Inside the business of hosting the Super Bowl

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1:40I don't think I really fully realized how visible this space was going to be and how political it was going to be. I had no idea. To say that pulling off an event as large as the Super Bowl is a massive multi-year project may be the understatement of the year. So when Zaylene Jemuhamed was given the opportunity to bring the big game to the Bay Area, she knew it would need some startup-style energy with monster scale to follow. There's something that I really love about early stage. I like to build. And when someone gives me a blank canvas and says, hey, I have an idea and I don't know all the answers, for some reason, I'm attracted to that.

2:25Why do you think that is? Because I'm crazy. This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Zayleen Jamohamed. Zayleen, who goes by Z, is the CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee. The Bay Area Host Committee is the not-for-profit behind the scenes, making sure events like the NBA All-Star Game, FIFA World Cup, and the Super Bowl both come to the region and are big wins for the Bay Area. By the way, no region has ever done all three of these events back to back to back before. The stakes are high. The Super Bowl alone is expected to generate more than half a billion dollars for the Bay Area.

3:07Zee and I dig into what it takes to juggle the local politics, the maddening logistics, and the myriad stakeholders involved in hosting these iconic events. I am so grateful she squeezed in time to speak with us in San Francisco the day before the big game.

3:29Zee, welcome to Masters of Scale. I'm excited to be here. You are right near the end of a pretty brutal stretch. We are recording this the day before the Super Bowl. How are you holding up? I feel good. I'm tired. But it's been such a journey to get to even this point that I have like this really interesting feeling of like relief and just pride. Really grateful for the cities that have come together to make this happen. We have a couple days to go, but it feels really good. Yeah, you have to run through that finish line. I will say, having worked at the NFL and being a pretty big Rams fan, not my first Super Bowl week.

4:12I've been here all week. The Bay Area in general and San Francisco in particular has really been flexing this week. So congrats. Yeah, what I've seen come out of the Bay has been just incredible this week. from just the operations and logistics and walking down the street and seeing police officers friendly and welcoming and doing their job and all of the communities coming together. It's been everything that I wanted to see, everything that we'd planned for, but you don't know what's going to happen until you kind of see it take place. When we were talking about having you on the show, I had it in my head initially that you were kind of like almost a pop-up CEO.

4:51It's like, okay, well, it's Super Bowl and then it's World Cup and then this thing shuts down. It's almost like running a political campaign. Yeah. But it's not, right? Because the Bay Area Host Committee is going to be a persistent organization to help bring more of these events to the Bay. Give us like what is the Bay Area Host Committee and why were you drawn to take this role? Yeah, I have lived in the Bay since 2006. So, you know, originally Canadian, but moved out here 20 years ago now. And I didn't actually even know that we didn't have a longstanding sports commission. And I give a lot of credit to my board, which includes the presidents of all the Bay Area professional sports teams, which in itself is a unique value proposition.

5:38I don't think that exists in any other market where all the professional sports teams come together to do something collectively. they really saw a gap, I think, in what this region needed, especially coming out of COVID, and had a belief that sport could really help put this region back on the map. So, you know, Al Guido kind of led this initiative, which if you know Al, he is... From the 49ers. From the 49ers, now the CEO of the 49ers. He is a force. And when something gets into his head of, you know, something that needs to be done for sport and for the region, you're not going to mess around with him.

6:15And so he brought this group together. And the first event that they bid for and won was the World Cup. And then I think they were like, well, we're going to need someone to lead this. And so the host committee is essentially a 501C6, not-for-profit entity. I know C3s. I know C4s. What's a C6? Similar to a C3 or C4, just a different kind of tax bracket. but a not-for-profit, which is the most important thing. And, you know, the reason I say that is our only purpose is for the economic impact and the benefit that comes back to the region. We don't share in any of the revenues from a Super Bowl.

6:52We really want to see that economic impact come into the region. We want to see the exposure and the visibility of the region. We want to see the societal and community impact that comes into the region. Our goal is to exist for the long term. If we can't sustain ourselves as an organization and then shut down and have to relearn everything, build new relationships again, and not take advantage of the reps you have in the marketplace, we're just starting from scratch. So the goal is to continue. So Al has a vision coming out of COVID. He pulls the ownership groups of the professional teams together.

7:23What happens after that? Tactically, they establish a new set of bylaws, form a board. They brought in some independent board members as well. Mayor Lurie was my board chair when I first started. And then I think it was just how do we scale and what do we need first? And so the first thing they did was try to figure out who their CEO was going to be. I was at LA 28 at the time, but living in the Bay. And you've been working with companies like Visa who are massive Olympic sponsors and deep sport and sport marketing background. Yeah. And all have played a really interesting role in what I need to do today, right?

