Ep. 31- Winning the Fan Battle- Vincent Ircandia on Disrupting Sports Marketing with Data

Speaker A: I think the view of an entrepreneur is more accepted but still like it makes you nervous. Like you go tell people you're an entrepreneur, you're starting this company, they think you're unemployed. What happened to this entrepreneur means unemployed. I think he's senior vice president of business operations for the Trailblazers. And now he's back in Calgary and doesn't have a job.

Speaker B: March 2020, Vincent Ercundia is standing on a beach in Hawaii, finally taking a vacation after years of grinding. His phone buzzes and then it buzzes again. The NBA has just suspended its season and every arena in North America is going dark. COVID 19 has just changed things. For most people this is shocking news but for Vince it's ah, an existential crisis because he's the founder of a company called Stellar Algo. It's a small Calgary startup that helps sports, sports teams understand their fans. And if there are no games, well, there are no fans in seats, no tickets, no merch lines, no data. And his entire business model just evaporated while he was watching the waves. Here's what makes this story fascinating. Vince didn't just survive the moment, he used it. While the giants in the industry, the billion dollar software companies, the entrenched incumbents, hunkered down and protected their balance sheets, this tiny Canadian team did something counterintuitive. They told their clients, don't pay us for three months, we'll figure this out together. Today, Stellar Algo works with over 240 professional sports teams and leagues. They have Data on over 200 million fans. The NBA didn't just become a client, they became an investor. So how does a 50 person startup from Calgary become the company the biggest league in the world bets on? Well that's the conversation. So Vince, you are the CEO, the founder of Stellar Algo. Tell the audience a little bit about Stellar Algo. Let's just start high level to really get us going.

Speaker A: Yeah. So yeah, we're really proud of what we're building at Stellar Algo. We have a platform that we've been selling into the sports and entertainment industry now for we're on our ninth year believe it or not, it's called Gone by very fast. In some regard, in some regard it feels like a lifetime but it's been, been really enjoyable. But yeah, we have a platform that over 240 of the world's largest sports teams and leagues use to better understand who are our fans, what are the right opportunities for us to continue to grow fans and essentially, you know, stop spamming people, uh, In a way where. In a age where people get more messaging than they've ever gotten from advertisers and businesses, you know, we try to use data to cut through the noise so that fans can get the right messages at the right time and grow their fandom.

Speaker B: That's really cool. And so you're connecting these. These sports to their fans. And. And you know what I think what's. What's fun about today's interview? It's. And I've told you this, and, you know, the audience will know this, but it's. It's our David versus Goliath series. It's this series around us asking the question of how do small teams compete in these big industries? And. And how does a small team end up winning? And. And what I think is so fascinating again, and I love this because it's like no one will expect this. This little Canadian startup out of Calgary, right, to. To have such. To have built such dominance, to have built such impact across this industry. Where does this story start for you? Where were you before? Stellar. And where does the idea initially form?

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll have to see how far back it really goes. I think for. For me, it really started when I was in Portland and I was working for the Trailblazers. Uh, so, you know, you know, I'm now over 15 years in the sports and entertainment industry, but I was working for the Trailblazers as an executive there. And, you know, really, in 2014, if. I know you're a basketball fan, but Damian Lillard hit huge shot to send the Blazers into.

Speaker B: You can't forget that shot. You can't. That's it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, game six, it was an iconic moment for the franchise. And, you know, really, it was, you know, the first time in many years that the Blazers had advanced that deep. And yeah, it was sort of this huge moment in Portland. And actually, you know, across the NBA, like, people knew about this moment and we saw like, fan. Fan interest and demand really sort of popped. We were selling merch, we were selling tickets. But in sort of the months that followed, it became evident that sustaining that kind of momentum, we didn't really understand our fans well enough in order to capitalize as fully as I would have liked. And yeah, everybody loves the Blazers in Portland. They love that team.

Speaker B: But.

Speaker A: But they all have their own journeys into becoming a fan. And they have different messaging, different reasons for identifying with the team, and we weren't really able to tap into that in a way that allowed us, I would say, to really capitalize on it and we were using a lot of tools, we had a lot of technology, we were spending money. But the technology failed to be able to make it easy for us to be able to really scale those sort of unique journeys for our customers. And that's really where I started to think, you know, there's an opportunity for a company. And it, it took me a couple of years so to get the courage up to do.

Speaker B: Yeah. What was that journey like? That's that like, you know, first time entrepreneur, like.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Do you come from a family of businesses, entrepreneurs? Was there a little bit of like family history? What, what makes you be willing to take this leap? Because you've got a pretty sweet gig. The Blazers. You're, you're, you know, you're at the NBA. Like that's, that's, it's comfortable.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was comfortable. I loved it. We were working hard. But I actually, I loved the city of Portland. I love my job. But yeah, I started to think that was an opportunity, an idea. Uh, my, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. My, I have an uncle that was an entrepreneur. And then my dad was, he was a lawyer for a long time. And I grew up in a single parent family because my mom passed away when I was really young and I saw my dad, you know, agonizing being a lawyer, not enjoying it. And you know, he always said the good thing about, you know, going into business or being an entrepreneur is that you can, you know, you can make money when you're, you know, not billing the hours necessarily. So, you know, what I found is being an entrepreneur is punishing in a differently so. But I'd never been an entrepreneur, so this is my first time. So it was really scary. And it did really take me a couple years to get up the courage to do it. And you know, I ended up, you know, getting married right around the time that I was transitioning.

Speaker B: Same time we get married and started a business. Same thing.

Speaker A: But the marriage was actually a real catalyst, uh, for it because, you know, my wife and I were from, you know, Calgary and you know, it was sort of evident that for community and building a family, it was gonna be better for us to be in Calgary. I didn't know what the hell I would do because I'd been in sports for so long and you know, the opportunities in sport in Canada, frankly, uh, aren't quite as big. So that's where I started to think of like, maybe there's a third way for me here. And you know, that was really starting my own company. So, you know, I guess it's, it's sort of you know, love for my wife, you know, combined with this idea that started to like give me the courage and push to go out and strike it on my own.

