Inside Front Office Sports’ Strategy For Building A Digital Sports Media

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0:27Adam White: You've been asked to run the company's social channels, but company content plays by its own set of rules. It needs a logo in the first three seconds, but it can't feel like an ad. It needs subtitles, except when it doesn't. It needs to run at two times speed and deliver a complex message. Simply, of course, within 9x16. Thankfully, your company has Canva, so you can easily edit your video and every version of it. What will you Canva today? Get 1 % better every single day. Whatever that 1 % is, it's all about learning and improving. Those are the words of one entrepreneur and a Forbes under 30 honoree, now a CEO of a media company, and he's upset in the traditional media space.

1:14In a minute, we'll be talking business with Adam White, you're in the Enterprise Zone at the NASDAQ.

1:25Hello, everyone. It's Jabari Young, senior writer at Forbes and Uni Enterprise Zone at the NASDAQ market site. Thank you for joining. And I have a special guest. His name is Adam White. He is the CEO of Front Office Sports. This is a New York-based news publisher and covers sports business. And he's also a 2019 Forbes Under 30 honoree. Adam, thank you so much for coming, man. I appreciate it. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Yeah, well, you're joining me, man. I appreciate that. Well, listen, man, I appreciate it. Dive into all of that in a minute. But before we start, how's the family, man?

1:55How's your wife? It's good. She's great. Yeah, we have had a busy year. We're coming up on a year being married, which is always fun. So we're going to do our anniversary trip to Asbury Park, of all places. She loves outdoors and the beach and adventures. And she's like, we've never been to the Jersey Shore. So we're going to do that. Yeah, beautiful, man. Well, listen, check out the Jersey Shore. Because you're originally from Arizona. Originally, yeah. The Jersey Shore, I mean, you might not be all familiar with it. No, no. If you have any recos, let me know. Well, Cape May is great. Okay. Cape May is phenomenal.

2:23And if you want to get out of the state, you know, down in Rehoboth Beach down in Delaware, that's a pretty good one as well. But what's the most important thing you're learning about being married? I know you're coming up on that one year. I think it's always a work in progress, right? I think that's the one thing that I think is a little bit different than when you're dating. It's just like, you know, dating, granted, we had been dating a long time, eight years before we got married. But I think it's just the weight of the relationship feels heavier in a good way. the conversations changed to a little bit more about, hey, like, what is next and what are we developing?

2:53What are we doing together as we think about kids or things like that? Whereas, like, probably before then, it was a little bit different. And so I think, yeah, it's just a work in progress all the time, but again, not in a bad way. And how do you continue to find ways to meet each other where you are and what you need? Yeah, you always have to call her before you make that big purchase, too. Yeah, that's true. That is true. Hey, man, listen, you follow the stock market at all? Of course. Yeah, well, you have to, right? Tell me, what type of investor is Adam White? Oh, man. Well, it's so funny.

3:23My outside of work is pretty regimented and I wouldn't say conservative, but relatively straightforward. I have my money in the QQQs of the world and all of those things. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm not trying to day trade. I have enough to do, which is funny because on the business side of things, it is certainly obviously more aggressive. given the entrepreneurial spirit, the business. A lot of my potential upside is tied into whether or not the business does what it needs to do. And so it's a little bit of half and half. In the stock market, it's let's just put it in there. Let's forget it.

3:55I sometimes forget my password because I don't even want to think about it. I don't even want to, you know, I mean, I can figure it out, but I just don't even want to have like access to it. I just like, it's over there. And then on this side, it's a little bit more. You're building to retire. There are some people who are kind of building late and because they're ready to get out of it, but you have a long-term thing. Yeah, for sure. So an aggressive entrepreneur and maybe a conservative investor. Yeah, I think that's fair. I love that. Listen, you walk into a third grade classroom, Adam, and you say, well, what is it that you do, Adam?

4:23Do you say, hey, I'm a boss of this website? To a third graders? Yeah. Oh, man. I would say I run a media company. That's probably the easiest way to think about it. But it depends, I think, for them. I create content on the Internet or I work with people who create content on the Internet. is probably the easiest way to do it. And that content is focused on this intersection of sports business and culture. Yeah, I think they would pick that right up. I would hope so. You're a new age content creator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say an influencer. Overseeing it, yeah. I went to school with Alex Earl.

4:55I think they would probably know that. Well, I mean, perfect segue, because again, CEO, founder, and CEO of Front Office Sports. This is a company, a media company, that you founded back in 2014 while you were at the University of Miami. Went from website and dealing with that and the newsletter, and again, covering the sports business industry. I closely followed that when I was covering it back in the day at CNBC. But based in New York, about 70 employees I'm seeing here. In 2023, the company was valued at around$40 million, and that was up from$25, according to Bloomberg. And on previous podcasts, you're estimating to be profitable this year at around$24 million.

5:33Did I get anything wrong? Nope, all facts. All facts. Okay, great. Valuation still accurate at all? Yeah, directionally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we're talking about 40 million plus? Yeah, 40 plus. Okay, great. Well, so update me, man. What's going on with front office sports? We have so much going on. I think luckily for us, we're in this really unique time where the business of sports writ large has never been more important, more interesting. At this point, sports is truly like our last monoculture outside of maybe a few scripted or unscripted TV shows. You know, Survivor 50, I feel like had a moment, but you think about what happened with the World Cup, you think about with all of these things that are happening, that the sports is just the center of the conversation.

