An Interview with James Ondrey, BallerTV’s new VP of Operations
BallerTV is thrilled to announce the addition of James Ondrey to the team as Vice President of Operations.
James brings an enormous wealth of experience to BallerTV having held leadership roles at Uber and Sonder.
BallerTV has reached an unprecedented scale, providing full live video coverage of 350,000 amateur sporting games since 2017, and has broadcasted as many as 17,000 live games in a given weekend.
In the year of COVID-19, BallerTV has become more important than ever connecting athletes, families, and coaches. Since the pandemic hit in March, BallerTV has streamed 40,000 games with more than 2,000 college coaches tuning in.
As BallerTV continues to grow, having a strong operations team is key to successfully delivering on our promise to serve families and communities everywhere through the unifying power of live sports.
We sat down with James for an interview.
Tell us about your career to date.
I have spent the last dozen years working in operational leadership roles across several technology startups after starting my career in finance and investment banking.
My first startup was a tech company in the sports ticketing space and I got to wear many different hats and spent time as CEO. I then joined up with Uber in its very early days as a General Manager in the Midwest. I covered a lot of ground there in 5+ years from launching Uber in a dozen cities, building and leading teams, solving operational challenges for riders and drivers at sporting events, concerts, & airports, and tackling new challenges that came with hypergrowth in the business.
Most recently I was on the executive team at Sonder as a Senior Director where I led Operations across the central US & Canada region. Sonder is a hospitality technology company reinventing the hotel stay and I led teams handling the operational elements involved in opening new buildings and running the day to day hospitality operations in this new model.
What operational challenges are there at BallerTV?
We have plenty of operational challenges to tackle at BallerTV, but that’s what makes it fun and attracted me to the role. The technology side is great, but operations are core to what we do here.
First we have to be designing and building for scale. We already cover up to 250k games in a given year, but the opportunity for coverage across the youth sports landscape is far beyond that. Our solutions must be forward-thinking.
Logistics — It is critical for us to get our filming equipment, staff, marketing assets, etc to cover youth sporting events at different cities all across the US. And then once we do that, we need to turn around and do it all over again at a bunch of new events the following week. This involves a complex challenge of sourcing, procurement, shipping, storage & inventory management needs.
Internet — Because we livestream all the events that we cover, we require a certain standard of internet/data coverage at our events to meet our customers’ needs. Those specific solutions can vary greatly depending on the event and a multitude of other factors. It is up to our operations team to research, learn, and test so we are as prepared as possible the day of the game.
Variability — At BallerTV we have to plan for a fair amount of variability in our operations. Whether we are covering an event with 2 courts or one with 10 venues and 75 courts. This changes our equipment and staffing requirements on the ground. With covid-19, some events don’t allow spectators and some do. Our cameras need to be set up differently for one sport vs. another. Internet carriers and wifi signals vary greatly between events. Lastly, as we capture content at outdoor events, we must deal with wind, rain, heat and other unpredictable elements. How we capture all this information and plan for solutions is at the heart of what our Operations team tackles everyday.
BallerTV Site Leads — In order to scale quickly to youth sporting events all throughout the country we also rely on a growing network that helps us run our operations on the ground. The recruitment, training, support, and community engagement of this group is of utmost importance for our operations team.
What are the similarities or things you will leverage from your prior experiences at Uber, Sonder, etc.
This idea of needing to get people or assets to the right place, at the right time, at the right cost is something I’ve tackled many times before. Whether it was setting up a large pickup/dropoff operation at a major sporting event for Uber or making sure our shipment of smart locks was going to arrive from overseas in time for a site opening deadline at Sonder, I have lots of experience in this area.
This period in a company’s growth curve, like BallerTV today, is right in my wheelhouse. There are still plenty of unknown challenges where we don’t have all the answers and we need people to be creative problem solvers, willing to test new ideas rapidly, and share the learnings within the organization so we can scale faster and more efficiently.
I have spent lots of time building teams from the ground up and held leadership roles at several, high-growth technology startups. The ability to attract and retain top talent is crucial and will be a focus of mine at BallerTV. From a leadership perspective, there’s nothing more critical than a team that understands the mission, their individual and team goals, communicates well with each other, and is part of a culture they are proud of. Those are foundational.
What attracted you to the opportunity at BallerTV?
1) The founding team — I got to spend time with Rob and Aaron in the process and I loved their entrepreneurial DNA, the fact they’ve built and sold companies before, and their overall passion for the mission of this business.
2) The space — As an athlete who was immersed in youth sports growing up in Northeast Ohio, I know firsthand the power of live sport — the life lessons, the beauty of the games, and the power of relationships that are formed around them through family and friends. Being part of a company that is looking to strengthen those connections and memories was a no brainer.
3) The potential — Youth sports are a huge market ($15B) and there’s so much opportunity for BallerTV to continue to capture this type of content and find interesting and innovative ways to deliver it to its customers. No one has figured out how to do this at scale in this market yet and that produces an attractive opportunity for us.
4) The challenge — Startups can be inherently messy, chaotic, constantly-changing, and hard at times. On the flip side, I find there’s high satisfaction and reward for solving problems, making tangible impact, building a great culture, and figuring out how to grow alongside strong unit economics. I enjoy that pursuit!
Who are your favorite teams?
I’m a Cleveland native that just recently found my way back to my home city with my wife and three kids. Although life and jobs have taken me to different spots around the country, one constant has been my fandom and loyalty for the Cleveland Indians, Cavs, Browns, and Buckeyes.I always found that no matter where I was, sports was a common thread to link family members and friends around a common love.
