Social Influencer Series | Founder at Greenfly and Former Major League Baseball Player
It’s month one. I just started my dream job. Seriously - I’m still pinching myself! Somehow I found Greenfly, or maybe it was Greenfly that found me?
Now I find myself surrounded by an amazing team that is working with the largest organizations in sports and media around the world. After 20+ years in sports, media and technology I found a company that brings all of those three things together. (Greenfly on LinkedIn)
Shawn Green is the company’s co-founder. He is a former Major League Baseball player and two-time All-Star. His incredible career spanned 15 seasons with four MLB teams: the Toronto Blue Jays, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the New York Mets. He holds or shares seven major league records including: most home runs in a game (4), most extra base hits (5), most runs scored in a game (6), and most total bases in a game (19).
Shawn is also the author of The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH, is actively involved in several charities, and is a regular keynote speaker at sports tech, charity and business events.
TEDx Talk with Shawn Green
If you didn’t already know, that In addition to being a major sports fan - I am also a pretty big fan of our founder and had the pleasure of sitting down with him at our offices in Santa Monica to talk about the idea for Greenfly and its roots, all the way back to Shawn’s time at Stanford University. The vision he had for connecting athletes and their content to fans through new emerging digital and broadcast channels is exactly where short-form content lives today. Now the world’s biggest leagues (and brands) have the ability to capture moments in real time and share that experience with players, teams and broadcasters - for authentic real time fan engagement.
Here is a snapshot of what he had to say:
You were ahead of the curve with the importance of short-form content to sports leagues (as well as entertainment brands and sponsors). What was the catalyst for you to launch Greenfly?
When I first started working on the prototype for Greenfly about 10 years ago, the concept was a small subset of where we are today as a business. This evolution is more the rule than the exception with tech startups. I was looking to leverage my relationships in sports to build an “expert network” of sports personalities who would create video commentary for sporting events, often with real-time reactions.
The idea was for this network to consist largely of current and former athletes, but it was also to include sports doctors and trainers; front office personnel; officials; celebrity fans', etc. The original Greenfly software technology that facilitated the connection between those who wanted content (broadcasters and sports-centric shows) and the experts, who had our app on their phones. In short, the original idea was all about prompting relevant experts to create short videos to be used on air or online for sporting events. Ultimately, I hoped to create a monetization opportunity around it for the experts.
Back when I played in Toronto, there was one “sideline reporter” that would pull guys aside and ask us if we could answer a few questions when batting practice was over. Everyone said yes to Fergie because he handed us a $50 bill. The thought was to replicate this on a big scale through technology.
Who was the first customer? What was their primary use case and experience with the platform?
Greenfly’s first paying customer was CBS/Turner for March Madness in 2015. At this point, Daniel Kirschner, my co-founder, has been the CEO for 9 months and we had rebuilt the platform. Our engineering team was a team of 3 superstar technology experts. The original “big-3” are all still with us today: Marshall Greer (CTO), Josh Fredericks, and Steve Baker.
For the tournament, we brought on about 100 celebrities and former athletes relevant to the competing schools and it was a great success. They used content both online and on-air and were able to do some really innovative things, like put a “pep talk” for Iowa from Tom Arnold into the halftime show and get a remote video from Christian Laetner talking about Duke before the championship game. And they even added a Coca-Cola sponsorship to it.
This event was a transformative moment for Greenfly, though, for a different reason. At that same time, LeBron and Maverick Carter had just launched their media company, Uninterrupted. Their early initiative was to build their own network of sports stars and prompt them to create first-person videos. They had a partnership with Bleacher Report, who was owned by Turner, and thus they had visibility into our tech since Turner was using us for March Madness.
Maverick reached out to us wanting to license our tech. At first, we were hesitant because we viewed them as competitive, but then the lightbulb went off and we realized there was more opportunity for us to build a SaaS business and power everyone else’s network than try to create our own network. This was a monumental shift for us.
How has that evolved now with the work Greenfly has been doing with all of the world's major leagues?
Once we decided to power the networks of other entities, we realized that we needed to enable these partners to do more than just request videos from their networks, they also wanted to send content to those people to post onto their own social media channels. Social media, particularly Instagram and Twitter, were exploding and sports leagues realized they needed a content strategy for their athletes. Not only did the athletes have much bigger audiences in aggregate than the team and league social channels, but it was also clear that the algorithms favored content posted by the athletes.
So, we enabled leagues and teams to start sending individual photos and videos to their players. This initiative was very successful and was used by quite a few leagues, including MLB and NBA. But then, based on our insider knowledge with these leagues, we realized we needed to facilitate a firehose of content through Greenfly rather than just one asset at a time.
We created a gallery system that enabled leagues to set up individual galleries for every player, which gave the athletes content that was just for them and the opportunity to decide for themselves which content they wanted to use on their social channels. MLB had a huge impact on our business at this moment because they needed us to help them power the collection of this content from their staff and thier photographers at every game played.
Now, most leagues around the world have a workflow around the capture, collection, and distribution of this content and Greenfly is their core infrastructure. Leagues also needed us to connect to the other tools they use for their content, and we integrate with dozens of them. So now, all of the short-form content for a league is ingested into Greenfly and is then routed wherever it needs to go - to athletes; to teams; to sponsors; to broadcast partners, and even directly to mobile apps.
From a player perspective - how important is short-form content to their brand building, fanbase and "business"?
From a player perspective, short-form content is a crucial part of their lives. Every athlete playing today has a social presence and understands how important it is for their career opportunities. This wasn’t the case when we first started because many of the older players viewed social media as a distraction having not grown up with it and the social networks weren’t nearly as powerful as they are today. Nowadays, many professional athletes have three teams: their agents for handling contracts and endorsements, their financial advisors, and their marketing folks to help with their social strategy and fan engagement. In order to optimize endorsements and other off-the-field dollars, athletes need to have a strong social footprint.
As the founder - what is your vision for what Greenfly means (and will mean) to the world of short-form content?
In the world of sports (as well as with our other partners in media, entertainment, events, and brands), Greenfly is the backbone - the core infrastructure for managing short-form content across the enterprise and with external partners.
The destination for this content will continually change. New social networks will rise (as TikTok has over the past few years). Leagues are also now looking at new ways to monetize this content through their own apps that have a paywall. Our role at Greenfly is to be at the center of this content and remain agnostic to where and how the content ultimately reaches the fan. Whatever our partners want to do with their content, we will be there to facilitate the ingestion, distribution, and monetization of it.
Boardroom March 2023
This article captures the essence of Greenfly.
Speed Round:
Currently Reading - Anxious People, by Frederik Backman
Personal Highlight - Having a great wife and 2 (great) daughters
Baseball Highlight - Having 6 hits in a game with 4 homers as a Dodger
Greenfly highlight - Having a tremendous, talented team of great people working together to build this business
Most Impressive League (Content) - All of our partners have been great, but I do love what the NBA is doing with the NBA mobile app and how well they understand the shift in how the younger generation of fans consume content - it’s so much different than broadcast.
Mark Keaney is a Husband, Dad, Coach, Mentor and Leader. A rabid sports fan with over 20+ years of experience in media, sports and a wild ride in the world of tech start-up & social martech. Mark is helping the largest brands in sports and media deliver short-form content at Greenfly, where he is the Chief Revenue Officer. When I am not rooting for Greenfly I root for - Patriots. Celtics. Red Sox. Bruins. Boston College.
email: markkeaney8@gmail.com or twitter: @markkeaney2pt0
