Alexis Ohanian on Investing in Chelsea Women, Building Athlos, & The Power of Sport in a Social Era

We have a chance because we're building from new to do it a different way and I think do it better.

Largely me. [laughter] This is what I wish I had done with the NWSL in 2019. Instead of buying an expansion, I could have bought the league, but this is a second chance to build. Serena and Venus dominated in a sport, no offense, where like they didn't really belong and change the culture of it forever. She actually tried to talk me out of starting Angel City because she had seen firsthand how broken all the infrastructure women's sports was. And she was right. It is a different product. I think the advantage of America only having one soccer culture which is women's because our men are so bad is that it is so easy for us to embrace it as a different product because we don't compare. My biggest question was it's never going to be like winning a green jacket but like will they care? They're hitting a ball into a giant screen. Let's say Rosy's albatross. His reaction was as real and emphatic as if it was out on a open air course. And that for me was the moment I was like, "Oh, they really care." Athletics does not break through except when it's the Olympics. That's the gap that I wanted to fill with athos. And look, you can tell the entire story of the 100 m in seconds.

Happy, very happy to be back.

This I disagree with but please say your regret. It's very kind.

Okay.

He did a good job. He's been around the block. He knows interview. But the part that I was not okay with was you explaining what you had I was very okay with. I was not okay with you regretting it. What you had to do instead of the interview?

Yeah. So that's the supporter of the show.

Some version of it.

I so we were bringing Athlos. So, started this women's track and field league, was it three years ago now? And, you know, we've rocked New York a couple of times. So, we're trying our luck here in London. Turns out London loves athletics. I mean, we knew this going into it, but we sold out a week in advance, which was quite exciting. You know, it's

There's a different energy here. It's like, you know, in America, we still have to educate people about thinking of athletics as like a sport that like you're going to watch outside of the Olympics. And we've done a great job. We've sold out twice now in New York, but here it's just been easy. And with stars like Keely, obviously homegrown heroes, but also just the fact that I think Europe has a very different and deeper understanding, connection to the sport, and then we just bring a different energy, right? A DJ spinning in between the races, digital first storytelling and record prize money, equity too for the winners this year. So, it'll be a fun, very fun time here in London.

Well, look, you know, before Athlos, this was I actually remember announcing it just before the Olympics in Paris. You know, the top prize money in this sport was like, I don't know, 10, 20,000.

And it just felt weird to me that you had these amazing athletes who were like truly like the fastest in the world getting paid so little at the end of their season. It's hard to make a living as a full-time athlete on that kind of money. So, we grew the prize money quite a bit. Set a record there with Athlos the first time and you know in the last three years it's continued to grow bringing in more brand partners, millions of viewers basically showing people these athletes are not just great once every four years they're great all the time and people are willing to pay money, sell out stadiums, millions of viewers for watching their greatness.

I was in Budapest.

You know, he's done I think a great job it was fun. I was teasing him a little bit because I was like, "Oh, you guys took some great inspiration from some of the things that we did." Which I think like everything, I mean, I still remember the 15 years I spent building Reddit. So much of business is about basically looking around and saying, "Okay, how do I be a little bit better day after day?" And you can't help but look at places, peers and otherwise to say, "Okay, what can I learn from this? What can I do better here?" And so, I also walked away from that ultimate championship thinking, "Okay, there's some good ideas here. There's some good lessons." It has been awesome to see the investments that they've made over the last couple of years to continue to grow the sport, whether it's prize money,

Whether it's, you know, even like adding pyrotechnics and a spectacle sort of element to it.

Look, I did not know Mondo is an exceptional athlete. I also did not know he had such great musical talent. Now he's a double threat. But it's one of these things where, you know, it's great to see that. We're going to continue to push things forward and we work, I think, quite well with World Athletics in how we've built everything so far and more announcements to come here later this week, but I'm fired up. So, they did a hell of a job and I enjoyed it.