Speaker B: So you have this sort of desire to bring it all in together. You know, you're moving in Calgary and you understand this problem. You go, how do we connect to teams, to their fans? That's uh, that's essentially it. How do we capitalize on that? You got the understanding of the problem and you've had to deal with it yourself by mismatch m a bunch of tools and the existing frameworks. What do you do to start the company? Go find a few team members, you go find a few founders, you call up a few friends. What's, what's, what's your starting story there?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was, it was really lonely. So I, you know, I've been involved in sports and actually I was an athlete in college and so I've been on teams basically my whole life. And then to come back to Calgary and really start stellar algo from my apartment with no teammates, it was really, it was really hard. And those first six months especially I'd say were very lonely. So I really had to dial up like going out and networking and putting myself out there. And I think it's really changed in Canada now. Like I think the view of an entrepreneur like is, is more accepted but, but still like it makes you nervous. Like you go tell people you're an entrepreneur, you're starting this company, they think you're unemployed.

Speaker B: What happened to this entrepreneur means unemployed.

Speaker A: Senior vice president of business operations for the Trailblazers. And now he's back in Calgary and doesn't have a job. That's what I think people probably thought. But I did network and I ended up meeting some incre people in technology in Calgary just through like you know, small networking events and talking to some of the friends that I had that knew people in tech and you know, you, you sort of meet people that you don't vibe with right away and you uh, know what I've learned over time is like just trusting my gut and intuition a lot. I ended up meeting Sean Finn and Joseph King who came on early as co founders with me and you know they're really, I, I'm the domain expert as you say. So I really understood the pain points in the industry very deeply and I think that's been a, has uh, been a secret to our success as we've had to reinvent ourselves over and over. That That's a big advantage for us. But then Joseph and Sean are you know, world class talents on the product and then you know, on the engineering side and it's the combination of the three of us and our separate skill sets that have, have led us to where we've been successful.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so you get the gang all together, you get the, you get the team together, you get some co founders together and you start building. And, and, and what are some of the early moments of when you go, you know what this uh, wait, this is working like there is something here. What are those early moments?

Speaker A: Yeah, we were really bootstrapped in the early days and you know, I think a lot of companies start, start this way and thankfully the Blazers and a couple other NBA teams in the early going essentially gave us a consulting contract to help them on a services basis. Yeah, and I didn't, you know, I didn't pay myself for a number of months to capitalize the company. And then we started we knowledge and time with, with these potential customers to understand the, the pains and how we could solve them. And we started to build product, Joseph and Sean. So we really started building the product I'd say in January of 20 uh, 17. And then we bootstrapped to launch a platform at the end of 2017. And those early consulting contracts, I think two of three of those, those converted into sort of our first companies that uh, came onto the product. And so it was, it was really, it was fun, honest, was really fun in those early days because you have so much flexibility in terms of how you're working. You know, I'm intimately involved in basically, you know, everything. So you've got kind of like a front row seat to building this product and iterating really swiftly with the customer to get this to a place where you can, can solve it. Yeah, I've got really fond memories of us like you know, rolling up our sleeves and like co working spaces or you know, you know, my apartment or you know, all sorts of like crazy places just trying to pack something together that would, that would be uh, an MVP of our product.

Speaker B: Those are fun moments and I think it's cool here because you've got, I mean we talk about SaaS. SaaS is software as a service. And so basically you started the service first before you had the software. I think this is where you see so many success with companies who start as consulting as professional services because you go in and you understand the intimate pain of the customer in terms of how they're trying to use six or seven tools to build a little stack to move information from here to there, to make sense of it, to connect with their fans in whatever way. And so you get these professional services contracts, you're working on them and you're actually using that to fund your. Right. Instead of getting any funding like that, any investment like that, you know, customers are funding you and then you're building product around it. What's the landscape at the time? So you're kind of this little upstart. You got this idea as problem. Are there some existing competition? Is there some existing Goliaths in the space? What are the, what are the sports franchises already using that you're sort of going up against?

Speaker A: So there is, there's a combination of competitors in the space. On, on one end you've got like these big horizontal platforms that have seen sports grow and the industry's really grown because it's built on what is the world's most passionate customer. Right. And people forget that. But like, you know, if you send a survey out to sports fans, you're going to get 30% of them answering. If you're, if you go to a drugstore, if you get 0.3% of them answering, that's, that's, that's interesting.

Speaker B: I didn't know that. But that's, yeah, like they're the most passionate customer.

Speaker A: Yeah. So you get a ton of data. It's their team.

Speaker B: Like I was, I was, you know, you're watching, you're watching sports, you're behind the TV and you're yelling as if you're the coach. Right. Like I would do it differently.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, that passion is valuable, especially in a time where people's attention is so, you know, so federated into so many spaces. Sports is like this, this sort of last bastion where you can still get people's attention. And that's led to a ton of growth in our industry over the course of the last, you know, 20 years especially. And so, yeah, they're like the Adobes and Salesforces, which, you know, are huge data players. They were in the space. You know, we have really powerful capabilities, but in certain regard didn't necessarily understand the nuances of the industry, how the teams and leagues and their partners operate. The data is nuanced, so didn't necessarily have this sort of focus and the uniqueness to be able to solve the problems. And then on the other end you, you have some like, I'd say like, call it niche sports players, um, and also some like decent sized companies, but that were built More for a time when, you know, season tickets were everything and sort of the only thing. And the industry's really, you know, changed from just like putting bums in seats for a certain number of events per year to These are now 365 day businesses with, you know, local, national, global audiences. And they're trying to move fans from an awareness level and the top of the funnel all the way down to, you know, highly engaged customers that are, you know, buying and engaging with a multitude of products. And so we launched a platform that sort of sat in the middle of those two frankly, like enterprise capability and flexibility on one end, but with a sports specific sort of vertical software focus. And that sort of white space I think was really in the early days for us. We found a bunch of running room there and sort of uniquely solved a problem and inspired like we were still building the product. Right. So you're, you're figuring it out as you go like, and you're selling it as you go.

