Wins & Losses - Clay has an in-depth conversation with Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Finocchio - 2 Pros and a Cup of Joe

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This this Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis. Clay talks
with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in Wins and Losses Podcast.
I'm your fearless host, Clay Travis. I hope you guys

(00:23):
have been enjoying the podcast so far. We have got
a bevy of them. If this is the first that
you have listened to, go back through. It's summer. There's
lots of opportunity to kill time. Maybe you're sitting at
the beach, maybe airpool needs something good to listen to
on a drive while you've got the kids in the back.
Hopefully this can be a show that entertained you at
least a little bit. And what we're doing here is
exploring the wins and losses of a career through the

(00:44):
prism of sports, media, politics, and business. And we've got
a guy who is pret familiar with a lot of
those areas, Dave Finocchio. He's one of the original co
founders of Bleacher Report, and we're gonna get into that
here momentarily. But first of all, Dave, thanks for coming
on with this. H you're here in Nashville, getting ready
for a triathlon, right, Yeah, first first triathlon I'm doing

(01:06):
with a buddy tomorrow morning, so they'll there will either
be a win or a or a loss around that
as well. How confident are you on the triathlon? What
are you most nervous about? What particular aspect of the swim?
For sure? Yeah, I'm pretty I'm pretty solid, like mentally
on the bike in the run um, but yeah, if
I don't drown, I think I'll be okay. All right.
So a lot of people, I'm sure who are listening

(01:26):
to us are familiar with what the Bleacher Report does now.
But what I bet they're not very familiar with is
how Bleacher Report became what it became. So let's go
back in time. Uh let's go first into your background.
Where are you from? Where'd you grow up? All those things? Yeah,
I grew up in a suburb of San Jose, California,
so northern California, West coast. Went to high school out there,

(01:48):
and uh um, ended up at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
I've always been like a huge sports junkie my entire life,
Like when and visited that place and the you know,
the hairs on my arm stood up, and I just
wanted to go to school there so badly, so that
I bet you didn't visit the middle of the winter. No,
I was one of those like classic trap trips where
like had like seventy degree weather in April, m had

(02:09):
like the perfect tour guide. It was like it was
like all the wrong things lined up right as as Ah.
Was that a huge culture shock for you the winter
the first year you were there coming from south northern California,
the winner was a shock. And also like, um, I'm
not Catholic. I didn't grow up going to a Catholic
school or anything, So just like that aspect of it,
how religious Notre Dame is combined with going like it
was the first time I'd spent a lot of time

(02:30):
with kids like from small towns in the Midwest, and
it was it was great for me because I learned
how to relate to all sorts of different people with
different backgrounds and stuff that like seemed pretty foreign to me.
But yeah, the first year was a super weird experience.
Coming from college, I kind of had the same experience.
I went away to college in Washington, d C. And
I grew up in Nashville, where we're doing this interview now.

(02:52):
But it was a huge departure for me to suddenly
be on the East Coast and be surrounded by East
Coast kids. Uh. There were very few people similar to
what I've grown up with in Nashville, and uh it
was a total culture shock. But I think it toughened
me up because if I had spent my entire life
in the South, I came back to law school at Vanderbilt,
I feel like I wouldn't have been as tough, you know,
just in terms of the way people behave and kind

(03:13):
of that East Coast mindset, which I think really kind
of suffuses media in general. It definitely made me more
prepared for what I ended up doing for a living
without even realizing that was happening. And I bet for
you on some level, going to Notre Dame was important
for what you would end up doing as well. Yeah,
I went to ended up going to Chicago after school.
I did one of those classic like was dating a

(03:34):
girl in college and and kind of followed her there.
Um I ended up like when I was when I
was finishing up college. Uh, Um, I started thinking about
what Bleach report ended up becoming. Um, you know, you're like, so,
how let me start stop your ready? How old are you?
I'm thirty six. I just you just turned thirty six.
So when you're in college, what was your experience like

(03:55):
with the internet, Because what I tell people is when
I got to college, I've never had an email before.
I just turned forty, right, so I'm four years older
than you. They gave me an email address. I was like,
I mean, I I was familiar. It's like I was
not familiar with the internet, but we didn't have the
internet at home. I didn't relund yet certainly did not
revolve around it in any way. And uh, even you know,
when you got the email address, you would have to

(04:16):
go to the computer lab on campus to get on
the internet. And I remember my freshman year you were
talking about how you like sports. I was obsessed with
sports and for people. I bet you saw this too
when you suddenly went to Notre Dame. I don't know
what what teams did you grow up a fan of
in northern Californiaria teams Giants forty nine or four years
like my Big three. So I bet you found that
it was a little bit hard to follow those teams

(04:37):
when you got into Notre Dame because it was such
a regional sports universe. I'm a big SEC football fan
and and so I kind of gravitated to the web
because I remember the Chattanooga Times Free Press was the
first one to get online. But when I started uh
in d C, I would intern in the Congressman's office
and they would mail the newspaper. And like, I was
so starved for local sports news that I would read

(05:00):
at day old newspapers to try to keep tabs on
what my favorite team was doing. Yeah, and what young
people don't remember now because maybe they just missed it was,
you know, the alternative sports center, and you maybe had
to wait forty minutes, two minutes, right, Um, so that
wasn't a great user experience either. Or you would sit
and watch the ticker at the bottom of the screen
to see score updates, right, I mean, which now seems

(05:21):
totally foreign to anybody. But you might have to wait
ten minutes between you know, you happen to catch it
coming across the bottom and and then you wait and
then suddenly it's changed a great deal. So so I
got you on that. So like my generation or you know,
I'm I'm just four years later than you. But our
culture on school like revolved a lot around you know,
you've got a desktop computer, a laptop that's sitting in

(05:41):
your apartment or your dorm room or whatever, and like
everybody's on a O ll Inston Messenger. Yeah, so it's
like social life revolved around that versus Facebook. Um. Facebook
came out maybe like my junior year of college, but
it wasn't a big like our lives didn't revolve around
it yet. Uh So there's that. And then I just
found like I finished up my majors a little bit
early in college. It's cold as hell second semester in

(06:03):
my senior year, and I was just like doing what
you were doing. I was surfing the web a lot
looking for sports content. And that was when I started,
like I started to have these observations around one. Um,
Like I had this broad observation around I just thought
my generation was kind of stuck with like our dad
and grandfather's sports websites. I just thought like the voices
were old, a lot of the sports writers were older. UM,

(06:27):
I bet in retrospect, their content probably didn't perform that well.
It was like very wordy like content you wouldn't necessarily
share with your friends. It wouldn't start a discussion. So
that was one thing. It was like this content is old.
It's not like share able snack able. It's not video
content the wather is today. And then the other thing
is I was in economics major in college and I
just kept coming back to this, like this premise that

(06:47):
I thought there were pretty big supply and demand and
efficiencies around sports content. Like the best example that I
can I can think of as UM. You know this
is two thousand five. Every outlet in the country, whether
national or regional, is still like physically sending a reporter
to the Major League Baseball Star Game, like like paying
for hotel rooms, flights, and the Major League Baseball Star

(07:07):
Game was a huge deal in this country in the
sixties and seventies, even the eighties. By two thousand five,
it's not something that UM is like a premium event
from an interstandpoint, But then you have these other super
high interest events like the NFL Draft. Um, you guys
did an amazing job with here this year. Uh UM.
At certain NBA transaction windows, we just saw NBA free agency,

(07:29):
all these things that weren't necessarily TV events. First UM
and then certain teams like the Red Sox and the
Yankees great coverage. Golden State Warriors at the time couldn't
finel it not a lot, right, So it seemed like, Uh,
if you just explored these different kind of markets for content,
you could find pockets where, um, you could do stuff
that would perform really well. So you have that kind

(07:52):
of thesis percolating in your mind when you're the same
you're an economics touch students, the final semester of your
graduate of your college, you moved to Chicago. What happens
then you're probably around twenty two years old, Like a
lot of twenty two year old's probably a lot of
people who are listening to this or either college grads
in college soon to be college grads, trying to figure
out exactly what their pathway is, what comes next when

