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Welcome back to the Deal.

On today's episode, Erica Ayers Badon, she's now the CEO of Food fifty two.

You knew her in her previous job as CEO of Barstool Sports.

I did.

And she's a master at turner around companies.

I cannot wait to hear it.

But she's a great leader, great communicator, and she's onto new things.

Yeah, she has got massive ambitions.

She's also deep into the world of lacrosse.

She played in college and now she's on the board of the premier lacrosse League with our buddy Paul Rabel, So lots to talk to her about coming up.

Erica ayers Badon, All right, my man, Erica ayers Badan is here with us.

You guys are all buddies, So I gotta turn this over to you.

You gotta lead this one.

This is strange, So thank you, Jason So Erica, we're so excited to have you.

Obviously we work together a little bit with barstool'ew you first hand how wonderful you led with the conviction and really how much success they had under your leadership, and the growth was incredible.

Now you're Food fifty two.

It feels like a big pivot.

What is the through line for you?

It's a great question, So thank you for having me.

I sold Barstool twice in twenty twenty three, so we sold it to Penn National and then we bought it back for Dave Portner I for a.

Dollar and oh, we're going to talk about.

That come September twenty twenty three.

I was like, there's I've done everything I came to do here, like I have any I couldn't have dreamed that we would have had two exits in a year, that the company would be back with Dave.

I really felt good about that because I felt like Dave was always the right steward for Barstool, and I gave what I could give and the gift of the machine while I was there, and I felt that the greatest offense to what I had done for the past almost a decade would be to stay after I was creating, and I just felt like it was offensive to everything I sacrificed to build it that I wanted to go find a new adventure and a place where I could start and try to build something again.

And so that was really the pivot.

I also felt like I had marketed to eighteen to twenty four year old men for you know, the better part of a decade.

And I was like, I know how to do this.

I was finding that I wasn't I wasn't crazy stimulated by it.

And I was writing a book at the time, and the last section of the book is do you stay or do you go?

And the point where you go is when things stop scaring you.

And I felt that moving into the women's space and moving into home and lifestyle and manufacturing was sufficiently scary.

And so I made the pivot.

And I've never asked you this, how do you get an opportunity like borsch do?

There was a headhunter call and say, Erica, I have a wild idea.

How does that work?

No?

So it was actually funny.

So when it was very rare, and it was by accident.

So I was in Los Angeles and I worked in music.

I had a startup in the music space trying to build really fan platforms around music artists, and we were raising money and we went to go see the Charning group and I walked into the meeting and the Charning group were like, oh, hey, we just put money to this company.

You've never heard of.

And I was like, well, what's the company and they said, oh, it's Barstool Sports.

And I pulled up my phone and I was like, I lived in Boston when Dave started Barstool.

I used to get you know, I'd be hungover on the tee and I would read the paper and I have the app, and I'm like, here's everything that's right with it, here's everything that's wrong with it.

And my business partner was pissed because as he was like, we should be focusing on raising money for us.

But I really couldn't shake that conversation.

I felt very jealous because I knew that they would probably find a white guy with an MBA and a vest and a button down shirt, and that was not me.

And I pursued that opportunity.

I tried to find anyone I could to get connected to Dave.

I finally got connected to Dave probably three months later.

We met in a coffee shop in the West Village and I pretty much was working for Barstools since that moment, but it didn't come.

It was actually very interesting because they had interviewed I think probably seventy ish guys, seventy seventy five guys or men for the job, and you could tell the recruiter was irritated by the time I showed up because the recruiter had done his part.

You know, it was showing candidates, showing candidates.

Like I've delivered all these bros like.

And this chick walks in and so that's that's how I got it.

Wow, did you have any idea what you were in for?

No, No, you.

Said something interesting a minute ago that I love, which is the gift of the machine.

Was that what was in your mind that that's what it needed because it was what it was less than five million dollars.

Oh, it was, it was less than five million dollars.

It was probably fourteen people.

They were based in Boston, like it was.

You know, when I remember my first summer there, there was no office.

I worked in hotel lobbies and coffee shops while we while Dave and I built the office, opened the office, we weren't sure who was on payroll.

So, speaking of that, you go from under fifteen people employees, you go from the sub five million revenue.

You probably don't even have a P and L.

Really, Yeah, by the time you leave, you go from that to about two hundred and fifty million out of the top line revenue.

What were some of those drivers, the main drivers?

