alright we are back with another episode of passion of profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay this is a conversation i've been looking forward to for a while there was a chance encounter at the national got to talking with today's guests we kept in touch afterwards and during the conversations i i said hey i think this will probably be a pretty good episode for passion of profession so we're here we're gonna do it today i'm joined by sam gordon sam is the vp of programming and head of youtube at overtime overtime is just an incredible brand in the sports media space so we're gonna talk about kinda entering on the ground floor and how that has impacted kinda his collecting and then overall like there's pretty cool things that sam has done with tops in overtime and a lot of that stuff you probably already know but you haven't heard the story and the behind the scenes stuff so we'll get into that but without further ado sam welcome how are you man i'm good brad i'm very excited to be on the show because i listen to it every week so when you email me saying hey do you wanna come on i was like yeah let let let let let's do it so yeah i'm i'm excited and i'm i'm happy to be here awesome and maybe we don't like touch on all of the details but like you we were just talking before we hit record you were recently in asia and you attended a card show and we were talking about just how unique of an experience that was maybe touch on that and just maybe some of the observations and things you saw while while in in asia at a card show yeah sure so i mean i think like you know a lot of us we don't really see card collecting anywhere outside the us just because like you know who who travels i i mean you know i know there's the the toronto show and there's the london show but for the most part i think people are traveling you know nationally to to go to things whether it's like chicago or new york and this is my first time ever going to a card show overseas and like i just couldn't believe how many insane cards there were like the jornados the the the the griffey cards like the there's just i don't think we realized the scope of of the hobby sometimes and how it literally is the the the same way like you and me are like on ebay all day looking at cards like there's literally people across the world in shanghai doing the same thing every day so it kind of just like put things in perspective for for me and like you know as much as things were different over there a lot in in in the hobby a lot of things were were were the same where it was like you know you walk in there's there's all these booths set up people are negotiating like it's it it it really is like a worldwide phenomenon i love that yeah i totally agree sometimes we just look at things through our small tiny lens of instagram and say like this is the hobby but you probably don't realize it and how big it is until you attend a show in china and i know we're gonna talk about your background and get into your professional background and we'll talk cards but i thought maybe a good place to open up because i know you're a big collector and i wanted to make sure we had some space for this but maybe to kinda kick it off i'd love to know like based on your collecting all the years you've been at because i understand you've been collecting for a very very long time and there's some family ties there but maybe like what is your favorite card currently in your pc and why so my my favorite card is probably my nineteen ninety nine michael jordan final floor auto and there's a few reason i like it like one i i know i feel like when i was growing up like everyone wanted autographs like it was like the two thousand one bomochrome albert pujols auto it was like the the the each year of ultimate auto like for me growing up like the autograph was the big card and i think things kind of changed over time with with with prism where it's like actually some people are shifting to now just wanting the the card without the autograph but like to me i've always really appreciated autographs because the athlete had a moment with their card and i and i and like to me that's kind of something cool especially when it's michael jordan who's you you you know like the we could argue whether or not he's the goat but he's the biggest basketball player in collecting and and will be so i love the idea that he had a moment with the card and like the autograph is just perfect and and blue i i i could i mean i i don't have it with me i could show you a picture of it or i could send it to you afterward but it's just like a perfect autograph and then it has a piece of the floor from the from the from the finals game like to me like it it's really a piece of of history and it's it's a nineties pack pulled card so to me it just kind of checked all the boxes but that's the card itself there's also a crazy story behind it which i think will actually connect to some of the stuff we're talking about later but you know and i'll talk more about it later but you we did have a deal with tops and one day tops came in and we we we had a meeting and they left some boxes just for us to like have around the office and one of the boxes i just kind of kept on my desk and six months later i'm in the office one day i'm like you know what i'm bored i'm gonna rip this i think it was a it was a topps merlin soccer box i don't collect soccer but i was like you know what i'm just gonna rip it first pack messi one zero one superfractor auto that i got for free from from topps so the first thing i did was i asked our ceo i was like hey like is this my card like it was through the business deal but he he's like yeah i think it's yours it was on your desk so i have this card again it's not really what i collect so i was like okay what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna sell it and then i'm gonna use like the money to get a jorn autograph which i i had none at the time so i sold the card for twelve thousand dollars i used this i used all twelve thousand dollars and i bought this jordan final floor guard and that was in twenty twenty two the obviously you know both cards have gone up a lot since then but that's my favorite card in my collection and i got it from a from a a topbox that was sitting on my desk for for six months so i also just like like the story behind it and yeah i i i just love that card that's an incredible story yeah i'm just thinking about the values of those two cards individually now in comparison to twenty twenty two and i'll just say i think you you've probably done alright and you probably would have done alright if you kept the card or did what you you did so that's that's incredible yeah yeah and i think the the messi just sold like in the actually it sold twice in the last like four months i think for like fifty six thousand forty four thousand so i mean it was all over the place but yeah i mean in retrospect i probably should have just kept that and and shelled out the twelve k for the for the jordan auto but anyways yeah i'm happy i i don't regret it and and i love that card that's awesome so i wanna dig into maybe your background before overtime i know i've learned that you you studied econ kind of a finance guy played college