MGMT Boston - W11, Q2 24 - Sports, Gaming & Wellness Q2 Report
MGMT Boston - W11, Q2 24 - Sports, Gaming & Wellness Q2 Report
Sports, Gaming & Wellness Q2 '24 Report co-hosted by Fidelity Private Shares
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 920+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Sports, Gaming & Wellness Q2 ‘24 Report - Boston is truly one of the best cities in the world for sports & startups. What’s the connection between the two? Thank you to Kristen Craft from Fidelity Private Shares for co-hosting a breakfast to discuss with Jon Von Deylen from Drive by DraftKings
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping 50+ Boston based up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dana Wensberg, Senior Engineer @ Paperless Parts - 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup (check out Dana’s Medium blog here)
Sean Smith, VP Product @ Denim - lessons from a product guy who spent time moonlighting in revenue
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation, airSlate, Ayble Health, Occupier, Blink, Arcee, Lendbuzz
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara de Zárraga / RapidSOS
Sports, Gaming & Wellness Q2 ‘24 Report
Once upon a very long time ago I was an athlete. And of course a Boston sports fan, growing up in the city of champions. With 12 championships since 2000, there has been a lot to celebrate!
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!
TLDR: A tight knit community of high performers across both sports & startups provides a unique opportunity to build more interconnectivity here
Another big thanks to Jon Von Deylen from Drive by DraftKings who 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 that 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 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. Jon’s advice is to lead with unique insights and perspective. To think big but start building small.
The challenge (admittedly)? In consumer fitness tech, for example, a good first year retention mark is 30% and often lower when customers choose monthly plans. This “success threshold” makes it hard to build scaled businesses when you lose a majority of your customer base each year. Startups that can both identify problems and provide adequate solutions to drive better human performance over time will help deliver a superior customer experience (+retention) and is always of interest to the Drive team!
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.
It could be the recently retired professional athlete who is the best pairing for our startup ecosystem to adopt! Anyone interested?? Jules? Rob? Patrice? Dustin? Paul? Reach out!
At our breakfast we had representation from Cephable, Ekkobar, eSki Watercraft, Wurq, WHOOP, Mementix, Modulate, SportsVisio, Shift Group and more. Thanks to all who made it.
A lot to be built! Onward!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt