Replay: How Barstool Sports’ ex-CEO cooks up attention, with Food52’s Erika Ayers Badan

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1:22Today on the show, we're running it back with one of our favorite episodes of the year with Erica Ayers-Badon. The holidays are all about community, and Erica offers amazing insights about how to cultivate a community of online fans with fun and authenticity at the heart. We hope you enjoy it. it's hard to put words and your arms around barstool sports because you can get caught up in the controversy of it all when i took the job i had a lot of people in my network be like you just committed career suicide and how could you go work at that disgusting terrible place and you know what like i loved that disgusting terrible place i found it to be the least sexist place I've ever worked.

2:09It was the least insidious place. I've worked at, you know, Microsoft. I worked at AOL. I worked at Yahoo. I've worked at a ton of ad agencies. All of those companies had way more issues that were way more hurtful that nobody ever talked about.

2:31That's Erika Ayers-Badon, the new CEO of Lifestyle Brand Food 52 and former CEO of Barstool Sports. Erica helped scale Barstool from a janky frat house media shop into a viral cultural empire. So why make a dramatic career pivot at the height of Barstool's success? And how much might Food 52 embrace the drama that defined Barstool? Erica shares that running Barstool was like a reality show where every day felt like a heart attack and the constant controversy and noise was an asset. She offers compelling insights on what it takes to build a community of fans right now, plus lessons on why no is often a better answer than yes.

3:18It's a fun romp, so let's get into it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:30I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Erica Ayers-Badon, CEO of Food52, former CEO of Barstool Sports. Erica, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. I have tried to think about how to ask you about your career, but this move from Barstool to Food52 is so different. Like the vibes of the two brands and businesses are so different. Can you start just by describing for me, like how you define what Barstool Sports is, was, was about, and then how you define that for Food 52? Yeah, it's a great question. It's weird. It's a weird, you don't see people making this kind of transition very much, I don't think.

4:13I would describe Barstool Sports as one of the most wild and free and creative and disruptive, no holds barred, us against the world, anything for a laugh mentality company. And what was so staggering about Barstool Sports, I joined in 2016, is, you know, it had an insanely rapid period of growth from 2016 to 2023. I mean, crazy, right? Like the revenue went from like$5 million to$300 million. Yeah, it was a really crazy run. So in a lot of ways, it's hard to put words and your arms around Barstool Sports because you can get caught up in the controversy of it all or the Dave Portnoy of it all or the business of it all.

5:04Dave Portnoy, the founder. Yes. But I really loved Barstool Sports and it was a really electric, wild, stressful, painful, exhilarating, terrible, you know, almost decade that I spent helping Dave grow that company. And then I made the change to Food 52, which is, you know, it's a lifestyle brand. It was founded by two women. It is about home and table and food. There's a lot more perfection. The bathrooms are, you know, insanely better, cleaner. The office is beautiful. There's, you know, at Barstool, people were like sleeping on my couch and living in my extra bedroom. And like this has grownups.

5:49There's grownups at Food 52. But it's a really neat company that is fundamentally and like kind of foundationally not that different from Barstool, which is it's a company that is centered on community. It is a company that is both commerce-driven and advertising-driven or content-driven. And what I was really looking for after the Barstool run, we sold the company twice in 2023. We sold it twice for some quite different valuations, right? Crazy different amounts, yeah. Like the first deal was like$500,$550 million, right? Yes. And the second deal was$1. Exactly. Exactly. Which is pretty crazy.

6:33And, you know, I kind of woke up the morning after we bought the company back for Dave for a dollar and said, I'm not going to have a ride where we do two exits in one year, one for$5.50 and the other for a dollar ever, ever again in my life. and there's nothing that's going to top this experience. So I should go think about, you know, what is it I could do next and where could I contribute next and what do I want to learn next? And which is really what drove me to Food52. I've been on the board of Food52 for a while. I've been an advisor to the company since I think 2019. And I really wanted to do something that was really different.

7:13I think people expected that I would go work in gambling or I'd work at another sports company. And I was like, Right, because gambling was sort of the impetus behind the big$550 million deal, right? Exactly. That Barstow was going to become a gambling sports betting company, which didn't quite pan out. Right, exactly. But it became something much bigger, and I really felt like I did it. I learned a lot. I think I contributed good things. It was exhilarating. It brought me to places I never thought I would go, both good and bad. And I was eager. I think one of the things I wrote a book called Nobody Cares About Your Career, I was eager to try and learn something new to put myself in a place where I would have to learn a whole bunch of new skills or a new industry or a new way of doing business while still bringing what I had brought with me.

