This Week in Startups - China moves crypto mining to US + Overtime’s Dan Porter on GenZ basketball league & network | E1235

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Jason covers the recent Chinese Bitcoin mining migration (1:56). Then, Dan Porter the CEO of Overtime joins to discuss how Overtime is building a next-generation sports network across Youtube, Twitch, & social media (15:12) and launching Overtime Elite a new basketball league where 16-18-year-olds can earn $100-$500K to prepare for the pros.

Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. We've got a great interview today with a really interesting cat. Dan Porter is the CEO of Overtime. They are a YouTube network of shows that they produce doing digital media. You've probably heard of things like that before. Think of it like in ESPN, but for Gen Z. But what's really interesting is they just raised a ton of money from a bunch of NBA players and other investors to create their own basketball league for 16 to 18-year-olds who are,

you know, foregoing their college and remaining high school. eligibility in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's really fascinating to talk to somebody the year. They're starting their own sports league. And he's really candid about a lot of the interesting things going on in the NBA, which has become, I think, the Premier League in the world, you know, outside of soccer, of course. It's a great interview. It's a really fascinating concept and pretty groundbreaking. So I had a blast talking to him. This week in startups is brought to you by. Secureframe helps hundreds of companies get enterprise ready by streamlining Soctu compliance in weeks, not months. Get $2,000 off your first year by going to

secureframe.com slash offer slash twist. Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever and right now O-Doo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odo.com slash twist. That's ODO.com slash twist. And LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. I want to talk a little bit today about the trend of the last 48 hours, which has been just a huge crypto dip and a Bitcoin crash. We knew this was coming, and it's been part of a process. And of course, if you've been in Bitcoin for any amount of time, you know that Bitcoin hits highs and then comes back down 50 to 75%.

We crossed the 50% barrier. Remember, we peaked somewhere in that 63K. and then 10 a.m. Eastern today, June 22nd, most of the cryptocurrencies had fall and 10, 20%, and Bitcoin crossed that psychological barrier of 30K, down 12%, and it hit 29K, down 55% from its all-time high in mid-April when everybody was tweeting at you, have fun being poor. If you don't buy Bitcoin, it's going to 250K. This is the nature of Bitcoin. My position has always been the same on Bitcoin. Great technology. It's now become a bit toxic.

And there will obviously be other technologies that will be better than Bitcoin. That is heresy to any of these Bitcoin maximalists, Bitcoin Forever, Bitcoin deadenders, toxic Bitcoin syndrome folks. But that is the truth. And what we're seeing right now is probably the result of, as I predicted, people going back to life. People this summer with the pandemic ending largely here in the United States. and in many countries in the West, probably a little bit of a slingshot or rubber band effect. They've been cooped up.

Now they want to Yolo. They want to have the roaring 20s. That takes money. So if you want to go to Coachella, if you want to go to Italy, if you want to go to Miami or Austin and check out the scenes there, you're going to have to spend some money. And that takes some time, time that you might have been obsessing about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or even stonks. So people are now getting back to life and stimulus is ending.

You've seen many states have stopped doing unemployment, surplus action to try to get people back to work. So as we rotate back to reality, thank God, the pandemic coming to an end. Let's hope that continues. I think probably just people have less time for this. And it's completely, completely possible that this will go down 75%, which would put it somewhere in that 15 to 20K range, which, by the way, is five times six, seven, maybe five to seven times more than the previous low.

So remember, it went up to that 1920K, you know, high in that famous holiday time, whenever we're talking about, maybe that was 2018 or 2017, whenever was talking about cryptocurrency. And then it went down to 3,500. And I was dunking on it and saying, hey, be careful, this could go to zero. Well, 15 would be, you know, a really great new low as it were. So we'll see this keep happening. And obviously, this has a lot to do. Ethereum, of course, also correlate and coming down.

whole bunch. And it looks like, you know, 500 billion or so in lost market cap for Bitcoin. Of course, much of this was paper gains. A lot of people didn't buy in at these incredible highs of 63K. Some of those might be bitcoins that are lost and nobody owns anymore. The wallets, people don't have the passwords for them or they were bought for pennies. So why is this all happening? As you know, we talked a little bit about these cryptos, miners coming offline. And that really is the story. And I predicted on episode 1220 back in late May that we would see more regulation and that sovereign countries would not give over their fiat currency, their control over currency to just this random project, Bitcoin, or any random

project. They just wouldn't give it up to anybody. And so, of course, China has now escalated and said, we need you to stop mining in a bunch of different locations. Wangzhou-based Fongwa International has told CNBC, it is airlifting 6,600 pounds, 3.3 tons of Bitcoin mining machines to Maryland from China. And this is going to be part of a larger trend where people are going to, you know, be moving these Chinese mining clusters to the west. And as I said, you know, this crackdown in China would be very easy for China to do. And of course, naive kids said, you can't stop it. It's, you know, censorship resistant. It's resistant. How could you ever stop it? People could just, you know, memorize, you know, their

hashes and, you know, their passwords and their brain. And there is a very simple way for governments to stop people from doing things they don't want. It's called police and the law and the justice system. And it could be a corrupt, you know, authoritarian government in one country. It could be a a democratic one, and there could also be taxation. So in China, it's very easy for them to decide that a religion, it's very easy for them to decide that a new source, it's very easy for them decide. A region needs to behave a certain way, whether it's in Hong Kong, whether it's the New York Times, Twitter, VPN's virtual private networks, where they'll put you in jail for five years, or the Uyghurs for their religion being put in jail, reportedly millions of people, you know,

involved in torture, slave labor, and re-education in China. So these naive kids, you know, who I hate to be like get off my lawn, OK boomer style here, but I watch this. And I used to think, yeah, you can't stop BitTorrent, you know, and it's always going to be there. And it is always there. But you might remember people were getting arrested for hacking movies and being put in jail. Famously, somebody hacked the horrible, one of the horrible versions of the Hulk early on. And the person went out to jail and they got, you know, all these huge fines.

So, and that was in the United States in a country like China, much easier to do. So on May 21st, China's vice premier, Leo He, I hope I pronounce that correctly, proclaimed China needed to, and in quotes here, crack down on Bitcoin mining and trading behavior and resolutely prevent the transmission of individual risks to the social field. That's a lot of word solid there, basically saying this isn't good for overall society. And as we all know, having a harmonious society is the foundation of China's philosophy of how to run the country. And so since the CCP announcement, the global Bitcoin hash rate, you can think of that as like the processing power of all the miners put together. It's decreased by a third. And that indicates a large number of these servers, aka miners, computers, you know, racked, have been taken off the line.

