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Dan Porter is the Co-Founder and CEO of Overtime, a sports publisher and influencer for the next generation of fans. Across all accounts, Overtime has more than 1.5 billion views/month, 40 million followers with 88% of them being under the age of 35, and over 100 full-time employees.
Dan has a really cool background from working for Richard Branson at Virgin to selling Ticket Web to Ticket Master to creating game studio OMGpop and selling it for millions to working at William Morris Endeavor and starting their eSports department and creating the eLeague.
In our conversation, we talk about Dan’s background, how he started Overtime, his vision for the company, his thoughts on Overtime’s impact on youth basketball, and more.
Check out this episode by listening to the podcast, watching the video on our YouTube channel (or below), or reading the full transcript of the interview below.
Also, if you missed last week’s episode with the winningest American player in European basketball history with Kyle Hines, you can check it out here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ4C8oKTjv8
Full Transcript of Dan Porter, Overtime CEO, Interview
Host: 00:00
Dan thanks for joining us on the youth hoops pod. Appreciate you being here.
Dan Porter: 00:05
Happy to be here and support the cause.
Host: 00:08
Yeah, over time it’s big in the basketball world, obviously, we are a large part of that with pro skills basketball, one of the largest in the country and Team Curry. Most, recently, Steph Curry’s team, so our kids and our coaches and our parents love them some overtime. So, really excited to have you on.
Dan Porter: 00:32
Appreciate you.
Host: 00:33
Yeah, first, can we start with your background? I’ve read a lot about you. I’ve listened to some podcasts. I’ve done some research. But for those of you for those of our listeners who don’t really know about your background, I guess we just start with where you grew up, and where’d you go to high school and college and all that good stuff.
Dan Porter: 00:58
Yeah, I’ll try to make it. I’ll try to make it fast because that could be a whole podcast in of itself. I grew up in. Sorry, my dog is good. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, Dr. J sixers fan and a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Both my parents were college professors. Actually, they were PhDs in math and sociology. So I come from a very academic family. I played baseball, I played basketball, I played soccer. And for college, I went to Princeton University, where I did a whole bunch of things. My real love was music. I was a professional musician. In between college, I started at Berkley College of Music. And I used to play in bands from the age of 13, on up and that was really kind of where my passion was. And when I graduated from college, you know, it’s a little bit like basketball, like you can go really far. But if you’re not going to go to the NBA, you got to start thinking about what else you’re going to do. And it was clear that I was probably not going to be playing large stadium tours. So I had to figure out what I wanted to do. And I think like a lot of athletes, the first thing you think is, oh, I want to go work in sports. And for me, it was oh, I want to go work in music. And I started out in the music business on the kind of talent side and the record label side. But it became clear to me that I was I liked music too much to work there. Like it was really a passion. And I think one of the things that I learned is that sometimes your passions are just great to be your passions, like I’m happy to play the piano, I’m happy to play the guitar. I don’t feel like my life was incomplete. Because I didn’t somehow make music be a part of it. It got me really far. And then I figured out how to do other stuff. So the short version of all that is I kind of worked in the music industry, I realized that I cared way more about music per se than those people did. They were mostly business people and pretty good. So I left and I actually became a public school teacher in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I taught social studies, I taught special Ed. And through that, it kind of led to me becoming on the founding team of the Teach for America program, which is now almost 30 years old and has place 10s of thousands of teachers. So I was on that very first team in 1990. I ran all the admissions and eventually I became the president of Teach for America in the mid-90s. When I was 27 years old, I was working with President Clinton and I was traveling around the country, helping teachers working with school districts.
I left that to start some of the early charter schools in New York City. And that was really, it was another thing I had never really majored in education, or I didn’t know a lot of it. But I had a real passion to kind of for social justice and to change the world. And I loved young people. And I just really loved learning about the insane diversity across this country from rural North Carolina to Louisiana, to Oakland to New York. And it was very all encompassing for a young person with a lot of energy. And at some point about 10 years into that I just realized that I wanted to do something different. And I wasn’t really sure what that was. And I think moving around in your career a lot is really is really hard because when you go to school, nobody tells you about the 10,000 potential jobs there are out there. And so you kind of model around and you don’t have a lot of visibility. I thought about going back to school while I was working. I actually got a master’s degree in 19th century Mexican history that I’m for every pretty niche. I thought about going to business school. And in the end, I kind of talked my way into a finance job, which was great. I learned that I hate finance jobs, but I learned a lot about money and finance and numbers and I kind of got paid to do my Business School Education.
