Brian Kenny:
To say that men’s leagues have historically dominated the world of professional sports is understating the case. In fact, it literally took a World War to launch the first professional women’s league. In 1943, Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs proposed the idea of a professional women’s baseball league to keep baseball in the public eye, while many of the best male players were overseas. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was the catalyst for the launch of another women’s baseball league, and eventually women’s leagues in all other sports. Today, women are well-represented in major league sports, including hockey, basketball, golf, soccer, softball, lacrosse, and more. But the playing field is far from level when compared to the resources, and reach of men’s leagues.
What will it take to even the score? Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Jeffrey Rayport, and guests to discuss his case, Angel City Football Club scoring a new model. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Jeffrey Rayport is an expert in online media, and e-commerce with a focus on new business opportunities enabled by emerging digital technologies, and he’s been on Cold Call several times. Welcome back, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Thank you so much, Brian. It’s great to be here.
Brian Kenny:
And today we are really happy to have a couple of other guests. Nicole Keller is assistant director at Harvard Business School’s California Research Center, and a co-author of the case. And Kara Nortman is the founder and managing partner of Monarch Collective, and the co-founder of the Angel City Football Club, and she is one of the protagonists in today’s case. Nicole, Kara, welcome.
Kara Norton:
Thank you so much.
Nicole Keller:
Thank you.
Brian Kenny:
Great to have you all here. I think people are really going to enjoy hearing about this case. Women’s sports has been in the headlines as of late with Caitlin Clark, and her rise into stardom as a college basketball player, now as a professional basketball player. And it’s really brought to the surface again, all of the disparity that exists between men’s sports and women’s sports. And that’s part of what we’re going to talk about today, and the new model that you’re trying to pursue at Angel City Football Club. So, let’s just dive right in. Jeffrey, I’m going to ask you to start, if you can introduce us to the Angel City Football Club, and explain why you decided to write this case.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Well, Brian, it is a real pleasure to talk about this really exciting story. It came to us from a friend, and colleague named Jennifer Fonstad, who’s been an executive fellow at the Business school here at HBS. She is an alumna of the School, and she’s an investor in Kara’s fund at Monarch, and hence an indirect investor in Angel City. Jennifer proposed to me about a year ago that this case would be a fascinating one to teach in the context of a growth stage tech ventures course I teach called, “Scaling Technology Ventures.” The intent we had coming into it, obviously this doesn’t look like a tech business, was to apply tech in a non-tech situation to kind of ask what would happen if you took the Silicon Valley, and Hollywood playbooks, and you brought them to the world of professional sports. The thing that turned out to be fascinating is that of course that is what the case is about, but it’s about something else, which is that Kara, and her partners, Julie and Natalie, essentially flipped the model of how you build a professional sports franchise.
In general, people tend to build teams by getting a local following, playing a bunch of games, getting attention, and expanding their brand, and awareness, and audience from there, these guys primarily because of what you just talked about related to Caitlin Clark, which is that there’s an overriding goal here around pay equity, and social impact, and the fastest route to social impact, they concluded taking a Silicon Valley, and Hollywood Playbook was in fact to invert the model. To go global first, and build a global brand, and then deliver a team, or what they refer to as the on-field product after that. So, it has been a fascinating series of hypotheses about what brought us to this case.
Brian Kenny:
I have to ask you how, I always ask how you start the class. What’s the cold call that you use to start the conversation?
Jeffrey Rayport:
It is literally the choice, do you as Kara, and Julie, and Natalie going forward, prioritize what would seem intuitively obvious, which is invest in the team, the locker rooms, the pitches, get medical facilities, coaching, mentoring, psychologists, or do you allocate the incremental dollar to continued brand build against things like CRM systems for loyalty programs, e-commerce platform, and merchandise? And that’s a tough one because as I say intuitively, everyone wants to invest in the players, but the question is what puts you in a position to do well as a business is what puts you in a position to do well for the world.
Brian Kenny:
It’s a cart horse thing, isn’t it?
Jeffrey Rayport:
Absolutely. Or, a horse cart.
Brian Kenny:
Or a horse cart.
Jeffrey Rayport:
It’s unclear which, and that becomes a fascinating point of debate that takes us through the entire class.
Brian Kenny:
Kara, let me turn to you for a second. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, and just tell us in your own words what your motivations were for starting the club, and what you’re hoping to accomplish with it.
Kara Norton:
I’m just thrilled to be here with Professor Rayport, Nicole, and you. It was such an honor to write this case with everyone. It turned out terrific. My background, I spent essentially 25 years in tech and media at places like Morgan Stanley, Battery Ventures, IAC, and operating roles at mergers, and acquisition roles, investor roles. And so if you told me I was going to start a professional women’s soccer team with Natalie Portman, and Julie Uhrman 10 years ago, I don’t know if I would’ve believed you, but I always had what I considered a side hustle, something that brought me joy, which was nonprofit work around gender equity, and eventually also racial equity, and just equity in general. And so I saw something in the world that seemed like it just didn’t make sense, and I think that happens for a lot of us every single day.
But this thing stuck with me for five years, and I was doing what I realized later was market research. And the very quick version of the story is that I went to a 2015 Women’s World Cup finals. I tried to buy jerseys, I tried to find content for this league I didn’t know existed, called the NWSL. And I was an American who was just having fun. I was a working mom of three, and no one would take my money, and I just couldn’t understand it. So, the analogy I make is it’s as if you were watching a Gatorade commercial for 90 minutes, and it was the most fun thing you ever saw, and there was no Gatorade in the store for four years. So, it was this big marketing activation event, and there was nothing to do with my fandom, my consumer energy. And eventually four years later, that led to the founding of Angel City.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Nicole, I want to turn to you for a second, and I teased a little bit in the intro about the history of women’s professional leagues. I’m wondering how the case goes about addressing some of the challenges faced by women’s professional soccer leagues in the US. We’ve seen the women’s team in the Olympics do remarkably well. You would think that would translate to instant success for a professional league, but it’s been challenging.
Nicole Keller:
Yeah, you’re exactly right. There’s been sort of this paradox in women’s soccer where on the world stage, the US Women’s National team has been simply remarkable, winning four World Cup titles in 1991, 1999, 2015, 2019, and attracting enormous viewership. The 2019 Women’s World Cup final drew over 14 million viewers in the US, which was far higher than the men’s 2018 final. But back here in the United States, women’s soccer has had a really hard time developing a sustainable league, which is strange. And there’s been several attempts. We had the Women’s United Soccer Association that was launched in 2001 by a group of cable TV executives and businessmen, but that folded because operational costs exceeded sponsorship revenues. Then we had the Women’s Professional Soccer League launched in 2009 that was launched by some deep-pocketed folks, including Phil Anschutz, and John Hendricks, the founder of Discovery Channel. But that one folded as well.
