RockWater Roundup

RockWater analysis to make you a better investor and operator. Today we discuss Highmount Capital’s $100M+ investment into Dude Perfect, the company’s growth plans, how to model out their planned LBE business, and how we estimate Highmount’s ROI.

 

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Dude Perfect raised $100M for global biz expansion.

The deal is getting lots of buzz, but our team’s math signals challenges ahead.

Let’s break it down…

 

🤝DEAL DETAILS

 

💰USE OF FUNDS

 

👀COMPANY OVERVIEW: Dude Perfect

 

🚀PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS

 

📝ORIGIN STORY

 

💡INVESTOR OVERVIEW: Highmount Capital

 

🤔What else I find interesting…

I really like and support the trend of increased investment into YouTubers and digital-native media brands. 

But as I wrote about in my 2024 State of Creator x Media M&A and fundraising reports (here and here), investment has to match the market and opportunity size. 

To ensure good ROI, and to set good precedent for future investment into our space.

This Dude Perfect bet is exciting, but seems overly optimistic based on our team’s prelim math… 

 

🤔How we’re modeling potential investor ROI…

The ROI analysis for a $100M investment is important for creator economy investors and operators to understand.

Here’s some context…

I’ve seen ROI analysis for a $100M direct investment into a family-based entertainment destination in Frisco, TX – shout-out to my colleague Michael Booth’s analysis, shared below.

But I’m also curious to Highmount Capital’s angle in being a large minority owner of all of Dude Perfect over a medium-term hold period.

So here’s my math to break it down…

Dude Perfect estimates 2024 revenue of $50M.

And Highmount invested $100M. 

Assume Highmount targets a 40% ownership stake (which is high, but I’ll explain why below).

That implies a $250M total valuation, and a forward revenue multiple of 5x. 

(that’s a high media multiple, particularly for a forward number. But if I assumed a 30% ownership stake, that implies a $333M valuation and a 6.7x forward multiple! I’m trying to keep this number within the upper bounds of market reality, and it already feels stretched…).

Then assume Highmount targets a 25% IRR over a 5 year hold period, which equates to a 3x gross return on invested capital (IRR targets for growth PE is 20 to 30%+).

That means Dude Perfect needs to get to a $750M valuation.

Assuming no multiple expansion, a 5x forward revenue multiple implies a future revenue hurdle of $150M (750 / 5 = 150). That’s a 3x revenue increase from 2024E…a big jump!

At 40% ownership of $750M, that implies $300M total value of ownership stake, or a tripling of Highmount’s investment in 5 years. Of note, a tripling of revenue is aggressive growth across all monetization channels, from ticketed events and advertising to consumer products and licensing.

Lots of work to do for the DP team and their newly hired mgmt!

Further, that IRR target assumes there’s some type of liquidity event at the end of 5 years i.e. there’s a buyer of the Dude Perfect biz at $750M. Today in 2024, I can’t think of a buyer with strong strategic synergy that has the funds to do that type and size of deal.

Maybe possible in the future though….

 

💡Two other interesting angles on Highmount’s potential LPs…

Dude Perfect has a faith-based mission: “We’re about giving back, spreading joy and glorifying Jesus Christ”.

Three members of Highmount’s leadership, including their two founders, have faith-based affiliations per their website bios.

Makes me wonder who the LPs are in Highmount – could be parties who have faith-based investment mandates, where financial ROI may not be the only metric for success.

Think church pension funds, religious groups, HNIs, and family offices.

Of note, I’m not personally aware of much PR or press coverage of faith-based organizations investing in the creator economy. This could signal a new trend worth paying attention to, or simply that more press coverage is needed. 

I mean, one could say that religion is the OG of the creator-based economy…but that’s for a separate blog post. 

And speaking of LPs, it’s also worth noting that Highmount’s CEO and COO are both former Koch Industries (“KI”) execs. KI is the 2nd largest private company in the US (after Cargill) and is estimated to do over $125B in annual revenue and employ over 120,000 global employees. KI CEO Charles Koch and his political network are also major donors to Republican and libertarian causes.

KI is based in Wichita Kansas, and Highmount’s website lists offices in both Wichita and NYC. Makes me think that KI or affiliated parties could be a meaningful LP in the new Highmount fund, and thus have a meaningful influence on Highmount’s future investments.

Again, I can’t confirm any of this, as I’m just speculating.

Overall, I look forward to tracking the growth of Dude Perfect, the new Highmount fund, and its future creator x media investments.

 

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I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do financial and strategy advisory for media, agencies, and creator economy. From M&A and fundraising to consumer research and go-to-market planning. 

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com

 

Now some more analysis from Mike Booth on our team…

 

ROI Analysis of Dude Perfect’s $100M Raise

By Mike Booth

Am I getting punked? 🤔

Dude Perfect raised $100M from PE, which I love — big investors coming into the Creator Economy is great for business. The kicker – Dude Perfect is spending the $100M to build out their rendition of Disneyworld in metro Dallas. Its essentially an amusement equipped with sports courses, F&B, and some retail concepts all packaged into one. What?!

The economics for this plan are never going to pencil.

  1. $100M is way too much to spend for build out and construction.

  2. Theme parks aren’t high margin businesses. For reference Cedar Fair Entertainment Company (owner of Cedar Point) operates at 6% net income margin and Six Flags operates at 3% net income margin.

  3. Dallas isn’t the right market. It’s not even the top tourism destination within the Texas (shout out San Antonio). To justify a $100M build out Dude Perfect will need a very high amount of traffic (think Las Vegas, Orlando, New York, Atlanta, etc.).

Say the average Dude Perfect attendee spends $100 and the net margin on each attendee is 5%. Simply put, every attendee = $5 profit. Dude Perfect would need 20M attendees to recoup a $100M initial investment (let alone budget for renovations, new attractions, etc.)

Los Angeles MSA’s population + annual tourists combine to 70M per year.

Six Flags Magic Mountain (metro LA) has 3.5M visitors per year. 3.5/70 = 5% capture rates.

Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that Dude Perfect’s entertainment venue instantly becomes just as popular as Six Flags (it won’t).

Dallas MSA’s population + annual tourism combines for 35M. Say Dude Perfect pulls off a 5% capture rate of their addressable market (a major feat). That comes out to 1.75M guests per year.

At a $100M build out cost, $10 profit per guest, no reinvestment into facilities, and 1.75M guests per year –> it will take six years for Dude Perfect to recoup their initial investment.

That’s way too long of a payback for a location based entertainment attraction.

Quick-growing private companies like Topgolf average 2 years for payback

Whereas bigger amusement parks like Six Flags average 3 years for payback.

Net / Net – there are so many exciting things that Dude Perfect could do to grow its brand — expanding their content suite, launching CPG brands, or creating upstream film / TV properties.

I’m left perplexed by their decision of apeing into theme parks. What am I missing?

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Mike is a Director at RockWater Industries. We do financial and strategy advisory for media, agencies, and creator economy. From M&A and fundraising to consumer research and go-to-market planning.

DM Mike on LinkedIn or email him mike @ wearerockwater dot com

What We’re Reading

3 articles + RockWater analysis to make you a better investor and operator.

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For Gen Z, TikTok is More Than Entertainment. It’s a Search Engine.
Mashable, 7.31.2022

The RockWater Take by Chris Erwin

Gen Z’s search behavior is different than that of Millennials. They want bite-sized “vibe checks” w/ no fluff.

As in, no extended personal stories of chefs before a blog-based food recipe.

And short videos of restaurant views, ambiance, and food in under 10 seconds.

I feel that.

Historically, my lifestyle search + purchase flows consisted of…

🥘 Yelp + Eater for restaurants, reservations via OpenTable or Resy.

👩‍🍳 Google search for recipes, then saved in my Paprika 3 app.

✈️ Tripadvisor for travel, then booked via Expedia Group (RIP Hipmunk).

🛒 Wirecutter for tech + gear, or just go direct to my fave brands like Burton Snowboards or Patagonia

But after playing around with the TikTok search and Collections folders this AM, and finding some rad San Diego restaurants with ocean views in less than 30 sec of searching, I’m sold on this new search flow.

Excited to put this to use for my upcoming 2 week southeast US road trip at the end of August 😉 “Things to do in Asheville / Charleston”, here I come TikTok.

Which also makes me excited for new purchase and commerce flows TikTok will experiment with…table reservations, flight bookings, food ingredient delivery, and more!

…also has implications for the new recommendation algos being put in place by FB / IG, but that’s a separate post 😉

 

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Amazon Plans Alternative Telecast of TNF With ‘Dude Perfect’
Front Office Sports, 8.1.2022

The RockWater Take by Alex Zirin

As alternative telecasts have permeated NFL broadcasts over the last few seasons (ESPN’s Monday Night Football Manningcast, ViacomCBS’ NFL on Nickelodeon broadcast, etc.), Amazon has taken a firm step into the creator economy with their latest edition, TNF with Dude Perfect.

Dude Perfect, known for their viral sports-themed YouTube channel, will host alternate broadcasts for a still-to-be announced amount of Thursday Night Football games this season.

Interestingly, this is not Dude Perfect’s first foray into professional sports promotion. This spring, the team produced a controversial video at Augusta National’s Amen Corner for the 2022 Masters Tournament with the goal of engaging a new group of fans.

Regardless of how ‘sacred’ a sporting venue or event is deemed by its most faithful, the reach of successful creators, coupled with engagement metrics that mainstay sports could only dream of, presents an opportunity to attract younger fans that can’t be ignored.

By coupling their $1B investment in Thursday Night Football rights with the ethos of portfolio-co Twitch, Amazon is betting that Dude Perfect will unlock a new tranche of fans that were previously uninterested in NFL broadcasts. For those more interested in traditional football coverage, Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit will still narrate the main broadcast.

However, fans of Dude Perfect will have the opportunity to watch some of the world’s most popular creators doing what they do best, “mastering the impossible”. The simulcast will feature their usual fanfare, performing dunks, stunts, and tricks from their HQ in Texas.

Amazon wants to create an “opportunity for families to watch together”, but I’m not sure that’s what this activation will accomplish. As sports media broadcasters look to engage new fanbases, a segmented approach which addresses each audience group on an individual basis does more to divide an audience than it does to unify them. I’m certain that more total fans will tune into Amazon’s various broadcasts than they would have otherwise, but I’m bearish on the fact that they’ll watch together. More likely, each fan will simply tune into the broadcast tailored for their fandom, and ignore the rest.

 

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The End of Social Media and the Rise of Recommendation Media
Every, 7.30.2022

The RockWater Take by Mike Booth:

Recommendation media is overtaking social media. The Winners: platforms & micro creators. The Losers: mega creators.

Social media (Instagram, Snap, et al) rely on social graphs to distribute content, whereas recommendation media (TikTok and YouTube) rely on interest graphs to feed an all-knowing algorithm which then distributes content.

In social media, building followership creates exponential growth, because each new follower acts as a distribution node to audiences that a creator’s content previously wasn’t reaching.

At maturity this dynamic creates a small group of mega winners who effectively capture a platform’s programming power.

Once that programming power is captured, it is tremendously difficult for micro creators to scale their reach.

Conversely, in recommendation media followers are much less valuable to scale a creator’s content distribution.

Recommendation media algorithms are constantly optimizing to farm the most engaging content, meaning every view is a battle between creators for quality.

This levels the distribution playing field between mega and micro creators.

It also gives programming power back to platforms (after it was taken by mega creators in social media).

When platforms control the algorithm, they control content virality.

I like Michael Mignano’s quote here:

“In recommendation media, it’s ultimately up to the platform to decide what type of content gets recommended, not the social graph of the person producing the content. In contrast to social media, recommendation media is not a competition based on popularity; instead, it is a competition based on the absolute best content. Through this lens, it’s no wonder why Kylie Jenner opposes this change; her more than 360 million followers are simply worth less in a version of media dominated by algorithms and not followers.”

Some things it makes me think about:

 

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If these insights are relevant to projects you are thinking through, ping us here. We’re always excited to riff through ideas!

RockWater Roundup

M&A analysis of the creator economy to make you a better operator and investor.

Today we discuss Good Good Golf’s $45M fundraise, including the deal details, company origin story, strategic rationale, planned use of funds, and how the company is pioneering sports x social commerce.

Let’s break it down…

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–TARGET: Good Good Golf–

Overview

Origin Story

Business Lines

Content Highlights

Company Highlights

Capital Markets History

 

–INVESTOR: Creator Sports Capital–

Overview

Company Highlights

Investment Criteria

Investment History

Company Name Deal Date Investment Type Industry
Good Good Golf Mar-25 Later Stage VC Golf Content and Clothing
Cohere Jun-23 Later Stage VC AI and Machine Learning
Toonsutra Jun-23 Seed Round Webtoon Platform
BrandArmy Jan-23 Early Stage VC Creator Economy Networking
Nyan Heroes May-22 Early Stage VC Gaming Platform
1Bstories Jan-22 Early Stage VC AI Short Form Video Platform

 

–DEAL DETAILS–

Overview

Post Deal Ops

Strategic Rationale

 

–WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING–

 

 

 

 

 

I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do M&A and strategy advisory for creator economy and digital agencies. From buy / sell-side M&A and fundraising, to consumer research and go-to-market planning.

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com

RockWater Roundup

M&A analysis of the creator economy to make you a better operator and investor.

Today we discuss Fox’s acquisition of Red Seat Ventures, including the deal details, strategic rationale, and why the deal signals strong M&A momentum for creators x podcasting in 2025.

Let’s break it down…

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NOTE: We know the RSV founding team well, and have worked with them. Therefore, we can’t go into details about estimating financials and deal details, and will focus our analysis on public domain info. 

 

–TARGET: Red Seat Ventures–

Overview

Company Highlights

Business Lines

O&O Live Events Brand: CrimeCon

Capital Markets History

 

–BUYER: Fox Corp–

Overview

Company Highlights

Channel Name

U.S. Rank

Nielsen Audience
Fox News Channel

2

3.8M
FOX

4

2.2M
Fox Sports 1

35

242K
Fox Business Network

53

132K
Fox Deportes

112

15K
Fox Sports 2

116

10K

Business Lines

Stock Price

Financials

(via public filings and stockanalysis.com)

Valuation

Capital Markets History

Recent Media M&A History

 

–DEAL DETAILS–

Overview

Post Deal Ops

Strategic Rationale

 

–WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING–

I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do M&A and strategy advisory for creator economy and digital agencies. From buy / sell-side M&A and fundraising, to consumer research and go-to-market planning.

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com

RockWater Roundup

M&A analysis of the creator economy to make you a better operator and investor.

Today we discuss ShopMy’s $77.5M Series B fundraise, including the deal details, implies $410M valuation, strategic rationale, and rise of creator-led affiliate commerce.

Let’s break it down…

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–TARGET: ShopMy–

Overview

Product Overview

Financial Highlights

Capital Markets History

 

–DEAL DETAILS–

Overview

Use of Funds

 

–What Else I Find Interesting–

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do M&A and strategy advisory for creator economy and digital agencies. From buy / sell-side M&A and fundraising, to consumer research and go-to-market planning.

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com

RockWater Roundup

RockWater analysis to make you a better investor and operator. Today we discuss the sale of Hot Ones to a buyer consortium including its founders and Soros Capital, the deal logic, valuation estimate, and how political investors are making moves in the creator economy.

 

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Buzzfeed just sold Hot Ones for $82.5M.

I summarize the deal details, and offer insights on (1) revenue and EBITDA valuation multiples and (2) increasing political investment into the creator economy.

Aright, let’s break it down…

 

—TARGET: First We Feast—

OVERVIEW

FINANCIALS

SELECT SHOWS

“HOT ONES” HIGHLIGHTS

CAPITAL MARKETS HISTORY

 

—TARGET OWNER: Buzzfeed—

OVERVIEW

STOCK PRICE

FINANCIALS OVERVIEW

CAPITAL MARKETS HISTORY

 

—BUYER: Soros Fund, Crooked Media, Mythical Founders—

BUYER CONSORTIUM

GEORGE SOROS BREAKOUT

OTHER SOROS MEDIA INVESTMENTS

 

—DEAL DETAILS—

OVERVIEW

DEAL ORIGINS

VALUE PROP

POST DEAL OPS

 

WHAT ELSE I FIND INTERESTING & DEAL INSIGHTS

 

My estimate of revenue and EBITDA valuation multiples …

There are press reports that FWF does $30M in annual revenue. I assume EBITDA margin is in the 10-20% range. Likely company has been inefficiently run under Buzzfeed over past few years, since Buzzfeed’s publicly reported financials show continued decline in company performance. Also, FWF likely has many allocations in its P&L from parent co for back office and other shared services. I bet standalone the company will have a path to much higher margins.

At $82.5M purchase price and $30M revenue, that’s a 2.75x revenue multiple, which I’d assume is on an LTM basis.

At 20% profit margin, or $6M EBITDA, that’s a 13.75x EBITDA multiple. 

At 10% profit margin, or $3M EBITDA, that’s a 27.5x EBITDA multiple.

