Last week we ran five investor panels at the Virtual Early Stage VC Conference — 7,000+ registered, co-hosted by Techstars. Twelve investors. One room. SPIKE Series.
SPIKE Series is the ecosystem I've been building around sports, media, and innovation. But the sharpest insight from Panel 1 had nothing to do with sports. It had everything to do with what most founders are sitting on without knowing it.
Panel #1 - The New Sport Economy: three signals worth extracting
Garnet Heraman (Aperture VC, $75M fund), David Foster (TFO Equity, former NBPA Deputy General Counsel), Paolo Privitera (Events.com, six exits, NASDAQ-bound under ticker RSVP).
Signal 1: Sports became an asset class when it separated from media.
For decades, sports was valued as a content bucket — an anchor for cable networks and streaming platforms. The shift happened when institutional capital started underwriting sports independently from the media asset it rode on.
Garnet framed it clearly: the convergence of athlete entrepreneurship, creator monetization, and NIL created a new layer of value that didn't exist 10 years ago — one that compounds through direct-to-fan relationships, not broadcast rights.
Signal 2: The real investment is in the data infrastructure layer, not the event.
Paolo's platform processes 250,000 events per day. Google and Meta pull from his APIs. Ten acquisitions in three years — ticketing, advertising, parking, insurance, virtual events. Each acquisition closes another gap in the user journey.
The thesis isn't event technology. It's behavioral data ownership across the full lifecycle of a fan or attendee. As he put it: ticketing is the top of the funnel.
The compounding is in what the system knows about every person who moves through it.
Signal 3: Teams building proprietary apps are making a data defensibility decision.
David's observation: leagues and teams investing in owned digital infrastructure aren't doing it primarily for UX. They're doing it to stop routing fan behavior data through third-party platforms.
The moment customer interaction runs through an external system, the longitudinal behavioral data — the asset that actually compounds over time — belongs to that platform, not the team.
Why this maps directly to early-stage B2B
At M Studio, we formalized a data defensibility filter in our investment and partnership thesis last year. The diagnostic question we apply to every company we work with:
Where does your proprietary behavioral data live — in your system, or in infrastructure you're renting?
For most founders in the $100K–$3M ARR range, the honest answer is: rented. CRM, ad platform, payment processor, email tool — each generates signal about your customers that stays with the vendor, not with you.
This matters because software is no longer a moat. Build time has compressed to near zero. What a competitor cannot replicate in six months is a longitudinal behavioral dataset built on real customer interaction over time. That's the defensible asset.
Our portfolio approach applies an ontological lens to market segmentation — meaning we map the market not by industry category, but by the behavioral and operational patterns that define each customer type.
A SaaS platform selling workflow automation to a regional operations manager at a manufacturing company has a completely different decision architecture than one selling to a VP of Digital Transformation at an enterprise retailer — even if both technically fall under "mid-market B2B SaaS." Same category label. Opposite buying behavior, urgency trigger, and budget path. Treating them as the same ICP produces a pitch that lands with neither.
What Paolo built is a textbook example of this applied at scale: he didn't acquire companies in "event tech." He acquired companies that each owned a distinct behavioral layer — discovery, ticketing, advertising intent, physical movement, payment. Together those layers form a market map that no single competitor can replicate.
The moat isn't the software. It's the ontological coverage.
Self-diagnostic:
Map every system your customers touch before, during, and after interacting with your product. For each touchpoint: who owns the behavioral data it generates? If the answer is not you — you're building on rented ground.
Next issue: what the GTM Gap panel surfaced about why the best engineering team in the room still couldn't close — and what Jennifer Byrne said about the real difference between a pilot and a buy signal.
Elite Founders is where we run this diagnostic as a live build — mapping your customer's behavioral architecture and identifying where your proprietary data layer should sit. Two seats open this month for founders at $100K–$3M ARR.
Reply "Elite Founders" if that's you.
In the upcoming issues
Today - The New Sport Economy Where sports, capital, and technology converge to build the next economy of sport. Garnet Heraman (Aperture VC) · David Foster (TFO Equity) · Paolo Privitera (Events.com / 1521 Ventures)
Kill Your Assumptions: Founder Spotlight The unfiltered truth about what it actually takes to build a company that lasts. Scott Hindell (M Accelerator) · Ninh Tran (Grav.id)
Athletes Who Invest What two decades of elite athletic training installs in an investor that an MBA never could. Keaton Nankivil (Alumni Ventures) · Otis Grigsby (Distill Health / Player's Health)
De-Risking Innovation How institutional capital actually evaluates and de-risks bets on innovation. Allan Gobbs (ATEM Capital / YCare)
The GTM Gap: Why Great Products Fail The conversation no one wants to have — and every founder needs to hear. Jennifer Byrne (Grit Capital Partners) · Randall Hall (Booked By Friday)
Empowering Your Quest: How We Help
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