And so let's just take a pause here. So what does that mean? Well, as I said on that episode, this is going to be short-term bad for Bitcoin. It's going to make people scared. Some people have speculated it could cause problems with the blockchain and that we could have two different ledgers emerge or chaos because, remember, this is a technology managed by consensus and as amazing as it is. We've never seen this happen at scale, at least not to the best of my knowledge, which

Listen, I'm not an expert on Bitcoin or the code base, as it were. But we have to wonder why is China doing this? This is a savvy group of actors who allowed this behavior for some time. And now they're not allowing it. Why? Why is this? Why are they cracking down on crypto? Well, my friend Mark Jeffrey from Guardian Circle, which were investors in,

and he's pretty much a crypto expert when it comes to all of this stuff. He's been early and correct many times. China is going to launch their digital rem and B. And they've tested it. And perhaps, you know, according to him, they just don't want Bitcoin as an option. They just want it out of the picture. So step one, let's get rid of the miners.

That will have an obviously chilling effect. If you were in China and you see all the miners packing up and you see the Uyghurs in jail, you see people selling VPNs going to jail, you see Hong Kong students being, you know, put in jail and Hong Kong turning over. you're not going to, the average Chinese citizen is not going to disobey the government. In fact, they kind of feel like, I think most people would agree in China, that most people want to have a harmonious culture. This is like part of their ethos.

So this digital currency that they're going to come out with could have exploding features to it and they've actually tested this. So basically you get X number of dollars, you have to spend it by X date or advantages, which is great for something like stimulus. Imagine if we said to everybody with their stimulus checks, hey, we're going to give you $1, but you can't sit on it. So we're going to give you $1,000 and you have to spend it by August 1st. Okay, great.

Now we're really stimulating the economy. Or imagine your money just disappears based on your behavior. So you tweeted something wrong? Oh, we just locked your money. Does that seem far-fetched? Well, if you can lock somebody up in a jail and torture them and re-educate them and force them into slave labor, I don't think you have a problem confiscating their money.

And, you know, like maybe you do a search for Tiananmen Square and you lose your money or you lose some of your money. There's all kinds of really interesting things you can do with programmable money to shape how people behave. Maybe you tweet something positive or you make some great contribution to society like that Black Mirror episode, the famous Black Mirror episode where people are being judged by their behaviors and their ratings by other people and you move up and you get that social credibility. So this is really dystopian stuff. And so that's probably a big part of this. But got to be some other angle here. You know, I think China is thinking in a very long arc. They're very strategic.

And if they're going to ban Bitcoin, essentially, they've obviously been mining, banning the use of Bitcoin, owning Bitcoin. There's got to be a reason. And the digital remand-B is one. other people might think it is about energy usage because they don't want to have this excess energy being used by friend Pomp, Anthony Pompelano. He said he thinks this is a huge mistake. He is, quote, China has chosen the path that will become more obviously self-inflicted wound while simultaneously handing a large nonviolent victory to Western superpowers, the ultimate gift

to the U.S. I think that's, you know, a Bitcoin maximalist position here. They are not dumb. There's something else going on here, I believe. Maybe China wants to destabilize the U.S. so they're giving all of this mining and all of this money to other places to maybe make U.S. miners stronger, which would then create more chaos in the United States and devalue the U.S.D. And that's, I think, what America has to contend with, which is, if Bitcoin does become the standard and the U.S.D. is weaker, that's not good for America. It might be good for personal freedom. It might be good for, you know, portable money.

It might be good for people who are doing shenanigans with their money or behaviors that maybe are not as legitimate. But, you know, the United States really does want to be the global standard for money. And it does not help them. So we'll find out over time what China's real motivation is here. But these are very deliberate, strategic, you know, and on the margin, sinister individuals. They are running an authoritarian communist country that has millions of people in concentration camps. If they're doing something like banning mining, it's for a reason. And we will find out over time what that reason is.

Okay, now for the interview. Look, you probably keep hearing about SOC2 compliance. And you might think, is this really relevant to me? Well, if you're targeting any large enterprise as a customer, there are all sorts of data privacy and security measures that you need to have buttoned up to close those deals. And you don't want your engineers taking time out to do this stuff, and you definitely don't want to hire a third-party auditor. No joke, getting Soctu-compliant can take months, and it costs a ton. That's where Secure Frame comes in.

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that's right, $2,000 off your first year at Secureframe.com slash offer slash twist. That's secureframe.com slash offer slash twist for $2,000 off. All right, next up on the program, Dan Porter is here. He is the CEO and co-founder of Overtime, which you can go see at Overtime.tv. He was also the CEO, if you remember, OMG Pop, which made the most amazing game that kind of defined gaming. along with Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja and some other early classics

withdraw something, which was acquired by Zinga for $180 million. And I think had a quarter million downloads in a very short period of time. Before that, in the Web 1.0 era, he was the C.O and part of the founding team at TicketWeb. And that was bought by Ticketmaster for a staggering $40 million at the time, a number that is completely quaint in today's modern era of the internet. It's basically, Dan, everything we did in the 90s, and you just add two zeros,

and that's the equivalent in 2020, which is to say, when you and I started in the internet, there were only 10 million, 20 million people with connections, and then broadband was limited to people at colleges and maybe a handful of people at offices. But quite a journey it's been, has it not? It has. I remember one of the things I did at Ticket Web, and it's like 1998-99, is I went into the basement of like the Bowery Ballroom and all these clubs, and I helped

them install their DSL line so that they could actually be connected to the internet at a decent enough speed so that they could enter their ticketing inventory and people could buy tickets. Hilarious. The gating factor at the time was internet connectivity. And now we live in era where people can pop up a 5G router for 30 bucks a month that is a hundred times more powerful than the fastest connections that cost $5,000 per month back in the day. We used to have a call center for TicketWeb because people didn't believe that consumers were to actually buy something on the internet. And so even though most of the volume they actually did buy on the internet, I couldn't close

a deal unless I told them that we had a call center to take orders to. That's hilarious. And just thinking about that today, people are now, 30 years later, buying non-fundable tokens, digital assets for hundreds to millions to tens of millions of dollars that are not existing in the real world. We have now, you know, come, I wouldn't even say full circle, but it has manifested itself pretty amazingly. So you started overtime TV. back in 2016, what was the mission of the company? So right when I started overtime with Zach, I was working at Endeavor, William Morris, Endeavor, the big Hollywood Talent Agency.

