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Dan Porter is the Co-founder and CEO of Overtime, a sports network for the next generation of fans. OT reaches 85 million fans per month and runs a basketball league (Overtime Elite, OTE), a flag football league (OT7), and is launching a boxing league (OTX) the week this episode airs.
Dan started Overtime with his co-founder Zack Weiner in 2016, and has since raised over $215 million. OT is supported by investors like the late ex-NBA Commissioner David Stern, Jeff Bezos, Drake, Carmelo Anthony, Trae Young, over 25 other NBA players, Spark Capital, Redpoint, a16z, Greycroft, Afore Capital, and Banana Capital. [Myself (Turner Novak) and Banana Capital are investors in Overtime].
Find Dan on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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In this episode, we discuss:
The business of sports
Why people love sports
The founding story of Overtime
How to raise money for a crazy idea
Overtime’s very first product
How to bet on technological change
The changing professional sports landscape
How to launch a sports league
Why founders must obsess over their product
Follow The Peel on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Thanks to Zac and Xavier at Supermix for the help with production and distribution!
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak: Dan, thanks for having me in the office today.
Dan Porter: Thanks for coming.
Turner Novak: This is the Overtime studio.
You're sort of in the intersection of sports, media, culture. We can take this in whatever direction you want to go and then we'll get into Overtime. But can you talk through the market you guys are working in and everything that's going on right now?
Dan Porter: When investors look at sports as an investment or an asset class, there's two ways to look at it. Number one is that owning a sports team or a sports league is a scarcity business.
There's a finite amount and the price of a sports team goes up based on the fact that there are just not that many to buy. Steve Ballmer[1] will pay $2 billion and now $2 billion is the floor, and then someone else will pay $4 billion.
And they have their own rationale, but it's not the same rationale an expert stock picker might use to decide at what price they're going to buy a stock.
[1] Steve Ballmer served as the CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He previously tried to purchase the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Sacramento Kings but both deals fell through. In 2014, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers and he is considered to be one of the best basketball team owners for his contributions to the franchise.
Turner Novak: But they do kind of produce cashflow.
Dan Porter: They do. And sometimes the buyers are not agnostic to price, but the delta in price is somewhat immaterial to them.
And then they have other value, the real estate around it, the brand, all of these other things like that. But there's no doubt that we've gone from a state where you have stocks and bonds to, you have sports teams, you have real estate, you have watches, you have all kinds of asset classes, and there's a part of sports that that is an asset class.
And then there's a part where, obviously we're in a period of massive amount of distribution. You've got streaming, you've got network, you've got cable, you've got social platforms. And there's a belief that premium content is what they need, and that's where many people have made bets across film, television, all kinds of things like that.
And there's an aspect of sports which is live. And so it has a different kind of content resonance. And if you can produce a live event that people care about from an advertising and from a subscription and from a viewership model, that's incredibly valuable.
And you could almost use the metaphor of music, like music has gone from, “I make all my money by selling CDs” to, “I sell some CDs, but I make all my money by the concert.” Like to see Taylor Swift live, that's a billion dollar business. Maybe more so than the recorded music.
So you have sports as an asset class, you have sports as essentially content and culture driver. And I think for us you have sports as a vehicle to own a market or a demographic. And for us, that was young people who are engaged in sports and culture who are hard to reach.
We used to be able to reach them – and everyone – by just advertising on television. But, if they're not watching live sports on television, how do you reach them? And if they are watching sports, you can assume other things about them. They might be interested in this drink, or these sneakers, or this car, or anything else like that.
And so you have an audience aggregation play and asset class play and a content and culture play from a pure investment thesis. If you talk to people who start private equity and other funds and you say, “Why do you buy teams and leagues?” That's what they would tell you.
Turner Novak: We're at this weird point where fewer members of the younger generation are watching sports on TV. But then, when you go look at the top categories that people actually do watch on TV, it's pretty much all sports.
(American Football made up 87 of the top 100 most-watched US TV broadcasts of 2022. Source.)
Dan Porter: Yeah. The denominator shrunk, right? Less people are watching live television. But sports and essentially breaking news are the only drivers. And by the way, those are the two things that streaming services don't really do. And so the amount of premium television, or series, or other things that you're going to watch on television, has gone down.
But your live news or your live sports, the NFL, the NBA, or anything else like that, has gone up. And that's because there's an assumption that if I have a show and you don't have my streaming service, you might not watch it. You'll find something else to watch. Now, if that show is Game of Thrones, you're going to find a way to watch it.
Now if that is the favorite sports team that I have loved ever since I grew up, I'm going to find a way to watch that. And so it's this difference between essentially a commodity product: “Well, I was going to watch this reality show, but I don't have that service. But I'll watch another one that's kind of the same.” Versus something that is non-commodified: “Oh my God, I've been a Yankees fan all my life. I will do anything I can” – I personally am not a Yankees fan, but – “to watch the Yankees.’ And that's the value and the power of sports.
And so our challenge is, I have to make people care about our sports and our teams, but they've only been around for 12 to 24 months. I live in New York City. I say, “Why are you a Knicks fan?” “Well, my dad was a Knicks fan.” Well, I don't have 50 years of fandom to do that, so I have to use social media and everything else to accelerate that.
And people say, “How do you know when you're successful?” I say, “Well, when the City Reapers” – who's one of our teams – “plays the Cold Hearts in the final, and the Cold Hearts lose, somebody somewhere in the middle of the country cries because their favorite team lost.” And then, you know.
Turner Novak: Have you seen those meme videos where someone had a viral tweet that goes, “I don't understand why men like sports.” Have you seen that?
Dan Porter: Yeah.
Turner Novak: It’s the tweet, and then there's the video. There's usually a 3-minute, 5-minute video, and it's just followed by 10 scenes of the biggest plays that have happened in sports, whether it's football, baseball, hockey, and it's storytelling for a lot of people.
Dan Porter: I think there's a couple reasons why men and women like sports too. Number one is, at this point today, sports is about culture.
When people say sports – I could be doing music, I could be doing whatever. We come to work and I say, “Oh, have you seen The Bear season two?” Or whatever. Or I say, “Oh, did you see that tennis match where he almost upset so-and-so?” So it's just part of culture and that conversation.
I think the second thing is sports, like music, is very tied to identity. I've lived in New York for 30 to 35 years, but I grew up in Philadelphia. I'm a big Philadelphia Eagles fan. That is part of my identity. That is my bond with my high school friends.
And I think the third thing is, if you're reading a book, you can go to the end of the book and you can see what happened. Or, you're watching a movie, you can fast forward. Sports is one of the few things where you just don't know how it's going to end up.
And as a psychological exercise when you're engaged in it, you're just like, “Anything could happen at any moment.” And there's something about psychology and human nature that when you tie in, “Oh, and I really care because I like this player, I'm from this city.” And, by the way, this is culture because everyone's watching the Super Bowl. People who don't care about the Super Bowl watch the Super Bowl because you have to come in and talk about it.
When you put all those three things together, to me it makes a lot of sense.
Turner Novak: We haven't really talked much about what Overtime is – what is it today?
Dan Porter: Overtime is the leading brand for sports for our market, which is primarily Gen Z and millennial sports fans. And I say brand because it's not a social media company or a media company.
We basically go out and we try to connect with our audience and we definitely use video and we use social media to do that. But at the end of the day, we're trying to say, “We want you to love Overtime. We want you to watch our stuff. We want to listen to you. We want to have a two-way street.” And that, to me, is the foundation of the house.
