If you’re a football fan, you probably know what this is
I’ll save my ode to Bill Walsh for another day, but the above family tree outlines how many coaches were groomed either directly below him, within his system, or by one of his coordinators while at the Niners. Actually the tree above doesn’t even do Walsh’s impact on the NFL justice as it looks like many of these people never directly worked with him which is incorrect.
Here in Silicon Valley, people like to sometimes make similar family trees for certain companies and entrepreneurs as employees branch off into new ventures. Obviously given the increased pace of company life cycles and career changes in the startup world, drawing one of these up is not that hard for any larger startup that makes it big like an Ebay, Google, or Intel.
But something that has really been interesting is the legacy of some of the Yardbarker former employees who are still in the larger Sports 2.0 space although no longer with Yardbarker. Take a look below.
From left to right here is the breakdown.
-Former engineers Joe Pestro and Arthur Chang joined forces with Vishwas Prabhakara formally of Digg to start Fan Pulse. Fan pulse is a mobile app and web service that allows you to follow your favorite teams and interact with fans surrounding game activity. They’re currently based out of Dog Patch Labs in San Francisco. If you download the app, Joe has promised to take you to dinner and a movie* to thank you.
*= only redeemable for movies in the romantic comedy genre, Twilight series, or something starring Matthew Mcconaughey or Gerard Butler
– Steve Paulo is now at Bleacher Report, a citizen journalism reporting platform. Bleacher Report empowers fan experts to write content that can be promoted through CBS, Fox and Google News while also soliciting feedback from their writing community. Steve is a character and a knowledgeable college football aficionado despite the fact he likes Notre Dame and thought that Willy Tuitama was going to win the 2008 Heisman
– Obviously there is myself with Bloguin, a platform centric sports blog network. Pretty much the next Google. We’re actually thinking of acquiring them…
– Next up is Diana Klochkova who does everything under the sun at National Football Post while also helping with NFL player management for a player agency. National Football Post has quickly emerged as a more analytical compliment to Pro Football Talk and is a must for any NFL fan. We really miss her up here in the Bay Area as she is in San Diego now. That’s the only clue I’ll give on her exact whereabouts to all of her fans/stalkers.
– The strapping lad with this pretty cool confident pose that I will work on for potential future photo ops is John Driska. John is now at Watercooler Sports, a company I used to consult for. Watercooler does a lot of different things including social gaming, social team specific fan communities, and fantasy games on social networks.
– Taking up the anchor position is Dewey Hammond, now at Playmaker Mobile among a plethora of freelance opportunities. Dewey works with pro athletes to get them to produce unique content for the Playmaker Mobile platform, a social network and monetization platform for athletes under the BDA Sports agency. Dewey is quite the character and does a great job crafting awesome content that is way more entertaining than the normal PR type responses athletes give.
Pretty Cool and Best of Luck
I think one of the most important things when building a team is passion for what you do. Given how many former employees of Yardbarker are still actively involved in this very small and niche part of the startup/web world, you have to tip your cap to Pete and the rest of the Yardbarker team in vetting possible new hires to ensure great people who were passionate about sports, the web, and broadening the scope of fan engagement and the role of online sports media.
Time will tell where we’ll all be in a couple of years, but for now its great to see everyone still doing something they love and in exciting startup environments. Best of luck with all the endeavors.