And the thing that I loved at Teach for America at was really just this kind of almost entrepreneurial idea of just having an idea and creating it with a team of young people. And it’s very similar to sports in that I think some of the things that people like about startups and stuff is really being on a team and you know, where people’s roles are, and you can really run and you even compare basketball to a sport like football where there’s like 60 people on the team, it’s harder, you know, unless you’re the quarterback to make a difference whereas here you are all in. So I kind of moved across the country to the Bay Area, and I started the first ticketing company, called ticket web, I sold the first concert ticket on the internet in the late 90s. And in three years, we built that up to a $75 million business. And we sold that to Ticketmaster, which was the largest ticket kind of company, I ended up coming back to New York, I tried the music business again, it wasn’t for me, I ended up working for Richard Branson, and managing a lot of his investments in New York. And then I started my second company, which was a mobile games company, we made a whole bunch of games, we grew from seven people in a little room, which was upstairs from Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, it was an interesting smelling place. And ultimately, four and a half years, we made a game called draw something which in its time was on nine out of 10, iPhones was downloaded a quarter of a billion times. And I kind of steered that company and managed to sell that company for $200 million. So, big public company. So here I was kind of somebody who had no idea what they wanted to do spend a lot of time teaching kids. And now I had kind of backward walked my way into being some kind of games and tech entrepreneur, I was actually the designer of the game as well, even though I didn’t come from that background, but I’m super curious and open. And while I’m not good at a lot of things, I’m pretty good at learning. And I think it’s similar if you can, if you can listen to your coach, if you can figure out how the game of basketball works. Once you can learn that and you can learn how to learn things, you can learn anything, if you especially if you understand you’re learning so and especially if you’re curious, they say some of the best creativity comes from teenagers. But it also comes from people who can kind of open their teenage mind, even if they’re in their 30s 40s or 50s.
As a result of that, I ended up getting introduced to WME, William Morris Endeavor, which is the biggest kind of global talent agency in the world that represents all the big athletes and movie stars. And for three years, I ran their digital business. So I represented 250 of the biggest YouTube stars and 17 agents, I did everything you could imagine around the intersection of entertainment and essentially digital stuff. And that’s kind of where the idea for overtime came. I started working with a bunch of the sports leagues in Europe in the US and teams and rights holders. And I kept hearing the story that young people weren’t watching as much live sports as the generation before them. And the benefit that a lot of these big leagues and teams have is they can do really good research because they have a lot of money. And they have a lot of smart people who work there. And when you looked at the research, and you saw things like, you know, kids liked players more than teams are kids were choosing their favorite team based on a video game rather than where they grew up on.
Or young people and young athletes were just watching the highlights and they weren’t watching the games, you could tell that there was this massive change. And I think the change is really driven ultimately, by this is a first generation of young athletes and young fans who grew up with a smartphone, they grew up with a screen where they could consume content. And the joke used to be Oh; I would never put a TV in my kid’s room because that would be too distracting. Well, every cable, TV and stuff like that. And from that I just thought, well, somebody’s going to create a whole new Sports Network and tell stories about a whole new generation in a whole new way for young people. And they’re going to use technology. And that was overtime. And I think something that most people don’t know about us is not only do we kind of program for the front part of your screen, and we tell the story of all the kind of dopest young people who are on their way to the NBA, some will make in some won’t. But we actually use the other side of the phone too. We have our own highlight camera capture technology that we built that sits on top of the iPhone, and it’s got a whole cloud based storage and a publishing system. And we have over 7000 people around the world we’ve trained to use that special technology. So when lamella ball goes to Lithuania, we’re able to have people in a game in one second filming it and that’s how overtime kind of went in there and was able to be with Zion Williamson in South Carolina. And you know, and Oakland and all these places that this is that we have this army of people who were using our special iPhone camera technology. And not only did we have things more broadly but we had them faster kind of the secret of the internet and a lot of business is speed. And so we just want to add it and we went to speed. And I think the other secret was that our audience they cared about the players that we covered, they didn’t only care about what happened on the court. And if you think about traditional sports, you watch the game, and then the game is done. And if you think about our audience, they say, Zion lamella, call Anthony Mac McClung, whoever it is, they’re like, I want to know who that is, as a person.