But then in 2012, the National Women’s Soccer League was established with really a much more diverse set of owners, and it had the backing from the Canadian Soccer Association, and the Mexican Football Federation. And this one has shown strong success starting with eight teams, and now growing to 14, and more to come. So, the league is now 12 years old, and it’s going strong. And I think part of the success is attributable to the ownership, and the structure of the league, but it’s also dovetailing with what you said, this surge of interest in women’s sports. And we saw that this year with basketball with Caitlin Clark.
That was the first time in history that the women’s NCAA final generated higher viewership than the men’s final. And we saw the same thing in volleyball last year when the Nebraska women’s volleyball team hosted a rivalry matchup in the university’s football stadium with a record setting 92,000 fans. So, the trend is happening across sports, and research really backs this up. We found that almost 40 percent of Gen Z-ers report that they’re watching more women’s sports now than they were a year ago. So, I think now is the right time, and women’s soccer is really in the sweet spot.
Brian Kenny:
Jeffrey, I want to come back to you for a second, because you were talking about how Angel City has done things differently. What’s the traditional model for launching a sports franchise? Not that I’m thinking about doing it, but I just want to know what… Just in case I decide to start one.
Jeffrey Rayport:
There’s a good reason why you, and I might not do it the traditional way. You start by being white, male, and a billionaire, and you go by a team as an expression, no disrespect, but usually an expression of ego. You’re not running it as a business. You are looking to win. You’re looking to become Bob Kraft with the Pats, and get Super Bowl ring after ring. But interestingly, you’re focused, as we said before, on a local following, and building the franchise out from there. What is very interesting, and different about Angel City is that Kara comes from a venture investing background. Julie Uhrman is a serial tech leader and CEO, Natalie Portman obviously comes from the Hollywood realm.
These women recognized on day one that first of all, nobody in the party was showing up as a billionaire. Second of all, if you wanted to have the social impact, you needed a business, an economic engine that would drive the impact, including being able, when you get to pay equity, those dollars have to come from somewhere. And that makes this a very different story from the traditional kind of ego-driven avocational expression of most pro sports franchises.
Brian Kenny:
Kara, let me come back to you because I’m curious about the composition of your ownership, and the people who are running the team. Very different backgrounds than we would expect to see in professional sports league management.
Kara Norton:
Yeah, no, I mean it’s fun. I was just on with another professional sports team that’s heavily female backed, and the kinds of conversations you have, we have now about what are the best types of talents to bring in the team, I think are very different because of what Angel City has accomplished. People tend to look for rinse, and repeat, okay, take this person from the NFL, or this person from this team. And actually this first principal’s perspective was something that turned out to probably be the most invaluable thing. And men in tech use those words all the time, and now I really understand what they mean. But I would call it beginner’s mindset. And so the background, we all came out of tech content, Hollywood, and finance to some extent. We had no one from sports. And we did talk to hundreds of people.
I mean, we literally, Julie, and I, and Natalie did an extensive amount of due diligence. I was working on it for probably four years beforehand, and then we all worked on it together for a year before we actually kind of brought the capital in. And anyway, the backgrounds, I mean, out of tech, and out of media, and out of startup land were critical because it’s very, very different to build a team from a zero to one, right? A scaling a team from zero to one in a league that doesn’t have any revenue versus buying the Milwaukee Bucks, or let’s go with the Timberwolves since that’s in the news.
Brian Kenny:
So, are the Celtics.
Kara Norton:
Oh, Celtics, Let’s go with the Celtics!
Brian Kenny:
A little Boston plug.
Kara Norton:
Yes, go Boston. And I’m a Lakers kid. I mean, this is really generous of me. So, yeah, so the backgrounds were, we came out of tech, we came out of startups, we came out of Hollywood, so we could tell stories, but we also weren’t afraid to question as assumptions, and it’s probably the first time, and execute, and execute quickly, and make mistakes, but also really deeply grounded in mission. And we knew where to prioritize not making money to be authentic in mission. And that’s something that I think is a huge differentiator for us and Angel City as well.
Brian Kenny:
How does that mission driven focus, impact the way that you run the organization? What are you trying to achieve, and what are some of the ways those things are manifesting themselves?
Kara Norton:
Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, just to kind of talk through how we set this up, because the way a team is capitalized and structured allows you to make harder decisions. And in the beginning, we were looking for a control owner that would own the whole thing, and fund the whole thing because that was how we were told it was done in sports, and we couldn’t find a traditional control owner. We couldn’t find the billionaire who wanted to give us money. So, I like to say we got 99 nos, and then we did raise a million dollars with a substantive amount of it coming from Alexis Ohanian’s fund initialized, just before COVID to own 15 percent of the team. And then Julie, Natalie, and I owned the other 85 percent. So, we structured it as a C corp in the way you would structure a startup. This may be the first, and last time that’s ever done in sports, but because of that, we had a board where the founders had essentially a voice the way Mark Zuckerberg would have a voice at Facebook where we could show up, and just execute without a lot of interference. And this is how it’s done in sports. And the mission was just part of why we started it. Natalie, and I started working with the US Women’s National Team Players Union on their pay equity fight, and their early name, and likeness revenue. And so it started from the perspective of how do you get the players paid? How do you create? And so when we rolled out models like our sponsorship model, we rolled out models that would give back to community. And so I can go a lot more deeply into it, but every step of the way we have an investor who doesn’t align with our mission. What do we do? What do we say? Can we get that investor to leave? What is the bathroom situation at the stadium? And are there rooms for women to nurse, or to breastfeed? And so we talk about a lot of the bigger topics in the case, and our 10 percent sponsorship model. But there were little things that happened every single day that Julie, and Natalie, and I spoke about without a heavy-handed kind of influence in the room.
Brian Kenny:
I want to talk about how this focus, this impact emphasis affects the brand. And Nicole, I want to come back to you on this just to talk a little bit about some of the strategies that they’ve used to build the brand both locally but also globally, it seems like from the very beginning.
Nicole Keller:
Yeah, I think that was the real “aha” for us in this case. I think as Jeffrey pointed out early on, most professional teams start with a local audience, and then as they become successful, they started to build a global audience. But Angel City really inverted that model growing the brand of Angel City globally, right from the start in parallel with their local efforts. And in my mind, they were smart to focus on that global audience quickly because if you look at, say, the Warriors basketball team, only 1 percent of Warriors fans will ever show up to the Chase Center for a game. The Warriors have a totally separate fan base that watches them on TV, follows them on social media, buys their merchandise, and that’s powerful from a revenue standpoint.