(08:14):
you graduate. Yeah, so I took UM, I took a
finance job, I did finance internships in college, and you know,
I kind of kind of had this like feeling in
the back of my mind when I was figuring out
what I was gonna do that I like, I just
didn't like it didn't sit right with me to just
do the same thing that everybody else was doing like
did these internships and was with all these guys like

(08:36):
who grinded out eighty hours a week, and it seemed
like their relationships with their wives at home maybe sometimes
weren't that good and like the very cliche things that
you hear, and I'm just like, I don't want this
to be my life. I want to do something that's like,
so you're starting to have like a quarter life crisis totally.
It just feels like it just didn't sit well with
me that I was kind of getting on that type
of path and but I did it anyway to start

(08:57):
making some cash. But before actually started the job, UM,
on like fourth of July of two thousand five, I
kind of had a hay, screw it, I want to
do this sports thing, like for real, I want to
do it. UM. I made a power point presentation the
next morning. I sent it to like eight of my
friends who I thought kind of had their and African
swear and not have they had their had their shipped

(09:18):
together at that point. You know, with twenty two you
have friends who were smart, but maybe you're not like
totally put together at that point. So I sent it
to guys who I thought might actually like from college
or friends from high school had like high school friends
college friends, And the first response I got back was
um from my buddy Bryan Goldberg, who ended up being
one of my co founders, and he and I made

(09:39):
a we'd made a documentary together at the end of
high school. I mean we made like an hour long documentary.
So it was kind of like, okay, like what was
the documentary that we did a trip to Europe with
like a group of buddies, and we was like Spider
Man Far from Home. Uh, Like I'm sitting around I've
seen Spider Man Far from Home three times and the
theaters are Yeah, it was more like the drama that
was creating it after like long drinking nights and people's

(10:03):
where did you go? Like how many guys did you
go to Europe with? It was like twelve twelve guys
we did. We did London, Amsterdam, Uh, Munich for Lynn,
Barcelona something like how long were you gone? A month?
Oh that's a phenomenal. Yeah, it was really good. Yeah,
so you just had like a handheld camera at the time. Yeah.
We just decided going into it that would be a
project that we'd all do. Is like, let's take a

(10:24):
bunch of footage and see what happens, and then you
do like testimonials like real world style where people yeah, yeah,
totally yeah. And we had great jama like I I
stole a buddy's ticket to Wimbledon and then he kicked
my ass afterwards the next morning, which is like all
on film. So we had like when the last time
you watched the film probably like fifteen years ago. So
what would happen if the film got out today? Uh?

(10:44):
Would it be scandalous for like, Brian's probably better known
than than I am in in a media circles these days.
But yeah, my guess is it wouldn't be like a
perfect thing for him. No, No, it's interesting. Somebody should
probably leak it. We're not gonna do it. We did
something similar. We weren't on for a month, but I'm
four years older than he's, probably around the same time
law school. When we finished law school, we went to

(11:05):
Europe and we had like a buddy who was like
to take can like to take shots of everything. And
there's tons of footage right of us. I mean there's
probably about twelve guys. Uh. And we went to Spain
during spring break. It was during our last year of
law school kind of like a great time. Yeah, it
was like our last hurrah. We stayed in Severeo, we
stayed in Madrid, um and we had an incredible time.
But we all knew that we were about to hit

(11:26):
the grind of practicing a lawful time. And so it's
like an abrupt stop to suddenly being having a great life. Honestly,
because the law school, if you get into a decent
law school, your grades don't really matter that much, you know,
because they don't want to flunk you out because then
you can't get a job. So you're going to graduate
and uh, and probably you'll be able to get a
pretty good job. And so but we all knew that,

(11:47):
like we were going to go from our life is
awesome to like hitting a brick wall full speed right now.
The positive is you get more money. The negative is
you have no fun because you're just you know, you're
stuck in the office, grinding away eighty hours a week
all of a sudden. So way, I'm sympathetic to that.
So you did that, and uh, and he was on
the video and everything else, and he was one of
your co founders and he says, immediately when you send

(12:07):
out this plan for what would become Bleacher Report. I
love it. Yeah, Brian, Brian was just in right away,
and uh one of the other things I liked about
working with him. So he he has a cousin, this
guy named Jake Lodwick, who was one of the co
founders of College Humor. This is like like when I
was in college, college humor for people out there, College
humor was massive and and really what they did was

(12:29):
they would link all sorts of craziness that would go
on college campuses basically totally and they were like Wake
Forest grads right who initially started that. If I'm not mistaken, Um,
I forget where Ricky and uh that does that se
still exist? Still exists? I A c owns it very
dillar and they did pretty I mean they did very
well with it for years, right, Yeah they didn't they
sold it. They all made money. Um. But so basically,

(12:51):
like in Brian's family, there was this actual case study
of like, holy shit, you have his cousin he started
a media companies Like this is because everybody we talked to,
like our parents, maybe his parents were a little bit better.
Like investors in Silicon Valley. Everybody at the time, Like
you tried to make pitches, We tried. We initially did
pitches and and the the gist we got back was like, guys,

(13:15):
content businesses, um, media companies like this don't work. Even
nobody even back in like this would have been two
thousand five. This was before media companies got hot there
ended up and before they died, right, I mean, that's
right now. Therefore saying there's no opportunity in media, that's
exactly right. There was. There ended up being because of
not to jump ahead, but because of the success of
Huffing and Post, because of the successive Bleacher Report, because

(13:37):
Facebook started pushing media company content for like a three
or four year period buzze feed. For all the people
out there who were reading like there, there was an
entire incubated period. They were not hot, then they got hot,
now they're not hot again. So we we were on
the front end of that where we had to beat
on like the number of pitches I did, and just
like slogged, it was such a good experience learning how

(13:59):
to sell ourselves and stuff like that. But uh um yeah, initially,
like all the help we could get and having at
least a connection point to somebody who'd done it before.
For me felt like, okay, you know, great, so you're
still working full time while you're trying to pitch this
new venture that you have, or I was working. I
was working full time while we were just trying to
get a website off the ground. So we did so

(14:20):
I ended up having uh this finance job for twenty
months in Chicago. We got Bleacher Report off the ground
by I think like March of two thousand and six
was when we first launched a website. And I literally
and and Brian too, and Dave the other guy who
uh um co founder who came on. Um, I mean
I was emailing bloggers like at the time the blogger

(14:41):
sphere was a big deal. You had all of these, um,
these people who were writing for free. Anyway, Um, you
asked about the early beginning to Bleacher Report, UM, I
just like I tried as much as possible to sell
people on the notion of like, look, we're gonna build
a meritocracy for sports writing. We're gonna help you reach
way more fans than you could ever reach on your own,
which ended up being true times a hundred. Um, we

(15:03):
got people in front of millions of of of readers,
and uh, and it was like, look, the best stuff
will rise to the top and and the other stuff
will sink to the bottom. Um. One of the things
that didn't end up being the cases like because of
because of Google News and because of these different distribution
sources that would emerge. UM. Sometimes if we had stories
or content that wasn't very good, UM, somebody would pick

(15:25):
it out and say like look at this ship story
on Bleach Report, and we got our brand. Um took
a lot of body blows for I mean, I I
feel like I've spent the last five years kind of
working to overcome a lot of the early hits that
we took. But I kind of have no regrets because
I think I think it was kind of impossible to
build our business in that era of media any other way.

(15:46):
Be sure to catch live editions of Out Kicked the
coverage with Glay Travis week days at six am Eastern
three am Pacific. And we're live here outside the Perez
family home, just waiting for the and there they go,
almost on time. This morning. Mom is coming out the
front door strong with a double arm kid carry. Looks
like dad has the bags. Daughter is bringing up the rear.

