This Week in Startups - Ryan Smith on buying the Utah Jazz, evolving Qualtrics, AI’s early days, and more | E1782

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Fin can’t burn its mouth on hot pizza. Or wave at someone who wasn’t waving at them. Fin can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. Meet Fin. A breakthrough AI bot by Intercom – ready to join your support team today. Visit https://intercom.com/fin Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist Superside. Design and creative are crucial for growth. Tech companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Meta have found the perfect solution: Superside. Get $2000 off with Superside's Startup Accelerator package superside.com/TWIST. * Today’s show: Ryan Smith joins Jason to discuss buying the Utah Jazz while simultaneously prepping for an IPO (3:19), Qualtrics going from IPO prep to acquired to spin out IPO to a take-private in under five years (58:56), his thoughts on AI’s impact (49:12), and much more! * Time stamps: (00:00) Qualtics Co-Founder Ryan Smith joins Jason (3:19) Ryan’s decision to buy the Utah Jazz NBA team (9:05) The Rudy Gorbet Utah Jazz deal (12:05) Fin - Try Fin, Intercom's new AI customer support chatbot, at https://intercom.com/f (12:46) The process of owning an NBA team while prepping for an IPO (21:09) The impact of the midseason tournament (23:30) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (24:50) Providing a better user experience with free-to-watch games in Utah (26:37) Paradigm shifts in media and building an NBA media giant (36:10) The importance of going direct in media (39:52) Superside - Go to https://superside.com/twist to get $2000 off with Superside's Startup Accelerator package (41:24) Qualtrics’ product evolution (49:12) Ryan’s thoughts on AI’s impact on business (54:49) Job displacement as a result of AI (58:56) Qualtrics going from IPO prep to acquired to spin out IPO to a take-private in under five years (1:03:31) The change in approach to private vs public businesses * Check out Qualtrics: https://www.qualtrics.com/ Follow Ryan: https://twitter.com/RyanQualtrics * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

It's kind of nuts, you know, like I did podcasting for 10 years here at this week in startups, my passion, and it's gone incredible. And then you just do this, like, a little tiny side project. And it gets to, like, broken to the top 10 episodes of the week over the last couple of weeks. It's really bizarre. That's become so popular. It's crossed over into, like, colleges and, you know, civilians and stuff like that. I think it's a really cool thing if, like, you've got, like, people, like, I always tell our players or our coach, like, you want to understand tech. Just listen every week.

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slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I am super excited because friend of the pod who hasn't been on since pre-COVID, Ryan Smith, the co-founder of Qualtricks. And now it's not just a fan of the Utah Jazz. He bought the team. Enjoyed it so much. We bought the team. Welcome back to the program, Ryan Smith. Hey, it's good to be back on. I'm glad you're still doing this, man.

I remember 2019. Yeah, right before the pandemic. before San Francisco and the world got crazy. It's so weird. I mean, how do you look back on the last four years? So much has happened. Also for you, buying the team,

etc. But it is crazy how business has changed. And you also, you had done the IPO at that time, I guess, or shortly thereafter, maybe. Yeah, we had just sold and we're still kind of rocking

and then decided the IPO was a year later. And then it's been crazy for the last four years. been a little nuts, man. A lot of transactions. I got to just start with the team. What a dream to buy the team. How's it been? This is, you're going into your second year, I think?

Yeah, we're starting our, actually, our beginning of our third season. We kind of took over a half year. You know, it'd be like you with the Knicks. Like, it's your team. I think when Adam called me when we kind of did the announcements, that, hey, Ryan, like, if you're lucky, you can be part of the NBA,

If you're really lucky, you can work in it or be in a small ownership piece of it. And if you won the lottery, you get to be like a majority owner. Yeah. And but no one gets their team. Yeah. And you have the team you grew up watching, sneaking into the arena as a kid. Like, yeah. And so it's not lost on me.

I mean, it's a huge responsibility, especially with the team who has never won it. We're the second winningest franchise over the last 30 years, which is crazy. and most people know us for being such a prominent figure in the last stance, but not getting over like we peaked during those Jordan years. And so, don't I know it? And next as well, the Ewing era. There's a whole list of teams and players who, like, they just, they played during the Jordan years.

And it's just, he's the goat. So. Yeah. So we've just got a, we got a lot of opportunity and we're excited. I mean, Utah's growing a lot. And it's a huge responsibility. But it's fun. super fun.

And what's your approach been? I listen to like Bill Simmons and a bunch of folks. They talk about new owner syndrome and new owners coming in and getting frisky and, you know, jump in the fence, doing crazy stuff. What's your, and you must be aware of all that. And you must think about it like a business because I know you're a big strategist and you think about it like a chessboard or a business, I'm sure. It involves people.

It involves a strategy. It involves a budget. All of those things. So what's your approach been? and how do you think about the league and building that winning culture and then ultimately getting the chip, which is obviously the goal. You want to get the chip for your team? Yeah, so one of the things Adam said to me when I came in was like, don't take whatever you've learned through Qualtricks and your time and tech and check it at the door. That would be the biggest mistake.

We actually want you to bring that here. And, but it's totally different, right? In tech, we measure ourselves through market share. And if we have a certain amount of market share, we feel good. And there can be multiple winners. And actually, even second place in search is not that bad. No. And if you look at it within our world, like we're actually in a closed marketplace in the NBA,

which means whoever you deal with, you're going to have to deal with again. There's not new entrants. They're all there. So you've got to behave in a way that, you know, you need to go back. to the well or back to another team or back to another player. And that really, really matters. You know, in tech, we can just go out and recruit whoever we want at any time and create roles and do this. Like, that's not the way it works. And then I think some of the things that I've learned, like, we're all super competitive and we're also super impatient in tech. And that's

really, really hard because tomorrow comes. And you have a finite amount of assets you have to play with. And everyone kind of has the same amount of assets up to a point. And you've got to strategically go through and place these bets and know when to place the bets. And you've got to get lucky. And so if you look at what I came into, I came in. In my first year, we were the winningest team in the league in the regular season.

But we got bounced from the playoffs pretty early. Second year, we ran it back, didn't really want to mess it up. Like the team was kind of in the latter half of a pretty good run. We had two All-Stars and Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gaubert. And I really hadn't done anything. I just kind of watched. And I got a chance to work with, or at least the possibility to work with kind of the person who I idolized in basketball was Danny Aange who had run the Boston Celtics for 18 years. It's a killer.

My tech background was like, Ryan, surround yourself with the best people you can get. And it felt like I was going out to recruit an executive like we all have done. Yep. And said, hey, how do we get Danny to come in and like help run the team? And then who do we put around? And we had Justin Sannick and ended up going through a coaching change. How did you get Danny, age? Yeah.

