The Bay Area's coolest startup isn't building AI robots or self-driving taxis. It's actually a baseball team.
With his beloved Oakland Athletics planning to leave the Bay Area, serial entrepreneur Paul Friedman sought out a different kind of venture: What if he could use what he'd learned from leading edtech startups to create a baseball team worthy of Oakland? And so Friedman founded the Oakland Ballers, or Oakland Bees for short.
With the mindset of a startup founder, Friedman and co-founder Brian Karmel are taking on a huge challenge: The B's can't fully make up for the loss of an MLB team, not to mention Oakland has also lost an NBA and NFL team in the past five years, but they can build something that puts fans first and gives back to the community.