basketball interest in nba kind of writing about it did you ever like how did you think about those all those different interests and worlds and those things fitting altogether in kind of your professional existence yeah so i think like when i was in college i the way i kinda looked at things was i was gonna work on wall street for a few years and then maybe use what i learned on wall street to to go like work at at like the nba or something like that because you know like in in college i was on i was on like on our investment team so we we had real money that we were investing in stocks and i was studying economics so and all my path my my path was definitely leading toward toward towards something like that and i kind of thought that i would eventually use like the finance skills in in a more sports type setting and then what what actually happened i i never expected but that that was kind of where i saw it going was like start in finance and then try to use that to like go work for a league so when you were kinda on this path work on wall street you played college ball obviously interested in sports and media maybe talk a little bit about just like opportunities and having an opportunity on this maybe traditional path and then this opportunity with a brand like overtime popping up and you making a decision on hey maybe i shouldn't take this traditional path or conventional path maybe i should go jump into this new thing that's maybe a little more exciting and aligns better with my current interest yeah sure so i mean i think you know especially when you're in college like you're thinking i think a lot of the way people think when they're in that setting is like oh i'd i wanna know i wanna have some certainty right like you know you're spending four years in college and then you want a lot of people especially in the financial world world they want like a clear path where it's like okay i'm gonna start as an analyst then i'll work my way up and up and up and then i'll eventually become a managing director like there's a very clear path and i think it's like it's comforting to to some people and of course you know who doesn't like the idea of a steady job that can grow as long as you do a good job so like for me i was i was kind of on that path like i did the internship all that stuff and then my friend so i had a friend from when we were little we went to school together long story short i acted bad in the school my parents pulled me out and maybe did this when we were really little and and then i changed schools and i and i didn't i hadn't really seen him for a while and then we we we we reconnected years later playing basketball he had a job on wall street he quit to to join wme at you know william morris endeavor which at the endeavor and overtime kind of started within the a that the agency there so he he was doing that i ended up getting a job at the company he had worked for on wall street so i had had this internship there meanwhile he left to go start this this other thing and then basic long story short i stayed a fifth year to play basketball so i actually turned down the job offer and then i turned it down so so so i i turned down the job offer i went back to play basketball for another year they offered me the job again and i accepted it so it's in it's like in the middle of the summer end of the summer i'm supposed to start this job on wall street in in like two weeks and zach who's the cofounder of of overtime he calls me this was in twenty seventeen he's like yo you know this this company that we started like we just had someone leave and i think you should consider quitting the job on wall street and just coming to work for overtime and i was like okay like what what's going on he's like well we basically have a few more months left left of money but he's like but he's like i think we're gonna raise some more money and i think that that that'll give us kind of the the the runway to operate for for a while longer and he's like i think we're like there's something bubbling up here and and i think you should consider quitting this other job and i was like zach i'm interested but i feel bad like i i already quit i already turned down the job last summer to do my fifth year of basketball and now it's supposed to start in two weeks and you want me to to quit again like i feel bad doing this and he told me something that i that i never forgot and i and i still truly believe which is that he's like he's like you don't owe them anything like you're an intern there and you spent a summer there and sure you accept their job he's like the moment that your job stops adding to their bottom line they would cut you and i i remember like thinking that i was like wow you're you're a hundred percent right like i'm i'm supposed to do this job because i feel bad when it's some huge financial company like life's too short where you just gotta do what's best for you so that really resonated with me and i was like you know what you're right i accepted the job i called my manager i said i can't do it i got this other job opportunity at overtime i was the twelfth employee we ended up raising money from a bunch of investors including kevin durant and that was twenty seventeen and now we have you know two fifty three hundred employees wow that's such great feedback and advice and what a sales effort to get you into the fold and so you know media businesses are volatile and there's ups and downs and you know there's a i've got a small one over here and you know feel those ebbs and flows all the all the time and twenty seventeen you know you get this call and you have to make this big decision and you know the the it's a it's a it's a kinda a hope right like we're running out of money but we hope to get more but you that you you obviously had enough conviction to to jump over and and make it happen maybe like talk a little bit about twenty seventeen and what overtime looked like and maybe like what you were responsible out of the gates to coming in and doing and contributing i think overtime has really evolved into one of these brands that i think many consumers maybe take it for granted very recognized but like constantly pushing out amazing content through all of our social feeds being a pattern interrupt being something that we we we stop and we watch based on what you over time is curating but like maybe take us all the way through kind of the beginning in the ground floor of the company at employee number twelve sure yeah and i and i also you kinda touched on it a little bit but i do wanna mention too part of the reason i that i wanted to do it and i think you'll you'll this will resonate with you to you i mean a a a difference agree because you started the company but like i was also offered equity in in in overtime and for me having stake in what i was working toward every day was important like because then you feel part like again i know most people don't have equity in their company you still feel like you're building towards something but for me it helped to know that like i was building i was helping build something that i would also that i also had ownership in which i i'm sure resonates even a a crazier degree with you but that but that that did affect my decision but yeah