Like, that’s what social media is, what are they like? Do they go to class, like me, you know, what is their training, like, I want to kind of open that door, and you say, that’s almost as valuable as what happens on the court, you’ve got a big story, and you got a lot of people’s attention. And I’d say the final thing is kind of one we went when I kind of, we built and we got there slowly, slowly, over time, the kind of content of a 17 year old kid playing basketball was ultimately really interesting to only to two groups, parents, you know, parents want to see their kids play, of course, and then essentially recruiting, you know, who’s going to go to Michigan, and who’s going to go to Kentucky, nobody was taking that content, and in turn making it for that age group of the people who are watching it. And it’s not a revolutionary insight. It’s just nobody was doing it. And so I took everything that I understood about representing Youtubers and Instagramers. I applied it to sports. And I said, this isn’t content for parents. This isn’t content for recruiters is content for every person who thinks that might be me on the court, add in a whole sense of community, we respond to a quarter of a million DMs from our fans, you know, we try to lift kids up. And that’s kind of my story in the story of overtime.
Host: 11:47
That’s awesome. So where do you see overtime going? You see it competing? I mean, it competes now but you know, it I mean, it’s competing with ESPN and all that, but But what is kind of your your big vision for overtime?
Dan Porter: 12:01
Yeah, so I would say that in the very beginning, when we were tiny kind of people lumped us in the youth sports space and in that kind of basketball space. And now we do boys basketball, girls basketball, football, video games, like, we want to create the next ESPN. And we understand that it’s probably not going to be on your TV screen, it’s probably going to be on Snapchat and Instagram, we want to tell stories. And we want to build the biggest global sports brand in the world, we have an account that covers Africa, we have an account that covers Europe or in France, and French, we’re in the US, we cover boys we cover girls, like we want to build that brand that people have love for and that they consume. And you know, when you talk about a kind of a brand, like if you are in business school, talking about brand, brand is something you have loyalty to, you know, you go into that to the deli and you choose the soda or you choose the drink based on that brand you like what you wear, that represents you. And it makes you feel good. And it makes you feel aligned. And we hope to stand for something which is about the empowerment of young people and telling their stories. And we hope to get their loyalty over time. In the same way that back in the day a sports center did you can say sport center, and it was like a noun or a verb to everyone knew what that meant. And that took 20 or 30 years. We’ve been at it for about four and a half years. But that’s where we want to be we want to be the biggest brand for sports in the world. And we want to start with everybody who’s in high school and college now and just grows from there.
Host: 13:39
Yeah. Now, I mean, when you talk about it, and this happens a lot, obviously it’s like, oh, yeah, of course. You know, like, of course that’s the case. But you know, four years ago or five years ago, years ago, it couldn’t have been that easy. So when you when you went to investors, you know, I know you have some big time investors, including KB and Melo, right? So when you went, but I guess they were in the series a buddy in from the seed round the series A and when you went to these, these folks like when you pitched it, did they? I mean, did they buy in right away, or they didn’t see the vision?
Dan Porter: 14:19
They didn’t buy in right away? I think that I thought that because of my track record they would buy that, you know, they didn’t buy in because I think that people assume that if you’re making content about young people that it’s not valuable. You know, they assume the only thing that matters is the NBA or the NFL. And look, the NBA and the NFL are smashing successes with brilliant people who run them and a massive global fan base. But it doesn’t mean that something that a Mikey or an Amani or Zion does when they’re in 11th grade is irrelevant. It’s actually super relevant and I think we could see that already happening. But if you go in and you try to convince a bunch of old people about that, they’re just going to be like, who cares? And so about 50 people said to me, who cares? And eventually I set my sights on David Stern the form.
Host: 15:14
Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. How the heck did you get? I mean, he’s, he was a visionary, but like, how did you get him, I want to know that story.
Dan Porter: 15:20
So he was working at a firm where I had some contacts, so I kind of pitched him, he didn’t totally get it. But I just knew that, you know, sometimes you need just a door to open, like a little crack to open and get your foot in there. And I just knew that he would be game changing for us in terms of his advice, and his endorsement. And so we just kept telling him that we thought this was really big, we had a huge amount of enthusiasm for it, we weren’t all going to quit our jobs to do something that we thought was going to fail. And we just thought it was a changing time. And even though, you know, he was in his 70s, he, you know, he was the first one to recognize digital first sports league, he was the first one to recognize International. And so he didn’t even have to understand everything about our business. He just understood that, you know, in every 10 years, there’s some big inflection point. And maybe we were the ones to hit that inflection point, and he liked our enthusiasm and once we reeled him in, it kind of started to grow from there.