We have 85 million followers across all platforms. 9 out of 10 people under the age of 25 who like sports know what Overtime is. And now you've built that foundation. And for me, I always wanted it to be – you have rappers, and then you have Travis Scott, where people are so passionate personally, and he creates Astroworld, and he does all these other things.
Turner Novak: Like a McDonald's meal. He has a meal that people love.
Dan Porter: Yeah. He is bigger than music in that sense. And his fans aren't just like, “I like that song.” They're like, “This guy speaks to me about my lifestyle.”
That's what I wanted to do, or I aspired to do – whether we fully achieve that or not – around sports. And with that as a foundation, we go out and we launch leagues, which in business terms, I would say, owned IP, intellectual property, that we own on top of that.
So we have a basketball league about to enter its third season, based in Atlanta. We have a football league that just completed its second season, and we're launching a big project in boxing. And in all of that, I say to the Overtime audience, “Hey, this is for you in a language you understand.”
And that's where my first fans come from. And then I use all the capabilities that we have – digital content creation, distribution, all the things that make us good about winning on the internet – to basically accelerate the growth of those leagues.
Turner Novak: And you get people either into the seats or just caring about it.
Dan Porter: Yeah, and by the way, most of the athletes tend to be in Gen Z, more or less. And most of the fans tend to be in Gen Z, more or less. It's not a crazy secret that people like to see people who are like them.
I could go and I could get a LeBron James who might be the greatest basketball player of all time, to play in the league, and everyone will care about it. But the difference is that if I am 17, I think LeBron might be the GOAT, but he and I don't have anything in common. He's a dad, he's rich. He does this and that.
Turner Novak: LeBron would cost a lot for you to get to come participate.
Dan Porter: He would. Too much. But on the other hand, if I have LeBron's son, or someone who's just 17, 18, and I'm 17 or 18, and I'm looking at that, I'm like, “That guy is like me.”
Turner Novak: Yeah, you could be that!
Dan Porter: Yeah. And I think that it's not a complicated idea, but it is hard to execute. And it's important, and it's why storytelling is important. And it's why sometimes the most popular players in the leagues are the best players, and sometimes, they're the underdogs. Because everyone's like, “Wow, look at him doing that. That could be me.”
We don't all grow up with incredible athletic talent, so we both want to watch it because we respect it, but we also want to cheer for the person who's making it, despite the odds.
Turner Novak: Yeah, when I think about an example off the cuff, probably 10 years ago in the NHL playoffs, there was a guy on the Penguins – they won the cup – he got 2 goals in the game 7 and won. A random guy on the team. He's in the NHL, so he’s good, but he’s the hero of the playoffs. And you almost relate to that guy maybe more than the superstars on the team.
Dan Porter: Yeah. I watch sports, or we watch sports, to be inspired by incredible athletes who do things that I couldn't dream of doing. And they're not just athletic things like live reads, and incredible passes in football and basketball, people who scramble away when they're getting sacked, and just their high-level understanding of the game. It's like going to an art museum and seeing the greatest artist ever.
But we also watch because we're compelled by the stories. I was talking to somebody about boxing and I was explaining what we're doing. And he said, “You know why I love boxing?” And I said, “No, I don't.” And he said, “Because every fighter is fighting for something bigger than themselves.”
Turner Novak: Hmm, explain.
Dan Porter: And that aspect of the story – they could be fighting an internal demon, they could be fighting to prove something. They have this reason, and I think a fight is the most elemental version of that. But I think in a way, every athlete is doing it for something bigger than themselves as well, or the best athletes are.
And I think as people, we find that incredibly inspiring and gripping. And I think what social media has done is, it's said, “Now we can have a relationship with athletes off the court or off the field, or off the pitch.”
And when we learn about them, we're just like, “I love that guy. Oh my God, he's from my hometown. Oh my God, I can't believe that happened to him in high school. Wow, his mom was a teacher. My mom was a teacher.” Like all of the different things like that. “Wow. She didn't get picked for her team and now she's in the WNBA, that could be me.”
So, I think there's an aspect of that and it's what's interesting about my business. As a business person, I have to care about the P&L, I have to care about the financing. But so much of the marketing of the business and the audience development and the customer development is actually about human psychology.
It's not like, “Which pair of shoes do you look better in?” or, “Which celebrity did I get to endorse this pair of jeans?”. It's like, “Did I make something that gave you goosebumps and you cared about it so much you became a customer?” or, “Did I make you laugh?” or, “Did I make you take something and send it to a friend?” and say, “Did you see this?”. And that's actually about psychology. It's not necessarily about top-of-funnel spending and CAC and LTV ratios and everything else like that. And to me, that's what makes it so fun and challenging and exciting.
Turner Novak: So obviously, revenue, LTV, CAC, KPIs – there are formulas you can measure. Are there ways to measure audience connection and the storytelling? How do you measure that?
Dan Porter: Certainly, in the beginning and to this date, we looked a lot at something called engagement rate. And so, engagement rate is pretty simple. You have the number of people who saw a video, and then as a percentage of that, you have the number of people who liked it, bookmarked it, saved it, or shared it with someone else, or wrote a comment.
Because the difference is, I scroll, I see something, ok great, I scroll, I see something, I like it, or I say no, or I save it, or I send it to someone. That level of engagement shows that you have taken somebody from a passive viewer to an active engager, and if you have an idea of what that percentage is, then you can also essentially comp that against what percentage of people are doing on other sports platforms or for influencers or anything else like that.
You know how you're doing, and you know that you don't just have a bunch of dead followers or meaningless views out there. So that's definitely one.
And I'd say the second is, we sell a ton of apparel that says Overtime on it: hoodies, t-shirts, shorts, socks. And the idea that somebody cares enough about our brand to spend their hard-earned money to buy a hoodie that has an O on it, to me, says, we've reached them and we've done something right. And thank you for purchasing.
(Overtime’s merch store landing page)
Turner Novak: What was the moment that you came up with the idea of, “This is what I'm going to do.” It’s very unique – not a lot of people are trying to do the same thing. And, like we talked about, a lot of people would say, “Oh, sports – not a good business. I'm going to do something else.” What was the thought process?
Dan Porter: Well, not only that, there's almost no successful sports outcomes for venture investors. What venture investors love is sports technology. Like, “It makes you better” or “You recover faster.” And the reality is, I would never invest in most of those businesses. Not that they're not great companies. It's just really hard to get sports teams to spend money on stuff.
Turner Novak: And media too. Media is a classic. Never gotten it to work.
Dan Porter: Media is tough. I think for us, we started because we knew who the customer was and we were just looking for ways to connect with the customer, and that's different.
I've started and sold two other companies. Both of those, I was like, “This is the product, and now we market the product.” I made a game, I made a ticketing company. In this case, I was like, “This audience is missing.”
Every sports league in America is telling me, “We are missing the 18- to 30-year-old audience, they’re not watching live sports.” And so our mission was, “How do we get them?” We could do this, we could do that. We tried 10 things, we tried 15 things.
Turner Novak: What all did you try?
Dan Porter: It was the first time really that we had an audience before we had a product. We made an app that people liked but they didn't love. We tried to create discussion groups. We tried to drive around with a mini hoop and dunk over people.
Turner Novak: That's a popular content format.
Dan Porter: We just tried a lot of different ways of engaging people to talk about sports. The original name Overtime was because I think we thought, “Oh, after the game, Overtime is when people talk about what happened at the game.”
And the problem was that they do, but they either do it in iMessage or on Reddit. They didn't need another place and so it was only through trying a bunch of stuff that we found where the opportunities were in the market, where our audience was being underserved, and that's where we went. And now we can say, “Here are our customers and here's how we get them.”
