The Exchanges

Q It's going to be a lot of fun, and you probably know I'm a bit of a sports buff, so why don't we just start with your background and really your path to lacrosse?

A Yeah, so I grew up playing sports as a young kid. My dad tells me to this day that he would get my older brother, Mike, and my younger sister and I into whatever sport we had interest in playing so long as there was a path to getting us in there, and we played Majority of our ball in rec lacrosse. So I played soccer, basketball, my brother played baseball, I swam, I ran track, cross country, and there was a point as I was improving as a young athlete, I was 12, and I kind of shudder saying that because there's so much pressure on sports specialization for young kids today, but I was growing fast, and I was talented in basketball and soccer, and both of my coaches wanted me to play in basketball, AAU, and soccer, club soccer. And I wanted to keep playing both, so I told them no, and then my neighbor at the time was playing lacrosse, and he came to me with his backup equipment and said, hey, why don't you put this on and fill that open void you have in the spring? I didn't know what the hell lacrosse was. Despite being from Maryland, a lot of people think Maryland and New York are the two hotbeds. It's actually Baltimore and Long Island. So I was about an hour and a half from Baltimore, and at the time, in the early nineties, it wasn't much lacrosse. So I struggled for the first couple of years, and then over time, Really felt like I was excelling playing that game more than I wa…

AI assessment note: “my neighbor at the time was playing lacrosse, and he came to me with his backup equipment”

Q Yeah. So as you're now playing in MLL and running these camps, what was the evolution of that kernel of a business into where it went? Kind of until now, and we'll talk about now.

A Well, aside from my focus in lacrosse, which was playing in both MLL and NLL. So now all of a sudden I had a 17,000 dollar wage playing NLL. I had that 6000 dollar wage playing MLL. I had sponsorship income coming from Under Armour and Maverick, and I started a camping clinic business. So that was how I viewed lacrosse, and then next to that I had an older brother who was also an entrepreneur, and we started building companies together, and we were building gyms at the time because he played football at Dartmouth, I played lacrosse at Hopkins, felt like we knew a little bit about fitness, and then our third business partner at the time was an analyst at Summit Partners, and they had just acquired the majority stake of Snap Fitness. So we had an inside route to a franchise business that was pretty lean from an operational standpoint, from a cost structure standpoint. They could operate on its own, and we felt like, hey, this could be something that is in our wheelhouse from an intellectual competency standpoint. We had inside knowledge around how these businesses are successful through the angle of summit and the acquisition, and let's try to scale these at low touch points. So I was flinging gym memberships in Joppa, Maryland. I was living in Baltimore. I would train in the morning with my strength and conditioning coach, Jay Dyer. I would drive up to Joppa, sell memberships fr…

AI assessment note: “we started building companies together, and we were building gyms at the time”

Q And what did that look like when you were in high school?

A A lot of time against the wall, a lot of time creatively trying to improve. This was early 2000, pre-YouTube, around the turn of the internet age. And so we were getting a lot of our inspiration as young athletes through imagination. And on occasion, well, actually once a year, there would be lacrosse on television, and that was at the Final Four, and it'd be on ESPN too. So I would have those VHS tapes and rewatch those games to understand where and how the game was played at the highest level, and I would try to replicate it in my backyard. I think now there's more time allocated to Scrimmages and practices, and there's seemingly year-round lacrosse. I was watching a piece from Wayne Gretzky, who references this with his dad, too, that his time out in the backyard on the ice by himself, where he was just working on his skill and doing so creatively, was the most valuable and probably seminal time in his career, and he worries that fewer kids are doing that.

AI assessment note: “A lot of time against the wall, a lot of time creatively trying to improve.”

Q Did you find of the social media platforms, was there a bigger impact on one or the other? Did you just canvas all of it?

A Going back to it, I canvassed all of it, but those were different times. These platforms are evolving their algorithms daily. And I would actually say, if I were building now, and I was a young twenty-year-old, I would think about, you spray, and then you figure out which platform's best for your skill, the audience, reciprocity, and so on, and then you just go long there. There is overlap, but there's not full overlap, so there is value in being on multiple platforms, but understanding that value. So if you're an athlete right now, I think the biggest platform to be on would be Instagram. If you're, uh, Chief investment officer like yourself or an entrepreneur or an analyst or journalist, Twitter, right? That's where conversation lives live and it's viral and smaller user base, but really compelling content that goes on there. And then if you have the resources and the creative know-how and the ability to go shoot and edit, YouTube can be an incredibly valuable platform and has been for a lot of millennials and Gen Z's who have Evolved into these influencers of big, huge audiences. So those are, those are how you would, I would think about it now. If I wasn't building the PLL right now, and just long on media still, I would probably tighten more around whether I'm going to go, for example, video exclusively on Instagram or YouTube. I'm on both right now. And I love Twitter, so…

AI assessment note: “Going back to it, I canvassed all of it, but those were different times.”

