of the smartest guys. He's currently orthopedic surgeon. He brought everybody together. He was huge in the Web 3. My co-founder, Aaron, he was one of the biggest names in collegiate sports, particularly in the Southeast. And so he had a lot of that marketing power that we needed.

I was the business dev guy. I also had a little bit of marketing prowess. So we had kind of very lucky. We got lucky that we had that core team, that all the necessary pieces. When we began to put together, we learned pretty quickly where there was value to be captured. And so by the time we went to market in January 2020,

we had an idea that, hey, this is going to be about exclusivity. This is going to be about content, experiences, and community. And we saw that, you know, around the collegiate sports space, there are already a lot of these type of entities that exist. So for example, like a rival, a 247, a scout, like all of it is, all it is exclusive, exclusive content and community. And so we felt there was a pretty easy entry point in a way that, again, allow student athletes to participate.

And that's how we jumped off. I mean, it literally happened in two months, which I know sounds crazy, but yeah, that's the truth of it. So do you have to, who do you go to first, the athletes or the colleges? So it's a great question. Initially, it was athletes first. We went all the way around, we didn't really have to communicate outside of just making sure from an administrative perspective, everything was buttoned up.

We made the proper notifications to them, but we would go directly to the athletes, that has changed over the last year and a half just because how big NIL has gotten and the university have gotten more and more involved in the whole IP stuff. And so now we partner directly with some universities and we get to the athletes by way of the university itself. So it can really happen either way. So what's what's the value preposition that you give to an athlete? It is essentially direct to your fans, a platform that you can control, right? Like to what degree is it like up to the individual athlete to be like, this is what I would like, I don't know if you use this term, my channel or my, whatever, my page to be. Yeah. So I think the easiest value proposition

is you were doing this for free, now you get paid for it. That's not, you know, it takes 15 minutes, you talk about what you want to talk about and you get money. So that's not a hard sell, and it hasn't been. I think as we've gone along, we've unlocked some of where the deeper value is. And it's really in that athlete-centric, athlete-to-athlet ethic that we have gone on. So, for example, there's really two categories of content that we do. One of it is like you have a former prominent athlete, like an Aaron Murray, who sits down with the current guys. And you can just get so much insight, more insightful of a conversation of engagement because he can look at this guy that he's been in my shoes. He understands what I'm going through. I in many ways look up to him.

So it's just a much more engaging and deeper conversation, whereas the media punnings is super surface level. And then the second piece, and what I'm really excited about is truly like just putting an athlete, having his own platform or her own platform, allowing them to bring their teammates out and then just to highlight kind of that culture that's within the locker room that's special everybody loves where I don't know if we're allowed to curse but it's like you're shooting the shit you're just being yourself showing your personality you know and engaging with your and people love that and to be able to bring that that's what we feel like it's the athletes the start of the show we're supporting on the back end but it's your it's your baby

and if I'm if I'm a fan like so what am I getting am I getting like is it sort of like the the creator model the the Twitch model the the Patreon model, the whatever, it's whatever that the athlete deigns to provide as content, as special events, as whatever, right? No, no, exactly. 100% is kind of that Twitch model to where, you know, now for us, we're aggregating all the, all the kind of fan base in one, so you have access to all the athletes, but it is that, you know, maybe you get to submit questions.

Maybe, you know, you unlock special access and you get to go have a private chat or you get to join a broadcast. So it is taking a one step past, just consuming. to actually engaging and being a part of the experience. And then we've talked about this or alluded to it, like, in this case, you're going to have to engage with the colleges themselves. I'm looking at the Players' Lounge page right now. There's a Tennessee lounge.

