alright we are back with a new episode here of passion of profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay i love meeting new people i love learning about their careers i always try to dig in and understand all the stops along the way and then ultimately ask question why did you end up in a company supporting the hobby and we're gonna do that and this is one of my favorite kinda career arcs that we've explored here and today i'm joined by evan parker who is the ceo at onnit athlete we're gonna talk about his career the hobby and everything in between but without further ado evan welcome how are you i'm doing great brett thanks for having me so you have had a lot of stops you have worked in kind of pr sports media content community sports entertainment and the hobby most specifically i'm curious and we're gonna we're gonna dig into kind of all of those stops but before we talk about the the companies you worked for i i'm i'm interested to maybe learn from you kinda when you look back at all the places along the way what do you think connects each of those chapters that you've had from a career experience perspective i can't say it was like strategy from day one that it would all kinda go in in the way that it went i know it doesn't always look linear when you look at almost anybody's resume but certainly certainly mine but everything that i've done has been a content community around passion plays it's always it's always been sports so when i was you know agency side it was xbox and and and and you know bringing the xbox three sixty to life and everything that's community its content its partnerships but but on a in in a place that people have immense amount of passion than nascar and the athletic it's always been these communities and trying to to figure out ways rather than just focusing on on the business of each of these individually it's like how do we get the community involved how do we make people fall in love with this thing where the people who are already in love with this thing make them love it even more so i love the content and community intersection and i think about content a lot and i think about community a lot why do you think especially now in this industry we're in in the sports card industry why do you think content is so critical like at this very moment in this space that you spend your time in when i started you know so my first job out of school was working on on xbox for for an agency and it was two thousand five and at the time i mean you know the internet obviously existed but it was there were message boards but a lot of what we were doing was putting xbox and our games into magazines that would publish you know months later after we had worked on them or or you know newspaper articles and things like that it was such a different world and and i felt like you had to tell this perfect story and then hope that it was reciprocated by whoever was going to be the one that was going to distribute it out there and it was gonna take forever and you just had to hope that it really nailed and and it's just not that way anymore you know now basically anybody who has a phone can be a content creator anybody who has the inclination to post about what they think or the things that they love or to connect with other people there's nothing that should ever stop you from being able to do it you got internet you got a phone that those are the only two things that you need and and you're a content creator or you can be and so i i think it's caused brands to have to think about about content very differently it's not about trying to pitch an article for the new york times in the same way that it used to be you can't just go dark and and then pop out and and talk about things whenever you want because people are gonna be talking about you one way or the other and and so you know i think that the way that the the world has shifted with from a global standpoint it's just making people have this power that that they're all able to have a voice and when you're in a brand seat you kinda have to think alright well then how are we gonna make sure that not we're not just talking to the media here we're talking to everybody because at the end of the day those are the the voices that will be heard the most often i think about just nascar and you were kind of the head of content at nascar which is a pretty fun role and i just think about nascar from a fan and experience perspective rabid fan base passionate fan base you know conversations online people going to tracks everyone wearing merchandise and i think about just like where this industry is going in sports cards obviously more fan engagement kinda intersection of athlete and collectibles maybe when you were back in that seat at nascar like what are what are the some of the things that you picked up on and you learned because i see a lot of similarities with just like the the product of nascar and the fans and then kind of the space we're in right now with sports cards and the passion people have for collectibles you know the passion is very similar and there's all there's also another similar connection point that i haven't thought of a lot but but your question sort of brings it to mind when i was at nascar my job was to try to find new fans for the sport we had hardcore fans that were gonna love the sport no matter what you did and then my role was not to interact with them as much like you know we created content for them but i had to figure out ways especially in the early days when i was doing entertainment marketing like you know talladega nights type of things how do you get people who are not nascar fans to even realize that the sport exists go out out out for their first race or something like that and it was always this push and pull between the traditionalist those who had been fans of sport forever who love the sport for what they thought it was about and then these new people that didn't really care about what the traditionalist loved about the sport they liked it for different reasons maybe for them it was crashes maybe for them it was a cool way to spend the weekend and so you know i think about about the sports car industry now you've kind of got this you go to the national you walk around you see these tables of people who've been there for generations that maybe aren't on social media certainly don't care about breaking are not as interested in in you know quick flips and making money and repacks and then you got this whole pavilion which is breaking and repacks and all this other stuff and it kinda feels like where i was back in you know twenty eleven or twenty twelve with nascar with these two not warring factions of fans but two had that had very different motivations and i and i see that a lot from from a collectible standpoint where you've gotta build an industry that can work for the the pc collector who is out there buying stuff from you know their favorite player team and and has been doing this forever and then somebody who maybe doesn't care who they pull they care about the value of what they're pulling and they're gonna flip it quickly and it it's more of like a you know a shot in the arm of adrenaline or an ability to make money and how those two things can coincide it's just an interesting time in in this industry and then it does certainly remind me of my early days in the nascar side what did you see with those two kinda ecosystems of fans net new fans that you were trying to attract and your existing base of fans and maybe even layer in like the fact that you know nascar the the athletes are very visible and undeniably like you can use those athletes to nurture those existing fans by doing certain things and you can use them by attracting certain fans and i just think about