How Faves Is Reinventing Athlete Influence

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Okay, we've got a new episode of Legends and Leaders and today it's great to have Thomas here. Thomas, you are focused on data-driven partnerships and you know, making these recommendations basically shoppable through that. And there is a lot that we can do today with data.

[00:00:14]You're really making data the usage of it much smarter and helping, you know, guide people along giving them better recommendations, you know, through that.

[00:00:23]Um and it's it's a field that is growing and it's getting much more sophisticated in how these recommendations are done.

[00:00:28]So, I'm excited to have you here and talk about what you're building.

[00:00:31]Yeah, man. Um appreciate you having me on and uh excited to share a little bit more. I think uh you know, we've we've been working on this for a little bit and uh are excited about what we're doing with Awesome. So, Thomas, first of all, you know, I'd love to just talk a bit about your background. Like how did you get interested in this area? What led to the idea? Like love to hear more about the origins.

[00:00:51]Totally. Yeah, so I think you can probably trace trace back how I ended up here to a few kind of core things with my background, one of which just being my background as a kind of higher-performing athlete and and college athlete during my time running track and cross country in college. Uh but also a little bit of my sort of personal hobbies uh as sort of an internet kid that was making money online from a pretty young age. Um combining a lot of those things with you know, a little bit more of my professional experience actually building and scaling marketplaces. But you know, to touch on the first piece, when I was um for pretty much my whole life I've been a an athlete in in track and cross country as a runner. So, um ran out at the University of Portland in college is actually where I met my co-founder.

[00:01:35]We're both not only track and cross country athletes but also in the engineering school. Um so, spent a lot of time out there and although I was never good enough to go on and and run and um you know, compete at like an international level, a lot of my teammates from from school ultimately ended up uh going and running for um various countries on national and world championship teams, whether it's like in the Olympics or um you know, just representing the US in different capacities in the marathon and on the track. So, have always been very deeply sort of integrated uh with with that world and and just seeing um how these people kind of build a career and build a platform online and just just how influential they are. And so, always kind of stayed in that world. It was always very exciting to me, but also growing up and and through high school and college, I was uh one of those kids that was making money online in like very strange ways. Not only like um very connected to things like the creator economy, but um you know, I was that guy that was uh buying and selling Supreme in like freshman year when I was 14 years old and and and that sort of thing. So, I think from a pretty young age, I became very accustomed to thinking outside the box on not only how people view their career and how they make money, but just the way the world was heading directionally um and just how people were uh changing the way that they built their career and then and and and made a uh a living. So, that was a little bit of like how I sort of ended up, I would say, uh interested in some of these components of of why we built Faves, but but at its core professionally after I finished college, I uh spent a period of time building and scaling one of the most successful uh marketplaces in the fintech industry. So, it's company called Card. Uh it's basically a card linked offers platform, so it connects brands with consumers through uh these sort of uh cashback offers that you might see in in different banking apps.

[00:03:23]So, I I helped grow their supply side of their business for uh period of time while I was there and um they're still around today and are very successful. A lot of the big banks we worked with were everyone from Green Dot to Robinhood to Coinbase and and you kind of name it. Uh really just during that neobank boom. But while I was there, I got to really see firsthand what it took for brands to invest millions of dollars into brand new marketing channels.

[00:03:50]Really like the data that they were looking for and also the scale that they were looking for, right? Just to actually make these decisions and do so in a way that actually returned a really strong ROI. And it was just really fascinating to see also just how you build and bootstrap and cold start a marketplace, which is quite challenging as many people know. So, got to kind of run that through a period of time, but at a certain point in time I wanted to go off and kind of do my own thing. And And that's what pulled me back into sports and pulled me back into this sort of new creator economy world, uh just simply because I think we have entered a really interesting point in time. Um we've just entered a We've entered a point in time where I think people are making money online and they are uh sort of building their own personal platform.

[00:04:29]And they are kind of the new dis- distribution, and they are the new publishing network. And I think in a time where um distribution kind of rules everything around us, these trusted voices and these trusted platforms have a really unique opportunity. And that's really kind of what pulled us in.

