Barstool Sports CEO on building a diverse company culture & her advice to Gen Z
In 2016, 70 men applied to be the CEO of Barstool Sports, a sports and pop culture blog covering the latest news and viral highlights. Their choice? Erika Nardini, an advertising and marketing executive who previously worked in senior management at companies like Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL.
This week, we’re looking back at our 2018 interview with Erika. Here’s what we learned:
1. Barstool’s open culture has made it safer for women and marginalized groups than some larger companies.
Saturdays may be for the boys, but a woman makes it all possible at Barstool Sports. Barstool often promotes satirical content that shakes things up and has a masculine energy to it. However, Erika is committed to building a company culture that is safe and comfortable for a diverse range of employees. She believes that Barstool’s transparency, in comparison to larger companies, has made a difference for women in particular.
“The reason that I am so protective of Barstool is that I’ve been sexually harassed in the workplace,” Erika said. “I have had more opportunity than some, and less opportunity than others because I was a woman, or for whatever reason. But for me, the thing that I didn’t like was that in big companies, and historically, was that everything was so insidious. It wasn’t ever talked about, like it was opaque. And what I think is happening in the women’s movement right now is that it’s all out there.”
2. Barstool Sports is two different types of companies rolled into one.
Having read Barstool regularly since 2004, Erika firmly believed in the company as both a media organization and a lifestyle brand. “We’re very fast,” Erika said. “We connect every single thing that we do with a ton of conversation around it with our audience at the same level as our audience, so we will continue to build on that foundation. We will get into businesses that we have not been in before.” Erika cited Rough and Rowdy, an amateur fighting series on Barstool’s pay-per-view platform, as a great example of their innovation. “You’ll see us build commerce brands. You’ll see us bring big personalities into this platform and to create, basically a very diverse revenue stack around them that enables that brand or that person to be as connected to their consumer as possible and as real.”
So what won’t you see at Barstool? Freebies taken away. “What Dave [Portnoy] and I believe very strongly is that we’re not going to take things that were free for our audience,” Erika said. “If you look at NBC or EPL, like taking something that has been free and turning it into something that has a paywall is very difficult. We don’t want to do that. We will not do that. What we will do is build products and services for audiences that are worth their investment, that they feel that they’re getting great value.”
3. Erika has great advice for Generation Z.
Erika believes young people should intern and experiment and touch as many things as humanly possible to find their true interests. “When I started my career, I interned at Fidelity Investments. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer,” Erika said. “I hustled up and took a bunch of business classes and I was like, ‘I’m never going to be a lawyer.’ And I think the faster you can make that discovery process, the better.”
However, she urges college students to take a few risks in order to learn more about themselves. “I got a liberal arts education,” Erika said. “I loved it. I learned how to write. I learned how to think critically. I had a ton of fun. I played a lot of sports. College is an incredible time of your life…I say this all the time, but you should do something that scares you. You should get into something that you don’t feel totally qualified for, and then it’s on you to deliver.”
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To listen to our interview with Erika, check out Episode 22 of KindredCast, embedded below, and available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