Turner Novak: And then, the first thing that really worked was this distributed network. Can you explain what that was, how it worked?
Dan Porter: Yeah. So, the first thing that really worked was understanding that there was a whole subculture of basketball slash high school basketball slash club basketball, where there were players who were really popular, but who might not go to the NBA.
And the logic is, “You're a great basketball player, you're going to go to Kentucky or Duke or wherever. You're a five-star, you're ranked 1 through 10 here.” And that's where value is. And the reality is that the audience who use social media discover players who are just cool, who they loved, who didn't necessarily have a path to go to the pros.
And, we just fell into that, understood that, uncovered it, and amplified. And our competitors were like, “Well that's not valuable. Because the only thing that's valuable is pro sports and everything that leads into pro sports.” So they went this way, and we were like, “Here's the 10 swaggiest kids in America.”
One might be ranked a top 10, one might not be ranked at all, but everybody wants to watch them and follow them and be a part of their journey. And so, we did that, but instead of essentially putting that on an Instagram account, we created multiple accounts to talk to each other and distributed across – I think we have like 15 accounts on Instagram and like 10 on TikTok. And then all those accounts would talk to each other.
(The Overtime accounts that come up in the first page of Instagram search.)
And so, you built out this whole network of accounts that would post somebody here, post someone there, talk to them, which amplified discovery, which built more of a community. And I remember at some point, somebody at a large $20 billion public company in sports-betting said to me, “We just watched what you guys do, and we just thought it was like, ‘Oh, well we should have an Instagram account. We just never understood that there was this whole other network strategy.’”
All the accounts were called Overtime. All the staff had Overtime in their name. They would comment and you created essentially a community. And that's why I don't think of us as a media company or a publisher, I think of us as a community. And if we can talk to each other, then we can bring in members of our community and they can start to talk to each other, and then it grows.
Turner Novak: And the content you were posting was kind of proprietary?
Dan Porter: Yeah. It was probably three-quarters stuff that we filmed through our own specific camera app by going to street basketball, by going to high school games, by getting out there.
Turner Novak: And how did the camera app work again? Because that was really cool.
Dan Porter: Yeah, so basically the idea was that when we started, we'd send people with iPhones to games and I made an iPhone game 10 years ago that was downloaded 250 million times. So I was very mobile-centric.
And we're always talking about the screen, but I was also interested in the back of the phone, the camera, and basketball's a great sport for that. You can get close. Handheld feels more alive.
And the whole team would come back, and they'd sit around, and they'd say, “My God, I took like 200 videos because every time Turner came up the court with the ball, I didn't know if it was going to be a play or not. So, I just filmed it, and then I'd come home and I would delete 190 videos, and I'd have 10 left.”
And they started saying, “What if you made a DVR for the phone, where you could go back in time?” And so we worked on it, and eventually we made something. So, you'd hold up your phone in a game, a play would happen, and after a crazy dunk, you would hit record. It would go back in time 15 seconds in memory, grab it, tag it, upload it to the cloud, and immediately somebody in the office would see all those videos come in and they'd publish to social media.
So, it accomplished two things: speed – Zion Williamson could block a kid's shot in Spartanburg, South Carolina, you could have it on the internet in one second – and then breadth. If you could find somebody to work for you, to hold this phone when LaMelo Ball went to Lithuania, or anything else like that, anywhere in the world, you could cover it. And that's very different than the model of guys walking around with big cameras and everything else like that.
Turner Novak: And so, how did you convince these kids or these fans to do that for you? Did you compensate them?
Dan Porter: You start and your investors say, “This is amazing. It's UGC. People are just going to do it.” – that didn't work. We paid them. We paid them like $20. We literally built a network of a thousand people who are like, “I'm going to the game. I have my phone. I'd love to earn $20.”
Turner Novak: So 20 bucks per game, typically?
Dan Porter: Yeah.
Turner Novak: That's kind of risky. You’ve got to put all this cash to pay. How did you do the ROI on knowing it was going to work?
Dan Porter: Well, you don't need to cover a thousand games, because the audience only has appetite for a small number of players. So you start out and you cover 20 or 30 players, and you go to the games, and you tend to work with the same person over and over again who can get on the court. You tell them where to stand.
And within a month or two, you realize, “Wow, there's 20 guys or girls that everybody loves. And there's 10 that just don't get the views, they just don't resonate with the audience.” I don't even have to say why they do and why they don't. It's clear this guy gets a lot of followers and this girl gets a lot of views and these ones don't.
So, you then hone in and you cover, and this isn't a complicated idea. If you like gossip and People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly – who is it? It's the Kardashians. If you like football, it's Tom Brady. In sports and culture and music, they're only talking about 5 to 7 folks at any time anyway. And so it was the same for us. We could double down on those that resonated the most with the audience.
Turner Novak: Yeah, so it really wasn't as complicated as I made it seem.
Dan Porter: I think it was complicated to let it not get that complicated.
Turner Novak: So, making it simple was actually very complicated.
Dan Porter: Yeah, because you think you should cover more players, but you should actually cover less players. You think you should give the audience more information, “He's a 5-star. He has a 7-foot wingspan. He's a 6’ 3” point guard.” But actually, the less information you give the audience, the more popular the content is.
Turner Novak: Interesting.
Dan Porter: So all these things that you think are what people want, are not always what they want.
Turner Novak: So then how do you know what they truly want? Is it purely the engagement, the views?
Dan Porter: I think it's a lot of experimentation. I think it's a lot of understanding why people care and what they care about. And in a way, it's about not being too sporty, if that makes sense. People are always like, “You must be a huge sports fan.” And I'm a huge Philadelphia sports fan because I'm from Philadelphia originally and I love sports, but I can't tell you who the MVP was 7 years ago.
I'm not in the 1% of the 1% and I'm not trying to serve the 1% of the 1%. And because I'm a sports fan, but not a huge sports fan, I understand that our goal is to reach as many people as possible. And to do that, it's about stories and everything else.
The Olympics figured out this a long time ago. Do I care about swimming or track or speed skating? Not really, but they start to tell a story. “She was a single mom, and he did this and that,” and you're just like, “Oh my God, I'm cheering for that guy.”
Whereas, your competition, traditional sports people: more stats, more sports, more trade news and everything else like that. And they can do their thing. And that left us space to do our thing.
Turner Novak: There are storylines related to players getting traded and signed and it kind of works.
Dan Porter: Yeah. But it's very newsy, in a way, and it's very analysis. And I never focus on news and I never focus on analysis. Nobody came for Overtime or Dan Porter’s or anyone who worked here’s hot take. And in fact, we never criticize players.
We're just here to tell stories about cool people and that resonates with the audience. And it happens that they play sports too, and that's a huge part of their story.
Turner Novak: And you probably attract some of the best players that way, because if you're just like, “Hey, I know what you're trying to do. You know what we're trying to do. We're going to help you, we're going to give you a platform, we're going to elevate you. We’ll help you hit your goals faster.”
Dan Porter: It's mutually reinforcing. In the early days, people would say, “Well, you are exploiting the kids because you're covering them.” And I'd say, “First of all, everyone's covering them, so they all are. Second of all, I'm the only one who actually tags them with their Instagram handles. Nobody else will do that.”
And so, as a subset of that, yeah I can't pay you – before NIL, you would lose your eligibility – but I can give you 20,000 followers that stick with you for life. And in some ways, that's more valuable.
And now with NIL, I can pay you. So, I can pay you to do a photo shoot and I can do things that are kosher within in the NCAA landscape. And so, there's a lot of productive ways that we work together with athletes.
