Boston is one of the best cities in the world for sports AND startups. How many others can say that?? When I started MGMT Boston I wanted to explore the relationship between sports and startups in this city. Last week we co-hosted a breakfast with Kristen Craft from Fidelity Private Shares to meet some startups and operators building (and interested) in Sports, Gaming & Wellness around the city to uncover some of these insights. If you’re a growing startup evaluating your cap table management tools, you need to get in touch with Kristen asap! Jon Von Deylen from Drive by DraftKings brought his learnings & investment perspective to the breakfast. Drive is a multi-stage venture fund that invests in SportsTech & Entertainment with founding partners who include DraftKings, General Catalyst, Accomplice, and Boston Seed Capital. Jon shared... 70% of people in the U.S. say they are sports fans which implies 180M adult fans 124M people watched Super Bowl LVIII and 68M of that audience gambled on the Super Bowl per the American Gaming Association This implies ~60M Americans did not gamble on the Super Bowl and that number would be upwards of 100M+ if you extrapolate to the broader sports fan figure of 180M As of their Q1 ‘24 filing, DraftKings Inc. had roughly 3.5M monthly active users. So even this $16B+ market leader only serves a small (albeit high value and growing) portion of the broader sports fan base. ❗🤸♂️ 💡 There’s a good argument to be made that there are some big businesses to be built catering to 100M+ casual fans. 💡🤸♂️ ❗ Ahead of the breakfast, I chatted with some members of the professional sports community to hear about their relationship with the local startup ecosystem. In short? It’s varied. Professional athletes get a ton of inbound interest across a variety of requests so they’re often playing defense and choosing from the myriad of opportunities in front of them (or not at all) with agents, managers, and advisors playing gatekeeper. It’s hard to audit quality and often “too hard” to figure out what is worth spending time on, especially with a high performance job where so much of your attention needs to be on the playing field. At our breakfast we had representation from Cephable, Ekkobar, eSki, WurQ, WHOOP, Mementix App, Modulate, SportsVisio, Shift Group and more. Thanks to all who made it.
What a fantastic-sounding breakfast meet-up, Matt Crane! 🚀 Boston really is a goldmine for sports-tech. It's wild to think about all those casual fans just waiting for the next big thing. I'm betting on immersive fan experiences as the next frontier – imagine watching a game right from your living room but feeling like you're in the stadium! What does MGMT Boston think about that idea?
Wish I could have made it!
And beyond sorry I had to miss it!!
MGMT Boston | Top Boston Startups | Up & Coming Operators
1moMore here: https://mgmtboston.substack.com/p/mgmt-boston-w11-q2-24-sports-gaming