Steven Aldrich ’91
Steven Aldrich ’91, a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with a wealth of experience in growing successful companies, joined Catalyze during a visit to UNC–Chapel Hill this spring.
Steven shares with scholar co-hosts Elias Guedira ’26 and Stella Smolowitz ’26 about his experiences starting GoDaddy’s California offices and taking the company public as chief product officer; selling an online insurance marketplace he co-founded to Intuit; and his current role as chair of the Oakland Roots SportsClub, a community-focused pro soccer team in Oakland, California. The alumnus also serves on the Boards of Blucora, Xero, and Ruby Receptionists.
Steven earned a bachelor’s in physics from Carolina, and an MBA from Stanford as an Arjay Miller Scholar. As a Morehead-Cain Scholar, the alumnus was co-captain of the fencing team.
Music credits
The intro music is by Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
How to listen
On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.
The Catalyze podcast is a series by the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The show is directed and produced by Sarah O’Carroll, Content Manager for Morehead-Cain.
You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
Episode transcription
(Elias)
Welcome to Catalyze. I’m your host, Elias Guedira, from the class of 2026.
(Stella)
And I’m Stella Smolowitz from the class of 2026.
(Elias)
Joining us today is Steven Aldrich from the class of ’91. Steven currently serves on the board of multiple accounting and software companies in the Bay Area of California. In 2018, he became chair of Oakland Roots Sports Club, a new community-focused pro soccer team based out of Oakland, California.
(Stella)
Additionally, Steven spent seven years at GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registerer that empowers entrepreneurs to succeed online. He served as Chief Product Officer for the last three years, where he helped triple the company’s revenue and exponentially increased the number of customers. In his spare time, he also enjoys foil fencing and goalkeeping.
(Elias)
We have the privilege of talking to Steven during the coffee chat for our Sports Affinity Group Alumni meeting this morning, hosted at the Morehead-Cain Foundation. Thank you for joining the pod today, Steven.
(Steven)
Delighted to be here, and thanks for inviting me. It’s really exciting to be back on campus and have a chance to talk with you all.
(Elias)
I saw you came back in from lunch today at Roots. What was your order there?
(Steven)
A: What a great brand. I have to just put off the top there. Roots and Roots recognized game. I had the Roots Bowl just because the brand was there, and it was spectacular. A little bit of chicken on the side, took out the red onion. Great salad. Highly recommended.
(Elias)
Nice. What other spots have you visited since being back in Chapel Hill so far?
(Steven)
So I made a quick stop at Johnny T-shirt. So I went to go look for Carolina gear with a friend of mine, and that’s about it. I got in late last night, so it really was a short trip in. I’ll get to see my parents this weekend, which is nice. They still live here in Chapel Hill. My dad’s still a professor here at Carolina, so a plug for his freshman seminar. And after Carolina wins today, we’ll see the other parts of the town I get to go visit.
(Elias)
Can you briefly tell me what this is, the freshman seminar that your dad teaches, because I believe that I have a friend in my class who’s also taking that class.
(Steven)
Sure. And it’s amazing to see my dad, who’s been at Carolina since 1982, still loves going into the classroom every day, and he teaches a freshman seminar. I think the title is, like, The McDonaldization of America. And the basic idea is we take a lot of things for granted. We walk into Starbucks, walk into McDonald’s, and you could go almost anywhere in the world, and it’s the same. And he asks the students to think about that. It’s got some positives, but what are the costs of that standardization and routinization of life. And it’s a thought provoking question, like, “When should you standardize something, and when do you need creativity and artisanal creation?”
(Stella)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That is such a really impactful seminar that I think is really needed in our world today to teach about modernization, but also the pros and cons of it.
(Steven)
Yeah, thanks. I think he appreciates the students coming in with an open mind, and he loves to hear them both ask questions and then hopefully have them leave the class with an appreciation for what we’re gaining but what we’re giving up with the way the world is moving.
(Stella)
Awesome.