Q And what are the most important lessons you learned from the interviews you did on your podcast?

A There are fantastic lessons from each of these conversations, and whether that's, again, with the folks that I mentioned, or Tony Robbins, or Scott Galloway, who's the professor of business and marketing at NYU Stern, nine-time entrepreneur, two-time New York Times bestselling author, Ryan Holiday, they give you tactics when you sit down with them. But at a really high level, and we all hear this, but it's, great speakers can frame things really well, and they resonate as a result. But to create something meaningful that has an impact and a legacy, there's literally no way around the work that's required to create. And it's time consuming. It requires an insane level of endurance and speed. Partially talent, but mostly endurance. And we often romanticize successful entrepreneurs or athletes and We're entertainers, but behind the scenes are just full immersion and real sacrifice, and so it's motivating for me, and it also gives me a concrete episode to go back to on a random basis, because they all talk about it when times are lonely or dark or struggling and building this things, like everyone goes through it.

AI assessment note: “to create something meaningful that has an impact and a legacy, there's literally no way around”

Q And what do you do over time if, if there are just imbalances? Will there be trades? Do guys retire from the league? Have you thought about that as a multi-year period goes on?

A Yeah, definitely. So in addition to forming these teams, which by the way, there's six of them, and we have the best players in the world, so the competitive parity is just absurd, right? I mean, if you look at, I would be willing to wager a lot that no one's going undefeated. But yes, from the moment we formed teams, which was two weeks ago, From the time we're filming this is then they're in the hands of the coaches. So we haven't unveiled publicly how trades look. We announced that we're doing a college draft. We haven't unveiled the order of the draft yet, but yes, just like any team sports league, we only have this moment once in our life cycle. And from there on out, these teams will take their own shape based on how the coaches interact with the players and adjust Through trades or college drafts or dealing with injury or retirement in subsequent years, they're going to be building to win.

AI assessment note: “Through trades or college drafts or dealing with injury or retirement in subsequent years”

Q I want to walk through some of this, because this is awesome. When you get started, So, you're gonna have to rent out big stadiums. You gotta figure out that distribution. Do you start with funding and a concept? Do you start by trying to get distribution locked up? How did you put those pieces of the puzzle together?

A So, we started with a seed round. Just like any founder or co-founder group, you've gotta put in a lot of work leading into any round of financing. Scott Galloway says you've gotta be willing to Sign the front of a check, not the back, and it gets even more dynamic than that, because very few people in the U.S. will work for free. Now imagine working for free, 80 hours a week, and then writing a check to the company that you're working for. Like, it's fucking hard. But you have to build your investment thesis. You have to create an OM. You've gotta have the right conversations with the players, and The networks up to that point in the stadium, you've got to have all the case studies and the comps and got to put forth the effort. So we did that first, and then we took the investment opportunity to some venture capital because the time to acquire MLL had gone, so you shift quickly from private equity to venture because this was certainly a venture investment. So we raised a small seed round, and the goal of that was to allow us to anchor a network deal Secure venues, get first leads in on sponsors, sign up players, hire an executive team. So small in the, in the scheme of sports, it was a healthy seed round, but so we had about a six month period to go execute. Reflecting on this, Mike and I, you have to be confident and passionate about your concept, but we had an opportunity at…

AI assessment note: “So, we started with a seed round.”

Q So was there a moment or a day when a light bulb went off and you said, okay, I've been preparing, I'm not sure for what, but now the idea that became the PLL?

A No, there wasn't a day. There were a lot of conversations. I was experiencing equally some small success and some small failures, and because of, The accelerated platform I had, which was an audience that was now tipping 700,000 followers in aggregate. If I launched an OTT instructional platform, which I did called the Paul Rabel experience, I could onboard customers much easier than Joe Smith launching a lacrosse instructional OTT. Even if Joe Smith's OTT had a better UI UX, I had greater reach. That's why athletes are now really valuable for early stage startups as small investors that can, if you're the entrepreneur and you carve it out well, get access to their audience. It's like immediate customer acquisition.

AI assessment note: “No, there wasn't a day. There were a lot of conversations.”

Q dynamic is kind of interesting in a tour based model. I'm imagining that the players live all over the place. How do you form and build the chemistry of a team? And some of it, you mentioned that it may already exist with some of the players when it's not like, uh, Bill Belichick's football team. We're starting on Monday morning. They're getting ready to practice for the Sunday game.