Because he was, that's a hard one. I mean, it's not just about money for him. It's got to be about opportunity, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I think he was in a spot where it was a career shift. His kids lived out here in Utah. we have been friends for a really long time. And, you know, I think that, you know, creating a role that worked for him at this time of his life, right?

And, you know, a lot of times as CEO, you probably need someone around to make six or seven hard decisions. And that's kind of what I need Danny for. Right. We can keep the trains running on time. But there's the draft that comes up and decision to really when to go all in and how to go all in and have someone who's been through every side of it. You know, you've got someone who's been in the league for 46 years as a player at a championship level as a coach, as a GM, and now as CEO. It's pretty cool. And then how do you build an organization around that so it all works?

And so, you know, we made the decision to kind of take a step backwards, which really isn't popular. And it's definitely unnatural of what the type of splash I would draw up if I was coming in as a new owner. Yeah. It's to say, hey, we're going to trade two All-Stars. The year before we actually host the All-Star game in Salt Lake City, which our fans are looking forward to. You couldn't draw probably a worse strategy, but we end up getting Lowry Marketing him back in the trade.

He ends up starting the All-Star game. We end up kind of getting the Minnesota's draft pick with Walker Kessler, who's now on Team USA in year two. it look like we have, you know, we kind of accelerate a little bit on that process. And we have a lot of draft capital going forward, which provides hope and a lot of assets. Like, you guys broke the NBA with that Gobert trade. It was like, how did Danny Aange do that? He got four first round picks.

And like, now everybody else who tries to trade for somebody is like, well, wait, we got four for Rudy Gobert, great player. What does Kevin Durant get? What is, you know, the next person get? I mean, that, when he came to you with that deal, you must have been like, what? How does that possible? I mean, there's no, like, I always hate moving on from guys. Yeah. Right?

Like, like, I like this idea and it's just similar to tech. Like, I like working with people for a really long time and kind of, I think there's stability and continuity matters a lot. And I think it matters in basketball as well. So there was no deal or idea that made me excited, right? however, if we're going to go down that direction, then, you know, and it makes sense, I understand why other teams are doing it. You just saw this with Phoenix.

Like Phoenix went all in because they think it's a chance to push them over to give them that ability to go win a championship. And, you know, when one championship and an organization that hasn't won it, like, that's worth whatever. That's worth maybe even, you know, taking the next five years. struggling. It is, it does seem like if you do have a window to go for it, you should take a swing, right?

Because the, there's no dominance anymore with LeBron at the, you know, end of his career, the Warriors, you know, still dominant, but, you know, certainly beatable, as we've seen. You know, it's, it feels like anybody's so wide open right now that everybody's got a shot.

I mean, even my Knicks made it to the second round. And, you know, we've, we're kind of in a similar situation to you with a lot of young, great draft picks and a ton of a lot of young talent, a lot of picks and a lot of reasonable salaries. It does seem like that's the other key is the flexibility you have, right, to wait around for, because so many stars move now. It's not like when we were kids where Ewing or Hakeem Elijah won or whoever is going to stay for 10 years, you know, or 12 years or whatever it is. It seems like the players move around and everybody's kind of accepted that, right?

as like, yeah, the Stockton of Malone days where people are staying in one spot or the Steph Curry. I mean, Steph is such an anomaly, right?

So, it's getting someone who's going to spend possibly their entire career one spot. Ideally, you could do that, but it's super,

super difficult, especially with the new CBA that just came out that was just signed. I think that's going to increase the player movement. I mean, we had 50-something players

move at the trade deadline last year. and so as you go through that, but there's a lot of teams. I think the teams over the next five years are going to be different than the ones that you see now. I mean, you can see Oklahoma City. You could see some of these other teams, you know, with Detroit or Houston or ourselves, like really rise up as some of those who have had a good run like the Warriors or others. I mean, it's hard to maintain a 20-year run. Finn can't go through a golf phase or still be haunted by a bad haircut.

in middle school. Finn can resolve half your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. What is Finn? Finn is a breakthrough AI bot from Intercom designed for customer support teams. It learns your entire knowledge database and has the ability to carry conversations, remember context and nuance, while slashing your resolution times and support volume. Meet Finn, a breakthrough AI bot by Intercom, ready to join your support team at A. it intercom.com slash fin. We'll get back to Quattrix in a minute, but it's fascinating because buying a team, it's hard to do. So what's that process like to even?

Because I don't think people understand the structure of the NBA. It's a, it's a, the owners own the league. And so you have 30 owners and they're all like a partnership. It's kind of like an LLC or something, like, uh, like almost like a law firm or a venture partnership. Is that kind of more analogous to the structure than a, and a C corporation? Yeah, I mean, essentially, you know, there's always this debate. Do you own 3% of the NBA or do you own 100% of the Utah Jazz, right? Right.

And I think that as we look out at the end of the day, we are partners. And, you know, you're making decisions together. You want to kill each other on the court. But, you know, you come together in your meetings and you're saying, hey, how do we benefit the league through a new television deal or a new CBA? And how do you actually come together and work together? And you actually get pretty close and you become friendly. Yeah. But at the same time, once again, it's a closed market.

You have to face them in the playoffs or you have to face them when you're doing deals. And, you know, you've got to work with these people for a long time. And so it's a unique process. I remember going through it. And it was actually, it started about the same time we decided to take Qualtrix public in 2020. in 2019, the summer of 19. And reality was, you know, it closed. The team closed right around the same time as we went public.

They were all within like a week or two of each other. And I was like, this has to be the craziest dual. I've been, I've been a part of a couple dual tracks. This was the craziest dual track because the, the thoroughness of that process was, I would argue it was way more intense than going public. Really? Wow. That's incredible. But when you think about it, like, did you see the Blackberry movie by chance yet? No, no, I didn't see it, but we were just talking about that. I'm going, I haven't downloaded

on my iPad, actually. Oh, it is so good. I mean, it's a $4.5 million independent film, but just for tech guys and for guys who like sports, you know, the guy who came in to be, you know, the hired gun, sharky, sharp elbowed CEO of Blackberry, um, he tries to buy an NHL team. And he basically just doesn't, he does, it's pretty well known. He doesn't pass the sort of, you know, the sniff test with the other owners. And so you basically have to, the other owners vote on you essentially. They have to want to be partners with you. And then I guess that's nerve-wracking, right?

