How to drive innovation internally – Jim Caruso, Elevate

This transcript has been transcribed by Riverside.fm, no edits (please excuse any errors)

Sean Callanan (00:01.252) Very happy to welcome Jim Caruso. He's the CIO, Chief Innovation Officer at Elevate. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Caruso (00:09.038) Thanks for having me, Sean. Really a pleasure to be here and excited to chat with you.

Sean Callanan (00:13.478) Yes, we caught up briefly at the LA in New Orleans to sort of have a little bit of a chat to sort of Find out what you've been doing and the sort of why I wanted to to follow up Thank you very much for Lara for helping set this up. She's done it She always does a major job getting me interviews I always start with people trying to get an understanding of how they get into the world of sports. What about yourself? How did you find your way into the world of sports?

Jim Caruso (00:38.03) Yeah, it was a long road. So not very straightforward at all. I started my career as an entrepreneur building software companies, technology platforms, both on my own, at my own startups, but also for lack of better term as an entrepreneur going into companies who had been a legacy service business and knowing that they had a pivot into technology and was usually one of the first one or two people in those scenarios. So the history of building.

All of that happened outside of sports. My early career was spent in areas like education, B2B software, compliance software, and then moved in 2010 into marketing and advertising, both on the media side. I worked in 2010 at an ad network, which I like to say was a very good time to be an ad network. Tons of digital inventory coming online.

Sean Callanan (01:19.472) Okay.

Sean Callanan (01:27.312) Yeah.

Jim Caruso (01:30.466) The ability to package up that inventory, sell it to buyers and make a healthy, healthy profit margin was the name of the game. And we had our own technology, our own ad server, and we had to build that out. saw the move into programmatic or digital media evolving into more of a programmatic and real time nature. Saw that as the next wave of innovation and joined onto a trading desk, which like the name denotes, we were trading media. were buying and selling in hundreds of milliseconds real time with

with data driving all of those decisions. Wanted to get smarter about the other side of the business, the quote unquote other side, the creative side of the business. I primarily worked on data and media and the two houses very much lived separately and still do for the most part. So I went to a creative agency called Anomaly, which was one of the top and is still top ad agencies in the world, was their first head of product, first head of technology, built out a product stack and a technology stack.

Sean Callanan (02:07.43) Mm-hmm.

Jim Caruso (02:27.532) and got to learn the creative and the content side of business from some of the best. And from there, I built out our software platform to a point where it became clear it wasn't going to grow to the scale and wasn't going to seize on the opportunity that we saw if it continued to live within an agency on its own. So we spun it out and we built out that technology platform. The company was called Apollo program, built out an agency to couple with the tech.

and sold that to Stagwell in 2022, which beget me finally coming into sports at Elevate. So like I said, it wasn't going to be a short story, but that was how I finally marked my way into sports. Huge sports fan, never had the opportunity to work at a team or a league. And this was my chance to take those two things that I were passionate about, both personally and professionally, and merge those together. And that's what sparked me joining Elevate.

Sean Callanan (03:22.08) I you know, anyone who's listening, who's bet who he's in sport, you know, knows all those steps that you that you went through, like the, you know, the rise of digital inventory programmatic coming in, why that was shifting, you know, all of the all of the changes were happening in the social media platforms that were causing that shift and continue to, to cause that shift. And then you would have also been working with and seeing a lot of brands in that space that were playing in in media space, but then also leveraging, leveraging sports. So

I think there is a lot of, if you're in the digital space, you're always gonna come across sports. But now you're at Elevate as, when I say CO, normally that's Chief Information Officer, but you're the Chief Innovation Officer. What does that role mean?

Jim Caruso (04:09.262) It was very purposeful, obviously it wasn't by accident. There's the technology component, so traditional to your point CTO. I get called that a lot. I get called a CIA. I get called a lot of names. At the end of the day, the reason we were fixated on that was because the ability for Elevate to continue to push the boundaries of what's possible inside and outside of sports as our business expands outside of sport was crucial to me coming here and to the value that I could help the

Sean Callanan (04:33.594) Mm-hmm.

Jim Caruso (04:38.658) bring to the company, into the organization. How that manifested itself was actually much more broad than just tech. Hence not being bucket into a CTO role, but really into the CIO part, which is innovating on our business model, innovating on our client channels and commercial opportunities. Yes, of course, innovating through technology and data and AI, that's the most obvious one. But I wanted to be able to have an impact across everything we were doing, not just limited to technology, but to all of our products and services.