7:58Having experience at Visa, understanding the business side and what businesses are looking for, how they measure ROI, what the buy side of the equation looks like, important. And I would say every single organization I've been a part of along the way has basically provided something in my toolkit for me to be able to do this job. But wasn't looking, Jeff, to move. I was very happy and, you know, working in the Olympic movement. Does Al pick up the phone and call you and say, Z, come serve your region? Yeah, he basically did that. He found me at a conference, actually the Niners conference. And he was up front, like, this is why I'm reaching out to you?

8:37Not initially, but then when we had lunch a couple weeks later, he laid it all out. And he had, you know, he had a really good plan in his head. Didn't tell me then that there was going to be a potential bid for Super Bowl at that point in time. I think he was saving that nugget for a little bit later. But talked a lot about the World Cup. And as a sports fan and a soccer player when I was younger and both my kids play soccer and just I love the Bay that much. You know, when I walked away from that conversation, I kept thinking about it. And when that happens, when you walk away from a conversation and it doesn't really leave you, you kind of, you know that there's something there.

9:12So I was hooked right at that point. And this was when? Fall of 2022. Okay. So if it's me. Yes. Fall of 2022, I have this incredibly persuasive person, really interesting idea. I'm a Bay Area person. It's a chance to serve my community. All the things. But World Cup is four years away. And there's no guarantee you're going to get a Super Bowl. Had NBA All-Star for 25 been committed? Not been announced. Okay, so NBA All-Star isn't done yet. I think I might have had some concern about like, well, what am I going to do for three and a half years before the World Cup comes? Here's the good news. I joined LA 28 eight years before LA was in front of me, right?

9:54So I think there's something that I really love about early stage. I like to build. And when someone gives me a blank canvas and says, hey, I have an idea and I don't know all the answers, for some reason, I'm attracted to that. And they did that at LA 28 too. Why do you think that is? Because I'm crazy. No, I mean, but in all sincerity, I mean, there's an entrepreneurial mindset there for sure. Yeah, for sure. What is it about who you are, how you were raised, or where you were raised that you think led to that? I love thousand-piece puzzles. Like, I just, I love things that don't feel like they have an answer to them, and I get to create.

10:34I think that's just part of who I am. I think living in the Bay fosters that a lot for me. I also think that I've been raised in a way where I've had to push through some things, and it's created a stubbornness in me, sometimes too much of a stubbornness, but really a, hey, like, you think I'm not going to figure this out, and I'm going to figure it out. I think that's just, it's a grit that I think I have, and that works really well when you have to build an organization. Is there a story that is representative of where that grit comes from? I grew up in a really traditional Indian household, and girls were expected to be a certain way.

11:18My mom, when I was five or six years old, like, put me in ballet and gymnastics and reading and all the things. And I remember coming home one day, and I had a kind of a brochure or flyer in my hand from school that was about, it was minor league hockey. And I was Canadian, and you see hockey everywhere. where you, you know, it's how you assimilate into your community. And I handed it to my mom, and she looked at me, and she was like, we're going to give this to your brother, and he's going to go play hockey, and you're going to do the things that you're supposed to do as an Indian girl. And I, you know, I was six.

11:56I don't think I articulated this out loud at all, but I was upset. And just it didn't, I'm sure at that point, just didn't feel right. I just felt let down. And so that, I think, initiated a lot, the stubbornness of like, well, I like this. And you're saying I can't do this. So somehow I'm going to figure out how to do this. And it was every day sneaking my way into a gym and playing ball hockey and then finally figuring out a way through my brother, really, to get onto the ice and play. And at some point, my mom was like, well, OK, well, you're going to do it whether I like it or not. And so she finally got there to the point where, like, you know, we'd watch women's hockey on television for the Olympics or otherwise.

12:37And I'm like, that could have been me. And she's like, I feel really bad. You know, she's gotten there today. So fall of 22, you and Al have this fateful lunch. He recruits you to come aboard. When you came in, what were you inheriting? I was employee number one. Oh. So I had a set of bylaws and a board. And at that point, it was just the World Cup. And did you have a budget? Did you have funding? We had no funding at that point in time. But what we asked the teams was that they would provide our first set of seed funding, and all of them stepped up. So we have seed funding. How much did you raise in that?

