YouSaid · the spoken record

David Abrams

lines on the record: 68
first: 2023-03-23
most recent: 2023-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think it's that in the financial industry, it can be pretty intense. And to have a very strong emotional foundation is critical. And that emotional foundation, at least for me, has always been part of my family. So having a family that can support you is critical. I was fortunate. I got married young. I had children young. So that support system has just been my rock.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't ever let anyone out work you. I was an undersized, slow point guard in high school, and the hours that I used to work in the driveway trying to get better and obviously have lots of limitations, but it wasn't because I wasn't putting in all the work that I could. That's just what I've always been taught.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most challenging moment in my career, I think, coincided with the most challenging moment in my life was when I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017. I mean, the experience itself, you know, I'm fortunate, it's been five years and I have a clean bill of health, but it was the unknown of could I go back to the life I loved. I've never had a day where I woke up in any of the different jobs I've had that I didn't jump out of bed and really get excited about what I was doing. And I just worry that I'd never be able to do that again. I didn't worry about being sick for a long time. I just didn't know what was going to happen. And the fact that that's all behind me, all of these questions about raising money and building a new firm, they kind of seem pretty easy to solve versus what I went through.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was offered a job to go to Bear Stearns. Years and years later, Michael wound up moving to Westchester when I was living there. And I see him often throughout the New York world. And it just puts a smile on my face. I don't know where my career would have gone if I didn't start at Bear Stearns, but I did learn a lesson which I tell my kids about going to interviews.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To an event and get up in the morning and take the train to New York, which I did. Ultimately wanted Bear Stearns for a day of interviews. And let's just say my performance was not very good. I don't know what kind of hangarover I had, but it didn't work out too well. So I get back to Philly and the phone rings, and it's a guy named Michael Cass. We was a second year analyst. He was running the process to hire new analysts coming in, and he basically said words that I can't say. And I said to myself, oh boy, here I am second semester senior. This is my chance. What am I doing? He basically said, listen, why don't we try this again? Why don't you come back to New York? We'll basically redo the day and let's see if we can make it work. He gave me a second chance. I came back to New York. I must have done something right.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And decided not to ultimately went up at Apollo. But if I had gone back to work with Doug, it would have been an amazing experience. So he had a great impact because he really gave us the platform to build out what we did. And that was incredible time. The second one is really the first job I had out of college. So I'll give everyone a quick story. This might not come across in the right way, but I'm a senior in college. I'm interviewing for my first job. And back then you'd have your on-campus interviews. Then you'd go up to New York for interview if you were in the financial sector. So I had a friend who had been working at Bear Stearns in investment banking and I went through the process on campus and I was invited for the final round at Bear Stearns in New York. And it was a Friday morning and I'm a senior in college. And I decided that I was going to stay Thursday night in Philly and go.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially being in New York, people exaggerating how great their funds are and how great their returns are. You only hear about, oh, I did that deal or I did this one. There's a band of returns that are the top. And there are a lot of people who will say that they dramatically see those returns. And whether it's institutional fund or especially in your personal life, I'm like, really? Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? One of them, I think, has been on your show before. And I would say Doug Ostrover. Doug, that story I gave was the one that convinced me to go to DLJ way back when my first son was born and helped me along my path in many ways. And I do recall when Bennett Goodman and Doug Ostrover and Trip Smith set up GSO, I did have the chance to go work there when I was in Europe.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the flame. In the current environment that we're in, investments that solve a problem, and even more so, they solve a problem that people didn't realize was a problem. Trying to figure out how does a company solve a problem? And then is this entrepreneur, can that business evolve where they can realize their potential? What's your biggest investment?”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David, I can't let you go without asking a couple of closing questions. What is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? I only get one. You can have as many as you want. Okay. Because there's a family poll on this one. First of all, I love swimming. I don't know why or how, but when I'm swimming, it's kind of my way to decompress and just completely detach from the world. Ocean swimming, I could swim literally for hours. And having the sun on my back and swimming along, it's a great way to just think. No headphones, no music, just you in the water. Hopefully nothing scary in the water. I've been stung by a jellyfish a couple times. That's been the extent of it. So that's what I call my Zen place. And then the other side of it is I do like to travel around the world and see Bruce Springsteen concerts. That's my other passionate hobby. What type of investment do you gravitate to like a moth?”