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Alex Rodriguez

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72

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2021-06-07

most recent

2021-06-07

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1

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1. “Yeah, that's a good question. For one, we are a company that I believe under promises and over delivers. I think we are a company that likes to go narrow and deep and not wide and shallow. So part of our challenge when we come in is if Ted wants to do a deal with A-Rod Corp. Your first thing you should be thinking about, like, well, Alex, you have a million things to do. You're here, you're there, you're everywhere. How can you really perform? And I think that when you spend time with me and more importantly, my team, you will realize that we have an institutional team that has an incredible track record. And then when you look at our partnerships within real estate or venture, you'll realize that our track record is impeccable. And that if you talk to our founders and partners, they want to do more with us, not less. We like that model. What we want to do more with people we like, understand, and trust because trust is the biggest thing and our partners trust us. And that's something that we take a lot of pride in. You take hymns and hers as an example is we made an investment.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “So let's go with that game plan analogy. You're now the manager of the team. You're going onto the field. What is that game plan, right? You have a story when you're going in to meet with someone. You might be interested in investment, whatever it is. What have you sort of formulated into kind of what the story of AROD Corp is?”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “So before you enter those doors, make sure that you go in with a plan. You can crystallize your story and you have a team that can actually execute whatever you're promising. And I just thought that was brilliant advice. Knowing that as a celebrity or an athlete or an entertainer, you're not going in with no strikes. You're going in with two and a half strikes. Well, there's a big delta between going in with two and a half strikes and choking up and trying to put the ball in play versus thinking that is a 3-0 count, you're a celebrity and the deal is going to be done. And the delta of that is humongous. So I thought that was one of my competitive advantages having self-awareness of what's the score.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Number one, I understood the playing field, the gift and the curse of being an athlete, of being someone that's well known. This is a little bit before all these social influencers. And I kind of sit in the middle of media entertainment, sports influencer. But what I wanted most was not to have an image. I wanted to really work on a reputation. I wanted to have a world-class championship team. And I wanted to be taken seriously by people like you and your colleagues. And if we went to the Yale Endowment, if I met with you and your former boss who passed just a few weeks ago, to be seriously, right? And what magic taught me is like, look, there's not a meeting you couldn't get. But let's be honest, 99 of those 100 meetings, nothing's going to happen besides you're going to sign something, you're going to take a picture. They're going to get a picture for their grandkids and you're going to get.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Greg, again, another institutional guy, very aggressive, very confident, really understands branding and marketing as well as anybody I've ever met. He spent a long time with me and I didn't understand why. And he was hard on me saying, you got to come up with your logo. You got to come up with your logo. I'm like, I first got to come up with a business model that works. He's like, yeah, you get that. Logo is important. And of course, he has the great shark. He has it on his golf courses, on his stakes, on his wine, on his plane, in his job. I mean, but it's just been a great brand. And he was an early guy that took stock into the, I think it was King Cobra's and made a small fortune and then kept building it from there. But he had the foresight to say, don't pay me a fee, pay me an ownership and equity or warrants. And it played out beautifully. And at the time, he was one of the greatest players in the world, if not the best. So a lot of it is kind of big picture vision, branding.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “And I also got great mentors. So basically, in a nutshell, the two big takeaways was you should always try to do some television when you're done because that'll keep your name and your brand out there with the consumer. And then two, you should do as much public speaking as you can. Because even though people know you in the sports world, you're going to be a novice in the business community. And I thought those two advisors were incredibly powerful. And I've carried through with that advice all the way through”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Half hours in a restaurant in Beverly Hills. And he basically walked me through his whole roadmap, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and kind of lessons learned in his career. And I've always admired magic the way he's gone about his business with his humility, with his networking, and with his ability to and execute institutional-type partnerships.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “A lot of it is like everything else. I just study it and I've made a bunch of mistakes. One of my superpowers, both gift and curse, has been to dare greatly. And I'll take great, great risk. As I've gotten older, I'm much more averse to that. And I think I'm more downside protection because I'm at a different stage of my life and accumulated a different type of net worth. But I've always been aggressive and I've played offense. Two athletes in particular that became friends and mentors, dramatic Johnson and Greg Norman. There were goats on the field, but then they became goats in the boardroom. And I studied them incredibly deep. And both of them are friends and both of them mentors. I think one of the dinners that kind of shifted my entire career was about 20 years ago when I was with the Rangers. I asked Magic Johnston for a 30-minute meeting and we met for three and a half.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Will be happy. I said, okay, great. I love that. Why would they be happy? He says, because essentially they should be making 60 million and paying you six. I go, right, that's perfect. So sure enough, I call and I get on the phone and say, I got a great idea I've been thinking Sunday night. I said, how about this? For the record, starting with Willie Mays at 660, all the way through Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds, if I hit each one of them, you pay me $6 million apiece. If I had none, you pay me none. If I had three, you pay me for three. They go, I love that. I'll call you back. So they went, they thought about it. They were in Tampa. And they called me back 30 minutes later and they said, we got a deal. And literally two weeks later, we had the press conference.”