Yeah, I mean, I think the you know, the quote unquote machine was what we were really good at is one is finding new platforms at the time of emergence, So podcasting was podcasting was just starting to emerge around twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, fourteen to sixteen, and most of the big broadcasters weren't in it deeply because there was no money there, and we had no money and the cost of production for podcast was very low, and so it was there was a low barrier of entry for us to make a lot of podcasts.

So we started to make a lot of podcasts, and then you know, a year later, Facebook Live and Twitter bought Periscope and it was live streaming on the internet.

We got into that, and so the machine quote unquote, the machine is really how do you find emergent platforms, how do you find programming that was authentic.

I really felt that there's something with young men in particular that didn't want to be preached, preached at or told what you know, the whole notion of sports Center was dying, where you didn't.

You weren't going to wait until eleven o'clock at night to see what happened today.

You wanted the score and you wanted the opinion in the same conversation, in the same context.

And what we built was the ability to clip that post, that promote that, circulate it, and monetize it well.

And you also discovered this notion of of creators at the core, right I mean, and I mean Portnoy, and we'll talk a bit about him, I'm sure you know, at the at the center of that.

But you also set about finding people, not just you found people and married them to platforms.

Is that a yes, we found people and Dave is really gifted at this is the Dave Gaz like the core barstool guys have very good eye for talent.

And we were at a point where, you know, it's kind of pre the capital eye influencer world that we live in now.

But the alchemy of weirdos from you know, somebody's railing about New Jersey Transit and next thing you know, you have Frank the Tank and you're putting Frank the Tank next to an Alex Rodriguez or Dion Sanders and it's it's just weird.

And so that was very capital confirmed.

Yes, yes, yes, So we.

Did a good job of discovering talent, and then we did a good job of setting a social norm inside the company of a high degree productivity and a high volume of output.

And we had a lot of at bats.

So because we had so many at bats, it was easier for us to get a hit.

So you had some at baths.

I mean, what was your impression.

I just thought, first of all, I thought Erica was a great leader.

You always come up with wild ideas with her, and she never said no, that's not going to work.

She always tried to figure out, like, Okay, how do we think outside the box, how do we get to a Yes, let me think on that for a couple of days and she'll come back to you with really productive feedback.

But I mean, I was working with Dan, who's very, very talented, the cat right, and he had an enormous audience.

The brand is so big, Jason, that when I would go to colleges to give talks or whatever, or even walking here in the cities of New York, the people would.

Be like barstool, barstoo.

I was like holy smokes, Like not the Yankees' nothing.

It was Barstool, So I knew the power then when I joined them.

And so Eric, I want to go back to the pen deal that you mentioned, because that sort of sits at the center in terms of the deal making that you guys did, So how does that all go down?

So when I joined Barstool, the investors felt that we should be able to do I want to say, twenty five million dollars in revenue in four or five years.

I think it was five years.

We ended up doing twenty five million dollars revenue in like two and a half years.

So we it just we took off very very fast.

And that's mostly adds.

Ads in commerce, so in T shirts, right, merchandise.

But we then built a subscription business, we build a pay per view business.

We were able to spin up businesses in a way that was very fast because we were we were I would say reckless but also highly entrepreneurial.

But long story short, we knew that there were two outcomes.

One was that a media company would buy Barstool Sports.

And then when PASSPO was repealed and gaming and gambling looked like it would scale in the US, that became very obvious that that was going to be the path.

And so this was the Supreme Court decision that basically allowed for a life for.

States to regulate sports betting on a market by market basis, and prior to that it was illegal across the country.

I had always built the business to have optionality for either path.

And it's kind of interesting, like, you know, Dave was on Fox in September and then the Good Morning Barstools show launched, like that was actually probably the right outcome for Barstool Sports is to find a media home because the company has intrinsic media DNA.

PEN came along.

Pen needed a brand.

They had a large regional casino footprint, They had infrastructure, and they had a lot of licenses.

They had all the state licenses or most of the state licenses at the time, and so in that regard, we were a really really good match versus a DraftKings or a fan Duel or an MGM.

Those were companies we had worked for before.

Those were companies we had supplied a lot of audience to.

And the way I built to that, or we built to that is, you know, in year one we had five gambling partners and in year two we had two gambling partners, and in year three we had one.

So I tried to create more and more competition and a king making of who our partner was.

And then by the time Pen came along, we had a very very good case study and a very high volume of proof points of our ability to transact and our ability to drive customers for someone else.

I think a lot of times and acquisitions, what the acquireye forgets about is that the acquirer wants customers, and you are a conduit to either acquiring, keeping or up selling those customers.

