Andy Boyer

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Trying to Decipher MLS Transfer Rules

July 3, 2014 /

Here’s something about MLS I don’t quite understand. DeAndre Yedlin could be headed to Anderlecht of the Belgian League. A friend of mine who knows a ton about soccer asked this series of questions:

Is this a big step up for Yedlin? I’m sure he’d get a raise, but I’m sure he could get a raise in MLS too. But in terms of advancing his career, does it make sense to go to a second tier (or third, or fourth?) Europe league? Or should he try to get a decent MLS salary after this year, and wait until England calls And what would the Sounders get out of this? Do they get any of the transfer fee? Do they get to set the transfer fee? Are we just out of luck? And we’re full on designated players too, right? So even if we got a ton of cash, we can’t really use it, right?

Here’s what I think I know. Please correct me if you know better.

1) Whether or not the play in Belgium is better than the MLS, there’s the perception in Europe that the play in the Dutch, Turkish, Norwegian, Belgian and Portuguese leagues is better than the MLS.

2) It’s easier for a Premier League, Spanish League, German League, Italian League or French League scout to catch a game in Belgium than Seattle.

3) The top teams in all the 2nd tier Europe Leagues at least get to compete in some round of the Champions League. Anderlecht won the Belgian First Division in 2013-2014, and are one of 22 teams to have already qualified for the Final 32 of the Champions League. That’s nice exposure he wouldn’t get here.

4) The MLS technically owns all the contracts of all the players. Essentially, the MLS is a giant talent agency that hosts matches in which to show off the talent they’ve recruited. Part of their revenue model is to find cheap players and develop them into players that other teams want to buy. They need the old guys to drive fans, but the real money is buying young guys low and selling high. It’s another reason the league wants parity and would rather have all the best players split amongst the teams to get playing time rather than having some great players sitting on the Sounders bench behind Dempsey and Martins for 34 games

5) There’s some sort of revenue split between the MLS and the team who scouts and signs the player. Not sure what it is.

6) MLS sets the transfer fee. I believe the team has some input based on whether they think the team and league would generate more revenue if they held the player another year.

7) Sounders would get some cash, but all it would do is help the ownership group. We can’t reinvest it into a higher salary cap.

Bottom line, the more Yedlins the league develops, the more revenue the league makes, the more revenue the teams split, the more designated players the teams can afford to have on each roster, the higher salary cap each team can have, and the more talent we can recruit to the league, which makes it easier to get the next Yedlin to play here, etc…

Let me know if you have more insight.

 

Winners and Losers in a Digital Economy

May 18, 2014 /

This was the best 22:00 of YouTube video that I’ve seen in a long time.

The speaker is Scott Galloway, who owns a think tank called L2 and is also a marketing professor at NYU Stern. He quickly explains who is winning and losing in everything from social media and retail to brands and world economies. Really interesting stuff.

Geek Stars Shine Bright at Annual Geekwire Awards

May 9, 2014 /

There was more Polo than Prada. More Ralph than Lauren. And Levi’s outnumbered Louboutin’s about 5 to 1. But there was enough revelry, camaraderie and fun at Geekwire’s “Oscars of Seattle Startups” last night at EMP that you expected Ellen to organize a group selfie.

You can get the full results of the 13 Geek Awards over at Geekwire.com. But maybe more importantly than the awards themselves is the annual chance to catch up with what every startup in town is up to.

The startup world is a fluid one. Some people who were 100% confident in one project last year have a new passion this year. And some folks working out of their garage a year ago now have a staff of 26. But thanks to Geekwire, we get this annual opportunity to check in with one another.

It’s hard to know where this community would be without Geekwire’s involvement the last few years. Would the Seattle Times and Puget Sound Business Journal have been able to whip 800 entrepreneurial and tech enthusiasts into a kind of extended family who cooperate more than compete with each other? Would we all know the brand names of a few companies poised to be the next Zulily? I think not.

And in an industry still made up of more men than women, it was fantastic to see Julie Sandler and Jane Park given two of the top individual awards – for Geek of the Year and CEO of the Year respectively. In addition to her day job at Madrona, Julie has pushed tirelessly to encourage more young girls to pursue tech careers. And Jane is running one of the fastest growing non-tech businesses in the region.

I don’t think any more people could fit into EMP, and I don’t know how long you’d have to make the event in order to chat with everyone you know there. But it’s nice that in an environment that delivers more struggles than solutions, you know there’s a community rooting for each other. And that’s really what the Geekwire Awards are all about – a place to recognize the ones who made it, and be inspired to follow them on stage next year.

