College Spun & Startups

In 2012, I co-founded College Spun Media, Inc. and began one of the most valuable experiences of my professional career. I was fortunate to team up with two extremely talented individuals to start College Spun — Matt Lombardi, who had previously spent six years working in mortgage-backed securities and brought a wealth of financial knowledge with his original vision, and Alyson Shontell, who was originally hired as Business Insider's sixth employee, covering the tech industry and startups, and had a great background in startups plus a real sense for journalism that was created for digital and social sharing (she has now risen to Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider US). 

We spent the summer of 2012 creating and loading as much college sports content to the site as possible, and signing up writers from across the country. Our original goal was to hire teams of student writers at major universities nationwide to cover their athletics programs. Students have eyes and ears on-campus that major publications don't, and often have unique insight to what's going on with their sports teams. In August 2012, we officially launched the site and had dozens of contributors creating content, producing a variety of analysis, opinion pieces, listicles, Twitter curations, and more. That autumn our numbers began to grow significantly (as you can see in the first one-sheet we ever created, on the right) and we knew that we had an idea on our hands that could actually work.

The next year and a half was a whirlwind of invaluable lessons. We pivoted from a primarily student-driven model to a more conservative staff setup with a few interns and a handful of contributors instead of dozens of them. We drifted away from analysis/recap/traditional journalism and heavily focused on social media integration into blogs with the type of quirky, quick-hitting content that is prevalent everywhere today, but wasn't so much in 2012. "Social. Local. Consumable." was our tagline for quite a while.

I served as both Managing Editor and our lead writer, but it was really all-hands-on-deck for everybody involved — as co-founders, we all recruited, contributed, edited, and shared content, obsessed over traffic and analytics, worked with advertisers and explored partnerships. We all adopted an "Eat, Breathe, Sleep College Spun" mentality that is often associated with startup life — we did anything possible to grow our business and make it profitable and sustainable longterm.

Fortunately, we were quite successful in our strategy pivots, and the site grew consistently and significantly (College Spun is now The Spun, and isn't limited to college sports anymore). Many of my published works on College Spun were featured elsewhere, including on ESPN, FOX, Sports Illustrated, Deadspin, SB Nation, Grantland, The Big Lead, Bleacher Report, Business Insider, and the New York Post, among others. I also made appearances on ESPN's 'SportsCenter' and 'Outside The Lines' programs, as well as on FOX and Friends, Campus Insiders, and other news networks — that exposure was crucial to the growth of the company and my personal career.

In early 2014, I moved on as Managing Editor of College Spun. While I no longer maintained any day-to-day responsibilities with the company, I remained a shareholder through an eventual successful exit, and I’m so proud of how The Spun evolved and grew. Even post-exit, I’m a big consumer and fan of the site and the editorial team. I am really excited to watch its continued growth, now under the Sports Illustrated and Maven brand, and I am proud to have helped launched a successful media company.

After departing from College Spun but prior to joining the Oakland Raiders, I still had quite the entrepreneurial itch -- in the spring of 2014 I was admitted into and attended The Founder Institute in Palo Alto, California. The mission there was to first come up with an idea for another company, and over the course of several months, officially launch and incorporate it. I came up with a number of ideas, pitched a few of them, and listened to advice and feedback some from some amazing people, including Adeo Ressi (Founder Institute), Jason Calacanis (Mahalo.com), Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), Phil Libin (Evernote), and Munjal Shah (Like.com). Ultimately I never felt strongly enough about any of the ideas to incorporate, but the experience itself was enlightening and extremely useful. I carry with me a lot of lessons taught by some innovative and inspiring entrepreneurs and leaders, and often reflect on their advice when I tackle new challenges now in a more corporate world.