No, for sure. And they have to know you and like what they're getting and how they're getting it. And I mean, it's a, it's a process, especially myself, like, coming in. end a team or a family that it owned the team for 30 something years. They basically brought it, we're part of bringing it to Utah. I mean, it's, it's royalty here. And so how do you, how do you come in and like not screw it up or keep it going and like, but also put your own flavor on it? And so I think when we came into the league, everyone asked me, well, what type of owner or what type of executive are you going to be in the NBA? And it's like, well, I've been a leader for a long

time and I've run a company, I don't have another persona. It's like, I'm kind of myself. Like, that's how it's going to be. I'm Ryan and that's who I am. And, you know, because they want to, they want to classify you. They want to say, are you going to be like Mark Cuban? Are you going to be Steve Balmer? Are you going to be over here?

Like, how involved are you going to be? And it's like, well, I'm, I'm involved in pretty much anything I'm doing. It's the only way to actually, I haven't seen success otherwise. and, but I also don't think I have to run or make every decision and I can provide room where people like Danny or others

and really talented people want to work around you. Yeah. It's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. I'm just, I'm so crushed that we didn't trade Spider to New York. I know,

I know. I know. I know. You knew this was going to come up. It's like, we're so New Yorkers right now. We really do not like Danny Age. If he was working for us, we'd love him.

He's an unbelievable kid. That is one special kid. I mean, I mean, we beat him. We beat Cleveland in the playoffs. We trounced him. And you just saw the look on Spiders'Face. He's like, why can't I be in there? He just wants him to be in there.

Hey, I didn't say that. I know. He said it all summer long. He's in New York. He's coming. This is my theory. He's going to do him one more year that he's going to come. I have faith.

I'm really interested where Dame goes. Hey, you got to give it up for Cleveland. They went all in. They went all in. I mean, they tried us a starting All-Star. Like, I mean, that's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy. Yeah.

What a season last year, huh? Wow. It's just incredible to see Miami go from the eighth seed and wind up in the finals. Wild. It's the playing tournament's working. I love the playing tournament. You like it too, right? Yeah, I think one of the things I like about the NBA that I think maybe

some other leagues haven't. We're disrupting ourselves. Like, we just approved in-season tournament. Yeah. Tell me about that. How is this exactly going to work? I know it's part of, like, the soccer leagues do it? Yeah, I don't think anyone really knew how the,

the playing tournament would go. I think there's enough evidence that we're willing to try new stuff. And I think that, that, as we've all learned in tech, like, that is like the first, like realization that we've got a bright future is if we're willing to invent. Yeah. And I look around at other leagues and, you know, the one that's top of mind for me is like live and golf.

Like, why did it have to get to this point? Right. Like, you should have disrupted yourself and we always have a saying of Qualter. So we need to be our own activists. And there was an activist inside our company. What would they do? Oh, I like that family. We should go do it.

What would they tell us to go do about our own company? Right. Yeah. And run that exercise. And I think the NBA, I like the thought process here. Whether it's right or wrong, whether it works or it doesn't work, I feel like we sit around and we get forward thinking around tech, around camera angles, around television, around streaming.

We're leaning in hard on these things. And with global expansion, NBA Africa, you know, a lot of these bets aren't clear. and like we we use the brand well and we work together to go do it. And I think it's an exciting league to be a part of for that reason. Yeah, I love anything that makes the regular season more important to me is great. And now you're starting to see like teams are not towards the end of the season tanking saying, yeah, you know, we'll just we don't or we don't have to sit, you know, our top players and then getting rid of those back to back to back games, you know.

and I actually think maybe even the number of games per season, 82 games feels like maybe 72, 74, keep the players a little healthier or tighter. Maybe that would be good. I don't know. But you even saw it with the draft. You even saw it with a draft. We had an incredible draft this year where there was a lot of hype around Victor and Scoot and everyone.

And, you know, everyone, the last four had the same chance. And so I went and sat in the ping pong room because I wanted to experience it once. And like I had my numbers. it was like playing Kino, right? Where like you're sitting there and the numbers come up. And I was like, whoa, this is fascinating. Like one number comes up from a ping pong ball and it changes the future of your entire franchise or it could, right?

Yeah. I think it's done that for San Antonio, right? We'll see. But like, it's real. It's really interesting, these tall guys. We had Porzingis for a bit and then he couldn't stay on the court. And then I think what it was probably his best season last year on the, on the Wizards. And there was a whole contingent in New York, like, should we bring them back?

Should we try to get them to come back? That was crushing for me when we traded from, hey, let's go to, and then this, before we go to Quarge, this mid-season tournament? What's that going to be like? What do you impact you think that's going to have? Yeah, so I think it's exactly this where the games count as regular season games, but there's incentive, there's motivation, there's a lot of television around it. It culminates in Vegas.

And I think it's, I think it's a little bit. of, you know, I think we're going to look at it from a team standpoint to say, hey, where do we stack up? Where are we at? How are we really feeling? Because then that's followed by the trade deadline. Because a lot of times you don't know.

You don't know until really like the second half. Like, where are you really at? And, you know, there's injuries and people haven't played together. And I think it'll be a good test in the middle of the season, which I'll make the regular season. really pop and then people will want to get, you know, in a rhythm before that coming into that hot.

So I don't think anyone knows the unintended or the intended consequences of it all. I think just like the playing tournament, I don't think people had ever seen the Miami He for example get all the way through to the finals. Yeah, I love it. It just creates so much drama the week before the playoffs start. Those ninth and 10th teams, right? You just now they're got a shot. And, you know, getting into a playoff berth, that's what the fans want.

They want to come to some playoff games. I mean, I flew to New York to go to the playoff games. Like, I literally, I'm like, I'm 52 now. There's a certain amount of Knicks playoff games left, and I'm going to see them, you know. I'm going to be there in person unless Elon takes, you know, I had to miss the Cleveland search because Elon decided to, you know, have the Starship Rock and go up. And I was like, oh, Starship Rock and Cleveland. You got to come out to Utah. The experience is unique.

Like, it is, we're really drawn it up. It's the world I come from. Basketball. It's a basketball city, yeah, I mean. And it's amazing who comes into Utah. Like, everyone comes through Utah. Like, go talk to anyone and say, hey, what's the last time you were in Utah? It's like, oh, I just went to Zion or I'm up in Park City.

Like, and now we're bringing it all together. And every night people are there and saying, hey, like, whoa, I didn't, I've always come up here. I come up here to ski, I come up here to hang out. Just didn't know that this was here. Yeah, it's great. Okay, listen, you got an idea for a tech startup. Great. You think you want to change the world.

