Venturing Into Sports Marketing’s Future w/Boardroom/35V CMO Sarah Flynn

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We were proving a hypothesis, and that's what you're doing anytime you're starting a new business, and I think a lot of the time it's just like, here's the thing that I want to see in the world versus here's what people want. This is the Work in Sports podcast. Here's VP of content and Engage Learning at WorkinSports.com. Brian Clapp. I meet and interact with a lot of people. It's a big part of my job, and I feel like at this point of my life and career, I have a pretty good vibe for someone's core personality within a few minutes of meeting them. In fairness, I would absolutely hate it if someone thought they knew me within five minutes of meeting me. People are way more complex than any five-minute meeting could ever illuminate, but you can get a vibe. Not every detail, not every nuance, a vibe. This past summer, I met today's guest, Sarah Flynn, CMO of 35 Ventures and Boardroom, Kevin Durant, Sports Media and Entertainment Company at the #SportsConference and immediately knew this woman is an ass-kicker, and I want to hang out with her. Sarah began her career in the music industry working for indie music labels, which is likely a dream job if you wouldn't die of starvation from the paycheck. And then, after joining Rock Nation, she started working on the digital marketing of musicians and athletes alike. As you may imagine, and we'll discuss later, there are many parallels between musicians and athletes. So when Rock Nation started to dive deeper into their sports vertical, Sarah jumped in and started working directly with athletes like Kevin Durant, Robinson Cano, Des Bryant, Justice Winslow and Todd Gurley. She's got the creative chops, she's got the future vision, she's got the relationship side, the technical acumen, she can really do it all as evidenced by the fact KD himself said in July 2017, "Hey, Sarah, come work with me on this new venture we got rolling." Sarah is the modern CMO, and she's here to share with all of you aspiring sports marketers what that really means because that should be your vision, that should be the thing you're looking for. I want to be that top dog someday. How do you get there? Now, before we roll this interview, I want to bring back that theme of ass kicker. It's got to come full circle, kind of teased you a little bit in there, now I got to deliver. I mentioned meeting Sarah for the first time at #sports. She was a subject matter expert on a panel I was hosting, and I remember meeting her alongside Les Green, CEO of Slam Magazine and Wanda Hasus, VP of Sports Partnerships at Dapper Labs, two incredibly impressive dudes. And she stood out. On the very first question I came to her with, she spit fire. I mean it. She was authoritative, confident, knowledgeable, and assertive, and I loved it. I wanted to keep feeding it and feeding it and getting more and more out of her. She forced you to listen and pay attention because there was so much meat on the bone of what she was discussing. She literally changed the temperature in the room. After we finished up and those panels are always a bit of a blur. They move really fast, and I'm kind of debating in my head how I did, and if I asked enough questions and I asked good questions, I came up to her and I said, "Did that go okay in your mind? Did I come to you with enough good questions?" And she looked at me square in the eye and said, "Yeah, you did, and if you hadn't, I'd definitely let you know." It kind of felt like I passed her test, and I really feared what it would have looked like if I hadn't. Here's Sarah Flynn, who I hope I can call a friend because she's awesome, and I admire what she's accomplishing at 35 Venture and Boardroom, and I know you will too. Hi, Sarah. Great to see you again. How are you? Good to see you. It's great to see you too. I'm happy to be on the pod. This is cool because we got to meet at the #SportsConference this past summer. We were on a panel together. I was the moderator. You were the smart person, and it was like this is now that it's opportunity to expand upon all that conversation, which is super fun, and this audience hasn't heard any of your fire and expertise and things. So thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I will try to bring that same energy. Yeah, right? It's a high bar, but that was a fun time. So let's start at the beginning a little bit. I am super jealous when I started to do a little bit of research deeper into your background. I'm pretty jealous of your start. When you first started to get into the marketing world full force, it was on the entertainment side. Spinart records, Sanctuary records, Impose magazine, Windup records. I mean, that's really cool. It's a pretty impressive first act on the marketing side. As you look back, what kind of inspired you to get into the marketing side of the world? What led you that direction? I mean, first and foremost, I don't think you would be as impressed if you'd seen what any of my paychecks looked like. Well, yeah, I guess that. Like my first sports industry paycheck was pretty weak too, but yeah. Yeah. Indie rock doesn't pay that well, it turns out. But you know, I was studying, I was in grad school, studying