Sean Leary: The ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ of Sports (Full Transcript)
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Ronen Ainbinder 00:45
Joining us now is "the Mark Zuckerberg of sports" — This man founded THE social media app for athletes, also known as Sports Thread when he was 22 years old.
Sports Thread started as a platform for athletes and coaches to connect with each other, network, and find scholarships. And it has grown to add a Software-as-a-Service solution for youth sports events.
The app has a network of over half a million users, and it has disrupted the youth sports industry by monetizing its platform through advertising.
This guy is also a former Division I baseball player for Oral Roberts University and won two NCAA conference championships.
The man recently received recognition by Yahoo Finance as one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs To Watch Out For In 2021.
So buckle up, everyone, for today's FIRE Halftime Snack with Mr. Sean Leary!
Sean Leary 1:39
Thank you for having me on. It was a great introduction. "Mark Zuckerberg!". It's very flattering. I appreciate it.
Ronen Ainbinder 1:44
Man. You are the founder of the most important social media app for sports. And I want to kick off our conversation, Sean, by asking you a quick icebreaker man, this is just to see if we're on the same page. What is your favorite pizza topping, man?
Sean Leary 2:02
Ah, I'm a weirdo; I gotta go with Hawaiian.
Ronen Ainbinder 2:05
Hawaiian. Okay, man, we're not on the same page.
Sean Leary 2:09
Yeah, many people have heard me say that. They just cringe. And then the other half and people said, you know what's up. There are two types of people in this world, those who like Hawaiian pizza and those who don't.
Ronen Ainbinder 2:23
Man, mine is four cheeses. But I think I respect your take. And so let's transition now to the, to the real stuff, why we're here. And man, you have such a career in professional sportsmen baseball, traveled, the country played for college very, at a very high level. So I want to ask you, when did you first develop a passion for sports? How was that? Like? When did you realize that you had a talent for it? Tell us about it, man.
Sean Leary 2:53
Well, I grew up playing sports. And I was lucky to have parents who were very supportive of my career as an athlete. My dad played for the Denver Broncos for a year and a half, a year and a half, two years; he was primarily hurt while he was there in his career, but nonetheless, he was a very high-level athlete. And while I was growing up, I think that he did a lot for me to identify that I was a high-quality athlete and that my sports could take me somewhere. And then he also went far enough in sports in his own life, that he recognized that I had an ability level and that he needed to go and do the things necessary to make me improve, like finding me good coaching and getting me in the weight room and getting me the knowledge that I needed. And being highly encouraging and supportive. My mother was the same way as well. So then all about sports since I was a kid, we're a sports household. And I was very lucky to have a support system around my family and me that wanted to see me do well. And they made a lot of sacrifices to give me opportunities.
Ronen Ainbinder 4:08
Is it me? Or is it that most of like the athletes that become professional, they are the parents and the support that they received from them play such an important role in their development as an athlete, do you think that this is probably the most factor when it comes to someone who was born and probably had talent but thanks to their parents or their families, or their surroundings? This is just one of the most important, most critical reasons they could become pro?
Sean Leary 4:43
Well, I think I think anybody can work their way out of their situation. There's no question in my mind about that. I know people I've seen go on and play division one sports or professional sports who came from tough circumstances and didn't support it. But I also think that's that in a lot of ways is even more impressive. But no matter what, everybody needs help; everybody has to get that from somebody. So I think that if it's not from your immediate family, it's probably from a coach, or a neighbor or a teacher or somebody, but you know that everybody needs a support system. And I think people just have to go and find it and be motivated to put in the work and do the things they need to do well. But also recognize that if they're not getting that at home, there are other people who you can find who care about you, and we will help you along the way. And that's just everybody's individual journey.
Ronen Ainbinder 5:44
What are two or three lessons that you learned in Division One baseball that help you win in business and entrepreneurship and Sports Thread? What are some of the lessons that you transition from, from baseball,
Sean Leary 5:58
The biggest lesson that I learned as an individual in baseball is that you can't ever be satisfied or complacent with where you're at in terms of having had success. And that's a huge lesson that has helped me perceive my own success and drive me to go into my professional career. Because when you're a division, one athlete like it's every single day, you need to show up and perform and do well and continue to improve, or else you lose your spot, or your team loses. And the coaches were good at instilling that culture at all three of the programs I played for. But I think that that's something that's a very hard lesson to learn if you're not put in an environment like I was to learn it. Many people start to succeed at something, and they get comfortable, and they kind of like, relax, and they're like I made it. But in reality, like, you may have made it up to the upper level, but you're probably not where you want to be for the rest of your life. So you get to enjoy feeling like you achieve something and then get back to work. So I think that was one of the best life lessons that came out of division one sports. The other one is just that how you do anything is how you do everything or take care of the small details in your life. All that stuff adds up to being a high-performing individual, like everything you do, whether it's not making your bed in the morning, or like David Goggins talks about that all the time. And that's a great, great message. Or it might be not picking up, not showing up early to practice, for your sport. Or if you're in the business world, not thinking about planning for a morning meeting and getting your team on the same page and walking in unprepared would be a good example, if not, not being ready.
