Passion to Profession: The Future of Collecting Starts with Community with Evan Parker of ONIT Athlete

Foreign. To profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay. Here on the Stacking Slabs network. It is that time of the week where we dig into the entrepreneurial and operational journey of people building cool things in the sports card industry. I'm excited today to be joined by Evan Parker, CEO at Onit Athlete. He has quite the career path from Edelman to NASCAR to the athletic to Mantle. Now on it. This conversation will explore how those experience prepped him to lead a sports card manufacturing company. We'll get into the decisions behind his career, what motivates him, how he thinks as a collector, and what he believes the sports card industry needs. Next. Really fun chat. If you want to show your support for the broader Stacking Slabs network, hit the follow button, tell a damn friend, run on over to the Patreon group again, shout out to ebay. These conversations would not be possible without their support. For now, it's Evan Parker. Let's get into it. All right, 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 the question, why did you end up in a company supporting the hobby? And we're going to do that. And this is one of my favorite kind of career arcs that we've explored here. And today I'm joined by Evan Parker, who is the CEO at Onit Athlete. We're going to 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 going to dig into kind of all of those stops. But before we talk about the. The companies you worked for, I'm interested to maybe learn from you kind of. 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 kind of go 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 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 Xbox360 to life and everything that's community, it's content, it's partnerships. But, but on a, in a place that people have an immense amount of passion, that 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 or 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 2005 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 going to take forever and you just have to hope that nailed 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 you're a content creator, you can be. And so I, I think it, 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 talk about things whenever you want because people are going to be talking about you one way or the other. And so I, 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 kind of have to think, all right, well then how are we going to 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're 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 and sports cards, obviously more fan engagement, kind of 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 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 going to love the sport no matter what you did. And 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 Knights type of fence. How do you get people who are not NAR 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 traditionalists, those who had been fans of the sport forever, who love the sport or what they thought it was about. And then these new people that didn't really care about what the traditionalists 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 I, you know, I think about, about the sports card industry now. You kind of got this. You go to the national, you walk around, you see these tables of people who have 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 kind of feels like where I was back in, you know, 2011 or 2012 with NASCAR, with these two not waring factions of fans, but two had, that had very different motivations. And, and I see that a lot from, from a collectible standpoint where you've got to build an industry that can work for the, the PC collector who is out there buying stuff from, you know, their favorite player or 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 going to flip it quickly. And 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 it does certainly remind me of my early days in the NASCAR side. What did you see with those two kind of 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. 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 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 sport was at its height in the late 90s, early 2000s, 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 500 day, 500 in 2001. Everybody, if you, if you had a TV, you were aware of what happened. And I think it gave NASCAR some exposure that it, it hadn't gotten, you know, before that and at this 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 a different audience that we don't, that we don't already have. And I think we had to spend a lot of time thinking about how we were going to 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 going to 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 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, like how, you know, because the pendulum always swings and if the idea is, well, this is where the new money's 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 rap show at a NASCAR race, maybe that, that's, you know, repacks or, or breaks or something like that. And 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 things that I already love. 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 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 going to be around for a long time. And I hope that the way this industry is going, that when we look back in 10 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 and it was fleeting because now they're on to the next step. 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 card, the sports card space, it's very, very interesting. I guess this thought that just triggered in my head is just 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 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 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 kind of 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's served up to you is not necessarily the content that you're looking for that you enjoy the most, but it's, it's, you know, whatever is getting the most, 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, I think about collecting like 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 a 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, bre 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 an 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 or, 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've 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 volumes. 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 relatively niche and are talking to a very specific audience. 