I mean, crucial and it's one of these things where I think our goal was from the start, from jump, our goal was to make sure we were aligned with what was best for athletes. And you know that's why we have shareholders like Gabby and Tara and Sha who are part of advisory board. We're learning from I mean I was you know they took my phone calls when I was a total outsider and answered all my dumb questions to try to understand what they would want. And so core to that was learning, okay, these athletes year in and year out are still ultimately building their season towards an Olympics, right? That's what you dream of when you're an athlete, especially in athletics. And the way to get to the Olympics is through getting points and ranking within the governing body that is World Athletics. So then it became very logical for us to say, okay, we need to make sure we have a great relationship with World Athletics because if it's what's best for our athletes, then obviously we have to be good partners with them. And look to their credit you know I remember inviting them and John Ridgen the president came to the very even the very first Athlos when it was still literally five months after we had announced it came with his wife I think by all accounts was quite pleased and really happy with what we were doing and it started this relationship where we've had an open dialogue to be able to say like you know how do we work together we're a blessed event or sanctioned I forget what it's called. So when you run for athletes you are getting points towards your world ranking. Why? Because it's really important to the athletes because they want to go to the Olympics and do really well. So they've been great partners and it kind of helps like look governing bodies their goal their why their incentive is to make sure this is a healthy global sport where you know I'm Armenian like you know they have to make sure that the best athletes from Armenia have a pathway to potentially one day represent their country on the global stage.

Building Athlos I don't need to make sure every single athlete in the world gets a chance to compete at Athlos. I can just cherry-pick and say, "Look, we want the best best best best athletes to create it's basically solving a different problem. I want to build a product that's entertaining, that's galvanizing, that's not trying to be the solve for all of athletics. I want to build a product that delights fans and grows the game and grows the sport." So, I think we're quite complimentary in the same way you'd hinted at the golf thing. In the same way that the PGA Tour benefits from TGL because it's putting their athletes on a sort of under some brighter lights in front of a raucous crowd prime time in a different audience that wouldn't necessarily watch them play a full, you know, weekend of golf. And I think we represent that. We're not quite TGL to their PGA tour, but in a lot of ways very similar.

There is I think there's implicit and explicit benefits. So, explicitly, you know, it's quarterly Zoom calls where actually talking to them about here are the plans we have, here are the decisions we're making, here are the tough things that are happening, here are the great things that are happening, give us feedback and all the above. Then there's the more sort of subtle tactical things. Well, actually there's more explicit tactical things like, "Hey, you know, we're headlining this conference. Do you want to come speak on stage?" Yes, absolutely. Hey, we have this interview lined up with Vogue. Do you want to do it? I mean, that's an easy one to say yes to, but like it is, you know, the athlete is inundated with opportunities, appearances, all kinds of things. And the first question they're going to ask is why? as any reasonable person, their job is not to do press or show up at an event. Their job is to be the best athlete in the world. And so they have to say no to a lot of stuff. Having them as shareholders means they are way more locked in to the support and growth of what we're doing. So the asks just land very very differently.

And then subtly, and I think this is the one that's the hardest to calculate, but I think the most important. You see this within all the startups we fund in tech, the difference between equity is just the difference between that little bit of extra work that you're willing to put in, the extra bit of judgment that you're acting like an owner because you are an owner. And when Reddit IPOed, one of the best feelings I got was from seeing admins become millionaires because they owned equity and they stuck with us through hard times for five, six, seven, eight years. And so why not for the athletes, especially when you're building a new league now? We can't do this forever. Obviously, there's some point where we aren't going to be able to do it, but at least for these early founding years of the league, we want equity alignment and that's even happening here. You know, for the women who are lining up at Athlos in London this Friday, they are going to get equity in addition to their cash prize money. So, it's gone beyond now our original owner advisors where it's a part of, you know, the actual sort of race. Lawyers will not let me say literally race compensation, but like if you're lining up, you know, you're getting equity, so you're participating in helping us grow.

Again, there are very Yeah, I have you got to be careful about how you position that.

It's weird. Lawyers have prep and all this, but the bottom line that's most important is like aligning those incentives and the fact that they are able to do this.

I mean, if you just think about it, certainly United States, you know, the NFL in its early years, the NBA in its early years was like a messy league. It was a startup. They were trying to figure stuff out. Those athletes were not being paid a fraction of what they get paid today.

We have a chance because we're building from new to do it a different way and I think do it better.

Largely me. [laughter] So, you know, that's the other fun part. In a lot of ways, this is what I wish I had done with the NWSL in 2019 when I tweeted the whole vision for billion-dollar women sports teams. I should have bought the league.

I should have bought the league instead of buying an expansion. I could have bought the league and you know I think the NWSL's obviously been successful, but this is a second chance.