6:11Brands want to be around it. Athletes are obviously now kind of the main ecosystem of influencers today, specifically in major cities. You see someone like a Jalen Brunson, who is now the king of New York, right? Like really end up taking what is the impact that is happening on the field and now moving it to the off the field standpoint. And so because of that, and because we've been doing this for a decade, we've been kind of riding those tailwinds in a lot of ways, given the fact that our positioning is really like, how do we make the business of sports interesting to a mainstream consumer who sits mostly usually in kind of white collar jobs, 25 to 54 years old, who are interested in kind of that next level of fandom.

6:51That's never been like a dedicated publisher. You've had a lot of them that were more industry trade publications, which is totally fine. And that's needed. But there was never one who said like, outside of like a Darren Revell, who kind of, he, you know, paved or kind of blazed the trail in this category for a more broad set of audience. We said, okay, let's take what he did as a one person. And this was inspiration back in the day. And how do we make that into an actual outlet in a company that covers this stuff? Because of the fact that those things are now super important. And so as we think about all the things, we're launching a nationally syndicated TV show.

7:25We have a consumer-facing app coming out. Our newsroom is bigger than it's ever been. We were talking off camera about how we're hiring a college football reporter and an NFL reporter because, again, most of the major storylines today happening are the storylines that are off the field because they do trickle down into what happens on the field as well. And so it's been a really fun time. I think, again, like I said, there's never been a better time to be in this space. And for us, it's been essentially the culmination of the last decade of kind of beating this drum saying, no, no, no, this is what people actually are interested in.

7:56This is what people actually care about. And then to see so many other now mainstream people saying, oh, this is what people actually care about. but it's like a little bit of validation for what we've been doing over the last decade. I mean, listen, you mentioned it, man. Sports is a driving force. Looking at television, media rights, and things of that nature, that's the last must-see TV because, you know, unpredicted, unscripted. You never know. You want to miss, can't miss that moment. But what's unique about front office sports? Because in previous interviews, you said you wanted to be the Wall Street Journal of sports business, right?

8:26Now the Wall Street Journal is your competitor. Of course. Coming into the sports business landscape. Financial Times is in there. and obviously the other platforms and sports business journalists of the world. You know, we, Forbes, do our own valuation, although you guys are really not in that space. But what's so unique about front office sports where those other major legacy media competitors are coming in and trying to take some of that? I think I'll give credit to some of the others for sure. I mean, look, for us, it's validation of what we've been doing, right? Like if they now care about it, I think they've seen the success that we've had in this space, which is great.

8:59I mean, at the end of the day, for most of those large or legacy publications, what they're doing is truly kind of like a dessert. It's not a main course. Like they'll have a couple reporters, a couple writers, a couple people doing it. They'll have one or two events, right? Which is totally cool and makes a ton of sense for their business. But we have a team that's now 70 full-time that has social accounts dedicated. We have 2 million cross-platform followers. We have all of these things in this entire ecosystem that we've built up over a decade plus. And so I think one that just differentiates us in that way, shape, or form is like, if this is where you want to go for this news specifically, most of the time it is going to be broken by a few outlets in the category, one of us being one of them.

9:39And I think, again, for our standpoint, overall, you start to look at what the New York Times did, right? Like they had sports and then they acquired The Athletic because they realized that the New York Times wasn't known for sports. And I give Meredith and that team so much credit for being able to kind of put ego aside. They're the New York Times. They're the biggest digital publisher, biggest print publisher, biggest media company writ large almost outside of linear TV in the US, and you could argue probably some cases globally. And they said, well, look, like one of the areas that we can't win in is sports.

10:11And so we're going to go out and take an aggressive bet on The Athletic and buy The Athletic. And she was just in an interview in Cannes saying The Athletic is the fastest growing part of the company, which makes a ton of sense. You had the World Cup, you had a business that got plugged into the New York Times machine that has advertising now that can be bundled and all of this stuff. And so again, at the end of the day, all of those people coming into this space, I think just further validates the fact that this is what people care about. And because of the fact that the power players in this space have gone from what was traditionally kind of more so families, you know, you had families owning teams a generation ago, and now you have wealth managers, private equity titans, the biggest names in the world.

10:52I think the Walton family by themselves, who obviously run Walmart, own two or three or maybe even four teams and different brothers, sisters, everything like that, right? And because of all of that, now you're starting to see the mainstream interest become really real in this category, which again, rising tides lift all boats. For us, it makes it even easier when we go to market and we talk about why is the business of sports important and why this is something that adversaries should be around. Well, guess what? Not only do we say this, but now Wall Street Journal says this, now the Financial Times says this, now Bloomberg says this, now Yahoo Sports says this, now everyone says this.

11:26Is that your play though? You brought up The Athletic, right? And obviously they were purchased. I used to work at The Athletic. I remember they came and they were scooping up local reports left and right to help build credibility around their platform. Worked like a charm, New York Times bought them. Is front office sports, I know you guys are owned by Redbird Capital, private equity company. Is that the play when the private equity company, I guess, says, okay, our cycle's done to sell to one of the legacy media assets, the Wall Street Journals of the world, or to find it, because you guys have done it.

