Alexis Ohanian, you know him as an entrepreneur, a tech titan, an investor, and now more than ever, a heavyweight in supporting female athletes. Once invested in Angel City Football Club, but now betting big on professional track and field. And Alexis joins me live in our New York studio. And you're there for athletes and it's going to be hard, but I want to tie this together. Right. I always knew like seven, seven, six is a sort of self-described tech company that invests as or with venture capital now athletes. Explain, please. Well, look, I wanted to build a venture capital firm that operates like a startup that builds software and that is able to take chances at the earliest stage and some radical ideas. I've been fortunate to be an early investor in companies like Coinbase, Instacart, Flex, Port Rowe, and one of the things we love doing is incubating big ideas.

And you mentioned, yes, I was the founding owner and investor in Angel City FC back four years ago when no one thought that women's professional sports was an investable opportunity. Times have changed. But imagine a year ago I was getting ready for the Olympics and noticed, Hey, these are amazing women who compete every four years. They captivate us and then they seem to disappear. And immediately I thought, Is there an opportunity to build something here in track and afloat? This is the product of that and very excited, you know, record-breaking prizes. Tiffany and Co crowns live streams all over the interwebs. It's going to be a lot of fun here in New York tonight. You and I share sports in common. We talk about it a lot, right? Professional sports tournaments, but also kind of the money behind it. It's what fascinates me. What are you trying to do with that?

floss? Like a question that loads people have is like when you're going to have the first $1 million race and what it would take from a streaming and app-based technology approach to bring the audience that would actually watch it. Yeah, well, look, we take this one step at a time. When getting started with Angel City, that expansion fee to buy a franchise was $1,000,000, and all of the other owners told me it was kind of disheartening. No one cares about women's soccer. You know, getting even a seven-figure front of kit deal would be unthinkable. And that's what the owners were thinking back then. Obviously, again, a lot has changed. And the end goal here for everything in women's sports is still first and foremost to build long-term, durable, sustainable, great businesses. And the athletes know this. And so it's important. Don't get hung up on what either the prize money is today or the salaries are.

today. Because with every passing year, as there's more and more growth, more and more revenue, more and more tickets sold, more and more bigger media deals, that those dollars end up in the hands of the athletes. And so we've built athletes from day one saying, okay, what's the greatest prize in track and field? It turns out it was $30,000 cash. And I said, this is easy. We're going to double it. That'll be our top prize for one single race. And then let's put on top of that a 10% revenue share. And it's a similar model, what we did with L.A. Golf Club as well as Angel City, 10% of all the revenue spent for athletes. So that's broadcast, that's tickets, that's merch, that's hot dogs goes into a pool and it's divided evenly among every one of the 36 women who lines up to compete tonight.

And that's in addition to the record-breaking purse. And it's just the start. And so how long will it take? I don't know. But I believe that this sport, it's the original professional sport that this sport can and should be as big outside of the Olympics as it is during. And if we can do that, then there's no reason why we can't have purses and prizes that look like, say, sports. And yet track and field stars are underpaid. You know, that is kind of a commonly held belief. And then I think about a lot of what you just touched on. So take Angel City. FC My relationship with Angel City is I have a friend that plays in the squad. Megan Reid Right, And that's how I was exposed to that. But I also was exposed to Apple TV. I don't see the same level with track and field on the streaming platforms. What does a media deal? Not yet, but what does a media deal for

track and field look like? Well, I think we got phase one from our friends at Box to Box who produced a show called Sprints that captivated us on Netflix. And when we looked at Partners for Athletes, remember, this is today. It's just one event happening yearly. We want it to be the biggest spectacle of the sport of entertainment. We got D.J. D-nice, we've got Meg the stallion performing. This is going to be one of the best events any New York sports fan will have been to that. That was our goal. And when we looked at streaming partners, we said, okay, this is a global sport. The fan base is everywhere. They want access. So we need to make it accessible. So we will then deal with different partners who understood that was our goal and we were able to get to a place where you can watch on ESPN plus awesome. You can also watch it on X, you can watch it on YouTube, you can watch it on

the zone. And so Access, especially globally, was so important. But again, this is still phase one. I'm going to tell you a much different story come Monday morning because we have a re-air on ESPN two on Sunday. Exactly. The number of people who watched, who tuned in, who tweeted, who posted, who talked about it. And those are the numbers. That's that's the first step is to say, look, here is the thing. What if we invested real money outside of the Olympics into one of these track events? Will people show up? Will people tune in? I think they will, because these women are no less excellent when the Olympics end. Right. And so putting them on the stage, giving them this high profile attention, I think they'll deliver. And then with that, we can say, what are we doing next year? How big, how ambitious do we want to go? But it starts and stops with delivering