(16:09):
Oh but the diaper bag wasn't closed. Diapers and toys
are everywhere. Oh but mom has just nailed the perfect
car seat buckle for the toddler. And now the eldest daughter,
who looks to be about nine or ten, has secured
herself in the booster seat. Dad zips the bag clothes
and they're off. Ah, but looks like Mom doesn't realize

(16:30):
her coffee cup is still on the roof of the
car and there it goes. Ah. That's a shame that
mug was a fan favorite. Don't sweat the small stuff.
Just nailed the big stuff, like making sure your kids
are buckled correctly in the right seat for their agent's eyes.
Learn more n h t s A dot gov slash
the Right Seat. Visits h s A dot gov slash

(16:51):
The Right Seat, brought to you by NITZA and the
ad Council. What grows in the forest trees, Sure no
one else grows in the floor. Our imagination, our sense
of wonder, and our family bonds grow too, because when
we disconnect from this and connect with this, we reconnect

(17:12):
with each other. The forest is closer than you think.
Find a forest near you and start exploring. I discover
the forest dot org brought to you by the United
States Forest Service and the AD Council. Look for your
children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest.
It's a storybook world for them. You look and see
a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard

(17:35):
with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasuring pebbles.
They see a windy path that could lead to adventure,
and they see you. They're fearless. Guide. Is this fascinating world?
Find a forest near you and start exploring. I discover
the forest dot org brought to you by the United
States Forest Service and the AD Council. So let's go back.

(17:56):
How did you pick the name bleacher Report? Um, Brian
came up with the name. We we like, I hate
coming up with names. We did like a name brainstorm
on the like. We did literally like hundreds and hundreds
of phone calls, uh, those first twenty months when we
were doing it part time, and one of them like
over a few weeks. Al right, guys, we gotta come
up with a name. And it was just like this

(18:17):
pretty literal take on you know, sports bleachers, baseball, like Report,
Drudge Report it was, and uh, I never thought it
was the best name or the most original name. We
actually our first big investors tried really hard to get
us to change the name. I think they wanted behind
our backs and what did they want you to change
it to do? You They just wanted us to hire
like a third party firm to come up with another
name for us. And uh, because a lot of like

(18:40):
bleacher Report, a lot of people get confused at the
two rs and they're like bleacher Report Bleach. So until
it's like any brand, if it's around long enough, it
becomes a brand. Uh. But yeah, I don't think it
was like the greatest name of all time. So you
were talking to Dave Finocchio UM, who is one of
the co founders of the Bleacher Report. You said you
launched in March of I think when we first had

(19:02):
a website up. Uh. I think it was March of
two thousand and six. How much money did you raise
or what was the cost to get your website up?
Oh my god, you were in for almost like initially,
probably like ten or fifteen grands something like that. Super
cheap we Uh. The three of us, Brian, Dave, and
I saved up money bright Dave was working for Endeavor

(19:22):
in l a Brian was doing consulting for Deloitte, and
I was doing private equity stuff, and uh um, I
think we all we all saved maybe twenty or thirty
grand each. And then once we had that, we quite
our jobs, moved back to the Bay Area, opened up
like a three hundred square foot window lists air conditioning
Lists office, and like a child psyche, like we're we're

(19:45):
in like a weird situation. Find the place to be located.
I think I think Dave Nemets found it. I just
remember moving home and he he'd lined up in office.
It was it was the right price, you know, I
think remember what you paid, like it was like I
think it was like six hundred bucks a month, which
in the Bay Area at the time was pretty cheap.
So you're in the Bay Area at the time, do
you where do you move back? Do you move back

(20:05):
in with your parents? And I moved back in with
my parents, Like I was, you know, I was on
my own in an apartment in Chicago, living a decent
life for which what a lot of people would consider
to be on the path to success, right, Like, totally
got a great job, you're working in private equity, you're
in Chicago, which is the capital of the Midwest. If
you're from Notre Dame, you probably had a lot of
college friends who were in the area, probably a pretty

(20:25):
good social life. And then you just say this is
not for me. I'm gonna go start my own internet
sports website. Yeah, and all my friends and crazy fun
of me. Yeah, they all made fun of me behind
my back and stuff something in my face, which was
was fine too. But yeah, I ended up moving back
in with my parents for I think fifteen months something
like that into your old bedroom. Uh they had moved.

(20:46):
They moved when I was in college, like had had
a different setup. Um, so at least there was I
didn't have to deal with that shame. Um. But yeah,
like grinded through that, I think, you know, and that
my girlfriend broke up with me, like in that phase two.
So I went like I went from feeling like I
had a pretty good like like like I'm you're another
guy in the world Chicago with your own apartment to

(21:07):
living in your parents home parents home were you in
the basement as the cliche would be close enough, Yeah,
and lay in your parents home six hundred seven hundred
dollar a month place in San Francisco, starting your own
sports website. Yeah. Initially we were actually um down in
like the Menlo Park area, literally two blocks from our
high school. Oh, I'm like, and I'm you know, the

(21:28):
the group that ended up doing this full time. We're
three of my high school buddies. What high school did
you go to? We went to the school called Menlo Okay?
Is that a private school? It's it's a private school.
And you've known the guys that you started Bleacher Report
with for how long? Uh? Um? I grew up with Dave,
so I've not. I've probably known him since I was
six years old or something. I've known Brian and Xander
the other guy who joined early, uh, since we were

(21:50):
twelve maybe. Okay. So and all of you huge sports
fans growing up. Yeah, I would say, uh, Xander, Dave
and I are huge sports fans. Brian was a sports fan. Yeah,
and maybe not on the same level as the other
three of us. Okay, So, uh, you guys are doing
what on a day to day basis, like you on it?
You are like you show up, You've got this office,
you got this website. You remember the first article or

(22:12):
articles that you put up? Yeah? Um, in the first year,
I think I wrote fifty articles. So in the beginning,
a lot of it was was us and other friends
I brought onto helpful time. UM, some people that I
recruited a couple hundred riders. But I think I think
the first article I wrote was about how the NBA
undervalues defensive players. I think that's the first article that
was ever written for Bleacher Report. And what kind of

(22:33):
traffic would that do you remember what kind of audience
that article would have gotten. See, that's what we initially did.
So UM. On the one side, so Brian was kind
of managing we we We've gotten a website up, but
it was super basic and it didn't the back end
of the website. Like today, you can buy off the
shelf CMS software where you can kind of manage a website.
It's not that hard to do. Back then, you couldn't

(22:55):
really do that. UM. The CMSs were extremely limited, so
we had to build all of our own X stack.
So he for the most part was managing that where
it was like, Okay, we're gonna raise money and we're
gonna launch something that's bigger and better where we could
can scale. UM. At that point, I was focused on
raising the money and I was focused on um building
an editorial process and an audience. So I figured out

(23:18):
stuff like what you asked, which was like, okay, UM,
what topics are going to produce the most traffic? Why when? Um?
Everything about essentially marketing content. So initially I figured out, like, jeez, um,
every time we write a story about the NFL draft,
it does a hell of a lot better than when
we write a baseball story. And then you you start there,

(23:39):
and then it turns out you can get like incredibly
sophisticated about that down to um. Really, at the time,
when Google had more info available than they have today,
you could look up any keyword on Earth, like NFL
draft order was one I always talk about where we
figured out that on the last day of the NFL
regular season there were a couple of million people that
would search for the term NFL draft where season is

(24:01):
over and you're already thinking like where are we going
to be able to draft totally? So you're like a
Raiders fan back in that era, and you have the
first pick and it's like, you know, should we take
JaMarcus or who who's gonna include the Hope Springs eternal
right that notion? So maybe ESPN starts their NFL Draft
coverage and earnest and like February March, leading up to
the TV event, we figured out that, hey, on that

(24:22):
last day of the season, we need to have the
draft package for every single team because fans want this
content now. And that's an example of the type of
inefficiency I referenced earlier. So you and I love this.
You basically looked at it as a sports fan, but
also as an economics major from Notre Dame at the
Internet and said, hey, we can see that there are
tons of people who are out there looking for something

(24:44):
simple like what is the draft order, and that that
audience is not being serviced exactly and so early on.
And I know about this because I've been writing on
the Internet for a long time, and unlike a lot
of other writers, I got into the data behind what
people clicked on at a much earlier age. And a
lot of other writers did. I think, you know, because
maybe because I was twenty five years old and I
was more not remember um when uh, when you were

(25:06):
at fan House. I happened to hire a guy who
worked in analytics at FanHouse, and I won't I won't
out him, but I remember him saying, um, there were
some some well known writers that were at fan House.
I'm sure when he started a lot of money on
newspaper columnists, with the ir being that their audience would
follow them online, they spent hundreds of thousands, but you
were the highest performing writer there by a good margin.

