Gen Z vs. Sports Media, SaaS Valuations & NVIDIA’s 80-Year Bet on VAST Data | Aug 27, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pastrucha. It is Wednesday, August 27th. I'll just double-checking the date there. Today, we've got a really great show planned for you, stretching all of our tech muscles today. We are talking about sports media rights with the CEO of Overtime. We're talking about software multiples with the man behind the popular Clouded Judgment newsletter. We've also got a great conversation talking about the booming business of data storage. But before we get going, I want to remind you very quickly that prices for our AI Agenda Live Summit in New York City go up next week.

0:49This is our big AI conference. We've got speakers from Anthropic. We've got big-name venture capitalists like Sarah Guo from Conviction coming to join us. Be sure to grab those tickets now. We will put the link in the show notes. Okay, let's get to our first guest. Sports media is an industry that is quickly being reinvented in front of our very eyes. Over the past few weeks, we've seen a number of legacy media and entertainment companies increasingly snapping up new sports rights and sports media properties. I want to bring on someone who follows this space very closely. Dan Porter is the CEO at Overtime.

1:24Dan, it is great to have you. Welcome to TITV. Thanks for having me, Akash. So look, this is kind of an interesting time for sports media right now because, I mean, you've got the older television companies, which are kind of in some turmoil. You've got the big tech companies that are increasingly moving into sports media. Things are changing so quickly by the quarter, by the year. The question I want to start with is, where do you see the business of sports media rights going five years from now? I mean, one of the interesting things is that sports media rights are long-term deals. And, you know, having worked with a lot of leaders of big leagues, they love to lock in 10-year, 11-year deals, which makes a lot of sense because it mitigates against risk and against the future.

2:11But what it also means is that rights only come up so often. So you only have so many opportunities to make a deal. So if you kind of map out the whole table, you know, the NBA has just done their deal. The NFL has a couple of years. It's really it becomes almost like a feeding frenzy because there's a limited amount. You know, NBC is locked in the Olympics way into the future. I'll be on Social Security by the time that that's done. And so I think that what it does is it's like a great VC deal, right? Like a beating frenzy around that. And the legacy media companies are worried about the tech companies.

2:50Tech companies are really worried about the legacy media companies, but they want to be at a place where there's live, unscripted entertainment with passionate fandom. Yeah. I want to talk about the tech companies. One thing that I've been thinking about is these deals are long, like you said. I know that they want stability, and I know it's in their best interest to get a long-term deal in place. But isn't there something to be said, too, that if you make it shorter, then you have sort of a better idea of which platform, which channel might actually be the best for your own league? Isn't there an argument to be made there?

3:24There's absolutely an argument to be made there. It's just in the DNA of professional leagues to lock it in. And at the end of the day, you remember like a league is an entity. A league is a representation of owners. And that's part of what values sports teams. That's why people sell before rights deals and hold after rights deals and so forth. And so in a way, I think they prioritize stability of essentially contractually obligated income or revenue over the fact that they're constantly making deals. Right. So let's talk about the tech companies. You know, we've seen all of Amazon, Netflix and Apple getting into this space.

4:07Amazon and Netflix are it's an advertising play for them. I sort of see it. Apple is kind of interesting because they're not selling ads as far as on their sports content or Apple TV, broadly speaking. What do you think Apple strategy here is with sports rights? Right. And I would add for Amazon, too, it's about increasing the value of prime as well as advertising. I think that, you know, Apple clearly cares about being in the services business. Apple is like, you know, Apple's like the designated hitter. You just, you put them in and they take, they bat once and they try to hit a home run. Like you can go and look on the platform.

4:48There's, the catalog is not deep. And so I just think they want to play a different game. They want a level of control, and they want to take a much smaller amount of shots. If you kind of break them all down, you look at Netflix, I think they really care about live events, not sports leagues. They want the Golden Globes of sports, right? They just bought the Home Run Derby, but they didn't buy MLB rights. You look at Amazon, and they're trying to have regular usage to increase the value of Prime. And I'm not sure 100 % that Apple doesn't change their mind every six months about what they want and how they fit into that ecosystem, which is fair.