Turner Novak: Okay, so NIL, I was going to ask about this a little bit later, but we're on it. A lot of people listening probably don't even know what that means. Can you explain it really quick?
Dan Porter: Yes, so, NIL stands for name, image, and likeness. And so, I think everybody knows that, as a college athlete or a high school athlete, you couldn't get paid, right? Reggie Bush lost his Heisman for getting paid. You couldn't sell a t-shirt that had your name on it for $5 or you would lose your eligibility, you'd lose your scholarship and you couldn't play.
And so, at some point, we decided – a little over two years ago – that we were just going to pay the athletes and they would forego their eligibility. They'd say, “Okay, well I'm not going to play in college then.”
And I think because of that and other factors, not just us, college realized that this practice was unfair, out-of-date. It's like, Turner plays sports, and he can't get paid for throwing a baseball. Dan, his classmate, made a song on SoundCloud, and he can get paid whatever he wants. Or something on YouTube.
And so, there was a Supreme Court case. It created this thing that said players were allowed to get paid for their own name, image, and likeness. So, if I go to Duke, I cannot get paid for a photoshoot of me in a Duke jersey because I don't own Duke. But, I can get paid for me as Dan Porter to make a photo or otherwise.
And so, the idea was to not treat them as employees, but let them make money off their own face. If I want to sign autographs, if I want to show up at a car dealership or anything else like that.
How that has become implemented and impacted in recruiting – that's a whole other podcast. But at the core, it's a level of economic empowerment for student athletes that did not exist previously.
Turner Novak: Yeah, I think we got a question on Twitter when I threw this out. People said – which, I'm just saying the question was – “Does Overtime's business still work with NIL’s rules?”
Dan Porter: Yeah, I saw that question. It works 10x better. Because number one is, it's really easy for me to go do a deal with a college athlete now, because I'm able to do an NIL deal. So, if I want to do a photoshoot with Paige Bueckers, who's an amazing college basketball player, I can come up with something that's legal, and I can pay her, and we can have a business relationship. And that's awesome.
Furthermore, on our high school basketball league, it means now I might come and play at Overtime Elite, because not only do I maybe want to go to the NBA, but maybe I want to get a huge NIL deal when I go to college.
Turner Novak: Yeah, you’ll blow them up.
Dan Porter: And so, I care about building up my following and everything else like that. So it's been a huge amplifier for our business and, honestly, I think for anyone in sports, there's an aspect of it that's a relief. It allows you to understand, what is the rule set that I can have a work relationship with a high school or a college athlete?
Turner Novak: And then, did you start with basketball?
Dan Porter: We started with basketball. To me, basketball is a 10-month a year sport, with a lot of games. It's easy to film on an iPhone, and it has a lot of highlights. And it's probably our greatest sport in this country that is linked to culture. Rappers want to be hoopers. Hoopers want to be rappers. Fashion, music, it's the locus of all those things.
(Overtime Elite League promo poster)
Turner Novak: If I'm thinking about the major sports, baseball (who plays or watches anymore), football (there's a lot of health concerns), hockey is probably not big enough, soccer's maybe rising, but basketball's probably that sweet spot of very big and still gaining in popularity.
Dan Porter: Yeah, and basketball – they don't play with helmets, so you can see their faces. That rules out a bunch. They play 5 guys in a small thing, and so it is a very character-driven, individual sport. The below-average sports fan could probably name more basketball players than they could baseball, hockey, or football players.
Turner Novak: Really? That's probably because of the culture aspect, right?
Dan Porter: Yeah, absolutely.
Turner Novak: Interesting. So, we kind of touched on this a little bit. So, you raised money to do this. What was that like? Because, we kind of talked about this – it’s tricky to navigate. How did you convince people? What was the pitch and who bought into it?
Dan Porter: Yeah, so this is my third startup. I sold my first startup and I sold my second startup. So, I was just like, “Honestly, there's not a lot of people like me.” Not like me, Dan Porter, but just who have done it twice before. That's just math! I'm not saying I'm amazing or special, I'm just saying that by math, there's not a lot of people who have sold 2 companies.
So if a guy who sold 2 companies successfully walks in and both were $10s of millions, $100s of millions of dollars of outcome and says, “I have an idea for a third company,” wouldn't you give them money? That's what I thought. But, they didn't like me. I mean, they liked me. They didn't like the idea.
I think they didn't understand sports. I think the mindset was youth sports, and I wasn't interested in youth sports. I think my idea just didn't fit in a box. And so, it was really hard to convince people despite my track record.
And basically, the pitch of any first-time entrepreneur is, “I roughly have an idea,” and then, “You roughly have to trust me.” And so, I remember at some point, I was like, “We're going to start in New York, and then we're going to go to LA, and we're going to go to every street basketball court, and then we're going to go to Oakland to every street basketball court.”
And it was basically a rollout plan of how to do it. And a successful venture capitalist was like, “I don't think this is the right plan. I don't believe in it.” Didn't invest.
Two weeks later, we ditched that plan. The plan was immaterial. The idea that we could build something that resonated with our audience was so much bigger, but people were caught in the weeds.
And so, we met David Stern actually, the former MBA commissioner. And we were like, “This is a guy we have to convince. If David Stern, who built the modern NBA, was the commissioner for almost 30 years, believes in it, that's a pretty good proof point.” And we just worked and discussed with him.
And, this is a guy who literally pushed the NBA to be international when no other American sports league was, understood the value of digital, honestly, an incredible visionary. And he finally got it, and he pushed through the investment at Greycroft, where he was.
And, it took somebody who was in the system, but also could see the future, to do that. And I think that was a big proof point for us.
Turner Novak: So it was basically, you found the one investor, the one guy who could’ve gotten there.
Dan Porter: Yeah. He was a high leverage guy in terms of that. And then half the people were like, “Oh, sports ball.” There's some nerd badge of pride in investing where you don't like sports.
And then, the flip side, a quarter of the other investors are like, “Well, if it's about surfing, wind surfing, or extreme marathons that I run in Allbirds, then I'm definitely interested.” And you're like, “It's not like that.”
And then the second time, we actually connected with Andreessen Horowitz. Jeff Jordan, who is a massive basketball fan, runs a game just really inside of college sports. And I just emailed him, and he emailed me back over the weekend and he’s like, “I've been waiting for something like this.” And he just got it.
And between Andreessen Horowitz, and Jeff, and David Stern, I think there was enough momentum for us to get money to prove something. And, at that point, now you're talking about, “Here's how big my audience is, and here's how much money, and here all my metrics, and stuff like that.”
Turner Novak: And, was this the series A?
Dan Porter: So, it was the seed for David and the Series A for Andreessen and Jeff Jordan.
Turner Novak: And the pre-seed was my friends at Afore.
Dan Porter: Yes.
Turner Novak: Okay. So, when they invested, did you have anything?
Dan Porter: No, we had a phone call. I was in a different office. And I just was like, “This is it.” And, they were just like, “Cool.”
Turner Novak: So they’re the ones that bought the, “I’m Dan Porter!”
Dan Porter: I think they bought the Dan Porter, and I think they understood, at a high-level, that there was a market opportunity. And I would say, I think when you start a company, you have to see a market opportunity that other people don't see. And there's really only a couple ways to see that.
One is you just have an intensely personal experience, “I went through the healthcare system and nothing worked, and then I realized…”. Or, in my case, I worked for a company where I represented sports leagues, and so, they were telling me stuff in closed-door rooms that other people didn't know. So, I was like, “Oh, I know something that in 2 years, everyone else will know, but I have a 2-year jump to act on it.”