And I was running digital. So I was building kind of the first influencer, creator, talent department. Eventually, you know, we had, I think, almost over 100 different YouTubers and digital talent. We signed. And anything that was digital, podcasting, virtual reality, influence. kind of came under my purview. And at that time, we bought IMG, which was the biggest kind of sports rights seller in the world. And then WME became WME IMG. And I quickly kind of moved into sports as the digital guy. And in working in sports in, you know, 2014 to 2015, I worked a lot with

the different leagues because they were all represented by various talent agencies. And The leagues at that time were kind of getting hip to this idea that there was a whole generation of people out there who consumed sports in a really different manner. So they were aware of a couple big trends. You know, audiences in their teens and 20s were not watching three hours of a live game. They also liked to use social media. They didn't have cable. They didn't pay for cable. They had distractions. They could play video games. They could go on Snapchat. there were many things they could do. And one of the biggest ones was that young audiences were, you know,

in some sports like football, choosing their favorite team based on playing Madden rather than based on the city where they grew up in. And in other sports like basketball, kind of aligning with players and following players, if you liked LeBron, Miami, Cleveland, L.A., that's where you moved. And those were really disruptive. It was disruptive from an audience standpoint in terms of, you know, the ratings and television. And it was disruptive from a standpoint of how are you going to sell out your hometown arena in 10 to 15 years when all those people are fans of other sports

or they don't go to live sports or otherwise. And so I kind of looked at that and I thought, as somebody who was not in that demographic, wow, those are like, those are some pretty seismic shifts in audience. They kind of mirrored this idea that, you know, here I was representing all of these kind of YouTube stars, some of whom had much bigger audiences than the traditional talent that the traditional agents were representing. So you had kind of that schism happening on both sides. And yet, you know, what was going to fall in the middle? And I just thought, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where somebody's going to come out and they're going to create an entirely new, let's call it a sports network. And I don't really call it a sports network anymore,

but at that time it was easy to understand. It was easy to say, you know, you can imagine this is like ESPN. Imagine you dropped it on the ground and broke into 50 pieces and we aggregated those 50 pieces and that's over time. But it's for a totally different generation. And one of the interesting things to me as somebody who kind of studies all this is how much technology drives culture. So if you think about the early 60s, it was really AM radio. And AM radio had sonic limitations. You know how it sounds.

it's monophonic and otherwise. And songs were short. And all of a sudden, you had FM radio, and FM radio was like crazy and freeform and, like, guys would play the whole album. Like, there were albums I grew up with where I knew every single song on the album because they played every song on the radio. And that was transformational. There would be no rock and roll music in the same way without FM radio.

And I'd say there'd be no overtime and no transformation in sports without all the various social platforms. And when you go to overtime, Dot TV on the web, it's a corporate website. It exists and it manifests itself as a YouTube channel or a series of YouTube channels, am I correct? So, yeah. So the reason that we have a website is that when we do business development deals,

people type overtime into their browser, so you have to show them something. I don't know what the traffic is. I don't personally go to the website. Overtime is 53 different overtime branded essentially channels on every platform. on TikTok, on Instagram, on Snapchat, on Twitter, on YouTube, all over the place. And ultimately, kind of the secret of digital to some extent is that people like to follow something that's good at one thing. And that's very different than a sports center type of thing.

Sports center is a very like older model of aggregation. It's like your kind of Yahoo homepage. And the fact is, if I don't care about baseball as a hypothetical, I don't want to follow on account that shows me some baseball and shows me some football. Like, I want to make my own sports center, right? I want to go out and I want to aggregate the things I care about. And so overtime has six different verticals, basketball, girls basketball, football, gaming, apparel, and soccer, all with over a million followers. And they're all on different channels. But they're all branded overtime. They're called overtime. The talent has overtime in their name. So it's this

kind of bear hug network approach to sports content that allows both intense concentration with what you care about, but a broader community as well. So the business of having a network of channels across YouTube and other platforms, pretty well established from Maker Studios and a bunch of other folks. It's different though. Like an MCN is basically where you go out and you find a bunch of existing channels. Sure. And you essentially aggregate them at a massive scale and represent them.

and try to sell advertising. You're making the content. Yes, every channel, we make 100% of the content. We launch the channel. We own the channel. And we don't sell it as an aggregate. Each one touches and activates audiences in a different way. The thing I found super interesting is that you decided in March,

we must have decided before that, but you announced overtime elite OTE and that you would start paying 16 to 18-year-olds $100,000 to $500,000 to forego their remaining. high school and college eligibility and play in your own basketball league. Explain what this is. Yeah. So. And did I have that correct in my notes here? You did a great job. So I'll kind of tell you what it is and then I'll explain how we got there. So OTE, Overtime Elite, is a professional basketball league. We hope that if there's the NBA and there's kind of March Madness in the NCAA, OTE will be the third leg of the stool. It'll be a massively popular professional sports league.

And, you know, when we started overtime, a lot of people were like, why can't you pay the kids who are on overtime? And I was like, I would pay them, but I can't pay them because they'll lose their eligibility. And through working with all of these athletes, I think we came to understand two things. From a personal model, the system that exists right now to become a professional athlete and specifically a professional basketball player, it's a monopoly. you go to high school and you go to a D1 school, maybe you go to Kentucky or Duke, and then you go to the NBA. And occasionally someone like Lamello Ball

will go to Australia, but they have to, you know, hack the system to some extent. If you look at the NBA kind of top five players that they just released two days ago, three of those five players are international players. That was amazing. I did notice that, yeah.

Yeah. Was it Josic, Janus and Luca? The Joker, Janus and Luca, which means they were pros at 16, they never went to college. They played professionally, and they took, you know, similar to a soccer academy path. And so we don't have that option in the United States. And I think we felt like, look, going to college is awesome.

And but there's no other option. And young players and their families were telling us, like, we want another option. Like, we want another way to go pro. Like, if you're an amazing violinist, you don't go D1 from violin to Kentucky. You go to Juilliard. And you train and you play the violin and you perfect your craft. And that's true for acting. And it's true for a lot of things.

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O-D-O-O-com slash twist. And the second thing they told us is we don't understand why, like, our kids know, you know, our young people know people who are big on TikTok and YouTube, and they're able to make money from their skills and talent, and they're able to make money if they did make music. But for some reason, because they play basketball, they're not allowed to make money from the

thing that they actually know how to do best. And so I think I feel like a lot of this is known, but we just saw this opportunity. We saw a need. And then we saw an opportunity in that we have over 50 million followers who are already watching these athletes participating, excited about that. And we were like, let's start our own league. And let's pay. It's just such a crazy, ambitious concept.