philosophy, which was what I was meant to do with my life at one point. And I had started interning at Spinart, which was at the time five dudes in a loft office, really, really, really teeny, tiny indie label. But amazing opportunity for me as a young person to like roll up my sleeves and be like, oh, they're going to trust me with like doing royalty reporting and reading contracts and doing all like, I wasn't just like sending out mailers and stuff. I was like helping write press releases and like starting to understand all of these different little pieces of the business. And as I came up in that role and they eventually hired me full time, I was sort of managing both production, which at the time, and you will appreciate, was literally how many CDs are we manufacturing? What do the minor notes look like and all of those kinds of things and like making sure albums got in stores, which just sounds like very quaint and it sounds so strange nowadays, I know, but it's great to reminisce. I was there at this very interesting transitional period when the iTunes store first opened, I was also sending hard drives with wave files and metadata spreadsheets and like starting to bridge the gap between the physical world and the digital world and like what that meant to the music industry. And so much of that was about how you communicate things with fans and like what they're seeing and what they're saying. And the conversation at the time was like, is it bad if blogs are giving away free downloads? Is it piracy? Like what's the new PR strategy look like? And I think as a young person kind of starting to learn what the old music industry had been like and what those sort of checkboxes were, I immediately saw opportunity and I immediately was kind of excited about the way that things were changing and just kind of like ran full force into it and saw, listen, I'm learning all of this stuff on the fly that nobody else knows how to do because we're all learning it in real time. And that to me kind of became like the siren song of my career to large degree because I always have just like really enjoyed figuring out how to do things and problem solving and finding out what's new and next and like testing the waters in terms of what do fans actually want to see and what do they connect with. And that's kind of how I've built sort of everything I know about marketing is sort of running towards those opportunities and seeing what happens. See, I think that's so cool because I reminisce back to that exact same time period and I was working at Fox Sports Northwest and I was the news director there and social media is taking off and there's so many different things happening and I'm trying to push for these things and they're like website, we don't need a website, what is that for? And you look back at these moments and you're like, that was really a golden kind of moment of who were those companies and brands and whether whatever industry it was that we're going to go full force into the opportunity versus those that were going to hold back and try to do things the way they always were. And that like, I think it's such a linchpin moment or like a levered moment for so many different businesses out there. 100%. I mean, at the time for me too, it was very much like, listen, nobody tell legal, but when Facebook was still only for college students, that was the place you could go and you could organize really incredible after parties for your bands after all of their shows and start to figure out like how you actually galvanize audience and connect digital to physical. And I think like just the wild west of it is obviously very reminiscent to sort of how some of web three conversations are developing now. Yeah, yeah, it feels like we're at that moment again, where things are massively shifting again. And it's going to be that who gets on board and really dives into this and really understands it and figures out that opportunity versus those who are like, but I kind of like where we are right now, which I think is so interesting. And we're going to get there definitely. But let's continue on with your background a little bit. And so in 2013, you jumped to Rock Nation, which is a big jump. And you kind of have that crossover where it's still music, but they're launching their sports division. And you were pretty highly involved in that, very highly involved in that. So that seems to have created a little bit of a shift for you as well, where you went from music to then this second act is kind of in the sports realm. What was that transition like? And what motivated you to make that move? Well, when Rock Nation Sports was first launched, I was maybe one month, two months into my role there. I was working on the digital team at the time, sort of working across partnership marketing sales, working directly with a certain handful of artists. And I was the newest person on the team. And as the newest person on the team, it was like, okay, you have the most bandwidth, you have the least demanding clients right now. Can we put you on with some of these athletes and work with them on their social media and work with them on some of their brand obligations and just figure out what their needs are and get the lay of that land? And I think I've always been