Inside the business of hosting the Super Bowl

ZAILEEN JANMOHAMED:  I don’t think I really fully realized how visible this space was going to be and how political it was going to be. I had no idea.

JEFF BERMAN:  To say that pulling off an event as large as the Super Bowl is a massive multi-year project may be the understatement of the year. So when Zaileen Janmohamed was given the opportunity to bring the big game to the Bay Area, she knew it would need some start-up-style energy with monster scale to follow.

JANMOHAMED:  There’s something that I really love about early-stage. I like to build. And when someone gives me a blank canvas and says, “Hey, I have an idea, and I don’t know all the answers,” for some reason I’m attracted to that.

BERMAN:  Why do you think that is?

JANMOHAMED:  Because I’m crazy.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN:  This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show: Zaileen Janmohamed. Zaileen, who goes by Z, is the CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee. The Bay Area Host Committee is the not-for-profit behind the scenes making sure events like the NBA All Star Game, FIFA World Cup, and the Super Bowl both come to the region and are big wins for the Bay Area. 

By the way, no region has ever done all three of these events back to back to back before. The stakes are high. The Super Bowl alone is expected to generate more than half-a-billion dollars for the Bay Area. Z and I dig into what it takes to juggle the local politics, the maddening logistics, and the myriad stakeholders involved in hosting these iconic events. I am so grateful she squeezed in time to speak with us in San Francisco the day before the big game.

Z, welcome to Masters of Scale.

JANMOHAMED:  I’m excited to be here.

Copy LinkWhat it’s like to host the Super Bowl in the Bay Area

BERMAN:  You are right near the end of a pretty brutal stretch. We are recording this the day before the Super Bowl. How are you holding up?

JANMOHAMED:  I feel good. I’m tired, but it’s been such a journey to get to this point that I have this really interesting feeling of relief and just pride. Really grateful for the cities that have come together to make this happen. We have a couple days to go, but it feels really good.

BERMAN:  Yeah, you have to run through that finish line. I will say, having worked at the NFL and being a pretty big Rams fan, not my first Super Bowl week, I’ve been here all week. The Bay Area in general and San Francisco in particular has really been flexing this week, so congrats.

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah. What I’ve seen come out of the Bay has been just incredible this week, from just the operations and logistics, and walking down the street and seeing police officers friendly and welcoming and doing their job, and all of the communities coming together. It’s been everything that I wanted to see, everything that we planned for, but you don’t know what’s going to happen until you see it take place.

Copy LinkWhat is the Bay Area Host Committee?

BERMAN:  When we were talking about having you on the show, I had it in my head initially that you were almost a popup CEO. It’s like, “Okay. Well, it’s Super Bowl, and then it’s World Cup, and then this thing shuts down.” It’s almost like running a political campaign.

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah.

BERMAN:  But it’s not because the Bay Area Host Committee is going to be a persistent organization to help bring more of these events to the Bay. What is the Bay Area Host Committee, and why were you drawn to take this role?

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah. I have lived in the Bay since 2006. So originally Canadian, but moved out here 20 years ago now, and I didn’t actually even know that we didn’t have a longstanding sports commission. And I give a lot of credit to my board, which includes the presidents of all the Bay Area professional sports teams. Which, in itself, is a unique value proposition. I don’t think that exists in any other market, where all the professional sports teams come together to do something collectively. They really saw a gap I think in what this region needed, especially coming out of COVID, and had a belief that sport could really help put this region back on the map.

So Al Guido led this initiative. Which, if you know Al, he is –

BERMAN:  From the 49ers.

JANMOHAMED:  From the 49ers, now the CEO of the 49ers. He is a force, and when something gets into his head of something that needs to be done for sport and for the region, you’re not going to mess around with him. So he brought this group together, and the first event that they bid for and won was the World Cup. And then I think they were like, “We’re going to need someone to lead this.” So the Host Committee is essentially a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit entity.

BERMAN:  I know C3s, I know C4s. What’s a C6?

