B-Schooled Podcast Episode #291: Dave Aufhauser on Sports, Tech, and the MBA Long Game

 

Stacy: Welcome to B-Schooled, the podcast by Stacy Blackman Consulting. I’m Stacy Blackman, and for more than 20 years, I’ve worked with ambitious, high-potential people navigating business school and everything that comes after. This series is called Paths Less Traveled.

In it, I’m sitting down with MBA grads whose paths evolved over time in unexpected ways. These are conversations about optionality, reinvention, and what’s really possible when you stop thinking about the MBA as a first job and start thinking about it as a foundation. Let’s get into it.

So today, I am super excited to be here with long, long, long-time friend, Dave Aufhauser. Dave has an amazing bio. He is a C-suite executive, entrepreneur, and investor operating at the intersection of sports, media, and technology.

He has built and scaled businesses across immersive media, streaming, fan, and athlete engagement, and women’s professional sports, working with global partners, including the Olympic Games, NFL, and NBA, from launching one of the first 24-7 live sports streaming networks to leading the creation of Bay Football Club in the National Women’s Soccer League.

David has consistently helped shape new categories at the forefront of sports innovation. Today, as an operating partner at Accelerate Sports, a boutique sports investment bank, he advises clients on pro sports M&A, capital raises, league expansion support, and LP team equity transactions.

And as the founder of Fastbreak, he partners with companies, family offices, and PE firms acting as a fractional operating team or interim executive to close capability gaps and accelerate growth in their sports investments. And in between all of that, I know you’ve had so many different opportunities and experiences, and we’ll dive into a bunch of the highlights today.

I’ll also add that you introduced me to my husband, which is, you know, an important fact of our background. So, okay. Thank you for joining me, Dave.

Dave (2:33): It’s amazing to be here. Thank you for having me. It is wonderful to be here with you.

Stacy: This is like the most fun thing for me to be able to connect with all of my amazing friends. And actually, I learn more about you during these interviews. So, it’s cool. Okay. So, let’s go back to the beginning. You attended Stanford undergrad and played water polo for them. What was your pre-MBA career following graduation from Stanford?

Dave: So, look, I was an athlete at Stanford and was fortunate enough to be exposed to the very, very early days of sports as a business. And I literally had a one-track mind from the time I was essentially a junior and knew that I wanted to work somehow in sports. And I figured out a way when I was studying abroad in Spain to work at the Olympics, basically weaseled my way into a job. I came home. That was way back when it was in Barcelona, right? Way back, Barcelona Olympics, NBC, worked for NBC over the summer between junior and senior year.

It was an incredible, incredible experience and springboard into pretty much everything I’ve done since. And still have some of the relationships today that I met in that summer experience. Came home and in the off-season from water polo, worked in the athletic department and helped sell sponsorships and had some funny stories about being the announcer guy at the halftime show of basketball games and football games and bringing my friends on the field to kick field goals to try to win prizes and things like that.

(4:17) And literally when I graduated, I bought a one-way ticket to the East Coast because I figured sports and media and everything that was happening in sports was in New York or somewhere on the East Coast. And I got an internship at a sports agency that represented athletes, basically worked for free and to make rent, had a second job at night so I could pay the bills. Learned very quickly that I did not want to be an agent, which was great.

Sometimes learning what you don’t want to do is as or more important than learning what you do want to do. Very, very important lesson for me to learn early on. And then ended up in a job in New York City working for a sport very early-stage sports marketing firm.

There were five of us. We were an upstart firm, but we were also part of a very, very large agency. The company today is called Momentum and it’s part of the IPG advertising group.

And I was fortuitous enough to be in a role where my boss just said go. Put me in front of clients such as AT&T, Tommy Hilfiger, if people remember that brand, Gillette, and worked on their sponsorship stuff with the NBA, Major League Baseball, and every major sport. So, it was an incredible, incredible experience.

During that time, having been from Silicon Valley and Stanford and grew up in the Bay Area, all this stuff around technology and the Internet was starting to happen. And I just remember being in a meeting and looking across the room at the senior executive and I was this young guy and we were talking about advertising on the Internet. And he and I made eye contact and we looked around the room and no one else, everyone was like, just didn’t get it.

It was going over everybody’s head. And he and I kind of locked eyes and I was like; this is what I got to figure out. He went on to be the head of the digital advertising and ad agency bureau in New York for many, many years.