And we were very cognizant of that.

It seemed Ben Jason and I were talking offline like a dream, and I remember at the time, what a brilliant idea.

You have the regional footprint with Vegas, and you have the bricks and mortar, and you guys have with the brand, brand, the gambling and also Pen wasn't cool.

You guys made it cool, animated relevant.

When you trade on something like that, educate us a little bit.

Is it more top line?

Is it a multiple of ibadah or just you know, how does that work?

So we were a multiple of ebada So we were lucky in that we had good EBITDA in the business.

Most of it we reinvested for growth.

We were also looked at on a multiple because we had a very healthy and growing AD business and we were growing thousands of percents or hundreds of percents on an annual basis, really on every dimension.

So if it was ad revenue, if it was audience growth, if it's downloads on podcasts, we were trading.

We were trading up and exponentially up year over year.

Now there was a discount because the brand was controversial and there was like, well what about what about barstool?

What about what about So there was a discount to that and the partnership.

You know that in good ways and bad ways.

You know, we never and I never set foot in a Pen casino before we did the partnership, and I think we didn't know in some ways what we didn't know going into it.

I think we brought a tremendous amount of value to Pen.

You saw it in the stock price pop, you saw it in the audience, you saw it in the establishment of the brand.

Ultimately wasn't a fit.

When did you know it wasn't work?

It was hard.

It just was really the yeah, like from the jump like it, you know, and too in fairness to PEN, they had state and government controlled licenses.

Like if your business is predicated on a government license, like, you can't mess that up, like you just you just think differently, you act differently.

So that was really hard for us because we were more successful and most fulfilled, the most audience we were getting.

More, the more audience we got, the more eyeballs we got, the more people talked about barstool, the more people looked at us or talk talked about us, the better off we were.

Penn was like, could you guys just be quiet, Yeah, we will stop talking to you, which was so antithetical to how the company was built.

The second piece of it was pen it was really a cash driven business, right, so they collected you know, they were collecting coins and casinos, right, And when you collect the cash every night and you count it, you have a high degree of predictability and you have a high degree of certainty around what your revenue is on a day to day basis.

In the media businesses, you all know, like it doesn't work that way.

So I felt personally I was spending a lot of time of predicting what the revenue one month from now was going to look like on any given Wednesday, And it just was like it just was two really different.

Beasts if you have a mulligan, and in hindsight, Pen never happened.

Yeah, knowing what you do now, going back, what would be the ideal maybe one or two companies would be the ideal buyer.

I think, you know, I'm so grateful that Pen did happen.

It changed you know, it changed everyone's life.

It freed Barstool up to go back to being privately owned, gave you know, a huge reward to the investor, Like it was a win for you know, most everyone in that equation.

I think Fox is probably the right home for Barstool, like always was the right one.

To be honest with you, there was a hot minute we thought it was ESPN.

Obviously that wasn't going to be ESPN after we had you know, our one a m disastrous one episode TV show.

But I think Fox was right.

I think DraftKings or FanDuel would have been probably a better fit with similar challenges to Penn.

But I really do think from a media perspective, it would have been Fox.

Yeah, and so you know, you mentioned this a minute ago.

The notion of being out there, the notion of being loud, even the notion of controversies to some extent was a feature, not a buck when it came to Barstool.

That must have presented challenges for you as definitely a CEO.

How do you deal with that?

As a manager, you get very thick skin, and you know, Barstool we were not in crisis, but we created crisis for other people in our business dealings, which was challenging.

That was tiring.

It was trial by fire, which was a really good business experience.

Like not much phases me in business at this point because we had so much happened.

You know, Barstool years are like dog years, so it's there was a lot that happened in that.

But it was also media is a really interesting business.

And I mean to take it to the obvious point, like there's controversy and then there's like Dave Portnoy controversy, you know, and obviously it's like next level, right, he's been accused of things that he's denied, you know, Like how do you take that on as a CEO?

Every day everyone at Barstool starts with a blank page and the camera is on twenty four to seven, and most anyone where the camera is on twenty four to seven.

And your job is to make people laugh out of a blank page every day you were going to step in it, like that is a byproduct of the business.

Like so the first is just the acknowledgment of this is the world we play in, and this is the business we chose and the cause that we adopted.

I think on the Dave piece of it, like, I really loved working with Dave.

Dave is brilliant, truly brilliant.

He's a brilliant business person.

He has incredible instinct, He is very decisive.

He also is confident enough to know what he doesn't know.

