Ben Gilbert

There's nothing structural that we did to ensure there was no Cleveland Browns in our league.

It sort of accidentally happened.

And by observing the counterexample of boring football, where there's one dominant team

It kind of has to become a core tenet of our league now to fight these other guys of enough equality between teams that it is always very competitive.

Totally.

And if you have a league that figures out how to make sure that it's always competitive, and when I say always competitive, what that translates into from a business perspective is, let's say every stadium has 40,000 seats and you have eight teams.

That means you have the capability to sell 160,000 seats every weekend.

And your goal is to sell 160,000 tickets every single weekend.

And so what you basically need is to make sure that it's always a great game to come watch.

And to your point that the business model is around the gate or ticket sales rather than TV, that actually stayed the case until 1977.

That was the first year that the NFL made more money from television revenue than from ticket sales.

That is a full 30 years later than the time period we are talking about here.

All right.

Well, listeners, this is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading agentic trust platform that helps you automate compliance and manage risk.

And David, I caught up with Christina and the Vanta team to get the latest on this one.

Oh, nice.

Yes.

So listeners, you probably know that Vanta started by focusing on compliance automation, you know, helping companies get SOC 2 and ISO 27001 and GDPR and HIPAA.

Their big insight was they could build a system that would monitor all your compliance and risk continuously, not just once a year for your audit, so you can feel confident in your security posture all of the time.

But they've realized that the business they're really in is making it easier for you to earn the trust of your customers.