Ishveen Jolly, CEO and Founder of OpenSponsorship, shares with Bert how she took her love for sports and boosted an analog industry to the digital age by creating a model to accelerate the non-top 5% sponsorship market.
Ishveen walks through lessons she's learned as a leader, OpenSponsorship's "secret sauce" in creating the data-driven and intentional platform, what she's found is the major difference between a successful and unsuccessful company, and the categories that are experiencing the greatest opportunities within this digital sponsorship model.
The Story of Ishveen and OpenSponsorship
My love for playing sports started as a child from playing catch with my father in our backyard, which led me to captain the Keble College, Netball, and Cricket teams at Oxford University. It also gave me the courage to leave my career in management consultancy in London and move to New Delhi, India to become a sports agent. Working with premier leagues, teams, clubs, and athletes – brokering sponsorship deals gave me an insider perspective on how fragmented and unanalytical the sports sponsorship industry is. Realizing the industry lacked transparency, information, access, tracking, and tech innovation meant there was a huge untapped potential in the annual $60 Billion sports sponsorship market.
Today OpenSponsorship is the largest and smartest marketplace connecting brands and smart marketers to over 5,700 professional athletes.