You think you got this. This is the one. Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity. You need to go fast. And how are you going to go fast and how are you going to control your burn rate? If you got no engineers, well, what if you had a partner who could provide you

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Visit lemon.com slash twist and give it a shot. Getting people to see the local games. This is like one of my big hardships. I'm traveling around the world. I pay for the top level NBA League pass where they take out the commercials and give you like the in arena stuff because I'm such an NBA lunatic. I like to watch the inside MSG and, you know, see like the local coverage. But then I get all those blackout dates and, you know, like sometimes I'm trying to like get my VPN right so I could just watch my team. It's like, you know, every 15th game, there's something going on where I'm in Tahoe.

I can't watch a Warriors game, but I can't watch a Warriors game. but I can watch the next, you're doing something pretty creative with making sure all Utah residents can see all games for free, explain. Yeah, so we have 3 million people plus in Utah

and then we're uniquely positioned where we're only, you know, 45 minutes, a half hour from Wyoming and, you know, an hour and a half

or an hour from Idaho. So if you actually think about our market, you know, I've just gone back to ask the question from the world I come from is like, what type of experience are we providing from a viewership standpoint?

And the way the old contract which was done 10 years ago, we're the first in the league to kind of really come up for renewal. And it was kind of like, hey, you sign us over your rights. You don't worry about the experience. You're getting paid. You've got your money. We're going to handle it.

We're going to distribute it to the highest bidder. However, we do. And I think we had like 50% viewership that we were able to access. So a million and a half people. And then last year, a week before the season started, dish and this provider kind of were at odds and we lost 20% from due. So we were ultimately out of your control providing 30% of our audience, you know, our games.

And it just didn't feel right. So as we walked through this new kind of paradigm shift in all of local media, because it's not just the NBA. It's going to be everyone and everything. we couldn't view a scenario where in the future we didn't need to control our own destiny as we strategized out

every possible scenario we said hey wait a minute we need to be able to control our own content I mean this is exactly where Bob Iger wound up he's like I don't know who's consuming the Star Wars franchise the Indiana Jones franchise the Pixar I paid all these billions of dollars I don't even know who's watching it I don't know at what minute they're turning it off

I don't have their address. I don't even have their email address. And then they're criticizing him over Disney Plus. And it's like, do you realize they have hundreds of millions of people's credit cards now? They never had those credit cards. They never had a direct relationship. That's what you're talking about. Essentially.

So we basically also decided that from an experience standpoint, I remember when I first started working with the NBA at Qualtricks, we were looking at season tickets and we realized that there was like five types of fans for a team. And we also realized that this old model was assuming there was one fan and one fan that would consume data one way. So if you just take your like all in pod, like how many people are consuming this and how many different varieties and how they want. And so one of the things that we said is like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We are going to control our rights. We're basically going to go partner with someone and we're going to, for all intents and purposes, buy airspace on their channel.

We're going to give it away for free. Right? So we're going to go into a partnership and then we're going to sand up the sales team on the advertising team and we're going to produce it similar to what you do for your pots. You produce it. You sell the ads and so you control your destiny. And when we did that, it was pretty clear that there was a pretty significant revenue hit,

which was the gap. And we were one of the teams, though, and I don't know how many there are, where we had a little bit of a dislocation in the market, where our market size was growing bigger than our previous contract. So if we had to back ourselves into, for example, $20 million, we could do it as opposed to someone who legacy contracts were 70 or 80. there's no way they could get there. So we said, hey, Utah's the fastest growing state. It has been for like six out of last 10 years. With this growth, we think we can go and provide an experience to everyone. So the first persona was to go and say, anyone on over the air TV can watch it.

For free. For free. Amazing. Second persona. So in one day, we go from about a million people to three million. The second persona was we're going to sign a deal to go direct to consumer. And we're going to make it affordable where you can go direct to consumer. You've got to pay.

But anytime you go to the UtahJazz.com app, you will be able to watch the games. Oh, in your app? In our app. Wow. One seamless experience. And then the third persona is, okay, what if you're a fan in surrounding states? And so in this situation, we feel like we've gone from three, from one million people to 3.2 million people, hypothetically, like whatever it is, plus an online version, which could be

another population, let's say a couple hundred thousand, whatever. And now we're saying, hey, well, Idaho, we're kind of the team of Idaho. We're the team of Wyoming. And we actually spread into Washington in some of these areas. Like, how do we go get another two million people? And if we take a step back, we think we found a way to jump markets. size. So if you look at, you know, market size, like what's the market size of a team with five million people consuming? Yeah, much more. And we're historically branded as a small market team. But there's actually nothing in Salt Lake and Utah that's small market. We have top three tech ecosystem, top four tech ecosystem in the country. We have seven million people

coming in to recreate, to ski or to do whatever else it is. You can just, you can just. You can jump on a plane 10 minutes from the arena and get to France and London and Amsterdam direct. Huge airport. Yeah. And Delta just put $3 billion in there. You have the number one economy. You have the youngest demographic. And so there's really not a lot that's small market outside of television household viewerships. Right.

And the reason why that's low is because people move out of San Francisco. I think we're the number one exporter out of California, by the way. and they move there to spread out. That's what they want to do. They want to leave the super city of the urban area to actually spread out. And so it's actually a fascinating part of the job. Like the business side of this and working there is like, I want Danny to handle the basketball side.

I'm super involved. I want to be part of it. I believe I can add a lot. But the actual consumption side and how that intertwines with what we do in tech right now is fascinating. Yeah, well, just think, you know, when you start auctioning off chunks of the business, then everybody's got a different incentive. And as we know, show me an incentive. I'll show you an outcome. And, you know, you have to, you can now have a 360 degree incentive. Merchandise, season tickets, the sponsorship of the arena can now dovetail with the sponsorship

of the actual streams. You can collect the emails. In the emails can be the upsell for the local car dealership. That is now part of the whole process. So just thinking about marketers and advertisers who want to be involved or fans who want to be involved, you're going to have their email. They signed up for the app. You get their email. Now you can send them a last minute notice, hey, we got some tickets available last minute, same day sales, whatever. This is why when I was looking at Disney, I don't know, 10 years ago, I was like, I think they're going to catch up to Netflix because, and the NBA is just starting to do this. In the NBA app, they're just starting to upsell you on merchandise. The end of the game. You know, if, I don't know,

RJ Barrett has his best game. You know, he scores 50 points. They should say, hey, congratulations, RJ Barrett. Here's all the RJ Barrett jerseys. At the end of the game, 20% off, you know, buying it, whatever it is. And when I watched Star Wars, the first thing my kids wanted to do when they saw the Mandalorian was get at Grogu.