It doesn't mean I'm smarter or I'm special. I just listened and I put it together. And, I think when you talk to them, and they're like, “Well, how do you know?” And I'm like, “I'm in these closed-door rooms.”
And really good pre-seed and seed investors know you’ve got to know something that other people don't know. You have to know some secret. And I was Dan Porter who had done it twice successfully, and I knew a secret. So, 2 out of 2 things there wasn’t bad. So they wrote a check.
Turner Novak: So what was the secret?
Dan Porter: I think the secret was at that time, people didn't understand how just the next generation was really disconnected from live sports.
Turner Novak: Why were they disconnected?
Dan Porter: I think it was, first of all, you grow up and in fifth grade, your first phone is a smartphone and it's a screen. You've got competition from accessible video games that has never existed before. You've got more Netflix and streaming options, whereas if I was a kid, you watch sports because that was like 90% of what was available to you.
Now, there's more to do. Now, you're just like, “Oh, well I saw the highlight on Instagram. I don't need to watch the game. Oh, I don't have cable.” A lot of sports is on cable and we're below 50% rate. And so, it's just a combination of all of those things. And, there's just an assumption that sports is this unbreakable, amazing thing.
And, it turned out that it wasn't. And, I guess, if I could use analogy, people like to go to concerts, obviously. Taylor Swift's killing it in concerts. Ed Sheeran made half a billion dollars in concerts.
At some point, something is going to change and people are going to decide, “I'll just stay at home and listen to the CD or the Spotify or the tape or the vinyl or whatever their format is or was.” And people are going to go less. I don't think that's going to happen for a while, but at some point, that will happen, and somebody will see that before someone else will see that.
Turner Novak: That’s kind of a hot take. We won't go to concerts anymore?
Dan Porter: At some point. It might not be for 25 years.
Turner Novak: Will it be VR that's better than the concert actually?
Dan Porter: I think it's impossible to project based on what we have now. If you asked me in the 1970s, “Why will people not watch live sports one day?” The iPhone hasn't been invented, the cell phone hasn't been invented, there’s no social media. What am I going to say? “Oh, yeah, they're going to watch it on their Atari?” There's just not a good answer because we don't know what all the forms of disruption are.
Turner Novak: So, it's almost like you find this massive mainstay that everyone knows is never going to go away. And you figure out when that's going to change.
Dan Porter: Yeah. In all directions. It’s like, “People are never going to eat health food. Health food is sold at the hippie food co-op.” Or, whatever, you live in Ann Arbor – there's probably 20 hippie food co-ops.
And then, all of a sudden, Whole Foods creates this professionalized version and people shop there who would never be caught dead in a food co-op. And that changes the nature of it. So, it's a combination of product and distribution that we can't necessarily even predict.
Turner Novak: So then, was there a certain moment when you decided, “We have to do this sports league. We’re going to start our own league.” Because that's a pretty big undertaking.
Dan Porter: It's less like an apple dropped out of a tree on my head and I was like, “Light bulb!” and Zack was like, “Light bulb!”, and it was more this nagging feeling like, “We're making something that's adding value to other people's IP.”
And I remember I had a friend who was at Stanford Business School. And he texted me and he is like, “The NBA is talking to us at Stanford Business School. And they mentioned Overtime.” And I was like, “Oh, we're valid.”
And I was like, “What did they say?” And they said, “One of the benefits of Overtime is it makes people care about Summer League, because now they get to see all the players that they've been following.” And you think, “That's great, but that's great for Summer League and the NBA. What does that do for me?”
I'm in the business of holding up a sign outside of a movie theater and saying, “Go see that movie.” But I don't have anything to do with the movie. And so we started saying, “We need our own league. What if we had our own league?”
And then of course, all this other stuff happens: post-George Floyd, athlete empowerment, COVID, LaMelo Ball goes to Australia, all these other things happen. And they create this opportunity where doing your own league doesn't seem as crazy. But, ultimately I wanted to be an IP owner.
I want to have media rights, I want to have sponsorship, I want to sell jerseys. The NBA and the NFL are fucking amazing organizations, run by incredibly smart people that have figured out business at the highest level. That's what I want to do. I don't want to just be another site on the internet.
Turner Novak: So, how do you start a league? Because when I think about all these different sports leagues that have tried to start – XFL, AFL – there's all these non-major sports leagues. They never work. How did you do it?
Dan Porter: Number 1, you have to be batshit crazy and just believe that you're going to do it.
Turner Novak: Okay. So we're checking that box. You got that.
Dan Porter: Number 2 is, I think you have to be really sensitive to cost – not that it's not expensive, but we didn't do city-based teams. We did – all the teams played in one arena and it changed the nature of travel. All of these things where you can mitigate cost.
And I think number 3 is you have to have some endemic audience and form of distribution. So, in its second year, if Overtime Elite had 5 million fans, which is more than a lot of sports that start up, 99% of them came because Overtime has 85 million fans.
So you're not starting with the league where nobody knows the players, you have no distribution, you have no followers, you have no – any of that. It's because at the end of the day, the thing that people don't understand is, you and I could start a basketball league tomorrow. We could start a snooker league, we could start a darts league. We could do whatever. It's not about the league, it's about the audience development.
And if you don't understand how to make something that people care about, and if your obsession isn't, “Why should people care about this?” And, “How can they come in and become fans?” Then you're going to have a harder time.
Turner Novak: So you basically took this lower cost approach and because of the audience, you probably could say, “We're going to have some revenue that comes in also.”
Dan Porter: You're going to lose money in the beginning. Most pro sports teams and leagues lose money now. But, you have to go for it.
And we made a massive, multi-million dollar bet on building a 110,000 square-foot arena in Atlanta. Atlanta ended up being an incredible city to be in, a culturally relevant city, historically relevant city, really easy to work with, just an actor in our drama, in the most positive way.
And we built a place with unbelievable training and gyms, and you walk into the arena, and players and fans are blown away. And so, you have to take a risk in some areas. And so, we did that.
The first year, we distributed all the games not live. Only after they happened. So you could watch them kind of on demand on our YouTube, and people would discover them and start to grow.
And this year, some of the games are on Amazon Prime, which is an amazing partner. Some are on YouTube, where you can discover them over the internet. But, the idea is, you wanted to get the product in front of people with a variety of partners who have different skillsets, and you want to make them care.
And so, the basketball people do the basketball stuff. Social people understand it's not about views. It's about getting people to care. But yeah, we signed 27 players in the first year and we had no building and no coach.
Turner Novak: How did you convince them? That sounds kind of crazy.
Dan Porter: First, we had talented people who worked on that. And you were looking for people who were looking for something different. And you were looking for disruptors, and people who are looking for a different type of opportunity.
And I think as hopefully people know in 2023 this year, we had the number 4 and the number 5 player in the NBA draft. And they were 12th graders who were ranked 80th and 81st in the country. Somebody said, “These guys are going to be good. And they work hard.” And we went after them, and they took a risk, and they gave up their eligibility. And they came and they went from being 80th and 81st to being 4th and 5th in the NBA draft.
Turner Novak: And what all was the league again? Or can you maybe explain what the pitch is to the families and why they would join the league?
Dan Porter: Yeah. So, in a way, you are doing 2 things. One is you're building a league, so you're playing at a high level of competition. You're being watched by millions of people. You're on an incredible stage that is really different than a traditional high school gym.
Turner Novak: Like a prep team, that maybe travels and stuff?
Dan Porter: It’s as if you're playing in Madison Square Garden with massive coverage around you against great teams, and there's nothing wrong with the alternative. It's just that, for the best people, they wanted that.