So, Kara, Julie, and Natalie leveraged their backgrounds in entertainment and startups really to focus on the power of storytelling, and to connect with the global audience on what the brand of Angel City really stood for. And it’s a shared set of values tied to equity and inclusion, and that appealed to that global audience. And Angel City then used that same messaging to build the local brand before they had even recruited a team, the club was out in the local community with a street team of very passionate early fans who spread the word and excitement about what Angel City stood for. So that when the first game took place, the stadium was already full of fans.
Brian Kenny:
Jeffrey, you’ve been studying digital strategy in a range of sectors for years now. I’m wondering what you have to say about how Angel City has built their digital infrastructure in a way to support building this global brand.
Jeffrey Rayport:
It’s a great question. I mean, one of the things that’s very striking about the story is that teams take time to build. It takes time to compete for great players. Teams have good seasons, and not good seasons. You’ve got your ups and downs, and we all know that tech platforms, as Kara, and Nicole are indicating can be set up very fast. And if you know what you’re doing, you can amass an audience that, by the way, transcends geography, and by definition could be global. If you’ve got that kind of ambition, you’ve got that kind of reach.
So, in that sense, it raises this very interesting question for our students, which is what kind of business are they actually building? And it’s very clear that if you ask what is driving the economic outcomes in the business, there will be a point at which the team becomes so phenomenal that you could say that’s the driver. But in the meantime, they’re in a sense investing through digital, social, mobile channels in addition to the kind of grassroots on the ground analog world activity that Nicole was just referring to. But they’re building the way you’d build a digital brand. And we all know from the social world, these things tend to get built fast, and acquire momentum, and virality, and they spread, or they don’t work at all. And I think that is a fascinating lesson that’s part of this story.
Brian Kenny:
Kara, how do you feel these efforts to engage people in the digital realm are going in terms of building the kind of presence that you’re hoping for?
Kara Norton:
I mean, terrific. I could come at it two different ways. Julie, Natalie, and I went to a game called El Tráfico at BMO Stadium, LAFC playing Galaxy, and we walked through the supporters section, and there was a flag that said essentially bring women’s soccer to LA. The two people who waved that flag, the Rojas’s, were the first two members of our community. And the first thing we did was move it into Slack. And we built this community in Slack from the very beginning, and I remember the height of COVID, I’m walking through a motel in Utah with an Angel City mask on, and I got stopped, and I thought somebody knows Angel City, and they were members of our Slack community, and they were in there every single day, even during COVID.
So, I think you can look at digital from what you see out in the world, what you see behind the scenes, but we did kind of the tech version of your first thousand customers are the ones you build from all the way to, if you just look at our headcount, we probably have one of the highest percentages of marketing, and content, and just sort of digital enablement as a percentage of total headcount in all of sports. So, that’s something that we felt really strongly about pushing out from the beginning.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, it’s a really unique opportunity if you think about it, because you’re creating something from whole cloth here, whereas an owner acquiring a team, and a league that exists, a team that’s been around for a long time, doesn’t have the same desire maybe to try and figure this out. Is anybody else, this is to all of you, anybody aware of another team, or league that’s doing the kinds of things digitally that Angel City’s trying to do?
Kara Norton:
I mean, I can jump in. I live this every day with Monarch, the fund I left to start because of Angel City, Monarch Collective with my partner Jasmine Robinson. We are anchoring new teams with family office control owners to be able to take this business strategy elsewhere. And we believe it starts with building a syndicate that’s reflective of the community, women, men, and people from that town who are influential, and care. Kansas City, the Longs, they built the first stadium for women to play soccer in the world. They built a digital campaign around building that stadium such that when you’re walking through Australia at the World Cup this summer, you see signs for it. You have San Diego with Jill Ellis who took a real soccer-first strategy, and has done an extraordinary job there. You’re seeing it in Boston with the new expansion team, Jennifer Epstein, and the likes. There are other sports we don’t have here in the US. And one note, look up Dick, Kerr Ladies. 53,000 people packed a stadium in Liverpool to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies play soccer (football) in 1920. And then the FA banned it in 1921 because soccer was not befitting of women, and women were not allowed to play soccer in England for 50 years. So, the demand has always been there, but people forget, and you need numbers like Angel City, and execution to prove it to the world.
Jeffrey Rayport:
And Brian, I should jump in, because Kara’s too modest to mention this, but I mean despite what she’s saying about the fact that yes, this story has spread, Angel City is the most valuable team in the National Women’s Soccer League of any team in the league. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you’ve got folks who have serious business and tech chops as well as the Hollywood Entertainment connection coming in to do that. And maybe one measure of how hot this space has become because of innovation this time is that when these women bought the expansion team back in 2020, they bought it for two million dollars. When the Boston entrepreneurs bought an expansion team for this city, the price tag was 53 million. So, this is an incredible growth space, but I’d argue that the growth is being driven by the kind of innovation that Kara has championed.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah. Jeffrey, we talked earlier about the emphasis on impact that the team has, and I want to ask you, impact is important…Our faculty write a lot of cases about purpose-driven organizations, and that matters, but we always need to come back to profitability at some point, because you can’t sustain the impact if you don’t have the profitability. How does Angel City balance these two priorities?
Jeffrey Rayport:
That is definitely the central question in the case. I think one lesson here is that if you have the luxury of a control owner, as Kara said, you wind up not being under pressure necessarily to innovate around the model. If you don’t have that luxury meaning to survive, you’ve got to make money. And that money is the way that the passion and purpose are enabled by the fact that you’ve got profits that that puts you in a very different position in terms of what’s required of you as a builder of the business.
Brian Kenny:
And profits obviously come from putting a good product on the field, Kara, so I want to ask you about how you think about the player recruitment process, where that priority fits within your strategy for building the brand and the business?
Kara Norton:
The soccer side of the house, that is product, right? That’s like if it’s Instagram’s product is their app, our product is what shows up on the field. And one of the things that’s been articulated back to me by many members of the team was this was the first club they had been at, in particular the women’s sports side, but many on the men’s side, where brand and product went hand in hand where people love coming to games. It is their most favorite thing to do. And then there are always going to be sort of trade-offs in any organization. This is nuance, though, and this is where we’ve had to grow as a board in a management team, and what got us from zero to one is not what’s going to get us from kind of to the next phase, which is there are elements to the soccer product academy, training facilities. It’s an international market competing for the best players in that international labor market where costs don’t always line up with profit. And where you are investing for the future the way you are in a startup. And it’s a place where you need people who are going to really dig in, and have thoughtful debate in a nuanced way, and not just say, cut, cut, cut, or grow, grow, grow. And where you have to figure out how to show up in a board of governor’s room, which is kind of a place Julie goes on all of our behalf to sort of look at, okay, well are we increasing costs for players even though that may bring down our profitability to make sure they want to play in the United States? And players will play all over the world, and I think it’s good for them, but it’s a very nuanced debate. It’s very different than tech.
