Welcome! I’m Simi Shah, and every other week, I dive deep into the journey of a South Asian trailblazer. If you enjoy this issue, please encourage your friends to subscribe and follow us.
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Hot of the Pod 🎙️ Paraag Marathe, President of 49ers Enterprises
In our penultimate episode of Season 3, I sat down with Paraag Marathe, President of 49ers Enterprises & Executive Vice President of Football Operations.
Paraag is in his 21st year with the 49ers. Previously, he served as team president and Chief Operating Officer.
On the football side, Paraag serves as the team’s chief contract negotiator and salary cap architect, while overseeing the team’s football analytics department. Paraag has played an integral role in rebuilding the 49ers current roster, including QB Jimmy G. He also oversaw the development of Levi’s Stadium, and he leads 49ers Enterprises' minority ownership stake in Leeds United as Vice Chairman of the English Premier League club. In addition to his leadership in football and soccer, Paraag was named Chairman of USA Cricket in 2018.
Paraag moonlights as a faculty member at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA after graduating from UC Berkeley.
Excerpts from the pod below:
I want to start with the six-year-old kid who never missed a 49ers game. You've spoken extensively about how you loved sports growing up and even saw yourself playing professionally. But how did that eventually manifest as a career in the business of sports?
I played sports and consumed sports my entire life. I loved anything with a bat, ball, and competition. I played baseball and soccer for most of my life through high school and college.
My hopes and dreams ended when I stopped growing it 5’9” and 150 pounds. And I thought, ‘Right, well, that's it for me.’ By chance, I watched the movie Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. and I realized there's this whole other side of the business, where you don't need to be a player coach. You could be an agent or a GM, or something like that. From then on, I thought I wanted to be a sports agent for a number of years. And I was still at Cal as a sophomore in college. And I applied to every sports agent. I didn't actually ‘apply’ because there weren’t any specific jobs. I just wrote cover letters and letters to every sports agent in the Bay Area. Only one responded. Everyone else ignored me — most of whom I know now, and they all claim that they never got it or that they wrote back. But it was only IMG that reached back out to me. And they didn't really have anything as a sports agent, but they did do corporate sports representation. So I interned at IMG for three years in college and the rest is history.
Fred Warner contract analysis: How Paraag Marathe structured the deal to work for the 49ers My big breakdown via @TheAthleticWhile at Bain & Company, you worked on this data analytics project for the 49ers. And 49ers GM Bill Walsh liked you so much that he recruited you to join them. Tell me about your early days with the team.
In the early days, I was just trying to cut my teeth and learn as much as I could. I started my career all within football operations. So it was all around contract negotiations, research, salary cap analysis — things like that. I started to get into some player analytics, as in trying to figure out what athletic measurements or physical traits are good predictors of performance. It was just analyst grunt work — doing as much as I could.
It's tough because this industry is very black or white. And there was not a lot of room for other colors, and certainly not a brown guy — certainly not one who had never played football competitively in high school, college, or certainly not the pros, or who had a dad who played, so I was coming in at a disadvantage. And not just the NFL, but pro sports in general is very much an industry about who you know, not what you know. I didn't have a who. I didn't come in because I had a dad or a relation that got me connected. So I was looked at very critically both inside and outside the building. And I had to fight through that. It wasn't something that took months, it was something that took a decade — to earn respect. I just needed to keep my head down and do the best I could.
The fall and rise of Paraag Marathe: How the maligned 'numbers guy' endures as 49ers front-office force: @BrownieAthleticIt’s fascinating that your career isn’t entirely football focused. You serve as Vice Chairman of Leeds United, and you took up the position as Chairman of USA cricket in 2018. What are some of the learnings from one sport you’ve been able to apply to your work in another?
One is that they do a very good job across the pond in consolidating health and performance — your trainer, psychologist, internist, strength and conditioning coach, to your rehab person are all under one roof. And so it's very coordinated as a player matriculates from injured player to healthy player. Whereas in U.S. sports, it's really only changed the last five years or maybe even the last three years. It was very disjointed — a doctor or a surgeon just passed off a player to the rehab person, then when the person is healthy would just pass them off to the strength coach. And you’d think, ‘Well, wait a second, this guy shouldn't be doing so much on the benchpress. He should be doing fewer reps because he's still at this stage.’ That's something that we changed three years ago at the 49ers.
Something on the business side is again, across the pond, they do such a great job with membership of supporter groups. They have season ticket holders, yes. But they also have supporter groups which get special access, like access to single game tickets, special content, or opportunities for VIP events at the team's facility. We've taken the learnings from that and formed a 49ers supporters group. It mutually exclusive from the season ticket holders. There’s overlap, but it doesn't need to be and we provide special benefits that supporter group.
Catch the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or on our website!
What we’re following 👀
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🇺🇸 In Politics
Former Clinton staffer, Huma Abedin releases her book. South Asians blaze trails in local elections. Neera Tanden is named White House Staff Secretary. Rep. Jayapal is an increasingly formidable force on the Hill.