And I thought, gosh, I need to figure out what is my bridge to get back and learn this technology thing, even though I had no tech background. And that’s when I thought, hey, I need to get an MBA. That’s going to be my bridge.

Stacy (6:35): Okay. So were you thinking about tech and sports or were you just, okay, I did the sports thing. Now I want to start Google.

Dave: Yeah. At the time, at the very time, it was definitely tech. I was like, oh my gosh, this tech thing is going to happen. It’s happening all around me. My friends are jumping into it. I got to figure out how to get into it.

One of my friend jokes, oh, you never should have gotten your MBA. You should have just gone straight to Silicon Valley and be retired. And I’m like, well, I’m probably never going to retire anyway.

So, it doesn’t really matter. But I saw an MBA as my bridge to get into the technology space. What I didn’t realize at that time was that the combination of tech plus sports is what really would propel my career.

I can’t say I had that foresight at the time, but in retrospect, it’s absolutely that combination of those two things is certainly what defined much of my career. So, you ended up going to Kellogg, which is where we connected or reconnected. You were here above me.

Stacy (7:54): Talk to me about that experience, your time at Kellogg and any shifts that you experienced, career, personal, just life view.

Dave: I came into Kellogg and there’s certainly two themes amongst my peers at Kellogg, which kind of overwhelmed everything. One of them was all about consumer products and marketing.

That’s one of the things Kellogg is known for. And the other one was finance, which for whatever reason Kellogg is not known for, but I would say is even more impactful and popular major and post Kellogg career than even CPG and marketing, which I didn’t realize having those two things around me had a huge influence. But again, for me, I knew that that wasn’t what I wanted to do

I wanted to go into tech and I used my sports background as a way to get into tech. I was super involved with anything that I could get my hands on that related to either tech or sports, neither of which were really popular at the time. So for me, it was a bit of carving my own path and figuring out how do I create a major or an emphasis while at business school, learning all the skills that I wanted to learn, but at the same time, a little bit of marching beat of my own drum.

I helped start and restart the sports market club. We didn’t really have a tech club at the time, but a couple of us started an actual side business called the Internet Consulting Group, helped write a business plan for one of the early. Yeah, well I wrote the business plan for this early company that people may not have heard of called Peapod, which was the first grocery delivery business.

Stacy (9:40): Oh yeah!

Dave: For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically DoorDash. Or actually no, a better comp today would be Instacart.

Stacy: Just shows you timing is everything.

Dave: Yeah, so I helped write that business plan for free, didn’t get anything out of it. But Peapod, which was based in Chicago, has a lot of history there because of course there was the infamous web ban, which came and went.

And then Cosmo, I think, was one of the ones in the Bay Area and the first wave of internet. But anyway, today, for those of you in the audience, it’s essentially Instacart. Yeah.

So yeah, so while I was at business school, really tried to develop my skill set. My thing was I knew I wasn’t going into baking or consulting. So, not that grades didn’t matter, but I was definitely not focused on grades, but I was focused on learning.

So, I really, really sort of honed my curiosity and learning and took classes that… I put it this way, I ended up majoring in finance, even though I knew I had absolutely no desire to go into finance because I knew no other time in my life am I going to actually do finance. So, I’m going to do it now while I have the chance, while I could do it with zero pressure.

So that for me was actually… Fast forward even to today, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, that finance major, even though I did zero with finance afterwards, has come in unbelievably handy.

Stacy (11:14): Love that. Yeah. How the seeds you planted so many years ago just can keep showing up in your journey decades later, really. So, as you’ve said, you kind of spearheaded, you weren’t doing the big on-campus recruiting for all these big employers. But I know where you landed, but where did you land?

Dave: I ended up landing my first job at Netscape. Hopefully everybody knows a little bit of history of technology and internet.

Stacy: I know, we’re so old!

Dave: Yeah, be a pioneer. And this quick story there, most of my friends by January of senior year had jobs.

They had jobs in consulting firms, they had jobs at CPG firms, they had jobs in investment banks. A couple of people, we had some unique programs, so a couple of people went more on the industrial side, a manufacturing business. And I remember it was six weeks before graduation, so into April, and I still did not have a job.

And there were three of us, I believe, maybe four in my class, and we didn’t have jobs because we all had a one-track mind. The only thing, it was basically Silicon Valley or bust for us. And yeah, I think I got my job maybe four weeks before graduation.

