Field Notes: 4 People Moves, 3 Announcements, 2 Things Worth Your Time, and 1 Stat That Matters in the Sports Economy.
Curated and delivered every other Wednesday.
4 People Moves
Jeremiah Bates: Jeremiah didn’t just manage the finances behind the world’s biggest creator. He was CFO of Feastables, the CPG brand that turned MrBeast’s audience into a legitimate retail juggernaut. Scaling a consumer brand at that speed is a masterclass in hypergrowth finance. First Day gets a CFO who’s already built the financial infrastructure for a fast-moving consumer company and knows what it takes to hold it together while it scales.
Meghan Reynolds: Ōura to Eight Sleep (hot off a $50M raise at $1.5B valuation last week) is about as direct a competitor jump as it gets in the sleep-tech arms race. When your rival poaches your global growth marketing lead — and promotes her in the process — that’s not subtle. Eight Sleep is making it clear they want to own the category, not share it.
Brandon Rhodes: GameChanger is a Dick’s Sporting Goods-backed platform with massive youth sports distribution. The “Emerging Sports” title tells you everything: GameChanger isn’t just a scorekeeping app anymore, and they’re hiring operators who know how to build new verticals from zero.
Karl Gambin: Fraud and payments infrastructure is the unsexy backbone of every sports betting company. Karl moving from Underdog to Novig, the peer-to-peer betting exchange with $75 million of fresh capital, makes a lot of sense. As Novig scales into a model regulators haven’t fully stress-tested yet, this is exactly the kind of hire you make early, not late.
People Moves is presented by Workforce.ai by Live Data Technologies
3 Announcements
NBA considering a national broadcast hub | SBJ
Media runs in cycles: bundle, unbundle, re-bundle. The RSN golden era was peak bundle…cable subsidized local sports rights regardless of viewership, and teams collected fees like clockwork. Then streaming killed the cable bundle, RSNs collapsed, and the unbundle phase broke the distribution model entirely. Now the NBA, with up to 22 teams potentially orphaned from local broadcast deals, is doing what the best operators do at the turn of a cycle — engineering the re-bundle on their own terms, with better economics, before someone else does it for them.
Troon Launches Access, Ushering In A New Era In Golf Rewards | Troon
Loyalty in sports is almost redundant — fans and participants show up regardless. The problem has never been earning loyalty, it’s been rewarding it intelligently. Loyalty & Rewards is a giant, neglected opportunity in the sports economy. Troon’s Access platform is a step in the right direction: a unified stack that actually connects behavior to benefit. Most of the industry is still guessing at loyalty instead of measuring it. When you finally have the data infrastructure to understand the participant, the rewards loop becomes a real growth lever.
Hurricanes Owner Agrees to Sell Minority Stake at Record Valuation | Breakaway SI
Tom Dundon bought the Hurricanes for $420 million in 2018 when they were coming off nine straight playoff misses and had near-empty arenas. He’s now sold a 12.5% stake at a $2.66 billion valuation while simultaneously acquiring the Trail Blazers for $4.25 billion. Dundon is building a sports empire brick by brick — NHL, NBA, PPA Tour, Major League Pickleball, and he’s actively pushing to land an MLB franchise in Raleigh-Durham.
2 Things Worth Your Time
The State of Video Gaming in 2026 (Early Access Edition) | Epyllion
Gaming, with $200 billion in annual spend, is the largest category of media — bigger than film, TV, and music combined. I’m not a gamer myself…but over 3.3 billion people are. This report is full of eye-opening charts and stats spanning everything from iGaming to sports betting to OnlyFans. The contents of these 167 slides will amaze, disturb, and dumbfound you all at once.
Paul Rabil: Why Owning a Team Is a 100x Bet | Portfolio Players
Rabil made a bet on media as PLL’s foundation, securing ESPN deals with prime windows before even setting a game schedule. The narrative upside is underexplored: a Full Swing-style docuseries following stars from Yale, Princeton, Notre Dame and UVA would be must-watch content. Today, the PLL ‘TopCo’ owns everything (teams, IP, the WLL, youth academies, etc.), but when it starts selling franchises, buyers inherit a serious media machine—that’s the real hidden asset.
1 Stat That Matters
$17 Billion: The amount of net losses in online sports betting in the United States in 2025, up 35x from 2019 and growing 35% a year. (Epyllion)
What happens when you turn smartphones into sports books…
Pull of the Week
Not exactly a traditional throwback for this section, but it was too good not to share. This is a W for jocks everywhere.
ICYMI: Last week’s episode with Kyle Rudolph, Founder & CEO of Alltroo ⬇️
I’ll be publishing Field Notes every other Wednesday.
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Email: underthenumberpod@gmail.com.
– Brent