And I worked for him, you know, with him for almost a decade, and I trusted him, like I truly and you know, I truly trusted him on every level.

And when things got tough and stuff was you know, thrown at him, we talked a lot about it, you know, and it's intimate and it's personal and it's just you know, things people don't necessarily want to know about one another.

But I also felt like he was super forthright with me, and I think he also is super forthright with his audience, and there's people who like that, and there's people who don't like that.

But I also I felt like I had really partnered with a quality person who I was going to ride or die with in that.

And so, you know, one of the things that I think we're both fascinated by is and I've been listening to your podcast work, which is really good in part because you know, when you walked in, I felt like I knew you because it is a very authentic.

It feels like representation of yourself.

Is that just how you've always been or is an experience?

Is your professional experience?

Has it made you that way that you are transparent and open and like very comfortable with real talk.

Oh no, I think I've always been like that.

I mean, I grew up in a locker room, so it's you know, I think you're just like that.

Yeah, when you're in the locker room.

And I love to work, so locker room Alex is where like athletes got them to you.

Really, he's like I had my own.

I think I've always been very curious and I've always had a lot of energy, and I think barstool made me more public than I would have ever been, I would not have gotten to this place on my own, I don't think, but I do feel that there is really a lack of management talent.

There's a lack of authenticity, there's a lack of care for for younger people at work and passion around being great at work.

I think COVID kind of killed the management.

It really killed management, like you stopped getting feedback, you stopped meeting with people one on one, you stopped learning in the hallways, and and you know, I really believe that work as an apprenticeship.

Anything I learned is because I apprenticed under great people.

And to have a concept where I can talk about work, share work, laugh at work, ridicule and push people and confront things at work, I think is healthy.

So, Erica, you know, Jason and I were talking a little bit a couple of weeks ago about managing talent, and you've had some tremendous talent come through barstooping, from Deon Sanders to Alex Cooper, Pat McAfee and obviously Dan Kat If you had a do over, is there anyone that you wish you could have kept if you thought a little bit more proactively or is this the nature of doing business and people just have to move on in the next cold.

It's so funny because I think Dave and I always used to talk about it like an athlete contract, right where you get a rookie and the rookie contract might not be great, maybe it is great in rare air and a few but you start, you get your first contract or your first gig if you're a regular person, and it's all about how you perform in that first term.

And we were very good about ripping contracts up and creating new ones.

And you saw that progression with Alex Cooper in particular, because that was very public.

But I don't know that there's anyone who got away.

There are a lot of talent I'm glad we missed on, to be honest with you, like I'm more grateful for the people we passed on.

I also think, you know, it's funny.

I deal with this now at work.

When a talent leaves, there's a feeling I think, a failure of like, oh they got away, or we shouldn't let them go, But it's really like, hey, they just graduated to something bigger and this place.

We were very comfortable with Barstool being a springboard to go do other things.

I think the world has changed where when you're out on your own and the cold versus you're in a stable where there's constant promotion and cross promotion and instigation is very hard to make it.

That's very much like sports.

I mean, contrasts are up to get expensive.

The other part that you guys did really well.

So you had a great farm system, and you had great scouting, whether it came.

From you and data.

There's always a new crop.

There's always a new crop, and.

So how do you translate that?

Because as I understand, I want you to, you know, bring us and our audience up to speed on what you're doing at food fifty two because clearly talent also at the talent and content are clearly at the center of that.

So what are the lessons you take?

How do you approach that talent?

It's food talent essentially rather than sports.

So what's the playbook there?

Talent is succession, right, so it's how do you think about who's at the top of their game now and how do you feed the next generation of that?

And that could be if you're an accountant or an FP and a guy, or you're a media person, or you work in advertising, or you work in manufacturing, whatever, it doesn't matter you work in content.

I really think about it that you've got to give talent every possible piece of ammunition you have.

You have to offer something to them in the power of the parent brand.

I think a lot of times, you know, you read about this with Unwell and the Alex Earl versus the Alex Cooper of it all is like, what is Unwell offering to other talent outside of Alex Cooper in Unwell?

Like, that's a big question.

What's the value proposition?

Why is someone part of this network versus another network?

I think media people and media networks miss that.

But so long as you give talent freedom, you have their back when they mess up, because if you're in the public eye and you're making content on a daily basis, you're going to mess up.

And then three is the money shows up you can have, then you can play.

But you always need to be thinking about who's the future.

You know, who's the next generation?

How do you start?

Competition is so healthy.