11:55The New York Times, again, is that particular place. Yeah, I mean, look, I think we'll have that conversation with anyone and everyone. Luckily, we have great partners in Redbird who specifically on the Redbird IMI side with Jeff and the team, understand media, get media, know what makes media work and what makes media doesn't work. And I think that has been so awesome for us when they came into the business in 2023 to be able to really provide us with the resources to take the swing. We had kind of already established product market fit. They came in and allow us to really pour some gasoline on that.

12:26And that's where you've seen a lot of the growth happen over the course of the past three plus years. And so, yeah, for us and for them, sure, that makes sense, right? And that could be a natural outcome. But at the end of the day, it's going to be what is something that is accretive to us, our team, to them. And it could be legacy. It could be another PE. Who knows, right? For us, it's really just how do we continue to focus on building the business? The World Cup was awesome for us. We're rolling right into what we're doing with our consumer-facing app, our new TV show. We're getting right into the fall sports season, which is going to be loaded.

12:58College football is going to be crazy, NFL. All of these things are bigger than ever. And so let's take advantage of that and continue to build and see what happens. Yeah. Jeff Zucker, you mean the former CNN boss who is now chairman at Front Office Sports. You mentioned Front Office Sports tonight, right? New 30-minute program. Yep. and distribution looks amazing, right? Yeah, 93 % of the US plus. Sinclair, Grace, Scripps, Sunbeam, and apparently 85 % of American homes now. It's like 93 % now. 90 % of American households will be able to see. What time, what day, what's the plan? Yeah, it'll depend on the market that you're in.

13:32Most of the top 20 markets, you'll be anywhere between 10.30 p.m. till midnight, Eastern Time, or whatever their time slot is. Daily, every day? Every day, five days a week and once on Saturday. So six days of programming on a daily basis. And for us, there was, you know, as many people have probably seen, the syndication market is changing a lot. There is not the appetite nor budget for big, you know, huge entertainment-like syndicated shows with massive talent and things like that. And so it created an opportunity, given the fact that sports is really the driving force of all of these things.

14:06You know, it's going to be 22 minutes of fast-moving in and out. How can we bring great guests on? and how can we tell the stories and the headlines and the things that are really moving the conversation today. We kind of position it as like, if your sports show is only showing your highlights, you highlights, you're kind of missing the whole story, right, like ours, our goal is to tell you the rest of that story, right? And so yeah, we're really excited about that. The market has been super receptive from a syndication standpoint. And look, all of these channels and all of these local markets, they need more sports and sports adjacent content.

14:39And so for us to be able to step into that in a way that is really obviously accretive for our brand, but also gives them the opportunity to have another sports adjacent programming or sports programming that they can sell to advertisers in the local market is a huge win for everyone. Yeah, what would you tell a viewer, right? I mean, listen, these are the people you're trying to attract to watch this show, and if it does well, certain revenue share splits and all that thing, all that stuff goes up, but what do you tell the viewer? Because there's so much content out there. People can tune into anything.

15:10Netflix, you know, any time of the day, why should, if they see front office sports tonight coming up, why should they stick up and... Yeah, I mean, look, I think we're going to have a great host in Matt who's going to be super entertaining and fun. So that's going to be a huge part of it. I think we're going to have a bunch of news that we'll break or have exclusively on the show, which is great because it's going to be powered by the newsroom. And then we're going to have an amazing roster of guests and characters that I think they should be tuning in for, right? Because, again, this gives us something that is an entirely a competitive advantage for us.

15:41And we're going to spend a ton of time, effort, and energy really leaning in and making sure that every night when someone clicks into the channel at 1030 or whatever time it is on, they're going to be met by something that's fresh, that's exciting, that's unique. Right. Again, certainly if they want to watch highlights, they can find that everywhere. But if we can provide them with something, an insight or an interview or something that's a little bit different, that's why we hope that they'll come in and tune in and watch what we're doing. And I think the value that we're going to provide is the value that we provide on social and digital and all of our other platforms is that really it's news and information that sometimes you can get other places, but oftentimes you really can't.

16:17And we want them to come into that ecosystem from what is a more traditional linear TV environment. Yeah. Once again, expecting$24 million in revenue. Bulk of that coming from advertising? Live events is big now? Yeah, our business is about, you know, I mean, look, advertising, which includes events, is essentially our entire business. We don't have any sort of subscription product. So, yeah, it's going to be all brand supported for this year. Is that working for you guys? Because that was one of the things you did change. You were starting to go with the paid subscription model, and then you backtracked and said, you know, why not?

16:47What's keeping you from charging? Yeah, I think the paid subscription model was like a data product that we rolled out at a time where we just didn't have enough resources to staff it appropriately. It gave us some great early indicators of what people wanted and things like that. But at the end of the day, especially nowadays, our competitive advantage today, beyond the TV show and everything else that we've already talked about, is the fact that we do remain free, right? Like that was a big thing of like, you know, we wanted at least a still, like this is a 12 year old brand, but really the business got started in earnest at the end of 2018.

17:17So our first full-time year was 2019. We got our first round of funding. And so when you look at it, it's a 12-year-old brand that's really only like a five or six-year-old business. And honestly, in the last three years when Jeff and the team came in is really where we started to take off. And so at that point, it's like we still have trust to earn. We still have audience to build. We still have habits to form that I think we haven't done fully yet. And I think as we continue to invest in the team and the newsroom and all of these things, a year or two years down the road, we can certainly explore that.

