Minnesota Timberwolves CEO Matt Caldwell on bringing ticketing in-house with Jump to own fan data and unlock direct-to-consumer revenue

Speaker 2: That's pretty good. I like that. Well, speaking of basketball, we have the CEO of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Matt Caldwell here with us and Jordy Weiser joining us well. Welcome to the show. How's it going on? Fellows, how are you doing? Doing great. Hey, guys. See you. Great to have you. Thanks so much for hopping on. I would love to start with the news. Can you both introduce how this all came together and the various roles that how you guys see yourselves working together?

Speaker 7: Yeah, Jordy. You can kick it off. Yeah. Well,

Speaker 4: great to meet you. Thanks for having us on. Big fan of what you guys have been building and doing here. Basically, started this company Jump with Mark Lohrey and Alex Rodriguez. I think you had Mark on actually. Saw some Yeah, did. Yep. Talking. You also had Alex Donanian, one of boys with Jump too. Yeah. Nice. I love him. Yeah. So the whole theory was that Mark and I were just going buy a team. And if they were going to buy a team, these guys are not sort of in the business of doing things the old way. And so buying the team, actually I just saw the Shopify plug we're trying to do for sports teams what Shopify does for merchants, which is basically totally unlock the direct to consumer proposition for a sports team. And so Matt was hired right when Mark and Alex took over the club. And so we got to know each other, and then we were able to launch our platform in the NBA with the Timberwolves, with Matt, who's who's an unbelievable leader in sports executive, under the ownership of Mark and Alex when they finally took control of the club. Yeah. When you think back to sports ticketing generally,

Speaker 2: just the different eras of technology, the risks, what they unlocked, what do you draw on as, you know, things that organizations got right? Any organization that jumped on waves early and saw success, like, what what what are you pattern matching against when you think about where you want the team and the organization to go from here?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Thanks again for having me having me on. You know, listen. Traditionally, teams outsourced ticketing. Right? If you if you look at it from a team perspective, like, there's a lot of work to be done. You try to win games. You're signing players. You're marketing the brand and, to create your own ticketing system that's transacting and selling season tickets and single game tickets. It's a lot of work. Ticketmaster has built a great business on this with both concerts sporting events. And I think in the last ten years or so, teams are saying, okay, we had a lot of season ticket holders, but we don't really have data on people that just come to like one game or pick up a couple of games during the year. And when all that data is outsourced to another provider, it's hard to figure out the behaviors of that fan and how do you market to them, how do you make them a season ticket holder, essentially just grow with that fan. So, you know, what what Jordy has done with, you know, Mark and Alex, know, built a ticketing system that's in house, you know, that, you know, when someone goes on our app now and, you know, traditionally, we've had, like, you know, our schedule and some content highlights on the app. But now you can just scroll and buy tickets on the app. You don't even know that you're on Jump's platform. It it looks like the Teams app. So it's a way to have the data on your side of the table, on your app, and you're working with a great partner, you know, with with Jordi and Jump. So how do you think about actually

Speaker 2: scaling the marketing now that you have more data, more of a direct relationship? I've thought about times when I've gotten invited to a sporting event and my friend might have bought all the tickets. Occasionally, they'll say, oh, to get in, you actually have to download an app and Yeah. And and and claim the ticket, and then you'll have it on your phone. And then I should be getting retargeted to return the favor. Maybe I should buy them a round of tickets Yeah. Next time. Yeah. And I I I I've probably been served a few at I don't know. I in one ear, out the other, a lot of with this stuff. Right. How do you think about building your marketing organization internally? You know, Shopify has some buttons where once you're set up, you can just say, hey. I run some Facebook ads. You're at a much larger scale. How do you think about the rest of the organization internally executing this strategy?