the industry where we're at right now and what you described it's like we have a base of people and that base is stronger than ever but there's this desire to continually gain more and right now just online it's like interactions we have it's like sometimes we're talking with someone who's been doing this for a while and sometimes it's someone who's been doing this for you know three to six months so i i'm curious just at nascar like the that intersection of old and new fans like what are some of the things you observed and and saw during during those moments i think we overcorrected you know so the the sport was at its height in the late nineties early two thousands probably at its height you know around when dale earnhardt senior passed away and there was this this desire that put nascar on a much bigger map because everybody saw what happened at the five hundred daytona five hundred in two thousand one everybody if you if you had a tv you were aware of of what happened and i think it gave nascar some exposure that it it hadn't gotten you know before that and that the sports inclination was to say hey we've got these new people who are interested let's do everything we can to keep them around and then as time went on and certainly when i was there it was how do we you know country music is the stereotype for nascar let's go book a pre race concert and we'll make it rap let's go get a celebrity there and before it would have been somebody from you know traditional nascar fan no let's go get an athlete or an entertainer who appeals to to a different audience so we don't know that we don't already have and i think we had to spend a lot of time thinking about how we were gonna introduce the sport to you know i i i live in la and like how how do we make it relevant in la maybe that was never the right question right maybe the the the question was how do we make sure that everywhere that people care about nascar are only gonna continue to care about more tell their sons and daughters that they should watch it spread you know the the love of the sport kind of where we're strong versus turning our backs you could argue turning our backs to the traditional nascar hotspots and and focusing way more on let's make sure we're doing something cool in times square or in la on tv that kind of thing i do worry about it sometimes in our industry about how you know because the pendulum always swings and if the idea is well this is where the new money is coming in all these new faces people are really hot on on what we're doing collectibles let's just do everything we can to get more and more people interested in our area and we're we're you know like a a rap show at a nascar race maybe that that's you know repacks or or or breaks or something like that in collectibles you just have to make sure it's sustainable and i think what we saw on the nascar side is that we went too far away from our from the core from the the traditional fan to the point where we pissed a lot of them off and many of them walked away and and maybe never came back and then a lot of the new people we brought were like hey that was really cool i'm glad that i did that i'm going back to my life i'm going back on the things that i already loved and i and i you know i think about that a lot with the collectibles world how do we make sure that we're bringing as many new eyeballs in as possible how do we make sure that everybody who is interacting with cards for the first time or going to a card show or an lcs for the first time walks away and says that was not only something i'm really glad that i did for that one moment but now i'm in it i'm gonna be around for a long time and i hope that that the way this industry is going that when we look back in ten years we see this moment and say okay we did it right all these people are still here the industry is more vibrant than it ever was versus saying ah man we really put a lot of our eggs in this basket fleeting because now they're on to the next thing i think just as a guy who's built your career on the back of content and community and just the parallels with nascar and what's happening now in sports car the sports car space it's very very interesting i guess this thought that just triggered in my head is just how what role does content play like in the sports card industry now in terms of helping make sure that we're not forgetting about the base i mean there's content for entertainment we can just you know scroll on tiktok or instagram and see those creators who are creating that entertainment type content but then there's content to inform that usually comes in conversations like this or more long form content maybe how how do you think about just like this industry we're in right now and just like the ecosystem and just the maturity of collector across the board and just how content fits into all of it you know there are a lot of creators in this space you know i i think whatever you're interested in you can find somebody who's creating content about about basically that topic especially in in the card space i just think that if you are a soccer collector if you're a vintage baseball person if you whatever the thing is there's there's likely somebody doing a really good job who knows more than you know who maybe has more access than you have who's kinda talking about that on a daily basis that but you have to find them the way that the social media platforms work it's so driven by the algorithm and a lot of times the content that served up to you is not necessarily the content that you're looking for that you'd enjoy the most but it's it's you know whatever is getting the most the most engagement on the platform for whatever reason and so you know i think that that's always going to be a challenge of finding the right stuff for for who you are i think about collectively everybody in some regards is or can be a collector maybe not sports cars maybe not tcg or whatever but everybody you know has things in their life that they have sentimental connection to or they think was really cool they have a couple of and so you know it's really just about finding the one that that speaks to you and finding the person that can kind of pull out and say hey like brett you're into this i'm into this too let's go along for this ride and i spent a lot of time looking for content creators you know based on what i'm doing with on and athlete now and mantle which is you know our our our social platform for collectors how do you find people who are are talking about things in unique and interesting ways who are experts in topics making sure that i'm seeing as much of the stuff that's out there as possible what ends up a a lot of times getting the most eyeballs are you know the the people who are loud and and you know who are you know more than the kind of look at me look at me but what i found really interesting about this space is there aren't that many macro influencers i would say sort of politely like there aren't that many people who have really large followings and and if you look at other industries if you were looking you know whatever you'd compare us to if it was you know the food industry or the movie industry or or books or whatever it is you see people who have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers that just doesn't really exist yet in sports cards which to me says there's a long way to go we have so much time to continue to grow this where people are actually talking to the masses most of the people that we look at when we look when we watch content are are are relatively niche and they're talking to a very specific audience i i don't think that cards have gone as mainstream as they can go which depending on what camp you're in is is either amazing or like