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With our differentiation. And then when you add on top of that the overall repricing in the market and the size of the opportunity and then really the dearth of capital, it's a very good time to have capital. Our challenge is not sourcing attractive deals. It's not having the chance to invest. It's really just having enough capital to execute. That's a solvable problem.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Challenging? I don't think anybody would expect me to say something different. You know, it's funny if we had been doing this two to three years ago, we would have grown exponentially by now. But we also would have had a portfolio of investments that had been made during a period of over-exuberance. So how would that work out long term? Were we better served investing in this environment, even if it's a little bit less capital than having invested in the environment the past couple years with more capital? I did learn a lot from my fundraising experience, which is it's about building trust and relationships. And there are some people that by definition won't invest in first-time funds or emerging managers. Is that fine? Yeah. On the other hand, I do believe that we are incredibly well positioned.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And would be worth a conversation to see if it kind of made sense for us in our investment profile. So he was very instrumental in helping us source that opportunity. So you've brought all your history and experience from all aspects of this business to a new fund that just happens to coincide with one of the toughest fundraising environments in a long time. How have you found the process of raising capital for velocity?”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of leveraging outside resources. How are you thinking about that in this business? We have a handful of advisors that are in different stages of having their agreements formalized with us. They range from former industry executives who ran media and digital entertainment businesses to individuals who work inside sports teams, to athletes because they help us on the sourcing side. As an example, we've worked very closely with John Kosner, one of Arnie's former partners at ESPN and John ran the kind of digital media business there. John is an early investor in video sites and called us up Q1 2022 and mentioned that he's been involved with this company. He thought that we could really help them.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And brand is there, we just have to prioritize it. Well, David, you've built a bunch of businesses before within organizations. And in this particular business in Velocity, what do you have in place and what are you building in place to make the velocity business work? We're in the process of continuing to build out the team. So I think the two areas that we prioritize first were having the infrastructure to help source and underwrite these deals given that we really are investing through a private equity lens. So we have two senior associates. And then when you have a fund, infrastructure on the administrative side is critical. You start with the early stages of your first fund as we grow our assets. We will certainly add more people. And a lot of the new businesses you started, there was this aspect.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stephen Flissler, who ran original content at Twitch, gives you a sense for the challenges that the business have before. So now you have a CEO who understands original content because it's really a content play. And the third area is historically just given the size of it for the game day events, whether it's the Winter Games in Aspen or Summer Games elsewhere, there were no game day revenues. So think of going to a baseball game where all the tickets are free and there's no hospitality and there's no parking revenues and there's no premium. That's a pretty easy thing to solve. And we just had the first event in the Winter Games a few weeks ago and Aspen and starting to find ways to create the right pricing system to drive game day events. So we look at it and say everything that we would want in a premium intellectual property.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though for all sports teams and media assets, sponsorship is a big revenue line. Now inside ESPN given the size of the X games, the prioritization was on much bigger intellectual property, the NFL, UFC, Major League Baseball, so not a dedicated sales team to monetize the IP through sponsorship. So having a dedicated sales team. And by the way, there was no dedicated management team either. So hiring a dedicated team.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I love the word corporate carve out and can put distress in front of it, but I only say distress because I think anybody would define a business that has declined that much as a distressed asset. I think there were three easy examples that I can give you as to why we're excited about the capital and the turnaround. The first one is just programming. The X-Games, which really focuses on a much younger demographic, is really created now for linear television where most of its demographic probably don't even own a television. It's really hard to reach them if they have no way of watching your content. So creating relationships with digital platforms to promote the content digitally and also internationally, there's no international deal for the X games. The second area is really what I'll call sponsorship.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was working at MSP Sports Capital. They had done a carve out of the McLaren F one racing team from McLaren Automotive and looked at other carve-out opportunities. And then at the time, ESPN slash Disney wasn't ready to sell the X games. The X Games was always kind of an asset that Arnie was hoping would get carved out of Disney. Great relationship with his former partners at MSP. And so while he was a sport radar, those conversations continued, COVID exacerbated the lack of prioritization by ESPN in the X games. The business deteriorated significantly from where it was. And ultimately, after a lot of stop and start negotiations and a long year-long Long discussion. It was carved out of Disney and the transaction closed in October and given Arnie's historical knowledge of it and relationship, we invested in it in velocity.