8:03And so that really is what drove me here. You mentioned community as being like the common thread between the two of them. Like Barstool was incredible at building community, but it did it in a very specific way. Do you apply that to Food 52? Because it's a very different community. Yes, crazy different. The average age of a person at Barstool Sports was probably 22, 23 years old. The number one place we recruited people from was a college network we created. Food 52 is, you know, there are people who are pedigreed, right? Chefs and, you know, there's a lot of people who've worked in industry for a long time.

8:44A lot of grownups. A lot of grownups, which is both good and bad, to be honest with you. You know, I think Barstool was so on the edge and so fearless that we tried and experimented and created things all day long. You know, I would always describe Barstool Sports as a company where every day everyone showed up and it was a blank page. You know, when we started to monetize on TikTok, TikTok was just starting. They didn't have an ad product. When our creators came to work every day, they had to make people laugh and they had to start over every single day to make people laugh. Some of that will apply to Food 52 and some will not.

9:22You know, when you're developing a recipe or you're making a cooking show, you can wing some of it, but you can't wing all of it. And you can't, you know, it's not driven off of headlines. And so it's not viral in the same way. But I do, you know, I really think that community is built around personality. And I am eager to add more personalities to Food 52 so that we can build, you know, who is our big cat? You know, will there be a Dave Portnoy? Probably not. There's only one Dave Portnoy on the planet, but we need to find people who have opinion and perspective and charisma around home and design and lighting and furniture and food.

10:07And, you know, I'm eager to bring that here. So like some more edge is needed to sort of get and maintain attention in the attention economy and to build the emotional connection that you have with the community? It's not necessarily edge, but I'll give you an example. We have an intern here named Annie, and we have a lot of chefs in a test kitchen. Annie posted a video two days ago that was mixing fluff and Coke, like Coca-Cola and fluff, and it makes something. And people went crazy for it. She had 830 comments. We put a video about how to make a Basque cheesecake, and it gets six comments on it.

10:50So what I'm trying to figure out now is what is the balance of the Annie of it all and the cheesecake of it all, and how do we put those two things together? At Barstool, it was, you know, reacting to a sports headline or a news story or something insanely stupid that someone did in the public sphere. This is a place where we'll do it a little bit differently, but it's not necessarily edge. It's how we're talking to people and how we're eliciting reaction. I have a lot of respect for the food section of New York Times. I don't really care about the recipes, but I love the comments. And so one of the things that's really interesting is people have a lot of opinion on the internet.

11:33The internet is a wild, crazy, weird place. And how do we invite that in to have reaction, to be inspired by, to be contrarian to what people here think? And that's a new skill set for Food 52. I mean, Barstool, a lot of it, too, was around humor. And the example you give is something that had more humor to it. But I don't know, food brands haven't historically, like, defined themselves by that kind of personality. Exactly. And that's why I think there's a lot of opportunity. You know, you look at the food industry and it's like fashion a little bit. It's so much about perfection. It's so much about authority and what the top person has to say.

12:18And I think that's kind of bullshit now. Like I had a chef in here yesterday, a 24-year-old guy who started cooking over COVID and is self-taught. And now he's developing a recipe book. He's got a huge following. I think the Internet has changed this notion of authority. And it has, for good or bad, and you can argue it either way, it has ushered in this era of personality. And, you know, personality existed in food. You look at Julia Child. Like she, Julia Child is a legend, not just because of her cooking, but mostly because of her personality. And I actually think we're in an era right now where there's so much fragmentation.

13:00Anyone can be a chef. Anyone can be an influencer. Anyone can be a personality. And it's so fragmented that there's actually a very large business opportunity in the home and lifestyle space around that. And so you need to be a personality, although maybe not quite the personality that Dave Portnoy is. I mean, you have to deal with a lot of controversy. There was a lot of personality at Barstool Sports. You know, the internet has changed so much since Dave created Barstool Sports. Dave created Barstool Sports in 2003 or 2004. And he used to be able to sit on a story or a video for a month and then post it.

13:41And you flash forward to 2024, 2025, you can't sit on something for more than a second because somebody else has got it. So it's very hard to grow stars now. If you look at the music industry and you look at the biggest names in music, they're not new people. It's Taylor Swift who came around. It's, you know, Justin Bieber. It's very hard to break out anymore because there's so much attention fragmentation and there's so much proliferation of content. And so what we'll do at Food 52 is certainly build more personality, certainly diversify the personalities we have, certainly add humor. It'll be interesting to see if it works.

