#413 How To Run Down A Dream

Sam was born in The Netherlands where his father was working at the time, but he grew up mostly in Marlowe, Oklahoma, a town with a population just under 5,000. Sam's dad worked for an oil and gas company. Sam was gifted with intelligence and was his high school's valedictorian. From an early age, he loved numbers. He loved math. He was fascinated by the power of exponential growth. At the University of Oklahoma, he majored in finance. He loved sports. He briefly considered becoming a coach, but if you'd asked him at the time, Sam probably would have told you he wanted to become the CEO of an industrials company or something like that. After his freshman year, he applied for an internship at Conoco. He was invited in for an interview, and it was all going well until the interviewer asked Sam where he imagined he would be in five years. Sam was honest. He said he figured he would go to business school. The interviewer was like, what? You don't wanna work at Conoco in five years? And Sam said, no. Definitely not. I'm not interested in that. Instead, he interned in the accounting group of Ernst and Young, which happened to be the world leader in providing third party opinions on the purchase of professional sports teams, giving Sam some early exposure to the world of sports business. After he graduated, Sam was offered a job at Bain Capital. He was the first University of Oklahoma student ever hired by Bain. He enjoyed the work at Bain. It was long hours of rigorous analytical work. He liked to bring large amounts of data to important decisions. About eighteen months into his time at Bain, Sam was at lunch with some other young analysts and two men he considered mentors. The two older men went around the room asking the young analysts, if you could do anything, any job in the world, what would you do? Most of the answers are something along the lines of private equity or CEO. When they got to Sam, he just said sports GM. It was the first time he verbalized this idea, but it had been forming in his mind for a while. I remember they laughed at me. It made me so mad, Sam said. At the time Sam said this, almost nobody was bringing the tools of data analytics into the world of professional sports. Then in 2002, the Boston Red Sox hired Theo Epstein, an espoused fan of advanced data analytics as the team's general manager, making the 28 year old Epstein the youngest GM in baseball history. As Sam was thinking about all of this, the author Michael Lewis published the book Moneyball, which is a look inside the innovative approach of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Bean to assemble a competitive baseball team on a small budget. Sam read Moneyball in two days. He loved everything about it. He could not stop thinking about it. …