Brian Kenny:
That being said, as you think about the impact, and the purpose driven emphasis that you have on the team, does that make you think differently about how you recruit players? Do you look at players backgrounds, and the way that they comport themselves, and will that matter as you make decisions bringing players onto the team?
Kara Norton:
I’ll say a couple things to answer that question at a high level. One, people like to win in sports, and it doesn’t feel good to lose. Two people show up at Angel City, even when we’re on long losing streaks, and we try to avoid that. But the stadium dynamic, and how players feel in our stadium with our fans, away teams comment to me on it every week, and it raises the energy, the level of play, the enthusiasm, and the desire to come. And then the final thing is, I mean, I actually wrote an op-ed on this one. I got back from the World Cup, I do love thinking about why players go to different countries and teams just from a brand standpoint, a stylistic standpoint, and whatever your brand is, it should extend into your playing style, and how you recruit. I’m not involved in that part of the business, but it’s interesting to think about it from a brand standpoint.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, for sure. Jeffrey, I want to talk about the media deals. They’ve taken an innovative approach to how they structure their media deals, and I’m wondering what your observations are about how that differentiates.
Jeffrey Rayport:
It’s a very big deal, as Kara can speak to. I mean, in a sense, you could argue that they’re two levels of media and sponsorship. One of the things is that this intense level of community involvement that when Nicole was talking about fielding street teams, before you even have players on the field enabled Angel City to aggregate a bunch of sponsors across categories that normally don’t show up in pro sports, from beauty to vitamins to farmer’s markets to banking. So, that’s one aspect of it. The other is that it helps to have a league that knows how to negotiate the real deals, which are media rights. Those clearly take time to pay back to teams, and they’re spread across all the teams in the league.
But suffice to say that the original media deal that NWSL struck was a deal with Lifetime Television, Lifetime Network for seven million dollars in between bodice rippers, and gothic romances. The new deal worth 240 million over four years is with folks like ESPN and CBS sports, script sports, and even Amazon Prime Video. So, the issue of really understanding how to drive a business agenda here wherein you’ve got to identify the revenue sources that are ultimately going to pay not just for team activity, but the social impact to which you aspire. It’s absolutely critical part of the equation.
Brian Kenny:
We’re winding down on time, and I’ve got one question left for each of you. So, I’m going to start with you, Nicole. We’ve talked a little bit about the importance of competitiveness, and putting a competitive product on the field. Can you talk a little bit about what factors have contributed to Angel City’s success, and what lessons maybe some of the other franchises can learn from them? Are there things that they can do to be more competitive as well?
Nicole Keller:
As I’ve thought about it, I think the key difference is that the founders use their outsider status to their advantage. And they didn’t look in the rearview mirror to see how it’s been done in the past, but instead, they had an open mind. They listened carefully to ideas from other sports leagues. They tried new things like we’ve talked about their approach to revenue sharing with the players, and investing sponsorship dollars back into the community, and they weren’t afraid to take some risks along the way. So, instead of being limited by a mindset of this can’t be done, they really have approached all aspects of the business model with, well, why not? And I think I would be remiss if I didn’t add that the authenticity, and the passion, and the sheer work that the three founders are putting into the club is very different from many professional sports team ownership models, which we talked about at the beginning, which many are more of an ego project for the owners, but that is clearly not the case here. This is hard work, and they are out there doing the hard work day in and day out.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah. Kara, let me ask you, if you look down the road three, four, or five years, what does success look like for the Angel City Football Club?
Kara Norton:
Coming back, and having a hefty debate in Professor Rayport’s class.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Oh, I love that answer.
Kara Norton:
I think it is really figuring out how to be pragmatic, and never let go of our mission, which we fought really hard for. And sometimes people who say they see it don’t necessarily see it, and sometimes we might not even see it. We can all have blind spots around it. And so figuring out how to do our best to hold everyone accountable, our success means that we need different kinds of capital around the table as we get into real estate projects, et cetera. I think the thing, I mean, I think the thing I’ve learned at Angel City as somebody who’s been trained as an investor, and has done a pretty good job in all of these kinds of roles over time is this is different for me, and it’ll be different than I think anything I do in my career. It feels like one of my, I have three daughters, and it almost feels like a fourth child, and I care more about what’s going to happen in this world of Angel City 80 years from now.
And I imagine even if Julie, and Natalie, and I are not involved day to day in 30 years, that somebody will call us back, and we’ll come back if something isn’t right, and just to create the tolerance to move in and out of it. But I think the founding DNA, the three of us, all that we’ve been through that isn’t in the case, and requires cocktails, the working on it every night, every weekend, that, I hope, inspires students, and many people to not just go take a standard issue job, or do the startup that they think they should do, but spend years figuring out what their life’s work is, and do it whether they’re 30, 40, 50, 60, and take credit for it in their hearts, and let it sustain them for life.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. Jeffrey, I’ll give you the last word as the professor in the discussion. If there’s one thing you want our listeners to remember about the Angel City Football Club case, what would it be?
Jeffrey Rayport:
It dawned on me this spring after building this course, the “Scaling Technology Ventures” course, over the last four, or five years, I’ve probably written 50 plus cases. And that with only one, or two exceptions, every single founder came outside of the industries in which they then created this significant impact, and value. So, one of the things that I find very motivating, and spectacular about the opportunities that tech platforms create is that it’s no surprise the word disruption is associated with so many of these businesses, and that folks who carry 20 years of industry experience, and lots of industry baggage are unlikely to be the folks who then disrupt those models. I find it incredibly energizing, inspiring about that. That then puts them in a position to come up with novel solutions, not only to the business of pro sports, but to a huge societal issue called pay equity across genders, and races, in this case, obviously in pro sports. And I just end by saying that after all the mania around Caitlin Clark with which you started this podcast, wasn’t it stunning that her starting salary out there in Indiana was all of $76,000 in a world where we see millionaire male professional athletes. We need to get to a point of equity, and it takes disruption, innovation, and novel approaches to problem solving to get there.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah. Jeffrey, Kara, Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Thank you, Brian.
Kara Norton:
Thank you, guys.
Nicole Keller:
Thank you.
