The most common advice given to startup founders is to identify a problem in your life and find a way to solve it. Multi-exit founder Paul Friedman has a big problem: his beloved Oakland Athletics are relocating to Las Vegas, via Sacramento.
“It's interesting how much of an impact a sports team can have on the psyche of a town,” Friedman told TechCrunch, “and when a team decides to abandon a town, it creates heartbreak. Fans have described it as a death in the family, and that death is a family member who hosted a party.”
For Oakland sports fans, this collective grief is a familiar one, which makes it all the more devastating.
The Athletics will be the third professional sports team to leave Oakland in the past five years. The NBA's Golden State Warriors relocated across the Bay Area to San Francisco in 2019, and the NFL's Raiders based in Las Vegas in 2020. So when billionaire Athletics owner John Fisher announced he was moving the team out of Oakland, fans resisted. In 2023, fans participated in a “reverse boycott” at a Tuesday night game against the Tampa Bay Rays in June. About 30,000 people watched, some wearing Kelly green T-shirts with the word “SELL” written in large letters, and chanted “Sell the team” at various points throughout the game. That fight continued into this season. Another reverse boycott took place on opening day, this time with fans gathering in the stadium parking lot to protest the move. Throughout the season, Athletics fans made statements waving “for sale” flags in the background of national television broadcasts, pressuring Coach Fisher to sell the Athletics to new owners who would value the team's 56-year history in Oakland.
Unfortunately, Friedman and his business partner, TV producer Brian Carmel, can't buy the A's. But while they might not be able to afford $1.2 billion, they figured they could start their own team. So, with a bit of bad faith, Friedman and Carmel founded an independent baseball team called the Oakland Ballers, or Oakland B's for short.
This year, the B's debuted in the Pioneer League, a professional baseball organization affiliated with MLB but, unlike minor leagues, not tied to existing MLB teams.
“What we need is a team that represents the community and provides the kind of experience that has always been provided,” Friedman said. “It doesn't necessarily have to be a complete replacement. We're never going to be an MLB team, but that doesn't mean we can't provide some of the same experience and joy that we've provided.” [the A’s] did.”
Thanks to Friedman and Carmel, there will be baseball in Oakland next year, but now the founders face a new problem: How do they attract the attention of thousands of lifelong Athletics fans to a minor league team in name only, playing in a renovated Little League field?
For Friedman, the answer is applying what he's learned building and advising startups to baseball teams. It may not sound glamorous, but it's working.
“We're approaching it very much like a startup,” he said. “We raised a $2 million seed round and we literally built the stadium from the ground up. We're also doing things that startups do, like iterating and A/B testing. We're taking a completely different approach than how sports are typically built, and we think that's going to give us a competitive advantage.”
Before he became a serial entrepreneur, Friedman was an Athletics fan. He grew up in Chicago and rooted for the White Sox, but his family moved to Oakland when he was in high school. After he started rooting for the Athletics, the Bay Area started to feel like home.
“It was really the Athletics that brought me to the Oakland community, and I met a lot of my friends there,” Friedman said. “I've lived here for 30 years, and I chose to live in Oakland. I could have moved to Palo Alto and gotten a startup job with everyone else, but I chose to raise my kids in Oakland.”
In the late 1990s, before he even earned his bachelor's degree, Friedman had already founded his first edtech startup: an admissions chatbot that answered students' questions about college. He sold that company to Hobsons and, after a few years at the edtech giant, founded Altius Education, a Series B startup that aimed to make higher education more accessible through low-cost online associate degrees. Though the startup failed, Friedman gained enough respect in the venture world to later found Entangled Group, an edtech incubator that was acquired by Guild Education.
Friedman's transition from education to baseball was a bit unexpected, but whether he was advising new edtech entrepreneurs or building stadiums on a shoestring budget, Friedman always wanted to build companies that would make the world a better place.
“Every investment or business that I've ever tried to make into an impact business, I've spent a long time trying to determine whether this is a good thing for the world, a good business,” he said. “I actually spent a long time trying to determine philosophically whether sports is good for the world. Should we be doing other things? What is the magic of sports? And I ultimately came to the conclusion that the magic of sports is how it brings communities together, especially diverse communities.”
Friedman has spent the last 30 years of his life experiencing that magic firsthand. He believes that when he rides public transportation immediately after a sporting event, he feels everyone on the train bonded by a shared love for the local team.
“Usually when you're on public transportation, people are on their phones and not talking to anyone,” he said. “But then you get on that same train after a game where your team has won, and everyone is high-fiving and hugging like family. It's the same train, the same situation, but sports creates this layer of community.”
When Friedman launches and advises startups, he tells founders to align their business motivations with their mission. He took the same approach when laying the foundation for the Ballers. His previous mission was to build technology to make education more accessible. His current mission is to give Oakland baseball fans a vibrant community and a team worth rooting for.
“We believe that by putting the fan at the center and understanding that the fan experience within the community is fundamental, you start asking yourself if you're doing the right thing for your fans,” Friedman said.
Image credit: Henry Pickavet
Willingness to experiment
Oakland Ballers games look a little different than MLB games because the Pioneer League itself is a little different.
“Believing that testing, iteration and incremental improvement is the path to a better product allows us to innovate in ways that other leagues and other teams can't,” Friedman said.
If a Pioneer League game ends in a tie, it doesn't go into extra innings. Instead, an impromptu home run derby is played to determine a winner. “It's really cool and very fan-friendly, and it gets people excited when it actually happens,” Friedman says. “Some people even start rooting for a tie at the end of the game just to see the home run derby. Experiments like this ultimately lead to a better experience.”
The Ballers recently made a big move, partnering with Fan Controlled Sports, an app that allows fans to make real-time game decisions like a manager would. That would be a disruptive move in an MLB game, but it works well in the Pioneer League.
“This shows both a willingness to experiment and a willingness to make mistakes, even in public, and an iterative approach,” Friedman said.
The Ballers did indeed live up to their word: They opened up partial ownership of the franchise to their fans, and in a fan-driven fundraising round that was oversubscribed, the team raised more than $1.235 million from approximately 2,200 people.
“One of the things I always advise startups is to get your investors aligned,” Friedman said. “For us, it's about, do the owners want the same thing? And we believe the fan-owners want the exact same thing. We want to bring joy to the fans, and we think the way to do that is by creating an amazing experience.”
Though the Ballers have yet to complete their inaugural season, the team offers a ray of hope to desperate Athletics fans who are less than a month away from being able to see their lifelong favorite team play in Oakland. The best technology challenges the status quo, and Friedman is doing just that by showing fans that they don't have to bend to the whims of billionaire sports team owners.
But it's not just tech that Friedman learned: What really focused him on his mission was living in Oakland for most of his life.
“I'm fundamentally a tech advocate and I think technology has a lot to offer most elements of the world,” Friedman said, “but there's a lot that technology can learn from Oakland.”