Sean Callanan (05:08.954) And so as I sort of come back to you, again, you sort of said you're entrepreneurial, but a lot of your roles have been this entrepreneur, this internal entrepreneur and sort of, again, challenging business models, challenging the way things are done. Is that something you've always done and that's sort of real part of the core of your role now?

Jim Caruso (05:28.462) Absolutely. Yeah, that's central to what I'm doing. It's very unique opportunity for me at at elevate but as I mentioned some other places where I've been to go into an established business and again I've been on both sides as a pure play. I'm starting this company. I'm employee number one. I've got an idea How do I create product market fit for that idea? but also doing it within a company who's got hundreds of clients who's got years of expertise and

experience built up into it and being able to marry those two things together to not only think about how we transform and evolve, but how do we do so in a way that is purposeful is true to why we started in the first place. And I think that's the hardest part about a lot of this when it comes to doing it within a company. You're not, yes, innovation means new is most often equivalent with a new something new, something different, but

All of that is built on a foundation of coming from somewhere. We all have a history of doing things and coming from a certain way of doing things or using certain technologies. And there's reasons why we think we could do it better. And that's what you have to be able to bridge those two worlds together. So that's what I'm here to focus on and make sure that we're not pivoting in a way or evolving in a way that's not going to continue to maintain the essence of why Elevate existed and why it was created in the first place. But that also keeps us current with where the market is today, what our customers want, what they need from us, which

is obviously changing incredibly in a very, very rapid pace.

Sean Callanan (07:02.682) So I'd to understand some of, you know, there's a lot of people who work, you know, in the roles and have some of that entrepreneurial spirit, you know, and sometimes it might be called it, you know, being a change agent or something internally. How do you, I guess, what's the advice you give to someone that says, I want to change things, I want to change things up, or I want to see this change internally. How do you go about it? How do you, know, because you've to get buy in, you know, maybe one or two levels above. How do you go about pitching that?

that change.

Jim Caruso (07:33.612) Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one that to your point is universal. I've been challenged with that everywhere I've been at any level of the organization. I obviously wasn't always at this level early on in my career. What I found is you really need to have principles because the situations will change. The data will change. The dynamics will change. The people will change the state, right? All of those things are out of your control, right? They're uncontrollable elements of this equation.

When you have certain principles around entrepreneurship, around innovation, around change, some of the terminology used as well, you can apply those principles throughout any of those situations, regardless of what variables change. And so for me, it's been one of those has been solving a business challenge, solving a business problem, not just building technology, not just instituting new things for the sake of change. I have a better way of doing it. I bet you 20 other people think they have better ways of doing it too, right?

It's very hard to pinpoint what's right or wrong. When you start with what is a core thing that we're struggling with? Are we struggling to get better margins? Are we struggling to generate more revenue? What are those business problems that aren't being solved? And you orbit your focus and time and energy on solving those. That to me leads to a lot of opportunity.

Sean Callanan (08:52.858) I mean, and that's, I mean, that to me, that's also true innovation, because a lot of times innovation gets wrapped up in, he's the latest bright and shiny and like, he's the way we want to be doing something to be seen to be doing something. But if it's not, like you said, going back to solving a core problem, then it's really just, you know, something distracting and it's more performative innovation than actual innovation.

Jim Caruso (09:14.54) Yeah, which has a role too, right? And I try to be very purposeful splitting those things out. There's going to be, I don't love the word failures, you know, but that's like a very part of the vernacular now fail fast, you know, I ascribe it more to learning. I'm always learning something and I'm going to learn if something worked, if it worked out, we intended it to, if we didn't. And it's why I try to use more scientific words like hypothesis, right? You don't, hypothesis.

Sean Callanan (09:26.009) Mm-hmm.

Sean Callanan (09:31.12) Yeah.

Jim Caruso (09:42.478) True or false, it's not a failure, right? We thought this was going to happen. It didn't. Why? Why not? What could be done differently? Why didn't we think of that before? Was there a reason why we made a decision to do it this way versus this other way, which led to this outcome? There's so many layers to this of trying to understand where that and how that process works and the ability to accept that it's not going to be a straight line, but it is going to be this very iterative learning and recycle and repeat is really, I think what

you have to another one of those principles that you have to hold on to because it's not going to be, Hey, I came up with this great idea. We it's, know, it's very rarely does that happen on the, on the first try and a clean line.