14:22I noticed that Dave was just rescued from his boat by the Coast Guard. Yes. Like that's not your problem anymore. But I don't know, is it hard to be away from that kind of drama? Because it's also very relevant. Yeah, it's hard to describe what a decade of barstool was. It was so intense. It was 24-7. It was every weekend. It was every weeknight. Something went wrong always and ever. And it's a little bit— Yeah, you described it as a heart attack every day. Yeah, it was a heart attack every day. And I say that in jest. I loved it. But there is something very addictive to that, certainly. And I was a little bit worried about that for myself, quite honestly, because it was a constant adrenaline rush.

15:14Dave and I used to always describe Barstool as a shortcut. And the reason it was a shortcut is because it was dog years. Like one year at Barstool Sports was 20 years somewhere else because we had to go through so much controversy or so much adversity or we were trying to figure things out or, you know, XYZ happened at any moment. And I think part of it, you know, Dave is the best at this, which is, you know, Dave's looking like scraggly and furry on the beach and, you know, Coast Guard has to rescue him. And then Miss Peaches, his dog, is going to an auction charity benefit. And then he's on stage with Zach Bryan in a Patriots jersey.

15:52And all of it's documented and you see it all the time. And I think the magic of Barstool is that the camera is always on. I mean, you ran Barstool in a way that few CEOs have ever led a company with cameras and mics everywhere and audiences with a front row seat to your office every day, seeing the decisions you were making. It was almost like a reality show. Like, is that a model that you liked, that you'd like want to learn from? Like, how did I mean, that's got to impact the way you lead the company. Yeah, it's funny. I never intended to be public. So I think I can remember the announcement video when I joined Barstool and I think I have like 5 ,000 followers on Twitter and the announcement video went out and then all of a sudden I had 50 ,000 followers overnight.

16:43It was a little bit like getting like a mutant chip put in you from being at Barstool where you're getting comfortable being that exposed is highly, highly uncomfortable. And it does change you. It makes you recognize how to talk to people. It teaches you a lot of good things. And then also, I think, makes you very guarded. So you get a thicker skin, but you also get more wary about how you are? Yeah, you get a thicker skin, but then you also, you know, if I hadn't worked at Barstool Sports, I never would have written a book. I think, you know, while I do think there's some negatives about it, like I'm a harder kind of tweaked person from having been through that.

17:22I do also think it changed my life in really extraordinary and good ways. When I hear Erica talk about cameras capturing the everyday drama at Barstool, I can't decide if it's a brilliant idea for leadership or the worst idea. On the one hand, it's the ultimate form of accountability, but there's also the risk that every decision you make becomes performative. After the break, Erica shares more of her battle scars from Barstool about leading in the face of constant controversy and online scrutiny, plus lessons she learned from a recent guest of ours, Steve Ballmer, and more. Stay with us.

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19:39So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to D-E-E-L dot com slash M-O-S and get up to three months free. Before the break, CEO of Food 52 and former CEO of Barstool Sports, Erica Ayers-Badon, shared her hard-earned lessons for building community around a brand. Now she explains how she dealt with charges of toxic masculinity at Barstool, which aspects of the Barstool culture she hopes to inject into Food 52, and why media is what she calls an insufferable business. Let's dive back in. I have to ask you about some of the controversy, like the charges of toxic masculinity. One report described Barstool as misogyny and racism dressed as humor.

20:32Like, what did you do when there were things you didn't agree with that the company was doing you're saying? Or like, how did you feel about all those kinds of conversations going on around you? Yeah, it was very noisy. It was noisy for, you know, nine years, eight, nine years. When I joined Barstool, you know, I'd never been a CEO. The chairing group and Dave took a chance on me. I walked in there. There was no P &L. They didn't really have a running company. Dave texted people and they knew to blog every 30 minutes. So there was a lot to build. But one of the things, When I took the job, I was fired from two boards that I sat on.

21:13And I had a lot of people in my network be like, you just committed career suicide and it's over. And how could you go work at that disgusting, terrible place? And you know what? Like, I loved that disgusting, terrible place. Like, I found it to be the least sexist place I've ever worked. It was the least insidious place. I've worked at, you know, Microsoft. I worked at AOL. I worked at Yahoo. I've worked at a ton of ad agencies. I helped take a company public. And all of those companies had way more issues that were way more hurtful that nobody ever talked about. So I really saw it differently from the inside.