a casual sports fan. I'm not the person that's going to roll off people's stat lines after a game and things like that. That's not who I am. But I understand the language and I understand the world. And I think, especially coming from a music background, I took that for granted. Like, I remember working with people at the time who were like working to do like social messaging on the brand accounts, and they would send me stuff to review. And it would be like, Robinson Cano scored two points. And you're like, oh, that's baseball. Understanding the natural lay of the land of the sports world and having an appreciation for the rigor of the schedules and how little free time they have and really starting to understand that from a creative standpoint, so many athletes didn't have people on their side. It felt like there was a tremendous opportunity for me. And I feel like I vibed really well with some of the clients that I was lucky enough to start working with very early on, including Katie. He was one of the first clients that they signed. And, you know, I think being able to build some of that rapport and really understand what was needed and what was hoped for from a client standpoint, like that is the kind of thing that is translatable across all industries. And I think I really leaned into that and was also excited to learn new skills and learn a lot more about the sports world while I did it. Are there more similarities than most people would recognize between the music and sports world? I mean, you're dealing with rock stars or even just indie rock stars or stars in their own minds and up-and-coming athletes or, you know, established athletes. Are there a lot more similarities? Do you approach it similarly or is it like you had to retrain yourself and come at things from a totally different perspective? I actually approached it very similarly. And I think that that was a benefit because at the end of the day, people just want their ideas heard and they want people to understand what their goals are. And it's been very clear to me that from day one, like, I'm not trying to help an athlete with their goals on the corner on the field. That's not my job. That's not what they do out there. If they're doing great at it, obviously that makes everything that I'm able to do for them so much easier. But my job is to take a look at all of the other stuff and say, okay, you want to build a business. You want to run a media company. You want to start a YouTube channel. You just want more followers on social media or you want to develop a logo and like start doing a little bit more creative stuff. Like, my job was always to listen and to figure out the best way to do those things. And also, like, if you come to me with an idea that doesn't seem like it's going to work, how do I make that idea better for you? Or how do I explain to you why I think we should go a different route? And that's something that I think I learned a lot of on the music side of things. And it's very similar. Like, every single person has an ego, every single person has different creative aptitudes and different things that they're doing and different kinds of temperaments. And the way that you approach them has to be very personalized and you have to be very attuned to what that person wants, what they expect from you. And that doesn't change no matter the industry. That said, you're also coming into a world where there are much more rigorous schedules in sports than there are in music. The opportunity and the sort of time management piece of it is a lot trickier and their time is worth more money in a lot of ways. But they also make more money. So there's a lot less status anxiety there and there's a lot less fear. What if my album does bad and I'm broke for the rest of my life? That's not a concern that a professional athlete has in that same way. So there are definitely advantages and disadvantages, but at the heart of it, it's very much like, what does this individual want and how do I help them do it? Yeah, a true partnership. Like listening, absorbing, trying to do what you can with the idea to make it better or whatever it may be, but really servicing the need and making it into something that has business value. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's I guess same approach you can take to all, but it's interesting to hear about the fear and the anxiety on the music side. It makes a lot of sense. Marketing is such a broad term. There's so many different aspects to it. Design, content, partnerships, PR, activations, content, blah, blah, blah. We can go on forever, right? Marketing is huge. You've done it all. Was it important for you to figure out as you kind of went on this process to figure out what you really loved and wanted to focus in on and hone in on? Or do you like the idea of being good at everything? Was there a strategy there for you personally? I mean, if I'm being honest, I don't think I ever had the luxury of being like, these are the things that I really, really love. Let me run towards them and focus on them until very, very recently. It was, here's the job opportunity, here's what I know I'm good at. And 25 to 50% of the time, the job is either evolving in such a way or the industry is evolving in such a way that I've got to figure the rest of it out as I'm going along and I've got to make shit up. And again, I think that when I was younger, I struggled with that make shit up aspect of it a lot. So much of marketing is thinking out of the box and having creative ideas and trying new partnership ideas that might not work and getting to know sort of what's new and next in the lay of the land. And I think I had a very hard time when I was young, kind of wrapping my head around that. But the more comfortable I got in my skin and the more I learned, that was the area I wanted to play in more. And I wanted to do a lot less of the checking the boxes. Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty smart approach. So five years ago, you joined 35 Ventures. You obviously built the relationship with Katie a little bit at Rock Nation. For those who don't know 35 Ventures, the media investment company founded by Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman. So you are now the CMO. Congratulations. One of your big projects and one of my favorite sites is boardroom. I love what you guys are doing there. And I do stay up with it all the time. You launched in 2019 and there are thousands of sports sites out there, right? Everybody is taking an angle in the sports world. Everything feels like it's covered. And yet you guys set out to build this product and it is finding its own white space, finding its own niche, finding its own lane. How did you guys do that? How did you set out to differentiate and approach this? I mean, I think we really came from the perspective of fans. First and foremost, we consume a ton of sports media and we consume a ton of business media and we consume a ton of information day to day, just as people and curious people. And I think there's a through line, I think, between Rich and Kevin and also myself that we all share, which is that when we're in rooms with really smart people, we love stopping and listening and we love learning from them and we love asking questions and figuring out how they got to where they are or why they do what they do. I love being able to figure out how an NBA team actually runs and what does the GM do versus what's the owner's role in all of those things. I love asking these questions too, right? I love figuring out how somebody gets motivated to start. That natural curiosity and at the same time, we were lucky enough to have all of this deal flow coming in on the investment side. So we were able to see and predict trends as they were happening just based on sort of where the opportunities were lying and what we were seeing hitting and not hitting and who was raising the most money and things like that. So we just had all of this access and we also knew what other athletes and executives are focusing on and doing in the space. And as fans, we find that stuff very, very interesting. I don't think you have to be an entrepreneur or an executive to find the sports business and entertainment world interesting, but I also think that way more people now than even five years ago see themselves as executives and entrepreneurs. So we just felt like there was a real market opportunity to start telling more of the business side of things in a way that caters more to the modern day sports fan than say a B2B site would. Right. No, I mean, that's a super smart way to differentiate. I mean, oftentimes when you see new brands starting out, they try to be everywhere. They try to appeal for everybody. They try to be ubiquitous and just kind of throw everything out there and see what sticks. But it seems like you guys had a unique value prop from the beginning, a plan to differentiate. How important was that? Because you're talking about how you're listening to people and you're figuring out, I mean, where they're gravitating towards and what's important to them. How important is that in a general sense to anybody listening or whatever is to take a step back, do some discovery, do some real research and understanding before you just start firing off like whatever your product or angle may be. Yeah. I mean, listen, it's not sexy, but we tested the waters for over a year probably before we really started hiring and we really started putting feet to the ground in terms of what our company infrastructure looked like. And the reason that we did that was because we were proving a hypothesis. And that's what you're doing anytime you're starting a new business. And I think a lot of the time it's just like, here's the thing that I want to see in the world versus here's what people want. And for us, it was like, all right, here's the thing we want to see. Let's put out some content. We were lucky enough to do two seasons of a boardroom focused show with ESPN+. That sort of helped us kind of understand what we didn't like about that process, largely being us kind of looking at each other and realizing this industry moves way too fast and way too in real time for us to make a sit-down show at this time in this manner. Like we need to be doing more. It needs to be more daily news and curated content and more robust. But instead of hiring 20 writers and 20 video people to start and just busting out content, instead we took a more measured approach and started testing out different content types on social. Sometimes that