Technology
TechCrunch Minute: Why This Entrepreneur Is Running the Oakland Ballers Like a Startup
The Bay Area’s Coolest Startup Doesn’t Make AI Robots or Self-Driving Taxis. It’s Actually a Baseball Team.
When his beloved Oakland A’s were planning to go away the Bay, serial entrepreneur Paul Freedman was searching for a different sort of enterprise. What if he could use what he learned from running edtech startups to construct the baseball team Oakland deserves? That’s how Freedman founded the Oakland Ballers—or Oakland B’s, for brief.
With the mindset of a startup founder, Freedman and his co-founder, Bryan Carmel, are taking over a mammoth task. The B’s can’t fully recoup the lack of an MLB team — not to say Oakland has also lost NBA and NFL teams in the past five years. But the B’s can construct something that puts fans first and offers back to the community.