Of note, I previously estimated the valuation multiple for the sale of Complex to NTWRK. Complex reportedly did around $100-150M of revenue and was sold for $114M (all-in price). That implies a revenue multiple in the range of 0.9x to 1.1x. I also estimated EBITDA at around 10% (which declined significantly after Buzzfeed ownership, supposedly was above 20% pre sale), which would imply an EBITDA multiple of 7.6x to 11.4x.

My guess is that the FWF sale multiple was likely on the higher end. Since FWF was a premium asset within the Complex portfolio, I can see it going for 10-15x EBITDA. If one were to normalize FWF margins for a standalone scenario after being untangled from Buzzfeed, the EBITDA margin could be higher, and the valuation multiple range could be lower.

That speaks to the opportunity for the new buyer consortium, on top of investing into the business for growth as I described in the points about the deal value prop.

 

Increasing interest in creator economy from politically oriented investors…

Soros has long been an active and politically-oriented media investor. See my media M&A detail that I highlighted above. Now they’re buying one of the most prized YouTube-native IP franchises in FWF and Hot Ones. 

This is party of a growing theme of politically-oriented buyers and investors increasingly leaning into digital media, and specifically the creator economy. 

Semafor recently reported that Fox is talking to political media acquisition targets like Red Seat Ventures and The Daily Wire, which are digital-native and lean conservative. Fox might also be looking at audio networks like Audioboom and iHeart.

This also makes me think of Highmount’s $100M investment into Dude Perfect, which I wrote about here (I also pasted an excerpt below).

Makes sense. 

If you want to influence the masses, you need to go where modern audiences are. And modern media channels, particularly social media, podcasts, and influencers x creators, have an outsized impact on reaching consumers and influencing them. From their purchase decisions, to their voting behavior. 

Brands and marketers have made the move. 

Newco launchers have made the move.

And now politically-affiliated parties and investors are starting to pay a lot more attention and put their dollars to work in the creator economy as well. Particularly after the learnings from Trump’s presidential bid win, which is being described as the “first podcast election”.

Welcome to the party new friends. Maybe we’ll see more of you at RockWater-hosted exec events in 2025 😉

Lastly, as I was doing quick research on the deal, I found this quote from Fortune interesting…

“Hot Ones” turned down an interview request from Vice President Kamala Harris’ team during her presidential campaign because the show did not want to “delve into politics,” Harris campaign strategist Stephanie Cutter said after the election.

Might that change after new ownership from Soros?

Maybe.

The new Soros ownership is also noteworthy when you consider this insight from Business Insider…

Earlier this year, Ramaswamy bought up a 9% stake in BuzzFeed and told Peretti he should bring a group of conservative media types onto BuzzFeed’s board and turn BuzzFeed into a Twitter-style platform. Then he suggested that when BuzzFeed’s debt came due this month, the company would be unable to pay it back and that somehow Ramaswamy would end up controlling the company. That doesn’t seem like an option anymore.

Yes, that sounds quite right.

Alright, that’s enough deal analysis for one week. I’m taking a much needed vacay, so there won’t be another M&A breakdown for at least the next couple weeks. See you in January!

…BTW, for some final “final” reading, below is the excerpt from my analysis on the $100M investment into Dude Perfect…

“Dude Perfect has a faith-based mission: “We’re about giving back, spreading joy and glorifying Jesus Christ”.

Three members of Highmount’s leadership, including their two founders, have faith-based affiliations per their website bios.

Makes me wonder who the LPs are in Highmount – could be parties who have faith-based investment mandates, where financial ROI may not be the only metric for success.

Think church pension funds, religious groups, HNIs, and family offices.

Of note, I’m not personally aware of much PR or press coverage of faith-based organizations investing in the creator economy. This could signal a new trend worth paying attention to, or simply that more press coverage is needed. 

I mean, one could say that religion is the OG of the creator-based economy…but that’s for a separate blog post. 

And speaking of LPs, it’s also worth noting that Highmount’s CEO and COO are both former Koch Industries (“KI”) execs. KI is the 2nd largest private company in the US (after Cargill) and is estimated to do over $125B in annual revenue and employ over 120,000 global employees. KI CEO Charles Koch and his political network are also major donors to Republican and libertarian causes.

KI is based in Wichita Kansas, and Highmount’s website lists offices in both Wichita and NYC. Makes me think that KI or affiliated parties could be a meaningful LP in the new Highmount fund, and thus have a meaningful influence on Highmount’s future investments.

Again, I can’t confirm any of this, as I’m just speculating.

I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do financial and strategy advisory for media, agencies, and creator economy. From M&A and fundraising to consumer research and go-to-market planning.

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com

RockWater Roundup

RockWater analysis to make you a better investor and operator. Today we discuss Triller and AGBA’s reverse merger, Triller’s controversial history, POV on real VS company-reported valuation, and why a social video platform and financial services plan to combine (hint: it’s financial engineering).

 

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The TikTok ban is jet fuel for $4B Triller / AGBA reverse merger.

But this is financial engineering to salvage 2 struggling companies.

Retail investors, be wary!

Let’s break it down…

 

🎯TARGET: Triller

 

🔥PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS

 

💰OWNED ASSETS (often via M&A)

 

🧐CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY

 

🎯TARGET: AGBA

 

💡PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS

 

🤝DEAL DETAILS

 

💸DEAL VALUATION

 

🤝POST-DEAL OPS

 

🤝DEAL RATIONALE / SYNERGY

 

🤔What else I find interesting…

This is a particular opportune time for the deal news → Triller is being aggressive when competitor TikTok faces US regulatory challenges, and seems to have made a smart timing bet, considering Biden officially signed the TikTok ban on Wed…less than one week after the deal was announced!

So it’s no surprise to learn that in the past, Triller leadership has called for Americans to delete TikTok and for the US gov to ban the app. BUT, now with Triller operating under a company based in Hong Kong, there could be similar suspicions considering China is increasingly exerting control of the HK territory.

Also worth noting that is an opportune time because TikTok has a licensing dispute with UMG, meaning TikTok’s access to the worlds’ largest music library is limited. With Triller having a meaningful music angle to its own social video platform, it’s another reason to be aggressive (though with all the label disputes I noted above, I’m actually unsure the exact commercial standing with Triller’s label partners). 

 

🧐IMO, here’s the real angle on this deal..

It’s a cash-grab from less sophisticated retail investors…or those that want to make a meme-like speculative bet.

There isn’t solid industrial logic in how these businesses should combine. Instead, it’s 2 companies who have very challenged balance sheets, and that need access to more and new sources of capital. In other words, it’s financial engineering to tap into liquidity from the private markets during an election year where there’s political posturing and heightened tensions between the US and China. 

Some might consider this a stroke of genius in dealmaking, but I prefer to support “sturdy” businesses and M&A that’s good for our industries in the long term. Even if this deal goes through, the long term prospects for both companies feels very challenged considering Triller’s controversial history, poor track record of financial performance, and underlying business fundamentals. 

That’s not dealmaking I like to rally around for the long term interest of our creator x media economies. Investors will get burned, and data points like this make future deals and fundraising more challenging. 

I like this ending takeaway line from seeking alpha’s analysis offers good POV for how investors should look at this deal → “bullish with a lottery ticket-sized long position. No price target based on fundamentals, but the sky is the limit on meme-like speculation”

 

👋To that end…

As of April 22 morning, Halper Sadeh LLC, an investor rights law firm, is investigating whether the merger of AGBA Group Holding Limited (NASDAQ: AGBA) and Triller Corp. is fair to AGBA shareholders. Very curious where this nets out.

Alright, would love to write more, but I got to get on the road. DM me with any other deal POV or feedback you have…I’m loving the inbounds I’m getting on my recent analyses on the $13B Endeavor buyout and the $100M Dude Perfect investment.

 

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I’m the founder of RockWater Industries. We do financial and strategy advisory for media, agencies, and creator economy. From M&A and fundraising to consumer research and go-to-market planning. 

DM me on LinkedIn or email me chris @ wearerockwater dot com

Every 1-2 weeks our team publishes a What We’re Reading newsletter that highlights topical news items, and we give our “RockWater take” on each. Below is a summary of these newsletters since we first launched the series in 2021.

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2022

Critical Open Letter to Zuck & Meta, Saudi Arabia’s $38B Gaming Investment, and Netflix’s Sub Rebound (10.28.22)
Blog Post

SKKY Partners & Night Capital, Pinduoduo’s US Launch, and YouTube Shorts Offers 45% (9.30.22)
Blog Post

Why MrBeast Burger Will (Not) Kill Legacy CPG, Celeb Food App Flavrs Raises $7M from A16Z, and Is BeReal the Next Clubhouse? (9.16.22)
Blog Post

TikTok as Gen Z’s Search Engine, the Rise of Recommended Media, and Amazon Drafts Dude Perfect for Thursday Night Football (8.12.22)
Blog Post

VidCon 2022 Insights, LIV Golf’s $405M Purse, and 4 Insights from the Web3 / Video Games Nexus (7.29.22)
Blog Post

$100M Kids Social Network Wins NBA Backing, Boxing Draws 2.4M Twitch Viewers, and Snapchat+ Arrives (7.8.22)
Blog Post

ESPN Takes F1 Checkered Flag for $225M+, Smart UA for Creator Tools, and Meta’s Fashion Marketplace (7.1.22)
Blog Post

The $100M fight for F1 in the US, $10B Growth in GameFi, and Tastemade / Pinterest Strike Million $$ Deal (6.17.22)
Blog Post

SUPER and Penny AI Raise $97 Million, Prada Launches NFTs + Discord, and Streaming’s Back-to-Basics (6.10.22)
Blog Post

Creator Economy’s SAAS Winter, buywith Raises $9.5M, and 5 Keys to Web3 Survival (6.2.22)
Blog Post

Team Coco Sells for $150M, a16z’s $5.1B Web3 & Gaming Bet, and Firework Raises $150M (5.26.22)
Blog Post

 

2021

Amazon Eyes 10 Figure NFL Media Investment, Multi-Million Dollar Digital Land Sales, and TikTok x Buzzfeed (12.2.21)
Blog Post

Nike’s 7 Metaverse Trademarks, Fox’s $100M NFT Fund, and the Launch of Goldbelly TV (11.18.21)
Blog Post

The $1.7B Through Line Between Rent The Runway’s IPO and Lipstick King’s Livestream Sales (11.4.21)
Blog Post

Sky Mavis Valued at $3B, LeBron James’ SpringHill Sells Stake at $725M Valuation, and Coinbase Enters NFT Market (10.18.21)
Blog Post

Patreon Invests 8 Figures Into Original Content, Netflix Acquires Game Studio, and Golf’s Pandemic Growth Story (10.4.21)
Blog Post

Whatnot Unicorns @ $1.5B Val, Gucci Sells $10M of Clothing on Roblox, and Linkedin Launches $25M Creator Program (9.21.21)
Blog Post

 

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Today we publish our 22nd podcast episode. Links to listen and full transcript are below.

This interview features Michael Cohen, CEO at Team Whistle.

We discuss being denied by a Goldman Sachs recruiter, when wearing a suit can be bad for business, being on the launch team of Whistle Sports, why the movie The Martian inspires his leadership, executing an M&A roll-up strategy and going from $0-100M in revenue, exiting to ELEVEN Group, and learning how to “play it where it lies”.

I’ve known Michael for over 15 years, and he’s one of my favorites to share industry notes with and riff about all things creator economy. And we have some wild stories from back when we worked together as investment bankers in NYC right out of undergrad…

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Interview Transcript

The interview was lightly edited for clarity.

 

Chris Erwin:

This week’s episode features Michael Cohen, CEO of Team Whistle and Chief Transformation Officer of ELEVEN Group. Michael was born in Long Island and grew up with parents who worked in tourism and technology. He decided to migrate to Atlanta for college, kicked off his career in a financial training program at Wells Fargo, but he soon returned to his home turf in New York City to be an investment banker, where Michael learned how to tell stories with numbers. Of note, this is where we first met and actually worked together for a few years.

Michael’s career then progressed into private equity and strategy consulting, but he left to take an early bet in digital media and helped launch Whistle Sports in 2014. Today, Michael is the CEO and has spent the past year integrating the business into its new owner, ELEVEN Group. Some highlights of our chat include being denied by a Goldman Sachs recruiter, when wearing a suit can be bad for business, why the movie “The Martian” inspires his leadership, executing an M&A roll up strategy and going from zero to a hundred million in revenue, and learning how to play it where it lies. Now I’ve known Michael for over 15 years, and he’s one of my favorites to share industry notes with and riff about all things creator economy.

Telling his story has been a long time coming, so let’s get to it.

All right, Michael, thanks for being on the podcast.

 

Michael Cohen:

Chris, thanks for having me. Been a long, long time that we’ve known each other, so I’m excited to chat with you.

 

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. This has been a long time coming. I think I’ve been asking you to be on the podcast for almost over a couple years now. There was some assumed perhaps missed emails or lack of responses or who knows what, but finally able to make it happen today.

 

Michael Cohen:

I take the fifth, but I’m glad I’m glad to be here today.

 

Chris Erwin:

All right, Michael. I’ve known you for a long time. I think dating back to 2006. This is … I know. It’s pretty crazy to say that. It’s almost over 15 years starting in Wall Street finance into the world of digital media. A lot to talk about today, but let’s start where you grew up, if there’s any glimpses into your early career. Let’s rewind a bit and tell us about where you grew up and what your household was like.

 

Michael Cohen:

I grew up in Long Island in New York, a nice, quiet suburban town called Jericho. I have an older brother and my two parents as well. The town was a very small town. Everybody knew each other, which was great, but also a little bit of a bubble. And so I think having grown up in that environment, it was something that I liked a lot, but also knew it was something I needed to get out of and experience the world a bit different. And I think part of my childhood allowed me to do that. My mom worked in travel, which allowed us to go to all different places. Some I appreciated at the time. Some, I certainly did not as a kid. Whish I could go back and appreciate some of those more, but again, this is well before we had digital cameras, let alone Instagram.

 

Michael Cohen:

You couldn’t experience a culture the way you potentially can today through Instagram or other apps. I got to have a feel for other cultures around the world through that lens. And then my dad worked in and around technology for his entire career, which was pretty awesome. He traveled to Japan a lot. And I would always … We went to the consumer electronic show, when CES was actually consumer electronics, or at least more prominently consumer electronics. I would inevitably have some new gadget. I remember a small, little TV that had a massive antenna that I got channel two on, which was great, super exciting as a kid. And then I definitely had the first MP3 player, which I think it was called the Diamond Rio.

 

Chris Erwin:

It could hold five songs?

 

Michael Cohen:

Yeah. It literally had I think five songs. You could upgrade the memory and you might get eight songs. It was literally the coolest thing ever, but you’d use it to go for a run because you had a Walkman. That was the only other thing. And if you do more than a 20 minute run, that’s kind of it. But I think being around my mom and dad who were both working, gave me a strong appreciation for hard work and work ethic. I think both of the industries that they were in gave me perspectives that I probably wouldn’t necessarily have had. I’d say my older brother, in terms of work ethic, not to say he didn’t have great work ethic, but he is wildly smart. And he didn’t actually have to work all that hard to do really well, which, on the other hand, I believe I’m somewhat smart, but also had to do a lot of hard work to keep up. That’s just something that’s always driven me.

 

Chris Erwin:

Michael, I think you have many moments of great intelligence, so don’t cut yourself short there. All right. With your mother in travel, your father in tech, did you have a sense of what you wanted to do as a kid? Did a lot of people in your community work in New York City? Did they work in finance? What were you thinking about your careers you were preparing for college?

 

Michael Cohen:

Yeah, we had a lot of different folks in the neighborhood. Some worked in finance, some accountants, a variety of folks that worked in different industries. I think for me, business was something that was always an area where I wanted to focus. I knew I wanted to be a business man at that time, follow predominantly in my dad’s footsteps and be able to work with a great company and travel, be a part of important meetings, a big team. All that stuff was important to me. Exactly where and what that meant was certainly TBD. Again, we didn’t have internet, and all that stuff wasn’t as prevalent as it is today to sort of understand all the options and choices.

 

Chris Erwin:

And actually, a quick tangent to that … As a kid, what were your hobbies? What were your passions? What did you do outside the classroom?

 

Michael Cohen:

Played a lot of sports. I grew up in a neighborhood that after school, all of us would get our bikes. We’d go to a park. We go back to the school. We’d play pick up basketball, roller hockey, baseball, you name it. We were out until dinnertime. And that was just awesome, being able to always be playing sports. And then at home, I would say because I was able to get exposure to a lot of the technology, I probably had the latest and greatest computers, these massive machines, and got to tinker around with that. So played on the computers. I probably had the first CD burner that existed, and turned that into a little entrepreneurial business in high school, selling CDs.

 

Chris Erwin:

Burned popular CDs that you would buy at the time and sell them to your friends?

 

Michael Cohen:

There was a very popular dance mix. I don’t remember what it was, but it was one of those things that … I don’t know if it was Tower Records or one of those [inaudible 00:08:06] things that you get 22 songs or something on. And it’s a mix. I had this CD burner. My friend and I, we started selling these CDs for a few bucks to our friends. It was a nice little side hustle back in high school.

