"I just knew that they were wrong." How a former teacher built Overtime into a $500 million sports empire

A person’s path is never a foregone conclusion. Dan Porter may be the starkest example of that. Son of college professors who were 1960s activists. Former public school teacher in Brooklyn. President of Teach for America.

If this were a party game and you had to predict where Dan ended up, his next moves would seem obvious: nonprofits, education reform, academia, maybe a stint in government. (Spoiler: You would lose the game.)

But Dan Porter revels in not being obvious.

This former educator became the guy who sold a mobile game for $200 million in six weeks, worked for Richard Branson, and then launched a sports empire that has changed how players grow their skills and their audience. His media company, Overtime, was last valued at $500 million; has 3 billion monthly views; has a clothing brand can be found on tweens everywhere; and it's doing something no one thought possible — rethinking the sports-industrial complex.

"Every single investor assumed that we were covering youth sports or young people for the parents," Dan told me for this week's This is Working. "They were like, ‘Well, how are parents going to watch this?’ And I said, ‘I'm not making this for parents.’” But since parents were who actually had the money, lots of investors took a pass. The resistance didn’t shake Dan’s confidence that he could build something massive that only talked to kids.

"Never," Dan said when I asked if there was ever a moment he thought the investors might be right. "I just knew that they were wrong."

The business model that changed sports media

For those who don't have middle schoolers, here's how to understand Overtime : It's a sports media company that focuses on the handful of high school basketball players each year who might go pro. But instead of just covering them, Overtime owns its own professional league where those players compete. 

The company produces all its own content — from social media highlights to full Amazon Prime series — across over 40 accounts with more than 100 million followers, creating a complete ecosystem. It has more monthly views than most major sports networks and in a few years has become direct competition with ESPN's social media empire. Overtime discovers the talent, signs them to play in its league, then controls every piece of content about them.

As Dan puts it, traditional "sports media is about talking to you about sports," while "Overtime is about listening to you." And by "you," he means the Gen Z fans who don't watch three-hour games on TV but will obsess over phone-sized highlights and the personalities behind them.

Why everyone told him he was crazy

Dan has built his entire life around proving people wrong.

Before Overtime, he ran the digital talent division at Endeavor, representing some of the world's biggest YouTubers. He'd sit in meetings where traditional agents would dismiss these unpolished video creators who somehow had millions of people meme’ing their daily shows, dressing and talking like them, and buying the products that the YouTubers were hawking.

"Agents might come into my office and say, I represent this famous person and this famous person, why do people care about a 14-year-old sitting in their bedroom making a YouTube video?" Dan recalled. "And [I would] say, well, I think you just answered the question."

That insight became his superpower: Seeing value where everyone else saw noise. Overtime rose out of that.

Sports media had worked the same way for decades — cover the leagues, analyze the trades, debate the storylines. Dan decided to blow it all up: he’d make it only about the talent, not the business of the talent.

As Dan told me, "There are 32,000 high schools. I don't cover any of them. Every year there's five, seven, nine players who capture the imagination, who are potential pros, and we tell their stories." 

But he didn’t stop at coverage; he started his own sports league. (For what it’s worth, it’s hard not to connect the dots between Overtime and the recent ESPN-NFL tie-up.) Overtime Elite launched a year before NIL rules changed, paying high school athletes to play — a move that drew the ire of every college coach in America. "I was like, well, I guess if they don't hate you, you're not trying hard enough to do something different,” he told me.

And then he built this talent into superstars. Unlike Bleacher Report or other outlets that cover leagues and their politics, Dan built a vertically integrated sports entertainment company. When Overtime makes their docuseries "One Shot" following players in their league, they produce it in-house. "We didn't make it with a third-party production firm because we knew that if one player said something, it might make better television, but it might hurt their chances to get recruited," Dan told me. "Our job is to always show them in the best light. Why? Because that’s what the kids want — great highlights and fun players to emulate.

"Most people don't value young people. They mostly value young people based on their future potential.

"Most people don't value young people," Dan said. "They mostly value young people based on their future potential. Maybe young people are just interesting for who they are right now. And it's not about their future value, and it's not about how tall they are, or how many stars they have next to their name... They could be actually really dope or really cool for who they are right now."

My favorite sign of how embedded Overtime has become in the culture is two numbers: 6-7. If you’ve spent any time around middle schoolers in this last year, you’ve heard this seemingly random phrase. It became a viral meme after one of Overtime's players, Taylen Kinney, popularized it. 

What does it mean? "It doesn't mean anything," Dan explained when I asked him to help confused parents everywhere. "Like most memes in a way don't mean anything, but in that way it means everything because it's organically created."

His advice: Stop at the 11th idea, not the first

Dan's philosophy on innovation isn’t limited to sports and is deceptively simple: quantity leads to quality, and most people stop too early.

"Do you know how to have a great idea?" he asks his students at NYU, where he’s been a professor for 9 years. "You just have to have a lot of ideas. I have so many ideas that have failed, so many ideas for Overtime that have failed, but it's just like I just keep going and eventually one of them is going to be really good."

He challenges everyone in his organization to think like a product manager, to keep iterating. Most people — especially with AI — stop at their first idea. But successful people know "it's about the 11th iteration."

"Anything that you get on first blush, probably a million people have."

"Even if you're not in the idea business because you've outsourced your brain to AI or something else like that, you can be in the business of pushing whatever that brain is to keep thinking about, keep thinking about, keep refining," he said. "Because anything that you get on first blush, probably a million people have."

This extends to hiring. Dan has moved away from traditional resume-focused interviews. In a recent interview with a sales candidate he asked, "Why do most salespeople suck?" to understand how the candidate thought.

The approach traces back to his unconventional career path. A recruiter once told him he was unhelpable because his background was too diverse.

"I'm like, 'Oh, I need to find those people because they're going to bring in all these different points of views,'" Dan realized.

And if you do it right, you can start something totally new that grabs the world’s attention. Or as my kids might say, "Six seven."

Be sure to check out the This is Working podcast to get even more from Dan.

Stream it from: 🎧 Apple | 🎧 Spotify

🎧On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving difficult problems. See more from Blackstone COO Jon Gray, Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole, Google CMO Lorraine Twohill, Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant, Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, former US President Barack Obama, filmmaker Spike Lee, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, cosmetics legend Bobbi Brown, F1’s Toto Wolff, and many more.