oh no that's you know like we're already big enough but i feel like that this industry is still incredibly small and a lot of of the the things that we see we're all seeing because we're all in it mhmm on social if you're on twitter if you're on instagram like we all are aware of that person or what they said said or what the controversy was but if you ask somebody who's one degree of separation away from it they've got no idea who that person is what they're talking about any of that we we really haven't broken through in the way i think that this industry is poised to it's such an interesting observation and i think about just the content in this space and a lot of the time for me the inspiration isn't necessarily with someone who is doing something sports card content related although i consume just about everything because i love it it's more on the outside like for instance like looking at the ringer and how they've built their network or looking at the athletic i'm a subscriber you work there that editorial style that is very buttoned up professional it is after i get done consuming the articles from the different writers for the specific sports or teams that i love i feel like i'm informed and i feel like in this space having information and feeling that i am learning is something that interests me as a very very curious person i'm curious just in your role i mean you had a pretty big role as vp and general manager at the athletic i think a lot of people listening right now subscribe to the athletic sports media space is a hundred times the landscape and growth and trajectory of what we have in the hobby but maybe like share some observations from your seat in that role and just like things that you saw things that you have you learned during that time that maybe influence kind of the way you operate in the sports card industry i my time at the athletic was among my my my favorite in my career it was just such a fun ride i joined in twenty nineteen so the company was relatively established but still very young and and it was still early on and operated like a start up i mean we it was chaos and this was pre pandemic and when the when the pandemic hit everything obviously changed we didn't have sports for a number of months that we had to figure out how how to just keep the business afloat but i you know i was taken by having come from nascar which is you know made this sport came came to be in nineteen forty eight family owned and operated it was sort of old school and big boardrooms and and and and lots of meetings and stuff like that and then you go to the athletic and we were making decisions every single day and we would screw them up and the next day we'd make a different decision you screwed up and by the end of the week you you you'd like to think that you got to the right answer and and the speed to do things to try things to test i i thought was was pretty remarkable and i've taken a lot from it and and and brought it to mantle and and and you know trying to bring it into to what i'm doing now and on it but that that experimentation and in the internet age nothing's really forever you can if you're building an app you can try a a feature and if people aren't interested in it then you can scrap the feature and move on now i'm producing physical trading cards we don't have exactly that opportunity right like we're you know we're we're we're out there right now with our football cards you know getting them all printed and cut and if if they don't look good and people don't like them once they release well we we we lost that entire set like it it's over with but certainly on on the startup side you can move really fast and from just having that opportunity i think i i've learned that in some ways speed can be your only advantage and i think with the athletic that was ours we can just move so much faster than the traditional media companies and the new york times who ended up buying the athletic then every you know espn and everybody else we were just able to move faster and and and make bigger decisions quick and and i think that's a big part of the reason why we were able to grow as as much as we did i wanna get your feedback on the athletic and the scale scaling it i think a lot about content in the sports card industry from the perspective of like people create sports card content and so what does that mean it's usually very very general it's about maybe record high sale or hobby drama or new card up for auction and it's just very broad but what i am interested in is like two levels deeper than that where it's like a category a era a player and i look at the athletic and it seems to me that athletic got my attention because they were able to bring in writers in my local market here in indianapolis and it was better than what i was reading on the the star it was like the the coverage was better it was the stories were better and so that is what got my attention and got me hooked into being a paid customer forever so i see like the way i see our industry going in sports cards is more niche down more specific resonated with fewer but higher quality maybe like with with that in mind talk about just like the scaling and building connection at the athletic and if there were there are any parallels between kinda maybe where the sports car industry is headed and kind of what you were doing kinda growing the athletic i certainly tried to find the parallels it's been tough to to look at the media landscape in the hobby and think about it in the same terms as a sports media platform like the athletic i mean that's the way the athletic did it we would go into a market that we knew had a lot of fans had multiple teams and we'd go out and hire the best so if we're gonna go cover the colts you needed to have zach kiefer like that was no matter what if you're gonna do it you have to have somebody at that level and you find the zach kiefer in every single city that there is for every team that we're covering and it's easier said than done some cities it just wasn't possible to get somebody maybe there wasn't anybody in the market or that person who was in the market was so entrenched on wherever you know wherever they have been working and weren't willing to leave and then you have these local markets that we would convince you alright you like the pacers you like the colts you're gonna now subscribe because we're gonna be the best for that but then you get this bundle where you're not just paying for that it's not like we're gonna block you from seeing what's happening in chicago or seattle or or or or you know miami you're gonna get all of that stuff but you're here for this one or for this one writer or for this one team and we would look at the data every day the article that that person wrote how many new subscribers came in because of that article so you could you could track that how many of those subscribers continue to read that person or go out and read other things in the bundle and you know like if we are looking at every single beat which beats are making us money which are a loss leader that we have to have which don't make sense for us to con continue to to to to cover in the same way and and we'd have to look at that constantly and make business decisions based on it i think it's really hard in the collectible space because everybody kinda collects in their own way and cares about certain things and not others and it there's not as much of like that bundled ability so i think what really works is somebody coming up with a newsletter or a podcast that's incredibly niche but to then grow it and make it something like the athletic you need to have all of these people who like these niches also be interested in somebody else's niche enough that they're willing