JANMOHAMED:  Similar to a C3 or C4, just a different kind of tax bracket, but a not-for-profit, which is the most important thing. The reason I say that is our only purpose is for the economic impact and the benefit that comes back to the region. We don’t share in any of the revenues from a Super Bowl. We really want to see that economic impact come into the region. We want to see the exposure and the visibility of the region. We want to see the societal and community impact that comes into the region. Our goal is to exist for the longterm. If we can’t sustain ourselves as an organization and then shut down, and have to relearn everything, build new relationships again and not take advantage of the reps you have in the marketplace, we’re just starting from scratch. So the goal is to continue.

BERMAN:  So Al has a vision coming out of COVID, he pulls the ownership groups of the professional teams together. What happens after that?

JANMOHAMED:  Tactically, they establish a new set of bylaws, form a board. They brought in some independent board members as well. Mayor Lurie was my board chair when I first started. And then I think it was just, “How do we scale, and what do we need first?” So the first thing they did was try to figure out who their CEO was going to be. I was at LA28 at the time, but living in the Bay.

BERMAN:  And you’d been working with companies like Visa, who are massive Olympic sponsors and deep sport marketing background.

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah. And all have played a really interesting role in what I need to do today. Having experience at Visa, understanding the business side and what businesses are looking for, how they measure ROI, what the buy side of the equation looks like. And I would say every single organization I’ve been a part of along the way has basically provided something in my toolkit for me to be able to do this job. But I wasn’t looking, Jeff, to move. I was very happy working in the Olympic movement.

BERMAN:  Does Al pick up the phone and call you and say, “Z, come serve your region?”

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah, he basically did that. He found me at a conference, actually the Niners conference.

BERMAN:  And he was up front, “This is why I’m reaching out to you?”

JANMOHAMED:  Not initially. But then when we had lunch a couple weeks later, he laid it all out. He had a really good plan in his head. Didn’t tell me then that there was going to be a potential bid for the Super Bowl at that point in time. I think he was saving that nugget for a little bit later, but talked a lot about the World Cup. And as a sports fan and a soccer player when I was younger, and both my kids play soccer, and I love the Bay that much, when I walked away from that conversation, I kept thinking about it. And when that happens, when you walk away from a conversation and it doesn’t really leave you, you know that there’s something there.

BERMAN:  Yeah.

JANMOHAMED:  So I was hooked right at that point.

BERMAN:  And this was when?

JANMOHAMED:  Fall of 2022.

Copy LinkWhy Zaileen Janmohamed loves early-stage

BERMAN:  Okay. So if it’s me, fall of 2022, I have this incredibly persuasive person, really interesting idea. I’m a Bay Area person, it’s a chance to serve my community, all of the things. But the World Cup is four years away, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to get a Super Bowl. Had NBA All Star for ’25 been committed?

JANMOHAMED:  Not been announced.

BERMAN:  Okay. So NBA All Star isn’t done yet. I think I might have had some concern about, “What am I going to do for three-and-a-half years before the World Cup comes?”

JANMOHAMED:  Here’s the good news. I joined LA28 eight years before LA was in front of me. So I think there’s something that I really love about early stage. I like to build. And when someone gives me a blank canvas and says, “Hey, I have an idea and I don’t know all the answers,” for some reason I’m attracted to that. And they did that at LA28, too.

BERMAN:  Why do you think that is?

JANMOHAMED:  Because I’m crazy.

BERMAN: But in all sincerity, there’s an entrepreneurial mindset there for sure.

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah, for sure.

BERMAN:  What is it about who you are or how you were raised, where you were raised that you think led to that?

JANMOHAMED:  I love thousand-piece puzzles. I love things that don’t feel like they have an answer to them, and I get to create. I think that’s just part of who I am. I think living in the Bay fosters that a lot for me. I also think that I’ve been raised in a way where I’ve had to push through some things, and it’s created a stubbornness in me. Sometimes too much of a stubbornness, but really a, “Hey, you think I’m not going to figure this out and I’m going to figure it out.” I think it’s a grit that I think I have, and that works really well when you have to build an organization.

BERMAN:  Is there a story that is representative of where that grit comes from?