Helping the JOBS Act Get Through

February 24, 2014 /

From the entrepreneur’s perspective, more access to capital is better than less. We have a current ecosystem that involves Angels and VC’s, but there are many reasons why we should make it easier for people to make informed decisions about investing in new ventures.

There’s a hearing in the Washington senate on this Tuesday, 2/25. Here’s a good link to learn more: http://lunarmobiscuit.com/washington-state-jobs-act/

“This law will allow any Washington State company to raise up to $1,000,000 per year from Washington State residents. Any resident will be able to invest at least $2,000, with that amount rising to 5% or 10% of a resident’s income or net worth. No longer will entrepreneurs be limited to raising money from “accredited” investors.”

That’s Billion, With a B

February 19, 2014 /

Facebook just agreed to buy WhatsApp for $16 Billion. That’s one billion, this many times:

Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion Billion

When you add the other Billion Billion Billion for current What’s App employees, it comes to $19 Billion.

Just for fun, let’s look back at some previous tech acquisitions you may have remembered:

  • Amazon buys Zappos. Sale Price: $1.2 Billion. Year: 2009
  • AOL buys Netscape. Sale Price: $4.2 Billion. Year: 1998
  • eBay buys PayPal. Sale Price: $1.5 Billion. Year: 2002
  • eBay buys Skype. Sale Price: $2.6 Billion. Year: 2005
  • Yahoo buys Geo Cities. Sale Price: $3.6 Billion. Year: 1999
  • Yahoo buys Broadcast.com. Sale Price: $5.7 Billion. Year: 2001
  • Microsoft buys aQuantive. Sale Price: $6 Billion. Year: 2007
  • Oracle buys Peoplesoft. Sale Price: $10.3 Billion. Year: 2004
  • Facebook buys Instagram. Sale Price: $1 Billion. Year: 2013
  • Google buys YouTube. Sale Price: $1.65 Billion. Year: 2006
  • Google buys Double Click. Sale Price: $3.1 Billion. Year: 2008
  • Google buys Nest. Sale Price: $3.2 Billion. Year: 2014
  • Google buys Waze. Sale Price: $.96 Billion. Year: 2013
  • Google buys Wildfire. Sale Price: $.45 Billion. Year: 2013
  • Google buys Motorola Mobility. Sale Price: $12.5 Billion. Year: 2011

For one thing, it’s fun to look at what deals happened right before bubbles. It’s also fun to see that some of these deals look like bargains now, while some were just busts.

So give or take a billion or so, Google ended up with Nest, Waze, Wildfire and Motorola Mobility for the same price Facebook got Instagram and WhatsApp. Time will tell where the money was better spent.

Another way to analyze the deal is on a cost per user basis. From what I have read, WhatsApp has 450 Million Monthly Active Users (MAU). So at $19 Billion, that’s roughly $42 per user. Obviously Facebook thinks the lifetime value of each user is more than $42, which certainly seems reasonable. So from that angle, disregarding all other benefits of the deal (synergies, defensive play, talent, etc…) it could make sense.

So what about Snapchat? We all scoffed when Snapchat turned down $3 Billion from Facebook, wondering how they could think they were 3x as valuable as Instagram. Well, I can’t tell what this means for them. Certainly they are worth more than 16% of WhatsApp, aren’t they? Or is there enough overlap between WhatsApp and Snapchat users that they just saw their entire market value dry up? Again, only time will tell.

But $16 Billion is a lot of money no matter what. I think we are all on bubble watch now.

Why Start-ups Shouldn’t Pretend to Recruit Agencies

January 16, 2014 /

In the Entrepreneurial Marketing class I teach at the UW, we talk about how start-ups need to be scrappy with their money. Without aa lot of money to spend, we need to make every dollar stretch. We talk about the fact that we often can’t afford to hire an agency.

One of the ways to temporarily sidestep the need to hire strategic services from an agency is to look at campaigns you find compelling, and model your own plan after them. If you’ve noticed a company, it may be possible to reverse engineer their thought process (or their agency’s) and generate similar success. Emulation is a form of flattery.

However, one thing we DON’T advise students to do is “pretend” to be hiring an agency, send out a bunch of RFP’s, and have them do free work for you. Yes, this seems like a scrappy thing to do. Submit your problem and solicit proposals and ideas from 10-20 small to mid-range agencies. You’ll get a few hours of free consulting and brainstorming from each one, and get to form an overall strategy out of the ideas you like best.

Your VC and investors may think this is a fabulous idea. $10,000 in free consulting is a huge win, right?