   2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “So he literally goes quiet for like a minute and a half. I thought he died. I go, what happened? Mr. Buffin, are you there? He goes, No, no, I'm here. I'm just thinking, I'm thinking, okay, I got it. I got it. I got it. He goes, you go back and tell the Steinbrunner this, and they're going to love it. I said, okay, great. I'm writing. I'm literally like shaking my hands. I can't. I'm negotiating with the Yankees and Warren Buffett's helping me. And I'm just like some young kid from Miami who's not very experienced at this. So he says, okay, there's five big records out there, home run records, Willie Mays, and he goes one by one, Hank Karen, Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth. So if you hit all those five, Get a $6 million bonus in each one of them”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Was negotiating at the time with the late Hank Steinbrenner, Randy, and Hal Steinbrenner. It was my extension to come back because I had opted out. And we were basically stuck at a number. And we didn't know how to get past it. So I had a lifeline. I'm like, it's Sunday night, what did he do? Well, you called Warren Buffett if you're lucky enough to have him in your contact. And it was an incredible phone call. It was probably three and a half minutes. But the first say Mr. Buffett, he says, that was my dad I'm worried. So that's okay, Warren. We have a problem. And he goes, okay, shoot. Let me get a little notebook. And he writes it down. I said, what's the problem? I said, well, we're stuck at this number. The Yankees don't want to go any higher. We have a gap of about $30 million. What do we do?”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “So, I know from the first time I met him, I think it was 708, you had recently signed with the Yankees and he had told the story of how he was a little bit involved in that signing and would love to hear that story as well.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I went about half a dozen times to Omaha, and it was always the same thing. We spent two or three hours with me in his office. We would look at the portfolio. He would give me some great broad advice, and then we'd have a great dinner. And he always made me finish with a big Sunday. That was a running joke.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “So we had no problem the first five to seven years, but Tom Hicks was having a hard time with the last three years. I guess he put word out in the market. And Warren basically said, I'll take that piece of paper. I'll insure it. If you wire this much money by tomorrow at 11 o'clock in the morning, you've got a deal of Tom Hicks. And of course, I'm nervous because he doesn't insure it. Maybe there's a chance it still doesn't go through. So Warren makes the offer. Tom Hicks sends the investment. Warren insures my contract. And when I heard that story, I thought it was so cool. I cold called him Debbie, who's his longtime assistant. I thought I wasn't going to get a call back or anything. Sure enough, they emailed me back. But I emailed the same Warren, I understand we're partners. I would love to come see my partners. I want to tell you I'm working really hard and your investment is safe with me. That started a series of trips to Omaha from Miami where we”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Wild story was in 2001, I was the youngest free agent in the market. And so I was drafted one out of Westminster Christian in 93 as a 17-year-old teenager. And then at 24, I was a free agent. And part of the advantages out of coming out of high school and being in the major leagues at age 18 was that you hit you free agent market much sooner. So 24, just six years later, I was a free agent. There was a very healthy market. economy was doing well in sports and i got this really large contract 252 million over 10 years by tom hicks tom hicks is a private equity guy leveraged buyout out of texas and because the contract was so big but specifically because it was so long 10 years was something that the market hadn't really seen too much of the last three or four years was almost impossible to ensure because there wasn't a lot of”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Felt like the rents came every three or four days, and it was painful for me to watch. I wanted to like slow down time. And I remember as an 11, 12 year old boy going down to my knees and saying, you know, dear God, can you slow down time for my mom? And number two, if I ever get an opportunity to trade places with a landlord, I will. And sure enough, 10, 12 years later, I had my first opportunity to buy a duplex. I needed a $48,000 down payment. I needed a loan from the bank. I did both that led to selling it for double and then a fourplex, then an apex, and then I ended up growing that portfolio to over $10,000 apartment units in 14 states all over the southeast on belt.