was video, sometimes that was infographics and quick news hits and things like that. And as we started to grow and cultivate an audience, it became very clear what that audience was responding to and why. And even in those early sort of bootstrap days, we launched a weekly newsletter to start, which is now a daily newsletter and is like a very well curated, I think, really wonderful product. When we first launched it, I was just writing it every week. But us being that in the weeds and curating that content, that specifically, and Rich and I still do quite a bit of sort of creative back and forth with the team, I think that really helped us understand on a very, very granular level what was working and what wasn't working for our audience and helped us plan accordingly around it versus just saying we want to do this beautiful series or we want to do that thing and like running towards it and then finding out that it didn't hit. So what was that nexus where you think what you guys were skill to creating and you knew that the industry wanted? Like you just mentioned a lot of different types of content. What did you find was like that early niche that started to get you guys some momentum? Was it video? Was it newsletters? Was it what was it that you guys really started to lead into early combination of video and newsletter star? And again, like, there was an inflection point that I hope will never happen again, which is to be perfectly honest, where we started feeling most strong about our brand proposition was during the pandemic. Because all of a sudden, there was no more live sports and we had no shortage of things to talk about from a business standpoint. And I think we felt like, you know, it's really easy to think about a sports brand in terms of what's going on in the court and on the field and thinking about highlights and thinking about, you know, different player storylines and all of those things. When you strip all of those things out and you just focus on the ecosystem around it and like the things that people are actually talking about and worried about, then it provides a lot more clarity on where our niche was. And I think that was really useful for us. Yeah. So as I mentioned off the top, you and I met at #SportsIsHere and our panel that we talked about was on Web 3, NFTs, AI, betting, the future, like look to the future, what we're getting into the whole deal. In your role, before we get into the weeds on that kind of stuff, how much do you have to balance the shiny new objects, you know, the exciting new thing versus those things we've always been doing, brings in the fans, we know it works. Like, where do you find that balance between I want to chase this cool new thing versus like, I want to keep the lights on next week. Yeah. I mean, I honestly think it's 75, 25, 75 being the stuff that you know works and the stuff that you know is going to help keep growing the business. And then the other 25 is throwing things against the wall. And, you know, some of it is maybe like, you know, figuring out where we sit in the NFT space and figuring out what the metaverse opportunities are and like also keeping an understanding of what everybody else is doing and what's working and not working because I think that's super important. But also some of it is thinking about like cultivating newsletters and cultivating community and things like that because the reality is that all of the Web 2 stuff is changing so rapidly and all of the algorithms are changing so rapidly that the goal of all of these things is to have direct access to your fans and your audience and to maintain that direct access. And like it kind of, it doesn't matter if you are showing up at someone's door with a flyer and saying nice to meet you or you're having them sign up for a newsletter or if you have offered them an NFT that is then connected to utilities where you can speak to them afterwards or you're starting a discord, like there are a million different methods of doing that and they're kind of equally important in the now. I love that you break it down that way because sometimes we get so locked into the concept, the new concept, right? The NFT and it's like, I got to learn everything I can about NFTs, which is true, we all do, right? But all these different things, if you boil it down to it's about getting access, you know, I used to say all the time that every job I've ever had is about drawing in audience. Like forget what the subject is, it's about I need to bring an audience and make them engaged and interested. That's where they'll stay and hang out. And if you take that kind of a lens of things, it makes it a lot clearer what you're trying to accomplish each day, right? Yep, exactly. Yeah. So 35 Ventures was a pretty early investor in Dapper Labs, which as we know, was the brand behind Top Shot and now in FL all day. Why do you think you guys were so early investing and so on the NFT concept and growth projection? Why does that excite you? And where does boardroom kind of play into it? I know you guys do a lot of coverage in that space, but where's the where's the continual upside in the NFT world? I mean, it's such an interesting conversation. And there's, you know, there's a large part of me that's like, kind of glad that we've made