 

Chris Erwin:

Okay, so there’s a little bit of an entrepreneurial bend in you. I see that. You decide to go to college, and you go to Emory university in the south. What were you thinking when you went to Emory? What was the plan there?

 

Michael Cohen:

It was interesting. My brother had gone to Emory. I went down to visit him, Emory in Atlanta, Georgia, early 2000s. The “dirty south” was really having a moment in terms of growth, in terms of pop culture, a really awesome vibrant place. I think for me, having grown up in more of a smaller neighborhood where I knew a lot of the people, I think feeling like a bigger fish in a smaller pond was something that was more exciting. And I think looking at Emory, looking at the curriculum, the school wasn’t super small, but at the same time, it would give me warmer weather and the ability to feel part of the movement in pop culture happening at the time.

 

Chris Erwin:

And so from there, you end up going into finance, right when you graduate, which I think is around 2005. And I think you end up at Wells Fargo. What was your thinking there for your first role out of school?

 

Michael Cohen:

I’ll back you up a little bit. At Emory, I majored certainly in business, but with a concentration in finance and marketing. And again, I had always had the desire to be a leader, wanting to be the head of a company someday. Didn’t know exactly what that meant at the time, but that was always something that was important to me. I remember going to a … The school had put on a road show of meeting different investment banks. I got to go to Goldman Sachs, the cream of the crop. I remember this so clearly. I had my suit on, I had studied, I had the vault guides. I knew every question that could be answered. I was ready, and the presenter started off his presentation. And he said, “None of you in this room are going to get a job at Goldman Sachs right out of school.”

 

Chris Erwin:

Why are you there?

 

Michael Cohen:

I’m like, “Well, this is sort of the most deflating thing ever. And I’ve been preparing for this for an ungodly amount of time.” I was so angry for so long, but what I took away from that has stayed with me for my entire career, and it’s something I pass on. Because what he then went on to say was, “I didn’t start at Goldman Sachs. I started at X company. I then went to Y. I went then over to company A, and then I went to company B and ultimately got to where I am today as a managing director at Goldman Sachs.” And his point was that not all career paths are linear. You have to have different experiences along the way that ultimately allow you to become a better managing director at Goldman Sachs, or wherever you were going.

 

Michael Cohen:

Fast forward, that stuck with me. I didn’t get a job at Goldman Sachs and actually, for the first time in my life, I decided to take a different road. I stayed in Atlanta after I graduated when a lot of my peers were moving back to Manhattan and New York. Again, Atlanta during this time was really booming, and I was excited about the city. I worked for Wells Fargo in their corporate banking group, where we were lending money to large Fortune 500 companies.

 

Michael Cohen:

It was a really interesting experience because it was so foundational in terms of learning and the training program that Wells Fargo had. It was just an incredible training program, got exposure to a lot of different people, a lot of different industries that we were covering. And it really gave me a very solid foundation. Ultimately, it was something that I would say, started to lay a very strong finance acumen for me down in Atlanta. I stayed down in Atlanta for a year after graduation and worked at Wells Fargo. It was a two year training program and my focus was all right, it’s not investment banking, but maybe I can complete this training program in one year versus two years. So I completed all the training requirements.

 

Chris Erwin:

This is actually where we have a lot of overlap. Right after undergrad, I also started my career as a corporate banker. I went to the Bank of New York. It’s now known as BNY Mellon. Similar to you, we were lending to Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries. So paper manufacturing, TMT, energy and utilities, and much more. I remember spending a lot of time pouring over financial statements and getting into all the details. I learned a ton. Follow up question for you, Michael, is what did you like most about the training program?

 

Michael Cohen:

What was great about the training program is that, and I remember this so clearly, they taught you how to hold your plate and a glass at a cocktail dinner. They taught you how to answer the phone. And you think about these soft skills that you take for granted today. Most people don’t even use a phone anymore, let alone know how to actually pick up the phone. Go to a cocktail party, how you’re supposed to hold the glass on the plate with one hand so you have the other hand free to shake someone’s hand. Little fun things that you learned outside of just the core finance and accounting.

 

Michael Cohen:

But what was interesting, and why I ultimately decided to move back to New York, was it was a little too slow for me in Atlanta at the time. Still very much a nine to five attitude in that city in terms of where I was, and the opportunity to advance as fast as I would’ve wanted. This is when I got the opportunity to move to New York, and I landed a job at Waller Capital, which is where you and I had worked together.

 

Chris Erwin:

I remember that first meeting where I think you had just joined within the past handful of months. This is I think in 2006, and very similar experience to you, incredible training program at Bank of New York, learned a lot from the leadership there, but wanted something that was more faster paced. Wanted to jam in the hours while I was young in my twenties. I remember coming to an interview at night in the office, and this was a small office, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, or one rock, and meeting at the upstairs meeting room. It was in the dark. I walk in and I think we do a 45 minute or hour interview. And I was like, “Wow, look at this guy. He’s got a similar background to me, but he’s super sharp. He’s very confident. And you got me very, very excited about the role.” The interview I had was okay.

 

Chris Erwin:

But I guess it was good enough to give me the job, because I remember getting an offer letter shortly thereafter and then joined the company a few weeks after that. I’m curious, one of the things we talked about before was building three legs of the stool. Each of those legs being finance, operations, and strategy and leadership. What do you think that you got out of your experience at Waller Capital? And then you moved to The Cypress Group thereafter, what was the financial acumen that you were really building at that point?

 

Michael Cohen:

I think it was a few different things. It was a core foundational skillset in corporate finance and accounting, which is really understanding how the numbers work, how an income statement, a balance sheet, a cash flow, not only how that works, which I think I learned in Wells Fargo, but in investment banking and at Waller capital was more of how it’s applied. Because what we did was we were advising companies … As you know, you worked there, but we were advising companies on raising capital to support their businesses and more often selling the companies. Helping them with the most important moment of their lives to sell them to somebody else. How do you write a story based on these numbers and present them to the marketplace? I think that was …What I learned there was really the combination of how to use numbers to tell stories. And certainly learned a massive attention to detail.

 

Michael Cohen:

You talk about Jeff Brandon, who we both worked with. I remember what he said to me. He goes, “In our business, 99% right is a hundred percent wrong.” And that’s really stuck with me. The detail side of that, because what he was trying to say was one wrong number calls out your credibility to a client, to a potential buyer. And it’s cast judgment, cast doubt on the rest of the financial model. So we really, the threshold for being correct was there was really zero tolerance. It taught you how to double check, how to triple check your work, how to work with others, like yourself, to ask questions, to make sure that you were approaching things the right way.

 

Michael Cohen:

I would say the storytelling with numbers, the attention to detail, and then again, work ethic. Because we worked long hours together to ultimately be able to deliver for our clients. And you had to find a solution. I’ll give you an example of that, which was, we had a pitch, it was a very large pitch. We had done the pitch deck. We were all ready. Again, Waller Capital was media and telecom. I don’t think we hit that early, but we spent a lot of time focused on cable companies. These cable companies, if you zoom out of a map of the United States, it’s like a puzzle. There’s pictures of this map that we would often use in our pitch decks to show how some different assets, where a strategic fit of different areas. Well, that needed to be part of a physical pitch deck.

 

Michael Cohen:

And unfortunately the files were so large that they couldn’t print out. Again, this is ’06, so didn’t have these great printers that you can buy off the shelves today. And I had said to the managing director, “Look, sorry, there’s just nothing I can do. It won’t print. It keeps jamming. It won’t print.” And the response was like, “That’s just not acceptable. I need this for a pitch tomorrow morning. It’s got to be at my house in Greenwich by 4:00 AM, because I’ve got a 6:00 AM flight.” So, okay. And I’ve got my new shoes on, my new suit, my investment banker gear. Meanwhile, I’m living on a couch at this point, and I go down to the financial printers on Wall Street, and begging them to take this file. The financial printers were the people that actually printed out all the 10Ks, all the SEC documents that had to be physically printed back in the day.

 

Michael Cohen:

I begged them to find a way to get this file open. Ultimately after going to three different ones, I found someone that was able to print it. They printed it. I bartered with them, so instead of charging with me, we said, “Hey, the next virtual data room that we use will go with you.” And I took a black car all the way to Greenwich. I dropped it off. My feet were all blistered up. Ultimately got home, got a couple hours of sleep, and back in the office by nine o’clock. While going through that, I was obviously fairly frustrated and tired and exhausted, but it taught me that every problem has a solution. You just have to work it hard enough. I think those three plus years at Waller Capital really instilled a core foundation in how I work, and not only what I know, but how I work and what I really am able to do.

 

Chris Erwin:

Very well said. After investment banking for a few years, you then head to private equity. You head to the Cypress Group and Torque Capital. Tell us about experience and what the training was there that was setting you up for the rest of your career.

 

Michael Cohen:

Wat was really interesting coming out of Waller Capital after three years was, I don’t know how many different sell side mandates we were on, but probably, 30, 40 over my time there. Sell side is when, as you know, when you’re selling a company to the marketplace, so you’re representing a seller and you’re going out and you’re positioning them to a marketplace of buyers to ultimately sell it. Now, what was really fascinating for me, and what I wanted to do, was go on the opposite side. Okay. You sell the company, now what happens? A buyer buys it, what do they do now? How do they operate it? And Cypress Group was a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm. I would say they were focused on diversified industrials and manufacturing.

 

Michael Cohen:

And for me, what I wanted to get next in my career was a broader exposure to the economy. No better way to do that than getting more involved in industrials and manufacturing. The other side of it is I wanted to be involved in the actual operations of the company. Cypress was sort of nearing the end of its fun life, but really was focusing on portfolio operations. It would give me an opportunity to really roll up my sleeves, work with various executives in each of these companies that they had owned, and literally be on the front lines of operations. And I think that was an incredible experience, particularly because the fall of Lehman Brothers happened during that. When you have exposure to everything from automotive companies to kitchen cabinets during a recessionary period, how do you operate those businesses?

 

Michael Cohen:

It’s one thing when you can’t stop selling kitchen cabinets. It’s another thing when home builds are cut in half, and you’ve got a massive manufacturing line needs to be retooled or relooked at. And so how do you fix that? I was able to go to many interesting places similar to our days in Waller Capital, driving around the country and various markets, and get on the manufacturing floor. What I remember very clearly are two things. One, the first company I went to that we owned, I was wearing a suit, tie, nice shoes, clearly bringing a New York aura to this company that was in Tennessee, I believe. And it was like, who is this guy? What is he doing here? How can he possibly help me?

 

Michael Cohen:

I quickly learned culturally, you can’t get things done by decree. What I quickly did was, the next day I changed. I was no longer wearing a suit. I was a little bit more suitable, but I started just asking questions and listening. What I took away was, what are the biggest pain points that the CEO has, that some of the senior managers have. And ultimately I came away from that trip knowing that if I could solve some of those pain points for them … And some of them were fairly easy. Some of them were, “Hey, I need just better communication between the board and us,” or, “Hey, there’s this issue that keeps popping up.” These were fairly simple, but it just required connecting of dots to do. And I did that, and what was magical out of that was the respect and credibility that I was able to get.

 

Michael Cohen:

From that point on, I was able to acclimate and get involved in these companies in a way where I started to be able to understand truly what would move the needle for them as operators, versus me wearing a New York private equity hat. And that was probably the most fun I had ever had. It really reinforced my desire to really be an operator. I had now investment banking, private equity experience. After two years … Private equity was a two year program. You signed two years, and then you’re typically off to business school or you do something else. Ultimately, I had asked the head of the private equity firm for his advice on what I should do next. I said, “Hey, should I go to business school?”

 

Michael Cohen:

I had taken GMAT. I had done well. He was a big golfer. He said, “Play it where it lies.” He goes, “You’re sitting in the fairway. Why would you go to business school? You’ve already got the education. Everything you would’ve gotten, you’ve seen. You’ve been operating. You’ve been operating through these tough environments.” And this was about the time where we saw an opportunity in the market to create what I would call a lower middle market distressed fund that would focus on these smaller companies that were forgotten during the post Lehman era, that were still extremely valuable, had a lot of asset value, again from manufacturing, whether that was equipment or what they were doing, but just were victims of the challenging environment. Going in, helping to restructure those, bringing those back to life, was awesome. It was the best. After two years, I joined a couple of folks there.

 

Michael Cohen:

We created this vehicle called Torque Capital Group. It still exists today. We made a couple of investments. I was really part of the very beginning of a fund, the very beginning of the investment that we made, putting together a hundred day plan, living in places like New Hampshire and outer Georgia, really working with the operators on what is this next iteration of the company. That was just such an incredible experience. What I took from that was ultimately, I was more excited about the top line growth side of things, the innovation that was happening in Silicon Alley. That then led me to the next stage of the career.

 

Chris Erwin:

Few interesting notes there. One, in terms of really listening, and being aware, and understanding the cultural nuances when you’re working with different companies or leadership … I feel you on that because I remember you and I used to do this. We used to do the cable tours when we were in banking, and I would show up to the middle of nowhere, Missouri or middle of nowhere, Wyoming to a cable head end, where we were representing the seller. The private equity company, their buyer, and their leadership and diligence team would come out. They’d all just be in general outdoor work gear. And I’m showing up in a suit, slacks, nice leather shoes. I was totally the odd man out. I thought that dressing nice like that would get me respect in the room, or respect in a situation because I was typically 20 years younger than everyone else that was there.

 

Chris Erwin:

That was not the case, and I learned pretty quickly that I got to adjust the wardrobe. And I got to listen more to the people that are around me if I’m going to have an impact in this situation. I think that’s very right. And your boss, I think at the Cypress Group said, “Play it where it lies.” Probably around that time, it’s 2011 for you, I decided to go to business school because I think I realized I was making a change where I wanted to change geographies. I wanted to change roles. I wanted to change industries, and I felt that I didn’t have the right skillset and I didn’t have the right plan. I needed to reset and take two years to get the operating experience that I needed.

 

Chris Erwin:

It’s funny, we took two different paths, but ended up in pretty similar industries thereafter, and pretty similar roles that have diverged over the past few years. It’s just funny to kind of reflect on that. All right, so then after Torque Capital, we’re going to get shortly to your rise in digital media at Team Whistle, but I think there was a quick stint of strategy work that you were doing. Tell us quickly about that, and then we’ll get to your current role now.

 

Michael Cohen:

So now, I’ve got the finance acumen under me, I’ve got the operational acumen under me, and I see very clearly what I need next, which is more of the strategy work that was missing. What I was looking for at the time was, do I jump into a startup and take some sort of role that’s … I think at the time everyone coming from private equity or MBAs was looking for a business development role, or a strategy role within these companies. I got some really great advice from an angel investor who introduced me to the CEO of Fahrenheit 212, which their whole mantra, how do we take an existing asset, existing distribution channels, existing marketplace position, and how do we leverage that to create a new product, a new technology, bring that to market and ultimately build a startup within a Fortune 500 company?

 

Michael Cohen:

I was advised by this angel investor who said to me, “Go talk to Fahrenheit. I think this is a great bridge that will ultimately get you into more of that operating role, that startup role, but this is a great place to go. You’ll have the ability to work with large Fortune 500 companies that you’ve been working with, but you’ll also be able to help them work on new products, new innovation, very exciting activities.” And so got the job where I was an engagement manager. My role there was to lead different engagements. I got the opportunity to work with everyone from Citigroup, to Samsung, and a number of others in between, but big companies and big challenges that we were trying to tackle for them. One of the best pieces of advice I got from the founder, a guy by the name of Jeff Valletta, stuck with me. He said, “Free yourself from the fear of failure.”

 

Michael Cohen:

What he was saying was a couple things. One is, in innovation, you’re going to fail sometimes, but if you play your hands scared, you’re never going to innovate. The team that we built at Fahrenheit was there to support you. So it was one, the team around you is here to support you, so don’t worry about you failing. And two, don’t worry about the product failing because you’re going to learn from it. And it was about iteration. It was a great environment to frankly, retrain my brain because in banking and private equity, when you hit a wall, you think about how do I financial engineer around this? How do I cut it? In innovation when you hit a wall, that’s opportunity.

 

Michael Cohen:

It took me a number of months to sort of retrain my brain on that notion that this is opportunity, and so how do we innovate around it? How do we innovate through it? What does this mean in terms of opportunity? That to me was an incredible experience. I was at Fahrenheit for about a year, and then I left and ultimately started my own consulting company. And why did I leave? Well, something interesting happens when you work with Fortune 500 companies and you deliver them, at least in my experience there was you deliver them this great strategy. You deliver them this great idea. They sign off on it. Two things happen: one, the person who’s the key stakeholder gets promoted and it’s no longer their problem. Or two, they decide to take it internally. They’re like, this is great. We’re going to run with it from here. The idea of me getting to build a startup within a Fortune 500 company was not really a super viable path. You’re able to bring the strategy to life, but often, they’re going to run with it on there.

 

Michael Cohen:

So obviously lots of internal stakeholders, lots of different things you need to do. And being inside the company was how they were able to be successful with it or take it. But at that point, I was very confident in the skillset that I had built. And so I started my own consulting company called, Who Is M. Cohen Ventures.

 

Chris Erwin:

Can I just ask why, Who Is M. Cohen?