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 on social. If you're on Twitter, if you're on Instagram, like, we all are aware of that person or what they 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 really haven't broken through in the way I think that this industry is poised to. That'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 SVP 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. My time at the Athletic was among my, my favorite in my career. It was just such a fun ride. I joined in 2019 so the company was relatively established but still very young and, and it was so early on and operated like a startup. I mean we, it was chaos and this was pre pandemic and when the pandemic hit, everything obviously changed. We didn't have sports for a number of months that we had to figure out how to just keep the business afloat. But I, you know, I was taken by having come from nascar which is, you know, made the sport, came, came to be in 1948, family owned and operated. It was sort of old school and big boardrooms 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. The next day we'd make a different decision. You screw it 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 brought it to mantle and, and you know, trying to bring it into, to what I'm doing now at 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 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 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 lost that entire set. Like it's over with. But certainly 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 could just move so much faster than the traditional media companies and the New York Times went into buying the athletic. Then every, you know, espn, everybody else, we were just able to move faster and, and make bigger decisions quick. And I think that's a big part of the reason why we were able to grow as much as we did. I want to get your feedback on the athletic and the 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 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 kind of maybe where the sports card industry is headed and kind of what you were doing kind of growing the Athletic. I've certainly tried to find the parallels. It's been tough to, 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, 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 were going to go cover the Colts, you needed to have Zack Keer, like that was. No matter what, if you were going to do it, you have to have somebody at that level, and you find the Zack Keer 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 had been working and weren't willing to leave. And then you have these local markets that we would convince you, all right, you like the Pacers, you like the Colts, you're going to now subscribe because we're going to 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 going to block you from seeing what's happening in Chicago or Seattle or, or, you know, Miami. You're going to 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, 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 were looking at every single beat, which beats are making this money, which are a loss leader that we have to have, don't make sense for us to continue to, to. To. To cover in the same way. 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 kind of collects in their own way and cares about certain things and not others. And 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 I'm close with some of the guys 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 Revel, you know, is. Is. Is a writer. 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 going to care about that you can actually monetize to the degree that you need to to make a business work. That if Darren Revell, 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 and these Matt, you know, massive organizations. And if he. If he struggled to figure out how to make that a business, it's really hard to crack the code 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 going to talk to the thousand or ten thousand or one 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, Wemby doesn't hit the football fan, because the football fan's not interested in Wemby, it's okay, because tomorrow they can write about the football audience and that person's going to 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. You were going to launch a media company today in collectibles. You couldn't say, all right, we're going to launch the Athletic, and we're going to have a writer just about Pokemon and a writer about Naruto and a writer about baseball, cars, and soccer cars and vintage and grading. Like, you just couldn't survive that way, at least not if you were really trying to make it into a massive business. Very, very keen observations, and a lot of that resonates with me. And I will also say I miss Zach Key for covering the Colts because he was the ultimate. I still say his series on Luck. The podcast series is like one of my favorite of content of all time. It's so good. And that was one of the. I think it was the first, like, real narrative podcasts 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 and the Athletic where you could say, okay, Zach is incredible. He should not be. We should. 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 Keeper is such a shame. So what's happening all across the country, and you just plug them 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 am a Colts person. All I want is. Is to read about the Colts. If you had Stephen Holder and Zach Kefer in the beginning, like those two of the best doing just that one thing. You know, fans were. The Colts, fans were spoiled. But it. Then you have a, you know, Anthony Richardson gets injured and he stinks for a few years or whatever happens, and nobody's reading it anymore, and you're like, all right, we got. We got some of the best journalists in the country, and they're sort of writing for nobody. We've got to figure this out. I thought that's how it worked, but it. It's really nice to get the. The validation where. That's how it worked. Steve, you know, athletic, obviously, huge brand name. Everyone knows. And like, you move 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 stu. In a startup working on Mantle. How did this all come to be? So I, I had 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 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 the New York Times felt similar, that we would have a conversation and then we, you know, about something we wanted to go do and, okay, let's think about it, let's talk about it tomorrow, let's talk about it next week. Let's get 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. Then. Whereas when the Athletic was a startup, 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 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 Brett Montgomery. Alexis founded Reddit and runs a venture firm, 77 6, and Brent was the guy who came up with Pawn Stars and created that show and then built a huge empire in the, in the content space and created the Golden Auctions TV show that's on, you know, was on Netflix for, for three seasons. And so those two guys had this idea they had 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 want to do something that's going to force me to move fast. And so where do you move faster than a startup that has no employees, no business plan, nothing? And you just got to come up with it from the start as, you know, solo entrepreneur at the time. So 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 certainly it's not genetic 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 do it in an area that I was spending time and money on, already just felt like, these are the two guys I want to work with. They've been incredibly successful. I like the idea and I certainly like the space. 