When does it start? It is a crazy concept and it is an ambitious concept. It starts this September. We already have five or six players signed up. We have... How many teams will it be? So we will have three to four teams that will play each other internally. And then we will also play other schools and we will go to Europe and play.

So we'll have kind of internal competition and we'll have external competition. and then over time, we'll continue to grow. And all of those players have a unique opportunity because on the kind of input side, they all get a six-figure salary. They all get health insurance. They get kind of downside injury protection insurance. They get our coaches, Kevin Ali,

who won a four black coaches to win an NCAA tournament title at Yukon. We have a massive coaching attribute. They get a full education. They graduate from high school. We have like an incredible education platform out there. My background is I spent the first 10 years of my career working as a public school teacher and in nonprofit education as one of the founders that Teach for America program. So I bring a lot of kind of experience to that.

And ultimately, the other thing is that one of the things that was interesting to me as we kind of started to talk to players around the country was this idea of sports science, right, and prehab. And there's this thing in the basketball world. LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on his body. And that's why he can, you know, be 36. Yeah, that's why he can be LeBron James at 36. It's incredible.

Yeah, exactly. And the fact is that what I think what we found was that there was this tremendous desire for elite nutrition, elite training, sports science, what they call prehab, which I learned about, but that it's not equitably distributed like a lot of things in this country. And if you happen to grow up in a certain neighborhood or you, don't have enough money, you don't get access to that. And if you're rich and you go to a certain school, you do have access. So the idea to take some of the best athletes who don't have access to that and bring them

here is huge. And I'll tell you like a silly anecdotal story about this is we went to scout this player. And he's 17. He's excellent player. We think about signing for the league. And his finger got dislocated while he was going for the ball. And he came over to his coach. And his coach said, well, the doctor doesn't come for three more.

days. So let's just tape it up and we'll wait till he comes and then we'll fix it. And our scout literally said to me, he's like, I almost went over there and just, you know, put it back in myself for him. And the idea that these folks are coming to play professionally for our entertainment and for their careers without that level of support is huge. And then I think the final thing is we all know the story about the athletes who go pro and they lose their money or they mismanage their money and they don't have that. And so we have an extremely robust financial literacy program or focus on mental health. And so you have these incredible inputs where these young people are getting essentially the Juilliard of basketball. They're getting paid. And you have this output in which our

audience gets to watch all kind of their version of superstars and playing. We're building our own arena. It's located in Atlanta. They'll live in Atlanta. They'll train there. We'll have our own 2,000-seat venue that will be finished in September, and then we're off to the races. This would, if it did compete at all, because there's many players, so I'm not sure that you're exactly competing, but the typical program would be a player plays in high school. They don't get paid. They don't get all this elite training and mentorship and prehab, et cetera. They might get some of that. It would certainly be a variable. And then they go to college. They also don't get paid in college.

And so when someone like Zion or RJ Barrett or whatever decides to go for a year or sometimes too, I guess, in some cases, they're basically taking a year to showcase themselves, maybe get a little bit better, get some brand recognition, get some reps in, but then they don't get paid and they have a huge risk that if they were to blow out their ACL, they could have no career. Yes. So, hey, there's a huge risk. Am I right in terms of my understanding?

You're correct. Well, there's a couple things. A, you're right, there's a huge risk. B, they don't get paid that we know, but we don't know that they don't get paid in other ways. I mean, there's, you know, there's been these. There's been federal investigations. I don't know. I'm just saying that, you know, people talk about that type of stuff.

It's pretty well known that people would pay them under the table or something or maybe pay an uncle or an aunt or a cousin, you know, some money and then it might get chopped up. Yeah. But basically, the NBA doesn't take players before 19. correct? Correct. So that's why the one and done rule is there. And then I would say that the other thing is that, look, the goal of any college coach is to win the NCAA tournament or to win their division. It's not necessarily focused on the preparation of these athletes. And the best coaches can do both. And there are many fantastic coaches who send highly talented players. And college is a great experience. The reality is for the players who go for one year, the day the tournament is over,

they're off campus. They're barely on campus for five or six months. So I can't argue that they're getting an incredible education. There's a, there's a large amount of risk for them. And what they were telling me and our team was like that that it's just another hack of the system. I don't think college basketball ever started. Nobody wants to be a fan of Carolina or wherever you went to college, Gonzaga or Villanova and have different players every year. The goal was actually people went to college and they were student athletes and they played basketball, not they cycled through in this way. And now you have an additional thing where there's so much transferring. I think something like a quarter or a third of all NCAA division one

basketball players applied to transfer this year. So if a third of people left your company in one year, your investors would say to you, is that, is that really a good, good fit or not? And you're taking people from the age of 16 to 18, am I correct? Yeah. So we're, our kind of sweet spot is 11th grade, 12th grade, and we have, you know, we just signed a player who's going to be in the draft next year. So he's 18 to 19 and he's waiting for that space. And that was a player you signed. I think it's Jean Montero. Am I correct? Jean Montero, yeah. John Montero. $500,000 you're paying him.

He's from the, I can't comment how much we're paying him. I can say that there's lots of things that are lots of things that are in the press. Some are correct. Some are not correct. And that's true for us. And I think it's true for other programs. But he was actually kind of a prototypical player because he played professionally in Spain previously.

And we think he's going to be a lottery pick. We're excited to work with him. And the most interesting thing is you talk to the younger players who are coming into the program and you talk to them about the first B, which is basketball, and they talk to you about the other two Bs, which are business and brand. And when I was 18 years old, I didn't know what business was, and I definitely had no idea what brand meant. And these players are locked in on building a career and a business around themselves, and they're

looking at KD, and they're looking at these other athletes that have done it. And I think it's part of the reason that they're connecting with us for some level. How are you going to make money? Because you're only going to have these players for one, two, or three years, I guess, at max. Yeah. So our revenue model looks a lot like a pro sports league. You kind of have three drivers. One driver is brand partnerships.

And so you can watch an NBA game and you see that you see Kia and you see State Farm. Great. Advertising sponsorship. Got it. Yep. And it's different than media because it's on the jersey or it's on the floor. So it's not transactional media. Totally.

The second is you have group licensing. We will have a trading card deal. You'll be able to walk into Target or Walmart and buy trading cards of these players. We love to do video game deal. And then the third is we want to develop media rights. And media rights in sports, as you know, as a sports fan are gigantic. I mean, the NFL, Amazon paid the NFL a billion dollars for Thursday night football. Amazing.

