Ryan Spoon

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Spotlight:
Ryan Spoon

Former COO at Sorare and BetMGM

While success often stems from building the best solution, just as often it comes down to stumbling upon a great problem to solve. “So much of everything is timing and luck,” Spoon said.

Spoon was ‘fortunate’ enough to come of age in a world where the college athletics recruiting process revolved around phone calls–a process he experienced firsthand when he was recruited to swim for Duke. This led to his founding of beRecruited, an online recruiting platform designed to connect high school athletes and collegiate coaches.

Since then, he’s parlayed his incredible knack for timing into a 20+ year career that has included overseeing ESPN’s entry into mobile, live streaming, and fantasy football, MGM’s foray into online gaming, and the growth of startup Sorare into the leading NFT-based sports game across soccer, NBA, and MLB.

01

Focus on
Uniqueness

02

Know your
Real Competitor

03

Prioritize
Prioritization

01

Focus on
Uniqueness

While you can’t force luck, you can better position yourself to take advantage of it when a profitable problem comes along for you to solve. Whether advising billion-dollar enterprises or startups, Spoon says the one thing every organization can do to maximize their opportunities is to focus on the single thing that no one else can do.

“Too much of everything can be commoditized, and there is always someone as smart as you, if not slightly smarter. Find what makes you special. Sometimes that’s a skillset, an existing footprint, or relationships you can leverage into something more. When you can answer that question, it becomes pretty clarifying to the roadmap and the business.”

This principle applies to both organizations and individuals. By honing in on what makes one special, it can both simplify and amplify career decisions. For Spoon, it was his passion for both the competitive and business side of sports that enabled him to expand his career across social, mobile, gaming, and NFTs.

“The goal is to stay focused on matching how you spend your time professionally with how you spend your time and money personally. If you can do that, it becomes so much easier to stay focused on a North Star.”

“The key is to stay focused on matching how you spend your time professionally with how you spend your time and money personally. If you can do that, it becomes so much easier to stay focused on a North Star.”

02

Know your
Real Competitor

Spoon played a pivotal role in ESPN’s expansion from cable to digital, helping the company develop the industry’s leading sports media website, mobile app, live sports streaming service, fantasy gaming, and social media presence. Understanding what made ESPN unique–its ability to deliver an unrivaled fan experience–was key to the company’s growth.

“If you’re thinking about how to grow, you have two choices. You can optimize a customer’s existing behavior, or you can think about how to leverage new behaviors,” Spoon said.

For ESPN, this meant thinking beyond TV eyeballs and focusing on thumbs–getting fans to engage with fantasy sports, comment on social media posts, and click on videos. The switch from passive to active engagement meant that ESPN’s true competitors weren’t just Fox, NBC, or CBS, but Netflix and Fortnite.

“There are only so many hours in a day, so we needed to provide a compelling reason to spend the next 30 minutes with us. You have to constantly figure out what your user is interested in, and how you can expand your reach to provide it or be supplemental to it.”

“There are only so many hours in a day, so we needed to provide a compelling reason to spend the next 30 minutes with us. You have to constantly figure out what your user is interested in, and how you can expand your reach to provide it or be supplemental to it.”

03

Prioritize
Prioritization

Spoon believes the difference between an effective leader and a bad boss comes down to one thing: priorities. “There’s not one person on the ESPN campus who can’t recite the priorities of the company, because its president Jimmy Pitaro recites them very clearly,” Spoon said. “It doesn’t matter if you are numbers-oriented or focused on product or have great consumer intuition; your job as a leader is setting, aligning, and communicating priorities.”

Of course, that’s also the hardest part of the job. “Everyone agrees with prioritization until it’s your thing not being prioritized,” Spoon said. “Every time you make a decision, the best thing you can do is be clear, direct, and transparent about how it fits with your priorities.”

“This doesn’t mean your priorities are written in stone; it’s dangerous to say, ‘This is how it’s going to be, I’m not going to adjust.’ But it’s far more dangerous to adjust non-stop. As complicated as prioritizing can be, you can’t effectively make decisions or allocate resources without it.”

“It doesn’t matter if you are numbers-oriented or focused on product or have great consumer intuition; your job as a leader is setting, aligning, and communicating priorities.”

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