it through the first wave of NFT and Web 3, to be honest. I think you have to let big corporations and big media and big brands do the immediate money grabs and immediate art stunts before you can sort of take a step back and be like, okay, what's really here from a technology standpoint and what's really cool about this. And I think that's what you're really seeing now, especially within the Top Shot community is there are a bunch of people there who just really want to talk about sports all the time. They care so much about high life. They care so much about their favorite players. They care where they sit on their favorite players leaderboard in Top Shot. They're talking about those things every day. Like the NFT drop isn't about, oh, I paid X dollars for this or I sold this for Y dollars anymore. It's about this is a way that I'm sort of talking to a bunch of people about a whole bunch of things that I really enjoy. And this is simply the mechanism and the method by which I do it. And I think that's what's really exciting about those technologies. And I think the Dapper team has been really thoughtful about creating many different pockets of communities. I mean, they had success with crypto kiddies for this very reason before they had Top Shot. They're doing it now with NFL all day. They're doing it with UFC Strike to a large degree. Like they're figuring out sort of how to keep those conversations flowing even if it's under the guise of and layered underneath commerce as a whole. So you said I think a very important word early on too of utility. I literally am looking in my background and there's a folder right there which is my baseball cards from when I was a kid. And there may very well be seven Barry Bonds rookie cards in there that I'm hoping could pay off for college when my kids start to go. But there's literally no utility to them. There is like I buy it, I have it, it's there and I can do whatever I want with it after the fact that there's no utility. And that's what I think has been interesting about the NFT conversation is the ability to continue that connection. How does that all work in your view? 100%. And again, I think like the commerce aspect of it has sort of overshadowed the utility of it all, which is that the reality is is that you can either as a one-time experience or monthly for the rest of someone's life deliver them utility based on their connection to this digital object, which again, I think as a marketer is super exciting because I love the idea of creating a community NFT where okay, we picked 10 people to attend this event. And then next month, 10 other people got picked to get this piece of merchandise. And in three months, we want to bring you all in for a conversation about the sports business. And we want to know what you want to know as fans and all of these things. Like it's very easy access. And I think there's the OG fan club street team piece of me is really excited by it because like those are always the clunkiest experiences. It's really hard to fulfill them. It's really hard to sort of scale them. And at the very, very least, the connectivity to that person who is attached to that object never changes. They might move seven times. They might get another email address. They might do all sorts of things. But in theory, they are still connected to this object and you can still reach them through this object. And again, there's a million different things that can go wrong anytime technologically. But the spirit of that, I think, is something that we are just barely starting to tap into. It's got to be so exciting to understand like for somebody like KD to really be interested in this space and committed to it and seeing the opportunity to continually build his brand outside the court and to be able to do all these things as a marketer. I just feel like the whole conversation, like you said, we're just barely scratching the surface. But how is I would imagine in your position to be able to go directly to a source like KD and be like, okay, what if we did this kind of thing? Would that interest you? Would that interest other athletes? Like you almost have your test study right there you could talk to. I mean, that's pretty powerful right there, I would imagine. Oh yeah, 100%. And he enriched both from just understanding new opportunities and technologies and also just creativity. Both of those guys can bust my ass all day in terms of how thoughtful and creative they are, to be perfectly honest. I've always sort of taken a cue from them in terms of what the aptitude is. So it's exciting for me to be able to bring opportunities and plans and being like, does this sound cool to you? Does this sound cool to you? What do you want to do? What do you guys think? And vary off and be on the same page in terms of the things that we want to run towards and the things that we want to be conservative about. Yeah, I just think that's got to be so interesting because at our organization, we AB test everything, right? We change copy on a page, we AB test it for months. You know, if we do anything, we're testing, we're talking to the data, we're figuring that out, and to be able to have somebody like, I mean, so often we're guessing. We're thinking what the audience wants. We're maybe doing focus