(Elias)
Sounds like such an interesting seminar. Steven, you currently serve as a board chair for the Oakland Roots Sports Club in Oakland. Can you elaborate for listeners what the mission of this team is? And I’m also a little bit curious about what drew you to the formation of this soccer team in particular.
(Steven)
Yeah, those two questions are interlinked. What drew me when I got, literally, a cold email on LinkedIn saying, “Hey, Steven, there’s this idea to bring a purpose-driven pro sports club to Oakland.” I was like, “Great, tell me more.” And they said, “Well, we think this idea of the power of sport combined with the magic of Oakland to impact positive social change.” Like, that was what they talked about from day one, and it brought three strands of my background together. Stella, you talked about my time as an entrepreneur serving small businesses at GoDaddy, and even before that, I was at a company called Intuit, working on their small business product line. I played soccer growing up. Our son had played soccer. I was an athlete here at Carolina. You mentioned foil fencing. I was a fencer for four years with Coach Miller, which is an amazing experience we can talk about later. And then I’d done some work in the nonprofit sector, both in education, but primarily the arts. And so when this note came in and got me so excited, I was like, “Wow, I can bring sport and entrepreneurship and social impact together.” And it just seemed ready-made for me to basically take the first 40-plus years of my life and bring them together in one thing.
(Elias)
It’s so cool seeing how all of your interests are able to kind of balance out into this career, and you use your unique aspects in order to create something positive and empower social good. And I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about how you mentioned that this sports team seeks to harness the magic of Oakland. Could you elaborate what exactly that means and what that looks like on a day-to-day basis? For example, you talk about amplifying voices of the community on your website. How does it seek to really shape the identity of Oakland?
(Steven)
Yeah, the really interesting thing about this idea of the magic of Oakland is that there’s a history in the town of activism and impact. So the Black Panther movement was started there. You had incredible feminist leaders in the town. You had athletes who came out of the town and created platforms with their voices. You had the labor movement and unionization coming out of Oakland. And so you have this, literally, decades and decades-long set of social impact work, and then you had artists and musicians coming out of the town. And so, when we thought about the magic of Oakland, and we looked at the current state of the city, and it’s roughly a quarter of the population is white, a quarter of the population is black, a quarter of the population is Latinx Square, a quarter of the population is Asian. It’s not exactly that, but it’s pretty close. And then you looked at the geographic split between North, East, West Oakland, and we thought, “Gosh, there should be positive stories about the benefits of the innovation and creativity and grit of the town to balance some of the negative stories that come out about Oakland.” And so when we think about amplifying the voices, we go out, and we find parts of Oakland.
There’s a walking tour of West Oakland, and you get to see where moments in history happened and how gentrification in parts of the town also cut off parts of Black Oakland from the rest of Oakland with a highway and how that impacted people growing up there at the time. We think about trying to bring youth sports up to the level of par that you’d like to see in all neighborhoods in the town. And there’s, again, unequal access to playing fields and coaches. So we’ve done some work with a group called Coaching Corps to train 100-plus coaches in our training facility to get them back out into the community. And so we try to turn the spotlight on folks in Oakland who are already doing work on the ground and use our platform. So one of the beautiful things pro sports teams have is people following us, whether it’s on game day or social media channels after the fact. And so we use that visibility for us to shine the spotlight on folks already doing great work in Oakland.
(Elias)
That sounds wonderful, Steven.
(Stella)
Yeah, and I think one of the really important things that you talk about is that you do use Oakland as a platform for the common good and social change. And one of the things we found while researching for this podcast and on your website was that you guys, Oakland Roots was the first U.S. Soccer team to join Common Goal. And we saw that that was kind of a way to impact social change. So do you think you could elaborate more on what Common Goal is and what’s the impact of partnering with it?
