Bonjour. Is it still bonjour time? It's not bonsoir time. No, bonjour. I'm very bon time.
This is good to know. Thank you for that. Okay. My wife's a Francophile. She speaks some French, too. Both of our daughters are being raised speaking French. So, I got everyone around the house. Couple of Francophone nannies. Everybody's speaking French around me. And I'm still on Duolingo level nine, but we're going to get there. How y'all doing today? Okay. Doesn't sound great. I mean, we're having this is an amazing conference so far. So many people have turned up. Obviously, AI is a pretty hot topic these days. Are any of you all Redditors?
No one. Wow. Okay. So much for the traffic day. There's a few. Thank you. Thank you for Reddit. Thanks for also being brave enough to show that you're the least productive people in this room because you spend all your time on Reddit. And this AI conversation is very appropriate because who knows just how many people or accounts on Reddit are actual AI bots these days. Probably most. But on a happier note in sports, we have the last bastion of humanity. I can guarantee you in 10 years I will not be taking my daughters to see robots play football. I can guarantee you that the movies I'll be taking them to will look very different. I can guarantee you that most of the music they listen to will be very different. But in the world of entertainment, sports continues to remain unchanged at a fundamental level, right? It has to be a human experience. So, how does AI get involved? We have Vic here who's an amazing CEO. He's one of our 776 portfolio company leaders and grateful to have you here, Vic. So, first give it up for my man Vic, founder and CEO of Score Play and one of the amazing success stories of many of French entrepreneurs in AI. I don't know how y'all are doing it, but you're running the table in Europe.
Yeah, we're lucky with the engineers that we have in Paris. And I'm not an engineer, so I just benefit from that. But yeah, I mean I was chatting about that before. I would love to understand a bit more your thesis on sports and why you invest that much in IP because I feel like there is kind of an elephant in the room. AI is great but that will make content a commodity because everyone will be able to produce AI for literally nothing. The problem being that with that everyone will have access to infinite content and infinite content means that you need to differentiate yourself and the only type of content that won't be able to be faked by AI would be live. And you invested a lot in sports. So why in the live world you decided to focus so much on sports?
Look, most of the people here, you probably know I'm married to Serena Williams for y'all learning for the first time, but yeah, most all know. Okay, it's very interesting because she actually tried to talk me out of my investments in women's sports five years ago. Now obviously that seems kind of ironic today. You know, six years ago, I tweeted how undervalued women's sports was. Said I was going to start a team in the United States, a women's soccer team that ended up being Angel City FC. You know now that's the most valuable team in United States women's soccer just under $300 million so a good increase obviously for four years and really kicked off this movement in women's sports investing which is awesome and I think is still just getting started and the reason why it was so interesting back then was in part because I saw firsthand that set up the right way if the story was told the right way if the investment was made in the right way sports could be as compelling as men's. Because yeah, I went to enough tennis matches where I saw people screaming their faces off and spending lots and lots of their hard-earned money at Roland Garros at the US Open, etc. for women's tennis as much as they were men's. And in the United States in particular, more Americans to this day watch the US Open women's final than the men. Again, that's pure facts over feelings. It's not because of feminism. It's not because it feels good. It's because it's great entertainment and it's high quality sport. And so that was obvious and it just was clear the investments weren't being made elsewhere. And the part that's so interesting now that we're sort of in this age of intelligence because I definitely did not predict this AI abundance back in 2019. No way. Now that we're in it, I've only gotten more confident because like you said, there's a commoditization of content and you know, you put in the importance of live sports watching it in the moment. You lose that value almost instantly if you're not a part of it. If you're missing the conversation, yeah, you can watch the highlights the next day and there's more value to be gained from it. But the live event is so damn important. And my hunch is technology like Score Play, which we found because my head of marketing at Angel City insisted that a company called Greenfly was the best product that existed. And I started throwing up in my mouth a little bit because I as a product designer, I'm like, there's no way this is the best product. And she said, 'No, no, truly it is.' And I challenged her. I was like, 'We're going to go find someone building something better and invest in it.' And found Score Play. And we're very lucky to. But at the end of the day, this is all that's left in, you know, live entertainment is going to be such a defining force of where our attention lies. And in this battlefield for attention, I think if you're not competing there, you're not winning. And AI is going to augment so many parts of the sports experience, but it's not going to replace it.