Speaker B: Yeah, we can do that a lot

Speaker A: of, a lot of that which creates like, you know, culturally like that. It's exciting, um, it's dynamic. But it's also, you know, challenging to try to deliver on, you know, that, that sort of vision and hope in the early days. But we did, we were able to, you know, find some traction. And then the team did execute, I think we out executed anybody else in the space when we were bringing our product to market.

Speaker B: And so what were, what were some of those, you think back now to the early days, what were some of those either insights or advantages that you and your team had in that early days? You know, so one of the things is that you sort of said you've identified a little bit of a blue ocean. There was no one with both the technological kind of infrastructure for that level of data and the domain expertise. So that sort of cross section gave you, you know, what we'll call David's slingshot here. It gave you space to carve out in it. So what were some of those early, you said execution. So we often talk about the David like speed is a strategy. Like fundamentally it's actually why the Davids can succeed against Goliaths is you can move far more nimbly because your team is so small and agile. And so what were some of the insights for you as you look back?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think for us the number one is like getting time with those customers so that you can iterate around the right solution to their problem and truly solve it. Right. Because I see where a lot of companies Struggle, and this could be other startups, but also major companies is once you start to do a lot and you sort of dilute your focus, you, you're gonna have a hard time fully solving a problem to the extent necessary. And so we were really focused in the early days on this problem of making it possible for the teams to see their fan profiles in one place and just understand who their fans were and what was unique about them. Sort of this like single view of the customer. That was something our industry was really struggling with. And our brand platform now we've stacked products on top of that. But at the time that was a challenge. That was like the number one challenge that we were seeing time be wasted for these customers.

Speaker B: And I like that insight, Vince, because what you're sort of saying is you went, you went niche, but you also said we're gonna, we're gonna deal with the problem from A to Z. We're actually the whole problem versus where maybe a lot of companies or a lot of the competitors, like we deal with the problem from A to C. And then, and then, you know, the uh, client takes it from there.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was ready for frankly at the, and I, I really believe the growth of a company, especially in the early days. But you know, even up to where we are now, it's. The company's growth is really predicated on the founder's personality, the, the founder's appetite to writ for risk and then the founder's ability to grow as a person and as a leader. In those early days, like, like you are pushed as a leader and as a founder, CEO harder than you've ever been pushed before. And I think that that's the one thing, like I've done hard things. Like I, I've, in my life, like I, I feel like I've overcome a lot of adversity. I think like anybody has. But this is a really unique, high sort of stakes pressure environment to which you're forced to grow. And if you can allow that, the more you can allow that to happen and actually understand where that growth needs to happen, it's reflected in the company and the company benefits.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I love, I love how you said it. And I'm going to, I want to dig into where you think, you know, some of your strengths were early on and your weaknesses. But I think you've hit this, this, this theme where entrepreneurs are forced to face the mirror more often than anyone else. I remember a mentor of mine. I was, I was having a tough time with the business and I was like Man, I'm trying my best. I'm doing everything I can, and it's just not working. And he goes, yeah, Fahd, your best isn't enough. And, like, for a moment, that hurts because you're like, what do you mean my best is not enough? Because you. Cause you're like, but this is my best. He's like, yeah, your best is not enough. Right now. You aren't good enough to build what you want. So you either get good enough and get better or you settle with it. And I think you're forced to meet your limits often, and you're forced to face the reality that the Vince of nine years ago wasn't good enough to build where the company is today, but who he became in the process. And so take me through those moments where you hit a ceiling or you hit a limit. Where were you in terms of your personalities? Where were you good? You're like, you know what? I was. This was a strength.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, and I was really good at this early days, but this area just. I hit my head on the wall a few times before I could, you know, break through it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, like, the strength for me is on that. Like, this maybe doesn't make me sound like this visionary leader, but I honestly think at the time, it was my ability to understand a problem that could be solved and rally a team around solving something that I was confident we can solve. And not taking, like, these, like. We think of the entrepreneur as this, like, visionary risk taker that's like, yeah, has this huge, like, crazy idea. And, uh, you know, there's cases where that happens. But for me, especially nine years ago, that wasn't the. The personality. It was, you know, we were going from a man, and the moments would be things like we were doing these services business. I could have had a really good consulting business and. And. And probably done pretty well financially doing that. But I realized and understood myself well enough. Say that's. I know that's not gonna be enough for me. I want more. So a strength of mine is I do wanna build and push and grow and create change in the world. And I knew that, and that's not for everybody, but I knew that in those early days. And so that's where Sean and Joseph, uh, my co founders, came in. And that moment, meeting those guys in a coffee shop, like a Starbucks in southwest Calgary, and these guys walk up

Speaker B: and I'm like, so they knew each other, did they?

Speaker A: They knew each other, yeah. And they were sort of assessing me and I was vetting them. I Remember thinking, like, it was scary, right? Like, how am I gonna bring these guys into the business now? I gotta start to, you know, pay other people and think about, you know, equity and dividing the company up. That was really hard. But I, I, I knew I needed them to solve those problems and, and so we, we did hit it off right away. It was evident that we clicked and connected and. Yeah, and then I think the vision side is where I was weaker, like having this big, huge vision and where other founders might have this massive vision in some massive market. They go out and raise capital and they don't have a product, they have no revenue. You know, you see that a lot in the US and, and we've seen, you know, that's a riskier model in many ways, but you see huge companies come out of that. That's not my personality. And so I focused on myself and what I knew best at the time. And then we've grown. Our vision has changed tremendously. We now see huge billion dollar potential for this company and we've gotten a ton of validation that we're on track to building that. But it didn't start out that way.

Speaker B: That's awesome. I love that. And I think that's, you know, it is your advantage. Vince, sort of watching you from afar, being able to have worked with your team and worked with yourself is you are phenomenal at the execution stage. You identify a problem and you rally the team behind that problem. And once you solve that problem, you sort of move the flag and you go, here's the next problem. And I think that's just been you and your team. And again, I think it's, uh, I love hearing the background story of kind of getting the founders together because I think you've got this really phenomenal founding team, this really strong team who are execution problem focused. And so you go from one goalpost to the next. And so I think the other strength here is the evolution. You have this really strong at the top ability to evolve, but as a team M grows to a certain size, you've got to evolve the team with you, and that becomes challenging. There's culture to that, right? The founders can evolve. The founders can go, okay, here's the next vision, here's the next goalpost. We know where we want to go. But then sometimes you're like, well, I got to bring this team with me to evolve too. Walk me through the kind of early wins that give you more momentum. So you get your product, you get some first couple wins with the product and the professional services. What Starts to stack. And how do you start building the team to help deliver that?