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partner Arnie, I'll just give you a quickly how the XGames intersects with him. So he had been at UEFA selling the international rights to the Champions League for a while, got recruited to come to ESPN, moved to the US in 06, and started managing a portfolio of assets across their international and kind of digital brands. And one of them was the XGames. Even at the time, the XGames inside ESPN, which was pretty entrepreneurial when it first got acquired ultimately by Disney, it was not a very big asset, it was not a priority. And so it was underinvested in lack of real focus on revenue growth. It was just a brand that they had in their portfolio. And every few years, somebody else would come in and be given the X Games as part of a portfolio, so it never really had that consistency of growth. Ultimately, Arnie, when he...”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson that we're presenting to video sites because it is by far the leading technology in business in the space. And what we're focusing on is helping them hire the right person who recognizes it's not just the sale you make today. It's a long-term relationship with these large rights holders and brands.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we can clearly demonstrate the value add to the rights holder and or brand, we have a really good opportunity to convert them to a client. If we go back to chemotion for a second, one of the lessons I learned, and it was certainly a mistake that I made, was our go-to-market strategy was pricing our product at a premium level. And in the case of chemotion, we had by far the best technology and the best product, but we priced ourselves out of a lot of customers' reach. And that was a big mistake. One of those lessons we're applying now is let's make sure that we win the client business and then earn the return on their capital invested to grow the partnership. That's a really important.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem at this company was solving. And we know a lot of the other businesses that provide similar services for rights holders, but they do it in a very different way. They don't solve the problem that really exists. And then you speak to the rights holders who are trying to figure out the solution to the problem and the ones that don't know the company when their first response is never seen this. It's differentiated and it solves a problem for me that I've been looking to solve. That's kind of the fundamental diligence you start with. And then obviously it's the underwriting follows what you do in private equity, right? Trying to understand the customer base, what's the growth trajectory, what capital do we need, and then ultimately how do we position this for an exit?”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to go call someone who's going to give you a big report and say, here's everything about the company industry because some of these instances, they're just emerging. There's not a 20-year operating history in the industry or in the company. It really is the domain expertise and speaking to companies around the ecosystem, that makes sense. And I'll give you a perfect example in this company video sites where they are cutting edge business tracking content and measuring it and monetizing across social media. And so every rights holder in the world uses somebody to track the value of their medium impressions, whether doing it in linear, doing it on digital, people doing it on social. But Arnie and I have seen a problem of trying to measure the value of rights across the ever-growing creation of user generated content in social media. So we recognize right away that there was a big”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much the same process we would undergo if we were looking at a control investment because I only know one way to look at making an investment. And it's with that bottom up mentality where you're trying to figure out what can go wrong. How do we protect ourselves and how do we make sure that we're not making a big mistake here because that's just how I've been trained over time. We really try to look at these investments through the lens of our diligence process should lever all of our domain expertise and relationships. And we feel as if when we see a business, we can understand pretty quickly who their customers are, who are the operating companies in the space that might compete with them, and then who should we talk to to get our diligence done. In these opportunities, it's not as if.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the investors in businesses at earlier stages want us to be their next investor because we're bringing something more than just capital. And there are other people that we will also try and bring in because it's a very collaborative area, the growth stage space, because in control, highest bid wins and there's not that much collaboration. But we want to collaborate with other like-minded investors who also are strategic. It's the best way to win, right? It doesn't just have to be us. As we make investments and build our business, you would expect other opportunities to arise. So we just closed the deal that we led in a company called Video Sites in partnership with the NBA. NBA has new equity group. Have a great rapport with them now, and they are investing in businesses that we are.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our investors in venues who were investors in the fund. As you think about the overall industry with the capital that's flown in, with technology creating new businesses, great companies have been established. They're successful. They're on a growth trajectory. And now they're looking for more capital on a partner. And the best way to find those earlier stage companies is with relationships with the institutional investors who focus on the early inventor stages. And there's actually a fair amount of them across the entertainment and media sports ecosystem with a technology focus. This is no different than any other business I've been in. You define where the deals are going to come from and you go create the relationships with them so that you get good and early calls. Not going to get every call and you're going to miss deals.