NFL Starts Venture Capital Firm

Earlier this week, Sports Business Journal broke the story that the NFL was starting a venture capital fund, with the owners willing to put in at least $32 million to invest in businesses. I knew I needed to comment on this, but, to be honest, I didn’t think I was the most qualified.

For that, I went to Dan Shanoff of Quickish, a media company focused on short-form, real-time news curation and discovery.

Here is what Dan has written up for Sports Biz:

When news broke that the NFL was setting up its own early-stage VC fund, I tweeted out that it was “fascinating, forward-thinking and savvy.” I have been working in and around digital start-ups for 15 years, most recently spending the last two in the heart of New York City’s Silicon Alley founding and launching Quickish, a media company initially focused on sports, including the NFL. This has given me unique, on-the-ground perspective of the ecosystem of investors, entrepreneurs and institutions that the NFL is joining.

So let’s unpack that tweet:

“Fascinating”: That the NFL would recognize the value of not just investing in its game, but surging up the value chain to where early-stage companies are creating and cultivating the new technologies and techniques and talent that will drive the NFL’s business years from now. It isn’t unprecedented for non-traditional companies to create VC units: In the NFL’s New York backyard, AOL
AOL

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[AOL Loading... () ] has had great success with its in-house VC “Ventures” group; across the country, Google Ventures
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[GOOG Loading... () ] has parlayed the company’s dominant position into inserting itself into Silicon Valley’s (and Alley’s) early-stage environment. These are interesting analogues for the NFL. (More literally, it is easy to think of early-stage investment in the same way that teams deploy draft picks — some hit big, some become merely useful, some are wasted. But the best teams have a phenomenal system for product incubation, from college scouting to player development.)

“Forward-thinking”: At least in terms of barriers to entry, there has never been a better moment to found a start-up, and plenty of smart folks are trying. That’s not to say that many of these start-ups are businesses, let alone companies. But the experimentation alone is phenomenal: The process of founding a company, having a vision, launching (and iterating) and, ultimately, serving consumers pays off whether the founding team flies, flops or finds itself acquired by a larger company. By joining the start-up ecosystem in its earliest stages, the league gives itself years of a head-start in figuring out how and why — or even if — a start-up company or trend or talent might have a big impact on the NFL’s business. (Look no further than the same industry: MLB’s Advanced Media group has spent the last decade building out a business that is even more about being a profitable and powerful technology platform than it is about baseball.)

“Savvy”: The NFL is a powerful investor for any early-stage company. The league’s access to tens of millions of fans — let alone the relationship it has with sponsors and media companies, worth well into the billions of dollars — gives it a unique ability to accelerate the companies it invests in. With its market power, combined with the product- and networking-expertise of its co-investors among the more traditional funds, the NFL can create winners and do it efficiently. Meanwhile, the league nimbly gets to experiment with early-stage products that may ultimately turn out to be substantial drivers for its own business, and that’s in addition to any direct return on invested capital. Beyond that, inserting itself into the start-up ecosystem of Silicons Valley and Alley (and elsewhere), the league will have a built-in early-detection system for interesting companies and embryonic trends — the kind of thing a billion-dollar business doesn’t want to recognize when the NFL commissioner goes home and his kids tell him about some new product that is trickling into mainstream consciousness.