They didn't upsell me that on Disney Plus. They have my address. They have my credit card. At the end of the episode, would you like to buy Grogu? Click here. We'll deliver it to this address. Do you know how many Groguos they would have sold instead I'm buying a Grogo off Etsy? that's like handcrafted. You know, like consumers are going to find it.

It's, uh, yeah, wow. No, we're a media company, man. Exactly. You're a media company. We're a media company. We have content. We have distribution. We have talent.

Like, this is, this is, this is what it is. And I think that you start to understand. And not only that, our players are now their own brands. Big time. Right. They have their own media. Like, and so that's an interesting dynamic here. It's like, okay.

You know, the bigger we make our brand and our umbrella, the more we can help them where, you know, I don't think it's great to be in a situation where they necessarily believe that their brand is way bigger than the team because then we can't help them. Right. We want to help them. We can get their stories out there and help them. And that's, there's nothing wrong or illegal about that. Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, Draymond has, I've had many conversations with Draymond before he started his pod, during his pod. We talk podcast every couple of weeks at the poker game.

It's a beautiful thing. And, I mean, talk about a game changer. And people don't know this. Mark Cuban was an investor in my blogging company. And we set up blog Maverick for him. He famously wrote the post about Steve Nash getting traded and why he didn't give him like an extended contract or whatever. That freaked ESPN out.

They were like, they wouldn't even link to Cuban's blog. And now like folks don't want to link to Dremon's podcast. But it's like, Grandma's talking about the game in a very real, like, tangible way after a playoff game in his hotel. It's incredible. I thought we were going to see this last year. I thought we were going to see the in-playoff game. When he got kicked out of the game, I thought we were going to get the in-playoff game pod.

I heard it is. Look at this. I set this, my partner Brian, Alvi shouted to Brian. He came up with the name Blog Maverick. Oh, yeah. And then this is the post he wrote. And Mark emailed me the podcast. post. He wrote it on his Blackberry or

or psychic and he emails it to me, hey, post this. And I get it in my thing and I'm like, Mark, the comma is like, you're putting a space then a comma, like it's always comma than space. And he's like, leave the typos in. I'm like, but you're using like an ellipsis wrong here. He's like, I want people to know it's me. I just, I wrote it like stream of conscience. I read it once, just post it. And I'm like, are you sure? He's like,

I'm sure, go. And this like broke the NBA when he wrote this. Do you remember this? Yeah, I remember it. It's crazy. Yeah, it was just like, go direct. I mean, that is the overall, like, concept of media. As consumers want you to go direct, they want to talk to you. You mentioned five personas. I know corporates won.

I know the diard fans who've had season tickets for in their family for like 20, 30 years. That's the other. I know there's like the tourists who come in and they just want to catch a game. They're casual. That's three. Then I got to think there's groups that come to the arena who are like, you know, like, a school or something like that. And then I guess there's the people who you don't have who just casually maybe get dragged

to a game. Do they get all five? Yeah, pretty close, actually. I mean, I think we segment a little bit around if you overlay the games, right? So like families. So like I would argue that in Utah, you've got Monday night, which is kind of a family night and then the weekends. And so if you took your weekend games and the families and dates and you said, okay, then

you have the business folks, which are typically Monday through Friday. Yeah. And then you would have kind of the big game goers, like in L.A., this would be like the stars are out. Like this would always be the marquee matchup, the marquee game. And then if you overlay that with another variable or vector, which would be like, where do they want to sit? So if you look at like big game, marquee matchup, you know that those floor seats are going to be high premium, right? or you've got the diehards or they'll sit wherever and they just want to go and they go to every game. This is the way it is.

You've got families who are typically going on the weekends, right? Because that's when they can, I mean, those school nights, this and that. And then you've got, you know, events or people that are coming in or big groups or large groups or everything else. So, I mean, you know, they're pretty good. And so I think historically what you've done is you've said, oh, we've got a $3 million marketing budget. We're just going to attack that group. And it's like, wait, that's not one group. No.

So actually divide up your budget and go figure out how to creatively tack all of them, and you will end up a lot further. What are the court side seats go further? You guys have three, four thousand a ticket? We're a little less than that. I think we're probably bottom, mid to bottom half of the league. But we do have a 400 person waiting list to sit courtside. We sold out 250 straight games.

That's amazing. We're working on that. I have a theory now that. that sitting courtside for playoff any nationally televised game because now I got a lot of friends they have courtside seats yada yada I'm very lucky to have a bunch of friends like that

and I sit courtside once in a while and I've sat courtside on some very high profile games it is a marketing expense for anybody who's a business or an entertainer and I have like a little bit of an entertainer a thing going on with the podcast for me to spend literally I very rarely buy tickets but I've spent 10 grand on a ticket

whatever. When I spend that, it is so marketing accretive as an investor in companies or as having a podcast because hundreds of people text me, oh, I see it at the game. I see it at the game. And that's why I think some people do it. I think some people have realized showing up a game and sitting courtsides is a marketing expense that makes you seem baller or just build your own brand in the NBA. And so what goes on or what historically has gone on in Hollywood is not by accident. Yeah. Every talent agent's trying to get their person up front in Hollywood. Yeah. Like, for a reason. Yeah. But it's a cool, it's a cool experience. You'll have to come out.

I can find some court side for you. Coming up. All right. If you are listening to this podcast, you care about innovation, obviously. And one sector that really needed a shakeup was design. I'm always on and on and on about the beautiful design about apps we've invested in, but it's hard to do. In the past, you either had to hire this expensive old school agency.

Boom, all your startup funding burned. And then there were freelance marketplaces. It can get messy. Let's just leave it at that. There's got to be a better way, right? Well, let me tell you about that better way. It's called Super Sign, Super S-I-D-E. It's a new way to get great design done quickly and consistently and at a high level.

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I think people understand the business, getting survey data, leveraging that, doing analysis, this, but a lot of change to just started the business, specifically, you know, AI, and then there's all the corporate side and the transactions.

Let's start with the product. How is the product changed and evolved? We know there's been transactions. You got bought, you IPOed, and then you just went private. So that's a crazy series of events. So actually, you take it wherever you want. You want to talk about the transaction side or the business side?

Yeah, let's just talk about the product first. I mean, when we started up, we started as a, you know, we started my parents' basement. We started as a general survey platform. We were head-to-head with our friend Dave Goldberg, forever and trying to buy our company. You know, we'd work on just trying to gather data and run analytics on it. And that was kind of, I mean, to be honest with you, it was about all the market could handle. You know, we were trying to convince organizations that you need a platform to be able to, you know, gather data you don't have and be able to turn it around.

