Swetha Prabhakar
Founder & CEO of Fanvana
As an avid sports fan and engineering student at Stanford, Swetha was inspired by the book Moneyball, where the Oakland A’s transformed into a winning team by recruiting overlooked players using advanced statistics. She took the course Mathematics of Sports and predicted the outcome of the NBA playoffs using regular season data. To her dismay as a Spurs fan, her model predicted the Memphis Grizzlies’ surprising upset of the San Antonio Spurs in the first round in 2011. She enjoyed the combination of stats and sports and continued working on side projects that fueled her passion.
Upon graduating in 2012 with a B.S. in Mathematical & Computational Science and M.S. in Management Science & Engineering, Swetha joined Facebook as a data scientist on Ads & Pages. She served as the analytics lead for two high growth revenue-generating pages products: “Promoted Posts Flow” and “Promoted Likes Flow.” These were the fastest growing ads products among small and medium businesses on Facebook. After the monetization products she worked on matured, she became the analytics lead for crowdsourcing, places quality and core entities.
In her free time, Swetha started scraping NBA data to get ahead in her fantasy league. “I was sitting on a mountain of data from the draft, and I wanted to do something with it.” Inspired by Nate Silver and 538, Swetha started her own analytics-focused sports blog. Every few weeks, she would pick a theme, collect all the data and then analyze it. After a while, her blog got discovered by writers at ESPN and SB Nation. “They started making requests about what my next piece was going to be about. It was awesome! My first syndication was an analysis about the value of Kawhi Leonard for SB Nation’s Pounding the Rock. Keep in mind, this was before people gave him a second thought.” Her article was top ranked on Google search and Kawhi Leonard ended up becoming the NBA Finals MVP later that year.
As her blog gained traction and she got more involved with the Spurs blogging community, Swetha still felt out of touch with other Spurs fans. “I would go to Oracle Arena whenever the Spurs were in town and I saw hundreds of people wearing Spurs gear. I knew that there were a lot of fans like me in the Bay Area, but there was no easy way for us to connect or talk about the game in real-time. After the Spurs lost the NBA Finals in 2013, I was truly devastated. What made it worse was there was no one I could talk to about it with. All my friends just gave me a hard time about it.”
During the off-season, Swetha spent a lot of time thinking about her problem and she realized that she was not alone. She discovered that roughly half of all socially engaged sports fans in the United States live out of state. This applied to NBA, NFL and MLB fans alike. She coined a term to describe fans like her — “long tail fans.” Fanvana was born. Swetha started working on building a social discovery platform for sports fans. “In addition to helping fans discover other fans like them and places nearby to watch games, I also wanted to create a space where all the content is fan-generated and contextual. Fans should not have to spend 15–20 hours a week writing blog posts to have their voice heard. There are a lot of smart fans who have great things to say, but they get lost in all the noise. Popular social platforms right now are too horizontal and there is never any context. Do my friends on Facebook care about the posts I make about the Spurs? I know they don’t. They tell me they don’t!” Fanvana uses locations, trending and games as context for stimulating discussions among fans.
Swetha does it all from building the app’s backend cloud APIs using NodeJS and MongoDB to designing the overall architecture and fan context engine. “Since I have the technical skills and the vision, I can design the app so that it will be built to scale. It is great to feel that if I can dream it, it will happen. Our product team is also just phenomenal. Fans give us great feedback every day about how easy the app is to use. We are also nimble and able to move fast. So far, we have already added MLB and NBA for both iOS and Android and NFL is coming soon!”
Palo Alto-based sports startup Fanvana raised a $2 million seed round this year and the team has grown to seven people. Dominic Orr, CEO of Aruba Networks and technology advisor to the San Francisco 49ers, is an investor and board member. Fanvana is celebrated by fans and sports professionals alike and recently won first place at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It is available for free on both iOS and Android at Fanvana.
Swetha’s advice is to “pick a project you are passionate about. Try to solve a personal pain point that you have. If you are able to come up with a solution that makes sense to you, it is easier to see it through. I’m truly envisioning and building a product that is for myself and other fans like me. It’s motivating to learn how to solve your own problem. People are more receptive to joining and helping you if you are passionate about a cause.”