Sean Callanan (10:23.366) So the first bit is, we've sort of been talking about, I guess, changing in mindset and changing in process and looking for improvements, which again, don't need to be technical, don't need a new tech rollout to be able to do that. But then there is that side of the tech space, especially with AI is changing so quickly. What was your sort of coming into Elevate and they're looking at what they're doing and saying, hey, what can we do to take advantage of this opportunity?

Jim Caruso (10:52.268) It's a great point. I always go back to one of examples early on in my career and then we'll get to the AI bit. I was working in a test prep, so preparing people for standardized testing and we had these systems and you know, there were problems I started solving with spreadsheets, right? I didn't, wasn't building software. I wasn't building technology. I was sitting there going, this function could be done so much better if we automated this and because I'm not, I wasn't a coder or developer at the time. I stopped doing that after college.

Sean Callanan (10:56.784) Hmm.

Jim Caruso (11:19.022) I say, I can solve this with spreadsheets and we can make this system better and more efficient. Right. So it doesn't need to be, Oh, I'm not technical. don't Innovation can happen anywhere to your point change can happen anywhere. doesn't have to be limited to technology. I have numerous of the examples of that, but, to get to the, to the elevate bit. When I got here, I took a step back and said, before we start even thinking about AI, which quite frankly, yeah, I started here a little over two years ago. Even if I had been doing that first, it wouldn't have mattered. It's changed.

Sean Callanan (11:47.461) No, yeah.

Jim Caruso (11:48.404) so much in 24 months, let alone 24 hours that it was almost there, it would have been irrelevant anyway. But I started with going back to what is it that we need to do from a data standpoint? Because how I like to think of it on a continuum of getting all the access to information and data to making that information and data usable, you have to have both sides, but if you don't have the right data, no matter how great your AI is, it's not going to give you any relevant information. It's going to be giving you nonsense answers.

So we started out to ground ourselves in collecting data from fans, brands, and properties and putting that into one platform, cleaning it, connecting it, getting it to a place where then we could start to dream up, well, how do we make this usable? It's not going to be usable for the same person in the same way, depending on what job you have, what role you have, what team you work for, so on and so forth. And that was the first step. The second step was to build out technology to power and harness the value that's unlocked within that data.

And then what AI has done and how I think about it is it's the last mile. It truly is the last step to saying, Hey, for years we were told big data, you have to have the most data. have to hoard my data. You have your data. And everyone did that, but they realized very quickly that it became incredibly cumbersome to the point of almost sometimes being not valuable at all to how well that data, if it wasn't actionable and accessible. And most people aren't.

web developers, they're not data scientists. don't have, they don't, they're not going to sit there and write complicated data queries and hope that they could take advantage of all this data that we have and make it valuable. AI is that last mile that goes from, I've got a dashboard or a bunch of charts that I as a human need to make sense of. And I need to try to process as much data as I can put on a browser, right. Or a mobile phone in front of me to I've got exponentially more data than that. And now all I need to do is ask a question.

Sean Callanan (13:39.266) Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jim Caruso (13:45.996) And I can get back an answer that will help me decipher all that data I can't see behind the scenes into a very distinct, simple, clear answer.

Sean Callanan (13:56.518) mean, because that's the thing we sort of, I feel like there was a 10 years we sort of went through the big data era, everyone just went, hi, we've got to collect all our data. But then there was a little, well, what do we do? What you know, there was that overwhelm of I've got all the data. And then you're right, you, you, you had to then hire the right people to be able to, to mine that data to find some insights, whether it's a, you know, a ticketing list that is more, you know, has a high propensity to buy or

or here's high value customers that are engaging with us that we haven't really engaged with. was a lot of effectively you get the right person. You would get lots of great insights, but it was still relatively skill-based and resource-based for an industry overall that struggles to get the right resources or have the right people to be able to do that.

Jim Caruso (14:44.642) Yeah. And, and I think it's acutely accurate what you're saying in sports. It's also outside of sports, no matter how big of an organization or how small you, you as a business person have hundreds of things you're trying to get done and all these questions you're trying to get answered and information you're trying to get to the people. And you're only as good as the data that you've got. And for far too long, to your point, the ability to have all the data wasn't the issue was how do I, how do I get it fast enough?