when we started like all we knew so one thing that our our former ceo told me was like a lot of times people if you're looking at a company and you're you're thinking about do i wanna join the company do i want to invest in the company one good question which i and i always remember this question was what does your company know that other companies don't know like which is basically what's the competitive advantage but it's like what's the secret that you know that no one else is taking advantage of and i always and i always think of that whenever i'm looking at a company or looking at whatever and our secret at the time was that there were these high school athletes who were more popular than nba players right and to film them was free but to film an nba game you needed billions of dollars in media rights so that was our first secret and our second secret was that people actually didn't care if the footage looked good to watch it so what i mean by that is the way we grew was we we first of all we would literally post ads on facebook being like you wanna get paid to to watch basketball email us here so we'd have these people emailing us from wherever lamelo ball was and then zion williamson who was in like spartanburg south carolina we'd have people emailing us from south carolina we'd pay them a few bucks they would go film zion williamson's games and they'd be texting us the clips in real time over over over text and we'd be posting them like two seconds after they happen on on the overtime we have this is when we had a hundred thousand followers right meanwhile our competitors balls life and slam they were filming on these big cameras they wouldn't have the clips out for two or three hours later after they got home and offloaded the footage what we realized was people actually wanted to see something that could have been filmed by them or their friend so we were just posting stuff crazy fast and then sure enough sportscenter started saying hey can we put can we post this can we put this on top ten all that stuff so suddenly we started gaining all these followers and it was just because we were posting things so fast like almost in real time so that was our big competitive advantage and a lot of us building the company in the beginning was like literally like staying up late posting these games in in real time posting these clips in real time i remember lamelo ball was playing in new zealand for a while and me and tom who who who who just just left overtime after after ten years but we would take turns waking up at three am to work with the the nbl because they would be sending us the clips in real time so we would take turns getting up at two am three am one am to because that's when the games were so our thing was like first of all we're just gonna outwork everyone and and get the things out as fast as possible but then the secret was that there were these high school players that were more popular than nba players and we could basically film them for free i think what is so standard in business whatever business is the copycat method where you have a smaller company that looks at a bigger company and sees what they're doing and just tries to replicate it at a smaller scale and it just never works out a lot of money spent reps and sets but then i think what typically resonates and allows companies to scale is when someone thinks of a non traditional bat path and it sounds like you all did that at overtime kinda uncovering some secret sauce of like well you know we can just pay people who are at these games and post these in real time like how important do you think that thinking outside the box has been to the growth of overtime and then also just like comment on speed because like i think speed is one of those differentiators across business whatever wherever you're working that is so important but it sounds like speed was such a focus for you all being the first like having access to that content and getting it out there so maybe share a little bit of a perspective on just like this nonconventional thinking and just how important speed was throughout this entire process yeah i mean we're always we've had like a policy since i started overtime that if someone else posted something before us then we're not gonna post it like our our our thought process is unless we win unless we win on something that we're not even gonna like be like be there like we we we just wanna be fastest and and here's the thing what we learned was that like our clip was probably not gonna be the best but if you post it first then people are still getting the energy and everything you need from it so yes like our whole thing is is one how how how can we do things differently because if we're doing things the same we're just not gonna do it like it's almost unacceptable for us and i think it's kinda cool like if you look at now twenty seventeen versus now so many people have like basically copied our the way they look on instagram like we we made the thing where you're posting like a a iphone clip with like the like you know text with a with a color background like that was us and now everyone does it and so it's it's cool it's cool to see people you know copying what we did but yeah like we we just don't wanna be conventional and you know i'm sure we'll get it into it later but like that's why we launched high school sports leagues that's why we were the first people to ever pay us high school athletes a salary for and then then they you know didn't go to college so i mean brett you know like media changes so fast that like you need to keep iterating and and and trying new things so our our just whole policy and you know i really work a lot on youtube our whole policy is like we actually need to try a million things and then you find the one thing that sticks and just keep doing it yep i love that yeah the my mantra is always done is better than perfect because experimentation and testing teaches you so much i wanna go back to kind of this decision you made right like you've it sounds like you all cracked the code on an idea that led to strong performance and growth for the brand was there a specific moment that happened during the early days of your time at overtime where you realized that okay like this was a good idea from a long term financial perspective and from a happiness perspective that i'm not working on wall street but i'm building this company with people who are as passionate about it as me like do you remember a specific moment where you finally felt comfort that like this was the best decision for you yeah and also just on the decision i wanna mention one thing because i think it could be helpful for other people a lot of people ask me like oh did did you join over like people assume that i joined overtime because i wanted to work in sports that's actually not at all i joined overtime because when i talked to i mean i knew i knew my friend already but when i talked to the other people at the company i was like wait a minute i would actually build any company with these with these people because they're so smart so like i think i would have joined this company no matter what it was because i love the the other people that were working there and i trusted them and i was like wait