(Steven)
Yeah, absolutely, Stella. Common Goal is a really interesting organization. It’s basically a group of very well known soccer players around the world: Juan Mata, Megan Rapinoe, and since then, literally, dozens and dozens of others have said, “Hey, we’re going to pledge 1% of our salaries toward social causes.” And teams can do the same thing, but very few teams had, and no teams in North America had, and still, we were the only team in North America who said, “Hey, we’ll give 1% of our revenues from ticket sales to social impact organizations on the ground.” And we went to Common Goal to say we wanted to do this. They asked, “Well, what would you like to direct those funds toward?” And we said, “An antiracist project.” And at the time, there was not an antiracist project or program within the Common Goal programs that they supported. And we said, “All right, well, let’s catalyze one, let’s take our revenue and our team’s understanding of that very complicated issue, both in society at large, but also in Oakland.” And this was just after the spring of 2020 when, not only do we have COVID going on, but we had George Floyd murdered. And so the topic of race in America was a very important issue and had been brought to the surface where, for a long time, it was kind of under the surface. And so we thought it was important to say, “Let’s focus on antiracism and narrow it down to antiracism around soccer.” And we put some capital towards that, an idea towards a training program that you can take coaches for all levels, front office staff for professional teams, and make sure that those types of programs now touch everyone from the highest level of pro teams down to the local youth soccer level. And that’s been just a home run. So we talked to Common Goal, we got it up and running. Then Angel City in the NWSL joined Chicago Fire, and the MLS joined the American Outlaws—which is the group that follows the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams—joined, and I think there may be one or two other teams that have come on board. Then when that got running, it got catalyzed into something called Switch the Pitch. And so now there’s a program, you can actually go online, download the content, use it with your local clubs, and we’re excited to see that now roll out across the U.S., and eventually, hopefully, the globe.
(Elias)
I wanted to ask a little bit more about the impact that COVID and George Floyd really had on this project, specifically regarding the fact that you joined the board of this organization back in 2019. Did you encounter any obstacles during this time or personal challenges that made it difficult or interfered with your work, and how did your work pivot?
(Steven)
Yeah, it was a really difficult time. Again, the country as a whole in 2020 goes into lockdown. Any live event, sports included, went into lockdown. We had a game on March 7, our second game of the season. Two days later, the NBA pulls the plug, and every pro sport in the U.S. goes dark. And we went from expecting 5,000 fans a game, like literally the next week, to, how do we keep players safe? Revenue has gone to zero because we can’t sell tickets. We don’t know when they’re coming back. Sponsors are not going to get their sponsorships fulfilled. And it was a time of really worrying questions. And what guided us were actually the values of the organization. And we really thought through, we didn’t know when the pandemic would end and what the outcome might be, but we said, “Right now, we have players and front office staff and coaches who are our responsibility. How do we make sure that we’re doing right by them?” And so we talked to some of our staff. In Oakland, we had staff members where they were the only person in their entire family—parents had been unemployed because of COVID, siblings had been laid off because of COVID. So we had people who they were the only breadwinners still in the family.
And we thought that while we couldn’t play games in front of fans, maybe we could use this opportunity. And George Floyd had not yet been killed, and so we didn’t have that pillar yet to rely on, but we started to think through, “All right, let’s start to think about using digital, in particular, all of the ways to reach out to folks online to tell the brand story, to tell stories of our staff.” And then George Floyd gets murdered, and now you have this intersection of people that are at home; they’re angry; they’re sad; they’re disappointed. You have a flashpoint in major cities, including Oakland. And so our staff is very diverse, our player base is very diverse, our coaching staff is very diverse. And so we asked them to tell their stories, and they were powerful and meaningful. And I think we did what we could do, which was the medium available to us, was our brand and our people. The web, through Instagram and YouTube, and Facebook at the time, was the only way we could get the stories out there. And so we concentrated on storytelling, and we concentrated on helping members of the community that we couldn’t see, but we could talk to and touch.
(Stella)
I think it’s awesome, Steven. I think you’ve really pointed out that sports have this, like, unifying factor to them, and how even in times of need when people really do need that unification, you were able to bring people together and get those voices heard. That’s a really important thing.
(Steven)
Thank you, Stella. Yeah, you think about sports teams, and if you’re not able to play games, most folks would say, “Well then, the sport is irrelevant.” But in fact, the brand, especially when we have Oakland on our crest, the brand really stands for something beyond did you win or lose that day? And we weren’t winning or losing because we weren’t playing any games. And so we had to think through safety, and that was important, and employment, that was important, but how do we become a voice of positivity and how do we become a voice to, in some cases, tell uncomfortable stories, but always from a place of love and hope.