 

Michael Cohen:

A friend of mine was more advanced in the social media space at the time than I was. In terms of branding and everything, I was like, “I need a Twitter handle. What Twitter handle should I do?” I couldn’t redo my AOL handle from high school. So he’s like, “What about who is M. Cohen? There’s so many Michael Cohens out there. What about who is M. Cohen?” And so I took that as my Twitter handle, and then I just started branding a lot of other things with it. I liked it.

 

Chris Erwin:

Hey listeners, this is Chris Erwin, your host of The Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we’re putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guests, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating, wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work, and it also really supports what we do here. All right, that’s it. Everybody let’s get back to the interview.

 

Chris Erwin:

After Fahrenheit and after Who Is M. Cohen Ventures, you joined what is now known as Team Whistle back in 2013. I’m curious to hear, from your point of view, how you ended up making this transition. Because I do remember when I was graduating from Kellogg, I was working for a company called Pritzker that actually invested in Big Frame and Awesomeness. I joined Big Frame back in, I think July 2012. I remember increasingly getting calls from you being like, “Hey Chris, I see you’re working at Big Frame. You’re in the YouTube MCN world, what’s going on there? What are you doing? How are you building?” And I remember the frequency of those calls really ratcheting up. I think there was an eventual call I got from you, which was, “Hey, I joined Whistle.” And I thought that was awesome. I loved having one of my financial brethren making the move into digital media where there’s going to be some more quantitative focused minds and strategy minds entering the mix, which we needed. But how did that come to be from your side?

 

Michael Cohen:

I was doing the consulting thing as Who Is M. Cohen Ventures. One of my clients was the Whistle, and I was doing consulting for probably six months. I had a number of clients, probably had five different clients. And I wasn’t sure whether I was going to just keep building a consulting company or do something else. It would actually, frankly, gave me the opportunity to date a lot of really interesting companies. I worked with small seed stage companies, some more funded companies, and some actually Fortune 500 companies as a consultant. But, I would say what got me to join Whistle was two things that happened. One, I would come home and I would talk to my wife and she said to me, “What’s interesting, you talk about all your clients. When you talk about Whistle, you say, we. When you talk about your other clients, you say they.” It was a really interesting, subtle observation that she had made.

 

Michael Cohen:

And then too, Chris, as you know, back in time, this was a wild west. Not many people knew what YouTubers were. It was probably the only platform that had creators. I don’t think the term influencer was coined yet. And then Disney comes in and buys maker studios for a billion dollars. I sit there and say, well, one, there’s a great team, a small team, but really interesting people that are here. And then two, there’s just got some validation in this industry that perhaps there is some validation coming from Disney.

 

Michael Cohen:

At that point, John West, who was the founder of Whistle, said, “Hey, we got to raise some money, so I can’t have my finance person as a consultant. So you going to join? You can create a consulting company anytime in your life. There’s not going to be many opportunities you get to join a company at an early stage like Whistle.” And he’s a great salesman and a great mentor and friend, so I jumped on board. At the time it was called The Whistle and that began the nine plus year journey that I’m still on right now.

 

Chris Erwin:

Got it. When you first joined, what was the mandate? Was it, “Hey, Michael, we need to raise money. Let’s get the model and the deck together”? And then the money’s raised, what was your mandate immediately thereafter?

 

Michael Cohen:

They had raised some seed capital. Really I joined in 2013 and I would say our public launch was January 1st, 2014. And the premise of what we were trying to do was if you were to reimagine ESPN today, how would you do it? That was the question that we were asking ourselves at the time. It would be very different than what was happening back then. Traditional media, in our view, underserved today’s generation. It was mostly a one way broadcast directly to you from the old guys with gray hair, talking about the glory days, talking about this scandal, that scandal. And, when I came on, the mandate was to help figure out what’s the initial strategy that we want to take this on. Our view was, looking at how ESPN came to be and studying it, was ESPN came to be on the back of cable and satellite providers. They bought sports rights and, again, they sold them and then sold it to Telcos and had licensing fees and all that type of stuff.

 

Michael Cohen:

Our view was that the next company was going to be built on the back of social media company. Instead of cable and satellite, you’re going to have the Facebooks, the YouTubes, et cetera. But our view was that instead of sports rights, it was going to be social influencer rights. And so the first step of what we did was we created a sports MCN, like a Big Frame before us, or a Maker, or Style Hall. All these others that were either generalists, or they were very vertical focused, Style Hall being more fashion and beauty. Tastemade, being more around food.

 

Michael Cohen:

There was still room for sports. The first thing that we did and that I was part of, was really trying to come up with that strategy. Once we landed on the MCN strategy, which, our view at the time we came after a number of other companies, was instead of this actually being the destination we’re trying to go to, it was more of the vehicle.

 

Michael Cohen:

And what I mean by that is, we would create this MCN, we’d have a lot of creators under our belt. It would give us access to tons of data, which would then give us the ability to learn more about the audience and then figure out how best to serve that audience. So I would say the initial part of me coming on was helping with the capital raise, putting the deck together, putting together a financial model. But in order to put together a deck in a financial model, you of course need the business strategy. Looking back nine years, it’s very easy to tell a linear story on what we did, but between us that’s BS. We all know building a company is not a linear story. So that was the first piece of coming on.

 

Chris Erwin:

When you launch in January of 2014, did the launch go as expected? What surprised you?

 

Michael Cohen:

We were so focused at the time of being a very good for you sports media company that we launched Dude Perfect, as I’m sure many people know, one of the largest creators in the world. I think they were only 2 million subscribers on YouTube at the time. Now they’re multiples of that. They were one of our launch partners and a number of others were. We had PR around it. It was great. And then we’re watching YouTube videos and we see you can block certain categories that you don’t want to run ads. Our whole premise was certainly no alcohol, only really positive advertisements that could go on it. We didn’t want soft drinks. We didn’t want certain junk food. I think we got served a Pepsi ad or something, and it caused a whole panic of are we having sugary drinks?

 

Michael Cohen:

Are we allowed to have sugary drinks? Are we not allowed to have sugary drinks? And I think that was a funny moment. But at the time the rally cry was build our subscribers, the subscriber network, on subscribers being on YouTube. We had different targets that we ran after to bring creators on, to hit a certain subscriber threshold, which, was more of a proxy for the size of our audience and how we would be able to monetize it. But I remember that early on, it was getting a little over spooked on a very non-controversial ad that ran in pre-roll on YouTube.

 

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. And I have to ask, what was it like for you to start working with creators for the first time? For me coming out of finance, so venture capital, business school, Wall Street. I was very accustomed to working with private equity leadership, sophisticated investors, C-suite executives from the companies that we were representing. Transitioning into this intersection of digital media technology and entertainment, working with creators and personalities, working with the representatives that manage them. That was an entirely new world for me, both working with those talent and the reps in house, and then also out of our building as well. Did you have a lot of creator exposure early on at Whistle?

 

Michael Cohen:

I would say I wasn’t leading the creator efforts. We had an awesome person named Julie Kikla who came from YouTube that helped us launch that. Dev Sethi then came on, who I know has been on your podcast here, but definitely got exposure to the different creators. I would say that my diversified experience in the past very much helped me for how to navigate, how to partner with these creators, who very often were not sophisticated businesses. And certainly at the time they weren’t. First and foremost, they’re in incredibly talented, innovative creators that they’re most suited to creating incredibly engaging content. The monetization side of it was where we came in to help them.

 

Michael Cohen:

And so trying to apply a commercial acumen to a creative acumen often was easy to meet with challenges. But I think my prior experiences … Where the story in private equity where had to really acclimate to the people around me, working in the strategy roles, and having empathy for what it’s like to be in a larger company, what it’s like to be in a smaller company, understanding both a commercial desire, but also a creative of desire, and how that all works together. I would say it gave me the tools to have a lot more empathy for it. Certainly didn’t prepare me for the world of mom-agers and dad-agers, and how intensely passionate those folks are about their sons, their daughters, but I was prepared. But I’ve learned a lot in terms of how to partner.

 

Chris Erwin:

So phase one, with the initial launch of Whistle, call it the MCN stage, and some learnings there. And then I think there was a decision where working with the team, you guys then enter phase two, where you’re investing in intellectual property, audience growth, capabilities. This is I think where you transition from Whistle Sports to Whistle. Tell us how that came to be.

 

Michael Cohen:

We went from The Whistle to Whistle Sports. We started off as The Whistle. When we launched, we were Whistle Sports. It was important to make the point that, we were Whistle Sports. We weren’t well known at the time, so making sure that the name stood for what we were was important. As we evolved, and as we studied the data, we learned that sport was being defined very differently for this generation. We were focused more on a YouTuber generation, I would say, mid to late teens, the mid to late twenties. We learned a lot from them and really no greater learning than they are really defined by the intersection of multiple passion points. Sports fans today are very much, yes, I may be a ravenous sports fan, but I also care about the pop culture aspect. I care about the music aspect. I care about the culinary aspect of it.

 

Michael Cohen:

Very often today we’re taking it for granted, because on Instagram you can see an athlete out partying on yacht, and what they’re doing behind the scenes. You see them walking their dogs. You have such a more intimate exposure. I think at the time, again, it was really only YouTube was the platform that had the most data that you could get followed by. Facebook’s started to get in it. But we learned from the data that there was a white space that we could create content in that was more what I would call sport attainment. As we were talking to a number of our advertising partners, they said, “Look, your name’s Whistle Sports, but you’re not sports. Sports is, what I would say, classically defined as what an ESPN is doing, what a Bleacher was doing, a Turner was doing at the time, you guys are more entertainment. The content you’re creating is more entertainment. And if you focus on sports and entertainment, that’s a much bigger pot that you can focus on. So have you thought about dropping the name sports when you’re going from your go to market standpoint?”

 

Michael Cohen:

We started to test it, and all of a sudden we are getting lots more RFPs, lots more inbound interests, lots more PR opportunities, because we were really defining a new category. And early on, I would say in that category definition, people that would say to us, “You’re trying to be everything to everyone. You’re really sitting in this middle bucket.” What we try to convey and what is true today is that no, no, no, that’s a category of our own. So trying to define us in yesterday’s boxes is not the right way to approach it because we’re creating a new box for ourselves. And so that began really where we were consciously investing in our own content, building a diversified network of platforms. We wanted to be diversified across not just YouTube, not just Facebook, as many platforms as possible, not wanting to have the risk of being tied to any one platform in particular.

 

Chris Erwin:

How was your role changing at the company as you were rising up and as your business was evolving?

 

Michael Cohen:

As we start to invest in our own product, I got the opportunity to expand my role and oversee that. Now, I wasn’t running production, but I was overseeing the production side of things. My role was really focused on, at this point, not only how we operate internally, but the product that we’re creating. I think one of the approaches that I took to it was, very often in media companies, there’s a separation again of this creative and commercial, and there’s a tension, there’s a massive tension. And there’s often like a wall in true editorials, environments or newsrooms, there is a wall. In our world, my focus really was about trying to align commercial and creative again. And that was something that has really been important throughout my career is trying to get people to see and understand certain things from different perspectives.

 

Michael Cohen:

I would say one of my strong abilities is to help connect dots that people aren’t readily seeing. And so why commercializing a piece of content is important to our ability to do new and interesting creative endeavors. It was really about trying to align the product and revenue needs together so that we’re able to create really cool, compelling content, but we’re not creating content for content’s sake on a gut or a hunch. We’re doing it because it is somewhat grounded in, “Hey, this is a commercially viable type of thing that we can be taking to market.” I spent a lot of time on the product side, and our product being content for the most part.

 

Chris Erwin:

After this point, I think you enter what you describe as phase three, which I think began in 2018. This is a bit of the inorganic plan, or this is where you’re starting to exercise some of the skills and abilities that you learn from finance, banking, private equity, and you conduct an M&A roll up strategy, enhancing your capabilities by buying other companies. I think there’s three specific acquisitions that you led. And I think as you described, you’re starting to marry live sports and entertainment in a more meaningful way. Tell us about that point of the company.

 

Michael Cohen:

This is really, again, focused on IP, audience, and capabilities. I think at this point, as we’re building the company, our focus is okay, we have a creator network, which is awesome, and we can help those creators continue to be successful, both in terms of helping to monetize, but also in terms of bringing them into the IP that we’re creating. So that creator network, the creators that are a part of our company still to this day are still core to everything that we do. Now we’re creating our own IP and we’re monetizing it mostly via both indirect programmatic revenue and then direct sales. As we keep expanding into IP and keep expanding into this entertainment area, we saw that there were opportunities in 2018. Really, if you remember, I think this was sort of the nuclear winter of digital media.

 

Michael Cohen:

We had little things, which they were on top of the world and then a Facebook algorithm shifted. And they went out almost overnight. We had Mashable, which was as a darling at the time, which was frankly fire sold. And this then began I think Cambridge Analytica around the time, lots of scandals around social media, video, compression in CPMs. And so we saw an opportunity that there were a lot of companies that had raised a lot of capital. They had a choice to make. They didn’t necessarily get to the scale that they wanted to be. And so the choices were, we shut down the company, we raise more capital from other investors, or we partner with someone else that can potentially get us to the promise land. And so we saw that opportunity that most people would probably want to choose the last piece.

 

Michael Cohen:

Many investors were tired by 2018. The tolerance to put more capital into these companies was few and far between. The desire, and frankly, the PR nightmare of shutting down was not something that people wanted to do. And so we started to be very smart in terms of, okay, if we were going to build this vertical, or build this capability ourselves, what would it take us to do? How much capital would it take? Or, who’s out there that we can go and take a look at? The first company that we had gotten introduced to was a company called New Form. New Form was based in the LA ecosystem. Whistle was still primarily focused in New York and we knew if we were going to be taken seriously in the Hollywood ecosystem, we really needed to have a studio.

 

Michael Cohen:

And so this is again, the time where lots of streaming platforms are coming out, new types of mediums are being created. And so we bought New Form. They brought in a strong slate of IP that they had already created. They already had a number of distribution partners. Some that we had, some that they had. They had scripted, we had unscripted. It really made us a very strong studio. The who’s who around the table gave us a pretty strong signal to the market in a market that frankly was very challenged. We brought in the skillset to integrate these companies, and then be able to do more of them. We then got an opportunity to look at a company called Vertical Networks. Vertical Networks Brother, which was the largest Snap discover channel at the time, but the problem was they couldn’t get off of Snap.

 

Michael Cohen:

They didn’t have … Both from a capital standpoint, and just from a capability standpoint, they just weren’t able to scale off platform to other platforms as fast. Well, we already had the other platforms within our distribution, but we also didn’t have as much on Snap. So was a nice little partnership where we were able to come in and take a look at Brother, work with a lot of the existing people on that team, rethink what Brother was, reformat some of the shows. That really gave us more of the IP and audience. So now we’ve got both. We’ve got IP from both New Form, we’ve got IP from Vertical Networks. We’ve got a much bigger audience coming from Vertical Networks and the Brother. And then, what we realized was, okay, now we’ve got more IP, more audience. We need more capabilities to take this out into the marketplace.

 

Michael Cohen:

So we acquired an agency called Tiny Horse that was based in Charlotte. The premise of that was really adding more capabilities that we could bring out to our brand partners, that we could help different distributors and other partners with subscriber acquisition, because so many different streaming platforms coming out. How can Whistle not only use their audience, whether those are paid marketing, or inventory buying, other types of strategy work, and identity work that we could do to help these different companies navigate what I would call the digital transformation. We brought that skillset in. We built a very strong company that had this nice puzzle coming together of IP audience and capabilities, serving a younger demographic with a great suite of partners.

 

Chris Erwin:

A couple quick beats before we get into the rapid fire to close this out. So now you have this incredible platform. You started to put the puzzle pieces together for a really exciting new build, a new growth strategy for the company. And then at this point, I think you guys sold to ELEVEN Sports in 2021. What’s the quick story there for how that came to be? Was the M&A all with the intention of, “Let’s put the pieces together because we’re going to run a sales process for the company,” or was the acquisition unplanned?

 

Michael Cohen:

John West, our CEO has a great saying. He said, “Companies are never sold or bought.” So we never thought about putting ourselves up for sale. We had raised a lot of money over the years, and really we had now, to your point, put together a lot of these puzzle pieces and it was really about fueling growth. We went out into the market in 2020 to raise some additional capital to, I would say one, continue to weather the COVID storm that had impacted a lot of media companies. But two, be ready with a war chest to capitalize on opportunities, capitalize on what we already were building. And then other opportunities coming out of that. Ultimately got a number of different term sheets from mostly debt providers because we did not want to focus on diluting the company, and then ELEVEN Sports had put in an offer to buy the company.

 

Michael Cohen:

ELEVEN was someone that we had known well. Their main investor was Acer Media backed by a guy named Andrea Radrizzani. He sees the world in a different way than most, and frankly, very aligned to the way we see the world. ELEVEN was focused more outside of the United States. They’re more of a sports, live rights, more of their focus and they operate in a number of markets outside in Europe and Asia. They saw what we had already been seeing. Sports was being defined very differently. And so what we saw was together, we could unlock the power of live sport and on demand entertainment, and win a lot more hours of the consumer.

