Aaron Hawkey of BallerTV: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

An Interview With Paul Moss

Paul Moss, CEO of Moss Corporation
Authority Magazine
14 min readJun 17, 2021

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Chemistry — Talent may get you some short term wins, but talent + chemistry will get you on the path to a championship. In our world of startups, this is also known as being maniacally focused on building a strong culture. This can’t be overstated enough.

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles.

Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup?

In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experience about what it takes to create a highly successful startup.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron Hawkey.

Aaron Hawkey is an entrepreneur from Pasadena, CA and currently the co-founder of BallerTV, a sports media startup providing live video, replays and highlights of top amateur sporting events across the country. Similar to the early days of ESPN, BallerTV is expanding the spectrum of sports coverage to levels never seen before.

Aaron previously co-founded Cramster.com, an online study community for college students, which was acquired by Chegg (NYSE: CHGG) in December 2010. Chegg Study (formerly Cramster) is the core of Chegg’s business and the primary driver behind Chegg becoming the leading student-first connected learning platform.

Aaron holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. Aaron is a die-hard Caltech Basketball fan, and enjoys sitting courtside with his two sons at every home game. He resides in Pasadena with his wife and two sons.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’m a solve your own problem entrepreneur who’s worked with the same co-founder, Robert Angarita, for over 23 years. We met in high school in Pasadena in the early 90s, and BallerTV is our third startup together. I went to UCLA after high school, and I took being the manager of my intramural basketball team pretty seriously. I was stunned that the school known as “the birthplace of the internet” required me to walk half a mile to check my game schedule at the rec center. Rob and I started our first company, Intramurals.com, right then and there in 1998. It became a tool for universities to manage their intramural sports departments and to make intramural sports more competitive and fun. We ended up growing the company to 500 campuses before we sold it in 2000.

Another issue I encountered while studying electrical engineering in undergrad was access to basic studying help. So Rob and I founded Cramster, which became the world’s largest online study community. We grew Cramster for eight years and sold it to Chegg in 2010.

At the time, Dan Rosensweig was CEO at Chegg, and he kept telling us that we weren’t thinking big enough. Turns out he was right — Cramster (now “Chegg Study”) has nearly 5 million subscribers and generates over half a billion in annual revenue.

Rob and I promised ourselves that we were going to think bigger on our next venture. After we left Chegg, we wanted to focus on a massive market that is really close to our hearts: sports.

The initial problem we were solving was live streaming our rec league games. Essentially, building a “Facebook Live for sports”. We quickly found that showcasing how much older and slower we were compared to our primes wasn’t something we wanted to broadcast to the world. But there were younger athletes who could make use of this technology — we realized that there was a much bigger opportunity in broadcasting youth sports.

Our founding team member and EVP, Sandeep Hingorani, had strong relationships in grassroots basketball, so we repurposed our app for a network of videographers across the country to live stream the long tail of basketball. Since then, we’ve built our own proprietary mobile autonomous camera tech and logistics operations to scale to over 500,000 youth sporting events over the last four years.

Our mission at BallerTV is to connect families and communities everywhere through the unifying power of live sports. COVID-19 punched us in the face when it shut down our entire industry in March of 2020, but it didn’t knock us down. In fact, we’ve seen an incredible tailwind once youth sports started opening back up as there has been a tectonic behavioral shift around the adoption of live streaming due to the pandemic. It’s been a humbling experience to build another category defining business, and this time we are going to really swing for the fences.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

BallerTV is the result of a series of pivots, so the “Aha Moment” was really the moment we knew we were on to something big. After we had shifted our focus towards youth sports, we decided to leverage our app to live stream all 279 games of one of the countries largest high school basketball tournaments, the Tarkanian Classic.

I’ll never forget walking into a standing room only gym for the championship game at Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, and sensing an energy in a gym that I’ve never felt at a high school sporting event. We didn’t know this at the time, but two of the sophomores playing in that game would later become the #2 and #6 picks of the 2020 NBA draft.

It became perfectly clear to me at that moment that we had the opportunity to do for youth sports what ESPN did for NCAA sports in the early 80s. By expanding coverage to unprecedented levels using our proprietary mobile live streaming technology and pure grit, we could unlock a massive market that nobody was previously able to crack.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

I always considered myself an inventor of sorts growing up. Whether it was coding my own video games in the mid-80s, jerry rigging an old home stereo system to make the most “bumpin” (aka insanely loud) car in the neighborhood or building a search engine for pictures and videos of basketball dunks long before YouTube, I just really loved building for the sake of creating something cool.