(Elias)
As you mentioned earlier in the episode, Steven, we mentioned you previously served as the chief product officer at GoDaddy, and earlier you had served as their senior vice president of business applications. How did the skills that you acquired from these positions transfer into your current role at Oakland Roots?
(Steven)
The business world was an amazing place to be for basically my entire career before I became part of the Oakland Roots organization. And what you learn in the business world is that as a leader, you are responsible for ensuring that people understand the connection between their day-to-day work and the purpose of the organization. So that translated beautifully. You also realize as a leader that you’re responsible for seeing the world as it is, but you also need to give people hope. And so I had a boss that I worked for once, Brad Smith, who’s now, I think, the president of Marshall University. And Brad would say, “Look, Steven, we’re all dealers of hope. You can understand how dire the situation is, but you have to find what’s that pathway through that you can credibly tell the folks around you that this is going to be okay and give people those things to hold on to when they’re fighting through adversity.” And so I think the time I had at GoDaddy and even before that at Intuit, we were building companies that were touching millions and millions of small businesses around the world, and every day those small businesses were having to do work that was really hard and really meaningful, and yet we were there to be their support and their guide.
And I think understanding that as a leader we were actually in service to those small businesses really helped my mindset when I joined the Roots because I was in service to the organization; I was in service as a steward to the town. And so that mentality, that mindset, served me really well. There was stuff I didn’t know very much about that I had to learn around the business of sport, but the concept of how to lead and lead from a position of “I am here to serve others” was something that I took away from the business world, in addition to just a bunch of what I’d call hard skills. So, how do you negotiate? How do you write job descriptions? How do you hire people? How do you connect the dots between different functions? There are some things that you learn really well in the business world that apply to any business that’s complicated.
(Elias)
Thank you for sharing that, Steven.
(Stella)
So one of the things that we really enjoyed learning about you, while kind of doing some looking into your LinkedIn, was we couldn’t help but notice that you describe yourself as a former foil fencer. And for me, at least, that’s a lot of alliteration, and we had to look up exactly what that meant. But what exactly are your favorite memories as co-captain of the fencing team at Carolina?
(Steven)
Yeah, that was an amazing four years here at Carolina. I had come in assuming I was going to play soccer. I was a goalkeeper growing up and thought of myself as a goalkeeper. And when the opportunity to join the fencing team came around, and I met Coach Ron Miller, who was here for over 50 years, his vision of coach—when I would look up in the dictionary, what does “coach” say? Like, Coach Miller’s name would be there. And that’s because my memories of him, when we would say, “Coach, we need help on technique, we need help on this or that,” he was always willing to spend the time and would never treat a question as dumb or silly. Like, he assumed that, hey, if you don’t know it, he will help you learn it. And so the level of patience he exhibited, the level of willingness to share his knowledge, and he’d been doing it by the time I was on the team for decades already. Every year when I was on the team, he would come back with something new, like he was constantly reinventing. How do we train? How do we make it interesting? How do we keep people connected? And that was so impressive.
And a couple of fun memories from those few years, as a senior, we were on a team that had some scholarship athletes, but most of us were not scholarship athletes at the time. The fencing team was not an ACC sport, but it was an NCAA sport. So we had a goal to make the NCAA Championships. The only way to get there was to be one of the top two teams in your region. We had the Ivies in our region, Penn State, Notre Dame, teams that recruited fencers literally from all over the world. So we had a really good regular season, but there was a regional championship, and the top two teams would get to go, and then there was a third team that would be selected as an alternate. We had to beat Penn State, we had to beat Notre Dame, we had to beat Columbia. And so, as we started to go through the day, we’d had a good regular season, but we were just on fire. And I remember this one bout against probably what became the number one fencer at Penn State. He was a left-handed fencer. I was a right-handed fencer. And it was a tight bout, went down to the last point. I won the bout, my teammates won their bouts, and we wound up in second place, and made the NCAA Championships as a senior. And it was a team effort. Like a lot of these sports, you are fencing one person on the other end of the strip at a time. But every day in practice, we’re fighting and cheering for each other. And I think we were the stronger team, even though all these other teams had better individual fencers, which is kind of crazy to think about, but that was the spirit of team and teamwork that Coach Miller preached every day.
