NFL cities, Part 1

ways we convey civic heft; also, back to school!

Friends - hard to believe it’s nearly August. This coming week I’ll teach a summer intensive for MBA students at Waseda Business School. I’ve taught this course since 2018. This year it will be by Zoom; including pandemic years (2020-2021) this will be my third time teaching this class remotely. I will miss the opportunity to meet the students locally in Japan, and, of course, being in Tokyo. That said, I’m looking forward to meeting what’s always a fun and interesting group of students.

I wrote about last year’s class here.

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It was great to see friends old and new at the 13th annual Japan-US Innovation Awards on July 20th. Congratulations again to our Emerging Leaders, Figma and TreasureData; and to our showcase companies, Final Aim, Recotech, LegalOn, Skydrive, and Elephantech.

Yoshi Tsurumi of circular business provider Recotech

I particularly enjoyed Rep. Akira Amari’s fireside chat with my Japan Society board colleague Emiko Higashi on Japan’s pathways to greener power, including investment into universities.

Rep. Amari also spoke the next day at an event on US-Japan green tech collaboration, along with representatives of Principle Power, Chevron, and the US Grain Council. Suzanne Basalla of the US-Japan Council did an excellent job moderating.

Antoine Peiffer of Principle Power on floating offshore wind off Fukushima

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On to our post. I spent much of the 2000s at a location technology startup trying to solve GPS’ challenges indoors and in urban canyons. (GPS’ challenges, you ask? Everything from tree canopy to sun spots to plain old multipath.) There was a cohort of startups in that era - such as Ekahau and Quarterscope (later Skyhook) that came along using GPS alternatives - WiFi, beacons and Bluetooth among them - for geolocation.

Our innovation at Rosum was using terrestrial broadcast TV signals for location, timing, and frequency calibration. After the company was ultimately acquired by TruePosition, we had our own mini-diaspora, and my colleagues ended up at places like Qualcomm, Google, and Silver Spring Networks, now part of iTron. (Were I to do it again? I’d focus on the frequency and timing application, which we pursued in the form of residential femtocells. But alas, startups only get so many bites at the apple.)

Like many location technologies, our solution had an infrastructure component. In GPS circles, this is called a reference station. We would put these in places with line of sight to the sky, and to area TV stations, and the monitor(s) would provide correction data to our location server. As someone in a non-engineering role (bus dev / PR / govt affairs / standards) at a small company, sometimes I would do fun things like help install these at friendly host sites to enable testing in a new city. During trips to Washington I wore a lot of hats, and I remember arriving for a meeting at an intelligence agency with a small Radio Shack’s worth of signal testing equipment in my rental car trunk. (The equipment stayed in the car while I went inside.)

(Years later, I still can hear our co-founder and chair’s Jim Spilker’s admonition - “there are two ways a demo can go, and one of them is bad.” Point being: make sure you know your stuff works before going live in front of a prospective customer or partner. Dr Spilker, best known for his contributions to the GPS constellation and who had a long and illustrious career in the Positioning, Navigation and Timing field, passed in 2019.)

Eventually, though, you get to the limits of being startup scrappy, particularly when you are telling public officials and network operators that your startup can support safety-of-life applications like E911. I clearly remember the presentation below, to a host of public safety officials in late 2006 - we were expecting our first child, so I had my phone next to me on the podium.

E9-1-1 Summit, fall CTIA Wireless show, San Jose, 2006.

So we developed a monitor rollout plan for major metropolitan areas in the the continental US, and began to seek out partners who could help scale and operate our monitor network. Where to begin? What cities to prioritize?

Which gets us to the topic of today’s post: NFL cities. That is, how do we convey that a city is, well, a city of substance, of scale and heft? Why would a customer need service coverage there? Why would a startup invest in covering it? Eventually, we as a company got to the shorthand of “NFL cities”.

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One of the great things about working in an external-facing role at a startup is the learning curve is quick. I might have given 20-30 “pitches” a week, whether to media, or congressional staff, or prospective partners or investors. You quickly learn the FAQ and how to map a conversation to a desired outcome, or at least get a sense of the distance from where you are in a conversation versus a desired outcome. (The opposite applies in teaching. If I teach a class once a year, and cover a given topic once, what if that class fails to launch? Was it the material, the instructor having an off-day, or some external circumstance, like, pandemic or wildfire? How to compress that learning curve?)