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 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 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 stuff like that. And certain people are really good at working in the 0 to 1, 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, and I thought, okay, like, 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, startup at that level. You know, before day one and it proved to be kind of 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 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 of 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 had somebody always watching me 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, I really don't think I should. Why I need to eat right. Like it's, it's not, I'm still human, but I, Everything kind of felt like you have to be working 24 7. 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, 120 hours a week and whatever and, and anybody if you, if you, if you're going to do less than that, you feel like that 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 want to push. Otherwise you're never going to 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, things I'm terrible at. When you're a founder, you don't get to say I'm not going to think about this or do this. 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 think if. If you're somebody who, who relishes that idea and gets excited about the ability to kind of touch everything and do everything and, and. And you've got something you truly believe in that you want to build, there's nothing better. But I learned pretty quickly that, that as much fun as it. As it has been is exciting. And I've never felt more pride in any job that I've ever had as I have and 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. It 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 the. The only person involved and their good days and their 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 yourself manage that? I was lucky. I, I had some friends who were doing similar things, not in the hobby, but. But restarting their own stuff. I mean, one of the benefits of working at the Athletic is it's kind of like the Bill Walsh's coaching tree 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 kind of 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. I was able to relax and 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 kind of bring people in or, you know, Ian, who has did all of our. Our product design and. And work, you know, on the app. I don't know how to code, and I don't know how to. I'm not an artist. And so, like, there's 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 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 somebody in, even if you don't have the ability to hire, can you, you know, partner with somebody or can you give an intern a job or whatever it is? And if you. 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 wasn't dealing with it in her own life. She didn't have that. You know, she would be empathetic, but not in the way that I needed. And sometimes you just like, I don't want to rehash the day, but then you get with a couple people who are doing the same thing, and you can ask that, like, how do you guys deal with this? And it felt like it was sort of, at least for me, more. More useful than just complaining. I needed a place to, like, be able to. To air my grievances. But in a way that. That was constructed, 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 want to maybe talk about you as a collector before we set up on it and dig into kind of the model you're working at on it. And obviously I want to talk about kind of 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'd 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 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 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, 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 pops and panini and, and, and donorus and leaf over the years that like, for me it's, 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 would 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, I mostly collects things that don't have a lot of financial value. 95% of the stuff in my collection, some stuff has become valuable or 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 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 following and UCLA or I went to school for sports broadcasting and part of my PC or, you know, autographed cards of, of sports broadcasters like that you're not going to 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 MLB draft was, you know, over the weekend and Rock Chalosky 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 COVID of Gravity Baseball. Like you can go get his autographs in on it products and they're going to 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 audit was buying, you see, the UCLA product well before I ever thought that this was going to 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 gymnast and, and wanted to, to, you know, I buy his brother's baseball cards all the time and wanted to, to get him some cars and well, 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 going to flip, don't have an ebay account, or at least they don't sell on their ebay account. And they are there to buy things that mean something to them. And the acquisition of it, the owning of it is the thing that's important versus the flipping of it. And 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'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 on it right now. For anyone who maybe doesn't know or hasn't bought onit 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 kind of brief the audience who might not be familiar like how on it 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 going to get a player that you don't see the school 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 it. 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 buy Bowman, you're going to be getting the best players on a handful of teams and those cards are going to be amazing and they're going to be eventually potentially really valuable. But you're going to have the 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 25 product at 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 going to end up being on the COVID of Tops Boxes and they're going to have long careers and, and many hundreds or thousands of cards. But a lot of the people who have on it cards may only ever get an onit card. They, you know, they may not go pro and this could be the only opportunity that they're going to 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 sort of bridge those, those gaps. And for some of these volleyball. You're not going to find volleyball cards if you go into an lcs, but it's important for us to create them. And so Nebraska, for instance, you know, we created cars for Nebraska women's volleyball team. It outsold a, a lot of our football teams, you know, because of 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 it proves out time and time again that if you create something, a lot of people want to buy cards, want to 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. 