I mean you see this in sports, like competition, whether you're in a test kitchen at Food fifty two or you're a fellowship of creators in my world at home and life and food or you're part of barstool is a great thing.

So you mentioned that you ran into the Barstow opportunity by raising capital and then it's shifted to something else.

So I'm going to do a little role play with you.

Yeah, my friend Jason here, he's a cio.

He runs a family office and he has a lot of cash, okay, and he's looking to invest.

Can you give him a pitch on why he should invest?

And what exactly is food fifty two?

Oh?

Absolutely so.

Food fifty two started around the same time as Glossier, and the whole era of the blog turns into a little shop, and the shop turns into a product, and the product turns into a movement, right, and Food fifty two did this in the subject of table and home and food, really food as the center of a well lived life.

What then happened is Food fifty two started curating incredible products from all sorts of artisans all around the world and had a very particular aesthetic and a very elevated esthetic, but also for the first time had a real vision for home cooks versus chefs or restauranteurs.

Or professionals.

It was really about serving the at home cook Food media has exploded since that time, and what I really believe is that there's a couple things that make food fifty two worthy of investments.

If you want to give me money, I'll take it.

He's got a lot of it.

That's great, I love it, clearly.

But essentially, when you think about home and you think about food, and you think about table or decor, lighting or textiles or furniture, doesn't matter.

The Internet eats the middleman, right, and so you're going to have the Amazons of the world, or maybe a Target of the world, and you'd have a Creton barrel or pottery barn, and then you're going to have things that are very boutique and bespoke, and the pieces in the middle aren't really going to exist.

And what I think is very interesting about food fifty two is that if you create a content engine that surfaces artisans and makers and interior designers and stylists and fashionable women, and you service and put products underneath that, you can create a whole ecosystem that has a lot of cachet, that has a lot of differentiation, that has a lot of aspiration and a lot of appeal, and you can do so in a way that you're not dependent on Facebook and you're not dependent on Google, that you're creating an ongoing conversation with people.

So I'll give you an example.

I created thing called work like a Girl.

How was at barstool, everyone accusing barsool of being misogynistic.

So I was like, you know what, like that, I'm gonna make T shirts that say work like a girl.

And that became my brand.

And then last summer I was like, you know what, I'm going to create this into a Slack group.

We now have thousands of women who are giving each other advice all day long about getting a job, managing in your job, finding a new job, HR questions, management questions, AI questions, you name it.

It's a hive and you can surface all sorts of products into that because we're in an ongoing conversation that's professional women.

You could see the same thing with stay at home moms.

You could see the same thing with interior designers.

And the ability to put products into those environments in a way that's organic.

I think will ultimately win in terms of conversion.

And then how do you make money?

By selling those products and having really multiple lines of revenue.

So if you look at you know, we are just about to launch with Porsche, so Porsche wants to be associated with our audience.

We also are featuring artisanal products that we hand, you know, hand collect or curate.

We also manufacture and develop lighting and textiles and furniture, which so there's three lines of business in one Instagram story.

And that to me is an interesting business, which is not that dissimilar from the barstool business.

And so how do you level food fifty two up?

I mean, because when you came in, you were coming in at least a turnaround.

Based on listening to your podcast, it's a turnaround big time.

Are you attracted to turnaround?

Like, what was it about?

I don't know.

Now that I'm in the middle of one, I'm like, I'm not sure I'm gonna do this again.

But I liked the challenge of serving twenty five to fifty four women.

I was like, that's an interesting demographic.

They have a lot of pull there on.

They're underpenetrated in a way, they're underserved.

So I liked that it's not a viral crowd in the way that an eighteen to thirty four.

Man is a viral crowd.

Truth, so how you build for them is very different.

I thought that was intellectually very a lot of spending power, huge amount of spending power, huge amount of influence, and huge amount of influence on other people.

You look at youth sports, it's the moms.

You look at what's happening in the home, it's the moms.

You look at a family's finances, it's typically the mom.

And then the second piece on the turnaround of it all, I'm curious to learn, Like if you look, you know, I've been here a year.

I know more about manufacturing.

I know more about international shipping, I know more about product development.

I know more about e commerce than I knew coming in is by a factor of a thousand and so regardless, if I can make this thing turn around, and you know, I've taken a huge amount of cost out of the company.

I've restructured the company, I've refocused the company, I've rehired the majority of the company.

I've totally changed the DNA.

It may work or it may not.

I think it will work.