And that's a highly advanced product that's light years ahead of us in terms of history and legacy and band base. But look, if we can get to 5%, 10% of that over time because people want to watch this and they want to buy the meteorites, and we want to build something global from day one, which is why we're signing international players, which is why we will go and play in Europe. We think that that long term, that's a big opportunity. We all know marketing budgets don't grow on trees. The good news is right now LinkedIn is going to give you a hundred dollar credit towards your first ad campaign. Now, why should you use LinkedIn?

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more interesting. Obviously, NBA experimented with the play in tournament, much to some people's chagrin. I loved it. Fans loved it. Players, perhaps not as much. But it added these wonderful, great, I guess, one, two, three, four extra games that were awesome to watch and really added some excitement the week before. And of course, the four-point play is something people have discussed and other rule changes. Now, you're dealing with players in the start of their career. So getting a four point play, I could think about that two ways. Well, there's nobody who doesn't have the ability to take that risk on without the fan base getting upset and you're ruining history and yada yada. What about all the statistics and how this is going to change that?

So will you have a four point play or other innovations? We will definitely have some innovations. But again, we're training players for the NBA and that's their journey. And I think as a business, independent of whether overtime was doing this or not, for any business in this space, there's a line between, you know, speeding up the game and between what's being considered a gimmick to some extent. Got it. And so I think the four point play specifically as a gimmick, as a fan of basketball yourself?

I think that there are other things that you can do that are not about adding more points. I think nobody likes all the fouling that happens in the last 10 seconds of a game. I think that... How would one get rid of that? I'm curious. Has there been a proposal that's been given to the NBA or the places that's public? There are... There's another proposal.

I'm forgetting what the name is, but it was developed by just a regular guy where, you know, you would add a certain amount in the first team to hit a certain point level with, like, would get there, and so there'd be less fouling. I think there's a couple things to think about, though, is that let's imagine the court and the game. There are some innovations there you can do. I think if you play in AAU basketball tournaments or like soccer, they have a running clock. And so it just keeps going because there are no television timeouts and stuff like that. So you can do some things there to speed it up.

You don't have to play full NBA quarters. So it's a 48-minute game or other things. But I think there's three other areas where you can. where you can also add value to the game. One is how the game looks and feel. It's a very high quality product. I mean, the NBA is amazing. Yeah, they've been trying some new camera angles to share.

Yeah, and so you've got terrible use of the digital SLRs, which they couldn't get in focus. I mean, I was like, come on, guys. You've got the subject blurred and the background crisp. It's the exact opposite of that camera's supposed to work, but thank you for trying. I did see that. The problem with depth of field is it's terrible for motion.

And so the NFL has done a great job in the end zone around that. And so I think you have opportunities around that. You have opportunities around mobile devices. As we build our own venue, we'll try some different camera stuff to change how it looks. Oh, right. You're one venue. Yeah, it's a show court. So you could embed cameras in any number of ways.

You don't have to worry about having 30 teams. You're going to do some sort of Ron Robbins, etc. Exactly. We're going to have our own show court. So that's one area of innovation. The second area is how the game is called. I mean, I love Marv Albert. I mean, that, you know, I listen to that and it feels like I'm growing up.

But I can also say it doesn't sound any different than the 70s and the 80s when I was watching Dr. James Sixers or Howard CoSell or anything else like that. We're bounding and astounding. Yeah, exactly. And it's great, but I think there's opportunity for innovation there. Like the Rucker Park where people like sort of commenting and getting it, walking up and down the court with a microphone? Yeah, oh, that's good, you have good basketball knowledge.

Yes, Runker, Dyckman, all those, it's so fun. I've been to those. It's crazy. It's lit. Higher energy level. Yeah. Yeah, and we're building our venue on the second level of our venue. There are no seats.

So it's almost more like a nightclub and there's a balcony and people can stand around and you can create a vibe. And I think the third area is, what is the role of the fan? And so right now, the role of the fan in any sport is basically to watch. buy apparel and to vote for the All-Star game. Yes. And I'm not saying that the fan is going to text the coach in the huddle and being like, you should let, you know, Ben Simmons inbound to Embed rather than vice versa or whatever.

But I do think that there's going to be a way for fans to have a somewhat higher level of participation. And I think we'll try experimentation around that. And obviously, I think you're telegraphing with that, what we're seeing in a lot of the wagering apps where maybe you could. the audience could vote what play should be run or who's going to score the next point or what you know who's going to win the game or whatever but it keeps you on your phone and engaged in the game even in a blowout or you know just increases engagement right yeah i think you want a

positive experience for the players at the core but you want you want to experiment and try different things for the audience to be involved and and some of them are going to be amazing and some of them are going to flop and and that's okay that's the nature of the startup and and then i think you know, you're going to try some stuff on court. And then I think you've got really almost like two products. If you go to YouTube and you look for overtime takeover, two years ago, we did our own event. We rented a venue in Brooklyn.

We built our own court. It was a warehouse. It was three on three. It was like crazy hype, dunk contest, all of those things. And I think that you see it at halftime at the, All-Star game, although oftentimes not all the top players want to participate in that. And I honestly think that if it were a dunk exhibition instead of a contest, the best players would have less to lose, so they would participate.

But there's no reason that you need to expose yourself at that level. So you tend to get a lot of guys who aren't even starters who are just hungry for that exposure. But I think you've got a balance between traditional games and those types of things that can be more fun and can be more showcases. And so I think it's figuring out what those are too. But there's no doubt that if our audience has grown up watching a lot of highlights on Instagram, you want to work backwards from there. And at the end of the day, if you sign great players, like for everything else you do,

if you have really talented people on the court, like when you watch Kyrie or Hardin or any of those guys get down and dribble between their legs and they're about to make an incredible move or Trey Young or Steph Curry or anyone else like that. It's an incredible product because they're great players. And so I think that we never want to be like a bad version of the NBA. We want to get the best players and we want them to play at a high level. There would be for you to sell franchises and do what, you know, the ABA, NBA, NBA, etc. have done. You have Alexis O'Hanian and some other folks who are owners of other sports teams.

or investors in other sports teams, you got Carmelo and other folks as investors. Are you going to have 20 teams and let us buy our own teams and I could be an team owner? It's a great question. The honest answer is I haven't got there yet. I think that when you look at the traditional sports models, so we're not doing a touring model, for example, we're not trying to come to your hometown and sell out a stadium. We're not making money from beer and hot dogs. I think that it's like a startup from our space, from the tech space. You kind of look at all of the things and you're like, why do we need all of these things?