to either subscribe to something or read something broader you know i think i noticed today you know i'm close with some of the guys at at collect and will stern shot me their new website launch today the website doesn't mention media almost anywhere on it when collect launched will was a writer darren rovell you know is is is a writer and and it was about sort of their media side of things and now it's much more about their business advisory side of the business and i thought that was really interesting it's just so hard to create content in our space that enough people are gonna care about that you can actually monetize to the degree that you need to to make a business work that if darren rovell who is you know has the biggest i would say the biggest audience out of anybody who's like in the hobby on a daily basis standpoint he's obviously created content for espn and cnbc in these you know massive organizations if he's if he struggled to figure out how to make that a business it's really hard to crack the code in in what we're doing and i think that that's why a lot of these creators are able to do it because they're talking to the audience about this one topic and they don't have to worry about talking about every other thing under the sun you know this is the thing i love and i'm gonna talk to the thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people who love this as well and it's it's just going to be i think a lot more niche that said the athletic is covering collectibles now they have the benefit of being able to write about whatever they want because they've got millions of subscribers and if this article about you know wembley doesn't hit the football fan because the football fan is not interested in wembley it's okay because tomorrow they can write about the football audience and that person's gonna be interested in it they've got that benefit of already having scale but i think in our space it's really really difficult to take if you were gonna launch a a a media company today in collectibles you couldn't say alright we're gonna launch the athletic and we're gonna have a writer just about pokemon and a writer about naruto and a writer about baseball cards and soccer cards and vintage and rating like you just couldn't survive that way at least not if you were really trying to make it into a massive business very keen observations and a lot of that resonates with me and i will also say i miss zach keefer covering the colts because he was the ultimate i still say his series on luck the podcast series is like one of my is the content of all time it's so good and that was the one of the i think it was the first like real narrative podcast we did and the only way you could have done that is if if if andrew luck actually trusted somebody and was willing to to talk to them in that level after he sort of completely disappeared yeah somebody like zach it's the it's the benefit of being at the new york times in the athletic where you could say okay zach is incredible he should not be we we can't just have this guy only cover this one team that could be good or could be bad right you have a bad year for the colts and nobody's reading zach kiefer it's such a shame so what's happening all across the country and you just plug him into the biggest and best stuff and that's where the bundle i thought was really powerful but also where it fell apart for a lot of the local reader who said i don't care about all this other stuff i can go to espn and find out what's happening with the patriots or anywhere else like i i am a colts person all i want is is to read about the colts if you had steven holder and zack kiefer in the beginning like those two of the best doing just that one thing you know fans were the the colts fans were spoiled but it it then you have a you know anthony richardson gets injured and the team stinks for a few years or whatever happens and nobody's reading it anymore and you're like alright we got we got some of the best journalists in the country and they're sort of writing for nobody we've gotta figure this out i thought that's how it worked but it it's really nice to get the the validation for that's how it worked steve you know athletic obviously huge brand name everyone knows and like you've moved your career into this industry you know with mantle and i just would love to get some perspective on how this all came to be like how did you get into the sports card and collectible space especially in the in a startup working on mantle how did this all come to be so i i've been at the athletic for four years three of them as a startup and then one year after the the new york times acquired us and it was an incredible ride and an incredible job and as i was sitting around after almost a year of of working for the times i started to get this itch you know the new york times moves similar to nascar it you know nascar moves fast on the track slow everywhere else and and and the new york times felt similar that we would have a conversation and then you know about something we wanted to go do and then okay let's think about it let's talk about it tomorrow let's talk about it next week let's get a plan together let's review the plan let's take the plan up the chain let's let's debate the plan let's see if we have another plan and then eventually you do the whatever the thing is and six months after the idea comes up you're working on this thing whereas when the athletic was a start up if you had an idea you'd go to the founders and say i got this idea and they'd say okay go do it and then later that day i screwed it up it didn't work okay well you know how about try it this way the next day the next day the next day and then eventually you get it and i felt like at the new york times an experience that i love and people i i really respect we were just moving slower than i wanted to move after three years of sprinting the whole time it was like i'm not ready to slow down and so i started thinking about what i could do next and at the same time i was put in touch with alexis ohanian and brent montgomery alexis founded reddit and and runs a venture from seven seven six and brent was the the guy who came up with pawn stars and created that show and then built a a huge empire in the in the content space and created the golden auctions tv show that's on you know it was on netflix for for three seasons and so those two guys had this idea they've been talking about about doing something together and something in the hobby and and when i was put in touch with them it sort of just okay let's let's go do this they want to do something in this space but don't have the time or the ability to run it themselves because they're running massive businesses on their own right and i'm thinking about trying to find my next thing and i wanna do something that's gonna force me to move fast and so where do you move faster than a a start up that has no employees no business plan nothing and you just gotta come up with it from the start as a as like you know a solo entrepreneur at the time so i i i i jumped in and i'm somebody who i've collected my entire life it's sort of core to me i people talk about like you know you got the collecting gene nobody else in my family does so i don't feel like it's a it's certainly it's not genetic in in in my world but it's certain it's innate in me and so to have a chance to after this whole career of getting to do things in places that i was already passionate about and doing it in sports then getting to go one step further and and and do it in an area that i was spending time and money on already just felt like this these are the two guys i wanna work with they've been incredibly successful i like the idea and i certainly like the space if i'm