An athlete on the Players Association board explains why sports and tech need to connect. They've met with Reed Hastings at Netflix and watched streaming reshape sports rights. They built a player-focused tech platform with Bloomberg to teach athletes about entrepreneurship, ownership, and getting minorities into tech companies.
Chapters
Rudy came up with a great idea as we were trying to bridge the gap between sports and tech. There are a lot of parallels, and as you see the streaming wars, and as you see a lot of the content providers are going to streaming, you're seeing a lot of competitiveness in sports rights. You know, you just look at the NFL deals that just happened and You see Amazon going into broadcast games, you see games being broadcast even on Twitter. So the worlds are coming together right now. But I think we kind of saw that vision way back when. We actually went to Netflix's office and we had a chance to sit down with Reed Hastings and get a good feel what he was thinking about. And we, you know, we asked him questions about sports. So our minds were always just working and we saw what our exposure was and we wanted to The ultimate thing is to bring it back to our players and being unified as one. There's so much leverage there with everything that we do as athletes, and we go all the way into bringing minorities into the tech space as well. There's so much influence. You know, we're one of the largest— we are the largest consumers on the planet, you know, as African Americans. So I feel personally feel like our culture is exploited, but our culture isn't given a seat at the table in terms of ownership, in terms of stakes in these companies. So that's something that has been resonating with us for a very long time, not just within the last year or two. So what we wanted to do was, you know, bring that gap, bridge that gap, and be the bridge for a lot of these players who may not have the understanding yet, but give them the knowledge to understand what we're doing, come on the— we call it a platform, the platform ourselves. So what we did was we started with the Players Association, with our union, which I sit on the board of, and we have different player programs, whether it be learning about being a coach or a GM or broadcasting school, real estate symposium, so many different things. So we wanted to bring the tech side of it to the table, and we did it the first year, had some great success, a lot of players. A lot of great energy came from it. So what we did was we took it upon ourselves to take it outside for, you know, a lot of different reasons that held us back from what we were really trying to do, being that, you know, the union was involved. So we were able to go full scale, branching out with ourselves and partnering with someone like Bloomberg. And it's been growing every single year, wall to wall. We have everyone from all walks of the tech space, from entrepreneurs to investors, to fund managers, the athletes who have started leagues and companies on their own. So players have gotten a chance to see every side of the tech space and understand how we can play a part and continue to add value to the companies that we invest in going forward, or whatever they want to learn about in this space.