But now I know media, I know men, I know women, and I know manufacturing and it's so I feel that I'm more viable because of it, because I've been able to now study different types of business, different consumers, and different business models.

So, Erica, you made the analogy about sports.

You go from running this company Borstool again sub five million to north of two fifty in revenue in like eight years or so, you're basically the top free agent in the market.

How does that at this opportunity to come because I would imagine that you would have many companies, many headhunters after you.

How do you land a fifty?

Yeah, it's I think everyone thought I would stay in sports, and I think everyone thought I would stay in gambling in particular, and I got a lot of calls.

But what I I was a little bit scarred leaving Barstool from the big company of it all, where I was like, I don't I don't know.

I don't know that I'm going to Disney or I don't know that I'm going to be a cog and a really big machine.

I also didn't want to compete against Barstool because I still had like so much of I'm a Barstool girl, So I'm like, I still have so much affection for that brand in the business.

And I also felt, you know, like life is short and I want to try something completely different.

The investor behind Food fifty two is the same investor as Barstool Sports.

Sure, yes, so that made it also easy.

I had joined the board of Food fifty two in twenty twenty three, so I also got a look firsthand at what it looked like before I got in there, which I like, you know, I sit on the board of Ice, I'm on the board of Axon, I sit on the board of the Pace.

So it's great to see companies.

It kind of gives you a sense of where the opportunity and where the challenges.

And I felt that there was a lot of upside if I could, if I could turn this around, and I hadn't done a turnaround in the way that this company needs a turnaround, and that was a good It was a good thing that would scare me.

So as someone who's been on the byside and the cell side throughout your career, Like, what are the sorts of deals that you're looking at?

I mean, do you grow through acquisition?

Here?

Are you a and are those content acquisitions?

Are they talent like what commerce?

Like?

Where you listening food fifty two will grow organically.

Food fifty two made two acquisitions before I got there.

They acquired a brand called Dance and they acquired a company called Schoolhouse.

During COVID, the synergies between the brands hadn't been recognized.

So I'm more of a try to grow organically.

That's how I've seen things.

Now.

If you look at the PLL or you look at those Vice is a company that's finding its way through JV partnerships, right, and PLL in a large large part is growing organically.

But also the Premier Lacross League, sorry, the.

Premier Lacross League, they're also growing through acquisition.

Axon grows through acquisitions.

So I'm more of a grow organic drive.

Build a vision, you know, see a vision, build a vision, execute against a vision, have multiple lines of revenue, do so on a low cost basis, and then diversify.

That's more my approach.

I do think acquisition can be an incredible accelerant.

I think jvs are tough.

Yeah, and so you know, interestingly, you know the proverbial seat you're sitting in.

Melody hops inside in there a bit ago and she put on what I thought Alex was a masterclass and being a board member.

What are you like as a board Like, what what do you what do you feel like you bring to the party, what's the what's your sort of obviously it varies board to board, but like what are you looking to get out of that and what are you looking to give?

Hmmm, I don't probably not as good as a board member as Melanie hops someone.

Well, I think she's probably the best board member.

It's like the history of boards.

But like, so that's a good thing to aspire to.

We all aspire to that.

I'm not I ask a thousand questions.

I'm very curious.

I like management.

I am not a I'm not a pomp and circumstance board member, Like I appreciate public boards and private company boards obviously super different.

But I'm more interested in how can you represent the needs and wants and also the protecting the shareholders, but also how do you help the company see something that they have but they can't see from within?

And so I'm a high energy I guess I'm a high energy board member.

I'm very passionate.

I have a lot of opinions.

I think a lot of times in a board in board sessions, people get very pc and they get very quiet, and I think, you know, a hard part I always say, that's just as an operator and I have boards, is there's nothing worse than the board member who does nothing for you and says nothing during the meeting.

I hate those people.

So I'm like, I never want to be one of those people.

So I try to be the opposite of that.

All right, So now's the time that we get to talk about one of my favorite subjects, lacrosse.

In your proverbial seat, Paul Rabel sat, he's a friend of all of ours.

You played lacrosse at Colby College very successfully, so you obviously love the game.

How do you link up with Paul and Mike Rabel, his brother who you know, created the PLL.

They have grown as you, as you mentioned, through acquisition.

How does that come about?

And what's your relationship to the business of lacrosse.

So Paul and Mike Rabel showed up at Barstool Sports in twenty sixteen.

Well, and we had two conference rooms and you know, at that point, probably one hundred guys in like dirty sweats, and the conference room table didn't hold up where if you put your elbow on it, it just fell off, like everything was in the constant state of falling apart of Barsol.