But I’d argue that long-term (and even short-term), you can do your brand a pretty large disservice when you do this. Here are a few reasons why:

  1. As a Start-up, your plan is going to involve Influencers and Thought Leaders. When an agency tells you they can recruit “Thought Leader X,Y and Z,” they are saying they have a personal relationship with them already. When you get free work from the agency and then tell them you aren’t hiring anyone, you’re not creating a neutral relationship with the agency world, you’re building a negative one. These Thought Leaders you need to recruit will already have heard about what kind of company you are from the people whose time you wasted.
  2. When you become successful, you will get a larger VC round and have more money to spend on marketing. Then you really will have a budget in which to hire an agency.  But this time when you send out your RFP’s the good agencies will remember how you treated them in the past and decline to participate. Yes, you will get responses to your RFP, but you’ll be getting them from companies that need the work.  You want to hire agencies that turn down work, not the ones who can’t keep it.
  3. You are going to work at other companies in your career. When you are a junior person and your CEO sends you out to burn a bunch of cycles from the agencies, he/she is sending you on that mission so they don’t sully their own name.  We agency people are horrible gossip hounds. We’re going to share stories about the person who sent us on a wild goose chase.
  4. And finally, it’s just not good start-up karma.  Most agencies are like little start-ups.  They have to be scrappy themselves to go get the next piece of business. They have to balance how much staff to have on hand because they always either have just a touch too much work or a touch too little. Their teams are usually either overworked or worried they are going to be laid off. So it’s just bad to make these people do free work for you. As a start-up, do you want to have customers with no intention of buying your product to burn your salespeople’s time? No.

So start-ups of the world, I suggest you resist the urge to get free work from people under the guise of an RFP. If your CEO and VC are making you do this, pause and think what kind of nefariousness they are committing themselves. Is that the kind of company you want to hitch your star to?

 

Why Life is Like Football

December 2, 2013 /

I was talking to one of my young entrepreneurial friends today. It had been a while since we caught up so the conversation predictably started around, “How’s everything going?”

The funny thing about entrepreneurs is that nothing is ever going poorly. Setbacks are learning experiences. Unexpected hurdles are blockers for future competition. Lack of clarity in a mission is pause for contemplation.

People with jobs have a bad day. Entrepreneurs have a new challenge.

We ruminated on this awhile and came up with the analogy that entrepreneurship is like football. You build the best team you can, develop a system you think will work, scout out the competition, and take your game to the field. During the game you run your plays, knowing 11 people are trying to stop you. When you get the ball, you run into the defense, driving as hard and as long as you can go on each play.

Eventually you have to make strategic decisions. When you see something working, you ride it as long as you can. If the situation is hopeless, you punt and regroup. Somedays you have a great game plan and the right team. Somedays you have a great team and the wrong plan. And somedays, you just get blown out of the water by people more talented than you.

Anyway, I thought it was a fun conversation. Keep those legs driving forward….

Talking Startups at Entrepreneur University

October 20, 2013 /

Between teaching Entrepreneurial Marketing at UW, and being on the Board of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, I get a number of amazing opportunities to sit down and talk with people who are making things happen. Not just coming up with ideas, but actually executing on those dreams.

Last Friday at NWEN’s ntrepreneur University, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel with three of my favorites; Mariah Gentry of JoeyBra, Andrew Dumont of Moz and StrideApp and Kelly Smith of Curious Office. We talked about when is the right time for someone to jump into the entrepreneurial waters.

If you haven’t met Mariah before, if you run into her at an event I encourage you to grab as much of her time as you can.  She is easily one of the most impressive people under 30 that I’ve ever come across. And she’s only something like 22 or 23.  She started her first business at 14, owned at house by 20, and launched JoeyBra as a junior at the UW. When you talk to her, you just get a sense that she can distill any complex problem to its core, and come up with an obvious solution.

I met Andrew a few years ago when some people at my company told me they had a friend we should hire. In a ironic twist, our Office Manager at the time wouldn’t forward his resume because he didn’t have a college degree (he later went back and got it). I met with him anyway and realized we would never be able to hire him because he was way too impressive to take what we would be able to offer him.  He now works from 7:00 – 5:00 at Moz, then runs his side business StrideApp.com, which he disclosed has paying customers numbering in the hundreds.  But on top of that, he also spent a weekend building a Udemy course, which now has close to 500 paying customers at $100 a shot. That’s pretty impressive. The secret behind of Andrew’s success is pretty clear – a tireless work ethic and a commitment, almost obsession, to building stuff.

And then of course there was Kelly. Investor, founder, idea guy, executor, he does a little bit of it all. I loved his advice on harnessing the power of entrepreneurship. He said the key is, “Question everything. Whenever something sucks, figure out if there’s a better way to build it. Just solve the problem and figure out how many people have the same problem.”

