You know, it started purely as a business opportunity and I rage tweeted in March of 2019 about how undervalued women's professional sports in particular was, specifically women's soccer. And it was just math. I saw a headline that had said that Megan Rapinoe's team had just sold for like $3.5 million. But I said, 'Well, wait, like Megan Rapinoe alone is worth that much money in brand value every year. How could the whole team be worth that little?' By the end of that rant on Twitter, I said, 'Look, okay, this is one of the most obvious opportunities for investment. I'm going to either buy or start a women's soccer team, the NWSL, and you know who can help.' And it went viral. You know, there were a ton of women's soccer fans who, to their credit, were like, 'This is amazing. Buy my team. You know, don't talk about it. Be about it. We're so happy for you.' There were plenty of haters. I saved most of those tweets too just to tag people about them later. And then Alex Morgan, I always give her credit for this, responded and said, 'I can help.' And January of 2020, paid, you know, a little over a million dollars for an expansion fee. That's what it cost back then. Now it costs over 150. But did that to start Angel City and we've done quite well. And I feel very fortunate for that.
Creating Reddit, my mindset is entirely built around how do you capture engaged attention in the hardest environment. The generation of sports fan I'm really interested in is the one who is digital native. The one who is consuming sports clip by clip, highlight by highlight. Their allegiance because of free agency, because of social media, is much more player-driven and in particular is very oriented towards this sort of short-form storytelling of attention. And I believe the opportunity in emerging sports where we've invested, so you know, buying that first team in Tiger's league or building this Formula 1 for track and field, Athlos, is because they are so well positioned for that audience. So the value proposition of TGL very simply, right, I've been very grateful to be on Tiger's board for I mean almost more than half a decade now, but he also knows I don't watch golf. Do not care for the sport. Now it's changed since getting a team. But the value proposition was simply, hey look, here's a new format for golf that's just a few hours and it's the best golfers in the world in prime time on teams miked up in front of a raucous crowd. I would never devote days to watch, but you tell me a few hours and it's a high protein, high ROI use of my time to get to see the very best ever do it. Yeah, I'll tune in. Why not? And again, 2 and 1/2 years ago, plenty of haters telling me, 'This is never going to work. It's going to suck. No one's going to watch.' The market is responding and saying, 'Yes, this is a format that really works.' And similar to track and field, you know, one of the most viewed sports during the Olympics. And just like with this, is pattern matching the 2019 with the women's World Cup and women's soccer, it disappears outside of those Olympics. So how do we build a format, especially a team-based format, you know, taking inspiration from like a Formula 1 in some of the best cities in the world that the very best, the very fastest are still running and still competing. I don't need to convince the world that pickleball is entertaining, right, and a compelling professional sport. I'm really sorry. It's a great hobby. Great. I mean, it's awesome. But, you know, we have this blessing of a sport that everyone already agrees every four years is one of the most interesting things to watch during the Olympics. I don't have to teach anything. And again, what are those stories? Those are bite-size. The 100 meters you can be done in the blink of an eye. Even if you're an outsider of the sport, you've never watched a single meet in your life. All I can tell you is listen, give me 15 seconds of your attention and you're going to see something really interesting. And that breaks into the feed. If you can win there, I'm not worried. I think that proves out that the muscle is strong. And so 5, 10 years from now, those media deals will come. There's also this retroactive bias. And this was something that I called out when the NCAA was really underinvesting in its women's basketball. And again, I went viral on Twitter for this. This was right after that one athlete talked about the weight room controversy. And back then, they couldn't even say March Madness in their branding. Said, 'Look, yo, NCAA, sell me your women's league. You clearly don't care about women's basketball. And this is one of the dumbest business decisions I've ever seen because why? If you look at the follower accounts of your top 50 women of college basketball on a platform, let's say Instagram, and the top 50 accounts of your 50 men of college basketball, the women crush the men on followers. And so what I see here in the free market of attention is that the women of college basketball have way more engagement, way more eyeballs, way more interest than the men. And so the fact that you're not giving them premium placement is a bad business decision. Imagine for how long we heard the same narrative which was, well you know, no one really wants to watch the women. We're going to give the prime time spot to the men. Someone needed to ask, well why? And then confront them with this data that shows, like, and again this is before everyone else realized about Caitlin Clark and Paige and Angel and all these stars. They were there, been there. But when you're not able to use data, some producer deciding like, okay, we're gonna give this the 5:00 slot and we're going to give this the 7:00 slot is based on what? Like vibes. Like again, if I'm trying to build a billion-dollar business, I'm going to, you know, vibes will matter, but I want to look at data to arm myself to make the best decision I can.