17:49But again, like for us right now, there is an advantage and an opportunity in having the platform open to everyone who can experience it, who can feel our brand, who can touch our brand, who can understand what our brand stands for. And then eventually down the road, maybe there's an opportunity for us to do that. But as we know, media changes so quickly, who knows? But for us right now, it's like, hey, like we still have the opportunity and ability to earn a ton of trust and build a ton of audience as a news platform that is one of the only few that are free. What's it like being CEO of a company?

18:19Changes every day. Changes every day. Yeah, I mean, look, it's awesome. I think the ability for me now is that, you know, the things that we focus on at this point is like we've built a brand. We've gotten from, you know, zero to one. We've done that. We've started it. We have product market. We've done all the hardest work. Now the next step of the hard work is how do we continue to make a platform that people who work for us, because our business today is essentially people and software. And that is it, right? Like it's a media company, right? As a media company, you have people creating content, people selling it, you know, people posting it.

18:53Like it's really just a people company. And so how do we continue to build a platform that is where people can come and do their best work? There is a lot of people who've come from other places who got hired on to work as reporters or whatever here at FOS. And a year, two years, three years later, they're onto big national jobs even beyond what we can do, which is honestly a great outcome for us, right? Of course, we would love those people to stay. but if people can use us as that opportunity to not only feel like they have the ability to advance their career but make a big impact, that's awesome and we'll continue to work with them to try and make them stay as long as they can.

19:27But at this point, my role is how do I make things easier for our team across all things? The reason why we're building an app is we want to make it easier for our audience to consume our content. We have more content than ever before. The reason why we're investing in the events and things like that is to build faces and franchises so that the people who work for us feel like, wow, not only am I a reporter here, but I have a newsletter, I have an event, right? The reason that we've signed these content partnerships with the leagues is to make it easier for our sales team to go to market and sell and say, hey, you know, XYZ partner, we're an official partner of the NFL.

20:00And because of that, we can use their marks and IP and commercial content that makes it easier for them to have a conversation. Because at the end of the day, we're still a challenger brand. While we are certainly the biggest in this category, if you think about media in general we are certainly a challenger brand and so we have to use every advantage that we can in market specifically from an advertising side of things and so yeah I mean look my job today is as CEO looks very different than my job a year ago two years three years ago did and now it's really about how do we get rid of a lot of the roadblocks unlock a lot of these things make strategic capital allocation decisions with the board that is going to advance some of this stuff and then overall just make it and be focused on how do we build a brand and a platform that matter not only for our audience but also for our employees yeah biggest positive surprise adam of being ceo being in this role was the biggest positive surprise i mean look i think it's the impact that you can have right um i think whether and the platform you can build i think really it's just i was everyone's like well what is the uh what is what keeps you up getting up in the morning and all these things what keeps you motivated and i I was like, well, what keeps me motivated today is that we have 70 employees whose rent, mortgage, kids college, all of that stuff depends on what we make from a decision making standpoint every single day.

21:16And we have people who can use the platform to exceed and excel and take advantage of that stuff. And so I think that's the biggest positive is, but it's a hard thing to learn because early on you're just like fighting for survival and trying to do all of these things where now it's like, okay, how do we really set this up to scale? and how do I get myself out of the day-to-day weeds because me being in the day-to-day weeds isn't the best use of my time and it makes things like all junked up and things like that. So I think, yeah, the biggest positive is that even though you wouldn't think that there is a lot of impact that you can make, you can across employees' lives, across, I mean, sometimes even like the platform when we cover things, when we write about things or they go viral.

21:56I remember getting notes from people who, you know, we just posted about their story to your point earlier when we were talking about people really care about other people whose like careers have changed and lives have changed because they got opportunities off of the things that we had posted about like that's cool and yeah you would have just never expected it yeah have you gotten past or is that still an issue of credibility because there are some veterans in the media business who may look at front office boards oh that's just a website right and obviously yeah you guys though you got to put respect on your name yeah you've been out there you're part of the culture now when i'm scrolling through the timeline.

22:29I'm seeing the viral moments that's going on. I mean, you're broken news in your own right. Have you gotten past that credibility phase? Yeah, I think we have for sure. I mean, I think we still have to earn it every single day, right? Like I think we start, I mean, we, we break five, six, seven, you know, massive stories, usually a week that are picked up everywhere. Original stories. And then we have a newsroom of 20, right? That just shows you the output that we have. And I think, again, the category that we found, I think, yeah, I think overall people look at us very seriously. We see ourselves now being followed by so many different other outlets, whether it's story angles, story types, things like that, that I think have made a huge difference.

23:07And so I think we've certainly have gotten over the industry credibility thing. I think it's still more of an awareness thing. How do we get our stuff in front of more people? How do we continue to earn that trust every single day? Because that's the biggest, most important thing. I think the best compliment we can always get is like, man you guys really just have great reporting that has no real bias it just delivers the facts it's straight down the middle like that's for us like that's the that's what we want to do is we want to give you the news and information that you need to know about this case in this category and you can decide what you want to do with that we don't need to interject our you know if we had an opinion you know column obviously then sure that could be where it is but in the news and reporting we're going to give it to you straight without any slight or bend and because of that i I think that's been really something that people see as super positive.