i can actually work with these people and come into the office every day and be happy so i think a lot of people are going to things like i wanna work in in this like industry or or or whatever which might be true for you but if you work somewhere and you don't like the people that you work with it's not gonna matter versus if you go somewhere where you like the people you could probably work through anything that that that's what i've that's what i've found yeah and then in terms of like the moment i think there was like a i would say there's two the first was like when when espn and and again like now we're we're big also but at the time we had like a hundred thousand followers and i remember when espn started posting our zion williamson dunks on sportscenter top ten and you would wake up in the morning and like there'd be an overtime watermark clip as the number one clip on sportscenter and you'd be like holy shit like we we just paid a kid fifteen dollars to go film the game and now we got this clip that has five million views on instagram as the number one clip on sportscenter like there's like there's some there's there's juice here and then i think the second moment was when we did our first kind of like in person event which we called the takeover and basically it was like an all star game for for high school players and we built out a core in brooklyn and we invited all the top high school players in the country and this was in twenty i wanna say twenty nineteen and like the amount of people that came and the amount of juice it had online where we went from doing some we went from being an all online company to wait we can actually get people to come some to something and watch like that was a big revelation right because i think a lot of a lot of like media entities are just like an instagram account or a tiktok account right and like they have five million followers and like they're big but then if they did something where you had to show up no one would come and like for us to see that there was people coming and that the athletes wanted to come and that there was like this this kind of this this like building up and everyone wanted to be part of the overtime experience i think that was the second moment where we're like okay that we're onto something here and we need to scale this do you think in person activation and experiences are critical in order for any media company to jump from that perception of just being an instagram account that shares clips to becoming a legitimate business that has where there's opportunities are endless like how important is that in person to overtime it's it's super important it's become even more important as we've launched our sports leagues like you know we have a o we have ot we have a ot seven we have overtime select like we we're basically trying to fill for for ot we're trying to fill an arena forty nights a year which is which is hard and like we don't have that many you know we're probably like two thousand seats but like getting people to show up for something is is very hard it it just is but when you can do it that unlocks a lot of other stuff especially from like a sponsorship perspective right because now it's like okay now our in arena signage is is worth more now there's like in person like there's there's like booths that people can can set up there's like signage all all around the arena that you know people are gonna walk in and see so it does unlock a lot of revenue opportunities but ultimately i just think it's like the ultimate test of whether like how big your fans are and one thing people like another thing is at the beginning if you have ten people show up to something like i think that's pretty good like if you can get anyone that likes your brand enough to come and say something to you and like wanna hang out like that's super valuable and then you gotta find those people and like build around them so like brett for you like i i i saw you recording i think at the car ladder booth right and i was like oh my god like i i i listened to brett stacking slabs like i wanted to go up and and speak to you so i think that you know just to to me like that means like like you've built something strong enough where people wanna come in and interact with you and then obviously you know when you meet people they become even more in invested in what you're doing and similar to that another like secret which i think some people you know do more now but just in terms of interacting with a brand we try to respond to as many comments and as many dms as possible because for us it takes literally like one second and for some twelve year old across the country who loves overtime yeah for them to get a response back from overtime it it makes their day or makes their week and for us it takes one second so like we're like wait a minute there's a there's actually a huge like mismatch of the amount of time and the roi on something like that i hate using roi with like a with a with a something like this but like it just makes people really happy and it takes us one second so we try to do tons of things like that where you you get that you're actually experiencing the brand in a different way than just looking at a post well i think you know roi should always be top of mind obviously there's tremendous roi when you're paying somebody fifteen bucks to go shoot zion games that it ends up on sportscenter but yeah i love the the things that maybe don't scale track and i don't know man i think a lot about just like conversations i have with brands and i know it's not the right conversation right away when a brand is wanting to talk to me about vanity metrics that i might produce for them and i'm just like this stuff like really doesn't matter and you're probably not a good fit because of the discovery we're having now but like taking the time to respond to someone's comments because you know the impact that that can have on that individual is like it's that's that's not something you put in like a a board meeting deck or you it's really you can't measure like your business growth from stuff like that but that's just like good brand equity that you're building with your audience so like when you're like you all are making these decisions on these unconventional ways or maybe there are conventional but most companies are choosing not to participate in them like how do you come to those decisions like this is something that we think will have a positive impact on what we're doing down the road a a lot of it and we've talked about it a lot of it is testing like we we really try to just do as many different like weird things as possible and whatever works keep doing it and we we got such a positive response when we started well so here's the funny thing the reason we first started responding to comments was people would ask us to roast them and we had this guy josh who would just ruthlessly roast our our our audience and they loved it so people would just be commenting on the overtime roast me roast me roast me i hate going and just like obliterating these these poor people on instagram but they but they loved it and then we're like wait a minute like this is becoming a thing where people are coming to comment because they wanna get a a a