[00:04:44]And I'm going to go ahead and pause.

[00:04:45]Does that make sense? Yeah.

[00:04:47]So, you had experience building up something, you know, that was around growing a platform beforehand. Um but when did this specific idea kind of come to you? And then what did it look like launching it, you know, and getting it out?

[00:05:01]>> Yeah.

[00:05:02]So, so as I mentioned, uh a lot of my old teammates were, you know, really huge and and quite successful um professional athletes, and uh specifically in the endurance scene.

[00:05:12]So, these are people that are track athletes, marathoners, triathletes, that sort of thing. And reconnecting with them as I was sort of on my way transitioning into finding something new, I quickly realized not only how much trust and how much attention these people were garnering, but also how little they were actually converting that into value oftentimes.

[00:05:34]And in a world where I was coming from where we were matching uh value very clearly to the attention and the reach that certain platforms could drive, there was a very clear mismatch. And these athletes weren't necessarily making um or or really benefiting from their platform in the way that they could have. And I think that was kind of the light bulb moment that, hey, there's something here that's that's missing.

[00:05:55]Because in a world where traditional creators often times were were getting an insane amount of treatment and we're building these, um, these businesses for themselves online, uh, these sort of athletes who maybe don't normally think of themselves that way were starting to build platforms on their own just due to their status and and sort of needed better solutions. So, I think that was a bit of the core of why we started building it on day one. Uh, really just to service that.

[00:06:18]What did the first version of the platform look like?

[00:06:21]Yeah, so it's pretty funny. I talk about this a lot, but our our very first, uh, user on the platform who actually, uh, is now one of, uh, the members of the founding team who was such a believer in the product that he actually, uh, came to work on it full-time, uh, was a a track athlete named Sam Parsons. And he was like a big former, um, sort of running YouTube personality, uh, that was a professional athlete. And so, I think he understood sort of our goals for the product quite quickly, but it was a a really simple page where athletes could an athlete could add all of their favorite products they were using. So, like their shoes, their gear, their watches, and also share like who their sponsors were. And we had to like manually build the page for him, uh, and sort of send it out to him and ask him what he thought. But he he liked it so much that it was like in his bio and he was posting about it. And, uh, the great thing is that within a number of weeks it went from just him wanting one to tons of these like Olympic level and, you know, world-class very large platform athletes asking if they could be a part of it and them and if they could, you know, be on Faves as well. And so, I think it was a really cool, uh, sort of zero-to-one moment of us sort of, uh, taking this product out to market and people really loving and and resonating with it. And then that sort of like jump-started where we're at today.

[00:07:36]Why do you think recommendations kind of just weren't done like this where you have athletes just saying, "Hey, this is what I like." You know, and making it very public.

[00:07:44]Yeah, so it's funny cuz it's something that's already happening a lot online with a lot of these athletes, right?

[00:07:49]They're very trusted, they're the best in the world. These are like gold medalists and Olympians. And they've spent hours and hours and hours of time, you know, dedicated to being the very best they can be. And so, when it comes to like deciding which running shoes you want to train you want to use for your first marathon, or you know, what protein powder you should be taking, or um you know, what watch you should be using. I think oftentimes uh fans look to these people as uh role models and as sort of like a guidance on what's best practice, and what should be trusted or versus not trusted. And I think with in an in an era where things are getting pushed at you left and right online today, uh having these very like high trust individuals that, you know, have a bit of a um a stamp of approval it is really valuable. And so, I think they're constantly getting DMs all the time, comments, you know, asking like what they're using, what they're wearing, whether it's on Instagram, TikTok, Strava, uh you you name it. And so, this is already something that was happening. This was a behavior that was occurring. They weren't making money on it, they didn't really have an incentive to to engage oftentimes, and we were just sort of connecting those things to make it a little bit more profitable for them and also a little bit more accessible for the fan.