groups. We're talking to people, but so often it comes down to some gut instinct to have a resource like that that you could say, like you said, is this cool or not? You know, it's pretty interesting. But on that, on that concept, generally speaking, as a sports marketer, how important is it to balance that I'm super creative with, I understand data and research and really understanding how to get to an answer that actually works, you know, like balancing out that creative, like, I think a lot of people think marketing is just creative, but I think there is a lot of research and data that goes into it as well. How do you balance out those kinds of perspectives? Yeah, I mean, I don't think those things can work without each other. And, you know, as a company that has a lot going on with two sides of that same coin, we have a lot of strategic conversations about it. You know, I think we've got some really, really smart audience development people on our team. We've got some really, really talented creatives. And for me, the ability to kind of bridge the gap between those conversations and figure out what works best is kind of the most fun part of the job in a lot of ways. And I love looking at the data. And I've always loved looking at analytics and seeing, like, how correct I am about this work, this didn't work, and like, here's maybe why and all of those other things. But at the end of the day, there's always going to be a point where it's like, all right, let's just take a leap of faith on this one thing. And if it doesn't work out, we'll examine why. But if we really want to do it, we really want to keep doing it, there's just probably ways that we can make it better. It doesn't necessarily mean we need to abandon it. Because you also have to understand that, like, just because the data shows you that one thing doesn't work, doesn't mean that that thing's not always going to work. Right. You might have been too soon on it. You might have executed it properly. Like you said, in A/B testing, maybe the copy wasn't right. Maybe the creative wasn't right. Maybe the platform you used wasn't right. So, you know, and I mean, this is again, going back to the hypothesis of boardroom, like, we had to believe in the value proposition of what we were doing as a whole, and then test those little things underneath it. It was never like, okay, we tested this piece of content, it didn't work, boardroom shouldn't exist. It's always more of an iterate and adjust rather than like, this is never going to work. I think the data can do a really good job of helping make small decisions and helping make things better and helping make sort of day-to-day optimizations, but the creative kind of drives everything as a whole. Yeah. And sometimes, I tell our team all the time too, I'm like, sometimes you have to be willing to go and push into those uncomfortable spaces because you know it's the right direction, even if the data is saying it's not quite ready for it yet, you want to get out there and be able to push a little bit, which I think is important. Speaking of, we've talked a lot about FTs, there's a lot going on in our world right now with Web 3, with AI, with betting. I mean, we kind of, I've said a lot of it there. What else excites you? What else really gets you looking at it and saying like, there is so much potential here that gets me going? I am right now, this is going to be a little specific to the industry, so roll with me on it because it's outside of the sports business, like it's not as applicable to a lot of other people, but one of the things outside of boardroom that we've doubled down on in recent months is investing in new and emerging sports teams and leagues. And that is something that really, really excites me. Rich, Kevin, and I were all early in terms of being on the board of Athletes Unlimited and watching Athletes Unlimited grow and be successful has been incredible to watch. Watching something that is in part player-owned and player-driven, I think is extremely powerful. And we came on officially earlier this last month, maybe, as investors in that. We're investors in Gotham FC and the NWSL in Philadelphia Union, in the Premier La Crosse League, in Love Volleyball League, which is focused a little bit more on the youth space right now. And this week, we're announcing that we're getting a Major League Pickball team. I was going to say Pickleball. That's awesome. That's cool. Okay. That's awesome. Getting to play in spaces that have been largely dominated by very structured and established leagues and teams for a very long time is pretty exciting and, I think, pretty powerful. And each of these different teams and companies have different goals, different business models. But for me, getting to live alongside them and have part of my job be how can I help them and how can I help do community things and biz dev and audience development and just think about things and new and creative ways across these properties is something that I'm ecstatic about. And especially very selfishly on the women's sports side, because that's something that I've always been interested in. And getting to do that for real as part of my job is pretty great. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I mean, we've had so many different guests on from the women's sports side. And I just think there's so much energy there now. Finally, that is so positive. And there's so much momentum and velocity. And it's like, get on board because it's just real and it's valuable and it's important. And it's not even just a story about, yes, we should support women of sports in sports. Of course we should, but it's also like, no, he's a really good product. It's really fun to watch. It's really enjoyable and all those other things. Yeah. No, don't don't do it because you think that you're morally obligated to because it's a thing or because it's for community. It is one, fun as hell and two, an incredible investment that is going to really pay off for a lot of people in the coming years. Hell yeah. You said it right. Okay, we'll finish up with this. I'm so appreciative of your time. I know you're busy. This is great. I love getting into these conversations. And that's one of the main reasons I do this show is not only to learn about you and 35 ventures and boardroom or whatever, but also to give everybody an idea of what it means to be a modern CMO, to progress to a point that you're at, how you got here, that blueprint. So with that kind of a preface, what would you say are those key components of being a CMO today versus what it may have been that ideal in the past? And I know that may be a little bit unfair because you were to CMO 20 years ago, but you have perspective here. So what does that mean today as compared to what it used to mean in your eyes? I mean, it's definitely evolving and it's, I think, a moving target in a lot of ways. Again, even five years ago, not even 10, like being a CMO very much meant, coming in, managing a team, figuring out where you spend the bulk of marketing dollars and why, and honestly creating a lot of shiny brand-building opportunities that, depending on the kind of CMO you are and the kind of company that you run, either do or don't have a ton of measurable ROI behind them. And I think that there's two sides to that, which is like, I think a lot of people who are listening to this can appreciate somebody coming in at the top level, new to a company, and being like, "I have 17 great ideas," but you've never actually executed on those ideas. You just hand them to the people who work for you and expect them to do them. And the very, very tactical, very analytical, great. What does the marketing plan look like? I want to know what the value is for every cent that you're spending. And I think the modern CMO lives in a universe between those things, but also are a lot more often people who have come up in the industry and done all of the groundwork and can just as easily say, "Oh, if I need to, I can pull these seven lovers myself if I have to and if we're strapped, or I can teach you how to do it, or let me figure this out with you because we've never done this before." I think there's a lot more balance between the sort of overseeing a team and strategy piece and that actually rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. Do you like to still get your hands dirty? I do, I do. But again, I'm also at a startup. I'm not at Pfizer, so... Much, much, much different perspective than me. But for me, Kevin's show, the et cetera, is coming back this week. I spent yesterday at the practice facility with him helping record that and have been back and forthing with the team all day on the creative. I still like doing that stuff. Yeah, for sure. And this is a busy time of year. Like we were saying, start of the season, everything's going on. It's exciting. There's energy behind it. You guys are doing amazing things. Thank you so much for checking in, for letting us know a little bit of your background, and giving us a picture of what it's like out there with Boardroom and all the cool different directions we're heading as an industry. I just think the perspective you've given is just brilliant. So thank you so much for coming on, Sarah. Thanks for having me. Thank you to Sarah for coming on the show. One of my favorite parts of that conversation was her vision for what a modern CMO looks like. Because I think there's always this attitude of what that means is to be a CMO, but our world is changing so much. There's a different dynamic to everything. There's a look to the future with technology and the way we can build the brand of our athletes and grow things in the sports marketing world. And Sarah has such a great vision for that. I also love how aggressive they were in knowing there's a thousand different sports sites out there. We're going to launch Boardroom, and here's what we're going to do. And here's our niche. Here's where we're going to focus. And if we deliver, the people will come. And they've done it again. So keep watching. I seriously suggest you follow Sarah on Twitter because she's really funny and acerbic. So listen in on there. Follow her. Check out Boardroom. And thank you for listening to this podcast. Please rate, review, and subscribe. It's so important for us to have you all here and be a part of this community as we continue growing these conversations and growing your knowledge of the sports industry and what it takes to make it in this world. So thank you to Sarah. Thank you to all of you. And I will see you next week.