(25:27):
I remember him either telling me or showing me something,
and that was it kind of made sense. Once we
went back and looked at your repository of content, I
was like, all right, this guy knows what he's doing
relative to these others who were writing about topics that
are not necessarily connective to what their audience is interested in. Now, yes, no,
I mean that's a dred percent right. I mean, uh,

(25:49):
I think to the extent that that I had an
early advantage in writing. It was that I knew what
people wanted to read, right, And I think a lot
of writers right what they want to write the right
for their own peer group, which which is a tiny
little subset of the overall audience, and so you end
up writing articles that aren't very well read. And so

(26:09):
I was always like, okay, you know, and I think
it works for radio sensibilities too, because I've got to
talk every day about the three or four most popular
things that are going on in the world of sports
or otherwise. And for better or worse, I'm pretty good
at figuring out what people are going to care about.
And I'm also naturally there, right, Like I always say,
I have like very middle of the road taste and interest,

(26:29):
and so I think I hit a large swath just
by nature. Um, but I'm fascinated by you going in.
So you write these articles and you start to look
at the data. Initially, it's a pre social media era, right,
So there's no Facebook, there's no Twitter. When you guys launched,
Google is the primary driver of your audience or how
are people finding you? Yeah, so let's say to two

(26:50):
thousand seven, where we're really focused on this through honestly,
like through two thousand and twelve, two thirteen, everything's kind
of driven off of Google. Face Book didn't really start
pushing publisher content until so there's this big wave. And
what we did really well is we suit you have, um,
you have a team of writers who are creating content

(27:11):
and it goes on Google, Google News, and you have
readers come back to articles on a website, right, Um,
most websites basically those readers might be on the article
for thirty seconds a minute, if it's a really good article,
five minutes. One of the reasons we did so many
slide shows is people stay on slide shows keep way
longer than they stay on your average article. So I'm

(27:32):
sorry to everyone who had bothered, but just from the
from a pure business standpoint, we were always accused of like, oh,
they're doing it for the page views, and you do
a little bit, but the numbers just didn't lie. So anyway,
people say they hate slide shows, but the results actually
showed you that they will say at least sit there
and could. Engagement on slide shows is way way higher
than it is on standard articles unless the article is

(27:54):
is exceptional. It reminds me it's fascinating because when I
was at fan house you were mentioning um. People would
all say. This was in the early age of when
people it's in emails and stuff. They're like, why are
you covering Brett Farve? Like and will her won't he retire?
And the minute that a Brett Farve update went in,
there's like a fire hose right of traffic. Everybody says, oh,
I don't care about Brett Farve or Tim Tebow or

(28:15):
Ron James or whatever it is. But I always say
it's like the Internet. Data is like you can pull
back their brain and see what they actually care about
as opposed to what they say they care about. And
that's a great example. There's you can listen to a
vocal minority if you want and uh and try to
please those people. And and as we've gotten bigger, we've
had to do more of that, I think for brand reasons.
But if you're just trying to focus on surviving and

(28:36):
building a business that's going to be around, then I
think you need to look at data and do and
and balance more with the data. Is not like suggesting
you should do is slapping you in the face and saying, hey, like,
if you want to make it to the next level
and for this company to be around in three or
four years, um do more of this. Um So. But
on Google, the thing we did I think really well

(28:57):
is opposed to just letting those people bounce in and out,
we said, Okay, this is actually an opportunity to convert
these people who are essentially passers by readers into loyal users.
And the first thing we did where I started to
feel like Bleach Report might actually work. Is we launched
newsletters for every basically every single big team in the US. UM.
The college football newsletters SEC newsletters were the craziest where

(29:18):
we we had UM Bama, l s U, Auburn newsletter
list that had twenty people on them that in season,
we're getting open rates of closes, which signed up the
affinity that people have for their teams, so I mean,
the the voracious appetite of fans around those particular teams
in the United States. There's nothing else like it. Right,

(29:38):
They're the very top of the food chain. Um. But
all of a sudden, we had people because of these newsletters,
which we'd send out three or four times a week. UM,
we'd send out our own content, but we would also
round up the best content, like we would curate the
best content from around the web so they wouldn't have
to find it themselves. Again, this is before Facebook, before
people are really using Twitter, so it was a nice
service we were offering them. And all of a sudden,

(30:01):
like we had this loyal audience of a million people,
two million people, three million people in addition to the
you know, ten million people that were kind of coming
and bouncing out every month and that was real. All
of a sudden, people out of positive affinity for our brand,
or at least those people did. And then when UM
mobile apps happened in a more sophisticated way like the
UM the App Store with Apple, we basically turned those

(30:22):
newsletters into a real time app product and our app
just exploded UM and that was that was when I
think Bleacher Report like was a thing where Fox Sports
Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation.
Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot
com and within the I Heart Radio app search f

(30:42):
s R to listen live. Look at your children's eyes
to see the true magic of a forest. It's a
storybook world for them. You look and see a tree,
They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms
outstretched to the sky. They see treasuring pebbles. You see
a windy path that could lead to adventure, and they

(31:03):
see you. They're fearless. Guide. Is this fascinating world? Find
a forest near you and start exploring and discover the
forest dot Org brought to you by the United States
Forest Service and the ad Council. If I could be
you and you could be me for just one hour,
if you could find a way to get inside each
other's mind. Walk a mile in my shoes, wacome mile

(31:25):
in my shoes, my shoes. We've all felt left out,
and for some that feeling lasts more than a moment.
We can change that. Learn how it Belonging begins with
us dot org, brought to you by the ad Council.
Welcome Mile and the Shoe. Adoption of teams from foster

(31:47):
care is a topic not enough people know about, and
we're here to change that. I'm April Dinnuit, the host
of the new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt us Kids.
Each episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories to
hold by the families that lived them, with commentary from experts.
Visit adopt us Kids dot org, slash podcast, or subscribe
to Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids, brought to

(32:10):
you by the U. S Department of Health, that Human
Services Administration for Children and Families, and the ACT Council.
Talking to Day Finocchio, one of the co founders of
Bleacher Report, all right, I want to go back. So
you write the first article, and you write you said,
like fifty articles to begin with. When did you start thinking, hey,
maybe this business might actually work. Was there, Like everybody

(32:32):
who ever starts anything new, there is the hope and
then there's early signs that can be success or failure.
You have to push through it. When did the first
of all, how many hours are you working with the
other guys when you guys first start this business because shipload, Um,
like you guys woun't come into the office and I
mean basically working full time, Like what are you doing?
I would say it was just my life. Yeah, there

(32:53):
were days where I literally would start working, not every day,
but um we se I would just start working at
seven a m. And stopped working at midnight just because
I don't mean to be over dramatic about it, but
it's true because I knew that I needed to get sleep. Yeah,
I mean it was just like because I was we
had no professional editorial team. I was just literally emailing

(33:13):
assignments to you know, dozens, if not hundreds of writers
at times, dealing with correspondence back and forth. And you
found those writers just by going on the internet and
just kind of jumping around. Initially, Yeah, I recruited, uh,
I recruited people off of blogs, college newspaper writers. UM.
I did something that uh uh it was was probably
not great for the quality of content UM sports content

(33:34):
on on the internet, but UM helped us grow, so
judge judge away. But when Facebook ads came out, which
was I want to say like late two thousand and seven,
initially they did, they performed really really poorly relative to
Google UM. And as a result, they were super cheap.
UM advertisers were just like they were like banner ads
on the side of Facebook, not in news feed where

(33:55):
they are today. UM. But because they were cheap and
because you could target, uh, I had teams to fill
out in terms of like I don't have people covering UM,
you know, the national Predators if they were out like
whoever it was, so I could target for the first
time English majors, journalism majors who UM had an affinity
for the National Predators, and I could start building writer

(34:18):
leads and I could then send you know, if somebody
then click through and signed up and said yeah, sure,
I'll cover this team for you, I could then send
them an assignment right away and say, okay, I'll give
you a go. UM, I'm interested in this story. Why
don't you get this to me? By eight pm on
where How did you decide what that story would be?
National Predators? For example, you're trying to find somebody to

(34:38):
write about them. You're running a Facebook ad? Is it
a Google search that would give you an idea what
people might be searching for? Or I would say a
combination of data and just like I've been a sports
junkie in my whole life, so it's it's part art,
part science. There might have been a um, I don't
know the Predators that well, but so uh um, I
won't have a good like real example, but there might
have been some sort of recent free a move, recent