Ronen Ainbinder 7:57
Yeah, I think that both lessons relate to how it's all about the process and less about the goal. It's all about focusing on working hard every day and doing what you need to be doing and putting in the effort instead of thinking, Okay, I want to reach this level. And then once I'm there, I'm just gonna fall off cliffs. So I love the takeaways, Sean. And now want to switch over to talk a bit about Sports Thread man, the company you founded when you were 22 years old, man, I'm 25. And they haven't found that one. So now I feel like I'm at a disadvantage. But how are you like, how are you guys democratizing the recruitment process through Sports Thread? What? What's happening over there, man? What went through your mind when you started this being 22, to share with us the story?
Sean Leary 8:46
Sure. Well, first, I'll say 25, you want to be an entrepreneur? You got a lot of time left. I think anybody can start at any time. It's just whether you feel like you have the right idea and want to go after it, but I started a Sports Thread because of my experience. playing college baseball, I got recruited out of high school and was one of the better high school baseball players in the country and went to play ball at Pepperdine University. And while I was there, there was a big recruiting scandal that happened. And there were dozens of kids on multiple teams on the campus who were receiving scholarship funding from an institutional grant at Pepperdine. It has a big endowment, and there's a lot of very successful people who put money back into the school to try and make it great. So they were giving athletes money out of that fund, rather than athletic scholarships, and I was one of them, and I wound up losing my scholarship. And I was one of many kids, and I don't think we all didn't do anything wrong. We just thought we would go to school and play our sport, but it turned out the athletic department was cheating across the board. That was disappointing, but They offered me to come back and play on the team again without a scholarship. And I couldn't afford that. So I left and went to junior college. And while I was at Juco, I played for the coach, John Altobelli, who passed away in the helicopter accident with Kobe Bryant last year. Just an incredible, incredible guy helped me move on and continue my career and watched how he impacted so many other young men and helped them move on in their life. And a lot of those lessons we were just talking about, I learned from him and my other coaches at the other programs. But while I was at that junior college, I met dozens or probably even hundreds of other athletes who had very similar stories to me; they were all dealing with the same thing, which is trying to get recruited all over again and go to a division one school or a four-year college. And at that time like, there weren't many great options to get your name out there. You can pay a couple grand to some services to call on your behalf and say, hey, I've got Sean, Larry Orange Coast College, and he's a pitcher, and he throws x y, hard and here's his era, and what do you need out of the bullpen in next year and try and get you a place to go play and I didn't have that kind of money. And even if I did, I wouldn't have wanted to spend it. So I spent all my time when I wasn't playing ball. Looking up every college division, one coach in the country is email blasting out information to them. Trying to figure out ways to get my recruiting video to embed into my email, which is 2012, wasn't the easiest thing to get that sent out. And it was just this awful, antiquated process. And the alternative was expensive. And I was hearing a lot of other athletes be frustrated about it. So I came up with the idea to use software to bridge the connection between kids and coaches in college and help athletes get to school for less money or for no money, and came up with that idea pitched my dad on it because they knew he had started a bunch of companies in his past and could tell me how to get started and he liked it. And then I went to junior high and went to my last stop at Oral Roberts, the last school I went to. And while I was there, I wrote the business plan for the company and raised the first million dollars to start it. Then I graduated and built the first version of the platform. And after I got that first version going with, it extensively exhausted the money we had raised and needed to raise more. And we call it a good friend of my dad's who raises capital in Silicon Valley for companies. And we asked him to help us, looked at what we were doing, and said I love your concept. But you're thinking too small about it. And you don't need to raise more money right now. You need to meet my friend Dave O'Donnell. So I met this guy on Dec. Who turns out was the VP of corporate marketing at ba systems, an eight-and-a-half-billion-dollar acquisition by Oracle TIBCO, a multi-billion-dollar company started by the background, a DBA. And the VP of corporate marketing at Borland software, which was the big Microsoft competitor in the 90s and late 80s, and got involved with the company and kind of took me under his wing and showed me how to mature into an entrepreneur who's ready to lead a big company, and also flew me in and out of Silicon Valley. Many, many, many times over the next three years, while we continue to build the business to meet with all of his former bosses and colleagues, people that are incredible at what they do in their different areas in the industry, whether it would be sitting down with someone who is running an award-winning PR and marketing agency, or someone that software billionaire who had started many successful ventures, I met with dozens of these people with deck and I'd get to go through the business plan and explain where we're at. They would give advice, and it's thanks to Dick's help the team at Sports Thread and the advice that they got from those the people that I was able to figure out a way to solve or provide a solution for the problem that I identified when I was a young kid in college and build a business around it.