And in a form that's actually usable enough for me, which is very different than you versus someone else. And you think about all the different functions of a department or a team in the different departments within it. Person in finance need data in a very different way and a very, you know, than someone in ticketing. So,

Sean Callanan (15:30.81) So, I mean, initially that first piece, cause you're looking at that 30,000 foot view of all the data and making sure you're getting the right data in, then I'm a former geek, I was a former developer, coder and designer. Like that architecture piece is really important because you can't decide how all of these different users and use cases will be required. And you're also trying to future-proof it. You're like, don't know what will be needed, but.

getting that data architecture right as far as one getting the data in but then, you know, getting a house in the right in the right manner so it could be accessed by the right things was that I guess the first bit which you know, that's none of that's new tech that's just good structure I guess it comes from your you know, experience being in building products, having them scalable all those kinds of things.

Jim Caruso (16:17.26) Yeah, that's right. There is no right answer. But again, it's one of those things where you also are trying to do that in a way where we're answering specific business problems. We have the advantage, as I kind of alluded to it, elevate of having dozens, probably hundreds of clients, right? That we could draw on and say, these were the things that we're looking for that we couldn't deliver or that we did deliver, but it was, it took an exorbitant amount of time and energy to do so. What exists out there?

Sean Callanan (16:35.814) Mm-hmm.

Jim Caruso (16:46.222) The other advantage, and I think this is very true of people and it's why I always tell, especially people younger in their careers, there's gonna become a time and a place where any experiences you've had, whether they were in, I'm not in sports, but I said, don't focus on that. Focus on what am I learning? How can I get immersed in whatever industry or whatever sector I'm in? You are going to use that down the road. When I got to Elevate, I had not worked in ticketing. I didn't know what, right, ASP, I didn't know some of these acronyms.

felt like the same way I did 15 years ago when I got into advertising, I didn't know what a CPM was. I'm Googling what a CPM, you know, I didn't know this terminology, right? When you boil it down, what turns out is ticketing today when you're talking about managing primary, secondary inventory across brokers is very similar to the work I was doing at the ad network 15 years ago. We were packaging up primary inventory. We were pricing it.

Sean Callanan (17:22.491) Yeah.

Sean Callanan (17:35.621) Yeah.

Jim Caruso (17:39.798) reading the market, reading, understand the dynamic market dynamics, setting floors, setting ceilings. I built, you know, the same product 15 years ago in advertising and then selling that and distributing it, right? To ad exchanges and to the Manside platform, same way we're just, you know, and I was able to draw on all that experience and apply it to our ticketing. So it goes back to your point of being able to do this in a way where a,

You have to have a broad lens because there's no right one right way to do it. But what there are is best practices and certain things that we were able to do. Yes. With the data. The second point I'll make is around AI and it's another area where this is changing because it used to be, again, I need to know SQL or some programming language to be able to know how to structure this data. And I sounds like we both had the same, you know, some of the same experience. I remember in college doing database normalization and all this stuff. mean, it's right.

Sean Callanan (18:29.273) Yep.

Jim Caruso (18:31.072) Now you can tell AI, write code to help perform a SQL function that can do X, Y, and Z. That's really powerful, And so it's still very important that you have your underlying technology and infrastructure and architecture set up properly, for sure. But I think it's changing the game in terms of how that's going to be manipulated and how much work can be offloaded onto AI to do that work versus developers.

Sean Callanan (18:39.759) Yeah.

Sean Callanan (18:55.75) Well, that was the bit that I wanted to discuss. You know, I was lucky enough to hear the guys from OpenAI at the MBA tech summit and just talking about the level of what, know, chat, GBT and Claude are as right now is effectively maybe a little bit more than a junior programmer if you're giving them the right instructions. But like you said before, there it's get, know, in the next six months, they'll be, you know, 10 percentile or top one percentile in 12 months time.

it really accelerates the opportunities from a development point of view when you've got that as a developer resource. You still need the right people to provide the guardrails to say, or get another agent to be writing test cases and those kinds of things. But the speed of development, like you said, if you'd had started this project two years ago, like the tools that you've now got with AI assisted development and all the plugins that happen,

Like it's just so much quicker from a development point of view.

Jim Caruso (19:54.816) Yeah, it's speed and it's knowledge. think when people talk about AI and you talk in these very abstract terms, large language, how large? They're very, they're massive data. How much data terabytes of data, you know, you read these statistics, open AI was trained on as much data as the equivalent amount of data that it would have taken someone a hundred thousand years to read. mean, these numbers are very, very, very hard to comprehend as a human.