13:13About a million dollars, so not a lot, just to kind of get me going. And from that funding source, we had to try to scale and do all the things early on in a business, right? find office space, you know, find our first set of employees, build sales materials, you know, really think about what our brand was going to look like. Now, the great thing about being a not-for-profit that is, A, rooted in the Bay, but also just here for the economic impact of the region is you bring on partners right away. And we had some great ones. One of the first people I called was J.J. Carter at Fleischman Hillard.

13:49And I was entering a space that I don't think I really fully realized how visible this space was going to be and how political it was going to be. I had no idea. And, you know, maybe two weeks in, I'm like, J.J., I need help. What version of political? The Bay is actually a really interesting place. You know, it's nine counties. All nine work very differently is probably one of the reasons there's been no Central Sports Commission, is because it's actually very challenging to bring nine counties together to do like one big thing. Super diverse region. I love the diversity in it, but like that centralization does not happen.

14:30And, you know, there's a lot of little brother, big brother syndrome in the Bay. And I'm Canadian, so I feel very comfortable saying that. I felt it myself, but it becomes political when people are like, well, the South Bay is getting this and we're not getting this, or Oakland's not getting this and San Francisco's getting this. And those sentiments are stated in the press. They're talked about a lot. And think about how you start an organization, right? And the things that you need right away. You need legal. You need a marketing agency. You need a comms agency. You need finance. How did you land the Super Bowl?

15:02Yeah, this one I did not see coming. I mean, if you had Al in this chair, I think he would say to you, I knew this was going to happen. We just didn't tell Z initially, which he's done a couple times. But I walked into my first board meeting. My first day was sometime February 2023. My first board meeting was sometime in March. And I walk in somewhat intimidated by this group of people. And, you know, you're sitting and the table is like Al Guido and Larry Bear and Brandon Schneider. You have all the team presidents sitting there. And, you know, I'm just trying to talk to them about my vision for the organization.

15:34I have a few slides and, you know, really expected it to be more of a conversation and discussion of like what we were going to do to host a World Cup. And the board at that point in time was like, we need to do more. And both Al and Brandon Schneider, who's the president of the Warriors, you know, started talking about the events that they wanted to host. And Al kind of got to it first. He's like, we're going to bid for a Super Bowl. And I was like, are we? Which one? He's like, yeah, I'm 2026. And I was like, wait, hold on. And like, I think we have another event in 2026. He's like, yeah, but I think we should still do it.

16:12And so that meeting was, I don't know, middle of March. The bid was due six weeks later, I think, or eight weeks later. Never done a Super Bowl bid before. You just get a folder full of requirements that you start, you just have to work through. And so, you know, as a first time CEO with a board like that, you don't actually say no. You're like, sure, that sounds like a great idea. And you just, again, you go try and figure it out. The three hardest companies I've ever done deals with are Apple, Nike, and the National Football League. And I worked at the National Football League. Obviously, massive impact.

16:49How big is the economic impact of the Super Bowl on the day? Yeah, it's going to be around$500 million. You know, our projections show anywhere between$450 million and$630 million. So we'll see, you know, after the event, we'll do a post-event. But it'll be around that half a billion dollar mark. And then there's a halo effect because it promotes the city, promotes the region, all of it. And so there should be a lasting impact and particularly carrying through with World Cup and everything else. So between the three events, so if you take NBA All-Star, Super Bowl and the World Cup, we're projecting about a$1.4 billion economic impact.

17:21All the moving pieces here, Z. I mean, you've got the teams and leagues that are here. You've got your board, your participants. You've got all the political factions. You've got other business leaders. You've got the NFL itself. I mean, all the fans who come in, all the hospitality. I mean, on and on and on. How does it work? The role for the host committee really is to convene, right? And so we kind of sit in the center of bringing a lot of different parties together. Sometimes after we do that, they continue and do some of the work on their own. Sometimes we have to continue to be in the room.

17:53So, you know, for example, there are 29 transportation agencies in the Bay Area. I didn't know that again living here. It was just fascinating to me. You know, our role was to bring those those 29 transportation don't really come together often. And they definitely don't and won't come together around a sporting event unless we're going to unless we bring them together. Same with safety and security, right? The NFL has a safety and security plan. They lead the safety and security deployments, at least the planning of that from a very kind of highest level. And then they need local PD in San Francisco.