5:28Right, right. One of the questions I wanted to ask you is what people are, what young people are watching nowadays as it relates to sports. I mean, you know, we can put aside the discussion about which sport is most interesting. You know, I like hockey. I don't like baseball, but that's just me. I mean, where are you seeing younger audiences gravitate to in terms of sports or in terms of content? You know, you live at the center of this new age of sports content with overtime. How do you think about that? I mean, listen, hats off to all the professional sports leagues. They're all incredible. The average age of the viewer is 40s, 50s, some of them even 60s.

6:07and this idea that we're just waiting for young people to hop on the couch and turn on the TV and watch a three-hour live game it's just never going to happen it's just not the operating system of young people and so I think that there's there's an interest I always used to say when we were selling overtime it's like more people talk about Tom Brady or LeBron James and sit down and watch Tom Brady or LeBron James. And it's about, you know, it's about live viewing. It's about the competition that exists from Roblox and Fortnite and Netflix and all of those other things. I mean, I think when we were all kids, we had a way finite amount of stuff that we could participate in.

6:50And listen, everything that I just described to you is about participation and about being social with other people. And I think a live sports event is a great example of that. So the person next to you is screaming. It's incredible. You know, less than 5 % of Americans have been to a live sports event. And so I think that those are challenges, but young people's attention is more varied, number one. Number two, clearly they're using social to keep up to date without watching the live game. And I think the biggest challenge is there are a lot of fans, but are they customers? And that's the threshold that I have to think about and that every single pro sports league has to think about.

7:31Right. Last question I wanted to ask you is ESPN came out with some news that they're pushing out this new revitalized app as part of the big announcements that came in recent weeks. One of the things I've been thinking about is how a business like you thinks about ESPN moving more into that space because for me, I mean, it's a new app. I wondered if you think of it as competition to the content that you produce at overtime or how do you think about that? Listen, in my previous life, I made a mobile game that was downloaded 250 million times. I love apps. I want to make the most popular app in the world.

8:08I just recognize that my audience uses apps. They're called Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. And it's just very, very hard to change that usage. So when I talk to young people, I'm like, are you on the ESPN app, the Bleacher Report app? They don't, that's not what they use. I mean, 90 % of Gen Z gets their actual news, their restaurant reviews, their sports news from TikTok and Instagram. And I think what do they teach you in business? Switching costs. Like it's very hard to get people to change their behavior. On the flip side, it's way easier to make money on your own platform than it is on someone else's platform.

8:49So I think it's a big challenge. And I think, you know, hats off to ESPN for trying it and they're using AI and they're trying to personalize it. But at the end of the day, even I, an old man, I'm making some of my fantasy football picks based on people I watch on TikTok, not based on websites I use. Great. And you talk about fantasy football very quickly. This is a bit of a stretch here, but sports betting, an area that has intrigued me. Any interest in overtime moving into that space at all? Honestly, no. I think for a couple of reasons. One is I have no problem with sports betting. I think that most sports bettors lose money.

9:30And I think for what I care about personally, and I want to spend my time on and building a brand, I think we just occupy a different space. I think number two is it's very focused on lead gen. And when you're in the digital and the video space, less so. I think that prediction markets are clearly super, super interesting. I mean, I was talking to young people who made tens of thousands of dollars on the New York mayor's race. So I think you can't you can't ignore that to some extent. But I think for us and our fans and our brand fantasy, which is non-monetary, but allows you to feel like you're part of the action is a good spot for us.

10:11I think sports betting is probably a better spot for somebody who's, you know, audience can afford to lose more money or so forth. But listen, it's a free country. Happy for them. I'm happy for people to spend their money however they want to. Right. Well, Dan, thanks for coming on the show. It's a very interesting and exciting time for sports. And we've obviously got a number of these leagues kicking off. And let's just hope that my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs make something happen this year. Good luck to you and them. That's Dan Porter, the CEO of Overtime. Well, it is software earnings season, which means there's going to be a lot of movement across public tech companies.