[00:09:00]So, you had one, you know, athlete that you mentioned that was a part of the, you know, pretty much part of the founding team that helped you get a lot of traction. What happened, Thomas, like when you got that traction? Like, how did you manage the scale of that? What was that like? And how did you build, you know, upon the recommendation idea as that occurred?

[00:09:16]Yeah, so there's this sort of concept of traditionally in advertising around like SSPs and um you know, DSPs. And I think people talk a lot about how do you orchestrate distribution from both of like a supply and a demand side. And And what we found really quickly is we had a lot of supply, a supply of reach and of attention. And we're living in an era where uh distribution and attention sort of rules everything around us. Really, it's it's like a an extremely valuable asset class. And so, it was it was very quick that a lot of brands started coming to us asking how they could get their products quickly featured or connected to these athletes so that they could get their products featured in a lot of these pages. And I think that was like the the lightbulb moment that we had something larger that we could really offer to the world. Because at the end of the day, and I think I I touched on this a little bit earlier and hadn't really connected the dots, but uh these athletes are looking to stay in sport for a long time. They want to continue to pursue their goals, and that requires often times that they are making money doing it, right? And so, they're looking for these opportunities that they can work with brands and work with sponsors um and they continue to to chase those dreams. And so, being able to connect them with the partners that can help sort of power that pursuit is something that we realized really quickly that we could be a a core a core part of. And at the same time, you know, the brands looking for distribution left and right, I think they saw this as a really unique moment not only to grow into new markets and to reach new consumers through very trusted voices um and do so in doing so at scale, but also a way to continue to build that trust in a in an environment where there's like AI-generated content and all of these sort of traditional creators, it's like how do we stand out and how do we be different? And we want to work with the best. And so, that was sort of the start of it, and that's how we kind of thought about it.

[00:11:02]So, from a from a team perspective, building out marketplaces, supply is often like a CAPEX expense. And so, we we pushed really quickly on how do we own the culture and how do we like be a part of the sport. We know working with the athletes, spending time with them, hosting events with them, that's something that we started doing a little bit of. And really just trying to really grow our foundation in the sports that we were working with.

[00:11:24]But on the on the flip side, you know, really building out a lot of the automated tools for the brands so they could very easily tap into those things.

[00:11:30]Um so, that was a bit of how we we kind of thought about it early on. I think it things are still growing super quickly and I think we've gone from just being a very endurance driven platform to now having Olympic golfers, you know, Olympic snowboarders, you know, everyone from like a high rocks athlete all the way through to people that are, you know, ultra trail runners running 250 miles through the desert. So, you know, it it's grown a lot over time.

[00:11:55]And you've done a lot around product discovery, too. Can you talk a bit about that? Like how you optimize product discovery because today sometimes it's can be quite difficult.

[00:12:04]Yeah, so, you know, I think this is something that we're still working through quite a bit and continuing to improve because something is really interesting specifically when it comes to athletes is just that they have such global audiences. So there's people that are their fans from all over the world, right? And in the way they think about, you know, what they want to see from athletes, but also even more so whenever they find certain products, how do I actually find a place to purchase them?

[00:12:27]A big part of our goal with the product is how do we make that user journey as seamless as possible and provide them the most adequate way to find the things they need and then also find a way to actually get them. And so, that's been a big piece of the puzzle here and there's a lot that goes in like from an e-commerce perspective on how you optimize those things, but at the end of the day, I think we've we've actually taken an approach of letting the athletes fully control their curation.

[00:12:52]So they have their own application that's often times in their phone where they're going in and and and customizing not only which products are on their page, but even like descriptions and recommendations and endorsements about why they like the products. And we want to really keep that element today very human because I think algorithms often times flatten everything and it sort of takes a little bit of the magic out of what you find and what you want to see. And I think, you know, giving the athletes that control and that opportunity also gives them a little bit more power on how they work with brands and how they prioritize who they're promoting. So, that's been really the core of of how we're doing it today. I'm sure it'll evolve over time, but we always are kind of staying centered on creating like a really magical fan experience and also providing the tools for the athletes to actually get the most out of the platform.