21:48And I think one of the things that's happening, you know, right now we're kind of in a culture where it's like condemnation by headline, where you don't actually take the time to figure out what the real story is. It's just your judgment and opinion is the headline. And that's that. I really realized that I could not change people's minds. You know, I remember being on Fox or something and I just basically was like, Barstool has offended everyone. Like it's actually indiscriminate. They have offended everyone. So I could, I had the choice of like, I can either go apologize and try to make it right with everyone, only knowing that they were going to offend you the next day.

22:25or I could try to build a professional environment, build a compelling business, build a durable system, which is ultimately what I did. And Food 52, like the feeling, the culture on it, I don't want to say it's more feminine because that's probably oversimplifying, but was that part of the appeal to go to someplace that felt different? I mean, there are a lot more women on the executive team. There are a lot more women leading there, right? Yeah, I think, you know, we had an all-female executive team for the majority of the time I was at Barstool, which I think very few people recognize. I did want to go someplace more feminine.

23:06I don't know that it's feminine, though, because of the people that work here or because our customers are women, which was the other thing I was really looking for. You know, if you were to ask me, how do I market something or build a product for an 18 to 25 year old male? Like I could talk your ear off about that. And what I'm actually interested is, you know, I want to build products for women like me or women who are younger than me or women who are older than me. So that for me was a good next challenge and was something I was looking for. You mentioned your book. Nobody cares about your career.

23:42Are there things that women in business especially could take from your book? Oh, I hope so. I mean, I think anyone, it's not a book for women. I wrote the book because I was getting a lot of career questions. I get probably about 500 DMs a week across all the platforms of, hey, my boss is an idiot and what do I do about this? Or, you know, how do I get promoted? or I just had a baby and I feel like I'm being discriminated at work, like whatever. But I really do think it comes down to the same things for everybody, which is your ego and your insecurity. And how do you get over both of those things to be better at work?

24:22I think a lot of times women at work tend to second guess themselves and tend to overanalyze themselves and hold themselves back. But I also, in fairness, think men do that a lot, too. So the book really is designed to talk to everybody. Both Food 52 and Barstool Sports are media businesses. I work in the media business. I've worked my whole career in the media business. And it's really a hard business. Like, in some ways, it's like it's a terrible and kind of grueling business because you have to recreate your product over and over again. And the market, like, where do you feel like the media business is now?

25:02How and why are you drawn to being in this messy, relentless? Yeah, insufferable business. I love the media business. I feel so lucky. There's not going to be people who come after us who work in the media business the way we work in the media business. Mostly because the media business is so screwed up and it's so challenged. It's not sustainable the way it works now. But I find there is something infinitely challenging and kind of fulfilling about that blank page every day. And you've got to make something. You've got to make something. You've got to distribute it. You've got to program it. You've got to figure out if it works, if it doesn't.

25:46But it's the same thing in the business model, too, though, right? Like you've got to keep coming up with what the new business model is, too, all the time. All the time. And I think, you know, I think the world has changed so much. The media business for so long has been it's been disintermediated, right? You had the newsstand and maybe a consumer bought it or not or in cable or broadcast television. And the Internet has just made it constant. And it's death by a thousand cuts or it's it's an opportunity with a thousand swords. Yeah, right. You can reach everybody in a perfect way, except then you've got to create everything for every platform and every person.

26:24Which is exhausting. Like you got to have it's exhausting. Like it's so you know, it's so funny at Barstool. You know, we were lucky at Barstool because we were early, early on podcasting. And I think that's the big thing in the media business at this point is you got to jump on to the next thing just as it's starting and when it doesn't look like it's going to make you any money. And that's but that was a big part of our success at Barstool. But anyways, at Barstool, everyone's like, I want a podcast. I want a podcast. Give me a podcast. I want a podcast. And I used to be like, be careful what you ask for, because the worst thing about having a podcast is having a podcast, because you got to do it every week.

27:03You got to promote it every day. You got to do the clips. And it really separates. You're holding up a mirror for me. Yeah, it's hard. It's a pain in the ass. But it's that's what it takes at this point. Some of your podcasts, like they move beyond Barstool, right? Like Call Her Daddy went on to went on to Spotify. Spotify, and that was good. That was required. It's like you got to keep moving. You got to keep moving. I mean, I think that's a huge success. I think it's a huge compliment to Barstool. I think it's a huge testament to Alex Cooper, who's a phenomenal talent. You know, she had a contract at Barstool.