And they showed up, because that's a metaphor.

Yes, So they showed up, and Paul was playing for the MLL, which was a competitive league at the time, and I believe he had a large sponsorship with Warrior Lacrosse, which was owned by New Balance, and they were looking for advice on how they could get out of that, how how how could this thing be created called the PLL Wow.

And they showed up and we were supposed to meet for a half hour.

We ended up meeting for two and a half hours.

And I've been connected to them ever since.

So what were you were you thinking, all, Right, this is a viable option, this isn't a Did you think they could create a whole new league?

Definitely, Because that summer when they came to see me, we had just written.

Jordie, one of the barstool guys, had just written a blog on the conditions of the MLL players, which were pretty embarrassing, you know, like it was one pizza to be shared across thirty guys.

They were making like negative fifty bucks every.

Day, were literally like going home with fans and like sleeping on their cat.

It was awful.

It was awful.

And Paul was the first million dollar player, and he had this big lucrative contract, but the big lucrative contract was tied to the league, and so I thought it was an interesting problem to solve, which is he had a bird in hand, which was a big sponsorship, the first time anyone in that sport had been recognized at that financial level, and he wanted to give it up to start something new.

And I thought it was very brave.

I thought it was ballsy.

And I also felt that, you know, we were getting Barstool was getting really a first hand look at sports because we were doing so much.

You know, this was early days for you know, not early early Barstool, but early in my time at Barsceol, and we were seeing, you know, hockey is kind of lagging.

Hockey is a very insular media culture around it.

Football was starting to rage, not the way it is now, but in a way that was was big.

Baseball was you know, a little sleepy, and I really felt that when I looked at the energy, you know, you're a great example of this, the amount of money, time and effort people will spend on their kids come across is bananas, Yes, bunkers bananas.

So I'm like, there's an opportunity there.

Yeah, yeah, and they've been chasing it.

I mean it is amazing.

And we've talked about this in the context of lacrosse.

I mean it really is like a rod being like, you know what, I think there's a better baseball league that I can you just be like this majorly crazy, crazy to think.

About Bana savannas.

Yeah, exactly, really cool.

But you had a lot of those ideas.

I mean that baseball should I when we were working together, and baseball should be more entertaining.

You've got to commingle the entertainment and the game like it's and.

They've done that.

They have, They've done it like they have.

And we talked about youth sports a lot podcasts, and it's a forty billion dollars opportunity and it's so fragmented, and I always go to like, how do we also make sure that like my mom, who couldn't afford you know, big ticket items, how do we grow the sport but also make it affordable for I think that's going to be the rub we have to make it because we don't want to lose great players to other sports because they can't afford it.

It's just not good enough.

And so how do you grow it?

Again, asking for a friend, how do you grow lacrosse?

I think you have to go to the youth.

Yeah, you need more kids preferring lacrosse.

Lacrosse is low barrier of entry sport.

You know, if you look at street lacrosse and Harlem like perfect example, like it's not if you can pick up a basketball, you can pick up a lacrosse stick and ball like it shouldn't be cosper.

There's also been an expansion into you know, there's now the WLL, the Women's League.

I would imagine as a former.

I'm passionate about the women's league and the women's lacrosse.

The coolest thing about the WLL is they will be bigger stars than the men.

Really, yes, because they they get it, they want it.

They are captivating on camera.

They Charlotte North and what she does for young girls playing lacrosse is epic.

And they're also new and I you know, this is my thing for which I've been saying to Paul and Mike forever.

This is what I'm like on the board, is like you who is your Dennis Rodman?

Yeah, Like, who's the jerk who's creating controversy.

It's the same conversation with WNBA, Like, the more players showing color off the court in a way that's real and relatable and impassioned, the better off the sport's going to be.

Well, I mean to the point of they get it.

I mean, you've seen this through the links.

You know, we've seen it in college sports especially.

You think about women's college basketball and the stars that you know, not just Caitlin but Paige Becker's when she was at yukon jiw Watkins at USC.

I mean, these are stars in part because they have cultivated that in a much more methodical and serious leg job, right right they did?

They just see they see the potential there.

Now, going back to food fifty two, I'm curious, where do you see this in the next three to five years.

In a perfect world, do we talk about barstore world totally?

I think in a perfect world, food fifty two finds a home inside of a bigger company and it brings the engine to bear and that may be something that should happen in seven years, and you know, or it happens in three years or you know, but I think it should be part of something bigger potentially.