And how do you because again big part of what you're doing with those IP is to create content because at the end of the day you have media companies and you need to generate content to monetize those. How do you see AI transforming? And happy to give you also some insight of what we've seen when we arrived on the market. But how do you see AI transforming the way you're producing content without like who is keeping like this level of humanity that you mentioned and like not faking the content? What do you see AI doing a transformation in the content that you're producing?
Well, I'll give you an easy example. You know, we started a women's track and field league called Athlos. It was a record-breaking first event last year. There three million people tuned in. Y'all at Score Play powered all the asset back end, all the digital backend. And what was so interesting was seeing, you know, even something as simple as asset management where, you know, traditionally you have humans spending lots of hours trying to find the perfect photo, trying to identify the right athlete, trying to make sure the right brand sponsor logo is visible. Like this is all work that obviously is a trivial computer vision task if you've been willing to do the work to build that interface and that software. And I just think about how so many traditional sports leagues and teams are sitting on infrastructure that has not changed in decades. And that would have been crazy to me five years ago where I'm the product builder in me is like well obviously you need to upgrade software like no one is still using software in any other industry that's 20 years old unless it's like foundation layer and obviously in the age of intelligence now it's almost an intelligence test like the product experience the user experience is so much better with that assistance it's the only way to navigate those large data sets and those images better cheaper faster and at the end of the day it comes down to just improving these workflows so that humans are not wasting time doing things that a robot or AI can do better.
Yeah. And when you take a step back, you have like now two types of companies that are already proving well. You have like the models, the actual AI models and then you have like the companies that are taking all those models to verticalize and make one industry working more efficiently because enterprises will never be able to integrate those AI algorithms themselves like they need someone to integrate that for them. And when we started in sport we were shocked by the fact that the mere fact of centralizing all the data in one platform. So all the content that you are getting you're producing your broadcast your social media your photos was not done yet. So that's the first step. You need to have all your data centralized and then if you have that you can do two things. One as you said you can automate a lot of tasks tagging distributing making sure that your athletes have access to the content because they are your most important influencers. Making sure that your partners have all the content where the logo is appearing. Making sure that the broadcasters gets a dubbed version of this interview because they need to adapt it to their audience. But the first step starts by centralizing it. And the second thing that I think a lot of people are missing in content in general is that again content creation going to be free in five to 10 years. In life is not the case because you need a camera, you need an operator, you need like some capex. So it means that you need to make very intelligent choice in order to decide what you're going to focus your time and effort on. And because sports and entertainment in general is very legacy business usually you will end up with people that will tell you invest your money in having like one camera more so that we're going to have one angle more. But the truth is if you analyze again if you have all the data centralized and you know exactly who is downloading what who is consuming what what's performing on social media you're then able to say okay rather than having this brand new broadcast camera maybe I'm going to put someone with a phone in the locker room because that's actually the content that works.
We had an example of this with the NWSL. That's the women's soccer league, professional soccer league United States where I was just getting so frustrated with our content folks because we had very traditional, hey, let's add another camera. Hey, let's think about it this way. And the solution that ended up driving the best content creation for our club was a freelancer shooting on an iPhone directly from the side of the pitch and getting those highlights up quickly because it created this feeling of this organic in-the-moment sort of visceral like you were there pitch side. And what's wild is I think so many of y'all I'm like I'm 42 I realize I am now a geriatric millennial the other interesting thing that I'm excited to see is when y'all's generation is now looking at these problems, not just from first principles, but also with this technology as like a default, you're going to see much much better solutions much much faster because you don't have the natural bias of like, well, this is the way we've always done it. And it's so exciting with such a major shift even seeing the ways someone published this study about how boomers use ChatGPT versus geriatric millennials versus Gen Z and they're three totally different use cases. And I think it really exemplifies the difference and the sort of handcuffs that having this sort of legacy way of thinking does. And I say it without judgment, but like the way my dad uses ChatGPT is basically no better than like Google. It solves the Google problem for him, but he's not fully understanding what this technology can do yet. And where I'm most excited is the fact that you have, to your point, a whole revolution of emerging leagues right now. And it's not just women's sports. Obviously, post Angel City, we're seeing more investment than ever in women's teams and women's leagues, but also brand new men's emerging leagues. And what's exciting is that is driving innovation that you all can take back to the big four to the established in the United States the big four that you can take to the Premier League you can take to Roland Garros and show the top top tier of sports hey there's data there's a better way there's a new way and having that why now is so compelling because you know if you take that pitch five years ago but without having that data it's the reason investors like me almost never invested in sports tech five years ago. How much has that shifted and how much are those emerging leagues helping?