JANMOHAMED:  I grew up in a really traditional Indian household, and girls were expected to be a certain way. My mom, when I was five or six-years-old, put me in ballet, and gymnastics, and reading, and all the things. And I remember coming home one day and I had a brochure, a flyer in my hand from school that was about, it was minor league hockey. And I was Canadian, you see hockey everywhere. It’s how you assimilate into your community. And I handed it to my mom, and she looked me, and she was like, “We’re going to give this to your brother, and he’s going to go play hockey, and you’re going to do the things that you’re supposed to do as an Indian girl.”

I was six, I don’t think I articulated this out loud at all, but I was upset. I’m sure at that point, it just didn’t feel right. I just felt let down. So that I think initiated the stubbornness of, “Well, I like this, and you’re saying I can’t do this, so somehow I’m going to figure out how to do this.” It was every day, sneaking my way into a gym and playing ball hockey, and then finally figuring out a way, through my brother really, to get onto the ice and play. At some point my mom was like, “Well, okay. Well, you’re going to do it whether I like it or not.” She finally got there to the point where we’d watch women’s hockey on television for the Olympics or otherwise and I’m like, “That could have been me.” And she’s like, “I feel really bad.” She’s gotten there today.

Copy LinkBuilding the Bay Area Host Committee from the ground up

BERMAN:  So fall of ’22, you and Al have this fateful lunch. He recruits you to come aboard. When you came in, what were you inheriting?

JANMOHAMED:  I was employee number one.

BERMAN:  Oh.

JANMOHAMED:  So I had a set of bylaws and a board. And at that point, it was just the World Cup.

BERMAN:  And did you have a budget? Did you have funding?

JANMOHAMED:  We had no funding at that point in time, but what we asked the teams was that they would provide our first set of seed funding, and all of them stepped up.

BERMAN:  Okay.

JANMOHAMED:  So we had seed funding.

BERMAN:  How much did you raise in that?

JANMOHAMED:  About a million dollars.

BERMAN:  Okay.

JANMOHAMED:  So not a lot.

BERMAN:  Yeah.

JANMOHAMED:  Just to get me going. And from that funding source, we had to try to scale and do all the things early on in a business. Find office space, find our first set of employees, build sales materials, really think about what our brand was going to look like.

Now, the great thing about being a not-for-profit that is, A, rooted in the Bay, but also just here for the economic impact of the region is you bring in partners right away, and we had some great ones. One of the first people I called was J.J. Carter out of FleishmanHillard. And I was entering a space that I don’t think I really fully realized how visible this space was going to be and how political it was going to be. I had no idea. Maybe two weeks in I’m like, “J.J., I need help.”

BERMAN:  What version of political?

JANMOHAMED:  The Bay is actually a really interesting place. It’s nine counties, all nine work very differently. It’s probably one of the reasons there’s been no central sports commission is because it’s actually very challenging to bring nine counties together to do one big thing. Super diverse region, I love the diversity in it, but that centralization does not happen. And there’s a lot of little brother, big brother syndrome in the Bay, and I’m Canadian, so I feel very comfortable saying that. I’ve felt it myself. 

But it becomes political when people are like, “Well, the South Bay is getting this, and we’re not getting this.” Or, “Oakland’s not getting this, and San Francisco’s getting this.” And those sentiments are stated in the press, they’re talked about a lot.

And think about how you start an organization and the things that you need right away. You need legal. You need a marketing agency, you need a comms agency. You need finance.

Copy LinkHow the Bay Area landed the Super Bowl

BERMAN:  How did you land the Super Bowl?

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah, this one I did not see coming. If you had Al in this chair, I think he would say to you, “I knew this was going to happen, and we just didn’t tell Z initially,” which he’s done a couple times.

But I walked into my first board meeting, my first day was sometime 2023, my first board meeting was sometime in March. And I walk in, somewhat intimidated by this group of people. You’re sitting and the table is Al Guido, and Larry Baer, and Brandon Schneider, you have all the team presidents sitting there. And I’m just trying to talk to them about my vision for the organization.  I have a few slides and really expected it to be more of a conversation and discussion of what we were going to do to host the World Cup. And the board at that point in time was like, “We need to do more.”