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sourcing is where everything starts. It's the key because not everyone's going to see every deal. Sometimes you see a deal too late where you really can't have an impact. And so a lot of starting a new firm is building a brand. The entrepreneurial requirements to sourcing are tremendous. I don't think as any industry where you're really just sitting in your office or in these days at home and expecting everything to fall into your lap. It just doesn't happen that way. We have made a concurred effort to be very proactive with sourcing. And it starts with all the different relationships you've built over the course of your life. You have to start there. And we have the partners I've mentioned are part of that and we have a lot of other strategic investors who own media companies and teams.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business in a way that it's attracted to the next buyer, it doesn't really make sense for us. It's great to invest in a company that grows and is really successful, but we want to understand what the exit is.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses are at these growth inflection points where they are leaders in their market. They've got this proven revenue and monetization model. And that we see that they can be a category leader. And sometimes they're the first one in that category. And then what makes them unique? Do they have this defensible moat, which some companies do, some companies don't. I guess my lens of trying to focus on all the things that can go wrong first, we like to think about how do we protect our capital. We always think about, well, what can we do as operating partners, right? As strategic partners to these companies, what can we do to help them grow on a path so that in a three, four year period, we see the viability of an exit. Because if we can't help a company construct their”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can get yourself caught up in a lot of things and kind of a little bit by process of elimination. We said, where do we really have a lot of expertise? Where do we believe that companies are going to want to pick us because we're domain experts? So that's how we focused on content, intellectual property like we've talked about, the businesses that support the institutionalization of these companies slash teams and leagues, sports betting, given Arnie's expertise at sport radar was a key theme for us. As I said, really needed to be focused and have a narrow mandate because one of the biggest challenges of running a fund is spending your time really wisely. And sometimes the best deals that you do are the ones that you don't do.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Role and for some strategic advice and domain expertise, that would be where we really wanted to focus. Starting up a business, we felt we would focus on mostly non-control investments to begin with, just from a size of team and a capital perspective. It seemed like it made more sense. And we decided definitively we were not going to be investing in sports teams. But some of the underlying foundational themes that people look at for sports teams cuts through everything that we do. The value of intellectual property, technology driving, innovation disruption, new companies being established, funded, being successful, and then needing a strategic partner to grow. So all these themes resonated with us. And then we really just said, all right, well, let's narrow down the industries we're focused.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to describe what you're doing to somebody in a way that they can understand. To say, oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we're also going to do that. That just doesn't work in today's world. Maybe if you're on your fund 11, you get discretion to do lots of different things. But I'd learn from my experience building a business and running it at Apollo that focus is probably the number one priority, especially when you're starting out. And so for me, that was it. Let's define what we're going to do. In order to define it, let's pick where we believe we are differentiated, where we can be successful. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean we should do it. And so we felt that businesses that are looking both for capital.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment firm, you have to start with your first thing. And what should we do? And there was a bunch of discussion about how do we take advantage of how we're different. And the cool thing to do would be to invest in sports teams. For people like sports, it's fun and a bunch of people are doing it. And I think there's a very interesting play to invest in sports teams. We talked about, well, where is our competitive advantage? What gets us up in the morning? What do we get excited about? And it was really helping companies build and ultimately create successful exits. That's just kind of the mentality from the different things that we've done in our careers. That was how Velocity Capital Management was launched towards the end of 2021. We established our fund and have been building the business since then.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for me. And given my relationship when Josh and David, I mean, we're friends, David is my lifelong friend and my fraternity brother, and Josh, I obviously have known for a very long time as well. We all lived in London together for various times. And so it was kind of a natural extension to try and figure out what the next thing was. I definitely recognized this broader industry that I had been spending time on. There was a really interesting opportunity here. So what's the best way to take advantage of it? And my co-founding partner, Arnie Rees and I, we started talking about, well, what would that look like? He had just helped take sport radar public in 2021, and he needed to transition all of his gaming licenses, which if anyone's been through a regulatory process with gaming license, it takes a bit of time. So we were trying to figure out, well, when you have”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shot. So we had this investment platform that I was overseeing that was looking across a handful of verticals, everything from early stage through venture. And then we had a handful of growth stage investments that we were spending a lot of time helping grow and a handful of live entertainment real estate investments. And we were using internal capital, raising third-party capital. And the business was growing. We made over 25 investments in a couple of years. And then COVID hit. It became a little challenging for everyone who owned intellectual property that relied on live events to generate revenues. Capital allocation became a little bit challenging internally. And without dedicated capital for the investment verticals and themes that we were trying to pursue, it didn't really fit.