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

Clay asks all the hard questions as Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Finocchio opens up about starting the popular website and what’s next in his career.  And, he dispenses some sage advice for anyone who wants to explore a career in sports media.  His life is laid bare for you as Clay pulls no punches.

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Episode Transcript

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, 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 it

(15:25):
out and say, like look at this ship story on
bleacher 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. Be

(15:47):
sure to catch live editions of I would kicked the
coverage with Glay Travis week days at six am Eastern,
three am Pacific. So let's go back. How did you
pick the name bleacher Report? Um, Brian came up with
the name. We we 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.

(16:07):
Those first twenty months when we were doing it part time,
and one of them like, over a few weeks, all right, guys,
we gotta come up with a name. And it was
just like this 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

(16:28):
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 bleacher Report, a lot of people get confused at
the two rs and are 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

(16:50):
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 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
upre for almost like initially probably like ten or fifteen

(17:13):
grands something like that. Super cheap. We uh the three
of us, Brian, Dave and I saved up money a bright.
Dave was working for Endeavor 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

(17:35):
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 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,

(17:56):
like it was like I think it was like six
hundred bucks a month, which in the very 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 in with your parents? And I
moved back in with my parents like I was, you know,
once I was on my own and 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,

(18:18):
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 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 I'm 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

(18:39):
back in with my parents for I think fifteen months
something like that into your old bedroom. Uh they had moved.
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

(19:00):
had a pretty good like like like I'm you're another
in the world Chicago with your own apartment to 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

(19:22):
Park area, literally two blocks from our high school. I'm like,
and I'm you know, the 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

(19:43):
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 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, but maybe not on the same levels
the other three of us. Okay, So, uh, you guys
are doing what on a day to day basis, like

(20:05):
you on it? You are like you show up, You've
got this office, you got this website. You remember the
first article or 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

(20:26):
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 traffic would that do? You remember
what kind of audience that article would have gotten? See
us 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

(20:46):
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 really do that. Um. The CMSs
were extremely limited, so we had to build all of
our own tech 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,

(21:09):
I was focused on raising the money and I was
focused on UM building an editorial process and an audience.
So I figured out 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 continent.
So initially I figured out, like, jeez, um, every time

(21:32):
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, 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

(21:52):
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. You're seasons 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?

(22:14):
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 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

(22:34):
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 simple like what is
the draft order, and 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

(22:55):
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 um when uh, when
you were 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

(23:16):
fan House. I'm sure when he started a lot of
money on newspaper columnists, with the I 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. 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,
it was all right, this guy knows what he's doing

(23:37):
relative to these others who are 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,
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

(23:59):
for their own pure 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
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

(24:21):
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,
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,

(24:43):
Google is the primary driver of your audience or how
are people finding you? Yeah, so let's say to two
thousand seven, where we're really focused on this through honestly,
like through two thousand twelve, two thirteen, everything's kind of
driven off of Google. Facebook didn't really start pushing publisher
content until so there's this big wave and what we

(25:04):
did really well? Is we suit you have, um, you
have a team of writers who are creating content 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

(25:26):
is people stay on slide shows keep way longer than
they stay on your average article. So I'm sorry to
everyone who that 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

(25:46):
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
is exceptional. It reminds me it's fascinating because when I
was at FanHouse you were mentioning UM, people would all
say that. Just in the early age of when people
it's in emails and stuff, they're like, why are you
covering breath Farve like and will her won't he retire?

(26:06):
And the minute that a breat 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
le Bron 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

(26:27):
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
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

(26:48):
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
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

(27:09):
newsletters for every basically every single big team in the US, UM,
the college football newsletters, SEC newsletters where the craziest were
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 sign up the
affinity that people have for their teams. So I mean,

(27:31):
the the voracious appetite of fans around those particular teams
in the United States. There's nothing else like it. Right,
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

(27:52):
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 this, and 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 mounting
out every month. And that was real. All of a sudden,
people out of positive affinity for our brand, or at

(28:13):
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 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

(28:33):
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. Talking to Dave 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

(28:55):
you start thinking, hey, maybe this business might actually work.
Was there? Like everybody 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 wuldn't

(29:16):
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, they had there were days where
I literally would start working, not every day, but um wee,
I would just start working at seven am and stop
working at midnight. Just because I don't mean to be
over dramatic about it, but it's true because I like
knew that I needed to get sleep. Yeah, I mean

(29:37):
it was just like because I was we had no
professional editorial team. I was just literally emailing 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

(29:57):
something that uh uh was was probably not great for
the quality of content UM sports content 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 advertisers were just

(30:20):
like they were like banner ads on the side of Facebook,
not in news feed where they are today. UM. But
because they were cheap and because you could target, 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

(30:41):
who um had an affinity for the National Predators, and
I could start building writer leads and I could then
send you know, if somebody then clicked 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?