Brian Kenny:
If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work, find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you, email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us, I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
Brian Kenny:
To say that men’s leagues have historically dominated the world of professional sports is understating the case. In fact, it literally took a World War to launch the first professional women’s league. In 1943, Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs proposed the idea of a professional women’s baseball league to keep baseball in the public eye, while many of the best male players were overseas. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was the catalyst for the launch of another women’s baseball league, and eventually women’s leagues in all other sports. Today, women are well-represented in major league sports, including hockey, basketball, golf, soccer, softball, lacrosse, and more. But the playing field is far from level when compared to the resources, and reach of men’s leagues.
What will it take to even the score? Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Jeffrey Rayport, and guests to discuss his case, Angel City Football Club scoring a new model. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Jeffrey Rayport is an expert in online media, and e-commerce with a focus on new business opportunities enabled by emerging digital technologies, and he’s been on Cold Call several times. Welcome back, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Thank you so much, Brian. It’s great to be here.
Brian Kenny:
And today we are really happy to have a couple of other guests. Nicole Keller is assistant director at Harvard Business School’s California Research Center, and a co-author of the case. And Kara Nortman is the founder and managing partner of Monarch Collective, and the co-founder of the Angel City Football Club, and she is one of the protagonists in today’s case. Nicole, Kara, welcome.
Kara Norton:
Thank you so much.
Nicole Keller:
Thank you.
Brian Kenny:
Great to have you all here. I think people are really going to enjoy hearing about this case. Women’s sports has been in the headlines as of late with Caitlin Clark, and her rise into stardom as a college basketball player, now as a professional basketball player. And it’s really brought to the surface again, all of the disparity that exists between men’s sports and women’s sports. And that’s part of what we’re going to talk about today, and the new model that you’re trying to pursue at Angel City Football Club. So, let’s just dive right in. Jeffrey, I’m going to ask you to start, if you can introduce us to the Angel City Football Club, and explain why you decided to write this case.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Well, Brian, it is a real pleasure to talk about this really exciting story. It came to us from a friend, and colleague named Jennifer Fonstad, who’s been an executive fellow at the Business school here at HBS. She is an alumna of the School, and she’s an investor in Kara’s fund at Monarch, and hence an indirect investor in Angel City. Jennifer proposed to me about a year ago that this case would be a fascinating one to teach in the context of a growth stage tech ventures course I teach called, “Scaling Technology Ventures.” The intent we had coming into it, obviously this doesn’t look like a tech business, was to apply tech in a non-tech situation to kind of ask what would happen if you took the Silicon Valley, and Hollywood playbooks, and you brought them to the world of professional sports. The thing that turned out to be fascinating is that of course that is what the case is about, but it’s about something else, which is that Kara, and her partners, Julie and Natalie, essentially flipped the model of how you build a professional sports franchise.
In general, people tend to build teams by getting a local following, playing a bunch of games, getting attention, and expanding their brand, and awareness, and audience from there, these guys primarily because of what you just talked about related to Caitlin Clark, which is that there’s an overriding goal here around pay equity, and social impact, and the fastest route to social impact, they concluded taking a Silicon Valley, and Hollywood Playbook was in fact to invert the model. To go global first, and build a global brand, and then deliver a team, or what they refer to as the on-field product after that. So, it has been a fascinating series of hypotheses about what brought us to this case.
Brian Kenny:
I have to ask you how, I always ask how you start the class. What’s the cold call that you use to start the conversation?
Jeffrey Rayport:
It is literally the choice, do you as Kara, and Julie, and Natalie going forward, prioritize what would seem intuitively obvious, which is invest in the team, the locker rooms, the pitches, get medical facilities, coaching, mentoring, psychologists, or do you allocate the incremental dollar to continued brand build against things like CRM systems for loyalty programs, e-commerce platform, and merchandise? And that’s a tough one because as I say intuitively, everyone wants to invest in the players, but the question is what puts you in a position to do well as a business is what puts you in a position to do well for the world.
Brian Kenny:
It’s a cart horse thing, isn’t it?
Jeffrey Rayport:
Absolutely. Or, a horse cart.
Brian Kenny:
Or a horse cart.
Jeffrey Rayport:
It’s unclear which, and that becomes a fascinating point of debate that takes us through the entire class.
Brian Kenny:
Kara, let me turn to you for a second. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, and just tell us in your own words what your motivations were for starting the club, and what you’re hoping to accomplish with it.
Kara Norton:
I’m just thrilled to be here with Professor Rayport, Nicole, and you. It was such an honor to write this case with everyone. It turned out terrific. My background, I spent essentially 25 years in tech and media at places like Morgan Stanley, Battery Ventures, IAC, and operating roles at mergers, and acquisition roles, investor roles. And so if you told me I was going to start a professional women’s soccer team with Natalie Portman, and Julie Uhrman 10 years ago, I don’t know if I would’ve believed you, but I always had what I considered a side hustle, something that brought me joy, which was nonprofit work around gender equity, and eventually also racial equity, and just equity in general. And so I saw something in the world that seemed like it just didn’t make sense, and I think that happens for a lot of us every single day.
But this thing stuck with me for five years, and I was doing what I realized later was market research. And the very quick version of the story is that I went to a 2015 Women’s World Cup finals. I tried to buy jerseys, I tried to find content for this league I didn’t know existed, called the NWSL. And I was an American who was just having fun. I was a working mom of three, and no one would take my money, and I just couldn’t understand it. So, the analogy I make is it’s as if you were watching a Gatorade commercial for 90 minutes, and it was the most fun thing you ever saw, and there was no Gatorade in the store for four years. So, it was this big marketing activation event, and there was nothing to do with my fandom, my consumer energy. And eventually four years later, that led to the founding of Angel City.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Nicole, I want to turn to you for a second, and I teased a little bit in the intro about the history of women’s professional leagues. I’m wondering how the case goes about addressing some of the challenges faced by women’s professional soccer leagues in the US. We’ve seen the women’s team in the Olympics do remarkably well. You would think that would translate to instant success for a professional league, but it’s been challenging.
Nicole Keller:
Yeah, you’re exactly right. There’s been sort of this paradox in women’s soccer where on the world stage, the US Women’s National team has been simply remarkable, winning four World Cup titles in 1991, 1999, 2015, 2019, and attracting enormous viewership. The 2019 Women’s World Cup final drew over 14 million viewers in the US, which was far higher than the men’s 2018 final. But back here in the United States, women’s soccer has had a really hard time developing a sustainable league, which is strange. And there’s been several attempts. We had the Women’s United Soccer Association that was launched in 2001 by a group of cable TV executives and businessmen, but that folded because operational costs exceeded sponsorship revenues. Then we had the Women’s Professional Soccer League launched in 2009 that was launched by some deep-pocketed folks, including Phil Anschutz, and John Hendricks, the founder of Discovery Channel. But that one folded as well.