What's the difference between, you know, five, eight years ago, an Uber and a taxi, the difference between me walking out and just pinging my phone and me taking $10 out and giving it to a driver, like, why does it have to be a certain way? And so I think we're looking to optimize around the things that allow it to be. be a successful business and look at many of the leagues that have spent a lot of money and gone out of business and make decisions. So it's definitely possible, but I think having some level of control in the beginning while you're still, you know, people are still playing basketball, but you're still trying these kind of startup like innovations is probably the best thing.

So if I'm interpreting that correct, maybe get a couple more revs on this experimentation and learn if that opportunity is there, that opportunity is there. Yeah, for sure. Look, I can't, I couldn't have told you in 2016 when all we were trying to do, I mean, we were launched an app, which we shut down, and then we pivoted it and we launched an Instagram account. I couldn't have told you that four and a half years later, an Instagram account would, you know, cause us to raise $80 million and run a league.

It's just a, you know, because you do this. It's a process of innovation. And we'd like a little space to figure out what that innovation is. Makes total sense. now David Servers investor when it was a young person's ESPN obviously now you've learned, pivoted

or evolved, whatever term you prefer and I see a ton of NBA players 6% of active NBA players are investors in overtime So this then leads me to ask the question what does Adam Silver

and the NBA think of you creating clearly something they should have created They did the G League. They called it the Developmental League or what was the name before? It was the D League, you're right. The D League, right, the Developmentally, D League. Now is the G League.

And they have just absolutely mismanaged that. It's been a complete disaster for them in my mind. They've tried to fix it and make it two way or something, but it seems like people are just not interested in it. Correct me if I'm wrong here. And then you come along and you're say, hey, we're going to do something innovative down here. Do they see you as a feeder and something positive?

Or do they see this and say like, okay, this seems. seems disruptive. Because I'm looking at this and saying, if you make something really entertaining, and it connects with millennials and the NBA, it cannot change because they have to be risk-averse because they can't lose all the old people over 30 years old who are spending money and you can cater to Gen Z. Are they not thinking of you as the disruptor? And how do they feel about it? I don't know 100% how they're thinking about it. I would say in terms of the G League as a developmental product, it's great, right? Alex Caruso, all these players who come up.

I'm not sure that their intent was to make it a media product because they already have a big media product. And so I think it's given as a developmental product, it's strong Nick Nurse came out of the G League, right? So you have coaches and you have players. Sure. But it's clear that all the leagues are focused on our audience. And I would say we have four NBA team owners who are investors. We have 6% of the NBA players. And Adam Silver came out at the NBA All-Star game and said, you know,

we're supportive of overtime elite because anything that provides more options is good. And so is it competitive only in the sense that nobody can watch. watch sports for 25 hours a day. So maybe some people are going to watch us. Some people are going to watch them. I mean, I don't think you're going to cut into people watching LeBron James or Trey. I mean, and his quote was very supportive, I would say. I think it's generally good for the community to have optionality, especially very solid people, which he called you very solid people, which appears to be the case in OTE and our backing. Yeah. So I would add to that. So people love the NBA. They're going to watch the NBA. I think ultimately,

If we deliver an amazing media product, that's great. They don't care about that. That's our business. But if we deliver players who are better trained, you know, smarter, we have more access to data about them. They're ready for professional play. That's a plus for them, right? That's a plus for every team owner.

That's what every team owner wants. I mean, think about the draft process, you know, when you talk to GMs and assistant GMs, it's actually incredible to hear these stories about, oh, You know, we thought about drafting Jason and we brought him in for an interview. And in the interview, he looked at the floor the whole time and he did this. Couldn't make eye contact, whatever. He brought a crew with him that was disrespectful. Whatever it is, you could blow the interview.

You're going to teach people how to do that stuff and help groom them, mentor them for professionalism, which is also what the NBA has tried to do in all of this as well. Yeah, for sure. And the last thing I'd say is like, this isn't like a direct answer question. But working with David Stern was by far one of the most amazing parts of this journey. I mean, I know he was a tough guy to work with at the NBA and he had a big job. And he didn't work at the NBA anymore. And he loved startups and he loved the energy.

And we learned so much from him. And I just remember sitting in this room and he's like, what about this? And we're explaining the league to him. And then I would step back and I was like, I'm literally sitting in a room having meeting with this guy who's like, with the third pick in the NBA. draft. Yeah, exactly. I just never, I never stopped appreciating how amazing that was. And we told him, we said, Commissioner, we're going to launch our own league. And he was like, this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Like, I just spent 30 years running a league. Why do you want to sign up for that kind of Mishigas? And, you know, by the time, you know, before he tragically passed away,

he was like, this is a good idea. Like, I get it. I get why this is needed. And I just think that even his saying that gave us so much confidence because I have unlimited confidence, especially in techs and startups, but we were in a new and different space professional sports and it really meant a lot to us. Okay, big controversy around quantitative self for athletes. Obviously, people are wearing Apple watches, aura rings, Fitbits, whatever. But now we have players who are wearing this information, data being collected from cameras, obviously data being collected from cameras, team seems to have a reasonable right to that since it's out there on the court. But some players don't want to have their heart rate tracked and their effort tracked because

it seems too intrusive or their sleep. Other people are opting into it. What is your take on this? And do you think that this could be interesting for the league to see people's heart rate live? We've seen experiments with that and other sort of quantitative self and metrics. because obviously that does have to do with rest and recuperation as well. We track how many minutes have been played, but we don't track exertion, heart rate as compared to the resting heart rate of the player, et cetera. So have you thought about that at all? Yeah.

So I understand the concern. Nobody wants their location tracked. One wants to be like, oh, I looked on my phone and you were at the club last night. I can see it right here. At the same time, we measure how fast they run the 40. We know how much they can lift. Like, we do track data that's extensible that we're. we have about all of the players.

And so I think my personal point of view, and I use whoop. I've heard good things about whoop. Do you like it? I love it. It's super interesting. People seem to be in the whoop. What do you like about? People are like in this whoop cult where I talk about Fitbit or whatever.