Speaker A: Yeah, we did like I think we, we ended up exiting 2017. We had, we had seven teams on the platform. We sort of got up to, we were, we were almost like I think 500,000 in annual recurring revenue coming out of our first year. So we had some pretty sweet track three to five year deals. So we kind of felt we were onto something. But we continued to bootstrap. We identified some talent through Sean and Joseph's networks primarily because in those early days we were really lean and we needed folks that could execute really quickly. There's always this battle in engineering over how much do we productize. Knowing that the product is going to have to change, uh, but the product has to be reliable also. So we had these early product principles that really guided us and those were sort of like differentiators in what we had to deliver to our customers and those served us. So like those sort of of early pillars and you know some of those are culturally like you think about core values in those early days, to be honest, like I can't remember, I don't think our core values were like all that strong. We were just sort of executing and going for it. But with the product we were delivering through to the customers and the experiences with the customers we had some pillars and it was things like we were going to have the most reliable data in this platform. That was a huge pain point is making sure our customers could access and use the data and trust us. We also had things like you know, performance so like the data couldn't be slow to load. So these customer experience pillars that really guided us and, and we were all connected to executing through the lens of those pillars and that helped us to grow and we ended up getting a few more customers. We were around a million of recurring and we did in June 2018 we did our first call it seed round. And it was nice to have some real customers and real revenue at that time because it was allowed us to actually select sort of of the best of breed angel investors, you know, that could support our business. And that was I think a huge launch point for us to go into growth and we sort of hit this exponential. We deployed that capital to continue to evolve the product. We hired sort of our first go to market team. So, so it wasn't just me out selling and that yeah led to like, you know we had uh, some really strong years following that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I think that's um, it's one of the themes we're seeing in a lot of the David versus Goliaths, it's that because you bootstrapped early and you were able to find some product market fit and you were able to get some customers early, you sort of realized that in a way, capital is a commodity. Different investors are trying to sell you their dollar as a part of the company. And so then you start to pick and choose which investor you actually want because their dollar and their dollar is equal. It's a dollar. But, but that investor comes with certain experience or that angel investor comes with certain, just a better board member, so on and so forth. Uh, and so when you start to realize that capital itself is a commodity because you're not desperate for capital, because you've got some base, you're able to make much better decisions with where that capital comes in. And I find that Canadian founders do that well because they bootstrap, uh, often for a while because we're not flushed with capital. Right. Like the joke in the Valley is money just dropping out of investors pockets here for this idea and that idea. And you get far more volatility with startups that yeah, they seem huge in the beginning and then they fall because it was just an idea and a vision and there was no traction. So you're getting some traction, you're getting some teams, you're building the team. It's feeling good, it's tough, it's never easy. You raise your seed capital and where's the first customer churn or hiccup or you can't produce what you need to. Where does some of the challenges and the problems start to, to, to stack up?

Speaker A: Yeah, and there's been needless to say like a number of moments. Like I'd say one that comes to mind is we on the back of that success that, that I'd mentioned in that really strong run and, and even that it's not linear and up and to the right like it's, it's really not. But we had had some success and it really, I remember I had a long needed vacation with my family and we, we took it, we were in Hawaii and it was right, right when you know, Covid started. So basically sports started to shut down and like the NBA I think announced that they were gonna stop all games and I was like coming off the beach in Hawaii and we were in the middle of closing an extended seed round and we had basically like uh, the reason I was there was because the deal was in principle agreed to and it was all basically just, we were at paper. So it wasn't necessarily a celebration. It was far enough along that I was comfortable. Like it was just administrative and, and yeah, the world sort of stopped and especially in our space. And so that was really hard because I have to talk to our team when I'm not even in front of them and say, hey, you guys, like hang in there. We don't know what, really what's going to be coming here, but like, we're going to figure this out together. And then I'm on the phone. Like, it ended up being the worst vacation I've ever had because between telling our staff, like, like, you know, hang in there guys. And then working through things with these investors because we did end up getting the deal done, but we did have to renegotiate on, you know, valuation. It was, it was really tough. And, and so that, that was a moment that, you know, really comes to mind. And then, you know, to your point earlier, like when you think about the team that got you there and who's going to get you there next. Yeah, that's a really hard, that's been a really hard reality and lesson that, that you know, I've learned along the way and I, I had enough, I guess hubris maybe is the word to believe that as a leader I'm gonna be able to evolve my team so that they're gonna be ready for the next, you know, leg of the journey. Like, I'm, I'm a good leader. I can coach our people so that they're always gonna have a place for us. And unfortunately, the business is so dynamic, fast paced, conditions change so much that the, that's not always the case.

Speaker B: Sometimes outpaces.

Speaker A: It does. Yeah, sometimes it, it does just outpace your ability. And as a, you know, for me as a CEO, there's so many things I'm trying to do. We always try to prioritize our people. I'm really proud of the culture that we have. But you know, I, I think you can't, the reality is you can't bring everybody along and you have to. It's one of the hardest things I think of actually. You know, being a CEO is just, that is the reality, reality. So you're going to have to have those hard moments when you do have investors. You know, we've got great investors, we've been really cautious there. They've been supportive. But those investors want to know that you can make those hard decisions and you know, you gotta, you gotta keep it going or else you're gonna lose the business and the team and that benefits no One.