(35:00):
trade or whatever that you would have been cognizant of
totally uh any anything along those lines that like fit
the mold of a type of story I knew that
people would be interested in. And then I would see
if the writer was one reliable, accountable uh and then
you know if they were any good. And I think
we we basically had all this data right and we
were able to um tap into this huge supply of

(35:24):
writers who ended up signing up and our store and
the quality of the content was really mixed, right, everything
from pretty good to um to shitty. But the way
our business worked over time, is once we were able
to raise more money, and once our audience started to
get big enough where we could sell advertising, I was
able to just over time replace the writers who were

(35:44):
not up to a certain quality with professional people. And
it took me about three years to complete that transition,
and it was hard, uh and it took the brand
years longer to recover from it, but it worked. So
when do you guys, So you're working, you know, sometimes
basically all day except for sleeping hours, when do you yeah,

(36:04):
when do you start thinking, hey, maybe we've got a
business here. When do you get start taking salary? Like
because you know you said you started it with you know,
basically you saved up twenty or thirty thousand dollars each
When does it? When does it become possible that you
can start to make money off of the website? So
like in in late two thousand seven, we raised a
million and a half dollars and that was like one
of the best feelings I ever had. When we got

(36:25):
that raised, it was like, ha, like my friends can't
make fun of me anymore. This is real. Like you
raise a million and a half, that's like a year
and change into the existence of the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
so what and there's probably people out there listening. I'm
I actually don't know that much in specific about venture capital.
So when you sell, I mean a lot of people
watch Shark Tank and everything else. You raise a million
and a half dollars. What kind of equity are you

(36:46):
selling at that point? Yeah, we sold about thirty percent
of our companies. We sold. We were nobody's you know,
it's not like we were like, uh, Bill Simmons or
somebody like, Um, Yes, we sold thirty percent of our
company for a million and a half bucks. Was a big,
big chunk up front, but nobody else would do it. Like,
we literally found one investor. But how did you find
that investor? Um through that? Like it was a guy

(37:07):
that my co founder, Brian Um, Brian's dad I think,
went to business school with. There were these two guys
who co founded a company called a Reba that had
a forty billion dollar market cap before like the dot
bomb crash, and they happened to I think they like
they had a falling out with the CEO or something
and they left the company and they sold at the

(37:27):
right time, and they just made an unbelievable amount of
and they had tons of money that they just found
the seed capital in the Bay Area to kind of
get exactly right. Yeah, yeah, Bay Area and Israel, I
think are where they primarily make their investments. We got
hooked up with those guys. But to your point, like
you asked, you asked when when I thought it was
gonna work or between two thousand and seven and two

(37:48):
thousand and ten, I mean, there were some serious ups
and downs like it. There were. We We hired an
initial CEO that those investors kind of forced on us
that didn't work out, and we had a hard time
kind of figuring out that transition of how things were
going to go forward. I'm not having the right CEO
on board, and I like I bought G Matt books,

(38:09):
I started, I was taking G Matt practice. You thought
the company might just yeah, so I was. I was
totally on the fence. I went to bed so many nights,
not not thinking, but knowing it wasn't gonna work. You
know what, you know in your gut, We're like, I'm
doing this, but this is not going to work. Um
our audience got stuck at like two to three million people.
We were focused on the wrong things UM and so

(38:31):
I was there like totally in the dumps, and uh,
the best thing that ever happened to us was when
when we went through like honestly a pretty ugly transition
kind of away from the person who is the CEO,
the three of us who were the three original founders
really pulled together and we kind of divided up our
responsibilities in a more clear way than we ever had before,

(38:52):
and in like a six month span, we took our
audience from three million monthly readers to ten million UM
and that was, honestly, like one of my favorite memories
of all the things we've done was that six months period.
And that would have been what years That was like
end of two thousand nine through the first six months
of two thousand ten, so like three or four years

(39:13):
into the company's life cycle. Yeah. And once we'd say,
once we got to the UM the end of that
and we started hiring, we that gave us the ability
to start hiring more professional people who had been there,
done that before. Like it got us over the hump
with investors with everyone where they're like, all right, these
guys are real and there's something here that's working. So

(39:34):
you start off with three employees four eventually, Um, when
do you start hiring more people after we raised the
first round? Initially? That initially we just hired software engineers. Yeah,
I think we hired four. Um. I hired one content
person from that round. Uh. First content person started in
like February of two thousand eight. The second full time

(39:56):
content person was October two thousand and eight. We didn't
really start building out a real editorial staff until like
late like that time period. I just reference where we
really started to grow is when we started to actually
hire content people. Be sure to catch live editions of
out Kick the Coverage with Clay Travis week days at
six am Eastern, three am Pacific. What grows in the

(40:19):
forest trees? Sure? No, what else grows in the forest,
Our imagination, our sense of wonder, and our family bonds
grow too, because when we disconnect from this and connect
with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is
closer than you think. Find a forest near you and

(40:40):
start exploring. I discover the Forest dot Org, brought to
you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council.
We're talking to Day Finocchio. I'm Clay Travis. This is
the winds and Losses podcast. I started out Kick in
two thousand eleven, and my idea was, it's now two
thousand nineteen. You may be listening to this years after
this or whenever, but we're recording in the summer. Often.

(41:02):
I had a section of the site called the Bullpen
about Kick, and my idea was, this is going to
be user generated content. And my philosophy was at the time,
I'm forty now, but my thought was when I started
that website, I'm roughly thirty two ish, that there were
a lot of people who were younger versions of me,
right because when I came up, I had to start
my own writing online. It was hard to find an audience,

(41:22):
but I was a grinder and I would write, I
would work hard. What I found is that talent is rare,
and that talent that works is even rare. Um and
grit matters a great deal and everything. I think you
probably found it too, and I just eventually had to
stop the Bullpen because and I'm curious what you found.
I had this idea that there will be a meritocracy
that bubbles up of people that want to work hard

(41:43):
and want to make their name and just want to
get read. Because I did it for years without really
making any money while I was practicing the law and
everything else, with the idea being if I'm good, I
can build an audience and the money will one day follow.
And what I found is people might write one good
article and they're like, hey, I expect to get paid now.
I'm like, dude, you know, I wrote for years without
making a dollar to prove that I was good enough

(42:04):
to be able to do this. I bet what you
found because what I kind of admired about the Bleacher
Report was what you said, the idea that we were
going to create a meritocracy by people who would write
and continue to write and do good quality content. Those
people are rare. I would say that I view, um
that like that. Part of the initial thesis I think

(42:25):
was I wouldn't call it a like failure is too strong, um,
But I was more idealistic, kind of like you. I
thought that I thought that the content would end up
being better than it was and did. I had no
People will never understand the amount of work that we
did under the hood to get that user generated content
or whatever you want to call it, to the point

(42:46):
where it actually like we edited all of that content.
We did crazy photo deals with Getty we um, we
we had all of these uh it's it's boring stuff.
But like the the amount of the amount of in
a structure that we had to create to get that
content out was honestly more work than once we started
paying people full time. So I had the same observation.

(43:10):
There were there were people that we found, um through
those days, who did grind away and built a name
for themselves that are still with us, that did really well,
like the Matt Miller's, the Gary Davenports of the world.
There there are others on There are plenty of people
who came through Bleacher Report that have gone on and
had great career as other places too. But yeah, the

(43:31):
hit rate was much smaller than I initially thought it
would be. And not only was the hit rate smaller,
what I found was I'm spending a lot of time
reading other people's work instead of working on my own. Yeah,
well for you, yeah at least, And that's why I
decided I'm like, I'm I'm a far less talented than
you are from the standpoint of um, you know, sports analysis.