And both Al and Brandon Schneider, who’s the president of the Warriors, started talking about the events that they wanted to host. And Al got to it first, he’s like, “We’re going to bid for a Super Bowl.” And I was like, “Are we? Which one?” He’s like, “Yeah, 2026.” And I was like, “2020 … Wait, hold on. I think we have another event in 2026.” He’s like, “Yeah, but I think we should still do it.”

So that meeting was, I don’t know, middle of March. The bid was due six weeks later, I think, or eight weeks later. Never done a Super Bowl bid before. You just get a folder full of requirements that you just have to work through. So as a first-time CEO with a board like that, you don’t actually say no. You’re like, “Sure, that sounds like a great idea.” Again, you go try and figure it out.

BERMAN:  The three hardest companies I’ve ever done deals with are Apple, Nike, and the National Football League. And I worked at the National Football League. Obviously, massive impact. How big is the economic impact of the Super Bowl on the Bay?

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah, it’s going to be around $500 million. Our projections show anywhere between 450 and 630, so we’ll see after the event, we’ll do a post-event, but it’ll be around that half-a-billion dollar mark.

BERMAN:  And then there’s a halo effect because it promotes the city, promotes the region, all of it. So there should be a lasting impact and particularly carrying through with World Cup and everything else.

JANMOHAMED:  Absolutely. So between the three events, if you take NBA All Star, the Super Bowl and the World Cup, we’re projecting about a $1.4 billion economic impact.

BERMAN:  All the moving pieces here, Z. You’ve got the teams and leagues that are here, you’ve got your board, your participants, you’ve got all the political factions, you’ve got other business leaders, you’ve got the NFL itself. All the fans who come in, all the hospitality, on, and on, and on. How does it work?

JANMOHAMED:  The role for the Host Committee really is to convene. So we sit in the center of bringing a lot of different parties together. Sometimes after we do that, they continue and do some of the work on their own, sometimes we have to continue to be in the room.

So for example, there are 29 transportation agencies in the Bay Area. I didn’t know that, again, living here, it’s just fascinating to me. Those 29 transportation don’t really come together often, and they definitely don’t and won’t come together around a sporting event unless we bring them together. Same with safety and security. The NFL has a safety and security plan, they lead the specific security deployment, at least the planning of that from a very high level, and then they need local PD in San Francisco, and Santa Clara and San Jose. They need state resources, they need federal resources. We will play a part in making sure that everybody’s connected in the right way, and they know who the right people are, and then we’ll get out of the way.

So it really depends on the situation and what is needed every single day.  Are we in the role to just convene? And we have to figure that out and then play that accordingly.

Copy LinkWhat success looks like for hosting the Super Bowl

BERMAN:  When you do the post-mort on the Super Bowl, what will have been success?

JANMOHAMED:  We wanted two things to happen from a Bay Area Host Committee perspective. One is – and this is outside of making sure the game is safe and secure, and people can get in and out, all of those things, so I’m not even going to touch the operations piece of it – one was to ensure that we weren’t just focused on the game on Sunday, and particularly because I’m a Niners fan so that’s a little bit easier for me. But, what is it, 70,000 people are going to be in that stadium, and the event is going to come and go in a week, and we’re going to be off. So we’ve spent so much time trying to think through, how do we make sure all of the Bay, whether you’re in the stadium or not, gets to experience this in some way, shape, or form. Very intentional about spreading things out. Putting opening night in San Jose, having our media party on the Peninsula, doing a watch party in Oakland and all the things that are happening in San Francisco. It was one of the biggest learnings we had in 50-odd communities feeling like the Super Bowl wasn’t part of their area or community and we really wanted to change that. So that’s part of it.

We’ve done a ton of work around legacy. I think just this week, we opened two fields or ground-broke on two fields. We have a couple more that we’ll announce. Our initiative is to build or refurbish a new place of play in nine counties of the Bay Area. So really thinking about legacy, impact, breadth of our Super Bowl work. So that’s one, all around impact.

Second is not surprisingly, making sure the story around technology and innovation was part of everything that we did. So yesterday, we hosted the first-ever Super Bowl Innovation Summit.

BERMAN:  Which I got to be there for and was a tremendous success.