But on the other side, you've got some of the best trainers in the country. You've got people who played and coached in the NBA, played and coached in college. You have an opportunity to develop your skill as a basketball player in an environment that I think is unrivaled.
And, if you love classical music and you are great, your dream is to go to Juilliard in New York, which is the premier music academy. I wanted to build the premier basketball academy. And on top of that, not only did I add great academics, but we created essentially a 4-to-1 student-teacher ratio with incredible teachers so that people could learn at an accelerated rate, and they could free up time in their day to spend and develop basketball.
And I would say, it's not for everyone. If you like basketball, it's not for you. If you love basketball and you want to be great, it's for you. We don't need a million people. We need 10, 20, 30 people every year who love basketball, who want to push themselves and achieve at the highest level.
And we are there with the academics, with the life skills, with the financial literacy, with the basketball training. The average player in our league gains 10 to 15 pounds of muscle a year. There's so many opportunities to get good. And again, if you're a great musician, you might want to stay in high school, or you might want to go to Juilliard.
If you're an actor, you might want to go to a specialized school. If you are a tennis all-star or a child Hollywood actor, you might get your own tutor. There's different paths for different people. It just didn't exist for basketball, and we built it.
Turner Novak: And then you also gave a guarantee, right? Of whatever, X amount – if you don't go to the NBA, we'll help you pay for college.
Dan Porter: Yes. We'll pay for college for you, for sure. And now, they don't give up their eligibility. So pretty much everyone who comes through will be able to play in college, in the NBA, or abroad. In the first 30 players there are who came through, 16 of them are already pro-playing in Europe, playing in the NBA, playing in the G-League, playing all over.
Turner Novak: That’s insane. I did not realize. That's a very, very high number.
Dan Porter: Yeah. And of the other 14, some are not even eligible yet. They're just younger.
Turner Novak: Why do you think people made a bet then on Overtime? Was it just a no-brainer for some of these players?
Dan Porter: I think that all of the players saw opportunities that they weren't getting. Even getting access to a gym 16 hours a day is huge. We have a guy who's in the NBA now, and he used to drive an hour and a half each way.
If I want to play basketball for your school, and I come and I'm like, “This is great.” That's great. “I want to play basketball for OTE.” And I come, and somebody pulls up film and shows me everything with my game of how I can improve. And I'm not dominant here and my catch and shoot is off and whatever. I'm like, “Wow, I want to get to be as good as I can.”
Turner Novak: And I don’t know if you mentioned this, but also just to helping them grow their following online, which is huge.
Dan Porter: Totally. Amen and Ausar Thompson, both had under 10,000 followers and now, they're in the NBA and they have a quarter of a million followers.
Turner Novak: Which is huge, that carries with them forever. You basically give them a pro-training environment.
Dan Porter: Yeah, I think we say internally with them – and this comes from them, not from us – basketball, business, and brand.
You can see 27 million posts on social media. How much did MJ make in the NBA and how much did he make out of the NBA? How much has LeBron made in the NBA versus all of his investments and his businesses and everything else like that? Most of the really, really successful folks make a lot of money outside of basketball as well.
Turner Novak: Yeah. It's always leveraging that brand that they build. Do you think there's opportunities around there for Overtime? I don’t know what that looks like.
Dan Porter: I think there's opportunities for the players, but I have my lane. They have their lane. We don't represent them. I'm not their agent. They go to the NBA. That's on them.
We will always support them and show them love, but our job is to have them play for us, train them, deliver, and hopefully they have the skills and the right people around them to take advantage of that level.
Turner Novak: So then you did the basketball league, you did 7-on-7 football. And then now, you're launching boxing. That’s very interesting. What was the decision to do boxing of all choices?
Dan Porter: There's probably 3 things. One is, I'm just in our arena and I think this would be an amazing place for a fight.
Turner Novak: Okay. That’s fair.
Dan Porter: Second, Brandon, who is our GM of boxing, started boxing during COVID, and he would relentlessly DM me videos, and he'd be like, “We’ve got to get into boxing. We’ve got to get into boxing.”
Turner Novak: It’s a good business too, boxing.
Dan Porter: And then, I think that there was a guy who used to work with me at Endeavor, Josh, who went to work at the UFC. And he used to also be like, “Why are you not in combat sports? Why are you not in combat sports?”
And at some point, I was like, “Let's just do one of those analytics packages on our audience.” So, what does the Overtime audience like? Basketball, football, boxing/combat sports. So, I've got 2 people in my ear. I've got this incredible venue, and then, it's basically telling me our audience is interested – and by the way, shout out to all the YouTubers who fought and generated interest in boxing as well.
And so we spent a year just going around talking to people to make sure – is the opportunity real? What's our space in the opportunity? Who's going to kill us? Who's going to partner with us? And then we put together something that I think has a potential to be really big.
Turner Novak: When is it launching? What date?
Dan Porter: So, we're launching with 4 Friday night fights in Atlanta. And Friday night fights is kind of an old-school concept. You'll come to our arena in Atlanta on August 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. And the arena will feel like a club, and there'll be seats. But in VIP area, we'll have couches and bottle service, and it'll have an Atlanta vibe and there will be 6 fights each night.
You can watch them on DAZN. We'll do a ton of social media around it. The storytelling will be off the charts. It's called OTX. And, I think it's going to be a vibe.
Turner Novak: So do we know who's participating? Is that a public thing?
Dan Porter: Yeah, we've announced a ton of fighters. We have some of the biggest fighters like Ryan Garcia, we have his brother, Tank Davis. We have Truck, who fights for him. Evander Holyfield’s son, a bunch of guys who are next-up contenders for that.
And our ring will be a little smaller and we'll have some knockout bonuses. So, the idea is to try to make the sport a little bit faster, safer, and ultimately, relevant for our audience.
Turner Novak: So then how do you think about the business model in boxing? Is that a subscription business or is there a sponsor?
Dan Porter: I think you look at the UFC and the WWE and you're just like, “Well, one built a $9 billion business. The other built a $4 billion business. It's two guys in a ring. How do you do what they did?”
Turner Novak: That’s true. I remember when I first met you, my comp was WWE. It's a league, it’s wrestling. I was like, “Huh, it's worth $4 or 5 billion? Wow. And it's wrestling. It's fake.”
Dan Porter: It's a combination of media rights, sponsorship, and live event.
Turner Novak: And then, have you talked much about other things you could probably do with Overtime? How do you think about that?
Dan Porter: I think you think about it strategically and opportunistically. Strategically is like, “What's happening in the sports landscape? What's happening in tennis, what's happening in golf, what's happening in all of these other things?”
And you're looking at that all the time. And opportunistically is somebody calls you and says, “I have an idea. I wonder if we could partner together.” And you're like, “Wow, that's a dope idea.” We could really work together on.”
Turner Novak: What are examples of that happening?
Dan Porter: Somebody called me with an amazing idea in soccer that I think is really cool. From England, a place that has more soccer capital than the United States does.
Turner Novak: United States, it’s growing here though too.
Dan Porter: It's growing. I think as they say in Europe, when you hear somebody with American accents start to talk about soccer or football, you stop listening.
Turner Novak: Really? Okay.
Dan Porter: So the audience is growing, but it's so strong and powerful in Spain, Germany, France, the UK.
Turner Novak: Someone told me this crazy theory. They think that there's going to be a North American soccer league, that the MLS is just going to merge with some of the teams.
Dan Porter: I wouldn't be surprised. I know that for a while, and maybe even still, the MLS was doing marketing for the Mexican national soccer team. The soccer audience in the United States has a very strong Hispanic audience as a subset of the audience. It would make a lot of sense.
