Oak View Group (OVG) has announced the first of what may become many accelerator programs, this one as lead investor in SportTechie, a sport technology media company.
For OVG, founded by Tim Lieweke and Irving Azoff last year, investing in SportTechie brings added benefits to venues in its Arena Alliance and stadium group and to its Narrative division, which is looking for the best practices in connecting brands and venues.
For SportTechie, OVG brings the majority of the seed money it was seeking and the contacts and expertise to help drive the media company to the next level.
Taylor Bloom, SportTechie CEO and co-founder
Taylor Bloom, SportTechie CEO and co-founder and his partner, Simon Ogus, started SportTechie four years ago as a bootstrapped blog and have grown it to include newsletter subscribers from practically every major professional sports league, team and brand, plus scores of attendees to its regional meetups. Bloom explained that those meetups and an active Twitter following of nearly 20,000 followers.
This summer, SportTechie announced a partnership with Sports Illustrated to launch a multi-platform sports technology vertical on SI.com.
With the OVG investment, SportTechie will hire new team members, including, most recently, a beat writer from the Golden State Warriors, and earlier a writer from Forbes, and will strengthen its sports technology platform. Eventually, in a year or two, SportTechie will go out for a new series of funding, in which OVG will participate. Vintage Capital Investments also participated in the round of seed money.
Kai Sato, Vintage Capital Investments, actually facilitated the meetup between OVG and SportTechie, a story both Bloom and OVG’s Francesca Bodie, VP of business development, love to tell.
Bodie had learned about SportTechie through OVG’s Narrative Partner Group and was having lunch with Sato due to their mutual involvement in the Los Angeles Dodgers Accelerator program in which the Dodgers fund startup companies in sports and technology. While telling Sato about SportTechie, Bodie learned he was actually a mentor to that startup and was helping them seek investors for a round of seed money to accelerate growth. The rest is now OVG history.
Bloom is originally from San Diego and attended UCLA before founding SportTechie. He moved to London a year ago, which helps position the firm as international. Other key personnel live in New York and Washington.
“Our core audience is teams, leagues and brands, and with those teams come venue operators,” Bloom said. “They read our site to learn about the latest and greatest technological happenings in the sports world.”
“There are more and more technological innovations, services and products impacting sports pretty much at every level from youth to a league athlete. That’s what we live to cover, that’s our intersection,” Bloom said.
To date, they have been monetizing the valuable eyeballs of influencers who read SportTechie through sponsor content and some advertising on the site and in the newsletter. “Very soon, with the help of OVG, we will grow into video content and events and start to monetize our content across those types of various platforms,” Bloom said, noting OVG is a strategic investor and very much involved in the growth of the company.
“The event space is an attractive part of working with OVG and gives us the possibility to do sports technology conferences, shows and product launches. There are a lot of ideas we’ve been throwing around,” Bloom said.
Bodie finds sports technology, from wearables to virtual reality, to branding to be a huge growth industry and believes SportTechie does an incredible job of curating what’s out there. “You can glance at one of their digitals and get a sense of what’s going on. We’ve seen a lot of our Alliance partners pop up through different activations.”
There are a couple of touchpoints for OVG with SportTechie, Bodie said. “They offer a unique competitive edge to stay ahead of the curve. Our business plan is to be positively disruptive and there is no better space now than technology. From a facility side, SportTechie will not only be a great resource for advising our Alliance on how to be innovative, but at the same time, when we look at how our company will strategically grow, we will look at companies they highlight as leaders in the industry.”
“There is no better platform from a technology sports perspective to think through an accelerator or some sort of long-term program where we can help grow companies from within,” Bodie predicted. “We will have them come into the fold and help them get more knowledgeable about what our industry needs. Technology companies outside our space haven’t actually come in and said how does operation of an arena work with our business. That communication and what our industry needs will be important.” SportTechie is the communication portal, the media company matchmaker.
Personally, she thinks of SportTechie as “my Associated Press for sports technology.” Bodie believes it can be a great resource for the industry, with first dibs for members of Oak View Group.
Bloom and his partners will attend the first quarter Arena Alliance conference for face-to-face sharing, but even before that, OVG is rolling out this resource for its member group, a way to sort through the clutter and learn what’s cutting edge and who’s leading the way.
“I love the international play,” Bodie added. “Look at how innovative western Europe is in fan engagement and technology.
“The kindergartner today will never know life without mobile purchasing. We have to stay ahead of the curve and engage with our fans.”
Already, SportTechie’s coverage of Brad Allen and NextVR has sparked interest from OVG, Bodie said. “I actually use SportTechie as a resource for personal sorting through of the world. Alliance members will have access to Taylor and his team on a daily basis as well.”
Interviewed for this story: Taylor Bloom, (858) 206-1225; Francesca Bodie, (310) 954-4800