23:52Yeah. Well, listen, man, let's take a step back, right? You were raised in Arizona, right? I don't know how far you were from Scottsdale, but what town in Arizona? Phoenix. I mean, they're all touching each other. Yeah, I love Scottsdale. Yeah, it's great. I love it. It is. But what was that like for you growing up down in Phoenix, Arizona? I mean, it was great. I mean, the city of Phoenix has changed drastically since I last lived there full time, which is now 13 years. You know Ford's under 30s down here for the next two years. Yeah, I know. Yeah, which is now 13 years ago since I actually lived there full time.

24:20But it was a great place to grow up. I think it's an incredibly underrated state in general. Why is it underrated? Why do you think? It's underrated because everyone's like, oh, the summers are so hot. And it's like, they are, but there's air conditioning now. And so in every place, the summer usually is at least warmer, right? So, but outside of that, you know, you have three months of really, you know, end of May to end of August, yeah, it's hot. But outside of that, it's amazing, it's beautiful. It's six hours driving from really anywhere you wanna go. You can go to Mexico in a few hours, you can go to the beach in California in a few hours.

24:58In the winter, if you really are adventurous, you can go and ski and snowboard in the morning in Flagstaff, which is two hours away, and you can come down and you can play golf in Phoenix in the afternoon. There's very few places that you can have both a snow, an area where you can snow and ski, snowboard and ski, and an area where you can play golf all within two hours of each other. Like, that's just not - You're in a snow suit and then two hours later you're in a pair of shorts. Correct. And so, you know, I think the cost of living is relatively affordable there too. Obviously, they've been building up a lot more industry there.

25:29And the other thing too is the infrastructure is all so new. You go out there and it's always funny when people go out there like, wow, the highways are so big. And it's like, yeah, there is nothing out there, right? You have six lane highways everywhere. They're building brand new homes. I mean, so I think it's just a, it was just a good place to grow up and enjoy. Yeah. Well, listen, your dad, he was an entrepreneur. He ran a spa business at one point in his life, right? Sold water systems, a salesperson, and your mom put on conferences. But in digging into your story, one key development and one key thing that I think, you know, you kind of mention all the time is how your parents helped sharpen your skill set because they were introducing you to people who were older than you at these particular conferences.

26:10And that helped you kind of learn really, really early how to talk to older people, how to talk to people who are maybe more successful than you. Does that still help you to this day? For sure. I mean, look, I think that was a huge, I think, early. I mean, I was 19 when I started the business. And so having these conversations, I never have gone into a room and felt, you know, I can't have a conversation with someone who's my senior. and I think it really started because of the fact that you know we didn't grow up from you know in terms of like real money or anything like that and so really the only vacations or trips we would take was to my mom's summer conference that she put on and so we in Arizona in Arizona it was in Tucson at the time and so we just did that and and as part of that she would include us in a lot of the things and you know she made us made sure that we were walking around the convention floor and saying hello to people.

26:59And I think just by pushing us out of that comfort zone, I think it made such a huge difference. And they did a great job in that way from a parenting standpoint to make sure that, hey, like if you want to order something, you're ordering it. I'm not ordering it for you. You want to talk to the person? I'm going to talk to you. When they were talking to someone, they introduced us to them, right? So I think that was really beneficial to the overall development of the fact that like by the time I was, you know, 17, 18, you know, 19 years old, I never had an issue of communicating with people because of the fact I've been doing it since I was like five or six.

27:29Which I think was really beneficial for me. But then again you know you go off to University of Miami and you know working in a restaurant and that's when you develop you know front office sports in 2014. An idea sparked from a class project at that and then you know as you mentioned in around 2018-19 it became you know kind of like a real business right. What was the signs that you were sitting on a real business? I remember our first ever like real advertising like meaningful was we had sold Rising 25, which is our kind of version of Forbes 30 Under 30, to Anheuser-Busch for what at the time was 100 ,000 bucks for them to be the presenting partner.

28:03And I was like, if I can get Anheuser-Busch to sponsor this, I can get anyone to sponsor what I'm doing. Like, there's no reason why. And so at that point, we're like, okay, there's real momentum, there's real brand, there's real audience, people really care about this. And, you know, we got the original investment right after that, right? Like, that was almost kind of a linchpin into us getting - On Twitter, right? Yeah. Yeah, that was almost a linchpin in us getting the original investment. And so we got the, you know, after that, we got the investment. I moved to New York. And, you know, what had really given me the validation at the time, and obviously people talking about product market fit and all of those things, but really it gave me the validation at the time is we did hundreds of informational interviews.

28:39And during those informational interviews, I just asked people, I said, what else do you want to see? What do you want to look? You know, and so that's where Rising 25 came from. That's where they're like, oh, we want to see more stuff on social. We want to lean in here. We want to lean in there. And so I basically told our first investor, I said, look, I have all of the kind of qualitative data here and quantitative data because I've been interviewing people for two years. And this is what they've told me. This is what they want to see. And I'm like, if we have the money to do this, I'm pretty sure people are going to respond positively.

29:09And so they gave us the money to do it. People responded positively. And here we are a few years later. And so, yeah, I think all of the initial things that we did gave me the confidence that I was saying, if we do this how people say, and unless they're lying to me and hundreds of people would have had to lie to me, then I'm like, I think we have a good shot. And over time, obviously, that is matriculated. It was, you know, we were going to be focused on the industry. And now it's obviously much broader than that, much bigger than that, because opportunity has gotten bigger. And so things have changed.