10:51The categories in focus right now, though, are the wonderful industries of cybersecurity, data services, customer relationship management, all the fun stuff. I want to bring on someone to the show who follows almost all those companies very closely to talk about his market analysis more broadly. Jammin Ball is a partner at Altimeter Capital. It is his first time on the show. Jammin, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. So I want to bring up a chart that, you know, we've been talking about numbers in the background here. Let's pull up this chart here that you produced here, which is very interesting to me.

11:27It looks at the median next 12-month revenue multiples to the median next 12-month growth rates for SaaS companies. Look, we've got two lines here. The thing that I want to get you to explain to us is why it is that growth rates are coming down, but multiples are staying the same. That sort of seemed counterintuitive to me. Talk about that for us. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things on the chart. One, you can kind of tell the multiple and growth rate chart lag each other. And maybe just some context as well. What this is showing is NTM stands for next 12 months. And so it's the median next 12 month growth rate of a universe of public software companies.

12:07There's about 80 in the list, which it's not an exhaustive list, but it's decently representative of the entire software world. And I think what you're seeing is you kind of saw the early, I mean, the chart shows an interesting story, right? We had the onset of COVID, right? The very early days where we thought the world was falling off a cliff and estimates all came down. We had dessert period where estimates all went way up as kind of software more broadly benefited from just less scrutiny on buying and an easier environment. And then over time, I'd say you'd seen a natural deceleration, maybe a quicker deceleration early on as we went through the 2022-2023 period of rising rates and just a tougher period of selling.

12:51And we've kind of leveled out now. I think the median growth rate's about 11%, 12%. The median multiple's about five times. And that's held constant. I'd say the overlay and maybe why has multiple stayed constant as growth rate is decelerated is a revenue multiple. There's many different ways to value public companies. I'd say ground truth is let's look at the present value of all future free cash flows, right? A DCF. A revenue multiple is a it's a very crude estimation that will weigh many different variables. growth rate, margin profile, profitability, all wrapped up into a simple revenue multiple, right?

13:31It's why two companies growing the exact same rate might have different revenue multiples because they have different profitabilities or different TAMs or other things. And so I'd say like why has multiple stayed constant as growth rate has fallen? I think it's because you've seen across the board the profitability and the free cash flow margin of these companies go up. and so that has kind of balanced out equalized it out exactly exactly right now talk about the the growth rates because this is something that i've found interesting to you and look we had the the boom period in you know after the pandemic we saw a lot of these software companies growing very quickly that started to taper down a bit what do you attribute that to and then the next question i have for you is do you see it coming up at all but let's let's start with the with the client first?

14:21Yeah, look, I think that was coming out of the zero interest rate period where there was just heavy scrutiny on every procurement, right? Every CFO was looking at their spend from headcount and people to IT software and was looking for redundancies, was battening down the hatches, was kind of unwinding the period that we had, the period of exuberance, and that made it tough to sell software, right? A lot of software solutions compete with a product from Microsoft, right? Microsoft had this great bundling effect, right? And so large companies wanted to reduce the number of vendors, reduce the complexity, reduce the contracts that they had.

15:02And that was, I think, right, why you saw a big decline in growth rate for just the public software universe in general. Right. And I mean, another thing I've been thinking about is that we haven't had as many IPOs. And so the basket of companies has actually kind of stayed the same over the past couple of years. That's right. You know, usually you'll get about five to 10 new software IPO issuances each year. And generally speaking, the companies going public or early on in their life cycle are still growing quite quickly. And you kind of get this balancing of later stage, not later stage, more mature public companies that are maybe slower growth, but higher profitability get acquired by private equity and kind of some of the slower growth names drop out of the index and the higher growth names enter the index and it keeps the overall growth rate.

15:56I mean, I think the median on that chart was close to 30 % pre-COVID, right? It was not in the ZERP period, but pre-COVID. And we just haven't had, I mean, Rubric and Figma, there have been some in Service Titan, there have been some recent IPOs that are higher growth, but we just haven't had many. You know, we had news this week at the Information. We reported that OpenAI is increasing the size of its share sale, and it kind of got me thinking about the private markets and that side of this story, you know, how powerful private markets have become, and that being sort of a reason that companies don't need to go public.