Turner Novak: There's kind of this big Golf storyline[2]. What do you think of that?
[2] LIV Golf, owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, and the American PGA Tour had been embroiled in a long legal battle. In June 2023, they agreed to merge along with the European Tour (now called the DP World Tour) to form a unified global golf platform.
Dan Porter: My opinion is, it's just fascinating to watch it happen, right? Golf comes, another entity comes into Golf, they spend a ton of money, they disrupt, they force Golf to merge with them – the PGA, which is essentially a membership organization and a governing body. I think what's interesting about it is that it's clearly caused everyone else in sports outside of golf to look at the world in a different way.
Because especially golf, and tennis to a large extent, are very much driven by tradition. Augusta, the US Open, the Masters, Roland-Garros, Wimbledon – these are sports events that have been around for years. Some have their own clothing, and the idea that somebody could come in with so much money – it's almost immaterial who it is – and cause so much change and disruption in something that has so much legacy history, I think is both fascinating and unnerving to a lot of people in sports.
And when the entity that comes in is so well-capitalized that the money to the sports team, or league, or governing body, seems like a lot, but to them is immaterial. If you were a billionaire and I was a 5-year-old kid and we could go into the store, you could buy me every single candy bar in the store, and it would not make a difference to you.
Turner Novak: It'd be like a coffee for me.
Dan Porter: And to me, I would be like, “Oh my God, this is unbelievable.” And we would just literally walk out with a shopping cart filled with candy bars.
Turner Novak: Well, and then when you think about the similar thing that was sort of happening in soccer, Messi was going to play in this league in Saudi Arabia. And he took, I guess objectively from a financial perspective, you might say it was a bad or a worse deal. But I actually don't think it was.
Coming off a recent World Cup win, Messi is arguably the best soccer player in the world. He just joined Inter Miami, a team in the US-based MLS league (Major League Soccer. He was also being courted by a league in Saudi Arabia with a rumored $1.3 billion offer.
Dan Porter: It might have been lower in cash, but there are other things that he cared about, that mattered to him. It's interesting, because if you think about in business, if you remember, Microsoft owned a streaming service and they paid Ninja a ton of money to leave Twitch and come to streaming service. And it didn't work, and they shut it down, and Ninja came back to Twitch. And I think you've seen that happen a couple times.
It just happened in streaming again with another streamer who went to Kick and left for a hundred million dollars. I don't think we've ever really seen it work, but in sports, we'll see. We'll see if Cristiano Ronaldo going somewhere for a lot of money causes fans to come in interest or even Messi coming to MLS causes interest in growth.
Clearly it has – MLS and Miami growth are off the charts. So it's not a 1-to-1 correlation. You can make a movie with the biggest superstar in the world and pay them a hundred million dollars and people still might not watch the movies. So, it's an idea, but it doesn't always work.
Turner Novak: There's almost network effects, in a way, to how these leagues maintain. Or another way to think about it is retention. Sure, you acquired a big, impressive, piece of content, or the athlete or whatever, but does the audience retain over time or do they just drop off?
Dan Porter: Yeah, I think they were saying in European soccer that this is the first time that 45% of the current generation, gen Z, millennial soccer fans, have a second team that they care about. They're fluid in their fandom. Like, “Oh well I really like Erling, so I'm going to watch City Football Club because he's a cool guy and whatever.”
The idea that, if I was a kid, that I would watch the Cowboys when someone was on the Cowboys? I'm an Eagles fan. Fuck the Cowboys – I'm never watching that! Never. I don't care about them. I want them to go 0 and 17. So the idea that the fluidity is there in the fanbase is amazing, but also unnerving I think, to teams and leagues.
Turner Novak: Well, and the interesting thing too is when I think about fantasy football – I always cared about sports And I think it was in college, I started playing with my friends. I'm like, “Man, I just love some of these players.” I watch probably more football than I used to because of this second way of interacting with the sports. I used to just watch, but now I make my own team with the players.
Dan Porter: A hundred percent. I agree with that. On top of it, I'll say to my wife, “He's on my team.” And she's like, “You own a team?”. “Well, no, my fantasy team.” She's like, “He's not really on your team.”
Turner Novak: But he is.
Dan Porter: Yeah. I was like, “He is.” The number of pro athletes who have told me people will come up and be like, “You are my fantasy team.” And they're just thinking, “Whatever.” But I feel that way. It is my team. I named it, I chose the athletes.
They are humans who do not know me, but it is very compelling. And sometimes, when I have a player who is on my fantasy team, but he's playing against the Eagles, I'm torn because I want my team that I love to win. But, I still need this guy to score a touchdown.
Turner Novak: Yeah. We've all had those moments, anyone who plays fantasy football. Where it's like, “Man, I need this guy to get the touchdown, but I need the running back to throw the pass.”
Dan Porter: I think the other thing that approximates that is the NCAA tournament bracket. I think without the bracket, nobody would care about the tournament. But instead, it's like busted bracket.
It's so well done as a product because they put the numbers. So, my father-in-law who's in his 80s can say, “I don't know this, but I think the 8 team is going to beat the 7 team, or the 16 team is going to upset the 1 team. I don't even know the name of the school.”
And so, it's really easy. It's a one and done. You do it, you sit, and now you watch. And I think it has 100% correlation to the growth of the NCAA tournament as a viewable product.
Turner Novak: Yeah. And it adds to the story also. Growing up, that's when you get exposed to sports, you probably saw it on TV or on social. You have no idea that there's a business behind it. But you just fall in love with this story. And really, there's a lot of money behind sports and some of the biggest businesses that people don't really know how they work.
Dan Porter: That's why I’m in it. Not for me, but for my investors.
Turner Novak: Yeah. So you said that you get 15 to 20 DMs a day from kids. You personally. I'm sure Overtime as a brand gets tens of thousands. But what are kids saying? What do people want to talk about with sports or with the content you guys are putting out?
Dan Porter: Well, number 1, they want to send me their highlight because they think I'm going to post on Overtime and they're going to get famous. I would say number 2, a lot of people want to know, “How do I get a job in sports?” And number 3, outside of just partnerships and stuff, people are like, “How do I launch my own sports account? How do I do this? And by the way, can you like my most recent video?”
Turner Novak: Yeah. Boost me in the algo. So what do you think kids want, is it new leagues or stories and content?
Dan Porter: I think that the audience of the kind of generation that's of age now wants to participate. They're not the passive, “I sit on my couch and watch on a big screen” audience. They want a chance to be part of the action. If you can comment on an Instagram or a TikTok video, you're part of the action. Why wouldn't you want to be part of the action? I think they want to see themselves in it.
I think sports-betting is another way that you're able to participate, so I just think they want to move from whatever it means from being a passive fan to being an active fan.
Turner Novak: You've talked about the multiple accounts, so you can almost set the tone. You can take 5 Overtime accounts, maybe set the culture and the comments, and you get the kids to almost participate along. Or you can amplify what they want.
Dan Porter: And I think they also want to know the story. Who is this person? Why should I care about them?
Turner Novak: Alright, wanna do rapid fire? Couple questions? We can close it out.
What is something that you used to not be good at, but you're really good at now? Any examples?
Dan Porter: I'm good at everything. No, I'm just kidding.
Turner Novak: Two exits, Dan Porter.
Dan Porter: This is an imperfect answer, but I didn't start out as a technical person. I wasn't a software developer. But in the very first company, I started getting a ride to work with the CTO every day, and just asking a lot of questions and trying stuff on my own.