And they're like, get a whoop. Fitbit's garbage. And I'm like, well, Fitbit does break often. I would say a couple things. One is that all of the products that have moved beyond actually trying to have a screen on your wrist as opposed to use. your phone, I think, are somewhat advanced. But it's very much, it's a lot about sleep monitoring and about recovery and measuring your

resting heart rate and otherwise. And, you know, not to turn this into a commercial for WOOP, which I have no affiliation with. But, you know, they give you some kind of like red, yellow, green. And I know I took the red eye back from California and I had slept terribly and whatever. And I was totally in the red next day. And at Woop, at the company, they tell you. you don't come into work that day. And in fact, I, when reading, I like to exercise in my old man ways. I won't exercise when I'm in the red because it's an injury prevention thing.

And so the amount that it teaches me about the value of sleep and all these other things allows me to be a higher performer. And I think every athlete wants to perform at their utmost best. But they're not thinking like, oh, I just ate this food that isn't good for me or I didn't get enough sleepers. Everyone tells you to get enough sleep, but when you start to really see the data there and you see your breathing and you see how much stress impacts you, it causes you to modify your behavior. And so I would say there's a, you know, there's a Venn diagram where the athlete and the team are aligned that they want the best. And I think it's less interesting necessarily about all the data that happens on the court. And it's more interesting about

understanding recovery and sleep and everything else like that. And I think the way you solve that is you say, I don't need to see that. It's like the same thing. I say, you don't, I'm not going to ask you if you're vaccinated to come to my office, but I'm going to assume if you're going to come to the office, you're going to get vaccinated. I haven't violated your privacy or anything else. I'm not going to ask you about you. Also, if you're dealing with this cohort who wants to succeed, and you're paying them and they don't have any other opportunity to get paid, it does seem like you would be able to say to them, listen, we want to see you succeed, you should opt into this kind of intense, you know, quantitative self stuff.

It's more about teaching them. It's more about teaching them the value. So when when they're long gone from our league and they're in another league, they're able to manage effectively. Let me ask you another question about contracts. I don't understand how this works in the European leagues when I watch soccer, aka football, where people are under contract and then contracts that can be traded or bought out or sold. It all seems very weird to me. And they also do that, I think, for the NBA, for basketball where you hear about, you know, this team in Europe has to be bought out by the Knicks because they got Fredwig Weiss or whatever. You know, sorry for the trigger warning to Knicks fans, Fredwick Weiss, the dunk.

So anyway, would it not be amazing for you in terms of upside to say, hey, we're going to put these folks under contracts for X number of years? If they do make it, we get bought out by whatever team drafts them for 500 grand, and then that puts us net neutral or something like that. Have you thought about that? Because we are looking at investing in a lot of what's called ISA companies, income sharing agreements. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but we invested in Meritas and we have a couple of other investments, Lambda School, where people who provide the education,

which is arguably what you're doing, then get some upside in the future, and that's how you make money. Have you thought about that? I've thought about it, and in fact, it goes one level further, which is in European football and in soccer, there are clubs like IACs and Benfica where they make almost all their money from selling player contracts. And then there's other clubs like Barcelona where they end up being net buyers or they try to develop talent inside.

My general takeaway is that... How much money do they make on it? If there was a $10 million contract, just ballpark, do they get like 10% of that, like an agent might? Or do they make a ton of money on that? And how does that affect the player? Does the player split that? Or is it like the commission of the house?

No, no. They buy the contract and the player gets paid somewhere else. They make tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. So they can assign a player for $4 million. The player does great and they can sell that contract for $20 million and they get to $16. They could sell that contract for $100 million. Wow. And they don't split that with the player?

It's like startup investing. Oh, my Lord. Wow. The good version. I would say, it's different than startup investing because we own a portion of the shares, a small portion typically, and the founders own it. So this is in a way like they own the rights to the player for all that time. And, you know, because we all have share prices. We all go up.

If the share price goes from a penny to $10, we all win. So it's a little weird. Wow. Yeah. I would say I don't think that. it is culturally aligned with how we think about ourselves as a country. Perfect. I think that.

I mean, indenture servitude comes to mind. Yes. There are a lot of bad things that have happened in this country that come to mind. And so, A, I don't think anyone wants to participate in it for that reason. B, I don't think it's, I think it's culturally out of step. And so it's not something that we would do. It would be interesting, though, you could own the rights or participate. in the rights to their likeness during the time in your league.

In other words, if you had some amazing, you know, Steph Curry went to your league and then Steph Curry, you have his jersey rights for the overtime league, you could be selling those forever or the rookie cards, etc. That could be amazing. Sure. You can buy a Michael Jordan UNC jersey too via Nike. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and you can buy a Kobe Bryant, Lorimerian jersey. So yes, on that front, but I think the mission here is to empower and be partner with athletes. Of course. And there are more avaricious things that one can do in the world, but those aren't really in our purview. And you get to start over. So, in fact, if you were able to open the window from 16 to 18 to say 16 to 20 or something and then eventually have teams and you had eight teams or 12 teams, whatever it is,

you're not in a position where you could not give some ownership or equity in the mothership or the individual franchises to the players. We're already doing that. Oh, really? All the first players have options and equity. Wow, they got stock options in the league? Yeah. Wow.

Can you? So we're allowed to do basically whatever we want. I'll give you another example. Like we're working on, as I mentioned, trading card deals. What I want to try to do and, you know, we'll see how all the deals shake out. But you think about, you know, the trading card space and somebody buys a Mike Trout rookie card for $5 million. How much does Mike Trout get? He gets nothing.

What we would love to do is say every rookie card, one of them gets put in a vault for the player. And if in five years that player is, you know, the next Kevin Durant and that card is worth a lot of money, like that player will own one of their own cards and they'll be able to do it. And I think when we talk to partners in the trading card space, in the NFT space, and all of those things. things, they look at us as kind of like a blank whiteboard and they're like, we can do whatever want. You want to give equity to the players? Fuck yeah. Let's give equity to the players and give it.

And I will not only, I will add to that, like, we are actually setting up, you'll appreciate this. We're setting up essentially like a venture fund where the players are going to be the GP and where there will be an outside LP. And so the players will get the carry. They won't have to put up any money. the LP will put up the money, they'll bring the deals, and then as part of the education instead of math class,

the players will sit and they'll review pitches and they'll vote and decide what they want to invest it. Well, let me know, I'll come speak. All right, as we wrap up here, and since we're both basketball heads, and you're so candid and honest, which makes you a great guest, I wanted to talk you about wagering,

because you had David Stern on, who was anti-wagering, or being anywhere near Vegas, anywhere near gambling. Obviously, things have changed radically in just the last decade, where fantasy sports, gambling, wagering, you know, a better word for gambling, has become acceptable. Now we have a federal mandate that people should be able to do this. The Supreme Court has made some decisions.