16:33Talk a little bit about how you view the private markets right now. Yeah. You know, it's very interesting. I've been in venture 10 years, so not a super long time, but also not a short period of time. And I think that the definition of venture capital has changed quite a bit, right? It's not just your Series A, B, or C stage companies where you're buying, you know, 10 to 20%. You have companies doing quite literally billions or over 10 billion in revenue, staying private, raising rounds that are 10 billion plus. And they're still a startup. We still call them startups. Yeah. And so I think we kind of need to evolve how we think about venture capital.

17:14We truly have venture capital in the sense of how we used to think about it. Earlier stage companies finding product market fit, going through the early days of scaling. And then you have what we call at Altimeter quasi-public companies, kind of premier growth, like the private Mag7, the opening eyes, the Anthropics, the Databricks, the Stripes of the world, which everything about them feels like a public company, except for the fact that their securities are not publicly listed. Right. One of the things that I've been thinking about are the employees at these quasi-public companies. Their motivations for joining these companies may be slightly different, or they might not have lived up to the motivations, I guess, when they join.

17:55How do you think about how the employees are thinking about this? yeah look i think they're you know one of the beauties of silicon valley is you know you could join an early stage company you get a lot of equity that equity is publicly listed one day and liquid and you can use that to go buy a new home or you know change your family's fortune there is a little bit of a kind of an employee contract you know not literal contract but like a social contract i would say i don't want to call it like an issue yet because again private markets are evolving. But the longer that that capital stays locked up, I do think at some point it will kind of make people question joining earlier stage companies, well, do I want to do this?

18:36Will I be able to? Is it worth the risk, right? And again, I think most people joining early stage companies aren't necessarily doing it for the money. They're the missionaries, not the mercenaries. I think the later stage you get, it does, you start to compare, you know, I could have a million dollar, I'm some high level engineer, I could go get a million in equity from Facebook, from Netflix, from Microsoft, name your big tech company and it's liquid or something that might not be. And I think at some point that will start to weigh. I do think though a lot of people joining these companies aren't doing it just for the money.

19:10It's the excitement of being part of the forefront of innovation. And private markets are evolving, right? You see SpaceX has a pretty regular cadence of doing tenders where employees can sell shares. OpenAI is starting to do the same thing. You see, you know, pretty regular tenders in the news cycles for them. I think other companies are kind of consistently attaching tenders to primary rounds or just independent of primary rounds. And I think that is enabled by the evolution of venture capital markets just getting quite large, right? And they can support it. They can go do a multi-billion dollar.

19:46You know, it used to be if you wanted to raise a couple hundred million dollars, the only way to do that was in an IPO. And that was one of the forcing functions to going public, access to a quantum of capital that wasn't available in the private markets. That's totally different now. You could raise, I mean, what was opening eyes around$40 billion, right? You could raise tens of billions of dollars in the private markets and kind of access to capital has now been totally unlocked. And so you kind of combine all those things. Yeah. You know, a little bit of like a loop here. You know, I think employees will be able to get liquid on shares.

20:18I think you have, you know, right, this private mag seven. A lot of these companies are still very founder led. And I think if you were to ask any one of them, well, how are you thinking about going public? Right. It could be a good time. The IPO market's opening. The IPO market's shut. How are you thinking about it? I think what they'd all tell you, which is what you'd want to hear is I don't really care what my company's worth in two years and three years. I'm trying to optimize the value of my company 20 years from now. And it's again, you want people taking big bets. You want people thinking long-term.

20:49You want companies like Databricks to think, how can I become the next Microsoft? Not how can I go public in the next two years and optimize my value here or there? That being said, I do think being public has a lot of benefits for broad employees, former employees. At the end of the day, having the optionality of selling your shares whenever you want to without restrictions is a benefit of being public. But I think private markets will continue to evolve. secondary markets will continue to evolve, and venture capital as an industry will continue to evolve. I know. We've got to come up with a better term for it.

21:25I think a more inclusive term, maybe just private capital, or at this point, it's just capital, really. Yes. Yes. So anyway. Well, Jamin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. And a big fan of your newsletter as well. That is the Clouded Judgment newsletter.