 

Michael Cohen:

If we could better serve the consumer, ultimately we would be able to monetize in more ways. When you start to put these pieces together, you really are creating a global sports media and entertainment company that plays across live and non-live, and both with an entrepreneurial spirit that can continue to be more scrappy than others out there. Our board, John, myself, we all recommended that this was the right opportunity that together we could get to a much more meaningful outcome for all stakeholders. We could better serve our partners, better serve our audience. And ultimately of course our shareholders.

 

Chris Erwin:

It’s an incredible story, Michael. I have to ask, looking back on all this, you’ve helped the company raise over a hundred million dollars in capital. You’ve helped take the company from zero to a hundred million dollars in revenue. Going back to the beginning of this interview, the through line of building the three-legged stool. I need finance, I need op, strategy and leadership. Do you think that this is the ultimate culmination of all of your hard work? Do you look back at this and be like, “I did it. I’m content”? And then second, I want to hear about what are the two or three key learnings about how you are now a better executive from this experience and what you will take with you going forward? But let’s start with the first one.

 

Michael Cohen:

First of all, it’s definitely not I. The most important thing that I learned is it’s always we, never I. I tried to take blame for the failures and would want the team to take, and have asked the team to always take credit for the wins. I don’t think you can be a leader in today’s environment by being an I person. In terms of looking back at the last nine years, the thing that stands out for me is adaptability is the reason that we are still alive and kicking today. John, our founder, he has a saying, and I think it’s been attributed to Darwin, but we’ll do that. “It’s not the strongest or the biggest of species that survive. It’s the ones that are most adaptable to change that survive.” That’s really been our operating mantra. Between that and a nice quote that I love from the Martian, the movie and the book, it says, at some point everything’s going to go south on you and you’re going to say, this is it.

 

Michael Cohen:

This is how I end. You can either accept that or you can get to work and that’s it. You just begin. You start to solve problems. You solve one problem after the next. And then if you solve enough problems, ultimately you get to come home. He was on Mars. And that’s just been a mantra of ours. Again, goes back to that very first experience in investment banking, was solve the problem. There’s nothing that can’t be solved by an incredibly talented team that we’ve built at team Whistle. I’m lucky to have the privilege to work with all these great folks. And it’s been fairly humbling experience.

 

Chris Erwin:

Do you feel on this almost 20 year journey, partially satiated? This is what I set out to do? Of course, with a whole team around you to make it happen. Because this kind of impacts how you’re thinking about what’s next.

 

Michael Cohen:

Yeah. I do feel somewhat satiated. I think I felt it probably for a little bit after the acquisition. For me throughout the journey, I started as EVP of finance and operations, I then took on the COO title. I then took on the president title, and then ultimately took on the CEO role. I think each one of those was a milestone that I had. Okay. Have I arrived? Okay, have I? And that’s … Being able to appreciate that in the moment is something that I probably wish I spent more time appreciating in the moment of having arrived at that and celebrating that.

 

Michael Cohen:

I just thrive on searching for things that haven’t been done, doing them, working with a great team, getting to be challenged every day, and working again in a media and telecom space. This intersection of media tech and commerce, it’s so dynamic. And so there’s always a challenge every day. For me, the satiation come from the challenge, the constant challenge. Maybe that’s right, maybe that’s wrong, but I’m enjoying what I’m doing now, and continuing to build. And that’s what’s fun for me, is the opportunity to continue to be challenged and built

 

Chris Erwin:

Final question before rapid fire. In terms of what’s next, with the acquisition, you have been leading the integration and transformation of the company. Your chief transformation officer of ELEVEN Sports. Are you coming to the end of that process? Is there a lot more work to do there? And what are you thinking next for you?

 

Michael Cohen:

It’s been an incredible opportunity. Mark Watson, the CEO of the ELEVEN group, and Andrea’s also involved. The whole team have been great. Getting the opportunity after selling your company to help lead an overall transformation effort, not only integrating your company, but working with their company as well has been a really incredible experience. Getting to reimagine, rethink the strategy and how we evolve it. I think we’re only getting started. I don’t think transformation necessarily starts and stops. There’s certainly some infrastructure building, some tactical things that we had to get done. Now we’re able to actually just keep executing on that plan of winning more hours of the consumer, whether that’s through different types of content, different types of products we’re putting out, different types of distribution. That’s the fun of it. I would say the journey continues, and as long as I’m being challenged and having fun, and get the opportunity to work with great people, that’s something that keeps me going.

 

Chris Erwin:

Well said. In closing, I just want to give you some kudos. I’ve known you longer than most people in my professional career over 15 years. And I think you are a big part of what sold me, “I’m coming into investment banking,” and also getting my foot in the door. Just like you, all the skills that you learned there was what I learned. And that is what allowed me to get into business school, and then to join the whole digital media revolution and Big Frame and Awesomeness, and actually hire our old bank to represent Big Frame in the sale.

 

Chris Erwin:

You are a big part of that, Michael. I give you a ton of kudos for that. I think our relationship’s been a fun give and take where you got inspired by some of the things that I did, and that was a catalyst to your entry into Whistle, but then you just took it to a whole other level and it’s been really awesome to see. I’ve learned a lot from your rise up. I think you even brought in our advisory firm to help you when you were looking through some different VOD strategies a few years back. So very thankful for that. And it’s just been a delight to know you professionally and personally. I think there’s much more fun to come for both of us going forward. Like we said in the beginning, we’re going to have to do some outdoor activities or some sports or something like that next time we hang out.

 

Michael Cohen:

I’m all ready for it. And I appreciate the kind words, Chris. All I would say is right back at you. It’s been a great friendship, a great partnership, and we’re still in the early innings, to use the sports analogy.

 

Chris Erwin:

Let’s get into the closing rapid fire questions. Six questions, the rules are as follows. You can answer in one sentence or in just a handful of words, keep it short and sweet. Michael, do you understand the rules?

 

Michael Cohen:

I believe.

 

Chris Erwin:

All right, let’s kick it off. Proudest life moment?

 

Michael Cohen:

Becoming a father.

 

Chris Erwin:

What do you want to do less of in 2022?

 

Michael Cohen:

Zoom.

 

Chris Erwin:

What do you want to do more of?

 

Michael Cohen:

In person discussions. That fuels my energy.

 

Chris Erwin:

What one to two things drive your success? Short answer.

 

Michael Cohen:

I would say just a relentless desire to learn and to be challenged, and to work with great people.

 

Chris Erwin:

Advice for media execs going into 2022?

 

Michael Cohen:

Know your audience, know your partners, serve them well. Don’t future chase.

 

Chris Erwin:

Any future startup ambitions? Might we see Who Is M. Cohen Ventures coming back into the mix?

 

Michael Cohen:

I would say I’ve always had the entrepreneurial itch, and there’s a lot of good ideas out there and great people to partner with. For right now, I’m focused on leading team Whistle, continuing to lead the transformation office at ELEVEN, bringing a great outcome to all stakeholders. But let’s revisit this in a couple years, because I think there’s something there.

 

Chris Erwin:

Maybe you can come lead the sports media division at Rockwater. It’s an opportunity.

 

Michael Cohen:

Maybe.

 

Chris Erwin:

All right, Michael, this is the last one. Pretty easy. How can people get in contact with you?

 

Michael Cohen:

Always up to chat. You can email me. You can hit me on Twitter. Text message me. LinkedIn as well. I’m always up to collaborate, meet smart, great people, help make introductions, connect people.

 

Chris Erwin:

All right. Awesome. Michael, this was a ton of fun. Thanks for being on the show.

 

Michael Cohen:

Thank you, Chris. Appreciate you having me.

 

Chris Erwin:

All right. That was a really fun interview. As I said at the beginning, I think I’ve been trying to interview Michael for the past couple years, so thrilled that we could finally make it happen. All right, but a few quick points before we wrap up. We just had an awesome executive event at Gjelina in LA a few weeks ago. We brought together various livestream commerce executives for a panel. Included Popshop Live, Stage TEN, and MARKET. That was a lot of fun and the Gjelina rooftop never disappoints. It was great to see a lot of you there. We do have another executive event coming up in New York in early November. More on that to come, but there’ll probably be an event in advance of that as well, maybe around VidCon, so stay tuned. As always, if you want to attend our events or learn more or interested in being a sponsor, ping us at hello@wearerockwater.com. And then we always love to hear from our listeners. If you have any feedback or any ideas for guests, shoot us a note at tcupod@wearerockwater.com. All right, that’s it, everybody. Thanks for listening.

 

Chris Erwin:

The Come Up is written and hosted by me, Chris Erwin, and is a production of RockWater Industries. Please rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts and remember to subscribe wherever you listen to our show. And if you really dig us, feel free to forward The Come Up to a friend. You can sign up for our company newsletter at wearerockwater.com/newsletter, and you could follow us on Twitter @TCUpod. The Come Up is engineered by Daniel Tureck, music is by Devon Bryant, logo and branding is by Kevin Zazzali, and special thanks to Alex Zirin and Eric Kenigsberg from the RockWater team.

 

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Today we publish our 17th podcast episode. Links to listen and full transcript are below.

This interview features Doug Bernstein, GM at Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights.

We discuss what he learned from launching his own fantasy sports website, predicting the future of sports fandoms, how he convinced Turner and Bleacher Report to buy House of Highlights, why he’s inspired by Faze Clan and 100 Thieves, and fulfilling his destiny as a sports media savant.

You can listen, subscribe, and follow our show on:

…and the many 3rd-party podcast apps. Please forward The Come Up to a friend if you think they’ll enjoy our interviews.

 

Interview Transcript

The interview was lightly edited for clarity.

 

Chris Erwin:

This week’s episode features Doug Bernstein, the GM of House of Highlights, which is part of Bleacher Report. Doug grew up in Long Island and actually predicted a sports media career in third grade. In just middle school, he was making his own football cards. And while in college, accidentally ended up running the school paper and public access TV channel where he cut his teeth learning how to sell ads, be on camera and inspire a team. Then Doug got his real digital education when he went to AOL to run sports and news blogs. There, he realized that the next fandoms would be powered by user generated content and social media. So, he made the jump to Bleacher Report.

 

Chris Erwin:

At Bleacher, he ended up leading the acquisition of House of Highlights and now runs one of today’s most exciting sports media brands. Some highlights of our chat include what he learned from responding to 400 blogger emails per day, how he convinced Turner to double down on digital, why he is inspired by FaZe Clan and 100 Thieves and fulfilling his destiny as a sports media savant. Alright, let’s get into it. Doug, thanks for being on The Come Up podcast.

 

Doug Bernstein:

My pleasure, very excited to be here.

 

Chris Erwin:

Let’s zoom back a bit and let’s talk about where you grew up and what your household and parents were like. So I think you mentioned you grew up in Long Island, is that right?

 

Doug Bernstein:

That is correct. So I grew up in a town called Garden City, which is a suburb of New York City. It was me, my brother who’s three or four years younger than myself and my mom and dad. And we just grew up in a really, really big sports household. A lot of my earliest memories are in and around sports. My dad loves to tell a funny story like when I was one, he was supposed to watch me and he got stuck on the WFAN call radio. My mom came home, I had a wet diaper crying, screaming, and he was still online to talk about the Yankees. I grew up playing a lot of soccer, watching a lot of basketball, playing soccer, basketball, and lacrosse. And then really just became infatuated with the Giants, the New York Giants, at a very, very young age.

 

Chris Erwin:

I was actually going to ask, what were the teams of your household? Who did you guys root for?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I am a very big and loyal diehard New York Giants fan. My brother has been more Jets but also somewhat of a colors guy. Like if they had good colors, he’d go in that direction. And my dad has always … We’ve never had a set team, but I’ve always been a really, really big Giants fan to the point that I think it scared my parents when I was younger. I remember when I was in the third grade, the Giants had a loss and I put a note under my door. I went upstairs, put a note under my door and was like, “I’m not coming out until the start of next season. Knock on my door, put rice crispy cereal at the door, I’ll eat it, but I’m going to stay in my room until the start of next season.”

 

Chris Erwin:

How long did that last for?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I think it lasted until the next morning. I think my parents gave me a full Sunday, we’re not going to bother him, and then Monday, “You got to go to school.” We went to a lot of St. John’s basketball games growing up, and that was a really formative experience. I loved going to those games with my dad and with my brother and being part of that atmosphere.

 

Chris Erwin:

What did you like about the live experience?

 

Doug Bernstein:

It was just everything. It was so cool to be able to watch the games, but also I think what I really gravitated towards was the people and the connections that were being made. So, every year, there’d always be the same older couple that would sit right in front of us, the same people that would sit behind us, next to us, and kind of those friendships and that comradery. I even remember when you’re in kindergarten, first grade, these people you see them and then you see them again all the way through middle school. It’s a really unique experience to have that. I grew up in a very non-religious household, so we rarely went to church, we rarely went to temple.

 

Chris Erwin:

The sports arena was your temple?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Exactly. So sports was that place where you congregated. I always remember when I’d go to church, there’d be that moment where you take people’s hands and say peace be with you. And I would always feel like when I was at a game, it was the heightened version of that where you’re clapping, people going crazy and having that feeling. So, I love being able to go to games. I think that was really, really formative for myself.

 

Chris Erwin:

You’re going to games with your family I imagine through your early years and in middle school, was there a feeling like I’m probably going to end up in sports in my career in some way? When was that early glimpse?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I remember in second grade I would have to write journal entries, and I would write these five-page journal entries every Monday about the Giants recap. And then every Wednesday would be this three-page recap on the St John’s game. And the teacher was like, “Why are you writing such long things about these sports when you’re supposed to write about what you ate for breakfast and what you did with your friends?” So I remember that very distinctly standing out. I remember very distinctly in third grade, and my mom saved it, we were supposed to write about what it was we wanted to do when we were older, when we had a real career, and I wrote be a professional soccer player or work for ESPN. So I really was not good enough to be a professional soccer player but did end up working for ESPN.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And I was really lucky that I have parents that fostered it where we went to Bristol when I was in fourth grade and visited the ESPN campus. All of our vacations, we went to watch Duke in North Carolina. I don’t know how my mom tolerated all this. We went to watch like US soccer in San Diego. A lot of our vacations as a kid were geared towards going to these sporting events.

 

Chris Erwin:

Oh wow.

 

Doug Bernstein:

It was really fun. I didn’t really have a great context for work because my grandfather had started a company, my dad worked for that company, my uncles had worked for it. So there was always this, “Oh, that’s the path is we worked for this family business.”

 

Chris Erwin:

Was it sports-related at all?

 

Doug Bernstein:

No, no. I like to say they make like widgets. They may start off making fuses for TV, they make computer components, just a lot of little electrical equipment type stuff. So it was the furthest thing from my interest area. But as I got older, I was lucky enough to break into sports and not have to pursue that.

 

Chris Erwin:

I think you had also mentioned too, did you, at an early age, have to create your own basketball cards and fantasy football mag? So you had some sports entrepreneurship in you at an early age too?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I’m definitely putting my sports nerd hat very heavily right now. I was going through all our old boxes of cards, when cards was having a big resurgence of late, and I stumbled across a Kobe that should’ve been worth 40,000 but the edges were dented, that was heartbreaking. But I also stumbled across all these cards that I would make. Tim Duncan, Randolph Childress, Samaki Walker, all of these guys, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, I would made … They didn’t make college basketball cards, so I would make their card. I’d have an index, I’d get the magazine. I’d print up a little … Like cut out the picture, find all their stats, write the stats on the back, give them a little bio. When I didn’t have the pictures, I would draw. I liked to do a lot of art as a kid, so I would do that. I’d make little fantasy magazines and things of that nature which were always really fun.

 

Chris Erwin:

Were these just for you or were you selling these to your friends?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I’d sell them to my brother basically.

 

Chris Erwin:

Keep it in the family.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Right. Me and my brother would constantly be collecting basketball cards, trading them. And then we would build little teams that my dad or my dad’s friends would then judge. So we did a lot of that. We played backyard basketball. In my mind, what I mean is like, “Okay, we’re playing backyard basketball, but we need to make a league out of this.” I was making jerseys in the fifth grade for all my buddies to play in this not official backyard basketball league. So I’ve kind of always had that in me.

 

Chris Erwin:

I didn’t realize that you had such a creative bent to you as well. Very interesting to hear this. I look at you as the data, analytics and strategy mind behind House of Highlights and a lot of the work that Bleacher Report is doing, but hearing you, that you’re making jerseys, making sports cards and like drawing characters and all that, it’s incredible.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, it’s funny. If you were to talk to any of my high school teachers or my wife, I think they would think it’s comical that I started in the data and analytics side because I think I got a two on AP stats and got like a five or four on AP art. So I think they very like, “Wait, what? That doesn’t really jive.” But yeah, I think what has helped me a little bit with the data and analytics side is being able to interpret it more creatively and be able to have … I always wanted to be more on the editorial side, whether that’s a writer or a talent, but I couldn’t write that well, I wasn’t that great of a talent, I was a terrible talent. And then what I always had was I always had ideas, so I figured, “Hey, if I can’t do that, let me at least come up with ideas.” And then nobody wanted to listen to me, so I was like, “All right, well, got to have it rooted in something.” That’s how the numbers came about.