Yeah, that was well that was the expansion fee and then I invested another maybe six or seven million in that first year. And so for let's say all in $8 million I could have easily bought the whole league at that point and then built it like a tech company. And that's important

Angel City is now 350.

Yeah. So I mean I've done well. I'm not mad at that. But you know when I look at four years later now or five years later now the growth of the NWSL still it's growing like a traditional sort of sports league, right? Hundreds of employees, no software. I'm sitting here as a product guy. Like we're running Athlos with basically three full-time people and maybe I think four or five maybe six contractors, but like we're able to do it with such a lean team because I've built an entire operating system to run. I mean, think of so much of the back office work in a league, right? It's CRM, it's emails with brand partners, it's social media management. Like these are all things that especially in the last nine months because I can ship code again thanks to Claude. Like I can just build these tools. We can build out all that infrastructure and never need to have hundreds of employees in the way a traditional league would. So, I'm getting a second chance. We did take on a couple of strategic investors, which I don't think I'm allowed to announce quite yet. But it's great to see that the idea is resonating and folks are, you know, wanting to join into.

Look, it's, you know, in the early days of any emerging league, the revenue is going to come from brand partner, at least my conviction is it's going to come from brand partnerships long before it comes from media deals because you there's a chicken egg problem. You're not going to get a media deal out the gate that's worth much of anything. Now, we've got some great media partners that we are, you know, like Ion that we do work with. Obviously, we got a BBC deal as well. But the way the bread gets buttered, the way the revenue comes in today in a meaningful way is brand partnerships. And so what do brands like Cash App, Essentia, Nike, these others want? They want eyeballs. And so it behooves me to make it as accessible as possible. That's why you can watch. That's why we had like four and a half million people watching it last year. It's because you could watch it literally anywhere. YouTube, X, BBC, I like literally if you had internet connectivity or a television, you could watch it. And that's our goal because the brand is willing to put up, you know, the reason we can have seven, eight figures of revenue is brand partnerships want the eyeballs. And so we can't get the media deal yet, but you know, if we keep executing well, we'll have the numbers that then justify more exclusivity on the media deal with like real revenue that again goes back to that cash pot prize pool.

You know, with Angel City, Kayla, who was our CMO there, now as president of Athlos, you know, LA in 2019, 2020, COVID, 2021, the way we built the fan base for Angel City was basically watch parties for the US women's national team. And so, we'd find a sports bar, tell people, hey, you like women's soccer, women's football, come on out. And it was very grassroots, but not too different from how we built the Reddit community in the early days. A lot of lessons learned. What is so funny about football is as popular as it is, the average person doesn't play it very often. Right. How many times I can't I mean

And yet with something like athletics or if you just say running, you know, it's the number one sport that people do in their free time. And so our grassroots building is actually through run clubs. So we have these Athlos run clubs. We had an event two nights ago here in London. Hundreds of people showing up. And look, they're there for their love of running. The idea is if you already run as a form of exercise or social activity, it is not a huge ask to say, "Hey, would you like to follow Keely, one of the best runners in the world, like you will never run as fast as her, but like that's an easy dot to connect where it's like, oh yeah, I like this thing. I aspire to be great at what I do." And so when I lace up my Nikes, I want to feel like Keely. Oh, she's racing here in London. I'm going to be a part of it. Now, this is a more this probably lands less well in the UK because you all really love athletics. But in the United States, the opportunity, the alpha here is the fact that we have such a disproportionate number of incredible Olympians in athletics, right? America, we are very very good. And yet the awareness of it as a sport is almost non-existent. And so that's the bridge or that's sort of the gap that I'm trying to bridge.

If you just look at I mean viewership I don't want to talk disparagingly about other leagues but it is or better yet if you're watching ESPN if you're thinking of the traditional sports zeitgeist even on social media athletics does not break through even though we have incredible Americans except when it's the Olympics. And so that's the gap that I wanted to fill with Athlos and look you can tell the entire story of the 100 meters in seconds so it's perfect for social like even don't get me wrong I think a lot about making you know Chelsea see the team, America's team, when it comes to football, especially women's football, but even telling the story of a football match in social is hard because you're yes, you're going to get the highlights and some goals, but the drama of football is spread out over, you know, each like soul-crushing or exciting minute and it's a you know, it's 90 minutes on the pitch. And so to have a sport that's already just so perfect, the whole story happens in a social media clip is an advantage.

Yes. Especially new generation.