In talking about our monitor rollout, there was a long way to tell the story, and a short way. The short way that we settled on over iteration was we planned to cover “NFL cities”. Which was a succinct way of saying we planned to cover all major US DMAs (Designated Market Area) or MSAs (Metropolitan Service Areas), i.e., the terms a media measurement firm might use.

Now, sports loyalties don’t stop at city boundaries or at media contours. Rather, they denote civic influence spheres, which was another reason the term helped facilitate the conversation about what would be required to provide metro-area coverage.

On that note - Bonus points for any comments defining the boundary where Yankees loyalty stops and Red Sox loyalty starts!

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Why “NFL cities”, and not, say, MLB or NBA? Good question. In the mid-2000s, the NFL was far and away the US’ biggest sport by revenue. That is still the case, with MLB as #2 (about $10B/year, while tweaking the product to speed up the game), with the NBA an ascendant #3, also at close to $10B/year.

Did we really mean just NFL cities? No, of course not. Sacramento, Columbus and Portland do not have NFL franchises. Sacramento and Columbus are state capitals. Sacramento has the Kings, which themselves are a well-traveled franchise.

NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and MLS franchises map, via Wikipedia. Yes, the San Francisco 49ers play in Santa Clara. Cue up the cable car b-roll!

What if a city loses a franchise? Having lost the Warriors (to San Francisco), Raiders (to Los Angeles, and then to Las Vegas), and soon the As, the city of Oakland is having a tough stretch. But, teams do move, as we’ve seen with the Giants, Dodgers, Kings and the As themselves moving to California. And Oakland is still part of the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose DMA.

What about Austin? Austin has MLS - and not at the expense of Columbus, as was once feared. It’s also a state capital, like Columbus, or Sacramento. It also has SXSW, which has done a wonderful job exposing visitors to Austin, and isn’t even the biggest festival Austin holds.

Is Las Vegas an NFL city? Cue up the Raiders jokes! But yes, thanks to the Raiders, it now nominally is. And Las Vegas also hosts CES and myriad other conventions, which made it worth covering. Also, cover Clark County and you’ve covered much of the population of Nevada.

Where does a metro end? Very good question. I recall the fall 2021 Clusters class spending at least 15 minutes on this debate. Using, say, a CSA (Combined Statistical Area) definition for the Bay Area includes the Salinas Valley. But sports loyalties can span further.

Of course, in rolling out infrastructure, customer pull and stakeholder priorities were a consideration. This is one reason we prioritized covering Washington DC early - so we could put dots on a map inside GPS-challenged locations like the Senate Hart Building.

How about major college towns? Major college towns, and major college sports towns, tend to be part of a larger MSA. Here, I am thinking of Lawrenceville, Kansas, or Madison, Wisconsin, or Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Or, naturally, Berkeley, California.)

How about airports? Yes, major transit hubs and specific airline hubs influence access to, and the heft of, a given city. There are incumbency benefits - gate access, for example - which create airport stickiness. Some airports may over-index as hubs when considering city and metro-area population, and others have airports that under-index relative to area population and general vector. In the latter category, I might put Columbus, which, as I will talk about in an upcoming post, has been on a growth trajectory for years even while the rest of Ohio shrinks.

As backdrop to this topic, the US population has both grown and moved south and west over the decades. Thus, eventually hub airports should come to reflect this.

US population by region, 1910-2020

Gentle reader: how do *you* measure civic heft? What other factors might help “weight” a city more heavily? (History? Landmarks?) Please let me know in the comments!

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Last but not least, I really enjoyed Bent Flyvbjerg’s How Big Things Get Done, written with the NYT’s Dan Gardner. Flyvbjerg is known for his analysis of megaprojects (and why they are often over budget and behind schedule). This most recent work will find a home in fall 2023 Clusters class. Thanks to Aaron Smith of Principle Power for the recommendation. Energy planners take note - by Flyvbjerg’s analysis, solar power, and wind power projects, due to their modular nature (solar farms and wind farms, rather than One Big Thing), score the best in terms of being delivered at or near the original estimated budget. Nuclear plants and Olympic Games hosting rank last, meaning they have the largest cost overruns as a percentage of the original estimated budget. Not coincidentally, they are bespoke one-offs, susceptible to political and civic influences.

Onward and upward!

Jon

(cosmetically edited post-publication)