comment back and then you realize okay the roasting thing maybe is not so great long term because now we're working with all these big brands they go see that we just like said something really mean to a ten year old without understanding that that's what that that's what the they actually wanted but yeah so then like the way to do it i guess more sustainably was like okay now we're can we just be respond to as many people as possible and be nice but then the that's kind of how we do everything like we we test so many different content formats every month and we like we'll give it a few shots and if it doesn't work then we're like okay we tried it on to the next one and then but like probably six months ago we tried this one format that actually worked where basically if we found a new story that that we wanted to cover instead of us reporting it we would just find a random person in the street and say hey do you wanna report this news story and they say yes and then we give them a a huge oversized suit suit and a microphone and they read off a teleprompter for the first time and like those videos were blowing up so like okay one out of the last ten tests worked but that's all you really need you just need one out of ten one out of twenty to work and then you have something that you're gonna have for for who knows how long so that's kind of what our our process is like as long as it's not gonna offend anyone let's try it and see what happens like we've also had huge failures like i wouldn't say this is a huge failure but one time i was just curious and so i took a i took a ten second clip of a dunk and i slowed it down so that it was three hours and i posted it on our youtube channel and i said the longest recorded dunk of all time it got a hundred thousand views now the audience didn't love it but it was like a weird test that we wanted to run because youtube pushes longer videos so yeah that's kind of we we just wanna try as many things as possible because if if you're not doing new stuff like immediate just moves so fast that you just you you're gonna someone else is already thinking of the next thing and like you you gotta keep up i love that also just the power of curiosity in business and how important it is i think that can't be understated based on just what you said i wanna maybe like get tactical a little bit on like the video front the fact that like there is so much content over the years that have has come your way and you've clipped up and you know you've distributed and you've seen a lot of moments and you've seen a lot of performance metrics like what what makes a good clip from your perspective and one that's going to get attention gonna get the comments gonna get picked up by other outlets as opposed to like something that you publish in i don't wouldn't say like it goes off like a fart in church because like over time's brands big enough where anything probably gets visibility but like has leg has legs to perform for a while yeah so that that's a really good question i think people actually i think people's instincts would be wrong about what works for us so what doesn't work for us especially anymore is good highlights like it it it just there are so many good highlights now right like everyone's so athletic everyone can do the crazy dunk like a good highlight just doesn't really work anymore now it did work with zion williamson and mac mcclung but those were two generational type high school athletes at the time when high school basketball was just starting to get covered so everything was kind of converging at the right time and their highlights crushed but honestly like since then there hasn't been any high school athletes that like people wanted to see any everything they do so since then what we realized is a lot of times the stuff that that goes crazy is actually on the sideline or like out of bounds it's like the weird little things that that people think are funny so i'll give you a couple examples our our biggest ote clip ever was a guy like goes up gets blocked and then he falls out of bounds and another player cashes it and then instead of going on the fast break the player that blocked the shot passes it to the guy who was on the ground out of bounds and he cashes it and they call out of bounds so it was like it's like this is like kind of disrespectful play but it actually wasn't a highlight it was a it was a low light and what made it was that he passed the guy to the ball you know they passed him while he was out of bounds and it was this like disrespectful thing and you get a billion comments being like oh he blew the fast break or like oh you just disrespected him so like that clip went absolutely absolutely crazy but then i think the other thing that people don't always think about and and you're you're probably gonna be more sensitive to it than other people is like the audio needs to be really good and and by really good i don't mean like necessarily crisp but like it needs to go along perfectly so one of our other most famous like kind of big viral things from ote was one year rob dillingham came and played who's out in the nba and he like he had this one game where he went off for thirty seven points or something like that and like it was on like crossovers step backs but the audio was so amazing it was just the announcers going absolutely nuts and by the way we don't hire normal announcers like we for ot we've used like streamers and youtubers right because that's where where our games are going so we hire people that are that that are already like native to that platform so we have these like really famous streamers just absolutely going bonkers while he's like hitting these shots and i think that's what made that clip it wasn't it wasn't the highlights it was like that you have these people that you recognize just going absolutely crazy behind the scenes and and and you hear all that so really now we we we we we of course post the highlights but it's the it's the little things off the court and like the audio that i think really makes something pop the bringing in streamers is such a awesome idea and i just think of like that's unconventional it's built in distribution you're not having to just rely on the algorithm and your built in audience but then it's extending out through the people that are covering it because they all have audiences like how important has it been for you just in the video space to understand like where the attention is and like finding the right fit where that attention attention is that aligns with the overtime brand and making it happen like how important has just like that unconventional thinking been to just the overall growth on the video side yeah i mean it's i i think it's almost all of it like we we we basically have our head like i i i focus on youtube and streaming i'm watching like i'm looking at youtube and watching youtube all day like i i i seriously am like i'm when when i breaks between meetings when when i need to brainstorm something i'm just going on youtube and and seeing what other people are doing and especially brett you you you talked about how like smaller people which i'm sometimes try to copy bigger people what we actually try to do is sometimes we'll try to find a a small