[00:13:41]So, I I get the part Thomas of like how you've attracted the athletes to the platform. Like it makes sense. Like you can showcase what you like, but you know, the piece of from like brand standpoint, like how did you get the brands to the platform and to have them engage with the athletes?

[00:13:54]Yeah, so that's a great question and that's really the core of our business cuz we don't charge athletes to be on the platform, right? They're really they're really here and we're at service to them. But what we noticed very quickly working with the athletes and talking to brands about how we connected them is that no brand really knows what an athlete is worth and it depends on the brand. So, per brand and at what price to actually activate them. Nobody knows. And there's a bit of this sort of mismatch that we see at the time which things clear at the wrong price with the wrong partners and it it all clears at a very low velocity. So, just less deals get done. Brands don't get to grow as quickly as they want through these channels and athletes don't get to make as much or partner as much with that with brands through these channels.

[00:14:36]So, it's just kind of a lose-lose. And whenever we came in and we realized very quickly there just wasn't a lot of commercial infrastructure that was guiding that, right? Like there needed to be better commercial infrastructure for athlete marketing. Brands really just wanted to get the data that they needed to actually scale smarter and obviously the tools they need to actually activate on that scale and and brand and athletes just wanted to really get the track record to earn more. And so, that was kind of the immediate next step is that we wanted to kind of connect those dots. The the other thing that we noticed really quickly is that working with athletes can be really hard for brands. Like it's often times very challenging to normally connect with these people who often times their primary focus is like training and competition and all of these other things.

[00:15:17]They're they're not always as accessible, but also e-commerce teams are getting a lot smaller. So, they don't have the resources to go out and build an entire athlete department to figure out to break into these these sort of categories and to tap into the right athletes and understand what's going on and and every sport sort of is its own ecosystem. So, there's a lot of learning that has to happen and when you're trying to grow quickly, that's hard. So, what we really ultimately realized we could provide is an ability for these brands to scale their athlete marketing without really actually having to scale their team and really be able to inform all those decisions and provide the right guided recommendations with the data that they just couldn't get anywhere else. And that really just comes because we have a direct relationship with the athlete. We are able to connect a lot of this like rich data about their top of funnel like sort of like social information with all of this really great sort of like shopper data um just to route where their fans want to shop. And it just allows for us to better recommend to brands the right athletes to partner with. Um and so, we're able to do that, connect them at scale and I think that was really like the missing link to understand like why this was the right time.

[00:16:23]Do you have like any kind of like examples of like ways maybe brands have engaged with athletes, Thomas, that like maybe they wouldn't have been able to do without, you know, what you built? Um maybe found a product category to back an athlete in that they didn't realize the athlete cared about.

[00:16:39]Yeah, absolutely. Um so, I would say that there's for one like really early on before we were even monetizing from brands and it was all just like this organic sharing that was occurring, there was a brand who really like rode our distribution, I think, and just naturally benefited from it. Uh it was like this um sort of like uh endurance product that sort of helps you recover better and it was like uh made out of like broccoli and it's very trendy today and it it's gone very very popular within the endurance scene, but that product was popping up left and right in every endurance athlete's page and all of these fans were discovering it, no one had ever heard about it and like we had even like actually with some of their team directly and they were saying they were tracking our pages as a way to show how they were saturating the market. And like that was really, really cool to see even before we had like fully formulated just how powerful the product could be.

[00:17:30]Um and just the fact that they were using our public data to just actually scale their own decisions. And so that was I think like a really cool starting point. But then once we actually started monetizing, I think we've um you know, been a part of like a lot of really cool campaigns. You know, most recently with the Winter Olympics, uh connecting with like a really popular recovery brand um with some of the Team USA athletes. And these are athletes that maybe previously would never been able to connect with like a wellness brand doing red light therapy and sort of like recovery masks and all of that stuff. But we were able to connect them and have them featured as sort of like the keynote sort of ambassadors for the brand all the way through the winter.