Speaker B: So, yeah, those are, those are tough, especially with, especially with the team members that were there early on.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: Right. It's, it's, it's hard. Right. We talk about, you know, do, uh, you reward loyalty? Do you reward performance? And hopefully it's a Venn diagram where they're crossed over.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And that's, that's, that can be difficult. So in this, in this sort of Act 2 of the Journey your Covid hits, you've got to evolve, you know, different members of the team to try and get to this next stage. And usually, I say usually in, in Act 2 of, of of these stories is when the competition starts to pay attention to you because now you're eating other people's lunches, now you're taking over some market share. Before you were just a little fly on the wall. No one's paying attention. But your customer count's starting to increase. Your brand name, um, is starting to increase. What point do you find that the competition started to get a little more fierce because you started to build a bigger brand that was being noticed?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think like when we hit 10 million of annual recurring revenue, like it was around that moment. So, so that would have been around 20, 23. That's when we come, you know, coming out of the pandemic, sports had continued to grow. Other companies had seen what we've, what we had built. And so some of those, like big horizontal goliaths started to say, hold on, these guys are building a real business and they actually have more market share than we have in this industry. What's going on there? What are they doing? So those sleeping giants start to wake up a bit more. And then there's also some small startups. Like, I think sports is a sexy enough space that we see a lot of startups come and go. Uh, but we did see some startups and we still do popping up that try to emulate what we're doing or say, hey, we can do it better than Stellar algo. My own belief and this, to use a sports analogy, is like, you kind of gotta play your own game. That's always served us. It's first knowing who are we, why are we different, why are we better? How do we win? What, what about our execution helps us and strategy helps us to beat the others. Yeah, but I, I have woken up a little bit more probably. Like my, my nature is to really focus on us when there's so much noise going on around, uh, building a company. But you also. We have had to get smarter about what's the competition doing? What can we learn from that while not allowing that to distract us? How, how does learning about those competitors focus us as opposed to allowing it to uh, a. It's a tricky balance. Yes. New competitor launches some brand new feature, big splash in the market. What do we do? We need a response like what are we doing here? You know, trying not to lose your cool but also being aware of the forces around you.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think it's interesting because you can sort of see the phases in the, in the early stages of a David story, you're sort of this focus on yourself, just get enough resources that you can survive, get enough customers, figure out what you need to do to win and then you get to this mid size, your 10 million arrow where you're now loud enough and big enough that the sleeping giants are paying attention to you. But now you've got little rugrats also popping up that are saying, wait a second, there's a big enough market here, maybe we can take parts of it. And so you actually start to, you've got to battle both sides. And I think you said something interesting. You can't focus too much on the competition because if you do. What we see with the Goliaths is that they become super defensive and their game becomes a game of defense where they're just trying to protect their margins and hold onto the market share versus trying to innovate and try to figure out the next part of the market and where it's going. And so you, you, if you focus too much on the competition, you start to, you become defensive and if you don't focus at all, you don't figure out how you actually get to win in this 10 million ARR. Uh stage. What are the insights that allow Stellar to win? So what, how do the insights transform from the early stages with building the product and the professional services to this stage in 2023? What does, what does allow you to win? What is your slingshot in these moments?

Speaker A: Yeah, like I think the big one is, ah, and it gets harder is getting that, you know, clarity of what are you trying to succeed at specifically? What's the one thing that we've got to achieve in a given time frame? And I think that's really, I'd say that's important. So. But it's the elements that, that you know, I think, you know, you and I have talked about this before, but if we don't have clarity on the purpose, then this is hard and the business is, is big enough now and there's Challenges that pop up, that if we don't know why we're doing this and our staff can't really connect to that, we're going to lose staff and that hurts us. We can out execute people if that doesn't exist. So I think our purpose is really important. It's thinking about, you know, like, core values, I think still come up and are so underdone, like people. It still, it still baffles me. People put them on their website or they're putting them on their wall or something. But I did it.

Speaker B: We went to a weekend retreat, we wrote a few, and we, we made a little poster out of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, but you change, like if you change the conversation now to say, you have a conversation with somebody weekly and say, what would you give Yourself out of 10 if you were scoring yourself out of our core values? Give me an example of that. That raises awareness to a new level. So it's, it's the clarity and intentionality around the culture that you've built. And what are you trying to achieve? Uh, I think in the business and what, I think what. Some of that ultimately differentiates you tangentially, but then, but then also being clear about what are our sort of differentiators. And I can tell you, for us, it continues to be our ability to swiftly understand the problems our customers are faced with. With. And then deploy product to solve. To solve that problem from like an external perspective. Uh, and then we measure those things, you know. Right. But I love the quote, you can't manage what you can't measure. And like, that for us has never become more true. And as we grow, I think, like, that's just gonna continue to be the case.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think you've, you've also stayed a certain size that's allowed you to keep people's focus in the direction. Yeah, right. I think, I think. And I'm sure you saw, I'm sure there was moments in that growth where you sort of start to see different teams working on slightly different priorities. Right. And it's often an exercise we do with teams where we'll get, we'll get different, you know, directors together and go, whoa, what are the priorities? And we see what they put up on the wall and you realize you're like, okay, you put six different. You're all trying to score on different nets.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so for all. And so I think that's why you're anchoring in the purpose. You're anchoring on the purpose, you're anchoring on the strategy. You're anchoring on the core values because we have to find a way. You know, we talk about how Davids are more nimble, but they're more nimble because you have to, you can keep people focused on the direction. It's easier to shift direction versus when you've got this Goliath. So many people, it's hard to move that machine. It's hard to turn that boat around. And you've had a few moments of cultural change. You've had a few moments of big change management. How was that? How are those moments with the team and with the culture? Culture?

Speaker A: Yeah, they're, they're hard. I think they're meant to be hard because you're forcing change on an organization and on people. And in those moments, like we've done a couple times where we've restructured and rebalanced the org, so that means saying goodbye to some people in certain cases, that can hurt the trust that people have. And that's always the fear. Right. Um, I think the good thing is, is when you make the hard changes, usually the people that are best suited and aligned for the business and where you're going next, next, they actually get energized in those moments. That um, that does continue to surprise me. But it doesn't mean that it's still not, not hard for uh, the organization. A lot of people identify when you think about having a great culture. They think that means like, we've all got great job security here. You know, we're going to all be here for a long time. And unfortunately that's not the reality of building a business that's growing swiftly. There's too much pressure on it. So I think that's really, you know, I think we've gotten better at this and you helped us tremendously, I think in this area because we're really good about communicating changes. I think we're really thoughtful. But the follow through that it takes to really be successful in that change management and get over the hump of that change, that's something that doesn't just happen with good communication. That's in the weeks and months and beyond that sort of follow. So that's another thing that I've had to learn and a lot of it, I don't want to say everything comes back to the CEO go, but I think the organization's self awareness to know like I'm very forward looking as a leader and I'm thinking about what's our next challenge, you know, what's that next flag and milestone, what are we planting next? And that's great. That serves us in one regard. But sometimes, you know, I look behind me and I'm like, I thought we made this change, you guys, we made that change. And it does. You don't, you don't always move through the changes as quickly as I am.