29:39But certainly, I think early on, that was like the bit real. Initial investment on$750K, was it? Yeah, first one,$750K. Wow. So$750K of initial investment now sitting on a$40 million plus company. Yeah. Man. Not bad. Yeah. I mean, listen, again, you talk about being a Forbes under 30, you know, back in 2019, here you are now, 2026 as we sit here. A lot of entrepreneurs, Adam, go out of business during that time period. And so here you are still here. Give yourself a pat on the back. Yeah, not enough. Every once in a while. But I mean, look, we've had some great partners. I mean, oh, you know, I would call my partner at the time, Russ, and I was joking with him.

30:15I was like, look, if there's one thing that puts us out of a business, it's a global pandemic, I don't think we could have, you know, I don't think we could have planned for that. Yeah, once you get out of that, you kind of like, yeah. Yeah, and once we got through that and, like, our partners, you know, continued to back us, it was like, oh, all right, like, we can do this, you know, we can do this, and we can continue to do this, and so, yeah, media, I tell people all the time, is the most challenging business, especially if you are someone like me who had no money, no audience, no experience.

30:38It's like I use a funny anecdote. I was like, it's building a media company in many ways is like working out naked. You know, everyone can see all of your imperfections and all of these things all of the time, no matter what, because you're building in public, right? It's not like you're building a software and then selling a software and all of the stuff is happening behind the scenes. No, your content is your product and everyone consumes that. Oftentimes many people have opinions about it. And so, but over time, what happens is people become, you know, like they feel like a part of it because they're like wow I saw you guys when you were this and now you're this holy like you guys are look totally different and I think that's been what's really cool is is to is to see all of that but yeah I mean look like it's what what advice would you give someone now like I mean listen media has changed again you guys were yeah in that global pandemic I was there covering everything from your house but now here we are now we're back out yeah people have phones left and right they've gotten better over time right I mean you know these cameras have gotten and better, what would you tell Adam White that is looking to maybe start a media brand today with all this technology and we're more integrated with AI more than ever?

31:42I think you have to have focus. I think gone are the days of trying to build, like we've seen it, right? All of the people who've tried to build the next New York Times or the next Wall Street Journal or something like that, they just haven't had success. It's almost impossible to build a scaled media company that has national focus, national, It's just so, so difficult because the capital that's required, the team that's required, the positioning that's required, and quite frankly, it's just not going to break through. And so how can you find categories and areas of those outlets that you can really own?

32:15Punchbowl has done a great job of this and Capitol Hill. Their focus is Capitol Hill and Congressional and Senate and stuff like that. One would think that's pretty small, but there's a lot of people who care about that. And so the way that we've always positioned it is that you have to be niche and focused, but not necessarily scale, right? You need to focus on one or two things nowadays, because if you can do those one or two things better than the kind of broader mainstream media can do those one or two things, you have a real good chance, right? Or you can create net new formats like TBPN came up and created a net new format of a technology kind of talk show that no one had ever done before.

32:50They leaned into the idea that they were both entrepreneurs and kind of had a good time together. And they exited to open AI. There's no one way to do it, I think, nowadays from a media standpoint, which is really exciting. And I think, you know, there's a lot of doom and gloom in media. I think today, more than ever, there is an opportunity for people who are aspiring entrepreneurs to lean into media because, one, the tools have gotten so much cheaper. The distribution you can use and leverage every platform you want. there is opportunity i would lean heavy into youtube and video and all of those spaces right how do you build the platform in there and you've seen the people who've done it the pat mcafee's of the world in our category in sports the josh pates of the world now in the in the college football space like these are people who've built independent brands that really matter that are now syndicated on you know espn's of the world and everything like that and so yeah but pat mcafee's a bad example because he was a former nfl player so he already had a brand he already had an audience somebody like yourself though you started from zero man like when i when when you got the celebrities to do it it's easy for them because they got there's not many celebrities who've had this success that he's had no very true very true but it's unfair because they already have the built-in audience thanks to nfl nba what have you but i respect those individuals who you know started zero and had to build a base yeah no money no audience no experience is certainly more challenging.

34:08Yeah, 100%. But I think, again, today the opportunity in media exists because of the fact that there are so many legacy businesses that have cost basis that are too far and too big for what it is that media is today. And so the smart operators are going to be the ones that can figure out a way to make those cost basis structured around the areas that really matter in their businesses. And then it's going to create opportunities for other people in these categories and everything like that, which I think is exciting. And if you can build today, I think what happened in previous iterations of the media, specifically in digital media, is most of these brands got high off the supply of free traffic from Google and Facebook and all these things, and they didn't build brands that matter.

34:47They just built distribution hubs that, you know, got tons of traffic from Google. They monetize them via direct display ads and all of that stuff, which was great business back then. But today, the consumer and the audience and the platforms reward brands that matter, brands that have a point of view, brands that have original reporting. It's a lot more difficult to build that, but it's so much more sustainable. And I think that's actually really good for the media industry is that you want people who are building brands that matter and building them in a sustainable way, which is so much better than basically saying, hey, we're just going to try and get a hundred stories a day on XYZ topic du jour, because we know it's going to go viral on Facebook and Google.

35:29You look back, Adam, right? And you think about, you know, that young Adam that wanted to be a baseball player, right? That young Adam that thought he was going to be in the Coast Guard.