18:28They need and Santa Clara and San Jose. They need state resources. They need federal resources. We will play a part in making sure that everybody's connected in the right way and they know who the right people are and then we'll get out of the way. And so it really depends on the situation and what is needed on are we in the role every single day to do something? Are we in the role to just convene? And we have to figure that out and then play that accordingly. When you do the post-mort on the Super Bowl, what will have been success? We wanted two things to happen from a Bay Area host committee perspective.

19:06One is, and this is outside of like making sure the game is safe and secure and people can get in and all of those things. I'm not even going to touch the operations piece of it. One was to ensure that we weren't just focused on the game on Sunday. And particularly because I'm a Niners fan. And so like that's a little bit easier for me. But what is it? 70 ,000 people are going to be in that stadium. And the event is going to come and go in a week and we're going to be off. And so we've spent so much time trying to think through how do we make sure all of the Bay, whether you're in the stadium or not, gets to experience this in some way, shape or form.

19:44Very intentional about spreading things out. you know putting opening night in San Jose having our media party on the peninsula doing a watch party in Oakland all the things that are happening in San Francisco like it was one of the biggest learnings we had in 50 of like communities feeling like the Super Bowl wasn't part of their area or community and we really wanted to change that so that's part of it we've done a ton of work around legacy I think just this week we opened two fields or ground broke on two fields we have a couple more that will announce our initiative is to build or refurbish a new place to play in nine counties of the Bay Area.

20:20So, you know, really thinking about legacy, impact, breadth of our Super Bowl work. So that's one, all-around impact. Second is, not surprisingly, making sure the story around technology and innovation was part of everything that we did. And so, you know, yesterday we hosted the first ever Super Bowl Innovation Summit. Which I got to be there for and was a tremendous success. Yeah. And, you know, Jeff, like, again, like, it was definitely an idea early on when we won the bid. And I remember talking to league staff about doing this and said, you cannot come into the Bay and not have this conversation.

20:57You are literally taking the biggest event in sport and bringing it to the innovation capital of the world. Like, this has to happen. And to their credit, all they said was how. How and when are we going to do it? And what is it going to look like? And so, again, those things that you think about and you start to plan for until you see fully realized. It feels so good today that we were able to do that. And the conversations we had in the room were incredible. But that's just one piece, right? Like we've tried to instill kind of a fun tech experience all the way through a fan journey. When you get to the airport, you'll see, you know, Steve Young and Jerry Rice and Mayor Lurie and kind of holograms, a little trippy, but in holograms, as they greet you, there's a tech experience at Super Bowl experience, really making sure we're talking, you know, innovation in its complete form.

21:43That was a part of our entire story is like we do things differently here. We are first to market. We are a little bit crazy, but we're proud of being that. And we're going to show you and tell you about what that means about being in the Bay. So I think both of those things were important to us. And I'm really happy to see that they've both played out. Still ahead, more with Z about how she built an innovative marketplace for Olympic athletes as part of the LA 2018.

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22:55Working with Capital One Business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we need it to go. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much, much more on our YouTube channel. And be sure to check out the link in the show notes to subscribe to our newsletter. I'm in the middle of reading a book called Range by David Epstein right now. Do you know this book? I know the book. Okay, so you'll remember that the book opens with basically, here's Tiger Woods, here's Roger Federer.

23:36Tiger, too, has got a club in his hands and is a prodigy. And Federer is refusing to move up a level in tennis because he wants to hang out with his buddies and, you know, shoot bull afterwards and hang out. And they both become generational athletes. And what range ultimately gets to is that perhaps counterintuitively, generalists have a massive advantage when it comes to solving problems that don't have obvious answers, which is something you've clearly been drawn to. And so I'd love to hone in in particular on one thing that you did with LA28, because being a lifelong athlete, maybe not as good as you were, but tried, wanted to be, and certainly a huge sports fan.

24:15Until, I don't know, 10 years ago, I didn't know what the initials NIL were. Name image likeness wasn't something that we really thought about or talked about. And so could you talk a little bit about LA28 and what you did with NIL and how you approached that opportunity and challenge? Yeah, LA28 was, again, just such a fantastic experience for me because it was a young organization when I joined. I think I was like the 30th employee. I think they're in the thousands now. And it was a role, the head of innovation around monetization. my job really was to come up with new ways for the organizing committee to make money for the USOPC to make money and for athletes to make money and so I'd spent a lot of time with Olympic and Paralympic athletes and I they're some of the most amazing people amazing human beings you know they give up so much to represent their country but what I think we don't remember is that they give it up in a time of their lives where all of the rest of us are honing our graduating from school, honing our skill set, getting early experience in our careers.