My co-founder Robert Angarita inspired me early on to think about how some of my creations could translate into real businesses. Rob is a true entrepreneur who was thinking about business ideas the second he got to the school of entrepreneurship at USC. I’ve seen many successful single founder startups, but I can’t imagine going through the ups and downs of starting a business without another co-founder.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Dwyane Wade is our global ambassador. He clearly makes any company that he’s associated with stand out, but it’s the story behind why Dwyane Wade got involved with BallerTV that really makes us stand out.

Dwyane Wade’s son, Zaire, was playing in the prestigious Pangos All-American Camp in 2018. BallerTV was live streaming the camp that was being held in Los Angeles. Dwyane couldn’t be there in person as he was in Miami, but an investor in BallerTV shot him a text to watch Zaire on BallerTV. Dwyane may not have been there in person, but he was able to watch him on BallerTV and feel that connection from thousands of miles away.

What makes us special is that every parent can relate to the problem we are solving, including future NBA Hall of Fame superstars.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Bringing goodness to the world is built-in to BallerTV’s DNA. It’s always rewarding to hear about the ways in which we’re impacting the youth sports community, from family members thanking us for providing live streaming services or athletes shouting us out for helping them get their first scholarship offer. There’s a ton of reward in what we do, including helping to keep the youth sports community going during COVID-19. We are an institution within this community now, and we hope to continue to strengthen the bonds between communities and families around youth sports.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

  1. Optimism — Our entire industry was shut down on March 11, 2020. At the time, it wasn’t clear when youth sports were going to open up again. When many thought our business was at its lowest point, I became more bullish than ever. I knew when the world got back to a new-normal, BallerTV would be needed more than ever. Fortunately I was right. I’m an optimist, and I’ve found that to be an important part of weathering the ups and downs of startup life for 23 years.
  2. Resilience — One of the best compliments I can receive is being called a “cockroach.” BallerTV went through multiple pivots early on before finding product-market fit. We are not only weathering this storm, but thriving during a global pandemic that most figured would have crushed our business.
  3. Fearlessness — You also need more than optimism and a cockroach-like resilience to build a category defining business in a massively fragmented market. We love using sports metaphors at BallerTV and we have a core value, “don’t play scared”. Like I said earlier, we are swinging for the fences here and are not going to play it safe and take the easy exit. We are building a once-in-a-generation sports media company. This doesn’t mean being reckless, but rather not being afraid of taking calculated risks in pursuit of our mission.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

My co-founder and I were coming off a life-changing exit with Cramster. It was a nice win for our investors, and it became the core of Chegg’s business (now a $10B public company). I was told by many people that it was going to be so easy for us to start a new company and raise money, you know, because we had done it before.

It was not easy at all. No doubt I can always improve my fundraising skills, but I got humbled pretty quickly with a lot of “nos”, or “too early”, etc. Every minute we spent trying to fundraise was time not spent building our core business. In the end it worked out for the best as it forced us to figure out a real business model and show real traction before we raised money.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

As I’ve mentioned, I’m a “solve your own problem” entrepreneur. My first two startups clearly solved the problems I was having at the time. Although BallerTV started with the intention of solving my desire to relive my pickup basketball games, we found out through trial and error there was a bigger/better opportunity to focus on in youth sports. Who knew nobody wanted to watch me play pickup basketball at Caltech?

BallerTV was the first time I ever had to “pivot”. Pivots are never easy, and I’ll never forget the conversation with our team when we saw the writing on the wall that pickup basketball wasn’t getting the traction we were hoping for. This was going to be our last pivot, and we were going to either do “Uber for Sports Videography”, or “ESPN for Youth Sports”. Both took advantage of the cool mobile live streaming tech we built, but the latter had the clearest path to scale. So we ran with it.

So now I like to say, I’m solving my future problem. I’ve got two boys, 5 and 4 years old, who are just starting to play soccer. I will be disappointed if I’m not watching them play their games on BallerTV when they start playing competitively.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

We have a culture where you want to do well for yourself just as much as you want to do well for your teammates. It inspires me to watch how incredibly hard our team works, and it motivates me to work harder and solve problems.