Ronen Ainbinder 14:31
The business started as a social media platform, and then it transitioned to more of a like a b2b system for us youth sports events and stuff. I wonder if the company has many focuses. I know that you also guys work with licensing deals, such as Sports Thread Miami, Sports Thread California, and I wonder what side of the business you guys need to like me To win to guarantee a sustainable future.
Sean Leary 15:05
So we have, we've built a very broad platform. That's that's the that's the concept that we are we've employed in, at Sports Thread you have a platform is something that allows for many different verticals, or many different business models to interact with it, we've built the sport said platform, and on that platform, you can do social networking, you can promote yourself to college, you can interact with your peers, you can do team chat. Businesses can sell there and can conduct advertising and sell products and services. That's how we produce revenue. Companies can organize events and communicate out with their people. We've built all these different things that you can do within the sport, said platform. And the reason why we built this broad platform, and this was the advice of the group of people in Silicon Valley, and the people who have gotten involved in helping us lead the company, is by building a broad platform, there are so many more people who can be a part of it. Many more people out there can be a part of a company that has communications technology, provides something for tournaments, and does team chat and scores and schedules. And, that's the social networking part, posting your videos and just interacting with your peers, and then also getting recruited to college, there's millions, there's hundreds of millions of people around the world 125 million people in the United States, who would fit into some category, that that I just named, we have something for someone out of that 125 million people, every one of them that's involved in youth sports would find something good for them on the on our platform. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is, it's not that we need to win with one individual function on the app, it's that the goal or the purpose of the platform is to bring together a gigantic group of people. And that large group of people that that scale is what will ultimately make us win. And that's why we've invested the time and money and effort into building something so broad and so diversified in terms of the different types of people who can give value to it.
Ronen Ainbinder 17:24
Yeah, it's super interesting because there's this thing that I call the "chain of sub-pains". That is basically, you have a pain in the market. Let's say, for instance, the recruitment process of youth sports is a pain because it's not democratized. It's not efficient. It's very expensive, right? But all of those are sub-pains, things that are smaller than the bigger pain that is more complicated or more specific. And I wonder how important it is for you to be the one solving all these like micro pains, let's call them instead of just saying, okay, we are the solution for this exact problem. This is like, this is where we are, number one, we can be like, instead of being top 10 in most of the different categories. Why not focusing on being super specific top number one on one thing?
Sean Leary 18:22
So we do that we have, we have three areas of key focus, the first of which is helping athletes get recruited, we want to make sure that we have top-notch service, and that where we're providing that connection, and that's, just told the story of why we started a company. That's why we did. So we focused very heavily there. We focus heavily on providing excellent software as a service platform for our clients that host youth sports events. We provide that service get their athletes, parents, and coaches involved with our platform, get them involved in the social network, the recruiting, and the fun aspect. The third-place that we focus on is driving results and doing a nice job for the brands who work with us. Because at the end of the day, we have to produce revenue to provide these services for the athletes and the other users on the app. So we focus very heavily on those three areas, the social networking portion, getting kids this college and helping them brand themselves, supporting our clients on the software as a service piece, and supporting the brands who work with us and pay us for the market access that we provide to the app. We need to focus heavily on those three areas, which encapsulate the majority of the usage on the app. We don't go out and do what you just described, which is trying to be the best of 10 or 20 or 50 things, and there are 10 2050 hundreds of things that fit into the youth sports market. There's $19 billion per year. Bear market, that's a lot, there are many different products and services and moving pieces in there. Going back again to why we built a platform by bringing together so many people, we can also attract great companies, great brands who have built products or services to solve specific pain points that they're the expert in. And we work with them and try to pass their knowledge along to our kids, the users of the athletes on our app. A good example of that is that we don't try to be an authority on NCAA compliance and eligibility. So we work with a brand called honest game. And there, they're, they're market leaders in that space. And they come on the application, and they teach and educate people about it. So rather than us trying to be great at that and great at 20. Other things, we have our main key areas of focus. And then, we work with companies that have a great point-specific solution. And because we've built this big market, there's a lot of value for them to come in and, and talk to our talk to the people who are using the app and brand themselves. So we think we're able to produce value all around by taking that approach.