(Stella)
That’s awesome. I think it’s really cool that the people that you talk about in your life, your coach, your old boss in business, and at GoDaddy, you talk about being dealers of hope. And I think both of those people gave you your hope to keep succeeding. I think that’s really awesome.
(Steven)
Thank you.
(Stella)
Also, speaking of Carolina, we did some more digging, and we were surprised to see that you received your bachelor’s degree in physics. We would not have thought that based on your accomplishments so far. And we also see that you have some other amazing business pursuits, such as serving as the chair of the Bay Area Glass Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching glass artists in the Bay Area. So when thinking about all of these really interesting pursuits that kind of take lots of different fields and are in lots of different fields, what is one piece of advice that you have for scholars or any alumni who might be listening to this podcast who may feel torn between many passions and choosing kind of what to pursue in the future?
(Steven)
Wow, that’s a hard question. I can construct a story backward looking at how all the things I’ve done have led to where I am today. But if you’d asked me as a senior at Carolina what was in store for me, there is no possible way I would have played out the story as it’s played out. There’s just no way. I think if you had asked roughly what I’d be doing, I said, “I want to help a technology company grow.” That was a pretty consistent theme, but the steps along the way were serendipity, so I was open to new ideas as they popped up. A lot of those came through people that I talked to, and so a piece of advice is to never turn down an opportunity for a conversation. You might learn something new that could set up a pathway that previously was just unknown to you. And I think that the opportunities are really limitless if you’re willing to make choices. And so I think one of the things that I feel pretty strongly about is that you don’t have an opportunity to predict the future, but you have an opportunity to make conscious decisions as to how you want to spend your time. And that I’d much rather be in a position of making conscious choices for what I’m going to do with my time than have it done to me. And if I’m making choices on my own, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be challenging. Things are going to be painful from time to time, or maybe a lot of the time, and yet, if I’ve made the decision to be in that position, then I need to get myself out of it or make things better. And so I think the conscious choice of doing what you want to do is key. And again, the work won’t always be glamorous. It won’t always be fun. But if you’re mentally in that position, if I chose to be here, I think it’s a positive thing.
And then maybe the last piece related to all of that is to the extent you can integrate your interests. So as we talked earlier, the Roots and now the women’s team coming, the Soul combine a number of different things I’ve done over time, both in terms of skills I’ve learned, organizations I’ve worked with, causes that I’ve been excited about. And if you can integrate those different interests and passions and people, you don’t have to choose. You have the ability to create not an “or,” but an “and.” I think that type of life is so much less stressful than having to lop things off, and you still have to make choices. But the more things I can do with people I like that bring causes and businesses and ideas together, the happier I feel.
(Elias)
I think that’s such a beautiful response, seeing how you can have different silos of different interests and still be able to integrate them into something that you love. And I think that’s something that you’ve been able to execute so wonderfully throughout your career. I wanted to ask if you had any particular experiences with Morehead-Cain, perhaps a summer enrichment program or a conversation that you had with an older scholar or alumni that really changed your interests and kind of had you thinking, “What if I went in this direction instead?”