Speaker 7: It's a great example. And and traditionally, you know, the the experience you talked about, your friend transfers you a ticket, you download Ticketmaster Yep. Or StubHub, SeekGeek. You know, all that data, that person's information, cell phone, email all stayed with the third party. Now we're getting access to it. So we can have our sales staff call them. We can have automated emails going to them. We can go visit them in their seat. We know someone came in, we know their name. But something that's really helped for us going to the next level is we've gotten to the point with jump where even if someone puts like a ticket in the shopping cart but doesn't close it out or even just browses over a game. We get that information, we get an automated email to that person. Hey, these two tickets are still available or even better. Hey, those two tickets were just sold but there's two other ones that are similar. So you just have just more engagement especially with you know what I would call the casual fan single game buyer. Like our season ticket holders we know them really well. They sit courtside, they're in suites, you can visit them at the games. Every

Speaker 1: season ticket holder has their own individual like concierge sales rep. But it's the people that, like yourself, got transferred to get come to a game. We we wanna make them long time fans, and now we just have so many ways to to reach out to them now. I went last last time I went to I went to an NFL game Yeah. And I swear I had to download three apps to get the actual ticket. And by the end, I'm like, I hope I got all the apps I needed to get it to use my ticket. I had a parking ticket with the hot dog ticket, hot dog app. And And it was a free ticket too. I was like, it shouldn't shouldn't be hard. Are you, Jordy? Was a lot of work. Yeah. A lot of money. A lot of work. Time is money. I was committed though. Jordy, how are you thinking about like using this to deepen the the like fan engagement knowing Alexis, like he's obsessed with collectibles. Imagine by having that direct relationship, you can unlock different products and things like that for fans based on their actual engagement with the team so that fans have to actually earn certain things. But where what does that look like?

Speaker 4: Yeah. You nailed it. And actually, this hits the problem of the three apps and the new login and the Lakers do some deal with some startup and then you gotta create a login for that thing to like it's just the whole thing is just one Frankenstein tech stack, you know, mess. And so, Shopify is the best comp. Like, it sort of consolidates that into one seamless experience then everything else plugs into you. Yep. So in that same vein, collectibles, merch, concessions, add ons, parking, you should have, you know, the Timberwolves login, the Timberwolves account, add to cart cool jersey, add to cart cool collectible. Oh, hey. I know that you you are a season ticket member, and you came to you know, KG is coming back for the wolves this year. It's a big part of the story. So they should know that these people who were there during the KG era, you know, it's not just that they know the CRM. Like, we know Bob Smith, and we know where he lives, and we know it's like, did Bob go to those games? Was Bob, you know, kind of there during the era? And then you can nudge, and you can you can sell, and you can upsell, and you can engage. And so it's content. Yeah. It's merch. It's media. It's everything sort of in one system. Have you are are you thinking about cross selling

Speaker 2: across different sports? When I think about the Shopify example, they've launched the shop app. You know, you oh, you bought this pair of boots. Maybe you want this pair of pants. Is there a world where you bought this ticket to a basketball game? Here's you know, it's the off season. Here's a football game or a a baseball game. Is that something that's a little bit more that that's a little more than market. That's kind of the marketplace model that Yeah. You know, that's the there's a bunch of ticketing marketplaces.

Speaker 4: Sure. YC versions of that, and there's stuff up. Know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's the thing that, you know, Jordy, you were saying is just kind of the beginning of the mess of this whole thing where if I want to buy Delta Airlines, like if I'm going to fly in Delta, I get the Delta app and everything about me. They went direct to consumer twenty years ago and that's it. So I think that's the missing piece in tier one sports at least. If you're in Minnesota, you've been to a Wolves game, hey, let's get to know you as a Wolves fan just like you were a customer of any other brand.

Speaker 1: How sharp are the elbows of the other players in ticketing? I mean, I I can't imagine they're thrilled that a platform that's allowing people to go d to c popped up with a bunch of backing.

Speaker 4: What do you think?