 

Chris Erwin:

Got it. Well, look, I think you got to test some of your editorial and talent muscles when you were in Pomona for college. So I think you made a decision that you wanted to pursue this sports media career. So you went and did media studies at Pomona, and you went from the East Coast to the West Coast to do that. Tell me about when you were at undergrad, what type of work were you doing? What type of work were you doing outside the classroom, and how was that inspiring your future sports career?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I was a media studies major at a small liberal arts school in California, which is really, really fun and enjoyable, but it’s not giving you the most preparation for a post-graduate life. If you want to dissect 1970s cinema, you’re in great shape, but there’s only so many jobs where you’re going to be able to do that after college. For me, I enjoyed school, and I think Pomona was a great college to be able to study media, play some sports, but I think I really found what it was that I loved once I was able to start doing things outside of the classroom. My first experience with that was I was on a soccer team, a teammate came up to me after practice one day and said, “Hey, do you want to work for the school paper?” I said, “Oh man, I’d absolutely love that. I’d been thinking about sports writing and stuff like that for a while, that’d be great.”

 

Doug Bernstein:

So he was like, “Okay, meet me under the campus bookstore, we’ll get going.” And I meet him under the campus bookstore, and I’m all ready to meet the team or whatever, meet my editor. And he’s like, “Hey, here are the keys. This is the office, the whole staff quit. This thing is yours.” So, that was a real baptism by fire, inheriting a college newspaper. I think it was like $5,000 in debt, which at that time, $5,000 in debt felt like $500,000. And then being able to lay out a vision for what I wanted the paper to be, build a staff, execute against it, do some sports writing, like-

 

Chris Erwin:

I have to ask, in that moment, did you get more excited where like, okay, there’s a little bit of shock value here, I’m going to have to build this from scratch, but I’m going to make it in my own vision. And I know what that looks like, and I’m going to recruit people that are excited by this and all the above or was it like, I’m not sure if I actually want to take this on?

 

Doug Bernstein:

No, I was way more excited. I was like, this is way better. I wasn’t very enamored with the traditional school papers, like a lot of the stuff that they were covering. So, we ended up pivoting and doing a lot more music and movie reviews, a lot more things outside of the school.

 

Chris Erwin:

It’s like Bill Simmons and The Ringer, it’s integrating sports and pop culture.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Exactly. I was in school in ‘O3/’04 when I started doing this. I think our first cover was the ultimate movie bad-ass was a 64-bracket ultimate movie bad-ass thing. So that was really, really fun and that was it exactly. It was like, man, I get to see out the vision or the creative that I would like for this to be and that was really, really exciting. And the ability to not just do the creative side but also really, really beneficial that I also had to do the business side. So I had to sell ads, go to the local pizza store, go to the local laundromat.

 

Chris Erwin:

Oh, so you were door-knocking? You had to drive revenue for the business as well and help pay off the debts?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, we had to make phone calls. We had to get ad sales, had to like pick up checks and like get a chicken parm at the same time. So yeah, definitely had to do like all of that and it was fun because it was an independent college paper. It wasn’t like supported by the school itself. So it was like … You really had like a P&L that you had to drive for and it was a great experience for a 20-year-old to be able to do that.

 

Chris Erwin:

Did you get college credit? That sounds like the best way to learn how to build like a sports media organization.

 

Doug Bernstein:

I did. I ended up getting school credit. So I think the second half of my junior and senior year, the second half of my junior year and my senior year, a lot of my credits were coming from like independent work. So I think I got credit from doing the school paper. I believe I got … We had a public access college [inaudible 00:13:57] channel that had long been dormant, so I started to be like oh man, what’s this? This looks pretty fun. I had a friend who’s a faculty advisor, like the world’s nicest man. He was 80-something years old. He worked at the theology school adjacent to where we were and so, I was like, “Oh, is there anything I can do for the school television channel?” He’s like, “Yeah, just run tapes back and forth, upload like a thumb drive and make a PowerPoint of like what’s happening this week, who’s speaking.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s great.”

 

Doug Bernstein:

And then when I went to meet him one time, they had an abandoned TV studio and I was like, “Wait, you have a TV studio here?” And he was like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Nobody uses it?” And he was like, “No, nobody’s used it in years.” And I was like, “If me and my buddies come and clean it out, can we use it?” And he was like, “Go for it.” So me and my buddies spent a Saturday and Sunday cleaning the whole thing out. It was like a three-camera studio, had like a switcher in the other room and we cleaned the whole thing out and every Sunday, for the remainder of the year, we filmed. Two of my buddies did a politics show and then me and one other buddy did a sports talk show.

 

Chris Erwin:

Wait, how did you learn how to use the studio? Of using the switcher and the multi-cam operation, who taught you that?

 

Doug Bernstein:

This guy, the guy who had been like this really, really kind man to go out of like empathy on us and would come like Sundays after church and would help us learn how to film and learn how to do the switchers and I would go home and then whatever Mac editing software I had at the time and edit together really pretty crudely but it was decent enough. Again, it was just a really, really fun learning experience to be able to have done that and then was able to do that and then get credit for internships that I was able do to during school as well.

 

Chris Erwin:

I also had to ask, I think you had previously mentioned that you had some, I think, leadership pillars or philosophies that you had printed in the office at the school paper and I think you still have a copy of this or you still use these pillars today. What is that?

 

Doug Bernstein:

It’s like actually like … I mean I don’t mean to take time to get it but it’s like 10 feet from me, I do have the little five-page write up of like the guiding principles for that school paper that are very applicable 15 years later to overseeing House of Highlights and I think as part of those leadership principles, a lot was about like laying out a very clear and concise vision, allowing everybody to really understand their roles but also kind of like this mantra that I’ve had and that I’ve kind of liked a lot was you don’t have to like each other but you always got to root for each other. And when you think about that, with any team or any organization, sometimes there’s an expectation that oh, we all have to be friends, we all have to love each other and it’s like, that’s not really the case. I think the best case scenario is that you’re all swimming in the same direction. Somebody’s failure is your failure and somebody’s success is your success.

 

Doug Bernstein:

I’m a big believer that like negativity is contagious and positivity is contagious and when you set the framework that what you have to do at the core is root for each other, so when we’re like, any person that we interview with, the last thing I tell them is like this is our guiding principle for when you join our team is like you’re not going to like everybody, we don’t always get along with our coworkers but you really, really, genuinely do have to be rooting and pulling for them and that’s been something that I think has worked pretty well for us and myself today, I think.

 

Chris Erwin:

Doug, you are so speaking my leadership language. I use the word positivity often and I agree and a similar value for us is we have always strived for excellence and that might require having difficult conversations with clients or with team members. I’ve learned, as a leader, that if you always introduce a shared objective, which is like, look, we’re working to do excellent work or to create something amazing, so I’m going to give you some candid feedback for how you can be better, for how we can be better, then it always lands differently. So, I really like how you think about it and I also like whenever you’re recruiting someone to your team that you’re making that expectation very clear upfront and it also kind of … It has a good sports vibe to it as well.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Right, exactly.

 

Chris Erwin:

So, let’s talk about all this incredible college experience and then your early career starts and I think the first job you land at, if I’m right, is at the NFL in around 2007.

 

Doug Bernstein:

That’s correct. So yeah, I had done an internship at the Tennis Channel in Santa Monica, which was really a great introductory experience, just all the internship stuff, logging tapes, doing research, learning to use Excel spreadsheets, all that stuff. Did another internship at NFL Films which, again, was a little bit more of the same. Again, a little bit more baptism by fire. I remember I went on my first shoot. I didn’t know if I wanted to be in programming or production. I went on a production shoot. They said, “We have a shitty job for you.” I said, like, “All right, I’m down. Let’s do it.” First big internship opportunity, they said, “There’s dog shit in the backyard. Can you go pick it up?” And I was like oh, okay. Maybe being a TA is not for me.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And then I did an internship the second semester at ESPN Classic Now, so I felt really prepared for coming out of school and then like most graduates, it’s harder to get a job than you would expect. I think it took me about four to six months to finally land something and that was after school. So I spent a lot of time over that final senior year trying to get a job and getting a break into sports is a really, really tough industry. And I remember I met with a friend’s father who was like … I told him I wanted to work in sports and he legitimately laughed in my face. He was like, “Okay, good luck. Have fun. Talk to me when that doesn’t pan out.” So, I was like, “Oh no, is that true?”

 

Doug Bernstein:

But was fortunate enough to kind of land at the NFL and was just a great way to get my foot in the door basically. Players get a percent bonus based on number of plays they’re in. So, I was responsible for the monotonous job of keying in … Like you had a picture and you key in who was in that play, like get their number, 89, 78, and then just doing that for every play of an NFL game.

 

Chris Erwin:

Players get a bonus for the more amount of plays that they’re in? You’re talking from a media coverage point of view or just from playing on the team point of view?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Like a tight end, right? If you’re in a certain percentage of snaps, you’ll receive a bonus, like a performance bonus. So the team can’t do it and then whatever, agent, player, whatever, their reps aren’t going to do it, so they have the league, as a neutral agent, do this. So, I think it’s a little-known thing but I don’t know if it still exists but at the time, for every NFL game, this is a great job, there’s somebody that just goes behind each field goal and takes a picture of the left side of the field, the center and the right side, zooms out, takes one more and then there are people that just key in those players. So the thing about sports is there’s always these little jobs that people aren’t aware of and that it is just taking whatever chance you can get that helps propel you to that next step because maybe you are in the NFL office, you do see the commissioner. You do get to send emails and experience things. So, it was fun. I was there for a couple of months before bouncing over to ESPN.

 

Chris Erwin:

At these low-level jobs, were you getting more excited about entering into sports media? Were you getting a little disenchanted a bit or was it no, it’s like hey, I like this but I just need to find my path and the role that I’m in is not it but I’m going to get there? What were you feeling in that moment?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Well, I’m excited to have a job, right? You’re just like very appreciative and grateful for a job. It was, I think, a six-month role, so I was like man, I really got to find something full-time. So it was like that appreciation but also combined with angst of being able to find that full-time role and trying to land in a spot that felt like more … It was like growing your career, which is kind of what that position at ESPN ended up being.

 

Chris Erwin:

I think you end up at Versus for a little bit but then you end up at AOL as a product manager at Fleaflicker, right? So, what was that role as a product manager? Because that seems like an evolution of what you had been doing.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Honestly, I was a customer service rep. A product manager sounds way better but the way I backed into it is kind of funny. I worked at ESPN for a year and basically was cutting games down for replays. If you’re ever up at two in the morning watching a college football game, I’d watch it live and then cut it down or I’d re-air SportsCenters, screen SportsCenters for re-airs, like Brazilian and all these other languages, really fun. It was like seven at night to seven in the morning and I always had this window where I would get ratings numbers. So I started to really dive into the analytics of the ratings and was like very, very curious about it just how my brain works. It was like if there’s a [inaudible 00:22:37] game, how does that perform? If it’s two top-10 teams, how does that perform? If it’s close, how does that do? If it’s a blowout, how does that do?

 

Doug Bernstein:

And I started doing this research late at night by myself just to kill time, and I might as well do something with it, so I forward it on to some people within ESPN, like oh wow, this is actually pretty interesting. And they started to share it and started … I would have interview opportunities within ESPN that were kind of in ratings or research, but I was a very ambitious 22-year-old kid. My wife came up to Bristol in Connecticut, which isn’t the world’s most exciting place. It wasn’t for her. So that’s why I bounced over to Versus where I was able to kind of do the ratings and the analytics side, kind of go into TV programming with where I wanted to land and as I was doing the TV programming, I ran into a couple of challenges.

 

Doug Bernstein:

One, Versus which is now NBC Sports, Hunting and Fishing Network, I’m a Jew that’s never hunted or fished, so that wasn’t the world’s best fit and also just I struggled in the role. Like it was a very … A role that required a lot of attention to detail, like real minutiae and that was something that I wasn’t like the best at, wasn’t given that much autonomy, which is probably right for a very, very junior level role and kind of struggled and as I was doing that, I was having a hard time … They were looking to move to Philadelphia. I’m a New York sports fan. There’s no way I’m moving to Philly.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So I had kind of like this couple of months where they were just kind of unwinding things at that office and wanted to kind of keep my brain really engaged, so I created like the world’s worst fantasy website is how I describe it. It had a good name. It was called Keyboard GM and I aggregated fantasy football rankings from different websites. And I went, oh, this is cool. Like maybe, I could do something in digital. I love digital because I was always doing that fantasy football stuff and kind of learning to code a little bit and build like a really janky website.

 

Doug Bernstein:

I also was doing a sports blog with a couple of buddies from ESPN and this was early mid-aughts sports blogging and really, one of the challenges on the TV side, was if you had an idea, it’d be like three months to get in front of the right person, three months of like sounding it out. Best case scenario, it gets approved. It’s like six months of production and then it’s on the air and it’s like the difference between a 0.1 or a 0.12 and it’s like man, that is a tough process. And when I was doing the digital stuff with my buddies, we would just create articles that we wanted to read every day and if they resonated, we’d be like oh, that’s awesome. Let’s do more of that. If they didn’t, we’d scale [inaudible 00:25:11], we’d be like okay, let’s not do that again.

 

Chris Erwin:

This is all on Keyboard GM?

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, there was Keyboard GM, which was the fantasy football website and I had … I think it was like sportsblog.net, going way back for you, [inaudible 00:25:21] sportsblog.net and then that was like that was where we just kind of blogged. So there were two separate things that I was doing in the digital space. I was in this period where I was just trying to find something to continue to work in sports. Ideally, wanted to get into digital. My mom sent me this job, it was like a product manager at a fantasy football website, and I was like all right, let’s go. It’ll be great.

 

Chris Erwin:

She sent you a newspaper clipping with like a red circle around it?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, pretty much. It really was a customer service rep job at first and people always like to say they started in the mail room and be like that lot, right? I always like to say I started in the digital mail room because this is like a classic AOL thing where they bought a fantasy football website. They didn’t tell any of their existing users. They just transferred them over to this new website. So, I was answering like 400 to 500 emails a day from customers about, “Hey, why are you transferring me? Where’s my lineup? Where’s my all this?” But it was a really kind of rewarding experience. I learned a lot about how to interact with your audience, your customer, your consumer.

 

Doug Bernstein:

When you’re playing in the world’s most detailed fantasy football league where it’s like 32-team keeper league with full IDPs, like you really have a level of understanding for your users that kind of is not surface level. Like you get to know users on a one-on-one basis. You get to know who your fans are, how to cater to your super fans, how to understand what really is an issue and what really isn’t an issue and work side-by-side and there was a programmer that founded it, a guy named Ori Schwartz, who was really beneficial in that he talked to me about what a roadmap is, which is something that I had no idea before, right? And really coached me up on the way of the digital world in a product and how to think not just of this week or next week but three, six months, a year out and then also taught me a lot, become somewhat thematic over the course of my career is about being a startup within a bigger organization.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, Fleaflicker was kind of this very small startup within AOL sports and within this mess of AOL Time Warner ecosystem and then that has played out really similar when like Bleacher Report got acquired and it’s like okay, a lot [inaudible 00:27:33] and then when we acquired House of Highlights, I had the same thought. Like I hearkened back to it and was like oh wait, what worked for Ori, this one guy, was like just a lot of autonomy and freedom and not trying to be micromanaging. And when we acquired Omar and House of Highlights, it was that same mindset.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, I was able to do that fantasy football side of things for about a year or two and then what happened was, because I had the analytics [inaudible 00:28:00] ratings research background, they said, “Hey, could you start pulling numbers for Fleaflicker, the fantasy football website?” And I said, “Sure, would love to.” And then because nobody else was doing that and digital analytics didn’t exist at the time, they said, “Hey, can you start doing it for sports?” And I was like, “Absolutely, would love that.” And then before you-

 

Chris Erwin:

I just love how you’re so positive and excited about trying new things.

 

Chris Erwin:

Hey, listeners. This is Chris Erwin, your host of The Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we’re putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guests, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work and it also really supports what we do here. All right, that’s it, everybody. Let’s get back to the interview.

 

Chris Erwin:

How did you create a culture and a mindset where like today, at House of Highlights, you trial so many different revenue streams and products for fans, right? Sports creator competitions, like talent and street wear collaborations to create new merch designs for different leagues and teams and I’m like, where do these ideas come from and how’d you get there and I’m hearing you talk about your entire history and career, you’re like oh yeah, I’m going to learn how to run a school newspaper, learn to be a writer. I’m going to learn how to run a TV studio and be on camera. I’m going to learn analytics. I’m going to start my own digital blog and fantasy blog. So now, I get it. And so again, you just jump into this new opportunity in data analytics with a very opened and ambitious point of view.