(Steven)
Yeah, the summer program back in the late ’80s, when I was here, opened my eyes to lots of different things. And I was thinking about this the other day. I was talking with another friend, and I think what was most interesting to me wasn’t the specific content of my summers but the geography of my summers. It may sound a little bit weird, but the places I went actually wound up being more meaningful than the things that I did. So I spent my first summer in Outward Bound in the Sangre de Cristo region between Utah and Colorado. It’s a beautiful spot, and so the mountains continue to be something impactful for me, although I have to say, I am not an outdoors person in any way, shape, or form. Some scary stories from that experience. The next summer was in Palo Alto. So I was out in the public sector in the police department in Palo Alto. I went to graduate school at Stanford. We live in the town next to Palo Alto now. And so there’s this distinctive smell of jasmine that I remember from that summer, that every time I’m going through an area of town that has those flowers, which is often in the summer, I’m brought back instantly to that summer of 1988. The next summer, I was in Philadelphia, first time in a big town, again worked in industry, but that was less important than being in Philly and making my way in a big town for the first time. And then my travel study was in Europe just after the Wall had fallen. So I traveled in Eastern Europe and in Western Europe to kind of compare what was happening in 1990. And the World Cup was happening that summer as well in Italy. And so the places and the things that were happening were more impactful than exactly what I did each summer. And so I think that’s what I took away from those summers. Interestingly, there wasn’t any one crystallizing moment, but it was those things that really brought home what I now look back on and say, “Wow, those places were significant.” And that’s a pretty neat thing to look back on. I would not have had that opportunity if it hadn’t been for the Morehead-Cain.
(Elias)
And just hearing you speak and watching your face kind of shine when you’re talking about these summer experiences, it really goes to show just how unique and diverse the experiences that scholars have today.
(Steven)
Thank you. Yeah. One interesting quick story which has nothing to do with my summers, but I went to the School of Science and Math for my junior and senior year of high school in North Carolina. Fast forward more than 15 years later, we’re living in California. A group of students from Science and Math comes out for a trip to the Bay Area, Silicon Valley. A young man is on that trip. He’s from the mountains of North Carolina. This is his first time out of the state, and we have a conversation, and it turns out he’s applied for the Morehead-Cain Scholarship. He gets it. He then comes and interns with me when I’m at GoDaddy as a product manager that summer, and did some engineering as well. He then graduates, comes out, and works in Silicon Valley now as an engineer. And now he and I are friends, and so we’re a generation apart. But Morgan Howell (’17), who’s an amazing alum Morehead-Cain scholar, like, I think about his trajectory of his life and the experiences that he had at Morehead-Cain, and just his experience. Now he’s giving back to the hometown where he grew up, even though he lives in California, helping entrepreneurs in his hometown back here in North Carolina.
My story is obviously not unique. When I think about Morgan and other folks I’ve interacted with, just the desire to give back and the realization of the position that we have been given, and how do we use that as a place to make impact and make the world a better location for everyone.
(Stella)
I think that is amazing, and I think that even as a freshman, Elias and I can see that there is this love in the alumni network of giving back to the scholarship, which I think is really awesome. And I think we both aspire to do the same. Kind of going, flipping gears back to Oakland Roots, just like that same passion that the scholarship Morehead-Cain gives of giving back, we really see that as you continue building upon in the future on Oakland Roots. What do you feel like you hope that the impact of the soccer club is in the future, and what do you really hope that your impact is in the city of Oakland?
(Steven)
Yeah, we’re wanting to be a unifying force across the different groups, the different geographies, the different neighborhoods. We want game days to be a celebration in the city. We want thousands of people to get together, march to the match, have a great time, think of it as an opportunity to be with your neighbors, young and old, black and white, brown. And it’s an amazing opportunity for us to be a focal point, and literally, right at the center of town where we play today is the dividing line between a bunch of these neighborhoods. And so our view is that as the world unfolds in Oakland, we get the women’s team up and running. We can tell stories about both racial equity and gender equity that we keep growing and that will be as big as the town wants us to be. And I hope that means we go from 5,000 fans a game to 10,000 fans a game and beyond, that folks get excited about the impact we’re making and volunteer more in their own neighborhood. Like, hey, they don’t need to be a part of what we’re doing, like, find something in your neighborhood that you’re excited about, make it better.
And so if we can inspire people to serve others just a bit more, and there are a lot of people doing amazing things already on the ground. And the last piece, I hope, is that people tell amazing stories about Oakland. Like they think of what the city is and all of its positivity around creativity and innovation and social activism. And that story is what’s in the headlines every day. And that’s really what we’re trying to drive is you’ll make that hope a reality.