creator that's doing something different and then we're like wait a minute how can we do that mhmm right because if a small creator is doing something that that's popping off then you're like wait a minute this thing is actually just did well not because of the size of the person but because the the concept's really good and how can we how can we do that so we actually try to go the other way we we we wanna see what smaller creators are doing so we could jump the trend so i think that's one way of doing you know kind of having unconventional thing is just like seeing what what other people are doing but but yeah i mean i i think everything online is like seeing what someone else is doing and then putting putting your spin on it so i try to find unconventional ideas on on on youtube and then try to have us kind of recreate it so like for instance you know we did i saw someone did like of their own version of love island on youtube and we were like wait a minute we should do love island with our ot players because like that's a way for you to see the athletes in a in a situation that you wouldn't necessarily see and they're gonna have fun and also you're just optimizing for youtube as opposed to just like most leagues will just post the highlights of the league on their page we actually operate our youtube pages like we're a youtuber so we use the the athletes as the talent and try to just do good youtube ideas that start with a good u headline and and thumbnail so yeah a lot of the unconventional thinking we do is one of course we wanna come up with them a lot ourself but we also look at what everyone else is doing and and then try to say okay how can we apply that to what we're doing smart you touched on this earlier talking about advertising and placement in person in arenas but i think we must talk about like the decision making from like curating and covering other sports leagues to building and starting one of your own because i think this will get into the card conversation but let's talk about just like this crazy idea and how you made it happen and the team and how it all took shape and then obviously some names of that have participated that the audience will recognize sure yeah so it it did kinda start with that one event i i mentioned that we where where we got people to show up in person because then we're like okay wait we actually know that there's something here where we can get people to watch but the the general idea of ot was okay we're working with the these athletes we know what they want but when we're filming them we're kind of like building up other we're we're building up the leagues they're playing in we're building up like the the their schools like how can we actually as we film these athletes and do youtube videos and then like how do we actually have it kind of aggregate to something that that that we're part of and then the other piece was we just from working with the athletes we got so much feedback about how like the current school system wasn't optimized for everyone right like when when we started ot i think it was like eighty percent of the top one hundred prospects had transferred schools at least once and like the nutrition wasn't good and they'd like a a lot of the feedback we got was like we don't have access to the gym at night it's like wait a minute you're a five star prospect for twentieth ranked in the country and you can't get in the you can't get shots up at nine pm like we saw we just heard all these holes in the current high school system so between that and like the media piece we're like wait a minute we're probably the right person to to try and build this so we raised we're like okay we're gonna go for it so we raised a bunch of money in six months we built our arena in atlanta which is like super state of the art we have two full length nba practice courts we have a show court that's broadcast tv level games we have an nba level weight room everything and like not only does all that stuff state of the art like a lot of nba teams use the facilities when they're in atlanta they they ask us to come practice there so we built that for the players and then we've basically been building out our our league since then and the idea is that we wanna get all the top high school players in the country to to to be playing in our league and then with all them there we're we have the best games the best content and we really just put out a a an insanely good product with insanely good players and then you know the players we've had the most famous are probably amen and asar thompson who are the fourth and fifth picks in the draft but we've also had alex saar who's the number two pick in the draft rob dillingham number eight pick in the draft don barlow was at ot and then he was undrafted and now he he and he started for the sixers a lot of the the year last year so that was a really cool story for us and then this year malik thomas who he was the second round pick of the cavs but he had he like led summer league in scoring he he he he's from ot but then outside of those guys like cam boosers play in the arena dylan harper's play in the arena like everyone's been in the arena and and experienced it so yeah like i i you know we have the best high school basketball league in the world and we're we're we're continually building it up how do you think about just like the impact from a brand perspective that like providing a league for the thompson twins and that being kind of their path is like there's that and then you've got dylan harper coming in and putting up shots at the gym like like what sort of brand impact does that have for overtime because i would imagine that helps extend far beyond their time in the brand bubble of overtime for for sure that that that that that's a really good question so it's funny you mentioned that since we launched ot ot is like has almost become its own thing separate from overtime like first i don't not everyone actually knows overtime owns ot which i think which i think is interesting but but then conversely just an interesting small note people will sometimes call overtime ot like like in the overtime like instagram comments they'd be like ot respond to me like they're almost like o ot isn't has in some way like become not not replaced but like people view that as the as the whole company which i which i just think is interesting i don't i don't know if i like it or don't like it but i've just noticed that it seems like people have a lot of people have come into the overtime ecosystem through ot which has been interesting and then yeah in terms of so the the thompson twins thing is interesting obviously for us it's a it's a major success story i would say like the honest answer is it there's still a lot of people that call us a tiktok league mhmm despite how many players we have go to the nba and despite the actual data where of all the d one players we have and all the players that have gone to the nba i think we kinda thought okay as soon as these guys go in the nba and they're really good that it's gonna be like okay ot is like the best pipeline for for nba i still think for those that don't really know about us that they there's still like oh that like the thompson's would have made the nba wherever