There’s a difference between ideas and ideas with execution. People like this are inspiring because they don’t let any excuse get in their way. They see a project they want to attack, and then relentlessly pursue it. There’s no wishing on a star or dreamland scenarios with these guys, they are all about dedication and execution. It’s great that we have people like this in the city, people who can remind us that the hardest part of entrepreneurship is the commitment to doing the work.

Soccer Supporters Groups Could Affect The 2022 World Cup – If They Cared Enough

October 5, 2013 /

Sports fans across the globe generally share a single problem – they really can’t affect any change in the leagues or even their teams.  Seattle Mariners fans may universally despise management for 10 straight years without making the playoffs, but they don’t have a way to remove the CEO. Some people may hate the way Roger Goodell runs his football mafia, but there’s not another league of gridiron superstars to support. As a fan, you take what you are given or find a new hobby.

But this isn’t necessarily the case in soccer. While it would take organization of historic proportions to get hardcore Mariners fans to build any kind of impactful protest, this organization already exists in soccer, in the form of Supporter Groups.

Supporter Groups, such as the Emerald City Supporters, can mobilize hundreds or even thousands of people. They often have a hierarchy and organizational structure that rivals a successful non-profit.  They communicate among each other, have dialogue with team management, share best practices with each other and have followers who will act as directed.

No one was happy when Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup. It was an obvious result of international bribery, blackmail, payoffs and back room deals, executed with a level of precision that NBA COMMISSIONER David Stern WOULD ADMIRE. And throughout the predictable controversy that inevitably became reality (wait, playing soccer in 130 degree heat is a bad idea?), there wasn’t anything that was worth an international boycott.

And then we found out that 4,000 people will die in the next 8 years building the stadiums.  We also learned that the “lucky” ones who survive are basically being enslaved in stifling, inhumane conditions. 

The world soccer community (DID ALL THINK THAT?) went from thinking, “This Qatar World Cup is a bad idea that I have to live with,” to “Damn, I’ll be sitting in a seat someone died to build, so some rich guy could get paid.”

If the global soccer community cared enough, it *could* do something about this. It’s the one sport that could organize a global protest. Here’s what it would take.

1) Supporters Groups of local teams in national leagues such as MLS, Premier League, La Liga, etc… individually would have to agree to support the idea that killing and enslaving people is bad. It’s key that the protests come from the Club Supporters groups, not the national groups (like Sam’s Army) at first, because national teams would fear retribution from FIFA if their supporters organized anything. Plus, you don’t want it IT CAN’T look like the U.S. Supporters Groups are organizing a political protest against the Middle East. It has to be country-agnostic. But keep in mind, members of Club Supporters groups often also support their national teams.

2) Then, the supporters groups in each league could galvanize together with one representative force from each league.  Arsenal and Tottenham fans hate each other so much when it comes to soccer, that is pretty powerful when they agree on anything.

3) If globally, members of Club Supporters groups agree to protest something like a FIFA World Cup Qualifying match, a week of friendlies or some other set of matches, it would make world news, and FIFA would have to take this seriously. Even FIFA didn’t want to take it seriously, brands that advertise with FIFA – McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Heineken, etc.. would have to take it seriously.  Multinational companies do not want to be on the wrong end of a global protest. So even if the groups didn’t want to boycott the matches, just threatening to boycott the advertisers en masse would create a massive headache that would have to be dealt with.

We’re talking about people protesting the killing of others to build stadiums, not whether there should be instant replay or a ban on if we need to limit flopping. It would be kind of hard for FIFA to turn a blind eye and ear to a global protest on mass murder.

This is something that could happen. Three to four 3-4 years of protesting, led by the Supporters Groups, could cause change. There are plenty of countries with the infrastructure to prepare for a 2022 World Cup with 4-5 years of notice. The question is whether the Supporters Groups care enough to do it.

Join Me at the TechCrunch Meetup Thursday

July 16, 2013 /

The next version of the Techcrunch Meetups + Pitch-Off is headed to Seattle this Thursday. Besides the fun and frivolity of your typical Seattle tech event, a few lucky entrepreneurs will be pitching their businesses to a group of TC judges. These entrepreneurs will have one minute to explain why “their start-up is awesome.” Since all the products will be in stealth or private beta, we may see some companies we haven’t heard of before.

Details:
Thursday, July 18
ShowBox at the Market
1426 1st Ave‎nue
Seattle, WA 98101
6 PM – 10 PM

See you there.

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