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close with, and Josh had gotten together with David Blitzer and formed Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, HBSC, and it was effectively a holding company that owned a handful of assets, some of which I had been invested in. We had the 76ers, New Jersey Devils, Prudential Center. There was an esports team there. There was Crystal Palace Football Club. And the world was in a very big growth phase, especially across this ecosystem. The thesis was we've got this fantastic operating platform that sees a tremendous amount of deal flow. But how do we harness all that? I had a lot of really good experience and comfort with harnessing resources across an organization to both source and provide solutions to make investments. And we just decided to give it a”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was the spring of 2018 and my youngest was graduating from high school in London and after almost 15 years there, it was just time to get back to the US with all my kids here. And I wasn't exactly sure what the next path would be, but I knew that I had developed this knowledge base across entertainment and media and sports and through key motion specifically, a lot of understanding about how technology and the innovation was driving disruption and how could you capitalize on that. And it was still a little bit early and other people kind of realizing this. And so I thought a great way to approach it would be to work with people that I've known for a long time and had already invested with in the space. So obviously through my time in Apollo and at Penn, Josh Harris is someone I'm”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is always the same, running a distress business of Credit Suisse and then at Apollo and then being an owner operator in these businesses, it provides for us a lens that I feel pretty comfortable looking through right now.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes you can say, Well, I've been running a hedge fund for my entire life, or I've been doing this for my entire life. That's fine. You develop a great set of skills. You keep doing it over and over again. I feel that I've developed a unique set of skills from all the different things that I've done, but they are very complementary in many ways. The institutionalization of what I'll call assets that intersect with intellectual property and then that have changed with technology these industries didn't exist eight to ten years ago. These companies, industries weren't big enough to really warrant anyone's attention. That's changed over the past eight to ten years and even accelerated dramatically in the past three to five. It doesn't really matter what the underlying asset is, the fundamental analysis and way of thinking about it.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pencil sharpening that you think of as a distressed investor buying NPLs, the sourcing, the negotiating, seems quite different from working on a tech startup effectively in key motion and then a very different kind of asset in these sports teams. Where did you have to develop either different mental frameworks or skill sets making those transitions?”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The grassroots building of the youth academy, how that can feed players for the team. And so that was where I spent my time trying to help as we thought through that and build out our academy and change trajectory of the business. But that was the same mentality of this is a process, right? It's not going to happen overnight. We've got to hire the right people. We have to plan for it and put it in place. And sometimes that's hard. It takes time. It takes money. saw that in chemotion took a long time and a lot of money. We ultimately sold the Yankees AAA team at the end of 2021 and Crystal Palace, we still own.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the same premises I had flowed through, which was we need to follow best practices, organization information was always key. And sometimes the smaller companies don't have that. That was part of it. Hiring, attracting, retaining quality people. We always had that across our investment businesses. So you need to recalibrate the types of people you need to hire for these businesses. And sometimes I had to learn what skill set they needed to have for their specific role because there was different roles than a principal investment business. When I was part of a group that bought Crystal Palace football club in the UK, I had this experience because my son went through the UK Academy football system. He plays professionally now in the US. And so I really understood the importance of”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The lifelong dream for me. I spent a lot of time commuting from London to Scranton Wilkes Bury. It's not an easy way to get there, especially when you throw Brussels in the middle of that. But it was an incredible earning experience about how to build and manage a professional sports franchise, but also focusing on ways to commercialize the business. That was really the big focus for me and all the companies that touch a professional sports team on the sports performance side, on the ticketing side, sponsorship, media rights. We had radio deals, local TV partnerships. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed every minute of it.