And I’d say that ultimately, you know, I was more of a kind of a technology entrepreneur, somebody who came from the kind of creative and the digital side, Zack, who’s my co-founder, who’s, you know, in his mid-20s, had, you know, published a sports publication when he was in college, but had worked in finance, and a lot of ways we were outsiders, right, I didn’t play you, I coach, I didn’t do any of those things. And, and sometimes, it’s a harder thing to be an outsider, because there’s so many networks you’re not a part of. And sometimes it’s a beautiful thing, no matter what you do, because you don’t understand, you don’t know enough to think that there’s less opportunity, meaning you’re not so in the weeds, that you can look at things and see something that’s really, really different. Right, I used to say, like, you know, some of my favorite musicians used to do things like have the drummer, play the piano and have the piano player play the drums, because they just had a totally different way of looking at how they played those instruments. And I think for us, we came in, and we weren’t like, Oh, it’s about the circuit, and AAU, and four star and five star, like we have a rule that we will not use four star and five star, I came in and I said, I don’t like ranking athletes, it makes me feel bad.
Every young person is awesome. And they have incredible potential. And like the rankings feel arbitrary, telling some kid they’re four star five stars to me, it just felt kind of gross. And so but nobody, you know, you’re so caught up in the system, that’s what happens. And so we kind of came in with the idea of like, empowering young people and using digital technology and admitting that we were outsiders. But through that we just had a different lens, I think. And then I think the last thing is that, so how do you do that? And how do you grow and get really big. I would say in the first year, we probably sent some people on our team, to at least hundreds of games. I mean, there were probably 100,000 high school kids in America who saw somebody in an overtime t shirt in their gym. Now that is a really hard way to build a business, it’s way better just to launch an Instagram account and put some clips up there. But I think like anything in life, if you’re willing to really grind and get out there and build the brand from the bottoms up, it’s like they talk about politics and knocking on people’s doors. And everything else like that, you know, you can look at Mike Bloomberg
Host: 19:04
Need the boots on the ground,
Dan Porter: 19:05
Yeah you need those boots on the ground and that made a huge difference for us. Because, you know, we were connecting with our audience and understanding them there. And that was really hard to replicate. And it wouldn’t have been possible. If we didn’t have a team of five or six people who are like, I’m gonna get in the car. I’m gonna drive to Atlanta, I’m gonna get in the car and I’m gonna drive to North Carolina.
Host: 19:28
I was holding on South Carolina down by the way.
Dan Porter: 19:32
Yeah, where the nearest hotel might be like an hour away. But there was so much excitement and enthusiasm. You felt like you were uncovering something that was like new and look, I mean, look at Mikey Williams. He has more followers than I think 97% of people in the NFL do, right? He’s in 10th grade. And these are athletes making hundreds of millions of dollars on every single person’s fantasy football team and yet he’s been because he’s a digital native. And I think that that’s pretty hard to see if you’re super rich and you on a football team or a media network. But if you’re on the ground up, you realize that and you lean into it.
Host: 20:12
Yeah, I guess that’s kind of a good transition, or I was gonna ask, so I guess like the value proposition up until now has been like, hey, let us film you, you know, switch to the star athletes or start maybe EEG video game or whatever it might be, but let us film you will use that we’ll promote it, you’ll get followers, we’ll get views. So it was a mutually beneficial thing? How do you think it seems like it’s coming down the pike now that, you know, NCAA is gonna allow players to get paid off image and likeness? And I guess that means high school kids potentially could do which I’m in favor of? But do you see that changing your business model at all? Or are you sad about that?