But then in 2012, the National Women’s Soccer League was established with really a much more diverse set of owners, and it had the backing from the Canadian Soccer Association, and the Mexican Football Federation. And this one has shown strong success starting with eight teams, and now growing to 14, and more to come. So, the league is now 12 years old, and it’s going strong. And I think part of the success is attributable to the ownership, and the structure of the league, but it’s also dovetailing with what you said, this surge of interest in women’s sports. And we saw that this year with basketball with Caitlin Clark.
That was the first time in history that the women’s NCAA final generated higher viewership than the men’s final. And we saw the same thing in volleyball last year when the Nebraska women’s volleyball team hosted a rivalry matchup in the university’s football stadium with a record setting 92,000 fans. So, the trend is happening across sports, and research really backs this up. We found that almost 40 percent of Gen Z-ers report that they’re watching more women’s sports now than they were a year ago. So, I think now is the right time, and women’s soccer is really in the sweet spot.
Brian Kenny:
Jeffrey, I want to come back to you for a second, because you were talking about how Angel City has done things differently. What’s the traditional model for launching a sports franchise? Not that I’m thinking about doing it, but I just want to know what… Just in case I decide to start one.
Jeffrey Rayport:
There’s a good reason why you, and I might not do it the traditional way. You start by being white, male, and a billionaire, and you go by a team as an expression, no disrespect, but usually an expression of ego. You’re not running it as a business. You are looking to win. You’re looking to become Bob Kraft with the Pats, and get Super Bowl ring after ring. But interestingly, you’re focused, as we said before, on a local following, and building the franchise out from there. What is very interesting, and different about Angel City is that Kara comes from a venture investing background. Julie Uhrman is a serial tech leader and CEO, Natalie Portman obviously comes from the Hollywood realm.
These women recognized on day one that first of all, nobody in the party was showing up as a billionaire. Second of all, if you wanted to have the social impact, you needed a business, an economic engine that would drive the impact, including being able, when you get to pay equity, those dollars have to come from somewhere. And that makes this a very different story from the traditional kind of ego-driven avocational expression of most pro sports franchises.
Brian Kenny:
Kara, let me come back to you because I’m curious about the composition of your ownership, and the people who are running the team. Very different backgrounds than we would expect to see in professional sports league management.
Kara Norton:
Yeah, no, I mean it’s fun. I was just on with another professional sports team that’s heavily female backed, and the kinds of conversations you have, we have now about what are the best types of talents to bring in the team, I think are very different because of what Angel City has accomplished. People tend to look for rinse, and repeat, okay, take this person from the NFL, or this person from this team. And actually this first principal’s perspective was something that turned out to probably be the most invaluable thing. And men in tech use those words all the time, and now I really understand what they mean. But I would call it beginner’s mindset. And so the background, we all came out of tech content, Hollywood, and finance to some extent. We had no one from sports. And we did talk to hundreds of people.
I mean, we literally, Julie, and I, and Natalie did an extensive amount of due diligence. I was working on it for probably four years beforehand, and then we all worked on it together for a year before we actually kind of brought the capital in. And anyway, the backgrounds, I mean, out of tech, and out of media, and out of startup land were critical because it’s very, very different to build a team from a zero to one, right? A scaling a team from zero to one in a league that doesn’t have any revenue versus buying the Milwaukee Bucks, or let’s go with the Timberwolves since that’s in the news.
Brian Kenny:
So, are the Celtics.
Kara Norton:
Oh, Celtics, Let’s go with the Celtics!
Brian Kenny:
A little Boston plug.
Kara Norton:
Yes, go Boston. And I’m a Lakers kid. I mean, this is really generous of me. So, yeah, so the backgrounds were, we came out of tech, we came out of startups, we came out of Hollywood, so we could tell stories, but we also weren’t afraid to question as assumptions, and it’s probably the first time, and execute, and execute quickly, and make mistakes, but also really deeply grounded in mission. And we knew where to prioritize not making money to be authentic in mission. And that’s something that I think is a huge differentiator for us and Angel City as well.
Brian Kenny:
How does that mission driven focus, impact the way that you run the organization? What are you trying to achieve, and what are some of the ways those things are manifesting themselves?
Kara Norton:
Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, just to kind of talk through how we set this up, because the way a team is capitalized and structured allows you to make harder decisions. And in the beginning, we were looking for a control owner that would own the whole thing, and fund the whole thing because that was how we were told it was done in sports, and we couldn’t find a traditional control owner. We couldn’t find the billionaire who wanted to give us money. So, I like to say we got 99 nos, and then we did raise a million dollars with a substantive amount of it coming from Alexis Ohanian’s fund initialized, just before COVID to own 15 percent of the team. And then Julie, Natalie, and I owned the other 85 percent. So, we structured it as a C corp in the way you would structure a startup. This may be the first, and last time that’s ever done in sports, but because of that, we had a board where the founders had essentially a voice the way Mark Zuckerberg would have a voice at Facebook where we could show up, and just execute without a lot of interference. And this is how it’s done in sports. And the mission was just part of why we started it. Natalie, and I started working with the US Women’s National Team Players Union on their pay equity fight, and their early name, and likeness revenue. And so it started from the perspective of how do you get the players paid? How do you create? And so when we rolled out models like our sponsorship model, we rolled out models that would give back to community. And so I can go a lot more deeply into it, but every step of the way we have an investor who doesn’t align with our mission. What do we do? What do we say? Can we get that investor to leave? What is the bathroom situation at the stadium? And are there rooms for women to nurse, or to breastfeed? And so we talk about a lot of the bigger topics in the case, and our 10 percent sponsorship model. But there were little things that happened every single day that Julie, and Natalie, and I spoke about without a heavy-handed kind of influence in the room.
Brian Kenny:
I want to talk about how this focus, this impact emphasis affects the brand. And Nicole, I want to come back to you on this just to talk a little bit about some of the strategies that they’ve used to build the brand both locally but also globally, it seems like from the very beginning.
Nicole Keller:
Yeah, I think that was the real “aha” for us in this case. I think as Jeffrey pointed out early on, most professional teams start with a local audience, and then as they become successful, they started to build a global audience. But Angel City really inverted that model growing the brand of Angel City globally, right from the start in parallel with their local efforts. And in my mind, they were smart to focus on that global audience quickly because if you look at, say, the Warriors basketball team, only 1 percent of Warriors fans will ever show up to the Chase Center for a game. The Warriors have a totally separate fan base that watches them on TV, follows them on social media, buys their merchandise, and that’s powerful from a revenue standpoint.