looking to sprint this is the best place for me to possibly do it i think a lot of people listen to this show actually i don't think i know a lot of people listen to this show that are in the industry working inside businesses are entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs maybe as someone who's started working at a company on the ground floor with pretty big aspirations like what are some of those things that you learned out of the gates maybe like the good the bad the ugly with launching mantle and just that experience i i think that certain types of people are really well suited to working in established companies and are good at growing things or building things or having you know coworkers and and and stuff like that and certain people are really good at working in the zero to one you know just not needing a road map and getting it figured out as they go i think it can be hard to know which one you are unless you've tried them i had an inclination and then i and and i thought okay like i i don't know if i'm a zero to one guy but i can i can't actually say that until i get into you know start up at that level you know before day one and it proved to be kinda accurate you know i i have learned an amazing amount in the in the mantle days and i've loved a lot of it but boy is it hard and lonely when you're building something by yourself and it took six months before i was able to hire my first employees and it took a while before we could really build the team and before i had people who were you know moving things along without me and who were as invested with with time and attention as i was but it always felt lonely and always felt really difficult and and you know i i i'm really thankful for that opportunity i'm really happy that i've been able to do it and that we've built something that i'm really proud about but man working where you've got like a here's your job description this is what you're supposed to do and and this is what we're expecting out of you i felt like was was probably easier for me to kind for my mind to work around it when you're the only employer when you're you know you're starting out any minute that you're not working you feel like you're you're wasting that time i i had this overwhelming feeling of guilt a lot in the early days that if i was doing something that wasn't building mantle then i was i was burning my investors' money and i was doing something i wasn't supposed to do i had no boss but i walked around like i i i had somebody always watching me and and always like wondering if i was using my time wisely and it was it was sort of bizarre for that that feeling to be there where i'm like oh buddy wants to go get lunch i like i really don't think i should i i need to eat right like it's it's not i'm still human but i everything kinda felt like you have to be working twenty four seven that's the expectation especially when it's venture backed especially when it has a tech tied to it the the the thought you you hear about these founders who sleep on a cot in their office and they're working you know a hundred and twenty hours a week and whatever and and anybody if you if you if you're gonna do less than that you feel like that you're you're leaving something on the table you're not doing your job the way that you're supposed to and you need a little bit of that pressure you need a little bit of that feeling that you you always wanna push otherwise you're never gonna build it as big as you need it to be built but i learned pretty quickly that that i'm better when i have a team around me when i'm better that there are things i'm really good at and things i'm terrible at when you're a founder you don't get to say i'm not gonna think about this or do this you you have to be able to do it no matter what you have to pay attention to it and you have to be versed you know well versed in it and there are things that i did for the in the early days of mantle i would never have hired myself for that nothing on my resume would suggest that i should be the one doing this and i was and so you know i i i think if if you're somebody who who relishes that idea and gets excited about the ability to kinda touch everything and do everything and and and you've got something you truly believe in that you wanna build there's nothing better but i learned pretty quickly that that as much fun as it as it has been as it as exciting and i've never felt more pride in any job that i've ever had because i have in in mantle because i got to build it from from the ground i named the company like everything but you know it comes at a cost how did you manage that being on an island being by yourself building something that sounds like you were trying to figure out how to make it work and make it make sense this feeling of guilt all of these things there's a lot of people in this space that run solo businesses they're they're they're the only person involved and there are good days and there are bad days like maybe share some insights on like how you got over the hump to feel comfortable before you had people surrounding you so every day you woke up and you stepped into the saddle you didn't feel like you were missing something like how did you self manage that i i was lucky i i had some friends who were doing similar things not in the hobby but but were starting their own stuff i mean one of the benefits of working at the athletic is it's kinda like the bill walsh's coaching tree of of of startups and so a lot of people who came through that ended up going out and trying to start their own thing and and you know getting a chance to to see the athletic grow i think everybody kinda got the bug and let me go out and find my next thing or do it myself so i was able to go you know catch up with buddies who were in their same world and how are you dealing with this or man i'm so stressed about that and i think being able to talk about it really helped but truthfully until we had employees it was it was tough but once we hired i was able to relax i was able to say okay it's not just me i have to give this person work i can't do it all myself i have to hire people who are good at things i'm not so this person is you know shane who oversaw operations and finance well he's got an ability to do things that i can't do so how can i not entrust him to go do it when i can't i'm not the guy doing the financial model you know so you have to kinda bring people in or or you know kian who's did all of our our product design and and and worked you know on the app well i don't know how to code and i don't know how to i'm not an artist and so like there's all this like eventually you have to like i think let go and understand that there are other people who are responsible and you never lose that edge and that feeling that you have to be working hard every single day to build a company but you you also know that you're not alone anymore and so you know i think if you're somebody who's solo in it and you don't like being solo whatever you can do to bring bring somebody in even if you don't have the ability to hire can you you know partner with somebody can you you know give an intern a a job or whatever it is and if you can't do that at least for me finding a community other people who are in a similar boat that i could talk to or if you don't have that a therapist but i couldn't you know my i love my wife i couldn't go go to the dining table at night and like unload on all these things that i was dealing with because they they they didn't always sound impressive she's wasn't dealing with it in her own life she didn't have that you know she would be empathetic but not in the the way that i needed and sometimes you just like i don't wanna rehash the day but then you get with a couple