(Stella)
Yeah, I think you keep talking about Oakland Soul, which is your new women’s purpose driven women’s soccer league. And I’m wondering what kind of efforts have been made to incorporate women into sports, and what do you think the importance of having that women’s-only soccer team is in Oakland?
(Steven)
Yeah, it’s, you know, so important, I think, for people to see people like themselves doing the activity that they aspire to. It’s really hard to be something you can’t see. And so when we were getting the women’s team up and running, we thought very deliberately about where are we going to find those women on the staff side. And we don’t have to hire women, but we think it’s the right thing to do. There are so many talented women that aren’t currently in positions of leadership. We knew we were eventually going to put the women’s team together, and we hadn’t yet formulated the plan completely. But part of our drive to make that happen is we hired a woman out of business school out on the West Coast to put the plan together. She had played soccer, she was excited about the mission. And as we started digging into women’s soccer in the U.S., there’s this huge number of women now that are incredibly talented athletes playing in the college level. And in the U.S., there’s currently ten pro women soccer teams. That’s it. So if you’re not one of essentially those eleven starters times ten, you’re not playing soccer professionally on a regular basis.
So a lot of my friends whose daughters went overseas to play soccer, let’s keep them in the States, let’s have them stay here, let’s have them develop here, and build a pathway for many more players to play, pursue their passion to be a coach, to be a front office leader. And in fact, our leader, the president of the club who started more than a year ago now, Lindsay Barenz, is one of the only female leaders of a pro sports team, period, in the U.S. Our technical director is a man, Jordan Ferrell, he happens to be black. And so I think what we have purposefully done and are incorporating into our Soul efforts as well is, you know, put people who are totally qualified but have been passed over for reasons that I think have a lot to do with bias in hiring, and make sure that our hiring processes are unbiased so that we get the best candidate, regardless of where they came from or who knew them or their color or their gender. And that allows you to put a team together that’s there for a singular purpose, which is make Oakland healthier, happier, more equitable. And we can do that on the field and off the field. And that’s something that gets me really excited every day.
(Stella)
That’s really awesome. I think, as a woman, that makes me super happy. And even just like at UNC, like watching how many people go to the U.S. women’s soccer games compared to the men’s and how amazing our women are that play on the field, I think that’s really awesome that that’s in Soul sports games in the future.
(Steven)
Thank you. Yeah, it’s super exciting. And UNC has an incredible history of women’s soccer excellence. And Anson, I think, is one of those role models for coaches who has just kept doing it, similar to Coach Miller on the fencing team, for decades and decades and always finding ways to be on the top.
(Elias)
Steven, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. We hope to see you at upcoming Morehead-Cain events, perhaps even sports games. I know you’re going to be at the NC State game later this afternoon, so I look forward to seeing you there.
(Steven)
Thank you. Appreciate it.
(Stella)
Yeah, we really thank you for sitting down with us. You talked about all of your dealers of hope, and we want you to know that you are really a dealer of hope for us, too, and Oakland Roots and just all of your business aspirations that you’ve been doing. So really thank you. Is there anything else you want to add before we end the podcast?
(Steven)
There’s one thing that I give my dad a lot of credit for, and he, from an entrepreneur, is a professor, but actually he’s studied entrepreneurship basically much of his career. And when I was getting my first business off the ground, he was quite worried, actually, about would it succeed or not, but he didn’t tell me that directly. He talked to my wife, and later on I was talking to him, and he knows the statistics that many small businesses don’t make it. And I talked to him a lot about it, and what he said was, “Look, a lot of folks wait too long to get something going, and yes, your business fails, but in fact, what his data has shown is that starting something and not being successful gives you the knowledge to try it again and maybe be successful the next time.” And so, I think the one sentence encapsulation of that growth mindset concept is “start before you’re ready.” If you start before you’re ready, the worst thing that happens is that you learn something you didn’t know before, and you get back up and try it again.
(Stella)
Awesome. Thank you so much.
(Elias)
Thank you so much.