[00:18:06]And so being able to kind of facilitate that, I think was really cool to see. Um not only providing athletes access to opportunities that they never would have gotten before, but also really quickly being able to help these brands activate like in the timely moment whenever um all eyes are on certain people and they really want to um you know, be a part of it. So that was like a really interesting one recently that was super fun. Yeah, that sounds awesome. That's great.

[00:18:30]Thomas, what's your long-term vision for all of this? Like is it to expand to lots of different areas? I mean, athletes is a great niche already.

[00:18:36]Yeah, so you know, to be completely honest, we think that there's a huge market within the athletic space that we're not even close to reaching um you know, at its core. You know, I think it's one of those segments that I think is uh a lot more anti-fragile in an AI-driven world than a lot of other types of creators uh today. You know, I think it's really rooted in trust and authenticity and also in like real human performance. And so being able to partner with these sorts of people feel like a really strong long-term bet and and they're the not only very it's very true to our core and our DNA, but it's also just something that uh we think it's going to be around for the long term. And so we're really all in on that, but you know, the expansive world of athletes goes really far and I think we want to really work with everybody in the right way.

[00:19:23]So I would say that's a bit of market-wise who we're really interested in, but you know, the workforce is shifting a lot and I think people everywhere are deciding to build their own audience instead of building a resume. That was sort of like post W-2 economy is really growing. And so we want to really be a center player and I think whenever you're growing up and you're introduced to things at an early age, one of those things is sports. You know, it's something you want to invest your time into. It was the thing that I was telling everybody as a kid that I want to be when I grow up was like a professional athlete. And so I think giving more people a voice and more people a way to tell their story and and and you know, build a career out of it is something that we want to be able to do for the long term. So.

[00:20:01]Yeah. No, I I think it's great what you've already, you know, accomplished with this and and I'm sure there's a lot more people you can bring into the fold, too.

[00:20:08]Um if you just like look at this like in 10 years, Thomas, like what does it look like in 10 years?

[00:20:13]Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So you know, really the way we see it and and you'll kind of see some stuff that comes out about Faze over the next couple months is Faze is really a brand that lives inside of sport. You know, over the next 6 months you're going to see some of the biggest athletes in the world really representing Faze in a really unique way and I think a way that you've never seen done in software before.

[00:20:35]In an environment where I think software and and products are very easy to produce, the things that really stick are are your personal brand first and foremost, really making network effects and really having, you know, scarce resources and I think athletes are like a very scarce resource and we want to really be able to build and champion them at a very high level across sport, across vertical, and and really be a place where people shop with them. Because I think they are the most powerful influencer in the world. So, you know, I think long tail, the way we see it, we think that every athlete in the world will be a Faze athlete one day. And they're all going to be representing Faze, they're all going to be using Faze, and they're all going to be able to communicate with their audiences very authentically through Faze. And not only do we want to be able to power the pursuit of every professional athlete in the world, but we want to build and provide the connections that like every fan dreamed of to really go behind the scenes and and see what they're using and sort of have that touchpoint that they maybe never had before. So, you know, I think at its core, that's what we're most excited to to power, but we also see a world where the traditional sponsorship model can really be disrupted in a unique way.

[00:21:45]There's an opportunity for athletes to stack more sponsors and less traditional sponsors because their personal brand and their personal platform is a lot more powerful than the organizations that they were previously previously participating in. And so, it presents a really cool opportunity where I think you know, the the types of partners you work with and then how you build those relationships and tell stories with those brands really is like a is a is a wide-open channel. And so, being able to unlock those things for a lot of these athletes, I think is a you know, a really exciting opportunity that we want to be a part of.

[00:22:18]Well, Thomas, that was all the questions I had. I appreciate you taking the time and doing this. I think it's a fantastic idea and you know, the fact that you've gotten a lot of these athletes, you know, new opportunities to monetize is you know, it's incredible. I mean, they that's what they need to keep going to perform at the highest levels and they you know, having a platform that they can say, "Hey, this is what I like." and brands can come right there and find it is is much easier than trying to guess.

[00:22:37]So, I think it's really great and I look forward to the next steps and the scaling of it even further.

[00:22:43]Appreciate it, man. Thanks.