(43:53):
But I figured out this that you have to choose
one path or the other. You can't do both, and
so that was the challenge. But then what we found
was we were getting a lot more attention like you did.
For sometimes things that would go up that was written
by you know, quote unquotes called the bullpen, right. The
idea is, you're not a starting pitcher, like you're coming
in and trying to prove yourself. I guess I could
have just as easily called it the minor leagues, right,

(44:14):
but that seemed a little bit more pejorative. Um. But
the idea was, find a lot of young writers who
can do great original content and will continue to work,
and then they can elevate themselves. Either I'll start paying
them and they'll become part of the OutKick, you know,
regular universe, or I will find them, you know, and
they'll go get jobs elsewhere because other people are able
to pay them more. And almost no one was willing

(44:36):
to do it, and and and people who were willing
to do it at a high quality level, we're almost
non existent. You named a few, but I bet you know,
if you were giving a percentage, I mean it's a tiny,
tiny percentage, I would say a lot there. There were
definitely hundreds of winners that came through that system. A
lot of them ended up being editors or having other
jobs in our organization that weren't writers. Uh. One thing

(45:00):
I did that uh that was um really helpful early
on was that kind of game of a lot of
people wouldn't like this in our industry, but I kind
of gamified the writing process where I was like, like,
I played a ton of Halo in college, and I
noticed that, like, even when I was so sick and
tired of playing Halo and like I really like shouldn't
be playing anymore, I would keep going because, um, every

(45:20):
time I played a game, I would get a certain
number of points which would get me like closer to
having a better status. Like now, yeah, exactly exactly gamify
the job to encourage people to continue to put in
it's exactly right. And so um, I built that system
for for writing for Bleacher Reports. So the more reads
you got on any individual article led to more points,
led to you getting uh badges, Like if you had

(45:43):
an article that got twenty five thousand reads, that would
you know, be a really big badge and that would
help you get up basically a better status on the site.
And so we had a lot of people that got
really into that and pushed and pushed and pushed, and UM,
for sure, there are a lot of people who at
the end of the day, we you know, we didn't
offer jobs too, didn't offer paid gigs to that. We're

(46:04):
really upset that put a ton of time into that.
I it's something that UM, I'm kind of of two
minds about. One is I feel bad they put in
a lot of work and for the expectation of getting something,
And on the other hand, I think they kind of
knew what they were getting into. There were never any
promises made. It was a website where you're writing for
free for a chance to build an audience. UM. But
there were hundreds of people that got UM either full

(46:27):
time or UM or different types of paying jobs through it.
Uh So, Yeah, it was a mixture of experiences for people.
So you get the one point five million dollars raised,
which is kind of a big shot in the arm,
But then you get a CEO that doesn't work out. Said,
you have that six month period where you go from
three million to ten million years, what then happens after

(46:48):
two thou start thinking like, Okay, this may be a
legitimate business. Do you go raise more money? Like, how
does that process playouts. We we had raised one other
round UM in two thousand and eight, we had this
initial burst of Oath raised another six million bucks. So
we were we were growing and how much do you sell?
So you sell one point five six million, you go,
what are you selling that for? Then? Like, honestly, about

(47:10):
another thirty percent? So we sold sixty percent of the
company has gone for seven five million roughly at that point. Uh.
Then that's not exactly not that's not exactly the math,
but a little bit less, not like, let's say about
fifty percent of the company gone at that point. UM.
We we ended up hiring another CEO in the summer
of two thousand and ten, UM, guy named Brian Gray,

(47:31):
who had previously run He had run Yahoo Sports and
then more recently had been running UM, the digital arm
of Fox Sports. And Brian had left Fox was was
an executive in residence at a VC firm in San Francisco.
We just gotten to know him over the years and
really liked him, and he like sports for better or worse.

(47:52):
And I don't mean this in a demeaning way, UM,
but it's a little bit of an old boys network.
I think it's not as bad as it probably used
to be UM, but Brian was just a really talented
dealmaker who in great CEO but knew everybody and just
helped bring credibility. Like I remember, like Brian's maybe first
or second week, he and I and maybe Dave did
a road show all over these like New York, d C.

(48:15):
Where maybe Chicago, wherever else we went, and he immediately
introduced us to the most senior people at all of
these organizations who maybe weren't taking meetings with us before.
And so we from from that period until when we
ended up selling the company, we were kind of like
all about, uh, creating legitimacy. From a brand standpoint, I'm

(48:35):
scaling advertising sales, growing our audience. Um. Yeah, when did
you start producing revenue like that? That was meaningful? Two
thousand eleven was the first year we did five million dollars.
Two thousand twelve, I'm sorry, two thousand, five million, two
thousand eleven fourteen, two thousand twelve, the year we sold,
we did thirty seven. So how okay, that's fascinating to me.

(48:57):
So that is an incredible growth rate five of fourteen
to thirty seven. What magic sauce were you think compared
to where we are now. But but at the time,
I mean that's at five to thirty seven and two
years it's pretty extraordinary. What magic what magic sauce did
you hit that suddenly made your revenue explode? Like what
you're five years in in two thousand eleven, you're doing
five million, and then boom, suddenly you start hitting in

(49:19):
a big time. Yeah. The first thing to understand is
for for people who are listening to this who who
uh um, you know, don't know that much about the
business of online sports media, which is a lot because
they're probably most probably the most detailed online sports media
discussion that almost has been out there. Yeah, so it's
kind of a zero sum game in terms of how

(49:40):
the size of your audience translates to um to advertising dollars.
And that's if you have something that really matters in
a niche like it's really important in a certain area
of the country, or it's you know, golf focused and
really focus on the golf industry, you can overcome this.
But if you're a if you're a general sports site,
and this was probably more true back then than it

(50:00):
is now because marketing is just a little bit more
sophisticated now. You kind of had to be top five,
did have one of the five largest audiences. So one
of the reasons why we went so gung ho on,
we're gonna, um, we're gonna really focus on audience growth
and creating articles about all these topics that people are
searching for, because we felt like we got feedback from
venture capitalists that if you didn't get into that top
five subset, guys, your business is worthless. So like, all right,

(50:23):
we'll deal with quality later, but right now, we need
to get this. We gotta get big now. That was
our strategy, get big now. Um. And so like we
we just jammed and got we We built up a
skill set doing that that I think was imitated by
basically everyone else in media. Um. I think the playbook
we created is UM. I think pretty it's still work today,

(50:46):
Like it's still it's still worse today. Um, it's not
as I think, it's not as compelling EIP market now
than it was then. That's right. There's so many people
that have come in and done the same thing that
if I were I'm never gonna go do this again.
But if I were to go do it again, I think,
like Brian Gldberg when He did the exact same thing
in the women's space, and he people gave him a
lot of crap for it when he did it, but

(51:06):
he was just better at it, so he just outmuscled everyone,
Which is did it surprise you sometimes that you guys
were capable as just four kids who went to a
college high school together in the Bay Area starting a
company could be able to make waves in the internet
space in sports like you did. Like did you ever
go on to like the bigger sites and be like,

(51:27):
I can't believe these guys, you know, because yes, let's
use the ESPN as an example, Like they are still
the goliath of the space right and dot com and
when you guys are starting out, they have so many
competitive advantages audience advantages over you, yet you are using
the data in a more sophisticated manner than they are.
Or do you think they were maybe crippled by their
size initially? What gave your business the chance to work? Um?

(51:52):
So we formed, uh, we formed a partnership with CBS Sports,
dot com and maybe two thousand nine where they would
link to some of our content and you're basically sharing
traffic back and forth. Yeah, yeah, that's that type of arrangement.
And I was in Fort Lauderdale where they're based, and
and HAT was in a meeting with their managing editor
and UM and I asked him how he picked the

(52:14):
stories that they're on the front page the feature that's right,
And he said, you know, we assigned the stories based
on the writer pitching me something or or me giving
an assignment. I read all the stories that come in
and I put the best one on the front page.
And I was with my editor in chief in the room,
and I like, we talked about this all the time.
It was this epiphany moment for us, where like, ship this,
like what we're doing might work because this guy they

(52:35):
are doing entirely intuition based, decision made exactly and you
guys are looking at what people are actually reading. This
is like this guy was a great, great guy, UM
and I think was really good at his job, but
he was he was a mixed paper way of thinking.
That's right. It was just it was a model that
wasn't built for the Internet. It was a model that
was built for newspapers, and we were a model that
was built for the Internet. And it was so the

(52:56):
answer your question, we were just playing a different game
than anybody else is playing like Moneyball for online. Yeah,
and I think the this is I don't mean to
come for this to come across as extraordinarily arrogant. It
it might, but um, well, this is also something that
my co founders and I have talked a lot about
over the years. There are a lot of smart people
in media, no doubt, um, But there are a lot

(53:20):
of people that also get very entrenched in the way
that they do things. There are ways that things are
supposed to be done in media, and we just didn't
have that background where we weren't schooled to do things
in a certain way. And I think all of us
are smart, but if we'd gone into other industries, we
might not have been like the smartest people in our field.
But I think in media, um, we had pretty good
brain power relatively, and I'm not sure that like there

(53:43):
were that many other people who were thinking the same
way that we were. So uh, you go from I
think you said five to fourteen to thirty seven million,
what you get into the top five and you scale
that up really quickly, and we sold our we sold
our company then to you are do you wish you
had not sold? Now? Looking back no, was the right
time to sell. I think it's for the first So

(54:05):
the next year after we sold, Facebook started throwing just
instant like I think my traffic went from yeah, I
went from reaching million people a month to sixty million people,
like really really fast. Like all these things we did
to build audience, which were so hard and detailed and
science oriented. Then Facebook comes online and all of a sudden,

(54:27):
it's like everybody so and I think we were a
little better at it than than most were. But it
was what I would call that was penis pump, right.
It totally was totally artificial, It's totally not real, but
all of a sudden, everybody's page views and audiences just
exploded because Facebook is just such a levia thing. Called
it a lot of things that never called it penis
pump before, but that totally works great. Um uh it was.