Speaker 1: A little knives right here. Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah, yeah, feels like something that's so aligned, so aligned to the team, so aligned to the fan, it's just misaligned with the legacy players that no one actually, I think, likes. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Well, that's a great question. If you're investing in startups, do you want to invest in a platform that is beloved by its customers and beloved by its customers' customers but not beloved by the 50 year old incumbent? Kinda like being on that side of history and I feel like we're we're in a good spot. But at the end of the day, I mean, I'm in Los Angeles. Thank you guys are here. Sure. This is a town that just in your in this space, sports, entertainment, I would say also in like the team owner space. You've you know, the headlines are pretty wild recently. Yeah. It's just a lot. There's a lot of going. Yeah. I was gonna say, we're

Speaker 1: not super tapped into the industry, but I was gonna say if you do any endorsement deals with athletes, make sure they actually endorse the company. Just I I that's what I've learned. We had Pablo on the show earlier, and I think that was one takeaway. You know? Make sure they actually talk about jump and and what they do. Well, no. That's that's Matt's that's Matt's quote. Yeah. No

Speaker 7: comment. No comment.

Speaker 2: What else is happening in the world of technology and sports that you're tracking? I mean, AI is getting slapped on everything, and I love this story because it's it's just a very clear software enablement, like, the actual relationship. It gets to, like, the core of a business problem that you're trying to solve. And then there's technology that is really powerful, but it's maybe a little bit further out. But what else are you harnessing at the Timberwolves that you think is is interesting or you're starting to explore us? Like, talk to us about technology's role over the next year next year or decade.

Speaker 7: Hey, Matt. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, the first thing that pops to mind, you know, for me is is the the pricing of our tickets. Yeah. If you think about you know, we're about 20 let's call it 20,000 seats in an arena. You know maybe half of them are season ticket holders, right? So you have 10,000 seats that you're selling you know at least 41 nights a year and if you have a manual process where you have different price codes and there's you know supply and demand in every couple hours or every day or so you're updating prices and those transactions happening you're missing out on margin or you're out on lowering pricing for a certain game and getting more people in the building. So I mean AI is gonna explode sports just like it's doing for every other industry. And to be with someone like Jordy that's very AI forward our pricing has gotten so much more better automated pushing revenue. And then and then we talk a lot about open distribution, you know, with all these different ticketing systems, can imagine, you know, there's some tickets that are on Ticketmaster, SeekGeek, StubHub. They're all kinda spread out. You're not getting the full marketplace looking at your tickets all at once. So what we've done with with Jump is, you know, any ticket we put on the Jump platform, say, you know, a single game ticket in the upper level, That same ticket is now being put on Ticketmasters, you know, TM plus, you know, what you know, secondary market,

Speaker 4: Yeah. All the secondary markets so that you're getting all that demand, all those eyeballs looking at the ticket and Interesting. You you're hopefully getting, you know, hopefully driving up pricing if if the demand's there. And that's not possible in the old way because obviously Ticketmaster wants them on Ticketmaster and Seqiq wants them on Seqiq. And so our our model is like, you know, you had AirPods, they do control the distribution. Apple says, I want some in Best Buy, I want some at Target, I want some Amazon. Give the teams the total control to distribute and that's a totally different model. Our

Speaker 1: head producer, Ben, from Minnesota, he just texted us and said, actually bought wolves tickets last night using jump. It was great. Yeah. So Alright. Two thumbs up. That was my plans. That was my plans. Yeah.

Speaker 7: I texted Ben, but

Speaker 4: That's great. Saw in your feed, it was there was some drop about a little bit of a little bit of a negative vibe about maybe the wolves won't get all the way to the other side. I saw that recently. I didn't wanna call it out, but since you mentioned it, like

Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 1: No. No. Ben's a fan. Ben Ben looks confused. He's he's a he's he's a true fan. True fan. Alright. Well, thank you so much for calling. Yeah. Great to meet you guys. I love a business that just makes so much sense. Yeah. You guys were probably, like, feeling out this idea. It's like, is there a reason this thing doesn't already exist? Seems seems really obvious. Seems really aligned to everyone involved. So very, very cool. Great to meet you. Cool. Thanks, guys. Thanks so much. Cheers. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you all about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era.

Speaker 2: Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value match. With Cisco. To death match.

Speaker 1: Up next. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Wait. To the portal. We we gotta get to the bottom Ben actually this is true, Ben. You bought Wolves tickets last night using Jump? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I did. It was great. And wait. Are you a Wolves fan? Yeah. Okay. Wait. Why the hesitation? Not huge.

Speaker 1: Not huge. It's a surprise for someone.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Oh, sorry.