(31:05):
For example, you're trying to find somebody to 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

(31:27):
sort of recent free agent move, recent 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

(31:50):
um tap into this huge supply of writers who ended
up signing up and our store and the quality of
the content was really mixed, right, everything from pretty good
to too 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 not up to a

(32:13):
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, when do you

(32:33):
start thinking, hey, maybe we've got a business year? When
do you 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 that raised. It

(32:54):
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 selling

(33:15):
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 that my co founder,

(33:37):
Brian Um, Brian's dad I think, went to business school with.
There were these two guys who co founded a company
called Ariba that had a forty billion dollar market cap
before like the dot bomb craft, 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 right time, and they just made

(33:57):
an unbelievable amount of and they had tons of mone
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 thousand and ten, I mean, there

(34:18):
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, I started, I was taking G

(34:38):
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, you knowing 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.

(34:59):
And so 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

(35:19):
ever had before, 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 month period. And that would have been what
years That was like end of two thousand nine through
the first six months of two thousand and ten, so

(35:40):
like three or four years into the company's life cycle. Yeah,
And once we I'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 you start off with three

(36:04):
employees four eventually, Um, when do you start hiring more
people after we raised the first round initially point 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 content person was October two thousand

(36:26):
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 actually hire content people. Be sure to catch
live editions of out Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis
week days at six am Eastern, three am Pacific. We're
talking to day Finocchio. I'm Clay Travis. This is the

(36:48):
Wins 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 of I had a
section of the site called the Bullpen about Kick, and
my idea was, this is gonna be user generated content.
And my philosophy was at the time, I'm forty now,

(37:09):
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, 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

(37:30):
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 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

(37:51):
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
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

(38:12):
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 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

(38:33):
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
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.

(38:56):
But like the the amount of the amount of infrastructure
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. There were
there were people that we found um through those days
who did grind away and built a name for themselves

(39:17):
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 careers other places too. But yeah, the 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

(39:38):
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.
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.

(40:00):
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,
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,

(40:21):
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
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,

(40:42):
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
I did that that was um, really helpful early on

(41:03):
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 time I played
a game, I would get a certain number of points
which would get me like closer to having a better

(41:23):
status like int do 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 an article that
got twenty five thousand reads, that would you know, be

(41:44):
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 were really
upset that put a ton of time into that. I
it's something that UM, I'm kind of of two minds about.

(42:08):
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 time or
UM or different types of paying jobs through it. Uh So, yeah,

(42:30):
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. So you
have that six month period where you go from three
million to ten million years. What then happens after two
thou you start thinking like, Okay, this may be a
legitimate business. Do you go raise more money? Like? How

(42:52):
does that process playouts? We we had raised one other
round UM in two thousand and eight. We had this
initial burst of growth, raised another six million sucks. 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
another thirty percent? So we sold thirty percent. Sixty percent
of the company has gone for seven point five million

(43:13):
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, who had previously run He
had run Yahoo Sports and then more recently had been

(43:35):
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. 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,

(43:57):
but Brian was just a really talented deal maker 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. Where, maybe Chicago,
wherever else we went, and he immediately introduced us to

(44:17):
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 scaling advertising sales,
growing our audience. Um, yeah, when did you start producing

(44:41):
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 that's fascinating to me. That
is an incredible growth rate five to fourteen to thirty
seven magic sauce where you think compared to where we

(45:02):
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 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

(45:24):
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 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

(45:47):
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 is now because marketing
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

(46:09):
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, 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

(46:33):
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, Like it's still it's still
worse today. Um, it's not as I think, it's not
as compelling. It's a more efficient market now than it
was then. That's right. There are so many people that
have come in and done the same thing that if

(46:55):
I were I'm never gonna go do this again. But
if I were to go do it again, I think
like Brian Goldberg went 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 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

(47:17):
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
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 usually dot com and
when you guys are starting out, they have so many
competitive advantages audience advantages over you. Yet you are using

(47:41):
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?
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 try effic back and forth. Yeah, yeah, that's that

(48:01):
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 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

(48:23):
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 are doing entirely intuition
based decision makes 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 axed

(48:44):
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 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

(49:05):
as extraordinarily arrogant. 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 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

(49:27):
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 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

(49:48):
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 too, you are
do you wish you had not sold now? Looking back? No,
right time to sell. I think it's for the first
So the next year after we sold, Facebook started throwing
just instant Like I think my traffic went from yeah,

(50:10):
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, 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

(50:32):
pump right. Yeah, it totally was total official. 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. It was an interesting time where, um,
the one the one thing that that kicked my butt

(50:53):
a little bit was one business insider sold the ACL
Springer for like four million bucks. We sold for two
fifth team. 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.
But then I look at what's happened to some of
the other talker sites for instance, Well that's a different

(51:15):
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, fourteen and VCSCR numbers and they're like, hey, um,
we'll write you a hundred million dollar check at like
a five million dollar valuation, 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,

(51:40):
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 kind of their distributions. Now
they just dialed back. They changed, they changed their strategy,
and it hurt all of those businesses. So I'm really

(52:01):
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 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

(52:21):
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 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.

