Lessons from Building a Billion‑Dollar Startup in Sport
With over 25 years in global sports—co‑founding ONE Championship, helping launch The Snow League into China, working on the Commonwealth Games, and now building EPIC—I’ve written these articles to share practical insights for the next generation of sport builders and leaders.
Building a billion‑dollar startup in sport is less about a single big decision and more about surviving a thousand small ones. As co‑founder and first CEO of ONE Championship, and later as a leader and advisor on projects ranging from snow sports in China to pickleball’s EPIC platform, I’ve seen how fragile and powerful a sports startup can be. The journey has yielded a few lessons I wish I’d known earlier.
Lesson one: mission beats mechanics. Early in any property—whether combat sports in emerging markets or a new amateur world championship in pickleball—everything is volatile: regulations, venues, capital, even rules. What holds the team together is a mission that feels bigger than a balance sheet. For me, that’s been about creating opportunities: giving athletes a global stage, opening new doors for host cities, and building communities around movement and competition. A clear mission attracts talent, partners, and fans who will stay with you through the difficult seasons.
Lesson two: build systems, not heroics. Startups love all‑nighters and last‑minute saves, but that behaviour doesn’t scale. As properties grow—from one event to a calendar of tours, from one host country to several—you need playbooks for everything: event operations, safety and governance, content workflows, crisis response, and commercial approvals. My time with the Edmonton Elks, a historic community‑owned football club, reinforced that structure is not the enemy of passion; it’s what protects it. If you have weak structure and processes, you have a weak organization.
Lesson three: evolve your role as the company evolves. At the beginning, you are the chief evangelist, sales lead, and problem‑solver. As the property expands into new markets and new sports, you have to become a recruiter, culture carrier, and eventually a strategic guide more than a day‑to‑day operator. Founders who cling to their “startup self” often become the bottleneck just when the organization most needs them to empower others.
Ultimately, sport is a people business disguised as an entertainment business. When you invest in relationships—with athletes, coaches, governments, sponsors, host cities, and your own staff—you build a reservoir of trust that carries you through setbacks, cancellations, and market shocks. That trust, more than any valuation headline, is the true indicator that you’ve built something built to last.