(54:50):
It was an interesting time where, um, the one the
one thing that that kicked my butt a little bit
was one business insider sold the AXL Springer for like
four a million bucks. We sold for two fifteen. We
did really well. We were incredibly lucky. Um, but that
was the one thing I was like, shit, Like, I
think we've built a lot more substance than these guys
have no disrespect of their business to get business. Um.

(55:11):
But then I look at what's happened to some of
the other talker sites for instance, Well that's a little
bit different, but like what we could have what could
have happened is say, um, say we we didn't sell
and we get to two thousand four and VCCR numbers
and they're like, hey, um, we'll write you a hundred
million dollar check at like a five million dollar valuation,

(55:32):
the way you know, BuzzFeed, box Vice. They all did
these things, um, and then it turned out a couple
of years later that um, it was really hard to
justify those valuations. It was hard for them to scale
their revenue fast enough to justify those valuations. Facebook did
not end up being the ecosystem for publishers to build

(55:53):
kind of their distributions. Now they just dialed back, they changed,
they changed their strategy, and it hurt all of the businesses.
So I'm really like, we made money for everybody. I
think our brand ended up with. Like Turner did a
really good job supporting bleacher Report. That partnership was really
really good. It wasn't always easy, but like It's one

(56:13):
of the great examples of media acquisition of the last generation.
So that's that's cool. Um, But what if we were
still out there, like I can't imagine, Like it would
have been fifteen years grinding away at this thing and
like still haven't made any money. And you know, maybe
our company has valued it a billion dollars, but nobody's
willing to buy it from more than five hundred like

(56:33):
a million. Um, that's not a good situation to be in.
So I'm so glad that we didn't end up there.
Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in
the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports
Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app.
Search f s R to listen live. So you sell
for two d and fifteen million. At the time you sold,

(56:55):
how much had you raised? Okay, so when you sell
at two fifteen million, I think there are a lot
of people out there sitting around and they're like, man, uh,
so what happens to founders? Right? So you stayed with
the company for a while? Yeah a lot? So. Uh,
the other two guys were founders that were still involved
with the business. Um left at that point. Yeah, my

(57:17):
I had UM, I was running. I was probably managing
eighty percent of the staff at that point. They just
had different different roles. Brian left to go start another company.
Dave took some time off and then started another company.
Uh I gosh, um, I like kind of kept my
job at the time. I was running like all the

(57:38):
kind of content products stuff at the company, and I
ended up taking over. Brian Gray left after eight months
or nine months or something, so I ended up taking
over the business at that point. Um. Initially when we sold,
I was honestly so exhausted that I I told those
guys like I'm not staying, Like no, I was just
so tired, Um, like what when the sale was complete,

(57:59):
I remember like leaving my girlfriend's apartment and I was
just like I cried tears of joy walking down the
hills in San Francisco. I was just so I put
so much totally, um, but I hung with it. They
basically said, no, you're not doing a year. If we're
gonna sell this company. If you're gonna buy this company,
you have to stay for two and a half years.
And I was like, guys, I'm not doing that, Like okay,
we're not gonna buy the company, Like Okay, Yeah, I'm

(58:22):
gonna I'm gonna sack up and do this and uh.
And after getting through that initial like six to nine
month window, which was a little bit rough, I kept
my head in the game. We continued to perform really well.
There were some more fun aspects of it that came
from being a part of Turner. Uh, getting promoted on TV,
I gotta you know, you get to know people that
are just of a different level. Um. I started to

(58:44):
learn new things and uh, and I decided to make
the most of it. Um And yeah, I really invested
in that partnership. How many employees you may not know
the exact number, but roughly how many ploys does bleach
your report have? Now a little over five a little
over five hundred, So you guys started with three, there's
now over five hundred. Um, when you before you sold,
what was I'm always curious, like, what kind of salaries

(59:06):
were you guys paying yourself? Were you living? Like how
what kind of lifestyle would you you're grinding your working
all those hours. What kind of salaries would you guys
have been making by the time you sold. Um, I
think by the time we sold, we're doing okay because
we just we just raised twenty million dollars on top
of so I bet, I bet when we sold, my
salary was like probably pretty close to two dollars a year.

(59:28):
So at that point, we're like doing great. But when
we but but but yeah, let me pause there. Two,
there's a lot of people listening right now. Two hundred
thousand dollars to run a major multimedia company. It's not
like you guys were just making money hand over fist
as the as the runners operators and no, I just
said I and probably a year before that, I bet
my salary was eighty thou dollars a year and for

(59:49):
the first couple of for the first year we did it,
initially we gave ourselves stipends of four hundred bucks a month,
and then after one month we realized that we didn't
have enough money to do it, so we made we
didn't pay ourselves any thing for I think close to
a year, and then I think our salaries were thirty
five thousand dollars a year, and then eventually it got
up to eighty. But then when we did, when we
raised the twenty million, I think at that point we

(01:00:11):
were kind of like, hey, like, we haven't been making much. Yeah,
you got like, this is San Francisco. It's expensive, Like
I'm still gonna live in a four hundred square foot
studio apartment. But like, come on, So if you had
not founded the company in San Francisco, did that matter
to your company's success? You said, the first one point
five million you made was based on having some connection

(01:00:33):
to Bay Area success in terms of making money. A
lot of people out there listening to us right now
they try to decide where am I going to start
my company? Where am I going to live? Bleacher Report?
How important was it for you guys that you were
in the Bay Area or do you think you could
have been successful anywhere starting? I think it's it's a
different era now. UM bleacher Report now is two and

(01:00:53):
fifty people in New York. New York is our biggest office.
San Francisco. Is that because of like advertising to a
large extent, almost our the biggest part of our content
team is in New York. And then yeah, the entire
advertising like the whole sales marketing giant team UM is
on an entire floor in in New York. UM media
businesses almost always end up gravitating to New York as

(01:01:16):
you get big because like you just have to have
your sales team. They're the way content and sales works today.
They're pretty integrated. Um it's not like the old days
where their separation of church and state Chinese wall. So yeah,
that just doesn't really it's hard. It sucks, kind of
wish it existed like that, but it doesn't. Um. So
there are all sorts of things you do so that
those teams can work effectively together. We get comple example,

(01:01:39):
who may not know it's like, hey, we're gonna do
game of you know, the game of the game Zones,
game Zones, which is insanely popular but I don't even remember.
But you find somebody who wants to sponsor that state
farm did it this year. Yeah yeah, So, I mean
the content is built basically with the idea knowing it's
already sold. Somebody's gonna pay millions of dollars to put
this thing on us, right, It's not necessarily like the

(01:02:03):
Cleveland Browns come to you and they say, hey, we
want a good article to be written about this. And
by the way that I'm Clay Traviss is the Wins
and Losses podcast. We're talking with Dave Finocchio, who's one
of the co founders of the of Bleacher Report. Uh so,
but to get people a context on what you mean
by content and partnership, Like, that's kind of the way
things work now. So when they're pitching Game of I

