A Cinderella Story: Young Entrepreneur Leaves Steady Consulting Job to Start Online Sports Website
In 2007, Bryan walked away from a promising job in consulting to move back home with his parents. It may sound like a rookie mistake, but this was likely the best move in his career to date. He is Vice President of Product for bleacherreport.com, a popular open-source sports network that gives voice to everyday sports fans. In the past three years Bryan and team have raised $5 million of venture capital to build the website, formed partnerships with CBS and Fox Sports networks, and earned recognition as one of America’s top under-25 entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek. To use a favorite sports metaphor, Bryan’s Cinderella Story has encompassed not only the realization of his lifelong dream to become a successful Web entrepreneur, but the empowerment of an untapped community of passionate and talented sports journalists.
Growing up in Silicon Valley with a family legacy of entrepreneurship (his grandfather started a business coming out of the Great Depression; his cousin Jakob founded collegehumor.com), Bryan seems to have been destined to become a Web entrepreneur. Yet he did not immediately set out on that path. After studying economics at Middlebury College, he took a coveted job as a consultant for Deloitte. “I wanted to learn a lot at my first job,” he says. “Consulting allowed me to do a different job every few months.”
While cutting his teeth at Deloitte, Bryan started talking to three high-school friends about an idea for a fan-based online sports network. At the time, all four men had begun promising careers: consultant, talent agent, private-equity analyst, and law student. They decided to stay in those roles while brainstorming on the website concept.
“The beauty of the concept for bleacherreport.com is that there are millions of diehard sports fans out there, many of whom have an opinion and want to share it,” explains Bryan. “Even though they are amateur writers, they can produce something on par with ESPN and Sports Illustrated. Plus, we can cover so much more ground because there are so many contributors.” Although Bleacher Report contributors do not receive pay for their work, many have honed their writing skills and gone on to start careers as sports journalists.
In March 2007, Bryan and his partners, having spent 18 months testing the concept with a hobby site through Joomla!, all agreed to leave their jobs to create bleachreport.com. Bryan knew the business would succeed based on the passion and determination of his partners. “They all committed to leaving their jobs to create bleacherreport.com. To me, that meant it was only a matter of time before things took off,” he recalls. “You have to trust your partners 100%,” he adds. “Only then can you build a balanced team where everyone can share their strengths and skills.”
They set up an office in Menlo Park, California. By September of that year, they had launched the official site. Coming from a purely business background, Bryan learned quickly. He insists that anyone starting an Internet company must be willing to “get neck-deep in the technology and Web product side. Don’t just leave it to someone else.”
Of course, learning PHP from CGI (popular web programming languages) wasn’t the only challenge Bryan faced. While living at home with his parents (a challenge itself), he had to assuage their anxieties. “They couldn’t understand why I quit a very comfortable, enjoyable, and successful job in consulting,” he relates. “To me it was very clear: I knew that my partners and I would work our tails off to make our dream come true. I didn’t want to look back on my life and regret not taking the chance.”
Bryan’s parents’ concerns, although understandable, proved unnecessary. The four founders did indeed see the business take off, thanks in large part to the passion of its millions of users and writers. “It didn’t occur to us how much we could count on our users and writers. They make the website what it is,” says Bryan. Today, Bleacher Report gets over two millions unique visitors a month, publishes hundreds of articles a day, and is linked with CBS and Fox, major sports networks.
Moving forward, Bryan says that “our goal is to expand upon what we already do well; to find more talented writers, publish thousands of articles daily, and cover a wider range of topics. Even if your team isn’t the most popular [read: the Detroit Lions], you’ll find it here.”
Bryan loves proving that fan journalists can produce world-class content and that no dream is too big. Talk about a Cinderella Story.
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