So, okay, I just wanted to note that for the listener. So, now what happens?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, so I mean I wanted to learn, right? My mom was bugging me about going back to like business school or grad school or whatever it might be, and again, I just loved digital media, like just my own internal self was like why does this happen? Why does this happen? Like what if you did this? Like how do you grow a sports website was of immense interest to me. So at a time, we were living in the city. My office was about five blocks from where I lived and my wife [inaudible 00:30:09] commuted into Queens. So she would have to leave for work at about six o’clock.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So I would go with her every morning and then I’d be in the office by six o’clock and this is AOL. People aren’t strolling in till like 9:30, 10:00. So for three and a half, four hours, I had the office to myself basically and I was responsible for creating a daily report that looked at 40 different properties but it was like AOL cut it up every way, like puppies, kittens, kids, dogs, like you name it, they had it and really was able to understand like that was my [inaudible 00:30:41] essentially, was like come in every day, and I’d study the metrics for home page topic from search topic, from engagement, what articles did well, what articles didn’t do well, what writers did well and just every single day or five days a week was responsible for like not just churning out this report but also really starting to like internalize what correlated to the numbers.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And I spent a lot of time sitting with the editorial team and there was a really incredible editorial team at AOL at the time, guy named Randy Kim, and I just had too many ideas than I knew what to do with and I needed to check myself and learn like okay, well, this is what the writer’s thinking about, this is what the editor’s thinking about, this is what the editor-in-chief is thinking about, these are all the things that we’ve done in the past and why your idea doesn’t work, this is what the designer thinks about, and I think really learning before doing helped me a lot in that role.

 

Doug Bernstein:

That was a big thing was there were people that would come in straight out of grad school that were, I’m sure, way smarter than me and way better with numbers but I think one of the things that worked to my benefit was that I had spent an inordinate amount of time listening and learning and gaining the trust of the people that I was going to be working with. So when I gave a recommendation based on numbers, it wasn’t just like oh, here’s the numbers, right? It was like where here’s a number guy, like again, this is like money ball days where like get the number guy out of here. It was like really trying to be deferential, especially at first and I put a big focus on like I would say like not try and be a weatherman breaking into the numbers but trying to be a doctor.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Not just saying like hey, the temperature was this, it’s going to be hotter or colder, like up or down but really trying to be prescriptive in terms of saying like okay, this is the problem. This is what’s going on and these are potential solutions for how you can solve it.

 

Chris Erwin:

I think a theme of your career is making sports more engaging and relatable for younger audiences. So, I think like as you start to look at some of the analytics from these 40 different AOL properties, what were a couple revelations that you were getting in either the mid-aughts or in around 2008 to 2011 that maybe you were seeing that others weren’t? That you leadership was like whoa, Doug, you really get this in a unique way, what was that?

 

Doug Bernstein:

So a lot initially was focused on search and I think a lot of it was that had traditional newspaper people that thought of things a certain way. So you write one story on one topic at a particular time and what we were starting to see, especially on that search perspective was, the interest wasn’t just when the editorial staff dictated it, right? So if we did a mock draft, an NFL mock draft mid-season, like historically, you only did mock drafts like the week before the draft. Like it was like sacrilegious to be able to do a mock draft like anymore than like a week or two out but when I was like, hey, if we could do a mock draft at the mid-point of the current season, I think it would do really well or at like the end of the college football season, we would see that do really, really well. And I was like oh wow, like there’s a level of interest and engagement here that’s not being met yet. People were interested in it. They were searching for it but there was nothing there for them. That was a big one.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And then the other big one was just like if a news story broke, for a while I worked really close with the AOL news team. So like if a tornado happened or anything that is newsy, politics, whatever, traditionally, they would just write the one AP-style recap and what we started to do is say like okay, well, let’s not just write the recap, let’s write like five … And now these are so commonplace that like it seems silly but at the time, nobody was really doing this, the five things you need to know on this topic, breaking down like who is this person that was at the center of this. Not just having one story of recapping a news event but having like a template of 10 to 20 different stories that depending on like is this a tier one event or a tier three, you’d be like okay, we need five stories on it and these are the five potential stories that you could do.

 

Chris Erwin:

So like early inspiration for Buzzfeed. You were like one of the first listicles.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Right, it was. It was like, at the time, Buzzfeed was struggling with SEO and I remember thinking, it was like it’s not that hard. They were doing a lot better in a lot of other stuff but yeah, like at that time, like I think some of the stuff at AOL was doing … And Bleacher Report and Huffington Post were like very early days like digital media optimization, SEO optimization.

 

Chris Erwin:

Got it. You just brought up Bleacher Report and I think that that’s a great segway actually into your transition to the company, which I think happened in 2011. So tell me what caused the move, what was the impetus and then what was your first role there?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, so the impetus was two-fold. So partially, was based on my current situation. So I was at AOL and they had shuttered AOL Sports FanHouse, which was their internal AOL sports brand and I was working on everything but sports, doing analytics and that just didn’t sit quite well. I was constantly reverting back to thinking about what can I be doing in sports and then on the flip side was over the final couple of months that AOL Sports FanHouse was around, I was responsible for looking at our Comscore reports and I would see in Comscore, our competitors and who was doing what. Every month, I would see Bleacher Report coming up and I would see next month, them coming up and I was like, oh, this is really interesting.

 

Doug Bernstein:

One of my friends from college went to school with a couple of their founders, so I was familiar with it and yeah, I worked with a guy at AOL Sports who ended up going over there as an editorial lead. He said, “Hey, we’re in the market for somebody to do analytics and I think you would be an interesting person for it. Would you be open to it?” And I was like, “Absolutely. This feels perfect.”

 

Chris Erwin:

So, you jump over to Bleacher and I bet you’re thinking you’re really into sports and digital. It’s an early stage company. Because I think Bleacher was started around 2005, if I remember correctly.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, probably, like yeah, around there, ’06, ’07, like ’05, ’06, ’07.

 

Chris Erwin:

Got it.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Like when it was actually like official, official is probably to be debated but somewhere around there for sure.

 

Chris Erwin:

So, it was probably in your mind, the ability for you to shape the company as well, to get in early?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I was employee number 40, which at the time, I didn’t really contextualize but now, being a little bit older, it’s really special to be in on a company at that level. To me, it felt really well-established but again, having a little bit more perspective on it now, I can see how nascent it really was. I remember when I would tell people I work for Bleacher Report early on, I don’t think anybody knew what I was talking about. So, that was really great and I was doing the analytics at AOL and had some ability to kind of be a part of decision making but really, it was still from like an arm’s length and I think they were being very kind to me. But then, when I went to Bleacher Report, I was kind of shocked, to be honest, that like it was the exact opposite where it was very analytics driven, very much about optimization, very much about giving the fan what they wanted, in particular the younger fan.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, Dave Finocchio, who found it, was one of the founders of Bleacher Report and has been just an incredibly brilliant guy, has been really, really instrumental to my career and Rory Brown, who was my first boss at Bleacher Report, my boss and me were really close. Again, another brilliant guy. They both were really critical in establishing a culture that was very much about let’s try things, let’s look at numbers and let’s try to have fun, I guess, in the process and it was just a perfect fit for somebody like myself that had all of these ideas of what I wanted to have covered in sports and those were shared by Rory, Dave and Bleacher Report as a whole and then be able to go off and kind of execute that and grow it and build it and keep growing it and keep building it and like fail a ton, was super, super exciting.

 

Doug Bernstein:

It was just like an incredibly exciting time to be at Bleacher Report as it was growing from like when I got there, I want to say like sub-10 million uniques to, I think, we reached a point where it’s like 40 million uniques and I think when we got there, it’s like eight million search visits a month to a point where it had 60 million and to be a part of that growth was really incredible.

 

Chris Erwin:

And so, for our listeners, what was Bleacher Report when you started?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, so when I started at Bleacher Report, it was just a sports website with about 100% user generated content. Those were the initial iterations. I think pretty quickly into me coming aboard, we started to have a little bit of an internal team where it wasn’t all user-generated. There were people that we staffed to write certain stories. We began to build out a newsletter product which then ultimately became an app but when I think I started, it was just strictly a website that was largely driven by user articles and that was it. That was the main crux of it.

 

Chris Erwin:

Fast forward to today and Bleacher Report is a multi-platform media brand that’s acquiring live rights and has acquired sub-brands like House of Highlights and there’s probably other things and you’re doing creator competitions and so much more. We’ll get to that story but okay, about a year in though, you were then acquired by Turner, which is you leaving the Turner ship and then going back through this. When that was announced, were you part of those deal talks at all or you just found out? What did you feel? Were you excited or were you confused about why is this happening?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I don’t remember if I … I think I was more excited than not, I think I remember that. And it’s funny because I was like at AOL Time Warner and then I left and then I immediately got put back on AOL Time Warner. I think I’ve been in like four iterations of Time Warner. So I think I was mostly excited, a little bit of trepidation because when you join a bigger media company, you don’t know exactly how that’s going to unfold, how [inaudible 00:40:47] is going to be and I think pretty quickly was like reassured that it was going to go well. So, there were people, David Levy, Matt Hung, Lenny Daniels, who really believed in Bleacher Report and the vision of Bleacher Report and allowed there to be autonomy for Bleacher Report to just continue to grow.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, it was like very similar [inaudible 00:41:08] like everybody was like okay, they acquired it but they just wanted to give it more infrastructure and resources to do what it was already doing. It felt like the same with Bleacher Report. It wasn’t like somebody came in and was like, “Okay, now produce a bunch of TV shows.” It was just like keep growing the digital presence that you have, like keep connecting with the younger audience and I think within a year, I felt really good about that acquisition.

 

Chris Erwin:

That mandate of keep growing a digital presence, clearly that’s worked well for you because I think when I look at your career profile, you had three promotions in the first four years there. So it seems your career was really taking off. Did you feel that you’re like hey, I think I’ve really found my groove here and I feel my career entering into a new inflection point?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I think yes and no. Again, I think like it’s all happening really quickly and at the time, Bleacher Report was really young. So like I think I started at Bleacher Report, I was like maybe 24 or 25 but the founders and the people running it were like 26 and 27 maybe, I think mostly 26. So there was kind of like this natural cadence, like every year we would grow, every year we would get bigger and we would take on … The team would grow with it. So, I was kind of along for that ride and everybody was relatively young and inexperienced, so it wasn’t like in a more traditional company, your promotion cycles are harder to come by but there, it just felt like okay, this is it.

 

Doug Bernstein:

I also think the promotion and everything was very rewarding and satisfying and I’m very grateful for it but at the same point, like I think myself and the team was like just really, really dead set on growing it. Like all the other stuff was like a little bit secondary. Can we hit these milestones? Can we unlock further VC investment? Can we get acquired? Even more so than that, like can we build a big audience? Like we always wanted to chase and be as big or better than ESPN. It was always about this case and everything else was kind of just like a byproduct that was happening alongside it and I think that chase was where the majority … That chase and the audience was really where the majority of the focus was.

 

Chris Erwin:

That chase though, Bleacher Report really evolves from a sports web, call it 1.0 brand to a dominant social media first kind of multi-media company. And I think there was a big House of Highlights acquisition in 2016. So as part of this chase, was there something happening that led you to be hey, look at what Omar is doing, we need to be part of that, we need to own that and were you one of the first identifiers as like hey, we need to make a move here and maybe we should be acquisitive?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, no, 100%. I mean that’s exactly essentially the story. So, I think we were having some early success on social and then I kind of moved into a role of kind of overseeing the larger social org and I think, over the course of the 12 months, we went from kind of like a second and third player in the sports space behind some of the bigger names and then we fast forward a year and we were just so maniacally focused on delivering the best social sports experience that when we picked our heads up in 12 months, we weren’t only the best in category among sports accounts, we were like not only the best with digital media, young digital media accounts, we actually were like top two or three on Twitter. We were like over all. It was like Justin Bieber and then us at the time in terms of overall accounts. The same on Facebook, we were one of the top most engaged with accounts on Facebook and then Instagram. We were pretty early on Instagram.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And we’re starting to reach a point where we were a little bit more mature and the business is kind of solidifying itself. We had been around for a couple of years and Instagram was really new and I started to think a lot more about like okay, we’ve always been a challenger brand. We’ve always been trying to unseat the established leaders. Who is going to do that for us? As we’re so focused ahead, where’s the risk and the risk was like somebody catching us from behind and I was really the mindset that Instagram was going to be, and this is like ’15 and ’16, where it was like still only photos for a while, it just transitioned to video and just like 15 second video. It was like we always went to where the audience was and the audience went from web to social and then inside social, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, like okay, well, we got to figure out Instagram. Very early on in House of Highlights lifespan, I became a really big fan of the account, I think when it had about 500,000 followers, led the acquisition, pitched it when it had 750,000 followers-

 

Chris Erwin:

So, you pitched it to your internal leadership like we should acquire Omar and this company?

 

Doug Bernstein:

At this point, we were having … I think Dave, I think, had transitioned out for a bit. We would have these like quarterly board meetings and I ran through this deck, which outlined our pivot to social, kind of the social monetization business that we’re looking to build and the store that we’ve developed in and around that and on the last slide, I had something that I really did not want to be a throwaway but I kind of was like okay, there’s a good chance this is going to be a throwaway, it was like was this pitch to acquire House of Highlights.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Luckily enough, the people in that room, again, Rory Brown, Matt Hong, Dave Finocchio, this guy named Sam Parnell didn’t dismiss it. They were like, “Okay, make it happen.” And really gave the green light to go about and do it and if you want to have fun, I would encourage you to try to pitch to an established [inaudible 00:46:40] company’s legal, finance and HR departments why you want to acquire an Instagram account, which again, people thought Instagram was just like posting rainbows and things like that, of a kid that, at the time, was 20 years old, yet to graduate college, was taking a decent amount of content that he didn’t have ownership of and had no revenue other than selling pocket like watch ads for like 15 minutes. That was definitely a very boring pitch for a lot of people.

 

Chris Erwin:

So, did you have to go pitch AOL Time Warner leadership as well? So, the Bleacher Report team was like, all right, Doug, yeah, go get the higher ups involved and like make it happen?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I got the green light from Bleacher Report leadership to go and pursue it and then I had to get Bleacher Report finance people onboard and all that but ultimately, I think, Dave and Rory and other people were responsible for getting the deal done. It wasn’t the world’s biggest deal, so I think they were just like okay, kid, go and do it. We’re not sure we really understand it but you seem really passionate about it and you guys have a pretty good track record.

 

Chris Erwin:

Who reached out to Omar in the beginning? Did you kick off the conversation?

 

Doug Bernstein:

I reached out to him. I think I sent like an overly generic or vague message that was like hey, big fan of your account. I’m from Bleacher Report. We’d love to talk. I think he thought I would come to like copyright him like out of existence.

 

Chris Erwin:

This is on Instagram? Like you slid into his DMs?

 

Doug Bernstein:

No, no, he had an email on House of Highlights. [inaudible 00:48:10] it was like, again, a couple hundred thousand followers, so [inaudible 00:48:13] was like a readily available email address. So I emailed him and he responded like basically like … I think I still have it, I got to find it. It’s like hi, what do you want? And I want to talk about ways in which we could potential partner and we got him on a call like, I think, literally that day or the next day and I think I told this story but it is funny because I call him up, we’re having a great conversation for a couple of minutes and like he just knocks me dead in the track. He’s like, “I got to hang up. I got to go. [inaudible 00:48:44] just signed free agency,” and like hung up on me, and I was like oh my god.

 

Doug Bernstein:

At first, I was like this is a little rude. Like [inaudible 00:48:51] at Bleacher Report. This kid’s like 20 years old. Like he thinks he’s like basically applying for like an internship kind of but he wants to do an internship with Miami Dolphins and he hangs up on me and I was like, oh man, this is not great. And then I thought to myself for a second, it’s like, that’s actually exactly who I want to be working with. Somebody that’s like so focused on their audience, so focused on the brand that they’re building that they’re just going to hang up on like a prospective job opportunity or partnership opportunity and from there, we just got along really well. So, we talked over the intervening months and was able to acquire it on January 1 on that year and the rest is kind of history.

 

Chris Erwin:

Has that purchase price been disclosed?

 

Doug Bernstein:

No, and it will not be disclosed.

 

Chris Erwin:

Don’t worry, this is not the podcast where I’m going to force you to say it. That’s awesome. All right, so Omar comes in and it’s like okay, getting the deal done is part of the battle but then it’s actually like executing against the vision and so this, again, is like you’re an up and coming executive and so the teams are looking at you like hey, Doug, you just made this deal happen but now like, let’s reap what you’ve sown, right? What are we going to do here together? And so were you responsible for setting the plan and making this all come to life?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yes, I mean I became the general manager of House of Highlights relatively shortly after we acquired it. My first job and the way I looked at it, and I referenced it earlier, was really about playing defense. So, for me, it was about I just want to put Omar, who is like basically a savant when it comes to this stuff, in a position where he is not beholden to anything other than growing this [inaudible 00:50:28]. So, basically I was like a left tackle and I would say like 50% of my job was just to allow him to continue to do exactly what he was doing but with the rights of the NBA and with the [inaudible 00:50:42] process for acquiring the user-generated content. So, obviously, I have an analytics background and knew the platform intimately and the two of us would just be insanely dedicated to growing the account.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Like nobody was more dedicated than Omar. Like he lived and breathed it and we would be texting every night at like two in the morning, being like do we need to do this, do we need that? What about this post? Trying to find UGC. Really, really didn’t even think about monetization of think about anything other than let’s grow this audience. That was it. Like everything for the first, I want to say, two years was only about audience and engagement. Like that was the 100% focus.