Sean Callanan (20:04.26) Mm. Yeah.

Jim Caruso (20:24.878) when you're talking in those extremes. And I think that's where people sometimes forget that there is absolutely what you were saying, the human element of, even if I ask AI to do this, how can I interpret? The power of that though is exponential. And what I mean by that is the power for me to go to you and say, hey Sean, how have you done this before? You tell me. And then I say, okay, I think that's a good idea. I'm going to take part of what you said and part of what I know and put that together. That's two people, right? You go and you say,

Sean Callanan (20:52.335) Yeah.

Jim Caruso (20:54.446) AI, you help me using a bot, whatever it might be, and say, hey, can you tell me how you would go about programming this? It's drawing on 200 million developers who've done that, like some ridiculous amount in terms of, and then it's telling you, and then you still have to do what I would have done if it was just the two of us, right? But you're drawing from such a vast wealth of insight and experience that humans just simply can't do on their own.

Sean Callanan (21:06.362) Yeah.

Sean Callanan (21:13.936) Yeah.

Sean Callanan (21:21.798) And it must, I mean, I know it excites me, but it must excite you, especially as that, you know, entrepreneur, I want to make change that, you know, learn lessons fast, if we're not saying fail fast, because you can pop up a new interface, a new way to build it and go, oh, here's a minimum, know, minimum viable product. And it's built in two days. And it's like 80 % there. And you can, and then you can put it to someone internally or a client say, is this what you wanted? Did you want this as an interface? Is this a

you know, a dashboard that is useful for you. And then they go, yes. And they're like, oh, cool. Now we can put in that extra effort to polish it off and get it to the level you want. But the speed at which you can build it is amazing.

Jim Caruso (22:02.222) 100%, one of those other things that I've learned and I learned quite, you know, very honestly, the hard way with some of this is I do believe in that maximum. It's very hard for people to tell you exactly what they want. And if they don't see anything, if they can't touch it, if they can't use it. And if you sit down and you ask someone to say, give me a requirement, I would like this interface to do X, and Z and you design it based on what they said, guess what? Chances are what you come back with that first. And they're like, that's not what I meant at all.

Sean Callanan (22:30.148) Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Caruso (22:31.318) And you lose sight of that as a technologist, as someone who's done development, right? Because you're so immersed in it. You're like, well, how you told me these things, like that's how you would design. They're like, no, I was just telling you what I thought or how I interpreted. So the ability to do what you said, to be able to turn those cycles from weeks or days to hours, right? Is transformative and so incredibly helpful to the product development life cycle.

Sean Callanan (22:55.812) Yeah, absolutely. And that's why we're seeing so many things, you so many new products pop up. The other piece from a, I guess, a data architecture point of view, and as a concern with some people in the AI space is how do you protect, you know, how do you protect your data? Like there is, you know, we've gone through, you know, years of data leaks, whether they be, you know, Facebook and, and those kinds of things, and just the traditional data. But now, you know, like you said,

AI and AI models are consuming as much data as they can. so, know, fan data, your fans data, your customer data is something you want to protect. So what are some of the guardrails that you put around what you've done to sort of protect that data?

Jim Caruso (23:39.32) Yeah, it's a great question. The two things that we focus on are having our own data sets, unique data sets that are proprietary to Elevate, and then being able to develop on top of those. So we're not just reliant on whatever's out there. The other is obviously being very careful and constructing the right setup for us to use these models. And so when I talk about us using AI and training, we want to really be able to

take in the data that we're using and layered on top of an LLM and train that LLM and have that self-contained within our ecosystem. Can we prevent everyone, you know, from going out and using ChatGPT in the company? Like probably not, right? But when it comes to our data sets and the ability to use it, it's quite different. And we do very much take a pride in having done all that, architected all that, and have that behind the scenes here within our own.

within our own tech ecosystem as opposed to just relying on putting our stuff out there into open models or open ecosystems.

Sean Callanan (24:42.47) Yeah, and that's the danger. that's what either security officers or CTOs are trying to say, no one use these products because someone will take a customer list and say, load it into a model and ask it a question. And then, that data, that's just like leaving that data out on the internet. And so that's one of the dangers of that space, which is why you sort of need systems that provide it and policies around it to do it. So what have been…

What have been some of your, I guess, learnings in building out the platform?