There's an LSU lounge. There's a Georgia lounge. There's no Florida lounge yet, but we'll get there. But so to what degree has this been a thing where you, It's not just going to the athletes. It's not just a creator platform play. You also have other stakeholders that are very powerful, have a lot of money, and how have you been dealing with that

in terms of what do you offer these other stakeholders in terms of their value? Yeah, so we've actually just acquired partnership right at Clemson. So in many ways, usually it will be an extension of the University of Athlete Department. But on behalf of student athletes, there's another one that's about to get closed.

which you know about, we're not going to mention it until it gets closed. And there's a few other in the pipeline. And so really what that unlocks for us first is from a marketing perspective, top of funnel, like they get to push everything out. It comes with a certain air of credibility. We get access to all of their IP, which is huge. As I'm sure you know, like you have to jump through those who loops. It'll give you a headache.

So it just makes it much easier to go to market. The value proposition in the pitch to the university is also somewhat straightforward if we can sit them down and get them to understand it. And basically it's like, hey, there's this entire mini economy around your collegiate sports in this town. Right now, all these third party players are owning it. If we can own that and aggregate all those fans together, we can create sustainable opportunities for your athletes to engage and drive revenues from that base. And why they love that is, one, it's sustainable. Right now, NIL is a lot of donation money. It's a lot of rich people writing checks,

and they're looking for a sustainable model. And the second piece, it allows us to engage with non-revenue or not the biggest sports. If you aggregate all of the fans via football, you can then have the gymnast come tapping. So you can then have the soft. more players tap into it. And so the idea of we're serving all your student athletes. We want this a platform that's truly like for everybody, not just football and basketball. And again, I'm going to use University of Florida as an example, but I know a young woman, a decade younger than me, that came up. And when I was in college, she was a gymnast. And she would come and go to the University of Florida gymnast competitions or whatever. And there

was an athlete, a gymnast that she idolized or whatever. So that sort of like connection for even what's the word I could use, the sports that are not making billions of dollars in terms of the revenue or it's like where your professional career options aren't as lucrative. That sort of a thing is incredibly powerful for a gymnast who, the only gymnasts that become millionaires, and maybe I'm wrong about this, are the ones that win the gold medal at the Olympics or whatever. But what if you create this community in Florida for girls that are like idolizing you and want to be you? And like, that's the thing that you can carry with you. And like, that's a way to not monetize, but also create community and value around like,

that sort of fandom. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head earlier. It's not just about one stakeholder. It's literally like you're trying to create value for this entire ecosystem. And that's the fans, the athletes, the university, the IP holders, everybody. And by aggregating the fans the right way,

you can certainly do that. So let me give you one more. You mentioned the Web 3 thing. And to what degree you're still playing into like NFTs and things like that? I'm not necessarily that interested in, but you can tell me if there's interesting things going on with that right now. But also, look, the collectibles and like, this is all stuff where it's, like,

you know, signed jerseys, personal events and things like that. So like a marketplace of, like, these sort of like personalized, like unique item sort of things, like that's a key part of this as well? So initially, we did like these, we kind of went the PFP route, right, where the PFP was your subscription. So you got a, It was a one-of-one, but ultimately what it did was unlock access. Now, we did partner with the entire LSU football season team last season, and we did a player card project, which was awesome. We probably talked about learning.

We probably spent a little bit too much money making sure they were super nice, but it was the first ever in the entire collegiate ecosystem that was fully licensed and partnership with a team, so we wanted to make sure we did the right way. They evolved every game with new stats, new badges. And so that was a really cool experience, and fans liked it. And so I'm not necessarily like a huge, NFT, crazy type of person, But I do think there's value there. You kind of asked initially like, where are we, how are we building it into our current system?

And so one of the things, like we were 100% Web3 up until probably last October or so. And so we were able to test a lot of the functionality and the engagement techniques that worked. And so like, you know, the live streams, the idea of the more you engage, the more you earn, you can redeem those things. What did you learn from that? Well, we're building all of that in. It gets to the idea of like this is not just about consumption. we want this to be immersion.