35:37Adam White: Yeah. And, you know, end up again in the University of Miami to build this new age media brand. And here we are, you know, again, $750 ,000 investment, 2026, sitting on a 40 plus million dollar company. Some heavy hitters helping you along the way at Redbird Capital in the private equity world and Jeff Zucker in the media world, right? You think about your entrepreneurial journey in one word, right? What word would that be? Persistence, I think. Persistence, why persistence? I mean, I think that's just what it is. you have to be able to be persistent through all of it, right? I think the best other word, and it's the fun fact that probably many know, but relentless.com redirects to Amazon, because Jeff Bezos was always like, you have to be relentless.

36:18And that's true. Like, it's all just persistence. Like, certainly other people could have and have tried to do things in this category. But I just always said that, like, I'm just going to figure it out. And we're going to figure it out. And we're going to just going to continue to iterate and change and persist through all of these different changes. And, you know, if we do that, we're going to be in a good spot. And that's what it really comes down to. Again, I started the business when I was 19. I had no responsibilities. Today, my responsibilities is my work and my wife. Like, that's pretty much it.

36:46And so - And wait until the kid comes, though. Until the kid comes. But like, that's a different situation. So I've been able to spend the last decade plus being laser focused on giving this all the time, energy and effort I have, you know, working 12, 15 hour days every single day, not taking vacations. That's different than people who start businesses later on, but I still think the same thing applies is that it's all about persistence. It's just the person who's going to run the race the longest is typically usually going to be the one who finds a success at the end. Sometimes you'll have things that will shoot up out of nowhere.

37:15And, but again, like even back to the TVPN example, like those guys were doing videos on YouTube for years and years and years and years and getting to understand the YouTube algorithm and all of this stuff before they did the show. They ran companies before they did the show. They operated, they invested, they did all of these things before they applied all of that stuff. And so again, that's just another different level of persistence that applies to the show in at least a different way. Did you try to buy persistence.com and have it redirected? No, no, I didn't. It took me long enough to buy front office sports.com.

37:44I'm out of the.com domain buying. Domains is still a good business. It is a crazy business, but I'm out of the buying domains, buying handles. No, I think we got all of them. Get you out of here some fun stuff, but before I do, Adam White's biggest failure, what did you learn? Things have to be resourced appropriately. I think that's the biggest learning that I've found is that you have to resource things appropriately and if you don't, even at a small scale, even at a startup, if you're not resourcing them, it's just bound to fail. And no matter how good the brand is, no matter how good the stuff is, even if you don't have one person dedicated to it, I think it's just bound to fail.

38:23So I think depending on the level of the business is, sometimes resourcing appropriately there's one person sometimes it's 10 people sometimes whatever it is like i think that's the biggest thing is that most of our failures in the business specifically have come from the fact that we've tried to outkick our skis we tried to do something with internal team we've put too much extra pressure on people who are already doing stuff and we just haven't resourced things appropriately and then you know we sit there and what happened was just it was really a resourcing issue it wasn't a brand issue wasn't anything else there's a resourcing issue and so how do we solve that i think we've done a better job at that i think Sometimes we still, you know, try and look over our skis a little bit too much.

38:59But I think we've done a lot better of a job of that because we've gotten to the point where now we're established. We don't have to chase everything. We don't have to try and like, you know, scrounge for every next dollar or something like that where we had done in the past. And so I think that's been the biggest learning is that even at the smallest scale, that needs to be a person, a time, an energy or a monetary resource to every new thing you launch. Because if it's not, then it's kind of bound to fail. Yeah. Love that. If someone gave you, if I gave you 10 grand right now, man, what's the first thing you would invest in?

39:29NVIDIA. I mean, they've been going crazy. I wish. You know, Intel stocks up right now based on Amazon maybe. I mean, I think in the sports category specifically, you would have to say some level of women's sports. I think we just did an event out in the Hamptons and Jason Wright, who was out there, who was part of a big group in the investing space. Yeah, aerial investments. Project level aerial investments. Yeah, he's amazing. but you know again he's talking about you're seeing valuations of teams go from 100 to 400 in two years like that's huge right like in terms of just return on investment you're getting four five six x investment in that space and that's why i think so much more smart money is flowing into the women's sports space to despite that one men's at the most major league level or become very expensive to own teams nine billion dollars for this the seahawks recently there's not a lot people who have$9 billion laying around.

40:18But are the Seahawks going to go from$9 billion to$18 billion? Maybe, but that's like a huge bet. Is a women's sports team, a WNBA team or an NWSL team or something like that going to go from$100 million to$400 million? That's probably a safer bet. So if I was looking for pure return on investment, it'd probably be in some of the emerging, and not even emerging, but more mainstream women's sports teams. Volleyball, women's hockey, I'm telling you, is right up there. You've seen volleyball bringing 60-plus thousand people Huge. Yes, the right markets. Women's softball. Yes, the right markets. I'm really bullish on those.

40:51Adam White's superpower. I think it's just energy. I think that's the superpower is the fact that, you know, I have the ability to, you know, move quickly when I need to, move quickly, but I can go long. I joke with some people because, you know, I've been doing these, like, fitness tests and, like, VO2 max, and it's like, oh, it's like I got a VO2 max of an elite athlete, and then my sisters are always like, well, why aren't you an elite athlete? I'm like, you know, I appreciate it. But I think it's, like, part of that in business is stamina. I really think is what it comes down to. I think the superpower is the stamina and the ability to continue to show up day in and day out and be able to find solutions, be able to connect the right dots for people internally.

