I know a dog walker and a hairstylist who rely on word-of-mouth to find clients. Most of my fractional PR/comms work also comes through referrals. If you can’t earn a warm intro, it’s hard to make it as an entrepreneur.

But a warm intro only gets you into the room. It doesn’t get you a business.

Jump CEO Jordy Leiser co-founded a platform for pro sports fan experience with baseball legend Alex Rodriguez and e-commerce mogul Marc Lore. Their multi-year product plan assumed they’d launch with the Minnesota Timberwolves once Rodriguez and Lore finalized their purchase of the franchise.

In stages, the pair bought 40% of the team. But in March 2024, then-owner Glen Taylor announced he’d keep them on as limited partners only.

“That was an existential moment for us,” Jordy says. “Most startups don’t have an extra year of cash lying around.”

He walked the Long Beach pier to process the shock, tapped his network for advice, and rebuilt Jump’s go-to-market around a crawl–walk–run model that leveraged existing relationships and technology.

In the episode, he talks about:

In February 2025, an arbitrator ruled in favor of Lore and Rodriguez, clearing their path to buying a controlling stake in the Timberwolves. The year-long pivot, early deployments, and resilience became part of Jump’s story when it raised a $25M Series A in August.

Most of you aren’t trying to disrupt Ticketmaster, but the lessons Jordy shared apply across every early-stage category.

To build a repeatable validation loop, borrow Jordy’s framework:

He points out that outsiders often succeed precisely because they’re not carrying incumbents’ assumptions. That “child’s mind” is a feature, not a bug.

I’ve been buying sports tickets since I was a teen. The process is faster now, but I wouldn’t say it’s better. I still expect a significant amount of friction every time I buy a ticket.

“Look for an industry where the leading product is really a second-rate product,” he says. “That’s a top tell-tale sign the category is ripe for innovation.”

When experiences suck and people are conditioned to settle, that's an opportunity.

Every startup claims they’re a platform. Very few of them actually are.

Jordy’s litmus test:

Are lots of people across the org dependent on your platform to do their jobs?

“You’re not a platform if you plug into a main platform that drives your business,” he says.

If you’re working in a sector that already has a platform with an ecosystem, network effects, and a large developer community like Shopify, Salesforce, or Zendesk, you’re not replacing it.

When the Timberwolves deal fell through, Jump didn’t have time for analysis paralysis. Jordy got away from his desk and took a long walk on the Long Beach pier so he could formulate a new plan.

He asked:

What do we already have?
Who trusts us?
What can we ship now?

That led to:

Sequencing matters more than scale.

I don’t believe in “founder DNA.” It's just another form of gatekeeping.

But if you can’t embrace the idea that something outside your control could blow up your spot — and if you can’t adapt quickly when it happens — don’t launch a startup.

If you want to keep seeing this kind of work, here are three things that help a ton:

1. Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on Beehiiv

I moved everything off Substack so I can centralize here.

2. Share this episode with one founder who needs it

You know the one.

3. If you’re feeling generous…

Become a paid supporter. It directly buys me time to make more deeply reported conversations like this one.

Thanks for reading,

— Walter.

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(1:12) Breaking into pro sports, rebuilding fan experience, and reverse-engineering fundraising.

(2:03) How Stella Connect (customer service) laid the foundation for Jump (customer experience for fans).
(2:58) What Jump does today: a unified fan experience + data platform for teams like the Timberwolves.
(4:11) The unusual founding plan: 3-4 years of R&D, designed to launch with an NBA franchise from day one.

(5:46) Why sports is nothing like building a typical SaaS startup — more like a “car company” level of complexity.
(6:48)The true barrier: a near-monopoly in ticketing that stops innovation cold.
(7:59) Selling into a market where fans have low expectations — and why demand is obvious but still untapped.

(9:54) Early customers as classic early adopters — every team already knows the pain points intimately.

(11:25) The first hypothesis they had to kill: incumbents don’t want to integrate or share data. At all.
(12:32) Designing for the actual fan demographic: season ticket holders skew 50+, so “cutting-edge UX” isn’t always the answer.
(13:25) Jordy’s advice to founders: get out of the building, talk to insiders, but keep your “child’s mind.”

(15:06) Sports as an industry you can’t “hack into” — it works more like fashion or Hollywood.
(17:31) Moments when he realized he was losing stakeholders — and why being “comfortable in the uncomfortable” is essential.
(18:03) Early would-be partners who backed out, the impact on morale, and what they learned from those rejections.

(19:45) Jump’s origin as a “dynamic seating” idea — and why they had to build the entire platform instead.
(21:03) The “invisible platform” ethos: why Jump melts into the background so teams can own the fan relationship.
(23:10) Why NWSL teams and NBA franchises have surprisingly similar needs — and what that taught them about productizing.
(24:36) Jordy’s litmus test for platform vs. point solution: how many people in the org depend on you to do their job?

(27:01) Seed to Series A timeline — and how the Timberwolves sale collapsing delayed everything by a year.
(28:37HaHow Jordy processed a crisis that was public, sudden, and existential.
(31:13) The Long Beach pier walk: the moment he decided to pivot the GTM to a crawl-walk-run strategy.
(32:49) Effectuation theory, the “bird in hand,” and how it led to NCAA → NWSL → Timberwolves as a survival sequence.

(34:39) What he had to unlearn from Stella Connect: stop zooming in — zoom way out to a 10–20-year vision.
(37:05) The habit he kept: talent above all else — and why his first call was to a Chief People Officer.
(38:45) Minimum viable people function for early founders: fractional HR > junior recruiter.
(42:58) High performance without grind culture: intensity ≠ toxicity — and why durability matters more than speed.

(45:40) Hiring from big tech: what’s actually transferable, and the dangers of logo-blindness.
(50:55) The one answer Jordy would need from a founder-CEO before he’d join their startup.