they went which is probably true but like they play an ot for two years and they came and were productive as rookies so i don't think we did them a i i certainly don't think we did them a disservice and they they only speak positive about their their experience with us so i would say like yes it it helps and like it's proven that if you come to ot like you could definitely make the nba but it it didn't like completely flip the you know how people viewed us as much as we thought it would that's interesting you i think made mention i i can't remember if this was in our conversations we've had or just in stuff i researched but that when ote was announced that you saw an opportunity in collectibles and and in trading cards obviously like we've set this up and we've understood you have a passion and a background in collecting cards yourself but like what was your mindset in terms of like what the opportunity was and then like how did you actually make it a reality yeah so i i think i always had in the back of my mind that like we had something because our whole thing was we're trying to get the best nba players before they go to the nba so in my mind the opportunity was always like a bowman first right and again like i i i think i'm curious what you think but to me when i was growing up like the bowman chrome rookie auto was the ultimate the ultimate card for any player like it was pools it was trout it was like clayton kershaw i remember i i had the clayton kershaw i think it was two was it two thousand four bowman chrome extractor auto i must have sold it for like who knows how much not not much like like getting the bowman chrome first the the bowman chrome rookie auto of the player was like the big thing at least in baseball so to me that like this was like the equivalent of that this was like their pre kind of like pre professional card and by the way it was also these are fully licensed like they're not in nba jerseys but the cards are fully licensed with our branding so that's kinda how i viewed it and how i was like trying to position it to people but topps apparently saw the opportunity too because because they actually reached out to us if i remember correctly so topps saw the opportunity as soon as we announced and you know we had all these top prospects coming in and i think especially at the time like topps didn't have the nba license so they were like oh this is a good opportunity to get to get guys that are gonna be in the nba before they go to the nba so topps reached out to us and we started discussing with them and then you know just doing our due diligence we we also spoke to panini we spoke to upper deck i think i spoke to leaf i i spoke to you know like park parkside cards i think it's called like we we spoke to everyone just to kind of get everyone's opinion and topps gave us this like they they gave us a strongest offer but i to me they also believed in it the most like i think upper deck was like yeah like we we we like it we probably include you include the biggest players in like in our in in in another set goodwin's champions or something yeah yeah right exactly so like they'd be a part of the set but like tops like we're we wanna give ot its own product and for me that was like insane right like i get to work on sports cards of of a lead that we just built so yeah so to tops came in you know strong and like i i guess it might be interesting for for for the audience but like the way that the deal worked for us was you you you you get a percent of the the the net like profits the the the net the net profits of of this of of all the product and then there's like a minimum guarantee so you know so you know you'll make at least something and then we also did like a marketing deal with them where we we made content around tops products so like there was like kind of the media deal plus plus plus plus the the the the sports car deal and yeah we kinda hit the ground running and and we made first year i think we did maybe inception and tops chrome and then the second year we did a bunch we did like tops chrome we did tops chrome sapphire we did inception we i think we did the finest like we're making a we we did a lot of products but yeah it was it was an amazing experience topps i gotta say like topps was was great to work with like top to bottom really enjoyed the experience they they they they they care about everything and they worked with us to to make it happen so even though we don't work with them anymore i just wanted to you know say like to topps was was great to work with i want you to get in the weeds a little bit because one of the things i remember most about us chatting is the fact that and i think this is unique and people don't get to hear this often but like you are a collector who is responsible for working with a manufacturer for putting this set together and like you had like deal breakers in terms of i remember you talking about autographs but like having a collector zero in on like putting a set together maybe talk about like the mindset you had and like what were like nonnegotiable terms for you in order to get those cards to market yeah so for me like the first thing was no sticker autographs like i just i i just hate sticker autographs personally and i was like we cannot do sticker autographs also didn't wanna do redemptions and then another thing was when which was important to us and i i probably doesn't really matter but i remember being important to us was like we we kinda wanted the bios on the back of the cards to be in in like in overtime's voice so we work with tops and we like we like work with them to write all those so it was more like the overtime y voice versus like the sports card voice so i remember those were those were a few things that that that were important to us and we we executed it the first year and i think the second year but i i i told you like man like it's so easy to criticize the the the production companies and then you get in the mix with these things and you're like to get the product down time like sometimes you just you literally have to do a redemption like i remember there was one player that was just giving us so much so many problems and was like overseas and we're like if if we're gonna hit this deadline to get the cards out like there's just no way his autograph's gonna be in there so we had to do a redemption and then i remember the same thing happened where i think it was year two or three like we we there was just no way around not doing stickers if we were gonna get the product out in in a reasonable time and you're you're kinda like damn like i i didn't want to get to this place but then you're in the weeds with with how the things work and how you need you need all the designs and all the and all the bios written so far before their the the cards are printed and like there's there's like it's not like okay they're done like we can print them tomorrow like the car the machines are printing tons of cards and like there's like an order of what sets are gonna get printed like it it just i i i just don't think people understand like it's not easy putting these sets together and getting them made and like sometimes you there's no other way to do it besides besides doing like stickers or or or