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah. You know, Jeff, again, it was definitely an idea early on when we won the bid and I remember talking to league staff about doing this. And said, “You cannot come into the Bay and not have this conversation. You are literally taking the biggest event in sport and bringing it to the innovation capital of the world. This has to happen.” And to their credit, all they said was, “How? How and when are we going to do it, and what is it going to look like?”

So again, those things that you think about and you start to plan for, until you see fully realized. 

It feels so good today that we were able to do that, and the conversations we had in the room were incredible. But that’s just one piece. We’ve tried to instill a fun tech experience all the way through a fan journey. When you get to the airport, you’ll see Steve Young, and Jerry Rice and Mayor Lurie in, it’s a little trippy, but in holograms as they greet you. There’s a tech experience at Super Bowl Experience. Really making sure we’re talking innovation in its complete form.

That was a part of our entire story. We do things differently here. We are first to market, we are a little bit crazy, but we’re proud of being that, and we’re going to show you and tell you about what that means about being in the Bay. So I think both of those things were important to us, and I’m really happy to see that they’ve both played out.

BERMAN:  Still ahead, more with Z about how she built an innovative marketplace for Olympic athletes as part of the LA28 team.

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Copy LinkOpening monetization platforms opportunities for Olympians

I’m in the middle of reading a book called Range by David Epstein right now.

JANMOHAMED:  Yes.

BERMAN:  Do you know this book?

JANMOHAMED:  I know the book.

BERMAN:  Okay. So you’ll remember that the book opens with basically, “Here’s Tiger Woods, here’s Roger Federer.” Tiger at two has got a club in his hands and is a prodigy, and Federer is refusing to move up a level in tennis because he wants to hang out with his buddies and shoot bull afterwards and hang out, and they both become generational athletes.

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah.

BERMAN:  And what Range ultimately gets to is that, perhaps counterintuitively, generalists have a massive advantage when it comes to solving problems that don’t have obvious answers, which is something you’ve clearly been drawn to.

So I’d love to hone in on particular on one thing that you did with LA28 because being a lifelong athlete, maybe not as good as you were, but tried, wanted to be, and certainly a huge sports fan. Until, I don’t know, 10 years ago, I didn’t know what the initials NIL were. Name, image, likeness wasn’t something that we really thought about or talked about. So could you talk a little bit about LA28 and what you did with NIL, and how you approached that opportunity and challenge?

JANMOHAMED:  Yeah. LA28 was, again, just such a fantastic experience for me because it was a young organization when I joined. I think I was the 30th employee, I think they’re in the thousands now. And it was a role, the head of innovation around monetization. My job really was to come up with new ways for the organizing committee to make money, for the USOPC to make money and for athletes to make money. So I’d spent a lot of time with Olympic and Paralympic athletes, and they’re some of the most amazing people, amazing human beings. They give up so much to represent their country, but what I think we don’t remember is that they give it up in a time of their lives where all of the rest of us are graduating from school, honing our skillset, getting early experience in our careers. So that when they are done competing, they’re behind. They haven’t done all of the – the first 10 years of your career, they’ve missed.

BERMAN:  Right. We don’t know who the American luger is who’s going to come in 14th.

JANMOHAMED:  That’s right.

BERMAN:  Yeah.

JANMOHAMED:  My team and I had seen where the future of NIL was likely going. So the collegiate space in the United States is basically the training ground for Team USA, and it’s a great training ground for Team USA. So you see this convergence of these two things happening. You see NIL.

BERMAN:  Can we just explain what NIL is?

JANMOHAMED: NIL is name, image, likeness, and in the collegiate space and in the Olympic space in prior years, five years ago, athletes weren’t able to monetize their own name, image, likeness. So the colleges would do it or their conferences would do it. In the Olympic movement, the national governing bodies would do it, so USA Swimming, USA Track & Field. Or the USOPC would do it, or a sponsor would do it. But the athlete, for the most part, couldn’t do it or didn’t know how to do it.

BERMAN:  Right.