A Yeah, that's exactly right. So the first thing is that the cadence of practicing is pretty close to mirroring how pro lacrosse has existed in that there's a couple of practices, maybe three, depending if you're a Sunday game. A week that these guys get and it's jammed inside of a 72 hour window, but that's how these guys are used to it. And frankly, like if you zoom out and you mentioned Bill Belichick, who's a friend of mine, I've gotten to know him for the last decade and a half because he grew up playing lacrosse in the Maryland area like me. Football, they don't actually practice during the week, during the season. They ain't suitin' up. They'll go through skeleton offense and defense. But it's a lot of film work. It's a lot of rehab, strength and conditioning, conversations, and all that in-person experience is very valuable. But understanding where we are at this stage, and we'll get there in a future stage, But add the technology and tools that are available. So there's a lot of software services that allow coaches to host video conferences with players every night during the week. They can send out scouting reviews. They can send out tape to players. They can monitor viewership from players. That type of scouting and video prep and work, that gets done remotely. That's easy. And then it's our job as the league different than What pro lacrosse players have been afforded …

AI assessment note: “cadence of practicing is pretty close... jammed inside of a 72 hour window”

Q Among the other media venues you've touched on, the one we didn't mention was your podcast, Suiting Up. Why don't you just talk a little bit about the last couple years of that and what it is and what you learned from it?

A If your audience doesn't Know by now if they're still tuning in. They, they know that I talk a lot. So this medium is great for someone like myself that likes to air it out with someone else, but I grew up with learning differences. I had auditory processing challenges. I had ADHD. I was an early adopter of a program that's called Kurzweil. It's still in schools now, but it's essentially you scan your reading material, or now you can just upload it online, and it can read it back to you, and you can click and highlight. I'm a very visual and audible learner. And so I was always attracted to podcasts, and a few years ago I found myself, and it's part personality type, just so obsessed with the medium and the way that I could satisfy a lot of intellectual curiosity and learn. I mentioned going to those sports conferences through my first decade as a young professional. Essentially was getting that information on a daily basis, depending on who I was subscribing to and listening to through this forum. And my friend at the time, who I was working closely with on a few projects, who's now our manager of content and a savant when it comes to digital, social, and frankly, widely technology, his name's Tyler Steinhardt, he was tapping on my shoulder and knew my relationship with someone like Bill Belichick and Venus Williams and Steve Nash and other folks. He was like, hey, you love po…

AI assessment note: “Why don't you start your own? And share some of those conversations”

Q How do you form the teams? There's no draft. There's no individual owners. Like, how do you put that together?

A Yeah, myself and my brother Mike are co-founders of this business. I'm our chief strategy officer. Mike's our CEO. So I work across essentially media and corporate partners. And then I chip in around, you know, rules and innovation and product on field from time to time. But it was critical for us that we Bifurcated our org and built out a lacrosse unit that could focus on competitive integrity, management of coaches, operation of weekends, management of players. So our player relations team tucks under our lacrosse org. And so we brought on Josh Sims, who's our head of lacrosse. He's about a 15 year professional in sports, product management and technology. He was a three time first team All-American at Princeton. One of the best players that the game has had over the last few decades, and he was constantly watching us and pinging us around, hey, this is really interesting what you guys are doing, and I've been distant from the game since I retired playing pro lacrosse, would love to, like, entertain coming back. So we, through a course of interviews and so on, brought him on as our head of lacrosse. So he oversees all of what I had mentioned, and is also currently building out his team of operational managers and so on. So he helped hire our head coaches, which are all world-class, kind of led by Dom Starge, who's arguably one of the best lacrosse coaches in the game's histor…

AI assessment note: “forming our teams, it was a combination of getting feedback from our players”

Q I want to go through some of the subtleties in how you actually then form the league and the team. So it first starts with, how do you pick the players?

A What we looked at was, all right, with our players, and this is why it was really attractive, and having been there, and we talked about the 6000 dollar wage in 2008 is, it's just not enough to be a sport that produces the top Quality competition on the field. You need your players to be full-time or about as full-time as possible. And I say the last part of it because our players are still, because of habit, a lot of them have jobs or are coaching. So there's going to be probably a three-year transition. We're not saying, hey, leave your job on Wall Street tomorrow and come take this wage that we elevated from what MLL formally distributed. Uh, But there's certainly a demand around attention during film and practice time scheduling and all that stuff. So we elevated the wages. We also solve for a challenge that I had experienced in some of my peers that were full-time lacrosse players and that we were sourcing our own healthcare. It's a challenging time, no matter who you are in the US. So we said, okay, true single entity league, we can open up healthcare to our players and so they can opt in. And then the last one, which is, I think the most transcending is We viewed ourselves as an early stage Silicon Valley startup. Venture backed from folks like Josai and Josai Sports, Rain Ventures, CAA, Chernin, Blum. We have an individual who's one of the most successful hedge fund ope…

AI assessment note: “What we looked at was, all right, with our players, and this is why it was really attractive”