And it was a little stressful, but at the same time, sometimes if you’re carving your own path, you just got to stick with it and do things a little bit differently. A lot of my friends thought I was crazy. Of course, a year later, they were all following my footsteps. But at the time, certainly some of my classmates thought I was a little bit out there.

Stacy (13:05): This is so bringing me back, because I was there at Kellogg with you. I was a year behind you.

But it is so true. It’s like when you’re in that moment, and it’s April, and then it’s May, and you need the job. But looking back, it’s like 10 days. It’s nothing. And it is important that you really stuck to your vision and your goals and were true to yourself. So you ended up at Netscape.

How did the MBA help you navigate those early years and the work you did and decisions you made?

Dave: For me, there’s really sort of two things. One is just the education. I mean, people will kind of laugh at this. But for me personally, the academic part of it was actually really important. The fact that I had learned finance, the fact that I had learned the academic side of marketing to complement the actual marketing that I did previously, learning some of these skills for me actually really helped.

Because the job that I was doing, the actual job itself as a tech company, building out this brand new business in a brand new industry, on paper, it was like, why do you need an MBA for that? There was nothing on a day-to-day basis, per se, that I was doing in those first jobs that was directly attributed to or that I secured because of my MBA. At the same time, those skills really helped.

And then the second thing, which is certainly a theme through today, is the people. So because I had a network of people to call on, even though I was doing something completely different, it was incredibly valuable, especially now. Well, I would say especially all the time.

But in those days, to be able to rely on even my friends who were in banking and consulting to be like, what’s going on here? How do I approach this? I would literally ask them questions because I was doing things that they didn’t understand and that were brand new, but I could rely on them to help guide something that was maybe more specific.

So those early days, it was sort of a weird dichotomy between the MBA not being applicable but being very applicable.

Stacy (15:33): Well, it was like the Wild West and nobody really had the playbook. You were writing it as you went along. So it’s like relying on smart peers and just exchanging ideas with people from business school is a great support group and sort of coaching.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, it was incredible. I mean, look, you may not remember this. I remember going on a hike with when you this was a year after. So you had just graduated.

We went on a hike with, you know, there were five or six of us and we were all just hiking and we were brainstorming not just business ideas, but actually, OK, how do you take that idea and actually make it happen? You guys did that in some of your entrepreneurial earlier days, the Internet. I was doing that with a little bit larger companies and then other startups that I went to after Netscape like Evite.

And we were literally, like you said, writing the playbook in real time. And I mean, those were unbelievable, unbelievable times. And again, it wasn’t just ideas.

It was actually taking ideas, making them happen and, you know, creating this sort of new this not sort of this new industry on the fly that, you know, fast forward today, we all kind of take for granted. Yeah, very much so.

Stacy (16:45): So, I mean, I forgot about Evite and I mean, you’ve had a lot of steps in your career. But I kind of want to jump to sports because that’s where you’ve landed and that’s really turned out to be your passion and your skill. Can you maybe highlight like how you transitioned back into the world of athletics and maybe one or two key exciting positions that you had in those early years?

Dave: Yeah, I mean, the transition back into sports, if you will, was so natural and easy for me because, you know, I spent a few years in tech.

All of the tech stuff I did was in digital media. I helped pioneer a lot of the things that were going on on the Internet in terms of, you know, website development, mobile development, live streaming and video. And one of and it was always media and content related.

And so, it was just a natural, you know, reintroduction and evolution to map that with sports. And now, I mean, it was like the perfect thing. You know, I am probably one of the original sports tech people that in the industry.

So, I ended up working early days of Yahoo Sports and, for example, in building out what we all take today take for granted in terms of playing fantasy sports. You know, my team built one of the first fantasy sports businesses. We were we were larger from an audience perspective at the time than even ESPN.

Stacy (18:21): That’s amazing.

Dave: Yeah, it was crazy. We built out original programming on the Internet. We built out and we at the time we bought a company called Broadcast.com, whose CEO and founder was this guy named Mark Cuban, who we all know. So, you know, we I never worked with him, but we said, you know, we bought his company. We kind of made him his money, which he then, of course, went on to pioneer in the sports world.

So early days of live streaming and really parlayed that combination of technology and sport. Again, an example, I worked at a company called Pro Trade, which essentially ended up pioneering mobile apps on the Internet. We actually built out the first predictive markets, believe it or not, and betting markets.

But we were very quickly shut down because we were 20 to 20 years too early. We were doing some pretty innovative stuff there. I worked at I’m just going to throw out some highlights.