Speaker B: And then as, as, as, as becoming a visionary leader becomes a strength of you, yours. You know that, that strength in its extreme is that you're sort of constantly moving the goalposts and moving it further and further out. And the team is still. Yeah, but we're, we're just trying to execute on this problem that we identified six months ago and still trying to

Speaker A: work through for sure.

Speaker B: You know, how do you find your leadership has evolved? And so we talked a little bit about how early days you were very problem focused. You know, early days you were always, I think that has been a strength, stellar. You were very culture focused. You've now become a bit more vision focused. So those are some elements of kind of your leadership change. What are some other elements of your leadership change? Or even just the leadership team, the founding team. How have Sean and Joseph's roles and mindsets had to also have changed in their ability to lead this team with you?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I think we've had to, uh, get comfortable and exciting, excited about being better at things that we definitely didn't have naturally. I think that's been a big part of it. So I think like, we've always been very transparent as a group. We've had like this core belief and I think we've got these strengths that we, we think need to remain. Uh, and so like that people focus sort of approach is something I sure hope we never lose. I don't think we've ever sort of gotten away from that. But for our people to be happy and successful, we've got, had to get a lot better at things that maybe aren't quite as sexy, like process and, and actually, you know, I, I sort of, I think foundationally have this belief that like, hey, if we have, you know, great people, that the work happens and we don't have to really think about monitoring our processes and documenting them and seeing how people are enabling, that was a bit of an eye opener for me. Me. Yeah, so. And I wish that I got better that a year ago. But now, like, so our leadership team, now it's like, what are the nine key processes in the company? Who's accountable for that process? How do we measure it? Those things and making them very visible every day, like, that's just one example

Speaker B: uh, you're now having to build the machine that builds the product.

Speaker A: Yes, that's right.

Speaker B: Right. Like you've got the people, but it's. Yeah. What are their. What are a system? Because that now you have those nine processes. Processes. You can iterate on those processes. You can make them better, you can make them more efficient, you can make them more effective, you can point them. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And scalability like we have, we work with, we have 240, uh, teams and leagues now that we work with, process. 200 million fans for our customers. It's like 50% of the US and Canada's adult population that we have data on now.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: So the organization.

Speaker B: 250 million fans, is that what you said?

Speaker A: 200 million.

Speaker B: 200. 200 million fans.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That's impressive.

Speaker A: Billions of data points. So. So the. When you think about us being like little seven team kind of seven teams and, you know, maybe a couple million fans worth of data back in like the end of 2017, early 2018 to where we are now, the organization to support that has to be so much more scalable. And the things that I'm focused on now versus what I was focused on back then have changed dramatically. And like, I still am really passionate about our product and the value that we're providing for our customers. That's something that, you know, I enjoy and I think that I'm good at. So I try to keep a really good pulse on that. But we've had to find, you know, the systems for how do we meet, how do we run our processes, how do we make information visible so that we're able to really scale our organization. And there's been some really hard growing pains in this regard.

Speaker B: What were some of the mistakes? What are some of the. Look back at it and you go, yeah, you know, we fumbled the bag here. We thought this was working for a while.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think a big, big moment is when we, we started to, you know, we'd signed quite a few teams and the team started to go to the leagues and say, we like this platform and leagues. You should be using something like this or buying this on our behalf. And so we started to sign these leagues and the leagues are, it's really going up market. So we had gone up market into these larger enterprises. Uh, and it was an engineering challenge. It was sort of a customer success and account management challenge to service these, like larger orgs and entities. That was hard for us. We had to make massive changes to how we operate to scale.

Speaker B: You just moved up leagues, you just went from college ball to you got drafted and you're like, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not as good as I thought.

Speaker A: We need a whole new training regimen if we're going to be successful going forward. Like, like, you know, and so we, we really had to change out, uh, some of our people very hard. We had to look ourselves in the mirror and say we can't keep operating the way that we are and, and change the organization. So like I remember one meeting we had an off site in this is about two and a half years ago. We, we went to the mountains here, uh, Banff national park, or just outside a town called Canmore. I, I made the call because I was at the time I was, was and we still have our same founders, like Joseph and Sean are still there. That's unique. We have an unbelievable relationship, but we have a five person executive team. I said we got to bring our VPs here too. So we brought like I think about a dozen people there. And I remember just like fighting it out in that room about we, you know, between with the constraints, like we don't have enough capital to. And people to do all the things that we need, need to do in order for us to deliver for all these customers, let alone keep innovating our product.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And that honestly was like it was. I remember arguing with one of our executives at dinner. We were out for dinner and he was stuff and I was arguing him loudly. We. I'm not proud of this in the restaurant. It happens, I think. But out of that came some really innovative thinking on how we could work better within those constraints to be successful.

Speaker B: Uh, so what were some of those insights? Because that's fundamentally the challenge of these. David versus Goliath. You have less money, you have less talent, you just are smaller m. You don't have access to all the things that a bigger competitor might have access to. And you're trying to of fight, you know, uphill battle. And so you sort of set the stage there at that, at that offset with your team and you had to make some trade offs. What were, what were the insights coming out of that? Maybe specific to stellar but also you know, kind of as you look back to them, what were, what were the lessons of that?