So, Kara, Julie, and Natalie leveraged their backgrounds in entertainment and startups really to focus on the power of storytelling, and to connect with the global audience on what the brand of Angel City really stood for. And it’s a shared set of values tied to equity and inclusion, and that appealed to that global audience. And Angel City then used that same messaging to build the local brand before they had even recruited a team, the club was out in the local community with a street team of very passionate early fans who spread the word and excitement about what Angel City stood for. So that when the first game took place, the stadium was already full of fans.
Brian Kenny:
Jeffrey, you’ve been studying digital strategy in a range of sectors for years now. I’m wondering what you have to say about how Angel City has built their digital infrastructure in a way to support building this global brand.
Jeffrey Rayport:
It’s a great question. I mean, one of the things that’s very striking about the story is that teams take time to build. It takes time to compete for great players. Teams have good seasons, and not good seasons. You’ve got your ups and downs, and we all know that tech platforms, as Kara, and Nicole are indicating can be set up very fast. And if you know what you’re doing, you can amass an audience that, by the way, transcends geography, and by definition could be global. If you’ve got that kind of ambition, you’ve got that kind of reach.
So, in that sense, it raises this very interesting question for our students, which is what kind of business are they actually building? And it’s very clear that if you ask what is driving the economic outcomes in the business, there will be a point at which the team becomes so phenomenal that you could say that’s the driver. But in the meantime, they’re in a sense investing through digital, social, mobile channels in addition to the kind of grassroots on the ground analog world activity that Nicole was just referring to. But they’re building the way you’d build a digital brand. And we all know from the social world, these things tend to get built fast, and acquire momentum, and virality, and they spread, or they don’t work at all. And I think that is a fascinating lesson that’s part of this story.
Brian Kenny:
Kara, how do you feel these efforts to engage people in the digital realm are going in terms of building the kind of presence that you’re hoping for?
Kara Norton:
I mean, terrific. I could come at it two different ways. Julie, Natalie, and I went to a game called El Tráfico at BMO Stadium, LAFC playing Galaxy, and we walked through the supporters section, and there was a flag that said essentially bring women’s soccer to LA. The two people who waved that flag, the Rojas’s, were the first two members of our community. And the first thing we did was move it into Slack. And we built this community in Slack from the very beginning, and I remember the height of COVID, I’m walking through a motel in Utah with an Angel City mask on, and I got stopped, and I thought somebody knows Angel City, and they were members of our Slack community, and they were in there every single day, even during COVID.
So, I think you can look at digital from what you see out in the world, what you see behind the scenes, but we did kind of the tech version of your first thousand customers are the ones you build from all the way to, if you just look at our headcount, we probably have one of the highest percentages of marketing, and content, and just sort of digital enablement as a percentage of total headcount in all of sports. So, that’s something that we felt really strongly about pushing out from the beginning.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, it’s a really unique opportunity if you think about it, because you’re creating something from whole cloth here, whereas an owner acquiring a team, and a league that exists, a team that’s been around for a long time, doesn’t have the same desire maybe to try and figure this out. Is anybody else, this is to all of you, anybody aware of another team, or league that’s doing the kinds of things digitally that Angel City’s trying to do?
Kara Norton:
I mean, I can jump in. I live this every day with Monarch, the fund I left to start because of Angel City, Monarch Collective with my partner Jasmine Robinson. We are anchoring new teams with family office control owners to be able to take this business strategy elsewhere. And we believe it starts with building a syndicate that’s reflective of the community, women, men, and people from that town who are influential, and care. Kansas City, the Longs, they built the first stadium for women to play soccer in the world. They built a digital campaign around building that stadium such that when you’re walking through Australia at the World Cup this summer, you see signs for it. You have San Diego with Jill Ellis who took a real soccer-first strategy, and has done an extraordinary job there. You’re seeing it in Boston with the new expansion team, Jennifer Epstein, and the likes. There are other sports we don’t have here in the US. And one note, look up Dick, Kerr Ladies. 53,000 people packed a stadium in Liverpool to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies play soccer (football) in 1920. And then the FA banned it in 1921 because soccer was not befitting of women, and women were not allowed to play soccer in England for 50 years. So, the demand has always been there, but people forget, and you need numbers like Angel City, and execution to prove it to the world.
Jeffrey Rayport:
And Brian, I should jump in, because Kara’s too modest to mention this, but I mean despite what she’s saying about the fact that yes, this story has spread, Angel City is the most valuable team in the National Women’s Soccer League of any team in the league. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you’ve got folks who have serious business and tech chops as well as the Hollywood Entertainment connection coming in to do that. And maybe one measure of how hot this space has become because of innovation this time is that when these women bought the expansion team back in 2020, they bought it for two million dollars. When the Boston entrepreneurs bought an expansion team for this city, the price tag was 53 million. So, this is an incredible growth space, but I’d argue that the growth is being driven by the kind of innovation that Kara has championed.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah. Jeffrey, we talked earlier about the emphasis on impact that the team has, and I want to ask you, impact is important…Our faculty write a lot of cases about purpose-driven organizations, and that matters, but we always need to come back to profitability at some point, because you can’t sustain the impact if you don’t have the profitability. How does Angel City balance these two priorities?
Jeffrey Rayport:
That is definitely the central question in the case. I think one lesson here is that if you have the luxury of a control owner, as Kara said, you wind up not being under pressure necessarily to innovate around the model. If you don’t have that luxury meaning to survive, you’ve got to make money. And that money is the way that the passion and purpose are enabled by the fact that you’ve got profits that that puts you in a very different position in terms of what’s required of you as a builder of the business.
Brian Kenny:
And profits obviously come from putting a good product on the field, Kara, so I want to ask you about how you think about the player recruitment process, where that priority fits within your strategy for building the brand and the business?
Kara Norton:
The soccer side of the house, that is product, right? That’s like if it’s Instagram’s product is their app, our product is what shows up on the field. And one of the things that’s been articulated back to me by many members of the team was this was the first club they had been at, in particular the women’s sports side, but many on the men’s side, where brand and product went hand in hand where people love coming to games. It is their most favorite thing to do. And then there are always going to be sort of trade-offs in any organization. This is nuance, though, and this is where we’ve had to grow as a board in a management team, and what got us from zero to one is not what’s going to get us from kind of to the next phase, which is there are elements to the soccer product academy, training facilities. It’s an international market competing for the best players in that international labor market where costs don’t always line up with profit. And where you are investing for the future the way you are in a startup. And it’s a place where you need people who are going to really dig in, and have thoughtful debate in a nuanced way, and not just say, cut, cut, cut, or grow, grow, grow. And where you have to figure out how to show up in a board of governor’s room, which is kind of a place Julie goes on all of our behalf to sort of look at, okay, well are we increasing costs for players even though that may bring down our profitability to make sure they want to play in the United States? And players will play all over the world, and I think it’s good for them, but it’s a very nuanced debate. It’s very different than tech.