And then that evolved. Like we went really into data management. Like, okay, how are we going to take? You have all these systems that are collecting what we call your operational data, which is what happened. It'll tell you your finance numbers. It'll tell you your shipping numbers. It'll tell you this.

But you don't have any systems in place to really manage the hearts, the minds, the sentiment, the feeling. And if you go into an organization, you say, well, where is that data? how is it run? You see like just an array of products and groups and and a lot of money being spent. But reality is, is most of that data was one and done. It was never used again. It was never set up. And so specifically when it came around customer experience and the employee experience, they were run on multiple platforms, but we found that they had a lot of similarities between them. So we went through this crazy five-year exercise of saying, hey, we've got the world's number one survey platform.

We've got a chance to actually build out what we call an experience platform where we're managing the four core experience of your businesses altogether. And we've been able to do that. So we'll walk into an organization and we'll say, hey, you've got your operational data systems, you're spending billions of dollars, trying to get them to talk to each other. But you've got this whole other line of data that's coming into your organization. that actually helps you run it from the outside in and really get at what people are thinking and where they're going to go next. This data, you're trying to predict where they're going to go next.

They'll tell you. So, like, let's just actually, like, take this data and let's present it organizationally. So all the data, first of all is captured into one single system. So then it could be used again. And we're storing this on our experience management platform where all that data lives. And we're actually building profiles around,

individuals and like what has happened, how they've responded, and you're actually able to see and almost have a dialogue and communicate with your end user, whether that's your employee, whether that's your customer. And it's actually become more and more important over time. Yeah. So it's not like we created something that was a fat. Actually, when we started the business, it like wasn't cool.

And then like as we've aged, it's become actually more and more critical for the way organizations run. If you think about it, when you think about what you did, everybody kind of looks at like, when you said the market wasn't really ready for the product, this sort of what I read into that. Like people would be like, oh, tell me about my customers. Okay, do a focus group. Okay, let me just like stick my finger in the water, put my finger in the air.

Okay, the wind's blowing this way. As opposed to saying every day, we are collecting information about these people and we're communicating or interacting with them based on that data. So it's like it's sort of a whole paradigm shift of just taking the temperature of the water or just always knowing. You just always know what the temperature is of the customer. It's not an event. The best companies who do this, it's not an event.

Like if you look at like Delta Airlines who just wants free Wi-Fi, like we're sitting there hooked up with Ed and the management team with a command center like this room with everything that's going on as they go free, Wi-Fi on every one of their planes with the data that they're giving and feedback. And it's just, are you good? Are you good? How are you feeling? Oh, wait, we also have their Sky Miles number so we know the profile of Jason.

Yeah. And like we can see who you are. And then we start running our machines in the background to say, and all of our prompts, like, okay, do we have a problem with this travel group or this travel group or this travel group. And then we're like, wait a minute, we just removed a massive hurdle or obstacle on the flight. And one thing we didn't realize is that flight attendants and the people working for the airline on the flight are seeing a 23% increase in their satisfaction on the flight. Holy cow, this impacted this. Like, keep going. And so this is actually the opportunity

that every organization has is like, quit trying to run your business. entirely from what you and your organization think. Like, we used to not be able to gather this data. We used to not be able to go get it. When I started, we couldn't do it. Now we have the ability to start to basically, we always say you can qual-tricks everything. Yeah. And like, if you have the data that exists, you can Google it.

If you don't, you can qual-tricks it. And like, get it out there and start to build this flow. So it's not an event. It's actually another input on. on how you run your business. Yeah, just that one example is so mind-blowing because you might have some people sitting there, hey, this is a business traveler.

Wait a second, this is a business traveler with three kids with them now. Oh, and they're business traveling. They're in business class. Oh, they're an economy plus right now. Oh, my God, the guy's got 500,000 miles sitting there. We did to upsell them on some stuff. And just even knowing that, like, whoa, where are they going on vacation?

And then now you've got some data from them being online. man, it's just killer what they can figure out. If you look at their business, it's a commodity business. Every single airline buys the exact same planes. Yeah. They have the same airport that they don't control. They don't control TSA. How is one airline a top 12 respected brand in the world?

Yeah. And the others can't figure it out. When they all have the weather, they all have this, they all have that. And it's because experiences the moat. Mm. when it's a race to the bottom, experience, which I believe all most tech businesses are, it becomes a race to the bottom.

It's a heavyweight fight, and you just kind of keep pounding. Your experience moat is the competitive advantage. And that's the problem we're tackling. You look at something like the Bloomberg terminal. Like, that is a commodity business, but the experience then, as you're saying, it just experience builds brand, right?

100%. Like, if you're staying out at a Mon Hotel, if anybody's ever been to one of those AM, A, A, M, I got to stay in one in Tokyo. Like, all of a sudden, you're like, whoa, this is totally different. Like, I have a place to stay when I'm in Tokyo. There's a million places for me to stay. But this one has done something completely different than put a roof over my head in four walls and clean sheets. It's kind of crazy.

Let's go to the AI side. Are you totally down the AI rabbit hole now? I would think, given the fact that you have all this data and data science. scientists are like the most amazing demos I've seen of AI right now are, here's a CSV file. What question should I ask? And chat you'd be like, oh, well, here's what's in it? These are the questions I would ask.

You're like, well, what trends do you see in the data? And it's like, here's 20 trends. And you're like, well, these 10 are totally irrelevant. These five are obvious. Of these five, I didn't even think of. I mean, it's got to be inspiring for you on a product level, huh? Yeah, if you think about how much unstructured data we are holding. I think we're one of the largest companies in the world that hold unstructured data.

And this is feedback that people are giving, whether it's in call center or this or that. You know, this data, this AI, it's interesting as I've watched the AI revolution said, okay, why now? Why now is this happening? Because it's almost like a light switch went on. It's so, we're talking about six months, right? This all started in the fall. We're not even on a year. And it's interesting because as we've been in talks with some of these hyperscalalers, whether it's Google or Amazon, whatever, you know, they've had this technology for a long time. They've been working on it. And the analogy I use is, you know, I go back to like when Salesforce or Microsoft or other organizations, like, we're a closed system.

And then they said, wait, we're going to create an ecosystem. We're going to allow vendors to build apps on top of it. And it was just like a switch that flip. And what they did is they said, hey, we've got all this technology, nothing's changed. However, we're actually going to give you a front door to it. And Google never had a real good front door until they were forced to or decided, hey, we don't need to be perfect here. Everyone else is doing it. It gives us air cover.