(19:23) I worked at a company called Justin TV, which became Twitch. So, for those of you who are gamers and and watch gaming on Twitch, which is, of course, now part of Amazon and when Amazon bought us, you know, they were really what people didn’t realize is they were buying two companies. They were buying Twitch, which was the e-sports company, but they were also buying the largest live streaming platform in the world, which, of course, today fast forward is the backbone for a lot of Amazon’s live streaming and sports.

So, all these sports and tech things really kind of came together. And for the sports tech part of my career culminated really when I joined the Pac-12, which, you know, made the former Pac-12 100 year old institution kind of rest in peace. And, you know, the new Pac-12 is certainly not what it was.

But in 2011, 12, we started the Pac-12 network and which was people don’t probably remember, but it was the most innovative thing happening in college sports. Actually, to be honest with you, in a lot of sports, I mean, we were brought into the NBA and helped them build out some of their early innovation around technology in that time frame, especially around live streaming and social media, early days of social media and things like that. But we built a we built a live streaming social media.

So and content business across the 12 schools, the league and an entire network that was on par to NBA TV or the NFL network. Or any other network. And so that was that was pretty incredible.

Stacy (20:56): Wow. Yeah, you’ve done some cool stuff.

Dave: So I was gonna say I can map that to, you know, what came after that, which was a bit of a change, which the NBA really kind of helped me through, which was taking the technology and the sport and, you know, I got a little I’d gotten a little ahead of myself in terms of immersive media, getting to virtuality and things like that that really never came to fruition. But then I ended up putting my own shingles up and starting my own company.

Stacy: Do you want to talk about it?

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, sure. So so I I ended up building out a fractional consulting business, which basically means that companies would hire me to do interim and fractional operating work.

And I did a lot of different things. The two high two of the highlights of that one was I ran Stanford’s NIL collective in the very beginning of NIL. And the other is I had the amazing experience of working with four former U.S. women’s national team players in soccer, all of whom won national championships, World Cups and gold medals here in the Bay Area to bring an NWSL expansion soccer team to the Bay Area. I was the interim president. It was supposed to be a six-to-nine-month gig. It ended up being a two-year project.

But, you know, successful and, you know, incredible experience.

Stacy (22:41): Yeah, I mean, that’s an incredible experience. So, what were some of the hurdles that you had to clear in taking that on?

Dave: Oh, wow. Yeah, so there’s the normal hurdles and then there’s the not so normal hurdles that we face.

So normal hurdles for any time you bring an expansion team or you first and foremost, you have to have a great market. That wasn’t really a hurdle for us being in the Bay Area, which is a soccer mecca. But you got to bring capital.

And what we learned very quickly is that there’s a lot of interest and there actually is a lot of capital out there who wanted to invest. But you have to have a lead capital like somebody who is the backstop, who is the extreme wealth, who will write the big check, backstop the organization and finding that person who’s also willing to do it as a startup is incredibly difficult. So capital and the right partner, the right capital partner.

(23:42) Number two is you have to have a stadium to play in. We were not about to build our own stadium. We didn’t need to build our own stadium, but getting a stadium deal done, in this case, partnering with the San Jose Earthquakes and PayPal Park here in the Bay Area was incredibly important.

So, we had to do that. And you have to have a training facility. You know, at this point in time is really we were living that transition from, you know, women’s sports being a little bit behind the scenes to being front and center and everything that’s going on in the sports world.

And we live that piece. And training facilities were a key part of that. So not so we knew we were going to build.

A training facility eventually, but we need to get the team in order to build the facility. So we had to negotiate a temporary facility at the same time as finding a new facility. Another hurdle is building a fan base.

(24:29) How do you build a fan base from scratch? You know, we put five, 10,000 people on our season ticket waiting list just by being scrappy and doing grassroots marketing around the Bay Area. And then the last hurdle is, you know, getting corporate sponsorships.

You’ve got to have, you know, you’ve got to show the league that you’re going to have revenue in order to bring a team. So, all those things together, sponsorship, fan base, facilities and capital together are the big hurdles. And then we had two hurdles that are not normal.

You know, well, really, I guess one. But, you know, when we were going through this, the league itself was going through an incredible amount of change. Some of it was due to some just not so good things happening in women’s soccer at the time, at the league level.

So even in that two years, I had to deal with three different commissioners. So, getting things done at the league level to submit the bid, to get the bid, sell in the bid was, you know, was extremely challenging, not normal, not a normal process by any stretch of the means. And, you know, extrapolate tons of hurdles that came with that.