Jim Caruso (25:18.022) so many. Some of the highlights I would say are the fact that these are very, very nascent technologies. And I think it's very easy for me and others to get excited about using those. And it goes back to one of the points I said earlier, which is no matter how much I try, I have to continually remind myself that we need to stay grounded in how all this is going to help solve people's problems today.

not in the future and it's easier said than done, right? Because you're looking at these things, you're like, my God, I can do this, I can do that. This is so transformative. But at the end of the day, you're talking to a company who's well within Elevate. What I mean by that is that's well established, that's got clients, that's got opportunities, and we have to make sure we're helping solve those most crucial use cases. So it's very much a prioritization, I would say, is the biggest learning. We've had to work really, really hard to prioritize because we do have both ends of the spectrum. We have…

Sean Callanan (25:47.813) Mm-hmm.

Jim Caruso (26:12.418) the need to service the business that we have today in a more efficient manner. And we've got people who absolutely are excited and coming to me with ideas of, can we do this, Jim, and this, and I want to be able to do that. And I've got to balance both of those and be able to prioritize properly. The second is these things tend to take a lot longer, but then happen a lot faster than you think. And that's saying, I didn't come up with that, but that's one of those things that always rings true. People go, hey, this is taking forever.

Sean Callanan (26:21.978) Yeah, yeah.

Jim Caruso (26:41.614) I can't, you when are we going to get this and how long is it much more take to build it? And then all of a sudden it, it clicked and it's like, Oh my God, it's here. Wow. And then you start seeing things light up. And so it's these very long cycles of like patients, patients, patients, patients. then, wow, we turned this thing on. You know, we were talking to Superbowl. That was where we had announced some of this publicly. And since then it's been tremendous in terms of the response, but it took us two years to get here. Right. People were going, Hey, Jim, you just started. You're, I said, no, I started.

Sean Callanan (26:55.61) Yeah.

Jim Caruso (27:09.72) Two years ago, you just announced it now, but this doesn't get built overnight, right?

Sean Callanan (27:16.1) Yeah, but again, if you look at development and product cycles of five years ago, 10 years ago, it is an exceptionally, you know, it's exceptionally quick in build, but then also those like that iterative and those added features that you're going to be playing around with as use cases come in, it's just going to be far quicker. I mean, we're just more, I think we're more impatient now and we want things quicker, we want things faster, but like the development time is actually quite short comparatively, if you look back, you know, to five to 10 years ago.

Jim Caruso (27:46.254) Yeah, we were ambitious. We decided to start developing four applications, which really are their own businesses, to be quite honest. But each of those are standalone companies or multiple. In some cases, one of our applications is taking the place of three standalone, you know, applications and companies that power those applications. So we were ambitious. But in terms of total time, to your point with each other, yeah, absolutely was condensed. You know, I've built.

A lot of products, again, some similar, but in different areas, in different industries, and took me much, much longer than it did here. Then the ability, I think now, to build on that foundation and add things is so much faster because of AI, right? Now that I've got this underlying foundation, now that I've got this data, now that I've got the real building blocks of it in place, I can iterate on it much faster. And that's exciting. That to me is exciting.

Sean Callanan (28:42.434) As much as AI can do a lot with a little, you still need a team in place. What do you look for for people in your team to really keep pushing innovation and I guess even keep pushing you and keep pushing the product in the right direction?

Jim Caruso (28:58.318) It's such a balance. So I look for two sides of the coin and I will obviously, you know, not surprising to hear like I focus much more on the let's go out and sell this. This is new. This is, you know, how do I keep pushing and pushing and pushing forward? But you know, that's it. I'm still only, I still have one perspective on that. And so I want other people who are also domain experts and I'm hoping that they can help me and help me find and identify those use cases. And we're really lucky that we have such strong business and leadership.

Sean Callanan (29:12.55) Mm-hmm.

Jim Caruso (29:28.406) business leadership and ownership in these different functional areas. I didn't run an experience business. have some team of people who ran, you know, who run corporate experience. They know everything about that. You meet with them and you're like, my God, are you, these are the things that you're working on. This is the challenges you have. Like how do we solve this together? The other side is looking for people who can make sure that I'm not going too far out in front, right? That can actually solve the problems and deliver the solutions. And so, you know, that's, that's where I have a great team and a great foundation of people who can help to.

execute the things that we have built and execute on them and get those learnings and be very measured and set client expectations about these are really cool things, but they're new, they're nascent, they're untested, and these are the things that are more proven and tested and how do we mix those two things together to get you what you need. And then from a tech, you know, that's more on a service side and the strategic elements of it, but on the technology side, very similar, right? I want to do everything. I want to do it fast. I want to do it now.