JANMOHAMED:  There wasn’t an easy way for them to do it. So you see these two things starting to happen. Athletes finishing their core, even in their moment of competing really struggling to make ends meet, and the training ground for Olympic and Paralympic athletes starting to move, and we started to say, “Well, hold on a second. If we don’t prepare for this moment where those two things meet, it’s not going to be good.”

So we pitched for a long time, this concept of a platform, a monetization platform where athletes and brands could basically converge. And more brands getting access to more athletes and learning about their stories in a really seamless, turnkey, software-induced way would be good for everyone.

BERMAN:  And this is almost a marketplace?

JANMOHAMED:  It’s a marketplace. It was really hard.

BERMAN:  What was so hard about it?

JANMOHAMED:  The technology for sure was hard, but making change in anything in the Olympic movement, very, very difficult.

BERMAN:  We hear over, and over and over again from people who have an entrepreneurial spirit and are working inside companies that are just not set up for them to succeed to generate the innovation, whether it’s because there are systems and processes that on many levels have to be there, or because there are people protecting their own turf or their own cut. And interestingly, often we talk to CEOs who are frustrated that they can’t get the innovative ideas from the team. What did you learn from that experience that might be useful to someone who’s trying to be more intrapreneurial at a bigger company or in a bigger system?

JANMOHAMED:  That experience of launching AMP, the athlete marketing platform, I think taught me a lot. It’s actually been so helpful in what I’m doing today. Which is, it’s going to sound overly simplified, but getting all of the parties in the room and being very transparent about your intent must happen, and sometimes it’s overlooked. So I think that was the first learning is, get the right players in the room, be transparent in what you’re trying to achieve.

And then the second piece of it is don’t stop if they say no. Because we had a lot of naysayers and people who were upset, and at some point when you believe that what you’re doing is the right thing, you just have to keep going. I think that’s what we ended up doing is – there’s a tendency in a lot of different things, definitely in the Olympic movement is if someone says no or if not all parties agree, then we’re going to pause because we need everybody aligned. And we just, at some point I actually had to push the USOPC, I think they were about to stop, and I was like, “We are not going to stop. We’ve already invested all of these dollars, the athletes are excited, let’s just go. Even if we test and change, we’ve got to just go.”

So I think all of those things have made me a better CEO today because there’s things that we’ve done, even in what we’re experiencing this week, that I think we had some naysayers. And we were like, “This is what we believe in, and we think it’s right and we’re going to go.”

Copy LinkThe future of sporting events in the Bay Area

BERMAN:  NBA All Star, February of ’25. Super Bowl, February ’26. World Cup, summer of 2026. What happens next?

JANMOHAMED:  I know, I’m getting that question a lot right now.

BERMAN:  I bet.

JANMOHAMED:  We’re going to take a little break because we need it.

BERMAN:  You deserve it.

JANMOHAMED:  And then really reevaluate, number one, how the organization looks and how we move forward. But number two, that the bids that are sitting in front of us, we’ve obviously put in a bid for the Women’s World Cup. I do want to see a women’s event here, hopefully before 2031. But this is such a great women’s sports market. I’ve had three men’s events and one with NWSL championships. I want to bring another one in.

We also like to do things a little bit differently. This doesn’t have to be an all star game, per se. There’s a lot of events that could come into the Bay because of the type of lifestyle we lead around bike racing, cricket. There’s things that happen in this region that I think are good fertile grounds for sport to really thrive. So yesterday, I talked to Alexis Ohanian about Athlos coming here. So there could be a bunch. If you asked my board chair, he’d say we are going to do the Olympics. I said, “Just pause right now, hold. Let’s take a little break.” But I can’t wait to see what’s next.

BERMAN:  Well, we can’t wait to have you back on to talk about it. Thank you so much for being with us.

JANMOHAMED:  Thank you for having me. It’s awesome.

BERMAN:  Thanks again to Zaileen Janmohamed for joining us. If you’re a sports fan, I hope this was a fascinating look behind the curtain at something you watch every year. And if you’re not a sports fan, I hope there were incredible lessons in here for scaling your own businesses.

Now that the big game is over, Z is onto the next challenge, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara will host its first FIFA World Cup game in June. I’m Jeff Berman. Thanks for listening.