We want to inspire you to take certain actions to engage in this community, and you can drive value from taking those actions as opposed to. The reason I'm asking you is because a lot of people have been like, well, Web3 is the last hype cycle or whatever. But you took learnings from that that you're still willing to invest in as the product evolves? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we marketed the Web 3 heavy early on because it was sexy, and that was where the market was.

but a lot of the value that was being delivered was just an increased or more immersive experience. All of those things are still deliverable without Web 3. But even what I'm saying is, even if the buzzwords go away, what you learned was, oh, there's engagement there, there's value there. Those are levers that we can still pull, even if the buzzwords go away.

Absolutely. That's what we're doing. It's going to be better for us, selfishly, because last year we were using Discord, we were using Stream Yard, we were using all these third-party pieces to create that experience. Now we're building all of that into our own ecosystem that will own. It'll be a seamless experience, much more engaging for the fan.

And people love it. I don't want to understand. People who are truly, truly engaged in the more engaged to earn aspect of what we were doing. Yeah, a lot of times I think of things like this where something gets super hyped and then the trough of disillusionment or whatever. And then it almost has to come back with a different term. And so whatever the term will be that would replace Web3, you can still have learned valuable lessons about what works. And if you can just market the better term for that, like, yeah.

I mean, what we decided is we don't need to market anything about Web3 at all. They don't need to know. It's like you don't need to know the infrastructure on which you signing into a certain platform how that's going back in. So yeah. All right. So let's bring this plane to a landing by asking, like, so where are we at now? how many schools, what is the stage of the company,

and getting towards ass. And I'll lead you to the ass, but where are we at right now in terms of the players' lounge? Yeah, so thus far, we've been in market now 18 months. We've worked with over 350 athletes across eight different kind of blue chip universities. We now have two official university partnerships in the back. Hopefully, we'll be adding another here shortly.

We were blue strapped initially, and so now we've raise some capital, we're actually in the process of closing our seed round, hopefully in the next few weeks, building the team out, just again, kind of make more of that foundation that will allow us to scale. We have some huge partnerships, which I know I've talked to you about, that will allow us to scale significantly faster that we're excited to execute against this fall. So, you know, the top of mind for me right now is get this round closed, get the team where it needs to be, you know, put the right resources behind the things that we're doing this fall to make sure that we kill it. And then continue to learn and adapt. Are you hiring yet? Do you need any team or anything? We are hiring. I'm looking for somebody to kind of oversee users. We use your acquisition in marketing.

So that's something that I'm actively looking for. Really, that's the number one thing that we're, that I feel like we're missing from a, from a capable of what about what about people listening if they're, you know, I just gave $10 million to the University of Washington. Let me put you in touch with them. Like anybody want to, are you how quick let me ask you this. School by school by school, like how quickly are you willing to expand this sort of thing? We are willing to expand as quickly as necessary.

Now, there is, you have to pay to play, particularly with the IP. There is a little bit of upfront. As you know, the other pieces, we want to make sure we have proper buy in from all the stakeholders before we go to a market. But when we do, like, you know, the deal that we're about to close here in the next couple weeks, we can get up and running in three, four weeks. So it really depends on how everything comes together because there are quite a bit of moving pieces. But I always tell people, like, I want to talk to every university possible, let them know what we're building, see if there's an opportunity to be partnered down the line, and that has paid off for us thus far. And if people are, the round is closing very quickly, but if people are interested in finding out more about the current fundraising round, get in touch with you or get in touch with me and I'll put them in touch with you.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll give me my email as key at the playerslounge.io. again, that's K-E-I-T-H at the Playerslounge.io. Just a little bit of kind of stats on the fundraise. We got Draper associates out of Silicon. They're the lead investor. We've closed right now about 1.5,

and we're looking to close another million before we wrap this thing up. And it's happening right now. And I'm excited to be a part of it. But Keith, like, this is one of those where it's like this is a great idea, such an obvious thing, so much energy around it.

and the right people behind it. So this is the time also. Like people, idea, but then timing is also the third thing that no one thinks about. And I think that's just the right time for this. So I'm so excited. Absolutely. Well, listen, man, we appreciate your support.

Obviously, we've got to know each out a little bit over the last few months. And look forward to continuing to build that relationship.