Inside the business of hosting the Super Bowl

What It Covers

Zaylene Jemohamed, CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee, details how she built a nonprofit from scratch as employee one to orchestrate three consecutive mega-events — NBA All Star, Super Bowl LX, and FIFA World Cup — projecting $1.4 billion in combined regional economic impact across nine Bay Area counties.

Key Questions Answered

• •Convener Model: Host committees generate outsized impact by acting as neutral conveners rather than operators. The Bay Area has 29 separate transportation agencies that never coordinate around sporting events — the host committee's primary value is forcing those parties into the same room, then stepping back once connections are established and relationships are self-sustaining.
• •Seed Funding from Stakeholders: When launching a sports commission with zero budget, Jemohamed secured roughly $1 million in seed funding by asking the Bay Area's professional sports team ownership groups to collectively contribute. This stakeholder-as-investor model aligns incentives immediately, since team presidents who fund the organization have direct financial motivation to ensure bids succeed and events deliver returns.
• •Legacy Programming as Risk Mitigation: With only 70,000 stadium seats, the host committee deliberately distributed Super Bowl programming across all nine counties — opening night in San Jose, a media party on the Peninsula, a watch party in Oakland — to prevent the political backlash that occurs when communities feel excluded from events happening in their region.
• •Intrapreneurial Persistence: When building LA28's athlete marketing platform (AMP), Jemohamed's team faced repeated internal rejections inside the Olympic movement. The lesson applied directly to her current role: get all stakeholders in the room, state intent transparently, then refuse to pause when consensus stalls. Stopping at the first "no" kills innovation inside large institutions before proof of concept is established.
• •Generalist Advantage in Complex Systems: Jemohamed's career spanning Visa's sponsorship side, the NFL, and LA28 gave her distinct toolkit components — understanding sponsor ROI measurement, league operations, and athlete monetization — that each contributed directly to managing the Bay Area's multi-league, multi-government, multi-stakeholder event portfolio simultaneously.