I have people, you know, and the product team that I work with and I've worked with a couple of these people for a very long time, you know, are really good at staying grounded, making sure we're hitting deadlines, make sure we're timelines and going through the daily, you know, paces with all that to get us to successful releases.

Sean Callanan (30:41.958) So you mentioned, know, Elevate was your first foray into the world of sports and you spent two years both learning the business, learning the industry, learning the technology and the data and analyzing data. That's where you come from, looking at the data, what's the data tell you? What are some of the key trends you're seeing in the sports entertainment world that have opened your eyes up to something you didn't know, but also, you know, now that they're starting to come to the surface, now you've got this, you've got sort of epic in place.

Jim Caruso (31:11.064) Yeah. Two things. One, I would say I had an idea of, but, it was one of the reasons I was excited that quite honestly, joined Elevate and build out Epic and what we're doing, which is a lot of the data analytics. I'm a huge Moneyball fan. like that was one of things that I gravitated to, but it's all focused on, not all, majority of it is focused on what's happening on the field, what's happening on the, and, I understand that, right? I'm paying companies or teams are paying billions of dollars for.

Players, want to optimize performance, optimize the on-field product, which is what their product is, right? It's what's happening in the players' performance on the field. I think there's a massive opportunity to take that from the outside, you know, from the inside out and also think about what's happening and how do I power performance around what's not happening in the stadium, what's outside my four walls. And it's no different than when I used to talk to brands and marketers about, you can optimize what's happening in your ecosystem. For most often, that's your website or brick and mortar store.

Sean Callanan (32:05.094) Mm-hmm.

Jim Caruso (32:06.382) as much as you want, but at some point you've got to figure out how to get people in there in the first place. that off it's harder to do, but it's just as if not more important, right? But it's a hell of lot easier to go. Well, how do I optimize when someone's on my website, I'm to do everything I can to get them to go from the homepage to the checkout, right? It's easier. You're in control of it. lot harder to go. How do I get a million people who I don't know anything about to come to my, my site in the first place? I think it's the same thing with teams. can measure everything down to, you know,

Sean Callanan (32:17.083) Yeah.

Jim Caruso (32:36.544) muscle movement, mean the metrics that you can do when everything's in your control in your stadium on your pitch very different than how do get people into the stadium in the first

Sean Callanan (32:47.526) Absolutely, absolutely. and that is, you know, I've discussed a lot that whole moneyball, you know, outside the pitch off the court, you know, that's just as fascinating, both, you know, getting people into the stadium and then one who in the same, what is that experience? You know, how can that? How can you deepen that fandom? And then it comes down to what does what does that deepening of fandom mean? You know, what's that revenue tweak from that? And sort of and seeing seeing some of those changes. So

Jim Caruso (33:14.19) That's right.

Sean Callanan (33:16.934) Like for me, like I love seeing more of that data come out because like here I am helping teams with digital and what they're doing in the fan engagement space. And it's like, hey, all of this work does, you know, does relate to getting that fan from the couch or from, know, from the bar, you know, to a closer tie to the, to the team. And it can be, and it is financial reward for the team.

Jim Caruso (33:39.502) Yeah, and if not, you know, that's okay too. If I'm in Premier, I have 38 matches a year. I'm in NFL, I have 16, you know, really eight, nine home games a year. That there's a other, other 355 days a year, right? Where these fans and these consumers are spending their time and energy. How do I tap into that? How do I leverage that? How do I use this emotional connection that is so deeply rooted with them and between my brand or my team and, and and these consumers, how do I monetize that really?

to me really, really fascinating and exciting opportunity to think much bigger than just to your point, not just on the field, but also, you know, yes, managing payroll, like all those places where analytics are, are, are right, like super turbocharged, think about it more broadly outside of outside of those areas.

Sean Callanan (34:25.51) You spoke about your challenge now as a challenge of prioritization, balancing things that clients now want to, know, a lot of cool ideas you're potentially coming up with that, again, will potentially solve problems. What excites you about what you're developing and what the next 12 to 18 months looks like?