Not to give any secret a way, but what type of company you think.

Could be a retail company that's looking for product differentiation, or is looking for category expansion, or is looking for a new customer set, or you could see, you know, more and more media companies are looking for food and home and life content, and so they're also looking for diverse lines of revenue, and they're looking to expand e commerce beyond affiliate.

So I kind of see those two paths as opportunities for this company.

So I have no doubt you're going to crush it in the next three five seven years with food fifty two.

I always wonder this.

You're very young, Yeah, you have a lot of experience.

Is there a dream job out there five seven years from now that's out there that you kind of think about a little bit, but you haven't leaned into it yet.

Is there one job?

Oh, I think I'm going to be like a college professor.

Oh really, yep.

I think I would teach business or I teach market I'm passionate about work like a girl.

I could see doing work like a girl for a long time.

I think, you know, as in the Middle East last winter for a sport a cook conference, and it was fascinating to me.

It was all men.

It was very well done, and I'm like, God, if you could just create a conference for women around culture and home and lifestyle, I'm interested.

That's a business I would build after this, for sure.

So I'm interested in that.

So one of the things that strikes me as we start to wrap up and we've got rapid fire questions coming at you in a second, but this notion that it feels like your brand again, listening to your podcast, even listening to this conversation, like you're about real talk.

I mean the title of your book.

I want to make sure I get this right.

Nobody cares about your career.

Why failure is good?

The great ones play hurt and other hard truths like this is who you are.

Give us some hard truths that you've.

H I mean, failure, it's all failure.

The better you can be failing is the better you'll be winning.

You struck out a bunch of time.

It was so funny, one hundred percent, Like I'm fifth of all time in the history of strikeouts, right, Yeah, it's cool that Reggie Jackson, my buddy's number one, But there's four people in the estue of mankind that have struck out more.

And I think that one of my small competitive advantages in business is that baseball is a game of failure, and if you fail seventy percent of the time, you end up in Cooperstown in the Hall of Fame.

Yeah, So the ability to get up to bat with optimism after's so much failure, I think it's a real gift.

Yeah.

I wish people would put themselves out there more and younger.

If you look at the percentages in baseball, they're pathetic.

I mean, it's so infinitismally small, and the reality is you're one of the greatest successes of all time.

And I really think the same thing is true.

It's so it's you got to put yourself out there.

You have to try, you have to take initiative.

I think people are failing to be generous and generous in their questions, generous in their thinking, generous in their effort.

And the more generous you can be with yourself in putting yourself into whatever it is you're doing, and the more chances you take one of them is going to.

Hit yeah, all right, we're gonna go the rapid fire.

Okay, all right, so ten questions.

We're going to bounce it back and forth.

So just like first thing that comes to your mind, one word to describe your deal making style.

Fast?

What's more important your data or your gut gut?

Who's your dream deal making partner?

In what way?

Like?

In how wherever you take it?

Who's my dream deal Dave Portnoy?

There you go.

What's the best piece of advice you received on deal making or business?

That no is the second best answer to yes.

What's the worst advice you've been given?

Hang in there.

What's your hype song before you go to into a big meeting or negotiation?

Ooh, this is an excellent one.

I have two.

One is I'm Coming Out by Diana Ross and two is The Velt by Dead Mouse.

Wow.

You can only watch one sport for the rest of your life?

Which one is it?

Tennis?

What team do you want to see win a championship more than any I shuld you're a tennis fan, you could say a person, team or person?

I mean Carlos Carlos outgraz he sees one a lot.

But yeah, we love Carlito it's so great.

You're obviously now running a food company.

I had your last meal.

What would that meal be?

Oh, that'd be like New Haven pizza and blueberries.

Oh, I gotta try that all right, Eric, Thank you, really really good to spend the time.

Do you thank thank you.

The Deal is a production from Bloomberg Podcasts and Bloomberg Originals.

The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly.

This show was produced by Anna Maazarakis, Stacey Wong, Lizzie Phillip, and Eden Martinez.

Original music and engineering by Blake Maples.

Matt Medulla was our sound operator.

Our booker is Paige Keffer.

David E.

Ravella is our managing editor.

Our executive producers are Jason Kelly, Amy Keene, Jordan Opplinger, Trey Shallowhorn, Regina Delia, Kelly Leferrier, and Ashley Hoenig.

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Special thanks to Rachel Carnivale, Elena Los Angeles and Nick Silva.

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Rubob Shakir is our creative director.

Art direction is from Jacqueline Kessler.

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