Dan Porter: 20:57
I don’t. So right now, it’s a value exchange where we can pay them. But yeah, you could be on, I can put your clip on overtime. And you could wake up tomorrow and gain 50,000 followers. And by the way, those are followers you’re going to have for your entire life. I mean, when we started covering Mac McClung, he had 22,000 followers, and we were done. He had 750,000 followers, that give him a platform that he would have never had otherwise, I am 100%, in favor of young people in high school and college being compensated, being able to earn money from their efforts. If they’re a Youtuber, an actor, a tennis player,
Host: 21:35
A musician,
Dan Porter: 21:36
A musician, anything else like that, they would be making money. And that’s how the system works. We just have some weird quirks in it, in a way; it would be great, because I would be happy to share the value with them. But also, in a way, I think there’s a ton more upside, you know, sometimes we’ll film an athlete and they’ll wear a sweatshirt or there were something in the video, and everyone will be like, Where’s that sweatshirt? How do I get it? Well, they can’t be compensated for that. Because that voids their eligibility, you know, they can, you know, be drinking a sports drink or doing anything else like that. So it’s not just that it changes our model, because we pay them, we’re the ones we’re talking to all those brands, we can actually help them make more money. That’s fact is if they if everybody else, you know, it’s like I remember a basketball player said to me, there are two kids in my high school who have YouTube channels, and they’re not even that big. And they’re making money every day. And I have millions of followers, and somehow I’m not allowed to make money. And I think that’s going to change. And I think it’s the right thing to do. And I think it will actually be great for our business and great for the young people too.
Host: 22:52
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, we’re firmly in that camp, that if you’re good enough, and someone wants to pay you, you know, you should be allowed.
Dan Porter: 23:00
And by the way, I would add, like, sadly, history has been that we there are a lot of people who do get paid, it just happens under the table. And it would be better for everyone. If that were over the table, its way less risky for the athletes, you get less shady people involved. And in the light of day, it’ll be beneficial for everyone.
Host: 23:25
Yeah, I have one kind of last, quote unquote, big question. And then, you know probably one or two small ones to follow up before we end this. But, you know, the common complaint we hear nowadays in the youth Basketball World is, you know, from the basketball purists where it’s like, oh, the kids are just doing that too, for the mix tape, or the kids are just doing that for the highlight and, you know, trying to like make someone fall down when they cross them over, and then they like brick a three or whatever it might be, you know, and, you know, so I think, yeah, there’s just a lot of basketball purists out there in the community saying like, Oh, it’s just for the highlight just for the mix tape just for overtime just for House of highlights or whatever. You know, what do you think that’s fair? Or, you know, how might you respond to that criticism?
Dan Porter: 24:17
I think it is. Look, it’s their opinion. So it’s a fair opinion. I would say a couple things. One is, every generation hates what the next generation does. I’m sure they would say, you know, what you just described is the same way that people talk about dunking. Dunking is just showing off people.
Host: 24:40
Roger,
Dan Porter: 24:40
Dunking was illegal, right in the NBA for like 10 years for that reason. And now there’s a dunk contest. So you know, that’s. Number two is basketball is entertainment. If nobody watches it, you know, nobody, no one gets paid. Like they’re not, you know, they’re not teachers. They’re entertainers that work in the Business ends even the NCAA March Madness tournament is a money making entertainment venue. And I would say that, look, all these kids are being coached, they’re doing their drills, they’re learning how to shoot. And if you want to have a little flair, you want to have a little flair. I think to me, I understand it, but it just sounds like, you know, the cranky old person saying, like, turn that rap music down. That’s not really music. Well, every generation decides what’s relevant for them. You know, I’m sure these people criticize them would say, rap music isn’t music, they’re not singing, you know that’s not a video. It’s too short, or whatever else. So you kind of like, the young people are the creators of it. And if that’s what they’re creating, that’s what they’re creating, and I don’t think it’s hurting anyone. And I think it brings some fun and some flair to the game as well. Now if they lose the game because of that, maybe, but I don’t think that’s really happening.
Host: 25:59
Yeah, I love it. Now that’s a great answer. So appreciate you talking about that for a second. But I think you bring up some really good points. So we’re about out of time. So I guess lastly, where can people find you online? Or, you know, and obviously, I think they know where to find over time. But you in particular, you’re relatively active on Twitter. I know.
Dan Porter: 26:20
If you want to hear boring tweets about politics, and the Philadelphia Eagles, and music, I’m TFA DP on Twitter. I’m also have an overtime, Instagram account over time CEO, I post a little bit but I also chat in the comments and I respond to DMs from young people there. And if you’re a super ambitious young person, you can find me on LinkedIn and okay.
Host: 26:52
That’s awesome. Well, Dan thanks so much. We are out of time. I really appreciate it and best of luck with everything you have going on.
Dan Porter: 27:01
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me and you too. Have a great rest of the year.
Host: 27:07
Thanks, Dan. We’ll see you. Bye.