people who are doing the same thing and and you can ask that like how do you guys deal with this and it felt like it was sort of at at least for me more more useful than just complaining i i needed a place to like be able to to error my grievances but in a way that that was constructive that makes perfect sense and resonates with me a little bit as you're walking through that you alluded to yourself as a collector and i wanna maybe talk about you as a collector before we set up on it and dig into kinda the model you're working at at onnit and obviously i want to talk about kinda what you're seeing in your role but maybe talk about just you and your collecting and just the the influence that that has had on this new role of yours like do you think you would be able to get up and running at a manufacturing company in the sports card industry without having kind of that collector gene in that collecting background it would be really hard to to do what i do every day if it wasn't a place that i was passionate about you know and and knowledgeable i think a lot of what we've been able to do in the three or four months that i've been in in the seed is because of the connections that i have in the space or the ideas that i can bring to the table not just me but everybody else on the team that you know the business that that i'm running now everybody is either a collector or a sports fan or both and i think that that's what makes it really powerful for us to be able to we we know what we're trying to build because we're in it you know like i i can open up a box of our product and i can have an opinion on how the things feel how they look what the quality is like what the experience is like because i've ripped enough tops and panini and and and donerous and leaf over the years that like for me it's i i i i know what that feeling should be like when it's good i know how it feels and i and so that's something that that i think it'd be really difficult to do if this wasn't a space that i was passionate about the other thing you know i'm somebody who mostly collects things that don't have a lot of financial value ninety five percent of the stuff in my collection some stuff has become valuable or be it it it checks enough boxes outside of the value that it but it also is valuable but i collect things that i'm like a a true pc collector i collect stuff that has some kind of nostalgic or emotional tie to you know grew up in la and so you know dodgers players that that i grew up being you know watching or or or following in ucla or i went to school for sports broadcasting and part of my pc or you know autograph cards of of sports broadcasters like that you're not gonna sell a john saunders signed scorecard for very much money and i when i think about a lot of what we do it on it it's it's getting people to buy stuff certainly there's the ability to make money the m mlb draft was you know over the weekend and rock cholesky from ucla who's you know in our our product he's in our ucla product he's in our gravity baseball he's on the cover of gravity baseball like you can go get his autographs in on our products and they're gonna be worth more money more than likely as his career goes on that exists we also have a lot of people who buy our products who aren't interested in in in ever flipping it they went to ucla or a ucla fan and they just want a connection point to something that means something to them and i think i resonate really well with that because that's no different than me buying sports broadcaster cards or dodger cards or ucla cards my my introduction to onnit was buying you see the ucla product well before i ever thought that this was gonna be somewhere that i'd work but you know i wanted to get ucla stuff there's a kid down the street who's a a gymnast and and and wanted to to you know i i buy his brother's baseball cards all the time and wanted to to get him some cards and well the ucla gymnastics cards they buy on it perfect i'll go buy that for him and that was sort of my like that moment of that there are a lot of people who collect who are never gonna flip don't have an ebay account or at least they don't sell on their ebay account and and they they are are there to buy things that mean something to them and and the the the acquisition of it the owning of it is the thing that's important versus the flipping of it and it's it's been helpful for me to come in with that mindset because it's not just a company that's trying to get people who are prospectors to buy we're talking to a lot of people who have that other motivation and it happens to be one that i share what a time for college sports cards the landscape has changed dramatically over the years with nil all the movement to me it it's more exciting than ever i'm a fan of the change i'm also a fan of the fact that college cards has been more a part of the conversation recently than ever before and it's variety of personas you the flipper people who collect their team their college they want those cards and it seems like there's the desire and there's a lot of people like talking about college cards but there seems to be a desire we want more like we we want this to be bigger which is great for a new company coming in and i think like just the timing to me seems great for onnit right now for anyone who maybe doesn't know or hasn't bought onnit cards before i think like the way you are all going to market and just the way you're packaging it's it's unique in this industry obviously focused on the collegiate athlete but and collegiate teams but maybe kinda brief the audience who might not be familiar like how onnit works sure so we've got it's it's all officially licensed cards so we work with the university you're you're never gonna get a player that you don't see the school on on on their chest everything is is is you know like tops is officially licensed for major league baseball or the nfl or the nba that that's what we we are with ohio state or ucla or university of florida indiana so you know that that's that's core to what we do and then we create cards not just for football and basketball but we do football basketball baseball softball women's basketball gymnastics we we do wrestling we do hockey so we do all these different different types of cards and our goal is to create cards for everybody on the team and so you know if you go by bowman you're gonna be getting the best players on a handful of teams and those cards are gonna be amazing and they're gonna be eventually potentially really valuable but you're gonna have the o only the ability to get to get certain athletes and so fernando mendoza you know heisman winner first pick in the draft he's in the on at twenty five product in indiana but you're also able to get his offensive line you're able to get his receivers and the guys on the defensive side of things his brother they're all they're all on the set and it's important for us as we build these things to give every student athlete who's on one of these teams an opportunity to get a card some like mendoza are gonna end up being on the cover of tops boxes and they're gonna have long careers and and many hundreds of thousands of cards but a lot of the people who have on it cards may only ever get an on it card they they you know they may not go pro and this could be the only opportunity that they're gonna have one so for us it's a really cool opportunity to be able to create something that will mean something really special to a lot of the athletes who are on it but will also create a connection point with people who are either hardcore fans of that sport or that school the athlete prospectors and and and sort of bridge those those gaps and for some of these volleyball you're not gonna find volleyball cards