And so put all those things together. And it was quite, quite a feat. You know, there’s an incredible team of people and then also early-stage investors.

And then our final investor who came in with us as partners to get this all done.

Stacy (25:53): Amazing. So exciting. I mean, ultimately, it’s a sexy business, but it’s a business. And, you know, all the things, the fundraising, the marketing, like it’s all it all comes to play. And I find that to be so true, like whatever people want to do, whether it’s nonprofit or, you know, starting a business in tech or CPG or whatever it is, like it’s business and there are these fundamentals that you just drawn and you need to know.

Dave: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the key thing in sports, especially today is absolutely a business and it’s a big business.

Stacy: Yeah. Big, big business. OK, so now you’re wearing two hats, right? You’re an operator with Fastbreak and you’re also a banker. So how does having an MBA help you sort of speak both of those languages?

Dave (27:02): Honestly, it kind of goes back to that finance piece that I again, the reason why I did it when I was MBA was really because of curiosity and trying to build something that I just knew I would never do or thought I would never do. And fast forward to today and that that finance component is an absolutely critical component.

I certainly don’t sort of define myself as an investment banker, but, you know, after that experience with BFC, you really fell into working with partners on helping other people buy and sell stakes and professional sports teams, emphasizing women’s sports along the way. And that finance degree and understanding the business side of it, but also the capital formation side of it and the transaction side of it is absolutely critical. And that goes all the way back to that starting point in business.

So that’s critical. And then the operating side is. You know, really the operating side, you know, certainly the skill set in business school helped people always laugh at the org behavior and understanding organizations and how to how to lead was critical.

But really, that the organization, the operations part, I should say, is, you know, taking that and then applying 30 years of building businesses across and that and it’s that combination of all of those sort of pieces that, you know, come together. Mm hmm.

Stacy (28:25): Yeah, you you’ve had a wild and very exciting career. So, for another MBA applicant who’s listening, who maybe wants to go into sports or just sort of take a paths less traveled, what is something to think about when it comes to the actual value of an MBA?

Dave: There’s so many things. But for me, it comes down personally to two things. One is. Curiosity and the other is I’ll just call it community. So for me, curiosity is about using the MBA to learn as much as possible, ask a lot of questions, learn about things you might not think you’re interested in and take those two years as an opportunity to just dive into everything related to learning and not not so much worry about, you know, the grades or that part, except for the fact that it’s like about learning and being curious.

And then the second part is community. You know, the network and the people that I met at Kellogg, you know, are my friends today. They are my business colleagues today. They are the people that I even sometimes even randomly call on today. And even this conversation with you is a great example, you know, in our long, long-term friendship.

So, you know, that community and that curiosity to me are the two things that I carry with me literally every day. I mean, I apply. I use that in some way every day.

Stacy (29:59): Yeah. I mean, I think the community thing. People, it’s almost like a cliche now: “Oh, the community.” OK, like you make friends. But it is so true. And in every one of these conversations that I have, it comes up. And I agree. It’s like that MBA community is so imbued into my life. It’s like a daily thing, the way that it shows up professionally, personally, all of it.

Dave: So, yeah, the one thing I would say that I didn’t do, which is part of community that I would have done more of is create relationships sort of outside of my comfort zone, if you will. So so like I didn’t spend a lot of time, for example, with all the international students that came because they kind of have their own little culture.

And I wish I had sort of bridge into that a little bit more as one example. Another example is we had some pretty incredible professors who have done and continue to do to this day, you know, pioneering work. And there are a couple that I like.

I mean, look, it’s always easy to reconnect, but I wish I had sort of kept in touch a little bit with them along the way. I think that that would have been a great way for me to continue to learn. And then fast forward today, a better bridge for me to be able to give back.

And I don’t think I did a great job at that. And that would be two things I would, you know, if I were giving advice to a future MBA, I would say, make sure you do that, you know, find your people, but make sure you go outside your comfort zone and build some of those relationships and build some relationships with professors.

Stacy (31:37): Such good advice. I love that. It’s so true. I mean, it’s it’s two years that feels like a decade because I mean, it’s packed with so much and you can only do so much during that time.

But I think those are those are two really good points to sort of like prioritize going in if you can. Yeah, for sure. OK, so if the MBA is sort of your foundation, what would you say is the most important thing that David Offhauser is still building on that foundation today?