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Started with my mom. My mother had several jobs. She was a secretary in the morning and served tables at night. And I remember her bringing her tip money home. And as a 10 11 year old kid here, we're in Miami, my father had left when I was 10. I remember she would go into her master bedroom and I would help her get the mattress up. And she would take her envelope of cash and put it in there. And I asked her, I said, mom, why not just go to the bank? This bank and that bank just right down the street. And she goes, well, we don't trust banks. I trust my mattress. It was a telling moment for me. The other part was that I saw the rent coming. Very quickly, even though it was every 30 days for our rentals a week, we never bought anything, we would always be renters, and we kept moving every 18 months.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Investing started because I was fearful. I saw this 30 for 30 broke and other shows and read articles about athletes and entertainers running into some tough luck post their careers. And that scared the crap out of me. I just started looking at some data right as a teenager. And what I saw was the three things that just jumped off the page. One, baseball players played an average of five and a half years. You play 90% of your career from age 20 to 30 and you make 90% of your income from age 20 to 30 and less than 5% of baseball players at the professional level have a college degree. If you look at those three data points, I would short the stock of who is going to be long term wealthy. So because those data points and the possibilities of running into financial issues, I thought about investing in my early 20s.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “And again, if you go to my closets, I have a few suits and a bunch of white shirts. And I love baseball. So I'm a lot like my father in many ways. And that's why I first started having kind of this entrepreneur spirit of building teams and thinking about sports and business at an early age.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “145 now. I started thinking about it when I was probably 10. I call it my 2Bs baseball and business. That was my 10-year-old thought. My 45-year-old is the three B's. Baseball business and my babies that are no longer babies. They're teenage girls. They're 16 and 13. But that's kind of like the ethos of my world, those three. And I think just from a business perspective, I wanted it to be a lot like my father. He was a baseball player and a banker, like a mes lender. He was also an entrepreneur before people knew what that word meant. And we had our own shoe store in our apartment in Washington Heights in New York. I thought that was really cool. They called my father like the calculator because obviously there was no iPhones and he can like figure out all the numbers in his head. And in many ways, I'm not very good at English, but I'm pretty good at math. So I'm a lot like him. And then I remember watching him and he had all these suits and white shirts.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “We then turn to his investment activities in real estate, the slam corp spec, venture capital, and the Minnesota Timberwolves, and we closed discussing Alex's reflections on his year-long suspension from baseball in 2014 and the future of AROD Corp. Please enjoy this special conversation with Alex Rodriguez. Alex, thanks so much for joining me.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “My guest on today's show is Alex Rodriguez. Alex had a 25 year professional baseball career highlighted by appearing in 14 Major League Baseball All-Star Games, winning the 2009 World Series Championship as a member of my New York Yankees, and hitting 696 home runs, including more Grand Slams than any other player in history. He's also the chairman and CEO of AROD Corp, an investment holding company he started at age 20 in 1995 that today spans investments in real estate, venture capital, a spac, and recently announced the Minnesota Timberwolves Basketball Team. Our conversation covers Alex's early interest in business, lessons he learned from Warren Buffett, Magic Johnson, and Greg Norman, the strategy of ARD Corp, Time Management, Leadership, and Identification of Partners.”

    2021-06-07 · Capital Allocators · Alex Rodriguez – Business after Baseball (Capital Allocators, EP.198) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source