if you go into an lcs but it's important for us to create them so nebraska for instance you know we created cards for nebraska women's volleyball team it outsold a a a lot of our football teams you know because of the the size of that fan base and it's it's very cool for us to say there are a lot of fans here they are totally underserved nobody's paying attention to them at all let's create something that these fans are gonna love and and and it proves out time and time again that if you create something a lot of people want to buy cards wanna be card collectors they just never had the ability to buy cards because maybe they don't follow the things that the card companies right now are creating whenever a new bowman drops without a shadow of a doubt i look at my instagram and there's always people complaining about their favorite player who they think is justified not being in the checklist yeah you just said like you have this aspiration which is very ambitious to like have cards for every player of these teams like how how do you go about like satisfying that like how what what is the method to the madness like obviously it's relationships and you you know you get sign off but like mhmm that seems like a ton of work like i know you're newer to the role but like how are you envisioning this all take place it's tough the collegiate space is space is complicated and every single school operates differently it's not like you know you got all these nba teams and they're all part of the cba and they you know the players are part of the nba pa and there are rules and that that the the league governs it all it's not like that so some schools we work directly with the school some schools we work with a third party that's kinda sits in between some schools are would come to us and say please do more do anything we want this to be we want everybody on earth to see it and other schools say you guys paid for this this is what your license allows for you're not allowed to do anything outside of that so every single school is sort of different in that sense and and you know our pitch to these athletes is one for the big name athletes you know you all of our athletes get paid so you're gonna make some money from signing your autographs being part of the set but also if you're fernando mendoza you know you are the quarterback all of your your teammates are gonna get in this set too and that there's to me that's that's a powerful piece of of information for these guys like if you say no there there may not be an ability to go create a set for every single team but if if the big name is in there it makes it a lot harder or harder to say no to to creating that product and so trying to appeal to the fact that this gives them an ability to be in the same set as as the you know the guys on the you know as as mendoza would say like his on the offensive line like this gives him that ability and then we just have to go out to to all these different athletes there's usually a clearing house that can help and and so that we're not having to call a hundred different athletes and and appeal to them individually and a lot of them opt in because for them this is this is you know if you're on the bench if if you're in a position that doesn't get a lot of a lot of coverage you're looking for nil opportunities you're looking for ways to get your name out there your face out there to make some money and so if you're able to to get a a couple of bucks signing autograph and be in a card set you're gonna say yes because you're not getting the lamborghini dealership down the street coming by with six figure offers in a car how how important is landing that fernando mendoza in their respective categories like obviously i'm i'm sure you know that's going to attract people to who aren't just iu fans that wanna buy the product but how do you think about those like tier one notable athletes that have name and brand recognition how do you think about like bringing them into on it a a newer company that might be less familiar than some of the bigger manufacturers it helps a a ton it gets people to to pay attention in ways they wouldn't otherwise certainly the prospectors are looking for the guys and and and women that are gonna go pro and so if you're gonna go buy if you're just somebody who who wants to hold on to these cards in the hopes that they're gonna be the big pros then you need to have the prospects in these in the in these in in the boxes so that that helps a lot that said there are a lot of people who are gonna collect and and they're gonna buy the cards no matter who's in it because it's about the school it's about showing you know school spirit it's about knowing that the money that you spend on this goes back to the school and goes back to the athletes so there there there are certainly a lot of people who aren't looking at the checklist to see the the names that are on there but we know for the biggest names and we want them you know to to be in in the in the honor product and we had mlb draft you know we had a a handful of guys who were in the top ten picks including the number one overall pick the number three overall pick are are in are on a product and that to to me no makes it that much easier to justify creating all this stuff because you just know that people are always gonna be scooping that up because even if you aren't a ucla baseball fan the fact that you could you could get an autograph card for the number one pick in the mlb draft there's a a a group of collectors that that's what they're looking for and i love that we're able to create something that appeals to both those audiences the hardcore fan of the sport of the school and then somebody who maybe isn't as interested in that school in particular but really wants to get a certain player what do you in your role how are you thinking about just the previous experiences that you have had that we've most of them that we've mentioned here in in kind of building a modern sports car company like what types of things are you maybe leaning on from your old worlds as you kind of apply the strategy to this new world with onnit i think a lot about brand a lot about content how do we create content that can make people aware of of who we are how do we build the brand up i i i think if you opened up a pack of our cards and you open up a pack of upper deck tops panini whatever you wouldn't look at ours and say that these feel less than it's all licensed all the autographs are on card the quality the printing quality and the packaging quality is is is on par with everybody in the industry so what makes our cards less desirable or less valuable than some of the other companies one i i don't believe that they should be but i think it comes down to brand and i think it comes down to the fact that we're we're young we haven't been around that long and we're up against competition that that has massive brand budgets and and decades and decades worth of history and and collectors and and that history passed down from generation to generation if we're gonna be in the same consideration set if somebody's gonna say i wanna go get a fernando mendoza autograph a a rocceloski autograph i can go get one of these from tops or i can go get one of these from on it if the answer is who's on it i'm not gonna get this i've never heard of this company then we're not part of that that consideration set and so a lot of what we are are thinking about now and and and it'll take time for it to to kinda mature and to come out to to the fans is how how do we build the brand and how do we make sure people are aware of of who we are what we're doing the quality of our product and why people should want it and why people people should should be collecting it i think that's a