Entrepreneur Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm partnered with Entrepreneur Media that is dedicated to backing passionate and innovative founders as early as day one. In this series, we are profiling the amazing entrepreneurs Entrepreneur Ventures is working with to share their insights on building and growing a thriving business.
Ryan Rottman spent more than two decades as an actor and producer, appearing on shows like 90210 and starring in nearly a dozen Hallmark films. Sean O’Brien invented a portable beach chair in his 20s that led to an eight-figure exit, then went on to co-found Autio, an audio-storytelling app, with actor Kevin Costner. Together, alongside quarterback Aaron Rodgers as co-founder, they built Athlete Agent — a database connecting brands directly to more than 30,000 athletes across 20 leagues — with its eye on 280 more across the globe. Their client list already includes Coca-Cola, Netflix and Goldman Sachs, and they built it almost entirely without spending a penny on marketing budget. I spoke with Rottman and O’Brien to talk about how it happened.
Dan Bova: So where did the idea for Athlete Agent even come from?
Ryan Rottman: As an actor, IMDb was my business card. Every time I walked into an audition room, casting directors were asking about my filmography — past, present, future projects. Producers from Hallmark saw me on “90210,” looked at my IMDb Pro account, where they list your representation information, saw who my agent was, and reached out. Because that information was correct, I’ve since done around eight Hallmark films. Had it not been correct, they would’ve gone down the next guy on the list. I’ve also been fortunate to call Aaron Rodgers a good friend for over 17 years. We went to dinner in LA, and I said, “I’m so confused. I know all the athletes through you — why is there not an IMDb for athletes?” He said, “Who have you told?” I said, “A couple buddies.” He said, “Don’t tell anyone else. There’s white space for this. Let’s do it.”
How did you first hook up with Aaron?
Ryan Rottman: We played in a golf tournament, and that’s one of the things I love about golf — where else can you just spend four hours with someone, sitting in a cart, understanding who they are as a person? Do they get angry when they hit the ball out of bounds? How do they handle adversity? It was such an amazing time, and we bonded over “The Big Lebowski,” one of our favorite movies. We just forged a friendship after that.
Sean, how did you end up joining as CEO?
Sean O’Brien: My whole career started with an invention — my friends and I built a portable chair for the beach, we got a cover story in Entrepreneur magazine, and someone from Swimways Corp read it and approached us. We sold the company for eight figures shortly after — that was my liquidity event at age 27. More recently, I co-founded Autio, an audio-storytelling app, with Kevin Costner — we raised $20 million and were on “Shark Tank.” I was going to retire after that, and then this came across my desk. The first thing I did was buy an IMDb Pro subscription and look up Costner’s team, and I thought, “This is crazy that sports doesn’t have this.” That’s why I joined — started as CTO and got bumped up to CEO.
How do you actually gather and fact-check all this data?
Sean O’Brien: We spent $3 million building the initial database for the first 10 leagues. There’s nowhere to scrape this stuff from, so it’s mostly manual effort — even AI tools aren’t great at it, which is why Google partnered with us. We’re the only people in the world who have this data. It’s relationship-driven; we have a whole research team, and we update rosters around events like trade deadlines. Agents will also notify us of changes — they’ll email us and say, “Pull that endorsement off a profile, that deal just ended.”
Photo credit: Athlete Agent
What’s the business model?
Sean O’Brien: It’s $99 a month or $999 a year, per seat license. A company might have five accounts with us, paying roughly $5,000 a year. In the long run, we intend to do the IMDb model, where agents pay us to manage their athletes’ pages too.
Ryan Rottman: What we didn’t realize going in is that 90% of an agent’s job is outbound. Now we’re creating inbound for them, and they love us for that. We don’t take any piece of the deal flow — we’re simply connectors. The brands pay us to get the information, and they go do the deal.
What does a profile actually look like when you pull one up?
Sean O’Brien: Say you’re a real customer like Netflix, and you want to put Travis Kelce in a new film you’re developing. You come to his page, and the vitals aren’t paywalled, but everything else is. You get Travis’ whole team — right in the middle, you’ll see his theatrical agents, and you can copy the email and go direct to the right person, rather than emailing the famous agent or the league agent, which is what people used to do. We’ve got the contract values, so you can see how much money they make, plus a full endorsement list — most sites only list four or five endorsements for someone like Travis, but we have all of them, linked. We’ve got all their startup investments, anything business-related that’s not an endorsement, and finally, the charity work.
You haven’t spent a dollar on marketing, yet you’ve signed Coca-Cola, Netflix and Hugo Boss. How?
Sean O’Brien: They’re finding us in the press, but also through AI applications — ChatGPT recommends us, Gemini recommends us. I took that data to Google, and they’re now backing us through the Scale AI program, a half-million-dollar investment, and we’re building a custom version of Gemini together. Out of the box, an LLM knows Red Bull and Monster are energy drink companies. What it doesn’t know is whether a specific athlete has a deal in that space. We do. So a CMO could ask, “Find me all the WNBA players who don’t have an energy drink deal,” and it pulls the profiles and contact information in one swoop.
What’s a lesson you’ve each learned building this?
Ryan Rottman: A big thing for me was coming from the acting world, where 90% of the job is getting told no. You get a thick skin to understand it’s not personal. On the fundraising side, when someone tells you no, it doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea — it just means it’s not right for them. A lot of founders get told no enough times that they start thinking maybe they don’t have a great idea. You just have to keep moving forward. And having Aaron is amazing — but at the end of the day, this isn’t the Aaron Rodgers business. This is a standalone business.
What do you want entrepreneurs to know about Athlete Agent?
Sean O’Brien: I want them to know that the wall has come down. If you’ve got $99 a month, you can basically access any athlete. Keep the email short, and make sure what you’re pitching is relevant to the person. A lot of people assume a top athlete’s agent is never going to read their email — but if you have a great idea that’s relevant to something that athlete cares about, you might just get a Zoom. We set those up all the time, and founders can’t believe it.
Entrepreneur Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm partnered with Entrepreneur Media that is dedicated to backing passionate and innovative founders as early as day one. In this series, we are profiling the amazing entrepreneurs Entrepreneur Ventures is working with to share their insights on building and growing a thriving business.
Ryan Rottman spent more than two decades as an actor and producer, appearing on shows like 90210 and starring in nearly a dozen Hallmark films. Sean O’Brien invented a portable beach chair in his 20s that led to an eight-figure exit, then went on to co-found Autio, an audio-storytelling app, with actor Kevin Costner. Together, alongside quarterback Aaron Rodgers as co-founder, they built Athlete Agent — a database connecting brands directly to more than 30,000 athletes across 20 leagues — with its eye on 280 more across the globe. Their client list already includes Coca-Cola, Netflix and Goldman Sachs, and they built it almost entirely without spending a penny on marketing budget. I spoke with Rottman and O’Brien to talk about how it happened.
Dan Bova: So where did the idea for Athlete Agent even come from?
Ryan Rottman: As an actor, IMDb was my business card. Every time I walked into an audition room, casting directors were asking about my filmography — past, present, future projects. Producers from Hallmark saw me on “90210,” looked at my IMDb Pro account, where they list your representation information, saw who my agent was, and reached out. Because that information was correct, I’ve since done around eight Hallmark films. Had it not been correct, they would’ve gone down the next guy on the list. I’ve also been fortunate to call Aaron Rodgers a good friend for over 17 years. We went to dinner in LA, and I said, “I’m so confused. I know all the athletes through you — why is there not an IMDb for athletes?” He said, “Who have you told?” I said, “A couple buddies.” He said, “Don’t tell anyone else. There’s white space for this. Let’s do it.”