I Launched A Viral Water Brand In 8 Weeks

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So this is like a canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar. And out comes this, and this is the story of that.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Can I just hype you up like I'm Dana White in the UFC? Because we have here the most entertaining man in business, the guy with the most illustrious career. He started Teach for America. He created the viral hit game, Draw Something, and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He worked with Arie Emanuel in the talent world. Then he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet and affected culture. And now he's here today telling us about his new ventures, his new brands, new things that he's building along the way and how to do it. So Dan, welcome. You are the reigning defending, undefeated, most entertaining man in business.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:59)
I appreciate that. Sometimes people go 19-0 and then they don't win the Super Bowl. So I gotta keep winning until I guess I'm in the grave.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:08)
So you are a teacher, a professor at NYU and so is Scott Galloway. Who's the better professor and who has more street cred on campus? Who's got bigger pull?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:18)
He's richer and more famous and I'm humbler. So I guess that's how it goes.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:28)
Okay, so dude, I wanted to talk to you because you texted us something and confused me. You're building a water brand now? Well, you've done this crazy water brand thing. Can you, you gotta tell this story. I don't think anyone even knows the story.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:42)
Yeah, kind of. So this is like the unlikely story of like the fourth most followed water brand in the world on social media.
And so to take a step back, I don't know if everybody knows what NIL is. NIL is name image likeness. It's like a revolution in college sports where, you know, for years players could not make any money. Reggie Bush lost his Heisman Trophy. People would lose their eligibility. And then a year after we started our basketball league and started paying players, Supreme Court ruled and all of a sudden there was NIL. So now every college and many high school players in America can make money. The difference is they can't get paid to play the sport, but they can get endorsement deals and so forth.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:29)
Their name, their face.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:31)
Yeah. If you think about it, like you're in school and your roommate has, you know, is a rapper and has a song and your other roommate is a YouTuber and makes money. And you hoop or play football and you can't make money. It doesn't really make any sense.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:45)
Right. Especially when the schools are making a lot of money off of those sports. And so the players today give a sense of the scale of this. So how much is an NIL, like top players, top basketball players, football players, maybe a, you know, I don't know what Cooper flag was making last year or, you know, a SEC quarterback.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:01)
Give me a range.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:01)
Like, are they making tens of thousands of dollars a year, a hundred thousand dollars, millions of years, tens of millions? What are the best players making through this NIL stuff?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:09)
So if you look at a top power five quarterback, SEC, whatever, seven to $10 million.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:16)
A year.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:18)
A year. A year.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:19)
Right.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:19)
To play for one season. Wide receivers, running backs, best defenders, a million to three million. A guy on the bench, 250K.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:29)
And like the NFL salary for a, for a, if you're a first round pick as a quarterback, you would sign, so Caleb Williams in 2024, he was the number one overall quarterback picked. He signed a four year, $39 million deal. So he signed a deal that made it paid him $10 million a year. You're saying that college guys are making, you know, sort of that same range, seven to 10 while they're still in college.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:54)
They can absolutely make that same range.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:55)
By the way, does this trickle down? Like if, if I'm like a woman's lacrosse player somewhere, soccer player, and we're not powerhouse, SEC football, blah, blah, blah. Are my still, you know, hundreds of dollars a month doing local stuff with the car wash nearby? Like is everybody eaten or is it only the people at the top right now?

**SPEAKER_1** (4:14)
It's really the people at the top. Top, top basketball players, one to three million. I have about four or five players who played in my league who are making over a million dollars in college. And it's kind of a waterfall. There is a, there's a softball player in Texas who makes a million, but it definitely, it kind of falls off the cliff because those are the sports March Madness on television, football on television, that generate a tremendous amount of money for the schools. And so those are the sports that they want to win at, at the highest level. And in fact, a lot of NIL legislation says like, you have to still support all of the other sports, the Olympic sports, the women's sports, the less popular men's sports, and so forth. And so, but in women's basketball on the college level, you think about NIL, you know, there's not a large number of WNBA teams. And in fact, there's only, there's three rounds to the WNBA draft. And if you're in the second or third round, you usually don't actually make it onto a team. So if you think about from the women's side, college basketball is a much more lucrative opportunity for them than the WNBA, because the path to it is just so small. It's just a numbers game, there's not enough. So, but our swimmers and lacrosse players making hundreds of thousands of dollars, currently they are not. Right.