(52:41):
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
dred and fifteen million at the time you sold, how
much have you raised? Okay, so when you sell at
two hundred and fifteen million, I think they're a lot
of people out there sitting around and they're like, man,

(53:02):
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
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.

(53:23):
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
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

(53:44):
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,
I remember like leaving my girlfriends apart man and I
was just like I cried tears of joy walking down
the hills in San Francisco. I was just so I

(54:05):
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
gonna I'm gonna sack up and do this and uh.
And after getting through that initial like six to nine

(54:26):
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
learn new things and uh, and I decided to make
the most of it. Um and yeah, really invested in

(54:48):
that partnership. How many employees you may not know the
exact number, but roughly how many ploys does Bleacher Report
have now a little over five hundred? 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 were
you guys paying yourself? Were you living? Like how what
kind of lifestyle would you you're grinding your working all

(55:10):
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.
So at that point we're like doing great. But when
we but but but yeah, let me pause there. Two,

(55:31):
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 thousand dollars a year. And for
the first couple of for the first year we did it,
Initially we gave ourselves stipends of four hundred bucks a month,

(55:53):
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 anything 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 were kind of like, hey,
like we haven't been making much. Yeah, you got like,

(56:13):
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 to Bay Areas success
in terms of making money. A lot of people out

(56:35):
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 fifty people in New York.
New York is our biggest office. San Francisco is that
because of like advertising to a large extent, almost are

(56:58):
the biggest part of our content team is in New York.
And then yeah, the entire advertising, like the whole sales marketing,
all that giant team UM is on an entire floor
in in New York. UM. Media businesses almost always end
up gravitating into New York as you get big, because
like you just have to have your sales team. They're
the way content and sales works today. Uh, they're pretty integrated. UM.

(57:23):
It's not like the old days where the separation of
church and state Chinese wall. So 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 with comple example, 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

(57:45):
I don't even remember, but you find somebody who wants
to sponsor that. Yes, 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. That's right,
and it's not necessar fairly like, uh, the Cleveland Browns
come to you and they say, hey, we want a
good article to be written about this. And by the way,

(58:05):
I'm Clay Travis. This 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 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.

(58:28):
Uh State Farms getting essentially what's called branded content. Um
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 little
cartoons that might be like ten second ads that are
about State Farm versus about Game of Zones, and those

(58:50):
get like crazy distribution through us, and I think 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 make a
money in sports media somehow, right, like, either as a
content person or as a business person. Uh. It evolves

(59:12):
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. Their names
campus and you've downloaded this podcast and you're listening 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

(59:33):
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
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

(59:53):
and what trajectory are you on? Five? It doesn't matter, Like,
go in somewhere, build the work ethic, 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 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

(01:00:13):
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. 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

(01:00:34):
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
like get inside a company. My advice on like, if

(01:00:55):
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 have
the guts to do it, just go go do it.

(01:01:16):
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
you need to chase, has to be something that has

(01:01:36):
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 ever bought. House of Highlights was just a kid, right,
I mean, just a young guy who starts uh. Omar
was a senior at the University of Central Florida, had

(01:01:57):
the coolest voice in sports. Would ever seeing. 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 Olmar 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?

(01:02:19):
Now 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

(01:02:40):
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 job the last year plus,
so more like managing HR issues and figuring out how

(01:03:03):
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 day something. I
don't know if I'll ever do something as impactful as
Bleacher Report again, but I would love to try. Versus,

(01:03:26):
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 to
get inspired to do something else. I know I said

(01:03:48):
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.
It bleacher port where you weren't quote unquote the cool
kids on the internet, right, and there were a lot
of people who took shots at you. Guys. You built
a business from nothing, you scaled it up all the

(01:04:10):
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 one
responding to critics, there's like literally nothing good that can

(01:04:32):
come from it unless it's helping to promote your best
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
were producing at times wasn't content that I was always

(01:04:54):
proud of. But I believed in the playbook we were
running that if we kept doing it and kept like
building a busines this, 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
to believe in yourself and like just play the long term.

(01:05:15):
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 I'd like,
I sort of get it, But at a certain point. Um,

(01:05:38):
it's like you have to realize that you have you
are in a position in life that nine point 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 never people said so
many nasty things about us early on it. I just

(01:06:00):
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 Arty
or whoever it is, and I just like, I think
it's funny, and I've never I just don't care. It's

(01:06:22):
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 me feedback,
let us know what you think. This has been the
Wins and Losses podcast. I'm Clay Travis, he's Dave Pinocchio.

(01:06:44):
Check out Bleacher Report. We'll be back with you next week.