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, 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 complicated and every single school operates differently. It's not like, you know, you got all these NBA teams and they were all part of the CBA and they, you know, the players are part of the NBA pa, and there are rules and that 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 kind of 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 you Know, our pitch to these athletes is one for the big name athletes. You know, all of our athletes get paid, so you're going to make some money from signing your autographs being part of this set. But also if you're a Fernando Mendoza, you know, you are the quarterback, all of your, your teammates are going to get in this set too. And that there's, to me, that's, that's a powerful piece of information for these guys. Like if you say no, 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, harder to say no 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 Hoggies on the offensive line, like this gives him that ability. And then we just have to go out to all these different athletes. There's usually a clearinghouse that can help and so that we're not having to call 100 different athletes 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 you're in a position that doesn't get 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 and make some money. And so if you're able to get a couple of bucks signing autographs and be in a card set, you're going to 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 sure you know, that's going to attract people to, who aren't just IU fans that want to 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 newer company that might be less familiar than some of the bigger manufacturers. It helps a ton and gets people to pay attention in ways they wouldn't otherwise. Certainly the prospectors are looking for the guys and women that are going to go pro. And so if you're going to go buy, if you're just somebody who, who wants to hold on to these cards in the hopes that they're going to be good big pros, then you need to have the prospects in These in the, in these in the boxes. So that, that helps a lot. That said, there are a lot of people who are going to collect and they're going to 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 are certainly a lot of people who aren't looking at the checklist to see the names that are on there. But we know for the biggest names and we want them, you know, to be in the, in the honor product. And we had MLB Draft, you know, we had a handful of guys who were in the top 10 picks, including the number one overall pick, the number three overall pick are in our honor product. And that to me note, makes it that much easier to justify creating all this stuff because you just know that people are always going to 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 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 card 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 hnit, 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 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 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 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 going to be in the same consideration set, if somebody's going to say I want to go get a Fernando Mendoza autograph, Rock Jaloski 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 going to 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 thinking about now and, and it'll take time for it to, to kind of mature and to come out to, to the fans is how do we build the brand and how do we make sure people are aware 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 with, with three years of mantle and 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 trying to bring those relationships to bear so that we have the right people walking around. Fanatics Fest and the national and local car shows and that and shops that know who we are, that believe in what we're doing, that want to 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 want to 10x the hobby. I hope that they do. I app 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'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 10x 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. And it's important us to create these things that, that aren't being created, you know, team sets and sports that are not getting cards otherwise. 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 10x the hobby. Because there's going to be little boys and girls who are going to buy their, their volleyball cards who may not ever care about getting a Wendy card or they may not care now about wemby, but maybe one day they will. But now they're in the ecosystem. They're going to card shows, 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 think that's, that's what I'm hoping that we're going to 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 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 going to 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 had been working on it even before that. And I think that that's sort of been like 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 spending a lot of time thinking about our, our tone of voice, what we say, where are we going to be part of these conversations? What's the thing that on it can own that we can is authentic to us. You know, 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 going to tell you about the, the, the game. Should we be telling you about the, the, the value of the MLB draft just happened? Here's what a, a, A, you know, a Choski 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 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 going to 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 have been with the company for years or there wasn't going to 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 kind of take that, that step and say, okay, let's, let's not think about tomorrow. We got to have something every day. 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 the mantle, we got to create it. There was no brand beforehand. 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 incremental gains and what are the things that are not working that we want to change, but we're not just going to 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. 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 vacation from work for me. If I go to a card show, 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 find things for my PC. And 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 going to 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 you're, 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 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. Love that conversation. There was so much to talk about. Love the career experience, the insights, the mindset. That is what we are doing here on Passion to Profession, bringing you the entrepreneurial and operational journey of people building cool stuff in the sports card industry. Shout out Evan. Shout out ebay for sponsoring this series. Appreciate all of your support. We'll be back with another one next week. You all take care. Talk to you soon, Sam.