Speaker A: Like, I think one of the lessons is you've, you can't punt these hard decisions down the road and you have to, to make them and face them as early as possible. And it comes back to that intuition for me, like once I feel like something's not right and when I've hurt the business. I think it's when I've said no, I think we can get through this. Like we just got to keep our head down and keep going. And resilience is like probably the number one trait of an entrepreneur. But you know, your strengths become, you know, overdone are weaknesses and so the best thing to do is say this isn't working. Like we're not going to be able to make it if we don't change something. And and so I think the one thing is you've got to get in a room again. And you know, I know companies operate remotely too but like get in a virtual. No, no, get in a room. Get in the room. Yeah. And, and put the one problem to solve on the board and say we're not leaving here you guys, until we solve this. This has been going on, on and oftentimes it's been going on for a while. Right. Like that. That's.

Speaker B: They're often cross functional team problems. They don't belong in just one. I find if the problem belonged in one area, it ends up being solved. But it's when it lives in between the departments and there because no one person owns the problem.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Which in your case, you made it, you made it a team. One problem, you said it's this problem is now the executive team's problem. It's not. Doesn't belong to any one person. We, it has to be our problem

Speaker A: as a company to fix for sure. Yeah, yeah. And these are all, these are all I think with these constraints and those sort of moments, it's actually where the best work ends up getting done. And we, we ended up re architecting the back end of our platform so we could go from hundreds of customers on. So now with the back end we've got which is like I think state of the art, we could bring thousands of customers on and we can bring them on, you know, 50% cheaper, you know, almost 100 faster than we were before. So. But it was a risk to do that and we had to like sort of face it and we had to make trade offs. And that's why you see businesses that have raised a lot of capital frankly that aren't successful. Like how did that, they raised hundreds of millions. How did they.

Speaker B: Because they don't have to make any trade offs.

Speaker A: They don't, they're not making those like hard decisions. I think in cases, not everybody. But you know, that's where you go wrong. We did a series. Series. We did a $16 million Series A round at the height of the market in 2021. And you know, I'm proud of how we, you know, we've always been pretty judicious and capital efficient. But looking back now, I can see the places that having that additional capital let you spend. Yeah, we spent more and that was part of the idea. But we definitely, we lifted some constraints that uh, didn't, we didn't help ourselves because we didn't make the hard decisions and we didn't drive the focus and enough in those moments.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we've, we've talked about what the leadership of has had to become. We talked a bit about the team. Tell me a bit more about some of the team dynamics that you think have been essential to a success. And then where are some of the team dynamics? Where you went wrong with some of the maybe team culture or some pieces that maybe you went wrong by a decision or maybe we were just too lax about it. We tolerated some, some team pieces for tools long.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I, I'm really, I'll start by saying this might sound like a bit of a cliche, but our team's ability to really rally around our problems has been our, that's our differentiator.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: How well our people work together, how energized and ambitious they are, that has been the biggest reason we've been able to, you know, outpace some of the Goliaths. Where we've gotten into trouble is where we ask, ask our team to do too many things. And that continues to be our sort of record that repeats itself that I,

Speaker B: we're doing too much.

Speaker A: I don't know why I can't learn the lesson, but I think it is because we see the needs of the business are great and growing a company is very challenging. So you, you try to push the team to do a lot. Uh, so there's, there's a balance there. But definitely where I've seen us sort of like stagnate or struggle, it's when our team cannot focus and prioritize their time on, you know, one, one problem or you know, maybe it's even like two or three. But when they start to time slice themselves and, and their focus, that's where we really struggle. And that I, I really think that's what has led us to hit some ceilings. And I, I mentioned this one moment sort of in the mountains, but we face that music because we had the, this backlog of customers to implement. We could not even say yes to any more customers. We were at that point, it was like we, we cannot sign any New customers right now, you guys, which is

Speaker B: the worst feeling because you're like, well, I want to sign more customers, but

Speaker A: yeah, and, and even for me, like, like growth is like, that's everything. You know, you want to be growing. That's why we do this, to grow the business like from the outset. But we were in a position where we were not going to be able to grow. So we had to. To think of how do we focus on like what the top problems do less, which is a hard thing to think about doing less. I think every step you've got to get more focused and more organized. And it's sort of in contrast to what you, you think about building a company, you think you get bigger, you got more resources, we can take on more. Yeah, let's do more stuff. But I think whenever we've, we've done that or we've done it in the wrong way day, it's really hurt and held us back. It's like you're, you're pulling an anchor behind you. So you've constantly got to make those hard decisions to shed, you know, shed the baggage.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then set up your team to like work different and work better together. Like, honestly, like we do, we run a really, I think, tight strategic planning process. It's gotten better and we go back to thinking, you know, from soup to nuts on what is our. Back to the. Is our purpose still the right purpose to get everybody excited?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like hopefully we're not changing that every year, but we. To look at it, are our core values still the right ones for us at this stage of the business? Like our, our bhag. Is that the right thing? What are our differentiators in the next year and what are the things that we're gonna. What rocks do we push so that we're able to achieve the outcomes that we set?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that, you know, I think that's really impressive because a lot of startups struggle with this cadence, these operational rhythms. Yes, right. And you have made these operational rhythms, these cadences, these processes is really core. The strategic planning, the quarterly planning. You know, you guys do the Pro bowl, you get the whole team together for an off site to do learning and do build, team building. All of these pieces, those have become essentials, pillars to the culture and help you kind of navigate as cultures change too. I think that's what they've become really. Well is sort of, you know, times to revisit the culture as it evolves so that it doesn't just drift, but there's real Intention behind it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Ah, And I love that. I think that that's, that's what happens. Like I, I actually still meet with any of our new employees. I don't always get, I don't interview them all anymore, but when they join, I have a cultural orientation that I run. And so I talk to them about the purpose of the business, why we created it. We go through the history of the company so they understand in my words, how we got there, there. And then I talk to them about culture and I talk to them about how they can fit into that culture to help us get to the next level. And the thing that I say, like, and I, I did one of these last week with three new employees. I say, you're not joining us so that you can fall in line and continue the great things we're doing here. I say if you do that and we continue on the trajectory we're on, we're not, we're going to run into a wall and we won't see it coming, coming. So your job is to come in here and actually be change agents and we don't want our culture to stay the same. Yeah, and I, I think that that's uh, another sort of fallacy is like the way it was at Stellar in the early days, we loved that, uh, like it was fun, like I, I loved it of course. But the business, if we continue to try to preserve that culture, we're dead in the water. And so, you know, we, we. Every time a new person joins, anytime a new customer joins joints, that changes. The culture has just changed. And I think recognizing that is sort of the first step to take towards like continuing the businesses growth.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's powerful. We sometimes say, you know, read the question is, is turnover in staff and startups, is that a bug or a feature? You know, and, and I say there's uh, a, there's a, there's a healthy amount of turnover. It's necessary.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Because if, if not then the culture doesn't change. It becomes this always. Oh, what it used to be what we always wanted. When um, new folks, they're naturally going like, oh, that's not how we do it over there. They have different perspective. It's like when you go traveling, you go to a new country, you go, oh, that's different. Here you just have this immediate perspective of what's different for sure versus, you know, when you're at home, literally don't pay attention to the roads, you know, you don't pay attention, you don't always see the changes, I think that's so powerful that you use and empower the new staff to be like, no, you're the change agents. You're coming in you here. And we want you to have that perspective. Yeah, well, Vince, we've talked about the strategies of the Davids, we've talked about the leadership of the Davids, and we've talked about the teams. And as you sort of walked us through, you know, a bit of act one and a bit of act two, the challenging moments. Has there been a climactic moment? I think that maybe the climactic moment is a moment where you called the retreat, you brought everyone in together, you said, we've got to fix this. Your team rallies behind the.