21:45Jamin of the most interesting parts of the AI boom are all of the adjacent industries that have seen businesses flourish. Vast Data is one company that has been a beneficiary of all this, and it has quietly become a data storage darling. I want to bring on Kevin McLaughlin, who wrote an in-depth story about the company today, to explain to us why we should be paying attention to this business. Kevin, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you. Thanks, Akash. It's great to be here. So talk to me about Vast Data. I haven't heard of this company. You wrote this story. Why should I be paying attention to it?

22:16Yeah, Vast Data is one of the more interesting companies to come along in some time. Storage has not been one of the most exciting parts of the enterprise software stack. It's kind of something everyone needs, but it has not been super dynamic. I'm sure that the companies in this space might argue that point. But Vast Data has emerged as really one of the leaders in flash storage for training AI models, its ability to move large amounts of data very quickly has appealed to companies like xai and tesla and pixar and vast data has gained a name for itself by landing some of the industry's largest ai workloads so they're definitely a company to watch and and what is it about vast's technology that makes it better than so many other players out there well one of the things we mentioned in the story is that flash storage is sometimes not economical vast has found a way through software to allow companies to sort of for less critical data you can use less expensive lower performance storage and for the training ai models you need the high performance flash storage that can move data quickly so vast has been able to balance those two worlds very effectively right and and i mean i want to talk about some of the other great stories you've written lately but you know one thing that did intrigued me is sort of, you know, Nvidia having invested in this particular company.

23:43What did you find about what Nvidia really liked about Vast? Yeah, Vast has a close relationship with Nvidia. Nvidia has also invested in other storage companies like Weka. And of course, Nvidia as an ecosystem player works with a number of other storage vendors as well. I think the thing that we keyed on in the story is that Jensen Huang has been to Vast Data's event last year, I believe it was there was a quote where he said that he's looking forward to working together with Vast for the next 80 years, which is a pretty long time. So I think that's one of the things that made us think, hmm, there's a special relationship going on here.

24:23Right, right. Look, I want to talk about another story that you wrote recently. You had this big scoop that Meta and Google have signed a big cloud deal together. Talk to us a little bit about that deal and really the significance of that$10 billion figure that you scooped. Yes, when I first heard about this tip, it reminded me of when I worked at a different publication about eight years ago. I got a tip that Apple had signed a big cloud computing deal with Google Cloud. And I initially was like, there's just no way. There's no way that these rivals are gonna work with each other on a cloud deal.

24:59And the people I spoke with when I started to research that story were also like, no way. But it turned out to be true. And this is another example of how cloud, it makes for strange dance partners. I think that Meta needs a lot of compute. But this is more than just raw compute. This is an actual strategic purchase that they've made, Meta has made from Google Cloud. And when I was doing the reporting, I heard that Google Cloud has put a ton of investment on its side into working with Meta. So this is something to watch. And I imagine there could be more coming down the road. Right. Right. And, you know, we talked about this deal briefly the day that you published this story with Stephanie Palazella, our AI reporter.

25:42One of the things I was talking about with her was just how much power Google has amassed in the AI ecosystem. Obviously, it has its model. It has its cloud deals. I mean, it really has become a central figure. I mean, even Meta is relying on it and they're kind of rivals. Yeah, yeah. Well, Meta uses Microsoft Azure and AWS as well. So in some sense, it was kind of they were due to sign up with Google Cloud because a lot of the biggest companies in the world do work with all three major providers. Right. But I do think that, you know, there's something to be said about Google has not made up a ton of market share on Microsoft and AWS.

26:20And yet all you hear about these days is Google's AI and how it's really resonating with customers. And, you know, this was always the prediction that a lot of Googlers had years ago was that, you know, eventually AI would propel Google into the leading position in the cloud. That's yet to happen in a market share sense, but who knows? We'll have to watch and see. Kevin, we don't get to have you on the show too often. So I want to ask you some other questions related to your beat. I mean, you've been covering enterprise software at large for, I don't know how long it's been, but I know it's been a lot longer than I've actually been in journalism.