Ronen Ainbinder 21:17
I love that. I love that, Sean, let's talk about COVID man, global pandemic; your company probably was affected one way or the other. I want to know if there was any way COVID was a benefit for your company. Was there anything that helped you guys either in terms of users getting adapted or having more time being spent or on the app or any other side of the business you want to share with those who benefited from COVID?
Sean Leary 21:50
COVID was an interesting time for us because it helped, and it hurt at the same time. Again, going back to why we've chosen this platform approach, why we've built something very broad that can attract a lot of people and can support a lot of people in different ways. I think that carried us through the pandemic. In fact, I know it did; we had had a lot of initial success in getting users on the app through working with our clients, our suffers service clients, companies, they host you at sports events. Well, obviously, there weren't any US sports events for a very long time. I mean, we're in the middle of getting some of our clients back up and running right now. I'm thankful to report that we have, like I think, over 500 tournament's that we have locked in dates with our clients. And we'll see running in 2021. Now that the vaccines are coming out, that's exciting news. And it's great to see that part of our business come back. But that was definitely the hit that we took. We lost a huge influx of how we get new users; we lost our partners were hurting. It was a rough time. But because we built this broad platform, we still had all these other things and all these other ways to produce value for our users. And even though the event support, part of our company sort of took a hit, our company's social networking and recruiting part exploded. Right after the pandemic happened, we became one of the top 200 apps on the App Store and in the Apple App rating for the sports category out of 40,000 companies. And we got there because all the kids couldn't go play sports. And I think that had two profound effects on the athletes and the reasons they came to our platform. The first is they couldn't get recruited. If you can't go and have a coach come out and see you play and you're not getting stats, you got to find another way to get your name out there. And we offered that. And that was an important thing because the kids had come on our platform, they could load up an old video that they had old game film, they can go in the garage, and if they're, take videotape of themselves hitting balls into it in a net or, go in the backyard and work on drills and tape that content. And then our network allowed them to send it to the colleges. So I think we played an important role in helping them overcome having their playing season taken from them and not getting seen in person by a coach. The other huge effect that we know that we saw a lot of was the kids were stuck inside, just like everybody was and that's that's a hard time for anybody to go from, living your normal life being around your peers and your friend group. Especially when you're a younger person and these young athletes last, not only their time that they're getting to spend around their friends their time, being outside and playing the sport that they love. But when you're growing up, and you're an athlete a lot of the time, that's, that's a big part of your identity, as well. If you had asked me when I was 16, who are you, I would have told you the first words out of my mouth; I just said, I'm a baseball player. And I can say, for certain, that a lot of the kids who use Sports Thread would identify as an athlete, if they had to describe themselves, they'd say, I'm a volleyball player, I'm a softball player, I'm a football player, or just, I'm an athlete, and our sister, our network, and our community, a place to be an athlete again, and to interact with like-minded people. And I think it was an important area of the congregation and helping them stay connected and feel good about themselves still, and keep that identity through the pandemic.
Ronen Ainbinder 26:00
The idea that when you're a kid, sports plays such an important role in your identity, you, you, your peers, your team are like your friends, and this is what you talk about all day, at least when you're an athlete, then you're devoting your life to that. So it's great to see that such a company like Sports Thread was able to provide a solution for a problem and fill that gap in that need for children all around the US. That's awesome, Sean. Since we're running out of time because this is just a halftime snack that can't take all day here. Um, I want to ask you this. One last question is more personal. And that is what's the nicest thing that someone has ever done for you? And why do you remember that?
Sean Leary 26:48
Well. I think it's hard to pick one person. But I think that the nicest thing that someone has done for me in terms of there are many ways to interpret that question. But I'm maybe the nicest, as in most impactful. And I would say the group of people who have just selflessly given me their time and advice. The investors have all the people who have put time and advice and money and resources and belief into me and the business. Those who have given my team and me a chance to be successful and go out and affect our mission, I want to very much wake up every day and go to work because we want to make sure that we're honoring them and all the things that they've done for us. But make no mistake about it. If I hadn't had countless people go out of their way to teach me something, or give me their time or invest in the business, or just anything that they could do to help. We certainly wouldn't be where we're at today. So all of those people, all of that collective effort and collective good that they've done. I'm very thankful that we get to pay it forward, and we're helping kids. And, I'm thankful that we're at where we're at, and we have a chance to do it because of them.
Ronen Ainbinder 28:33
Thank you for sharing, Sean. I want to also thank you for your time when coming on the halftime snacks man was an absolute pleasure to host you. I'm very excited to see what's gonna come out of the sports Thread and you in the future. I can't wait to see it. And yeah, man, I appreciate it. And thank you so much for coming to the halftime snacks.