I have a strong understanding of how technology works, challenges around scaling and everything else like that. So I'm not going to tell you that I'm a technical founder, but I'm a hundred times more technical and I feel comfortable talking to technical people.
Turner Novak: Interesting. So is there a way to learn software, learn the tech language?
Dan Porter: I would say for me, it was just talking to the developers, asking a lot of questions. Back in the day I taught myself PHP, MySQL – and I don't think I was very good at it – but I understood the structure of it. And so I think it just depends on whatever the best way that you learn is, it's something that you should definitely learn about.
And then also, you put an app out and the app breaks and you figure out why, and you're just like, “Oh, there’s too many calls on the phone versus in the cloud versus all these other things like that.”
Turner Novak: Any advice for just founders more broadly?
Dan Porter: There are founders who are good at selling, they're good at raising money, they're good at being in the media, they’re selling themselves, and they're actually really good at selling. But I don't think those founders are ultimately as successful as product-based founders because you have to obsess over the product and that thing that you're making for the first year or 2 before you can ever sell it.
And so if you're somebody who is more of a seller of the product, you're just patiently waiting, impatiently waiting for them to make it, so you can go sell it. But actually, the making of it is really the thing that's way harder.
Turner Novak: So if somebody's not familiar with what it means to make a product, is it the customer experience?
Dan Porter: I think it's, what is your business? Whether you're making an energy drink, an app, a website, a service, you just have to be obsessed about getting the right people and having the right vision to make that product and service awesome. And you just have to learn from all your iterations early.
The word that I hate is, I hate the word pivot. People are like, “Oh, you pivoted and you started leagues.” I was like, “I didn't pivot.” A pivot is if I started a sports company and I ended up selling underwear. That is a pivot. I'm just evolving. I'm looking at opportunities. I'm finding them with the team and we're going after them.
And I think young people and entrepreneurs are poorly served because if you have to pivot, you just fucking failed and you're in a different business. What you're doing is, you have a premise, you test it, and you evolve and you realize that you thought people wanted A, but they really wanted B. But you wouldn't have gotten to B if you hadn't started with A.
Turner Novak: Yeah. I feel like we always need these buzzwords to just define a thing and sometimes the words shouldn't exist or they do a disservice almost in some cases. Do you guys have any interesting teams at Overtime? Groups inside the companies?
Dan Porter: That's a good question.
Turner Novak: Because you guys aggregate content, you probably have a dashboard that pulls in the most popular videos.
Dan Porter: We do. We definitely have people who spend a lot of time on social media and look at videos. We have people who find people to film and other things like that.
Turner Novak: Like a Skunk Works team?
Dan Porter: There's some Skunk Works, but if you tell me the next LeBron is playing in Ypsilanti, Michigan tomorrow, there's a team who can find somebody who has an iPhone who can show up at that gym and film it in like two hours. Anywhere in the world probably.
Turner Novak: We didn't really even talk about Zack, your co-founder, but he had this business of a network of sports writers, right? So he set that up initially back. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask for finding people to work at Overtime?
Dan Porter: That's a good question. I generally just ask people to talk to me. I'm like, “Tell me your story.” And we have a conversation, and I feel like interview questions are contrived and they're gamified to be answered. Y
ou watch dating shows and people are always like, “Who is your ideal partner? How do you feel about family?” But the reality is, in real life, nobody does that. They go out and they hang out and they laugh and they're like, “We either kind of vibe or we don't.”
And to me, there's that. But I would say my second favorite thing besides that is asking people what questions they have for me. Because I think that an attribute of someone who's going to be successful is that they ask really good questions. And I can tell you off the bat somebody who has thoughtfully prepared questions that are really interesting versus somebody who's like, “How'd you start the business? What's the dental plan like?”
Turner Novak: “Do you have a 401k? What's the work from home policy?” (laughs) What did you think of my questions? Were they good?
Dan Porter: I thought they were pretty good.
Turner Novak: Could I have done a little bit better?
Dan Porter: That's for the audience to decide. Can I ask you rapid fire questions now?
Turner Novak: Yeah, let's do it.
Dan Porter: All right. Rapid fire questions for Turner Novak. Pancakes or waffles?
Turner Novak: I have pancakes more, but I prefer waffles.
Dan Porter: Okay. Don't limit yourself. If you like waffles, get a waffle-maker. Grilled cheese or mac and cheese?
Turner Novak: It's tough. Grilled cheese. I prefer grilled cheese, but we eat mac and cheese more.
Dan Porter: All right. Country or western?
Turner Novak: Country Western movies?
Dan Porter: That's a non-answer because Country Western is a genre. Alright, those are really my rapid-fire questions. I just learned a lot about you. You basically go for the thing that you don't like as much, in both cases.
Turner Novak: Well, part of it is I'm married and I have 2 kids. So mac and cheese. That is very easy to make.
Dan Porter: Grilled cheese is not hard to make.
Turner Novak: It's not, but it's easier to make mac and cheese than it is grilled cheese.
Dan Porter: It comes in a box. Grilled cheese doesn't come in a box.
Turner Novak: Yeah. So unfortunately, the stage of life that we are in, I don't get to eat quite as much grilled cheese, but we do. The mac and cheese we have like twice a week because it's the, “Shoot, we have nothing, the kids need to eat dinner.”
Dan Porter: Last question. Is a hot dog a sandwich?
Turner Novak: Yeah, technically. I'll say, yeah. I haven't thought about it that much, but I think it is. What do you think? Is a hot dog a sandwich?
Dan Porter: You’re not allowed to ask me the questions that I ask you.
Turner Novak: Is a hamburger a sandwich?
Dan Porter: I believe that two pieces of something with something in the middle is a sandwich, and so I will say yes.
Turner Novak: Okay, so is hot dog? Because it's one piece.
Dan Porter: It's debatable.
Turner Novak: So, do you have to rip it in half?
Dan Porter: Like is a tuna melt a sandwich?
Turner Novak: One piece of bread with tuna on top? I don't think so.
Dan Porter: Okay. So it depends how the hot dog closes then, I guess.
Turner Novak: Yeah, that's true. I feel good about my answer. Actually while we're on it, just because this is a hot topic. Pineapple on pizza?
Dan Porter: That is a hot topic. I feel like America is about freedom. And so I think you should be able to put whatever the fuck you want on pizza. And I also think that one of the great things about food is contrast. Ultimately, there was probably a time when pizza had tomato on it, and, “Cheese, why would you put cheese on that? It has nothing to do with it?”
So to me, it's an evolution and it's contrast and taste buds. So I'm all for it. I don't have any problem with it. If you want to put a hotdog on a pizza and a hamburger too.
Turner Novak: I've actually had that before. It was mustard, relish, hotdog. It was better than you think. It was not a chain, like a Domino's type pizza. It was an independent – they probably cooked it in like a grill-fire oven, whatever. It was really, really good.
Dan Porter: The closest I've had is they make hamburgers where the bun is a donut.
Turner Novak: It was good?
Dan Porter: I had the veggie one because I'm vegetarian. I would say it was interesting. Good is a subjective term. Do I like a sickly-sweet sugar donut with fatty meats or fake meats in between? Maybe not, but I'm sure somebody does.
Turner Novak: Yeah. I've been thinking the last 30 seconds. I'm like, “What would that taste like?” I don't know if I would like that. I don't know. I would try it.
But anyways, this is an awesome conversation. Thanks for being down to chat.
Dan Porter: Thanks for having me.
Turner Novak: This is a lot of fun.
Dan Porter: All right. Go Overtime. Shout out.
Turner Novak: Go Overtime.
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