We're going to flip, here's the front door. Here's the open API system that you can go in and modularize or you can. You can build, you know, different applications on top of that. And this is when, like I know in the business to business space or in the enterprise space, when that became the norm, innovation around business applications took off. And so we're just seeing this scenario where Open AI kind of let out and everyone else has opened up a front door and built some steps and to be able to access what they only had internally, and that's what we're going to see every new startup going, wait, I can grab

this and my idea, I've got a business pain. I mean, I'll give you a great example. I just saw someone tweeted at me and said, hey, I've got a, the new collective bargaining agreement came out. It's a PDF that's like 578 pages and the teams who learn them the best know and fans historically have no idea what the real rules are. It's all in the CBA. And someone built like a GPT on top of that. Wow. And it was like, you could just ask any questions. And it was just like that quick because they had a front door to be able to go do that

and take that equivalent. And so when it comes to our business, we just held an AI summit. I think there were 60 demos. And it's like, whoa, like we could take a data set within our own environment and say, similar to the CSB. Let's query this. Put a table in. What questions did I ask?

Like, we could actually, there's a lot. that people can do. There's still a little bit of work to get corporations to feel comfortable on what's going on. Their data's not being shared. And that's privacy and security. But quick things that I see. I see someone like Microsoft.

Yeah. Who's got LinkedIn, who has a CRM product, who's got Word and PowerPoint. If you're a seller working for an enterprise organization, and you're trying to create a proposal for Jason. and you don't know Jason very well, or you're trying to target a company,

you can now go and say, hey, give me an orchart of this organization, create a PowerPoint, scrub our CRM, and I want this pricing and this and that, and all of a sudden you're sitting there going, holy cow,

yep, first of all, this person did a better job, go tweak it, and it'll probably fundamentally change, first of all, who we go with. as an enterprise stack. Yeah. Because of this problem that every organization has when they're managing

you sales teams. And it will also change the productivity of all of this. And so are you seeing those productivity gains internally already? Or you got people using it every day? I think we're early days. I think we're early days. I think we're super early days. And I think I think that the fact that all of Wall Street's like, I'm going to have this company stand up.

and I need to see your AI strategy or we're going to downgrade your stock. And it's like, you don't even know what you're talking about. Like a flashy demo is like a rendering of a real estate project that has no chance of passing, right? Like we, we, you actually need to see like this is not probably the first mover advantage. I see.

I think it's more of who can actually build a moat around what they're doing to be able to last. the time that it's going to require. You worry about job displacement at all. If you look at some of the tasks being done here, everybody's, we're short data scientists everywhere. Every organization you work with is like, do you have any data scientists to help us Qualtricks this, whatever?

And then it feels like everybody's going to be able to have like, I don't know, a two-year degree in data science abstracted and just put into their toolkit, just like everybody now can type and do, basic graphics and graphic design. So what do you think about job displacement and AI? I don't think, I mean, I worry about job displacement, but I worry about the other macro environments causing more jobs displacement than AI.

Example. And there's been a lot of buzz around AI causing job displacement and less about what's going on in Washington and our causes and everything else is having much more of an impact in the broader job tech world. Um, because I think with displacement, I see change, change in the way we work. Yeah. And if you're thinking that no one's going to want to scale, the way people do scale is no matter who, who says it.

Like, there's not many hundred person companies that go create, you know, multi hundreds of billions of dollars. Like, they scale through people. Yeah. And so when they nail it, they're going to want to scale whatever it is. They nail up. And so, um, when it comes to. The overall job displacement, it's much more around, you know, how kind of frothy the last 10-year run has been.

And people often getting surprised. Did you guys do a riff and get too big during that sort of ZERP environment yourselves and have to resize? Yeah, I don't think anyone, I think everyone got too big. There was just a cadence of which everyone has hired for the future. Right. We were a higher. I mean, the job market's been so competitive. competitive that you had to hire out 18 to 24 months in order to even somewhat hit the possible growth plants.

And so I think the lead time has shrunken. I mean, you look at, we hired 1,700 people in the, in the middle of the pandemic. And like, why? Because our models were saying, hey, look, the way we used to do this is we're going to compound in a way and you've got this amount of attrition and this is going to happen. This is how it's going to go and we can't let off the gas or we're not going to be able to scale. And that market has reset entirely on all of those dimensions. And so I think that people are now adjusting to that market because I don't think it's like, hey, we're not going to hire at all. We're going to let everyone off and stop. No. It's like, okay, the pace, the market, who you hire, who you can get is different than it was pre-pandemic and post-pandemic.

And so the same way that we all had to ramp up our costs, our equity, everything in 2017, 18, 19, whether we liked it or not. We were in a game. Yeah, no, you had to play the game on the field, right? I mean, if you had to play the game on the field. Google and Microsoft and Uber and Airbnb. giving huge option grants. You don't really have a choice. Yeah.

And so what's the game on the field right now? Yeah. And I think this is the part that people, yeah, earnings. Right. Like the game on the field. And so I think that if I'm someone working in a corporation and understanding it, you've got to understand the game and the temperature of what's happening on the field. Yeah.

And as a junior employee from my first job, like you're working, if you're working in tech, which is most people listening to this, you work in tech, understand tech. Right. Like, it's your responsibility. You just don't work for the company. Like, you need to understand the landscape in the field because the more you understand tech, the more it's going to help you whenever job you're doing. Yeah.

And the customers now are also doing bell tightening, looking at every expense, negotiating contracts. They're not as freewheeling where they're just like, yeah, oh, this SaaS product could make us 2% more efficient and it costs, you know, 1%, Great, that's a great investment. Let's just buy it, buy everything. Now everybody's looking at every single bill. They're negotiating them.

They're negotiating their cloud bill. They're negotiating their SaaS bills. They're negotiating their rent. Everybody's just in austerity mode. So it's hard to sell, right? Yeah. I mean, look, if you follow the Qualtricks journey, we've got 20 years, right? Where we have operated a bunch of different ways.

And we've seen the reaction of every market across that. across that time period. So the first 10 years were 100% bootstrapped. We were in Utah. Yep. You know, it was me, my dad, my brother, in the basement. And no one wanted to raise venture capital because everyone had been burned in 99 and all of that. This was 2002.

I think us in Atlassian, who were the longest bootstrap companies, we raised money in 2011 and shifted our model. I remember operating in 2007, eight and nine and trying to go to market and every marketing team we had, everyone we would sell into could not like not only purchase, a lot of them didn't have jobs. And so that was,

I would say an extreme to what we're dealing with now. But even in that extreme, we had to completely change our offering, our messaging and our value proposition. for that time. 2011, we raised, you know, what would be between 2012 and 2018, about $400 million of, you know,

venture capital from Excel, Sequoia, Insight, and none of that went into the company. So that was all secondary outside of the business. Yeah. So essentially, we went from 2002 to 2018 without putting any money on the books. Just pure profit. Yeah, invested in the business.

