Once upon a very long time ago I was an athlete. And of course a Boston sports fan, growing up in the city of champions. With 12 championships since 2000, there has been a lot to celebrate!
When I started MGMT Boston I wanted to explore the relationship between sports and startups in this city. Last week we co-hosted a breakfast with Kristen Craft from Fidelity Private Shares to meet some startups and operators building (and interested) in Sports, Gaming & Wellness around the city to uncover some of these insights. If you’re a growing startup evaluating your cap table management tools, you need to get in touch with Kristen asap!
TLDR: A tight knit community of high performers across both sports & startups provides a unique opportunity to build more interconnectivity here
Another big thanks to Jon Von Deylen from Drive by DraftKings who brought his learnings & investment perspective to the breakfast. Drive is a multi-stage venture fund that invests in SportsTech & Entertainment with founding partners who include DraftKings, General Catalyst, Accomplice, and Boston Seed Capital.
Jon shared that 70% of people in the U.S. say they are sports fans which implies 180M adult fans. 124M people watched Super Bowl LVIII and 68M of that audience gambled on the Super Bowl per the American Gaming Association. This implies ~60M Americans did not gamble on the Super Bowl and that number would be upwards of 100M+ if you extrapolate to the broader sports fan figure of 180M. As of their Q1 ‘24 filing, DraftKings had roughly 3.5M monthly active users. So even this $16B+ market leader only serves a small (albeit high value and growing) portion of the broader sports fan base.
There’s a good argument to be made that there are some big businesses to be built catering to 100M+ casual fans. Jon’s advice is to lead with unique insights and perspective. To think big but start building small.
The challenge (admittedly)? In consumer fitness tech, for example, a good first year retention mark is 30% and often lower when customers choose monthly plans. This “success threshold” makes it hard to build scaled businesses when you lose a majority of your customer base each year. Startups that can both identify problems and provide adequate solutions to drive better human performance over time will help deliver a superior customer experience (+retention) and is always of interest to the Drive team!
Ahead of the breakfast, I chatted with some members of the professional sports community to hear about their relationship with the local startup ecosystem. In short? It’s varied. Professional athletes get a ton of inbound interest across a variety of requests so they’re often playing defense and choosing from the myriad of opportunities in front of them (or not at all) with agents, managers, and advisors playing gatekeeper. It’s hard to audit quality and often “too hard” to figure out what is worth spending time on, especially with a high performance job where so much of your attention needs to be on the playing field.
It could be the recently retired professional athlete who is the best pairing for our startup ecosystem to adopt! Anyone interested?? Jules? Rob? Patrice? Dustin? Paul? Reach out!
At our breakfast we had representation from Cephable, Ekkobar, eSki Watercraft, Wurq, WHOOP, Mementix, Modulate, SportsVisio, Shift Group and more. Thanks to all who made it.
A lot to be built! Onward!