You guys can look that up if you like. And Adam Silver came out a couple years ago and said, hey, listen, people are doing this. We should allow it. We should embrace it. It increases, you know, people's engagement. So I'm curious your thoughts on that, you know, putting your league aside, just that amazing transition that happened from the Tim Donahey era where he was, you know, in cahoots with the mob basically, you know, telling him who was going to officiate games

and then people trying to get an edge on the game. If people can look that up, Tim Donahey, and that scandal. And then all the way to now where they're going to put a team in Vegas, it seems. Yeah. So, yes, this is a great question. And I think, and I care about this a lot. So first of all, to your point, independent of the league, we don't do betting on minors or anything else like that. Look, sports betting. Like an ethical thing about betting on minors? Why would that? I don't know.

I just think it's better to just separate them to start with. But in general, in sports betting, there is zero question that is a single most transformative thing that will shape sports in the next 10 years. In 2018, PAPSpo was overturned and sports betting was allowed on a state-by-state base. And I'd make a couple points. Number one is that, you know, it's been legal in Europe for years. We're looked at as very prudish, right? We didn't allow gay marriage. Australia allows it too, yeah.

Yeah, we didn't allow gay marriage. We didn't allow people to smoke weed. We didn't allow them a bet. And I think we're getting to a point in the country where, and it's random. We allow them to smoke cigarettes to drink beer, but they can't do other things, right? Where we're like adults over the age of 21 are adults and they can make a decision about how they want to spend their money in their time. And I'd say the second thing is that it's already transformational in Europe. It's part of the fabric.

You know, I think in this country, you can't watch an NBA or an NFL game without seeing all the sports spending companies all over it. It's it's it becomes a more effective form of direct modernization in a way than actually even subscription and brand revenues do. I think it's been, it's, I've heard people discuss that, you know, the biggest sports platforms in the world are going to be bought by betting companies.

Like, someday we're going to wake up and somebody's going to buy ESPN and it's going to be part of it. Or ESPN or they'll merge. It makes sense. I mean, look what happened with barstool and whatever. Penn gaming. Yeah.

I mean, what a brilliant combination. Yeah. And so I would say that it's transformational. It's interesting. It's fun. I think the things that I, It's going to be a huge focus for us.

And the reason that it's a focus for us is twofold. One is the interesting thing about sports betting is we all have opinions, right? Like, oh, Katie's going to go off tonight. No way. The bucks are going to take them. Sports betting is just a way to back up your opinion at the end of the day. And if you think about how bad comments are on the Internet and how toxic they are, you don't have to back up anything.

You can say whatever you want. This is actually, in a way, it uses money as a sense. signifier to talk about that conversation and to show what you know. But I'd say the second thing is that I think, look, we come from an era where sports betting, you're thinking of a bookie, a guy with the cigar, you know, some kind of degenerate gambler and everything else like that. And the reality is that almost a quarter of sports betters in this country are female. And on top of it, sports betting is a highly, highly social activity.

And so I can go into my office and I can find the 10 guys all put their money, all chipped in $5 and bet on the worst horse in the Kentucky Derby because they wanted to talk about it all day when they were at their Kentucky Derby party. Our guy's going to hit. We're going to go big. And I think what you find is there's a tremendous amount of social activity where it's almost like going to a game or going out to dinner. A bunch of millennials are pooling their money and they're doing something that's interesting and fun to them. and they're doing it because it brings them together. I'd say, like, there are very few people who sports bet who do not have a group chat with all their friends doing the same thing.

And I think that's very similar to the ethos of overtime. Like, we have really focused on community, on discussion. And I think there's no real, Barstall's done an excellent job. And outside of them, there's no real lifestyle brand in the space. It tends to be very transactional. So I'm really excited about that opportunity. And I think it can be done in a responsible way that treats. adults as adults.

And I think it's going to transform the nature of sports in this country. All right. Final question. Big three is, I don't know if they're successful, but they seem to still be operating. And they seem to have hit some cultural zeitgeist. Obviously, they're doing older players and letting people relive the 90s and, you know, some players they loved. But it does seem to be a very innovative new format.

and they seem to have combined music, going to a location and a music festival, kind of like it feels almost to me like the All-Star game as a sort of default. It's a cultural fun thing to do. So what do you see in the big three that gives you hope that you can make a sustainable large business? And are they successful? Educate me. Look, I don't want to be in the position of comment on anyone else's league.

I don't know if they're successful. I've never watched the product. All I know is that Ice Cube is involved. And I don't really look there for inspiration. I'm way more interested, I would say, in what happens in e-sports and what 100 Thieves and Faze Clan do and folks like that. I also think that there's an element to overtime, which is you want to know who's next. It's like you want to know what that band is.

You want to know who that rapper is. You want to know who that young director is. And you want to follow that trajectory. And that's really where we carve out our lane. But I'd say anybody who's trying anything different and innovative is getting some level of traction because I believe that this generation of audience is far more open-minded about what sports is, about what music is. You know, it's like, oh, is it a movie because it was on Netflix and it wasn't in a movie theater?

And the answer is, I don't fucking care. It was dope. I loved it. Yeah, you know. And so I think you're going to see a lot of people do different things. And, you know, I think the biggest cautionary tale is, you know, You don't want to be a bad version of the NBA because the NBA is a great product. You've got to carve out your own lane.

And I think for us, we already have 50 million followers and we reach 100 million people every month. And so to start something from scratch, but where you have a built-in brand and audience, I think, is where there's a huge upside. And there's no doubt that basketball is the sport that is most firmly located in culture, right? Every rapper wants to be a hooper and vice versa. You got the tunnel. You got all those. So it's an amazingly fun place to play because what does every entrepreneur want? They want to build something that's culturally relevant.

They want to know that people love what they made and that it's changed their life and it's in the zeitgeist. And I think being around basketball, being around young athletes who are kind of the next social media generation, being in Atlanta, which is like an incredible hype city and everything else like that, that's, you know, that's where we want to be. Awesome. Listen, continued success. You've been a great guest.

Thanks for being so candid. I wish you great success on it. Let me know when I can buy a franchise. Thank you, Jason. I've always wanted to own the Knicks. Seems to be getting harder and harder. No matter how hard I work. I feel you.

The price keeps going up. My net worth and the Knicks value seems to be the spread keeps getting wider, not closer, closing. So you'll take the under and one day you'll take the over. Yeah, exactly. All right, listen, continued success. And we'll see you all next time on this weekend startups. Bye-bye.