Dave: I mean, look, I’m always building, I’m always doing new things. I think just the fact the fact that someone would say my name in the same sentence as investment banker is just a testament to me continuing to build. Like if someone had told me, hey, Dave, you’re going to be a sports investment banker as part of your job, you know, even four years ago, I would have laughed.

And so, for me, it’s just always continuously building. And I’m lucky that I work in sports. And yet I’m doing something completely different with my career today than I was even four years ago.

(32:46) So, the MBA is the foundation for being able to do that and kind of lean back on. And I’ll continue that. I hope I hope in four years I’ll be doing something, you know, building on what I’m doing now.

You know, I have it’s interesting being in this stage of career where a lot of my friends in other industries are starting to think about what it means to retire. And I’m the opposite. I’m like, hey, like I work in sports.

I now have time to do more and more. I’m going to hit the accelerator and do more things. So always continuing to learn and build and do new things for me within the industry is something that’s important to me.

And look, look what’s happening in technology again today. It does feel a little bit like, you know, 1999, 2000 kind of feel the good the good parts of that. We’ll see what happens.

Yeah. And so, you know, so I’ve thought of diving back into the tech side, which I haven’t done in a few years.

Stacy (33:52): Cool. Well, can’t wait to see what’s next. Always something interesting. Yeah.

OK, so now just a fun little rapid fire, if you’re up for that.

Dave: Sure. Always up for that. Sure.

Stacy: OK, Dave, if you’re closing a deal, are you doing it in the boardroom over a stadium lunch or on the golf course?

Dave: Oh, I’m probably doing it over a stadium lunch or a walking meeting.

Stacy: OK, what is the underrated sport you think is the next big frontier? If you have one.

Dave: Oh, I have three. I hope that’s OK. So, women’s volleyball, women’s volleyball, professional women’s volleyball specifically, men’s and women’s flag football at all levels, youth, high school, college and professional. I think flag football in both men’s and women’s is going to be enormous. 20 years from now, it’s going to be less brain injury. It’s going to be huge, I believe.

And then the third one, you know, everyone’s talking today about expanding into Europe. I actually think the big opportunity overall in the next 10, 20 years is basketball in Africa, professional basketball.

OK, those are my three: women’s volleyball, flag football and professional basketball in Africa.

Stacy (35:25): OK, that’s super cool. I just have to say when I was a first year at Kellogg, I did a global initiatives and management trip to Chile and Peru. And you always do a project, and my client was the NBA. And we were researching whether we thought expansion into those areas made sense.

Dave: Amazing.

Stacy: But it was fun. So cool. OK, what was the last sporting event you attended?

Dave: Well, OK, so I played in a basketball tournament for a Masters team myself. Does that count? I went to a Warriors game. How’s that? A Warriors game.

Stacy: Favorite stadium food?

Dave: I’m going to have to go with chicken fingers, French fries, and a beer. Super healthy.

Stacy: Is any stadium food healthy? OK, are you a face-paint fan or a subtle-logo guy?

Dave: Oh, I’m a subtle logo guy on the outside, but hardcore face paint on the inside.

Stacy: OK, yeah, that tracks. And last one, if you could have any athlete as your business partner, who are you picking for their MBA brain?

Dave (36:49): Oh, gosh. Again, I have two. So, I’m going to go with Alex Morgan. I think what she’s doing post-career, even though she’s super early, is very similar to what someone like Serena Williams has done.

She’s got her own fund. She’s investing in companies across the board. I think Alex Morgan as a business partner would be absolutely incredible.

And then the second one, I got to go with the Stanford boy, Spencer Jones, who’s an NBA player, who is really pioneering what it means to be a current athlete, but also think about what an athlete’s career can look like, you know, in this in this new age of technology, AI, social media, creator economy, NIL. And I think what he’s doing and has done both as an athlete, you know, who’s complete underdog, making it in the NBA and on the business world at the same time is incredible. So those would be my two.

Stacy: Love it. Such good answers. Well, that’s all I have for you. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I’m so grateful to you for joining me. Are there any like parting words or do you want to give URLs or anything that we can share with the listeners?

Dave: I mean, look, feel free to check out AccelerateSportsBusiness.com, feel free to check out Fast Break Partners. You know, those are those are great URLs. I’ll just leave you with two things I said earlier, which I would say put in action, which is be curious and create community. Best.

Stacy: So good. Yes. Thank you, Dave.

Dave: Thank you, Stacy. Thank you so much for having me.