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over a period of time, we made some acquisitions, we brought in some outside capital. It was an incredible earning experience and we had a very successful exit in 2021 to the largest publicly traded sports data technology company called Sport Radar. But that really got me excited about there is an investable industry developing around professional sports and the value of kind of intellectual property. So that was a really hands-on experience. And then in 2014, I was sitting around with one of my closest friends talking about sports actually watching the World Cup in London in the summer. And the idea came up about some Minor League baseball teams in the US. And one of them was the Yankees AAA team in Scranton Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. And the group of us wound up buying the Yankees AAA team and kind of fulfilled.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then for some reason they had a fiat and they would load this stuff in a fiat. And from Brussels, they would drive across Europe and they would install this stuff in gyms. I was just amazed by it because they actually produced something versus a lot of the stuff I'd done which didn't produce anything. So after a bunch of diligence, I got together some of my friends from the US who had been involved in owning basketball teams and worked across youth sports and we thought we could really help this company commercialize their product in a lot of ways. So I led an investment group and we bought the business end of 2014, early 2015. And I set out to become the chairman and wound up running the company and was its biggest investor. And if my wife listens to this, she was very concerned the amount of personal investment we made in the company because I was really committed to it.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basketball leagues, and they were trying to expand the commercialization of it. And I said, Well, you know, I could certainly help you in a bunch of different ways. I'd love to learn more about it. So I went a couple times to meet the university and meet the individual engineers who started the company. And when I went, there's a scene in, I forgot which Steve Jobs movie it is, but he's assembling computers in his garage. And he's got a welder and he's got all this inventory. And I think his parents are like, you got to get out of here. And that was the scene at this company called Kemotion. And they would assemble this equipment. And basically it was an automated cameraman. So think of sticking a camera in a gym and it would film the content on the court autonomously. So it got rid of the use for human intervention. So they had these big bulky cameras that they were putting together.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a very organic process. I think there were three moments that just happened that I never really anticipated. So when you live abroad, at least my kids roll into the American school in London and they play in various sports tournaments with other schools across Europe. And my oldest son was playing in a basketball tournament in Brussels in 2014. And after the game, his coach was sitting with an individual who had an iPad. The iPad had all the clips from the game, all the shots he made, all the shots he missed, and a whole bunch of others statistics. And I was kind of struck by it because first I was like, wow, that's really good for him to understand. And then after talking to the individual, I asked some questions about the company. And it was the company where it had been founded at this engineering school outside Brussels. And they were trying to commercialize it. And they had sold the product to some of the French basketball leagues and the Belgian.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to be my fun deploying capital. It could be across the firm deploying capital. And that led to a lot of times of us being able to carve out incredibly attractive opportunities. So the ability to always present a holistic solution to a problem has been a theme that I have kind of taken with me as I move forward and really used today because you never really want to compete on price, trying to figure out a way where you can buy it at a lower price because you're providing some other value or solution to a seller is how you make better returns.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really understand what the true value of the collateral was. So that was kind of a big example. And we had an effort that started focusing on financial institutions, which other firms did, but we were talking to financial institutions about their problems. And we developed a strategy that we like to say, we're from Apollo, we're here to help. Meaning when you're talking to a bank in Spain or a bank in Ireland and they have an array of problems in their balance sheet, we were presenting holistic solutions. If you have this business you want to sell it, we have a private equity group. If you're looking for financing, we have a credit group for some of your companies you want to get refinanced. We had built a life settlements business buying insurance policies. And then we had my business, which was buying a whole different range of loans and operating companies. So we presented these holistic solutions. So it didn't necessarily.”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your great question. At that point, most of the big firms didn't really have giant infrastructure in Europe. Apollo had bought a company called Countrywide, which in the UK was the biggest effectively broker for residential housing transactions. When the financial crisis hit specifically, we bought a lot of assets from Bear Stearns, which had this giant residential mortgage business in the UK called Rooftop. So we realized that While we're buying these distressed assets secured by residential real estate, we also owned the company that was the biggest brokerage firm in the UK residential real estate market, and they could help us understand the underlying value of the real estate. Nobody else could compete with us. And we became the dominant owner of distress residential mortgages in the UK by leveraging countrywide expertise to make sure we”
2023-03-23 · Capital Allocators · David Abrams – Sports Ecosystem Investing at Velocity (Capital Allocators, EP. 303) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source