I’ve been playing sports all my life, and co-founded a sports startup. I’m competitive. I’m no Michael Jordan, but there’s motivation all around us if we look for it and use it to fuel the entrepreneurial fire. Whether it’s someone not believing in the vision, a new competitor in the space, a TechCrunch article, or something else. You know… “and I took that personally”.

The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy, and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder?

I’ve learned that when you’re in the thick of building a business, you think a lot more about all the problems that need to be solved versus how much value you’ve built along the way. I saw this at my last startup, Cramster. We had built this company for 8-years, and as we considered selling the business we thought about all the friction points we had. It was a life-changing exit, but even so, we didn’t give ourselves enough credit on what an incredible business and foundation that we had built because we were always focused on fixing all the problems.

Being focused on constantly solving problems and removing friction points in your business is absolutely necessary, but I like to always remind myself and our team to not forget the incredible value we are building along the way.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

I’ve personally never gone the bootstrapped route by choice. I’m a big believer in venture capital’s ability to accelerate growth and provide added value beyond the cash. I’ve always thought all my businesses had venture-scale potential (yes, even the pickup Caltech basketball live-streaming one). But if you are a bit more self-aware than I am about the size / exit potential of your opportunity, then it can be more clear.

If you are building a consulting or lifestyle business, then you probably should be bootstrapping. If you are trying to tackle a problem in a large market that has the possibility of returning the funds of the VCs you are pitching, then I’m all for raising money. Either way, there’s a pretty easy litmus test there, and that’s to go out and try to pitch and gauge VC’s reactions.

Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

I’m going to use terminology that is regularly used in sports, because that’s what I do. There are so many parallels in building a championship sports team and building an incredible startup.

  1. Talent — Get heavily involved in your recruiting and hiring process early on, and stay close to it even as you get bigger. Every great team has great players. A coach can only take a team so far without talent.
  2. Chemistry — Talent may get you some short term wins, but talent + chemistry will get you on the path to a championship. In our world of startups, this is also known as being maniacally focused on building a strong culture. This can’t be overstated enough.
  3. Motor — A friend who’s an NCAA coach/scout once told me the difference between a DI recruit and a DII recruit isn’t necessarily talent, it’s their motor. This is a startup, you need to do more with less. Hiring people who leave it all on the floor and not afraid to dive for proverbial loose balls is vital.
  4. Focus — Spend time on strategy. Refine your mission and vision. Set goals that are aligned with that mission/vision. There are a lot of different frameworks for this. My co-founder and I used the Rockefeller Habits framework even when it was just the two of us.
  5. Analytics — Embrace the numbers. If you are shooting 10% from three, you should probably stop shooting threes. Same goes for startups — the numbers will generally guide you in the right direction if you let them.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

I can only speak for myself here, and one mistake my co-founder and I made early was getting too far out of our comfort zone when we were starting BallerTV initially. Did you know that Shaq played 19 years in the NBA and made only one three pointer his entire career? He knew where he could do the most damage, and he stayed inside the key. I’m all for trying something different, but the further you get outside of your comfort zone, the more challenging you are making what is already a difficult journey as an entrepreneur.

Our last company was a long tail content subscription education business. BallerTV started as a free UGC app. We went from selling aspirin for the last 10 years to selling vitamins. We weren’t playing to our strengths, and it wasn’t until we decided to pivot to a subscription-based business with a focus of generating content at enormous scale did we see the type of traction we had been hoping for.

Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

My advice is to live as close to your workplace as possible. Early on, before getting married and having kids, I had zero commute because I just lived at the office. I would sleep under my desk or on a couch and take showers at a nearby gym. Of course, COVID-19 may have changed all this if you are working from home indefinitely, but I do think there is a ton of value in collaborating in person. I currently live a block away from the office and this allows me to (1) save time driving to the office and (2) spend more time with my family. Because I’m so close to home, I can regularly meet my wife and kids for lunch, or pop home to put my kids to bed and pop back into work as needed.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

BallerTV is that movement. We produce content at an unprecedented scale of some of the most special moments of people’s lives. Yet, we are barely capturing 1% of the youth sports market in the US. We’ve got our work cut out for us.

We are blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

LeBron James. We’re both headquartered in Los Angeles, his son Bronny plays high school basketball. I’d love to pick his brain about what he and his team are seeing when it comes to our industry but also try to glean some insight from him. He’s at such a unique intersection of sports, business and culture.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Keep an eye on BallerTV.com and follow us on Instagram / Twitter (@BallerTV)

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

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