redemption so we we did get it done that first year when we had less product but once you started getting more product it it just it it did get they they get harder and harder i wanna go back to like this comment you had upfront of like viewing bowman first and just the desirability of those cards especially in baseball and thinking about it with ote chrome cards obviously like through this discussion our discussions and anyone who's monitored ote the thompsons are the most like probably not only popular but collectible athletes that have ever come through and so like i don't know like i'm sure you have collected the cards you probably own the cards but like you probably also like continue to evaluate performance of those cards like do you think like since those are like the first cards of the thompsons and they were part of a highly recognizable brand do you think like there is still an opportunity for those cards to be collected at a price that is maybe a lot more advantageous to what it might be down the road when like all the dust settles and all of our collect collecting minds have a chance to like really evaluate the landscape yeah so so i i do i have a lot of the cards i like my favorite two that i have are so i have the amen i i as part of me actually prefers the second year cards because that's when they're wearing their the the jerseys that we made that were actually had brands attached to them so we we like made the city reapers and the kolor so we we had like these like real brands with like cool jerseys so the second the first year they're wearing kind of ote jersey the second year they're wearing their branded jerseys so i have my favorite two cars i have are i have the men red auto out of five top scrum with in their red jersey and i and i have the matching asr red auto top five i can actually show you show you them quickly so those are my favorite and yeah to your point like i i don't don't know if you could kind of see them there oh yeah but they're really nice on card autographs tops chrome red refractors out of five and i think i i think the first year cards too they're like really nice tops chrome on card autographs and and the the they're like cheap like i think you get the assar and amend based ones for like maybe ten to twenty dollars and they're really nice cards so yeah to your point like i think that they're really undervalued especially for like just looking at the quality of the card like they're tops chrome and and oh and by the way we made it a point to put the rookie logo on the first year cards smart so the first year the the those first year of cards like they're on card top scrum cards with the rookie logo and they're not very expensive so like to me and again like we're not selling these cards anymore like i i don't really care if people buy them or don't buy them but i think they're really nice and not expensive and especially you know today's rising today today's period of prices where everything is insanely expensive like i think they're really high quality cards that are that don't break the bank and yeah like whether or not they'll eventually be viewed as these bowman first like i i i really have no idea but i i just think if you make a quality card like it has a good chance of standing up over time yeah no doubt oh man we we've covered a lot of ground talking about your unconventional career path decision making building a highly recognizable brand building leagues building card sets there's been a lot of ground covered like when you look back on this run and what you've done and what you've accomplished so far like are you satisfied or are you the type of guy that's kinda always looking towards the next i i look back on everything with i would say appreciation like i i i think it's easy to take things for granted when you're when you're in it but i really try to step back and be like wow actually the this is the only job i've ever had and and for these nine years i've been able to work with my friends in sports i've gotten to work on sports cars i've gotten to meet so many athletes i've gotten to travel to china and israel and greece for for work like obviously it's been a grind like it's basically been seven days a week for the last nine years but i i try to just be appreciative of it and be like no matter what happens like i've always had that and i and i just think i'm lucky like i i i just don't think they've the work experience i've had is had by a lot of people where you get to work with your friends and and do something that that you're happy about so i i really just try to to to appreciate it but i also you know i i like a new i always like you know taking on new challenges at work and things like that so i yeah i'm always like looking to like keep expanding my mind but i'm always i always try to stay grounded and just like don't take for granted what what's happened and how i got to meet people like you and be on podcast like this and work in sports cards and go to card shows like i i i just i try to like take a breath and be like wow i'm lucky this has been an amazing conversation i want to give you a chance because there's so many things that you're working on and what's something that the listeners can tap into something you're working on like that you know the audience here might be interested in yeah so our ot season is about to is gonna pick up in in late october i honestly think it's the best competition we've ever had we have like three of the top five players in the country including beckham black who's the number one player in the country we have the faze team returning which is coached by jermaine o'neil they have a bunch of five stars so i just for people that like basketball and wanna see a good product we we we stream the games on youtube we stream the games on twitch and so if you wanna see the future of of basketball i think it's a really good way good way to do that and you can get ahead of prospecting if if if that's your thing so yeah i i would encourage people to just check out ot just because i i think what the content we put out around the league is kind of unmatched to any other league like we really try to get you behind the scenes and then the encore stuff is gonna be re really high quality this year so yeah i would just have everyone check that out and we also just wrapped up our our women's league i that that that one just finished up but again we had every five star player playing in our in our women's league overtime select so it's just kinda cool that you have to see the future of the biggest leagues before they they really blow up great closing pitch sam this was awesome looking forward to doing this again down the road really appreciate it man thanks for having me on brett and one last thing i wanna say like last few months i've i've it's it's been a up and down few months for me because like i broke my hand i couldn't play basketball so i definitely you know like it was just an up and down period in my life because of that just getting taken out of your rhythm and i listened to the podcast multiple times every week and it was always been like a i think a source of like comfort so i just wanna say i appreciate that and you know being on the podcast it it it means a lot to me thanks a lot man