for these athletes, for these women. I know they're going to show up in a big way. And if you loved watching them in Paris during the Olympics, you're going to love watching them here in New York at Atlas. Alexis, was this social media story. Fabulous? I mean, it's simple, right? It's a ground game that we pioneered building it. One of the things I've learned. I've spent more time thinking about online community than probably anyone in the world. Right. Creating Reddit. 15, 16 years of building and turning around the business sports. We ran a similar playbook with Angel City. It is about engaging the community where they are. Kayla GREENE, who's the woman who did all that great work for us at Angel City Building, the brand, the community. She's back at it running the show with Atlas. And so you can follow the social accounts. You'll see it's about telling the story

of these women. They are stars, each and every one of them. And it's my strong belief that if, you know, the WWE can create a cast of characters that engage us and compel us week after week after week, athletes can absolutely do that with these superstar athletes. And it's no disrespect to the folks of the WWE, but these women are incredibly compelling. They're running. This is the original sport, and these athletes are superstars. They're incredibly telegenic, they're incredibly compelling. And this is one of the big reasons people still don't understand women athletes don't take any of this for granted. And this generation of athletes we're seeing right now, when they were little girls, they were digital natives who were deciding to choose a hard path to become a professional athlete, because unless they played maybe tennis or golf, there wasn't fame and fortune in store for them. But by choosing that harder path, by

knowing they had to be their own creative director and storyteller, they got really good at storytelling where it mattered, which is social media, which is why four years ago. I see it a mile away. But and sorry to interrupt you now. When I think about women's sport, I think WNBA, rightly so, around all of the things that you think about. And with you, Alexis, I know that you're always thinking about the next thing. How do you feel about the WNBA as an investor, and will you look at that as an option as your next big thing? Oh, gosh, I wish I had more hours in the day because that's one that I was doing the work on. I was looking at. But I had I had my hands full with Angel City and a number of other projects. I think the W was still a great investable opportunity. I tried to be a little cheeky, a little

cheeky tweet to the NCAA. About three or four years ago, I tried to buy the women's college basketball tournament from them because I said, You're doing a bad job. And the reason it was so obvious, check the tweets, was because even four years ago when they couldn't get a weight room that was worthy of them, it was embarrassing when they couldn't even say March Madness at that exact same time. If you looked at the top 20 women, college basketball players and their social media following versus the top 20 male college basketball players, the women crushed the men, and that's the free market of attention. And so I'm not looking at traditional media deals to tell me what people want. I'm looking at the free market, and I'm looking at follower counts, and I'm looking at engagement. And it was obvious four years ago that the women of college basketball were way outperforming the men. And so, yes, now we have this amazing

draft class and Caitlin and Angel have really stormed the W. Alexis, I'm sorry. So you just said you tried to buy the women's NCAA tourney via tweet March Madness. It was needless to say, they did not respond to my tweet, but I was basically complaining how poorly they were treating the women of college basketball. And I was, I mean, they're still there, like I said, like, you're clearly not trying. You're the reasons why you're squandering, like where people actually want to pay attention and why you should be investing in them, why you should be letting the market is March Madness, where you should be putting them on TV and why you should be giving them a reasonable weight room. And so, no, I needless to say, they did not respond to my tweet, but I still think there's a ton of upside with the W. I love what unrivaled is doing. I think women's basketball is already

such an established phenomenon, and the WNBA has been here for decades. And credit to those women who laid the groundwork. And basketball is such a fundamentally American sport. I mean, thank you, Dr. James Naismith. But, you know, as a women's football team owner, woman, soccer team owner. I do look a little jealously over at the W because it has such an established, durable league. It is a sport that's so just native to the United States and such a big part of the culture already. But look, it's a positive-sum game. We had, you know, at the Liberty match here just a couple of nights ago. Gabby Thomas was there courtside and got quite an ovation when they put her on the Jumbotron. And, and again, I love this meme that you're seeing now as it's becoming more and more valuable, frankly, for people to pay attention to women's sports here in America for better or for worse.

You know, money talks. And so, as people are realizing how valuable it is to build on these stories, invest in these athletes, I think it's going to be a great time for this next generation. And there's still room to grow. Even with all the success that WS had with that recent media deal. Alexis, just the start. Bloomberg Technology senior producer Jackie Lopez just wants to know, So, is something that you're going to pursue? Wait, okay. Jackie, I'm not. I'm not making news here for you. We got a... we'll come on. If we do something, we'll make sure to talk to you all first. I'm... I one step at a time. The focus is athletes right now. But I do think if you look at the entire landscape of women's sports, we're still in the early days. There is still a lot of room to grow. And now it's going to be incumbent on

the folks who are putting in the dollars to build. And I still think there are some opportunities, for instance, in track and field, for some great change to come. And like I said, I want to spend the rest of my years not on a beach. I want to spend my years building and doing it with intention and investing in great businesses that I also know my daughters can be proud of me for.

Why Alexis Ohanian Is Betting on Women Athletes

Welcome to the Bloomberg Technology YouTube channel. Subscribe for original series and mini-docs on game-changing technologies, profiles on innovators, live conversations with experts, and breaking technology news & analysis from Bloomberg TV.

Why Alexis Ohanian Is Betting on Women Athletes

Scripts