Warren Packard on expanding globally: think big, but you need local partners who know the ground. He's working with Royal Challengers Bangalore in India's cricket league and planning partnerships across cricket, rugby, and football in Asia and Europe. These relationships take years to build.
Chapters
Another great tension that we learned from investing internationally at DFJ is global versus local. And this comes up a lot here. And I think this is actually captured in that saying that you need to think globally and act locally. I gotta be careful. If I say that the wrong way, we. It's a global economy. There is no doubt that whether what's going to happen with the US Economy or the European economy or whatever, it's going to happen, it's going to happen beyond your control. But in the final analysis, it's all about the global economy, which is critical. What's happening in Asia, what's happening in Africa, what's happening in Europe and the US you have to be prepared for what's going on. But at the same time, getting back to the focus, you need to realize that you've got to think locally, because if you're going to expand your business into some of these regions, you have to know what's going on in those regions. In fact, just the other night, we had a call with the Royal Challengers of Bangalore in the ipl Indian Premier League cricket. And, you know, cricket is one of the sports that we cover. It's a great sport. It's not one that I know very well, but, you know, huge following. And IPL has got a great following. And I guess the Royal Challengers have a great following as well. And we're talking to them about how we integrate our service with theirs. And one guy very astutely on the call says, well, I looked at your app and it's all, you know, it's kind of focused on US sports, and you have US service providers and all this stuff. And we're like, yep, yep, we admit it, we're guilty. But the focus part of our business is we don't even know where to begin when it comes to India. But the global thinking globally and thinking big part says we need to be involved with cricket, we need to be involved with rugby, and we need to be involved with international football, the real football. And if we're going to get into India, if we're going to get into China, into Japan, Korea, Germany, whatever, we need to have partners there who help us out because it's a very complex landscape. But we have to be thinking about heading into that direction because that's an important part of our future. And so we're laying the seeds now for our ability to execute on the international landscape. And hopefully the Royal Challengers will take us up on their offer and help us into India, and hopefully we'll get a call from Bayern Munich to get ourselves into Germany and from an EPL team to get us into Britain. We'll see how these things play out, but we have to have some patience.