(01:02:23):
think McDonald's did Game of Zones the year before, so
State Farm this year. You know, they're negotiating an amount
of money per episode. Uh, State Farms getting essentially what's
called branded content. So they actually do some Game of
Zones as an animated show. If you're not familiar with it. Um,
that's kind of like a blend between Game of Thrones
and in the NBA universe. Um. But they're actually making

(01:02:45):
little cartoons that might be like ten second ads that
are about State Farm versus about Game of Zones, and
those get like crazy distribution through us, and I think
it it makes State Farm look cool and uh, and
there's months of work that goes into selling a deal
like that. There's a lot of people who are listening
to us right now and they're like, I'd like to

(01:03:05):
make a money in sports media somehow, right, like, either
as a content person or as a business person. Uh.
It evolves so quickly. Uh, what advice would you give them? Like,
pretend that you were twenty one years old and this
is the last semester where you're killing time in their
names campus, and you've downloaded this podcast and you're listening

(01:03:26):
and they're like, man, I'd like to be the next day, Finocchio,
What would you tell people out there listening that to
you seems like an opportunity. And also keeping in mind
that things move so quickly, it's hard to forecast where
the business is going there. There are a couple of
ways ago about it. One is the traditional way is
just scrap and get in the door somewhere. Like, how
does it matter how much you're gonna get paid? It
doesn't matter. It's like how much you get paid the

(01:03:47):
first couple of years or even what you're doing. I
don't think matters very much. I think people and their
parents like way over obsessed around like what what job
and what trajectory are you on? Five? It doesn't matter,
like going somewhere, build to workout, like learn how to
um like do politics inside of a bigger company or whatever,
and just like start investing in yourself and learning. I

(01:04:08):
think if if that's the case, just like and you
want to work in sports, just go somewhere and get
started and then learn more and figure out where to
go next. UM. The rule I always try to tell people,
especially young people at bleacher Report because we don't people
usually don't ascend it bleacher Report the way they could
in the past. It's a bigger company and there are
more people on the depth chart ahead of you. So
I always say to people and they ask me for advice,

(01:04:30):
is like, if you spend two or three years here
and you feel like you're learning curve is not as
steep as it used to be, Like you're learning slower
than you used to, and there isn't another opportunity for
you here where you can keep learning as quickly, get
the hell out of here, go do something else. Um.
When you're young, you have to invest in yourself and
just keep learning, learning learning. If you want to be
more ambitious and not go hustle for somebody else and

(01:04:53):
like get inside a company. My advice on like, if
you want to start something in the sports space, UM
one UM, not to be uh like cheesy, but you
kind of need to skate to where the puck is headed,
not where it is now. You need to have a
perspective on where the industry is going and you need
to make a bet on that. Um, you're not necessarily
going to be right, but like if you're you're gonna

(01:05:16):
have the guts to do it, just go go do it.
And then you can get a lot of people who
do that. The mistake I see them make is they
don't understand, um, that that opportunity needs to be big.
Like a lot of people will get really into these
things that they care about. You mentioned that earlier. It's
like the sports editor who's doing something where they're essentially
writing for their peer group versus understanding the the idea

(01:05:36):
you need to chase has to be something that has
a chance to have mass appeal. So you've seen that
on Instagram, right with like the House of Highlights and
how quickly some of that stuff has grown. It's it's
just insane, right. Um yeah, that was my favorite thing
that we've ever bought. House of Highlights was just a kid, right,
I mean, just a young guy who starts uh Omar
was a senior at University of Central Florida, had the

(01:06:00):
coolest voice in sports we've ever seen. Um. Doug Bernstein
started to get me to look at it and we
uh uh yeah, that was that was a really really
great acquisition and I think worked out really well for
Romark too. So what's next for you? Um, I'm honestly
like like trying to not even think about it right now.
I've been could you could you never work again? Now

(01:06:21):
if you wanted to? Did you make enough off of
bleacher Report that you could? I mean, it's not like
you're gonna be like, you know, Jeff Bezos, but if
you wanted to just spend the next twenty years of
your life kind of like living on a beach in
Mexico or something, Yeah, yeah, sure, But is that something
that appeals to you or do you know? Um No,
I don't think so. I'm like my attitude is more

(01:06:41):
like got like I did this for fourteen years. Um.
Just to put that same filter I just mentioned about learning,
I kind of felt like my learning curve was flattening out.
I was kind of getting bored. Still. I had the
coolest job in the world, right, but UM, I was
less like I was so used to solving tough problems
and like growing quickly in my out the last year plus,
there's so more like managing HR issues and figuring out

(01:07:05):
how to hit revenue numbers and doing p and L
trade offs and stuff. It was great experience, but um,
it was not as exciting to me as some of
the stuff in the past. So I think my plan
is get away for a little while and see if
I have enough energy to do something else that, um
that I could be really proud of some days, something.
I don't know if I'll ever do something as impactful
as Bleacher Report again, but I would love to try.

(01:07:27):
Versus my fear was if I sat around there for
another three or four years, then I could just kind
of be like like, I'm just gonna chill it for
the rest of time here, and I kind of don't
accomplish anything else, and I would rather um, whether I
succeed or fail, I'd rather give a go at trying

(01:07:47):
to get inspired to do something else. I know I
said I might have said last question, but this is
the real last question. I feel like nowadays everybody is
constantly criticized, right, and you guys might have gotten an
early version of that at Bleacher Report, where you weren't
quote unquote the cool kids on the internet, and there
were a lot of people who took shots at you. Guys.

(01:08:08):
You built a business from nothing, you scaled it up
all the way to several hundred million dollars to sell it.
It's now got five hundred employees. I feel like the
internet is steeped in criticism. What would you tell people
who are trying to build something about people who are
going to take shots at them along the way, What
have you learned? Really early on we figured out that

(01:08:31):
one responding to critics, there's like literally nothing good that
can come from it unless it's helping to promote your bet,
your like, unless it's in your best interest in a
very direct way. Um, there's there's no point. I always
believed in the long term value proposition of what we
were doing. I knew that I wasn't proud as a
sports like I have, Um, I'm a content snob in
twenty different ways. Like, I knew that the content we

(01:08:53):
were producing at times wasn't content that I was always
proud of. But I believed in the playbook we were
running that if we kept doing it and kept like
building a business, that it would get to a point
where I would be really proud of the content and
the user experiences and the products. And we did that. Um,
I'm really proud that I stuck it through and got
it to the point where I built something that I'm
really proud of. Uh, Like, I think you just have

(01:09:15):
to believe in yourself and like just play the long term.
People are so freaking sensitive these days, you know. It's like, uh, like,
I'm a big Warriors fan. Um, we've just been through
this Kevin Durant saga. I have a lot of respect
for that guy in certain ways, um, and in others
with like, I'm just like, can't believe that he cares
so much about create anonymous social media accounts, to which

(01:09:36):
I like, I sort of get it. But at a
certain point, Um, it's like you have to realize that
you have you are in a position in life that
nine nine whatever percent of people are never going to
be in, and like it may might make them feel
better for ten seconds to take a shot at you
for whatever reason, Um, it doesn't matter. Like, so I

(01:09:58):
never people said so many nasty things about us early
on that I just developed thick skin, and I just like,
I just don't give a shit. Um, I don't in
these days, whether it's whoever comes after us, Like, I'll
always be pretty level headed about stuff. Um. And I've
had plenty of you. I've had Mark Cuban blow me
Up or Dave Art or whoever it is, and I

(01:10:20):
just like, I think it's funny, and I've never I
just don't care. It's like all part of the game.
Kind of similar in that respect. It's been outstanding. Dave Pinocchio,
co founder of Bleacher Report. We need to talk again soon.
I know we're gonna golf this weekend. Looking forward to that.
I appreciate you spending the time here. Good luck on
the triathlon. Welcome to Nashville. Thanks great to be here.
Uh make sure you download Hope you enjoy them. Give

(01:10:41):
me feedback, let us know what you think. This has
been the Wins and Losses podcast. I'm Clay Travis, He's
Dave Pinocchio. Check out Bleacher Report. We'll be back with
you next week.

All Episodes

Wins & Losses - Clay has an in-depth conversation with Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Finocchio

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

1. The Podium

2. In The Village

3. iHeartOlympics: The Latest

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Wins & Losses - Clay has an in-depth conversation with Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Finocchio