Jim Caruso (34:44.614) Probably excites me the most is that while these applications and these new things that we build are definitely additive and pushing out to other areas, we're now building on a foundation. We're not starting from scratch. We're not starting from zero. We've got this backbone now of both data, technology, and AI that we've learned and trained and built and pressure tested and sold and have paying clients using a lot of this. So for me, we're just in the beginning stages of this. But what comes next is using all those…

Actually, a point you made earlier, right? Using all of those learnings to say, okay, well now when we go build the next four apps or whatever it is, we can do so in a much more intelligent, measured, and knowledgeable way.

Sean Callanan (35:26.662) Absolutely. Well, Jim, I really appreciate catching up again. I want to get to the SportsGeek Closing Five. Do you remember the first sports event you ever attended?

Jim Caruso (35:33.89) Sure, let's do it.

Jim Caruso (35:38.136) First sports event I ever attended would have been a New York Jets game at the old Meadowlands Stadium, growing up about 10 minutes outside of there in New Jersey.

Sean Callanan (35:48.27) terrific. And you probably been to a bunch of sports events in your time. Do you have a favorite food memory or a go-to food at a sports event?

Jim Caruso (35:56.098) Go to food is probably popcorn. Just like, yeah, just like easy snacks. Yeah.

Sean Callanan (36:02.682) That's all right. And what's the first app you open in the morning?

Jim Caruso (36:07.98) Unfortunately, probably the mail app to check my email. Elevate is now a global company. We have people, you the sun never sets on us anymore. There's people all around the world working at Elevate. So no matter what time or time zone I'm in or when I wake up, there's something going on.

Sean Callanan (36:24.806) Yeah, it is it is about the blessing and a curse when you're in a global company and that stuff stuff can happen for 24 hours, but also means you're getting emails at all kinds of times of the night. Is there someone that you follow that they might be might be someone on social or an author or someone like that, that the podcast listeners should give a follow on why?

Jim Caruso (36:28.909) That's right.

I'm

Jim Caruso (36:46.432) One of the biggest business and technology influences in books I've read is Ben Horowitz, and he exists outside of sports. He's a venture capitalist. What those guys do and what they've done for a long time is so fascinating to me as a technologist and entrepreneur. And I would, I don't know what he's up to these days, but I would say looking at some of his books and some of his essays are really, really compelling business learnings and about entrepreneurship for sure.

Sean Callanan (37:11.782) And especially that piece, you know, sort of we talked about entrepreneurship of the ability, the ability to an assessor model or assess tech to see what changes or what, you whether it's going to be a hit or a miss. mean, they're not, they're not batting 1000, but they have to, they have to have that thinking model to look over something. And it's a, it's that problem, you know, looking at the way they tackle a problem or assess something is, yeah, I find it that kind of stuff fascinating as well.

Jim Caruso (37:38.958) Yeah, no, listen, no one's going to, to your point, bad, whatever, you know, saying you want to use bad a thousand, whatever, right? Like you're to hear a lot more nos than yes. Like all of the, all of the settings, right? But they're all true and you have to have the ability to stick with it. And the ability not to give up is probably one of the biggest assets you can have as you're thinking about your, to your point, any form of entrepreneurship.

Sean Callanan (38:00.772) Yeah. And the last question I always ask people is what social media platform is your MVP?

Jim Caruso (38:07.392) I am not on social media. I don't have a Facebook account. I pretty much stay off of it. So I would say nothing along those lines as it relates to social, but I will spend a lot of time on like a Duolingo trying to learn, brush up on my Italian and get better there. So that's the closest it comes to social media, I guess.

Sean Callanan (38:24.846) Yep. That's all right. What's your streak at?

Jim Caruso (38:31.214) Pretty good. think I'm up to like 200 and something days. I'm committed. I'm all in. I'm committed to it. That's right. It does. That leaderboard makes you motivated. That and the Peloton, you know, between those two are good ways to keep me going.

Sean Callanan (38:34.81) There you go. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Gamification works. We see it in action.

Sean Callanan (38:50.63) Nah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Jim, thank you very much for coming on the pod. If people do want to reach out to you, ask other questions, say thank you for what they've learned. What is the best way to do so? it LinkedIn or is it you know, other ways can people reach out to you?

Jim Caruso (39:06.094) Yeah, LinkedIn or email me [email protected]. Happy to answer, chat on anything at all.

Sean Callanan (39:15.888) Thanks very much and hopefully I catch up with you soon when I'm next in the US.

Jim Caruso (39:20.334) That'd be great. Thanks again, Sean. Really appreciate your time.