Speaker A: That.

Speaker B: Where are you today? Because in many ways, you know, you've, you've become a mini Goliath in your own right. You've, you've captured a, uh, significant. You, you are the leaders in the sports market. Am I, am I correct to say that?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: In our category, in your category. And, and, and so you've had some significant wins. You have over 200 million data points. So walk me through act three of this, uh, David versus Goliath story. What, what's.

Speaker A: What.

Speaker B: What are the successes right now and what's the future that you, you're looking at?

Speaker A: You know, I think we're, we're in our strategic planning right now deciding exactly what we, what we think we want to write here, which comes next. But, uh, we, we do have a lot of momentum like, uh, from that round I mentioned that we raised In October of 2021, we've 3x our revenue, so we've had, you know, quite a bit of growth. The company's profitable. Uh, so we're, we're in this really strong position, really healthy customer base. And so I feel like we've built a really great, strong business here, but we're just scratching the surface of what's possible for us and the world's most passionate sort of sports entertainment customer that is just becoming more important. And I think sports and entertainment are a force for good in this world. They're a unifier for communities. You don't have to look too far to read like negative news headlines. And no, being able to just cheer for something with, with people you care about or that unify you, I think is going to only become more important on our world. So we're really passionate about building a company that allows you to connect better with those people as a, as a sports team or league. And then we're seeing opportunities now. Like we've been North America based, so we're seeing overseas opportunities. You know, that would be a cultural, talking about culture. So these are things that like, you know, keep me up at night and wanting to do those. Right. But we're seeing inbound interest now from overseas market. You know, we, there's billions of dollars in advertising spent to reach the world sports fan and we happen to know more about the sports fan than anybody in the world. So we're think we're in a really big, uh, position to be able to grow and create new products, you know, for these advertisers trying to reach sports fans.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So we're going to see, I think some really exciting growth come in that area. AI is a big opportunity for us. We have this massive data asset that I think is a differentiator for us. But how do we leverage that in a world where the technology and the tools are really changing and it's an opportunity for us, but it's also, it's a challenge. Customer expectations have really gone up. You know, I think it's an interesting thing because anytime there's huge technological disruption, you see the expectations in the short term pace realities of the technology. But in the long run they actually tend to underestimate the change that this is going to bring. And so for us, it's up to us to reinvent ourselves again so we can really be the bellwether for the industry. And that's what we've been like. We want to continue to be, we want to be bigger, but we want to be David. We don't want to be this sleeping, become a sleeping giant when the world is changing so rapidly.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, yeah. When the tide changes, you know, say it's interesting when the tide changes. The Davids use the tide, they use the wave, they ride the wave. And the Goliaths sort of try and block the wave. They try and slow it down. They try right there. It's sort of fighting it. And, and uh, you know, I think, I think you're in an interesting space because you have such a phenomenal moat with the data, such phenomenal moat with the brand. But you know, if you were to ask your team from a first principles perspective, if you were to rebuild today as a native AI, how would that look? And maybe that's an interesting off site or maybe that's a hackathon. Right? Like what would we, how would you rebuild from a first principles perspective using current, you know, technology? Where would that take us? And does, can the technology actually meet the customer's expectations. Because I think we're also living in this marketing world where, where you know, everyone thinks what AI is capable of because they see a little marketing video of, of it, you know, doing all this. But it's like, well, really that's, it's actually a backend of non AI tools that have just, you know, that, that require real data infrastructure that allow you to do that eventually. So. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Ah, yeah, yeah. You hit these moments where like I had a board member, I was sitting in our board meeting last month and, and we're talking about some things and he asked me, he said, is this a moment where we need to be. Be evolutionary with the business and, and with our product and with our culture or revolutionary? And you know that I love that question because I need to ask myself that constantly because, and especially when you're having success, actually when you're having the success, if you just think, oh, we gotta just keep evolving things to ride this wave, you can end up slamming into a wall. And you know, we, we've had that happen to us too. So, so it's being ahead and it's. The hard part is knowing when to take that more revolutionary approach. And usually for us, knowing myself, I like to evolve things because I'm more risk averse. But I have to push myself to say, hold on, the signs are there. You know, you have to make these hard calls and really put the revolution into play.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think you've summed it up so well with these sort of David versus Goliath stories because that's exactly it. There are times when the Goliath is just trying to evolve and the winner is the one who revolutionizes. And, and that's sort of the question is, is that the case? Is it not the case? Do, do you. Can you do that within the company? Awesome. Well, Vince, this has been fun. It was a great conversation. I feel like I learned a lot more despite, you know, watching the story and being part of it for a little while. Thank you for taking your time here today, sharing the story, sharing some of the strategies and, and reliving some of these moments with us.

Speaker A: Yeah, anytime. Awesome. Do it anytime. Thanks a lot. F. Appreciate you.

Speaker B: Thank you.