 

Chris Erwin:

What did you learn reaching out, acquiring a company, really like a personality and then integrating it to your org and being the leader here and the advocate? What was something that surprised you and then also something that’s like hey, this is how I became better from this experience?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Ooh, that’s a really good question. I think in terms of what surprised me is I had somebody that had been primarily on the analytics and content side and I hadn’t really done a lot of the business side of it and I think I had kind of that church and state divide and a little bit of oh, come on, the business side, look at this audience, like you could figure this out. And I think that was one of the things that I really matured on and had to learn how to get better at and was surprised by was just the amount of attention that you have to put into the fundamentals. Myself and Omar flew around the country the first year like going to Seattle, like Oregon and L.A., and all over to pitch the House of Highlights brand and it was that story and being there and really it’s like going to the pizza guy and calling [inaudible 00:52:30] chicken parms for the newspaper.

 

Doug Bernstein:

It’s like that where it’s like you really got to be part of the sale. You really have to understand how does this business make money? How does it scale? How do we build a support staff? All my jobs previous to the Bleacher Report, whether it’s at ESPN Classic Now or AOL Sports FanHouse or Versus, like basically everybody just got let go at a certain point because the audience wasn’t there. I really wanted to make sure and I think this is one of the things that was also really key to that experience was not getting too far ahead of yourself.

 

Doug Bernstein:

People have a real tendency that it’s like oh, where do you want to be in five years? And like really hot media digital startups that were like oh, we’re going to take over the world, we’re going to do this, that and the other, and I remember sitting with Omar and being like, “Dude, the most important thing is that like first and foremost, that we’re around. That we don’t take that for granted. That we’re building a business that’s sound and that’s sustainable and that could employ people and be successful, not just for the next year or two years but really be successful for the next, hopefully, 20 to 50 years.”

 

Doug Bernstein:

And that was a really, really big part of it was trying to build a foundation for a business that made sense and that wasn’t just like trying to chase every trend or trying to spend every potential dollar but really trying to be really disciplined and focused.

 

Chris Erwin:

Yeah, and that could even lead to conflict with the team that you acquired, like with Omar, for example. You’re the GM. You have a vision for this. This needs to integrate well into the company. We need to be here for the next 20, 30 years and you have to put your foot down on that, right? And the company was trusting you to make that happen?

 

Chris Erwin:

I liked your answer. That was definitely very compelling. So, I’m now curious, fast forward to House of Highlights and Bleacher Report today and I think a lot of peers and a lot of companies look at what you guys are doing, Doug, being like this is like this whole test/learn/iterate/improve culture that clearly you’ve had in your 15-20 year career. That is something that you definitely deploy as a leader of this multi-platform sports brand and so I’m curious, what’s a quick snapshot for listeners of here’s some of the big recent moves that we’ve made…but I’m also curious to hear when you talk about really catering to Gen-Z sports culture, what are you not doing that you guys should be? What are you thinking about next that caters to this next generation of fandom?

 

Doug Bernstein:

The way we look at it is like we see ourselves as really being on the front lines of what’s resonating with a younger sports audience every day across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. We’re posting anywhere from like 10-25 posts and all of those posts serve as like signals to help better inform what our strategy needs to be in the moment but also going forward. We also do a ton of research to just better understand the space and what we’ve really started to see and I think you’ve kind of hit on this earlier, at House of Highlights what’s kind of this middle ground is this fundamental shift from publishers towards personalities and a big part of the acquisition of House of Highlights was recognizing that shift and trying to find a hybrid and kind of Omar being something that … And House of Highlights being something that sat in the intersection of like publisher/personality.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And what we’ve seen is this shift increasing. So, I was just looking back at like a doc from 2018 where we lay this out where it’s like we were really early to social and Instagram. We really want to be early to this shift towards personalities and in particular, the creator space. So we’ve had a lot of success this past year of starting to create content in partnership with creators. So we’ve done our live creator competitions. So, we have done dodge ball was our most recent one. It ended up as kind of the number one YouTube global trend, which we were really excited about. We have a Grand Prix coming up we’re really excited about. We’ve also started to do VODs. We did VOD versions of these competitions. So we did a Highlight House Gridiron or football where we [inaudible 00:56:41] into a house and had them compete to determine who’s the ultimate football creator. We’re doing another one for basketball.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, for me, it’s really about doubling down on what’s working and I think that is where we see is working. I think one of the hallmarks of my career is just kind of like building off of success is part of that [inaudible 00:57:02] process is we’ve never gotten to a hundred before we’ve gotten to like one to two to five to 10 to 25, 50 and 100, right? So there’s this ramp up and I think that’s what we’re really seeing is we’re really seeing this shift, right? If you look at, I think, 10% of Gen-Z aspires to be a professional athlete today where at 35% aspires to be a creator, 50% follow a creator on social media versus only 35% follow a team, athlete or league. So, fandom has shifted and we’re trying to orient ourselves around that shift in fandom and not just kind of go along for the ride but really kind of lead that and we’ve developed really, really good relationships with creators.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, we’re not just trying to parachute in now that creator economy is a buzz-y term. A creator likes Supreme Dreams who is now as big a creator as there is, I’ve known Mark and his family for the last four or five years. Kenny Beecham and Through the Wire, who’ve become really big and influential in basketball, we have worked with them for three years. So, you really have to put it in … And Dan Levitt, who I know is on this podcast.

 

Chris Erwin:

Oh yeah, I have a lot of history with Dan.

 

Doug Bernstein:

[crosstalk 00:58:17] personal friend and incredible business man. We’ve been establishing relationships in this space for a long time.

 

Chris Erwin:

Well, that’s a good point. When you say, Doug, that we’ve really been investing in relationships with creators, a lot of people ask, well, how do you do that? What does that include? And look, that’s a really long conversation but if you were to list out like here’s how we approach creators differently, here’s like the two to three quick hits, what does that look like for House of Highlights and Bleacher Report?

 

Doug Bernstein:

It looks like this, so one is live creator competitions on a scale that nobody else is really doing them. I think that is a big, big part of it. I think the second is creator commentary, right? Historically, sports commentary has been driven either by two categories, one is former athletes or two is traditional journalists and what we’ve seen over time and particularly of late, is a new class really come in and own that and play a major part in that. Now, people seek out creators for their thoughts and their commentary in and around sports and we’ve worked really well in that. So I think that’s kind of the second category. I think those are the competition angle, the commentary, those are kind of the big one and twos of it and then also the incubation.

 

Doug Bernstein:

We’ve incubated creators internally. For example, we have a creator on our team named The Broadcast Boys. They went from zero to 2.2 million followers on TikTok and we’ve helped incubate them to success. We’ve worked with a creator named [inaudible 00:59:46], another TikToker who’s closing on a million who we’ve helped incubate to success on those platforms and then really give them the opportunity to shine, help them connect to a bigger and broader audience that we have and allow them to kind of tap into opportunities that might not be there historically. So, we just signed a creator named Nasher who’s really big in hockey and the opportunity that we present is not just like us leveraging his audience, which is a big part of it, but also him leveraging our rights and him leveraging the ability to appear on linear television.

 

Doug Bernstein:

So, I think that’s kind of how we look at ourselves and the differentiation that we present.

 

Chris Erwin:

Awesome. Very well said, Doug. Two final questions for me before we get into rapid fire. One, similar to your mindset back in 2015/2016, which is like hey, Bleacher Report, we’re ahead of the pack, so who’s coming for us? So, who is that for you right now/who inspires you? Whether it’s directly in sports or another modern digital publisher, who is that right now?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Very enamored and impressed by what FaZe and Thieves have both developed. I think what they’ve accomplished is really-

 

Chris Erwin:

FaZe Clan and 100 Thieves?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Right, FaZe Clan and 100 Thieves. I think what they’ve developed is really, really remarkable to have … To build like the modern vision of like the Cowboys or the Yankees is essentially what they’re doing, right? I think that is really, really impressive and I’m very … I have a lot of awe and respect for what they’ve done and are doing. I also look at individuals, like I take a lot of inspiration from whether it’s [inaudible 01:01:24] and kind of these collector creatives I think are really exciting to watch. What Mr. Beast has done. A lot of like what Night Media has done is really interesting whether … I got young kids who like [inaudible 01:01:36] and [inaudible 01:01:38], how they’ve kind of gone from these social presences, these individual social media presences to kind of these full on really big media brands. I have a lot of admiration for what they’ve accomplished.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And then when I look at the guys that we work with, Through the Wire, Kenny Beecham being a great example; Supreme Dreams, RDC another great example. They’ve developed cult followings and that’s an incredibly hard thing to do is to be able to really build and grow an audience that isn’t transitory, that just doesn’t go like with the scroll but really believes and loves you and I think those groups have really developed that and if you can build anything like that, that’s remarkably impressive and then just on like a really, really small level, like I’m a big US Soccer fan, so there’s a podcast called Scuffed that I have a lot of respect for, up and coming. They do really awesome job like hyper targeting a niche and being as good at it as possible.

 

Doug Bernstein:

There’s a Twitter account called [inaudible 01:02:41] and it’s just like this one small [inaudible 01:02:44] has the most unique voice and I take so much inspiration from this one person and their very uniqueness of voice and their ability to cut through clutter. I’m really like inspired by that. One of the guys that worked for us, Full Squad Gaming, which has become a really big gaming brand on TikTok, I really consume the space a lot, so there’s a lot of things out there that I really enjoy and so, I’m sorry that answer was long winded.

 

Chris Erwin:

No. I think what stands out is that you’re a decision maker and operator and you run a business but you’re also a total fan.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Oh for sure.

 

Chris Erwin:

And I think by being a fan and immersing yourself in just like the content and the creators and the publishers that you think are doing great work, that inspires you and that makes you better, right?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, 100%.

 

Chris Erwin:

All right, one last question before rapid fire. We’ve talked about the evolution of your leadership philosophy. One thing that surprised me in a very positive way is that you had a leadership philosophy from a very early age, when you were running the school newspaper at Pomona. If you were to capture a big evolution in how your leadership philosophy has changed from then to now, also I think in being honest, where do you see gaps or errors for you to improve as a leader to take your career and your team to like the next level, the next 10 or 20 years of you doing what you’re doing?

 

Doug Bernstein:

In terms of where the leadership over the last 10 or 20 years, this time I’m dating myself, has evolved is just a lot of maturation in terms of like understanding the big picture. So I think when you’re younger and you’re starting off, you only kind of see things through like your lens and what I’ve learned over time is everybody is doing their best, sometimes under difficult situations and empathy towards that makes you more productive and the team more productive.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Instead of being frustrated or jaded or like casting something aside because they’re not in agreement with you or they’re not moving as quickly, really understanding like everybody has challenges and everybody is trying to do their best and I think that learning kind of takes those points of frustration where you’re like quicker to lose your cool, I guess, in a way and resets it and reorients it and it’s like okay, let me try again. Let me figure out like where their struggles are, what their challenges are and when you have your own employees, you’re also trying to give them that context whether they’re frustrated with me, whether they’re frustrated with a peer or somebody underneath them, it is … That sends a perspective I think I really lacked at the earlier stages and that I’m starting to get more of but I think there’s a whole world of perspective that I still have to go.

 

Doug Bernstein:

And I think that’s the biggest thing is just like continuing to be open to learning and growing and trying to seek out different and new perspectives. I think that’s a really big part of it. Yeah, I think just in terms of [inaudible 01:05:41] to improve moving forward in terms of leadership. I think I’ve always tried to value people but I think there’s a depth of valuing people and their experiences that the last 24 months has really kind of pushed forward, particularly around DE&I, diversity, equity and inclusion, like I think that’s really come to the forefront and I think everybody, especially myself included, has work to be done on that front.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yeah, I mean I don’t know, there’s like a laundry list of things that I probably need to work on that [crosstalk 01:06:13]

 

Chris Erwin:

You’re very self-aware and reflective.

 

Doug Bernstein:

… like hitting deadlines and things like that but I think the big thing is just trying to gain a greater sense of scale and perspective. I think that’s a big thing.

 

Chris Erwin:

Doug, yeah, before we go into the rapid fire, I’m just going to give you some quick kudos. I’ve gotten to know you, I think I first met you through my colleague, Andrew Cohen, who knows Drew, one of the members of your team, and I think we just first chatted, was it like, six to nine months ago, if I remember correctly? And I remember that first conversation, I talk to people in the industry all the time and you’re like are we going to be on the same page? Do we think the same? Are we going to vibe? And I just remember, I was like, Doug and Drew are just awesome people and I was like, I really like these guys and I get why their business is performing so well because not only do they get it and are they super sharp but they’re grounded, they’re building a great team and they just have a great ethos.

 

Chris Erwin:

So then when I was like oh, I’m excited to interview you for this podcast, some people just fall into their careers. They’re these just unique trajectories that there’s no expectation, that’s unplanned but we were joking about this during the break, it feels like you are completely fulfilling your destiny. Like you were born on this earth as a lover and obsessor of all things sports and community and media and that has been something that started out with your family, with your father in very early years for you and I think that you had a vision for this early on, right? When you were writing in your third grade journals and you have more than fulfilled, I think, the career expectations that you have had and it’s amazing to hear your story and I think honestly, that what I’m hearing is that you’re just getting started.

 

Chris Erwin:

I’ve interviewed a lot of executives, I advise a lot of them, and there’s something I’m hearing in between the lines here. There’s some big moves that Doug’s going to make over the next decade or so. Whether that’s with Bleacher Report and House of Highlights or somewhere else, very excited to follow that and I think that also a second note is your self-awareness around your leadership from how early on that you’ve been thinking about it, I think that really sets you up for success. It’s inspiring and look, some of these questions I previewed with you in advance and a lot, I didn’t and for you to have such thoughtful answers off the cuff, that really shows something about your leadership character.

 

Chris Erwin:

So, kudos on that. I’ve learned a lot from you during this conversation.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Oh, appreciate it. It’s been a great conversation. Excited for the rapid fire, and I do very genuinely appreciate that, that does mean a tremendous amount.

 

Chris Erwin:

Very welcome. All right, so here are the rules for the rapid fire segment. Six questions, answers are to be one sentence or maybe just one or two words, quick phrase. Do you understand the rules?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yes, I do.

 

Chris Erwin:

Let’s get into it. Doug, proudest life moment?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Having my children.

 

Chris Erwin:

What do you want to do less of in 2021?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Eat just crappy, crappy food.

 

Chris Erwin:

Okay. What do you want to do more of?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Spend time with my kids, that’s the big one. Continue to be able to play with them more, not just kind of like spend time, like active, engaged time.

 

Chris Erwin:

What are one to two things that primarily drive your success?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Curiosity, I think, is a big one.

 

Chris Erwin:

Advice for media execs going into 2022?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Value your people above all else.

 

Chris Erwin:

Any future startup ambitions for you?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Happy where I’m at right now.

 

Chris Erwin:

Very safe, quality answer. All right, last one, this is an easy one. How can people get in contact with you?

 

Doug Bernstein:

Dbernstein, B-E-R-N-S-T-E-I-N, @bleacherreport.com would be the main one. I think I’m also on Twitter as … Let me see. I think I’m dtbernstein on Twitter.

 

Chris Erwin:

Oh yeah, got to look up your handle.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Yup, dtbernstein on Twitter. Those would be the two best ways.

 

Chris Erwin:

You now know how to get to Doug. You can flood his inbox or his Twitter DMs. Well, Doug, this has been a delight. Thanks for being on the podcast.

 

Doug Bernstein:

Been a pleasure. Excellent job. It was great speaking with you.

 

Chris Erwin:

Wow, that was a really fun conversation. I’ve gotten to know Doug just over the past year, year and a half or so and I knew that he had a pretty lengthy sports media career but I didn’t know it went that deep where his earliest memories were literally that of sport and going to games with his family. Pretty amazing.

All right, reminder that it really helps us out when you guys share our episodes. So, if you really enjoyed this conversation between me and Doug, share it on LinkedIn, share it on Twitter, anywhere on social media. It helps other people find the show and it allows me and RockWater to keep putting out these podcasts and interviewing these great executives and it also really helps us if you can go and rate the show wherever you listen to it. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, go and give us a five-star rating, leave a review. It really helps other people find our work and that would really mean a lot.

 

Chris Erwin:

So, appreciate the help, everybody and as always, thanks again for listening. If you have any thoughts on the show, any ideas for guests, hit us up at tcupod@wearerockwater.com. All right, everyone, till next time.

 

Chris Erwin:

The Come Up is written and hosted by me, Chris Erwin and is a production of RockWater Industries. Please rate and review this show on Apple Podcast and remember to subscribe wherever you listen to our show. And if you really dig us, feel free to forward The Come Up to a friend. You can sign up for our company newsletter at wearerockwater.com/newsletter and you can follow us on Twitter @tcupod. The Come Up is engineered by Daniel Tureck, music is by Devon Bryant. Logo and Branding is by Kevin Zazzali and special thanks to Andrew Cohen and Mike Booth from the RockWater team.

 

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