41:26And be able to match, I think, vision with execution. I think there's a lot of people who are one or the other. I think I've been able to do both, which is good. But I think it really comes down to the stamina. Stamina. Favorite AI app? What are you using? We're impartial to Claude. Claude. I love Claude, too. We see AI app. Yeah, Claude's great. I love Claude. Claude's great. Our team has done a great - Are you guys incorporating that in your newsroom? Yeah, in smart ways. Our whole thing is like AI should empower, not replace. So yes, if you do an interview, you should use AI to have it transcribed before you.

41:58Obviously double check it, but you shouldn't be sitting there typing and spending all of this time. But I also think at the end of the day, AI is great, great, great for journalists who are people who break news and have real sources. It's just never going to replace that. So what it's going to do is make that even more valuable. And it's going to make that worth a lot more money. So if I was a journalist today, and I'd be like, become a journalist who has invaluable sources, relationships, and can break real news and information. Yeah, is it going to impact a lot of the day-to-day kind of like just general news that's kind of aggregated or curated across the internet?

42:31Yes, probably. But if you're a reporter who's going to break news, your value just one, two, three, four, or five X itself because of the fact that like, I mean, maybe I'm speaking too soon, but Claude in so many ways, I can't imagine is going to be the person who's going out and talking to sources and doing those things. but for us it's really about we've built a great central brain where everything and all the things that we're using from our team from a marketing standpoint from a sales standpoint is all flowing into this thing it's all kind of training it and teaching it and they have the ability to use it for whether it's helping edit and clip things or whatever it may be and so you know again we don't use it in the day-to-day newsroom from a reporting standpoint because it just doesn't make sense but we use it to help empower all of our different team members across the organization whether it's hey, help me with this sales deck or help me with that because that's a way that it can unlock the team because, again, we're 70 people, but it can make them do a job that was going to take two hours, maybe 20 minutes, which is going to allow them to spend more time on the stuff that really moves the needle.

43:28So no AI writing stories or newsletters. No. It's the research. It's transcribing. It's like the picks and shovels type stuff. Yeah. Would you have a problem with that? Would that eventually be something that front office sports looks into? I don't think so. No, I mean, again, I think at the end of the day, people want to hear from humans, want to see humans. If we're doing that and going so far in that direction, I think we've done a bad job as operators. I think people still relate to people. People still want to see that. And you've seen so much backlash from other outlets or things like that where people are like, well, this is just AI slop.

44:01I think that is going to be a real problem. And I think, what was it? Snapchat just came out with a thing last week where they're filtering for fully AI stuff. And look, I think AI-created content for the right company and the right thing is totally fine and good. But for our company, it's really important that our team and our editors and our reporters and the people who know what our audience wants and care about every day are involved in that process all the time. People business, man. It is. People business. Get you out on this. Adam, thank you so much, man, for coming through the NASDAQ. Your first time.

44:30First time. Yeah, man. I can say I got something on you, man. We got you up to the NASDAQ, man. I'm sure it will not be your last. Get you out here on this. Some good to great stuff. My favorite business book is good. The great Jim Collins. And I'll ask you, Forbes under 30 honoree. I think you've mastered the art of what this is. But what's the difference between a good entrepreneur and a great one? I think it really comes down to ego, to be honest with you. I mean, there's a lot of things that we've done over time where, you know, we've taken valuations and stuff like that that, you know, are lower, but give us more optionality.

45:04You know, yeah, the thing is that people, I think everyone sees the valuation. So I'll raise this, raise that, raise that, raise that. But like, well, then you have to grow into that. And if you have a PE firm and your valuation is X, they're going to expect three or five X that. So are you comfortable in being able to deliver three or five X that? If you are a great, do it. But like, I think people get so caught up in the fact that like numbers has to be biggest and this has to be that. And I think that is the best thing is like that separates entrepreneurs from good to great, is being able in the right times to put ego aside and make sure you're basing the decisions and all this stuff on practicality.

45:37And the more practical you can be, the better you're going to be in the future, right? Because at the end of the day, in my opinion, the only number that matters is the last number. All the numbers that are there along the way are whatever, right? Like the only number that matters are the last number. And quite frankly, the only thing that really matters inside of that is that the people who've backed you are the ones who are seeing reward. Obviously, hopefully you as well, but like they're seeing rewards in the team and all of that stuff. That's what you should be judged on in my opinion. And so I think, yeah, at the end of the day, the really, really great entrepreneurs find the right time in their kind of journey to be able to put ego aside.

46:12Obviously you have to have a lot of it and you have to have a lot of conviction to be able to do that and, you know, kind of go to war every single day that we do. But I really think it comes down to in the right moments, being able to put that aside and being able to recognize, okay, maybe I'd go with this investor because it's a better partner. Or maybe I do something here and I maybe take a haircut on this, you know, business opportunity because of the fact that, you know, it's going to open up a whole other door for me and I'm going to be okay with that. Yeah. Lessons from the prices, I love that.

46:39Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Got it all from that. Adam, man, appreciate the time. Good luck. The rest of the way, man, you know, fall sports season is coming up and that is obviously the big one. So I'm sure when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'll see a whole bunch of sports, you know, stuff there. And I can say, I got that guy into the NASDAQ. That's it. It's been great. Appreciate the time, Adam. Thank you so much for joining us, the Enterprise Zone NASDAQ Market Site. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening.

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