lot of it and then you know the relationships luckily i the with with three years of mantle and the relationships that i've built somebody you know i've been a collector for a long time but i i didn't work in the collectibles industry up until three years ago and and thankfully i've been able to meet a lot of really interesting really good people across this industry and and trying to bring those relationships to bear so that we have the right people walking around fanatics fest in the national and local car shows and that and shops that know who we are that believe in what we're doing that wanna be part of it and that they and see that if we're successful it means good things for the industry overall you know you hear the fanatics team often talk about they they wanna ten x the hobby i hope that they do i have i i really hope that they do but i also know for them to be successful in that it can't just be fanatics doing all the work that other brands and businesses have to be able to grow too because there's just not not enough to go around otherwise and so you know i think it it's it's really important that that we're doing all we can to get more and more people into the hobby we're creating a product that's easy to get that you don't have to have massive allocation you're not buying our boxes for you know ten x the msrp when you buy it on the secondary market like you can get stuff at card shops and you can get stuff at shows and you can get stuff on our website it's important to us to create these things that that aren't being created you know team sets and sports that are not getting cards otherwise and and i think that if we're able to be successful in doing that we can help fanatics and psa and ebay and others to really ten x a hobby because there's gonna be little boys and girls who are gonna buy their their volleyball cards who may not ever care about getting a one b card or they may not care now about one b but maybe one day they will but now they're in the ecosystem and they're going to card shows and they're going to card shops they're buying things on ebay they're sending things into psa or cgc to get graded i mean i i think that's that's what i'm hoping that we're gonna be able to do is to to fill fill a void in this industry and create cards for people who otherwise wouldn't get it for sports that otherwise wouldn't get it players otherwise wouldn't get it but do it at the top you know the top quality and as we build our brand up and use our relationships i think we'll be able to do that i love the emphasis on brand brand is usually not something that you can just like turn on a switch and everything starts going your way it takes time to build brand as you know you have to place the right bets make the right decisions come from a place of abundance and watch things play out obviously i think you've got the the market and it's a good time because of collegiate athletes are more more stars than ever before and people are interested in collecting so that's that's something that's i think on your side maybe how do you think about those brand decisions when i'm sure it feels like you want it to happen and you want it to happen right now but like also making sure that like you're investing in the brand in the right way like how do you balance like the quick wins versus like the long game with brand you you know it takes a long time for our cards to hit the market and i think that that has been a forcing function to slow down there's all this stuff that you know for the football season we're working on it now it's july it's not gonna be out until the end of august or september and we've been working on it since you know i joined the company and the guys have been working on it even before that and i think that that's sort of been like a a break that said like hey evan you can't you can't sprint through this the way that you might otherwise want because it takes a long time for us to bring these things out there we have to be i think really strategic about it you know we're we're spending a lot of time thinking about our our tone of voice what we say where are we gonna be part of these conversations where what's the thing that onit can own that we can feel like is authentic to us you know it it is college cards should we be telling you what happened in the game last night and saying hey you know like this is not about the cards but we're just gonna tell you about the the the game should we be telling you about the the the value of the mlb draft has happened here's what a a a you know a choloski card could go for you know i think for us it's like where do we fit in and what's the thing that we want people to know on it for and and i don't have the answers to it one of the commitments i made to myself and to the team when i started this was i i i wasn't gonna blow things up just to blow things up the company is you know four plus years old a lot of really smart really talented really dedicated people who've been with the company for years are there wasn't gonna come in on day one and say everything you guys have been doing even if it was good we're gonna we're gonna blow up because it's not the way that i would do it or it's not you know you know it's the old way or whatever it's been really important to kinda take that that step and say okay let's let's not think about tomorrow we gotta have something every day we're we're doing stuff but i'm not gonna blow it up to blow it up and and i think that that's been a good learning experience for me because at mantle we gotta create it there was no brand beforehand what's what's the name of the company what's the logo gonna look like what's our tone of voice how are we gonna do it i got to be a part of all of that and now it's it's really different to come into something that's established and figure out okay where are the easy wins where are the places that we can you know make some some incremental gains and what are the things that are not working that we wanna change but we're not just gonna change for the sake of changing before i let you get out of here evan what is one thing that you have learned from turning your passion into a profession i think if you're able to work in a space that you're already passionate about you should take the opportunity it's really amazing to be able to spend your days doing something that you truly care about and you truly love the caveat to that is that then you you you you're you're bringing business and pleasure together that sometimes make it makes it hard to escape going to a card shop is no longer a like a a vacation from work for me if i go to a card show it it's i feel like i'm there representing the brand i'm looking at the tables and what people are talking about what they're doing i'm not just there trying to to find things for my pc and then you have to be able to to make that that sacrifice and say okay i get to spend all day every day touching the things that i love but the the price that i'm gonna pay for that is that now it's always gonna feel a little bit like work and if you have a great hobby and a great job and they're not connected you're very lucky if you have a great hobby and a great job and they are connected and it doesn't ruin one or the other for you you're very lucky i think where the risk is is taking something that you love that your you know your nights and weekends love and trying to make a job out of it and then turning the thing that was a passion or you know your respite into something that becomes you know stressful for you and and and i would try to avoid that if you can ton of good insights ton of good information evan i look very much enjoyed this chat hopefully we can do it again down the road i really appreciate you having me on it's a lot of fun