And so one was a profitable model where we just tried to like make it for the first 10 years. The second was we were going to fly the plane really close to the trees. So we weren't going to lose money, but we were going to break even every year, whatever that was, and invest everything back in growth. We're three days before going public. We're on the road show. We're 15 times oversubscribed. The market's in the toilet of October, November of 19.

We're the only company on the road. We look great because we had the ability to show high growth and profits. Bill McDermott, who was CEO of SAP, calls and says, hey, Ryan, do you want to be a public CEO? I say, the answer is, well, no. I would never really wanted to, but this is the next phase. And it's kind of what you're signing up for. When you take on that much venture capital?

Yeah, for sure. That's in the cards. And so, do you want to be a public CEO? He said, well, let's go public a different way. we love the experience category. We want the experience category. I will put at the tip of our spirit SAP, and I will take you global. We're the largest software company in Europe.

So we sign up for that year and a half later. Bill takes a job at service now. John Donahoe goes to Nike, and he had basically purchased us in an all-cash deal. But Qualtricks was too important to the category we were creating as well as Utah. And we said, hey, we want to keep rolling. And, you know, SAP during this time, pandemic says, hey, let's go focus on our core where our strength is, which is ERP in some of these other areas. And we're this growth engine that needs to be fed.

And so we said, well, why don't we go public? Well, can we? Have we? Yeah. Can you do this? Yeah. And I called Egon Durbin a Silver Lake, who had just taken V.M. Wardell, pulled that one out.

and we decided we were going public. And then a year and a half later, they had a 70% stake, and we needed to figure out a way to go down, and we ran kind of an auction, and Silver Lake ends up winning, and we went private a week and a half ago. And so now we're pre-IPO again,

which is my favorite time running the company. And so... Well, when you're private, private, you get to think not in quarters, you start thinking in years. I mean, you might still have quarterly goals. You still have weekly goals, but you have a different approach to the business, yeah? Yeah. And in reality is, if you look at that 20-year run between 2016 when you're getting ready

to go public to being public, you don't have a lot of time to take the plane down, stop it, refuel, rearrange some seats. Yep. Some folks that were on that part of the journey, you don't have the energy or the time or the ability. And one of those was when we took the plane back up, I wasn't CEO. I wanted to be executive chairman, my number two, Zig Serafin, who I had recruited out of Microsoft, we'd operated two in a box. He ran Skype for business and Link and helped build Cortana. And he was going to be the CEO somewhere.

Yeah. I would have rather had him be the CEO with us. And so he took it through the IPO and now he's his CEO and I'm chairman of Nuco, which is a brand new company. And I've sat in front of the whole company and say, hey, look, Zig's, Zigs is the new founder. I'm the old founder. This is a new start.

If you're not signed up for that, you probably shouldn't be here. Right. This is what we're signing up for. By the way, I'm going to invest in Zix. Because if they were starting a new company, I'd be his first check. And so this is the phase of this as opposed to this revisionist history that's like, hey, what's going on in 2007? It's not the same.

It's not the same as 2015. Nothing's the same in the world. Like, we need to go forward. And Silver Lake is the biggest check that they've written. It's the most commitment they've had. And, you know, if you look at what they've done with Dell, VMware, what they've done with WME and UFC and Endeavor at WWE or. fanatics or, you know, even Twitter.

Like, there's a lot that they seem to not lose very much right now. Yeah. I mean, operating a company privately, you get to really start to think long term. And like you're saying, you can reset the culture. And, you know, as long as everybody buys into it, it's kind of like that good to great book, Jim Collins wrote. I don't know if you ever read that one. Yeah, for sure.

Back when there were only like, you know, 100 business books, that was one of the ones that always, the lesson there, like before you decide your destination, like get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off the bus. And then you guys are driving in the right direction. Listen, I took an hour of your time. Another great episode. Can't wait to come out. I'll look at the schedule when it comes out.

And whenever those next games are, I'll come out. Hopefully it's during ski season. You've got seats right next to me during the next game. I love it. I don't think we'll have you do layup lines, but if that's part of it, maybe. You and I could do it. We could play a little horse. Maybe you could warm up with, maybe the Knicks will let you warm up being such a diehard fan with them. Absolutely. I will wear my, I will wear my gel in Brunson, Jersey. What a great acquisition that was, huh?

He's a stud. He's a stud. Like, he killed us. He killed us in Dallas. Like, Luca was out and he killed us. I mean, he is like so blue collar hardworking. He had like the lowest turnover percentage. and like his stats were so all-star and he didn't make the all-star team. It was very weird. And then everybody's like, oh my God, you overpaid $23 million for Jalen Brunson. I'm like, really?

Like we're talking about trading for some people making $40 million a year who are not exactly putting up the same numbers of Jalen Brunson. Ezzo, these max contracts are crazy, huh? This new... It's going to escalate quickly. Like the Jalem Brown deal, which is like 300 plus, like you start looking at this or even Dame or what Dame or Steph.

And I mean, it's part of it. But there's a lot of these guys who do a lot. Like, I mean, there's an argument that some of these, some of these dudes are worth a lot more than that. Well, if you look at the increase in the Warriors, when they bought it, it was at like a 600 million, I think they bought it for something crazy. And then it became a $3 billion team. I think when Chimot sold his shares to private equity, I mean, that was one of the big ramp ups of all time. And this new...

They've done a great job. This new television deal, when is that... That's happening for next season? 24. 24. Yeah. So that's deep in negotiation, yeah. Yeah, talks will start here soon. And that'll be interesting.

It'll be an interesting metric to see how new TV, new entrants come in. It'll be really interesting to see what happens because this is a big moment for not only the NBA, but for... a lot of these fledging media companies that are out there. I mean, distribution, whether it's Apple, you know, I'm part of MLS with Real Salt Lake and, you know, Apple and messy and what's happened. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like Apple and Google and Amazon, there's just a whole new

entrance of player who are playing the game at a different level, you know, if you've got, people didn't realize this, but Apple slowly has become the majority operating system here in the US. Everybody still thinks iOS is like, oh yeah, that's 20 and 30 percent. That's just rich people. It's like, have you been paying attention? Like, their market share is now the majority iOS. And they've just run the table.

It's such a great product, such a great base of users. All right, listen, can't wait to see it. Have a great off season. Good luck with everything. And congrats on going private and the team. And stay safe. And we'll see you for the 23, 24 season.

For the Knicks games. Can't wait, brother. Let's go, man. I appreciate it.