Brian Kenny:
That being said, as you think about the impact, and the purpose driven emphasis that you have on the team, does that make you think differently about how you recruit players? Do you look at players backgrounds, and the way that they comport themselves, and will that matter as you make decisions bringing players onto the team?
Kara Norton:
I’ll say a couple things to answer that question at a high level. One, people like to win in sports, and it doesn’t feel good to lose. Two people show up at Angel City, even when we’re on long losing streaks, and we try to avoid that. But the stadium dynamic, and how players feel in our stadium with our fans, away teams comment to me on it every week, and it raises the energy, the level of play, the enthusiasm, and the desire to come. And then the final thing is, I mean, I actually wrote an op-ed on this one. I got back from the World Cup, I do love thinking about why players go to different countries and teams just from a brand standpoint, a stylistic standpoint, and whatever your brand is, it should extend into your playing style, and how you recruit. I’m not involved in that part of the business, but it’s interesting to think about it from a brand standpoint.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, for sure. Jeffrey, I want to talk about the media deals. They’ve taken an innovative approach to how they structure their media deals, and I’m wondering what your observations are about how that differentiates.
Jeffrey Rayport:
It’s a very big deal, as Kara can speak to. I mean, in a sense, you could argue that they’re two levels of media and sponsorship. One of the things is that this intense level of community involvement that when Nicole was talking about fielding street teams, before you even have players on the field enabled Angel City to aggregate a bunch of sponsors across categories that normally don’t show up in pro sports, from beauty to vitamins to farmer’s markets to banking. So, that’s one aspect of it. The other is that it helps to have a league that knows how to negotiate the real deals, which are media rights. Those clearly take time to pay back to teams, and they’re spread across all the teams in the league.
But suffice to say that the original media deal that NWSL struck was a deal with Lifetime Television, Lifetime Network for seven million dollars in between bodice rippers, and gothic romances. The new deal worth 240 million over four years is with folks like ESPN and CBS sports, script sports, and even Amazon Prime Video. So, the issue of really understanding how to drive a business agenda here wherein you’ve got to identify the revenue sources that are ultimately going to pay not just for team activity, but the social impact to which you aspire. It’s absolutely critical part of the equation.
Brian Kenny:
We’re winding down on time, and I’ve got one question left for each of you. So, I’m going to start with you, Nicole. We’ve talked a little bit about the importance of competitiveness, and putting a competitive product on the field. Can you talk a little bit about what factors have contributed to Angel City’s success, and what lessons maybe some of the other franchises can learn from them? Are there things that they can do to be more competitive as well?
Nicole Keller:
As I’ve thought about it, I think the key difference is that the founders use their outsider status to their advantage. And they didn’t look in the rearview mirror to see how it’s been done in the past, but instead, they had an open mind. They listened carefully to ideas from other sports leagues. They tried new things like we’ve talked about their approach to revenue sharing with the players, and investing sponsorship dollars back into the community, and they weren’t afraid to take some risks along the way. So, instead of being limited by a mindset of this can’t be done, they really have approached all aspects of the business model with, well, why not? And I think I would be remiss if I didn’t add that the authenticity, and the passion, and the sheer work that the three founders are putting into the club is very different from many professional sports team ownership models, which we talked about at the beginning, which many are more of an ego project for the owners, but that is clearly not the case here. This is hard work, and they are out there doing the hard work day in and day out.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah. Kara, let me ask you, if you look down the road three, four, or five years, what does success look like for the Angel City Football Club?
Kara Norton:
Coming back, and having a hefty debate in Professor Rayport’s class.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Oh, I love that answer.
Kara Norton:
I think it is really figuring out how to be pragmatic, and never let go of our mission, which we fought really hard for. And sometimes people who say they see it don’t necessarily see it, and sometimes we might not even see it. We can all have blind spots around it. And so figuring out how to do our best to hold everyone accountable, our success means that we need different kinds of capital around the table as we get into real estate projects, et cetera. I think the thing, I mean, I think the thing I’ve learned at Angel City as somebody who’s been trained as an investor, and has done a pretty good job in all of these kinds of roles over time is this is different for me, and it’ll be different than I think anything I do in my career. It feels like one of my, I have three daughters, and it almost feels like a fourth child, and I care more about what’s going to happen in this world of Angel City 80 years from now.
And I imagine even if Julie, and Natalie, and I are not involved day to day in 30 years, that somebody will call us back, and we’ll come back if something isn’t right, and just to create the tolerance to move in and out of it. But I think the founding DNA, the three of us, all that we’ve been through that isn’t in the case, and requires cocktails, the working on it every night, every weekend, that, I hope, inspires students, and many people to not just go take a standard issue job, or do the startup that they think they should do, but spend years figuring out what their life’s work is, and do it whether they’re 30, 40, 50, 60, and take credit for it in their hearts, and let it sustain them for life.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. Jeffrey, I’ll give you the last word as the professor in the discussion. If there’s one thing you want our listeners to remember about the Angel City Football Club case, what would it be?
Jeffrey Rayport:
It dawned on me this spring after building this course, the “Scaling Technology Ventures” course, over the last four, or five years, I’ve probably written 50 plus cases. And that with only one, or two exceptions, every single founder came outside of the industries in which they then created this significant impact, and value. So, one of the things that I find very motivating, and spectacular about the opportunities that tech platforms create is that it’s no surprise the word disruption is associated with so many of these businesses, and that folks who carry 20 years of industry experience, and lots of industry baggage are unlikely to be the folks who then disrupt those models. I find it incredibly energizing, inspiring about that. That then puts them in a position to come up with novel solutions, not only to the business of pro sports, but to a huge societal issue called pay equity across genders, and races, in this case, obviously in pro sports. And I just end by saying that after all the mania around Caitlin Clark with which you started this podcast, wasn’t it stunning that her starting salary out there in Indiana was all of $76,000 in a world where we see millionaire male professional athletes. We need to get to a point of equity, and it takes disruption, innovation, and novel approaches to problem solving to get there.
Brian Kenny:
Yeah. Jeffrey, Kara, Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on Cold Call.
Jeffrey Rayport:
Thank you, Brian.
Kara Norton:
Thank you, guys.
Nicole Keller:
Thank you.
Brian Kenny:
If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work, find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you, email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us, I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
“Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA program, management-related doctoral programs, and executive education programs.”
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