Panel 3 — Entrepreneurship

A discussion of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur in the world of sports and entertainment. This panel will focus on opportunity identification, market validation, and following your passion.

Panelists:

Red McCombs

Red McCombs was born in 1927 in Spur, Texas and attended Southwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin School of Business and School of Law. He began his career as a salesman in the automobile business in Corpus Christi in 1950. In 1958 he moved to San Antonio and led Red McCombs Automotive to the sixth largest dealer group in the United States. Mr. McCombs has been in the energy business since the early 1960’s and moved that business to Houston in 1965. McCombs Energy continues to grow and operates throughout the West and Southwest. Mr. McCombs has always been active in real estate development and sales, including numerous joint ventures, the largest of which is the Koontz-McCombs development company.

Mr. McCombs has always had an interest in serving in leadership roles in many national, state and local organizations. He served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Southwestern University where he has been honored as a Distinguished Alumnus. He has also served as Chairman of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Mr. McCombs has chaired many fund drives and community service organizations. He has been honored by the University of Texas at Austin as a Distinguished Alumnus and as also been the recipient of their President’s Award. He has also been honored by their nationally acclaimed business school as it was renamed the Red McCombs School of Business. Mr. McCombs has been honored and recognized by many organizations including the San Antonio Business Hall of Fame, The San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame, The Texas Business Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame. He has also been honored by the American Academy of Achievement and recently received the Texas Legend Award from the Texas Automobile Dealers Association.

Mr. McCombs is the former owner of the NFL Minnesota Vikings, the NBA Denver Nuggets and the San Antonio Spurs, which he secured for San Antonio in 1973. At age 25, he purchased his first professional sports team, The Corpus Christi Texas Clippers in the Big State Baseball League.

Mr. McCombs’ daughter, Marsha Shields, was named Chairperson of all McCombs Enterprises activities in 2003 and works alongside Mr. McCombs who still maintains his lifelong 60 hour work week providing creative direction, expertise and daily oversight of all McCombs operations.

Mr. McCombs married the former Charline Hamblin in Corpus Christi in 1950. Their daughters Lynda McCombs, Marsha Shields and Connie McNab and 10 grandchildren all reside in San Antonio.

Bart Knaggs – Capital Sports & Entertainment

Bart joined then Capital Sports Ventures in 2001 to expand the company into new markets and new businesses. Under Bart’s leadership, the company acquired an event production company, creative services firm, and music management company, culminating in rebranding the company Capital Sports & Entertainment. CSE then went on to manage the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team, launch the Austin City Limits Music Festival and acquire and re-introduce Lollapalooza as a destination music festival in Chicago. During this time, CSE’s client Lance Armstrong went on to win a record 7 Tours de France, and each music festival was named Festival of the Year by Pollstar.

As a partner in Capital Sports & Entertainment, Bart is responsible for the marketing, management and corporate strategy for CSE and its clients as well as the creation of new entities and partnerships, including the successful merger of CSE’s Events Division with Charles Attal Presents into C3 Presents, one of the preeminent independent music promoters in the country. Bart has also led investments into the high end hotel market, www.letoiny.com, and specialty retail, www.mellowjohnnys.com.

Bart served as the President of Tailwind Corporation, which managed the Discovery Channel Pro-Cycling Team and is a former founder and Vice President of Marketing for Trajecta, Inc., an optimization software company. Bart served on the Board of Carmichael Training Systems and was a founding board member of the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Bart holds a BBA in Marketing and an MBA with concentration in entrepreneurship from the University of Texas at Austin. A Texas State Champion Road cyclist, Bart participated in the 2003 Tour of Hope, a cross-country bicycle ride to raise awareness for cancer clinical trials.

Randy Cohen — TicketCity

Randy founded TicketCity in 1990. He is one of the most well known and successful entrepreneurs in the secondary ticket market as he continues to work to expand TicketCity’s market share. Randy focuses on acquisitions and putting together large ticket deals, and is the Chief Energizer for the company. Randy graduated from the Business School at the University of Texas. He is a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization and active within the Austin community. Randy recently published his first book Ticket to the Limit, a personal account of how passion, purpose and performance can enable you to build a company from nothing to amazing and live all your wildest dreams along the way.

Greg Morrow — Sportnet

Greg Morrow founded Sportnet with the vision of bringing together a next generation media experience that converges the strengths of Web 2.0 social media technologies with traditional media discipline and production values to build the ultimate destination for action sports consumers. The company has raised over $10 million dollars from venture investors to pursue this vision. The company originally launched as, Purevideo Networks has launched several industry leading destination and was recognized as onHollywood Hot100 companies.

Prior to Purevideo Greg served as director of product strategy and marketing of Music at Yahoo! Inc., since the acquisition of LAUNCH Media, Inc. by Yahoo! in August 2001. Prior to the acquisition, Mr. Morrow was Executive Producer of LAUNCH.com for LAUNCH Media, Inc. In his current position, Mr. Morrow is integral member to help the growth and continued development of LAUNCH, the music destination on Yahoo!, as a compelling, global music destination for consumers, marketers and record labels. Under his guidance, the integration of LAUNCH into Yahoo! has resulted in a 200% increase in unique users making LAUNCH the most visited music site according to Media Metrix.

Greg Morrow began his tenure at LAUNCH Media Inc. as the head of business development following LAUNCH’s acquisition of the company he co-founded, MUSICVIDEOS.COM. In his role at LAUNCH, Mr. Morrow directed all strategic alliances and marketing opportunities for LAUNCH.com with companies including AOL, Yahoo, Real Networks and Microsoft.

Prior to LAUNCH, Mr. Morrow was co-founder and CEO of MUSICVIDEOS.COM, where he managed all partnerships, marketing and product strategy for the company. Capitalizing on the shift in the broadcast media paradigm from television to Internet-based distribution, MUSICVIDEOS.COM was the very first website to license music videos from major record labels to stream online.

Over the years Greg has been an active evangelist in the streaming media, entertainment and Internet industries. Greg has participated in numerous speaking engagements in his roles including Streaming Media Conferences, Jupiter MediaMetrix: Plug-in, Qualcomm Wireless Developer, WebNoize and Billboard Music Video Conference.

Greg earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He lives in Manhattan Beach with his wife and two young sons.

Moderator:

Gary Hoover

Gary Hoover began his entrepreneurial journey at an early age. His question about enterprises was, “What separates the losers from the winners?” He began subscribing to Fortune Magazine at the age of 12, and has acquired most of the issues back to 1930.

As part of his education, he studied economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and two other Nobel Prize winners, served as a securities analyst for Citibank on Wall Street, worked as a buyer for Federated Department Stores, and headed up acquisitions and strategic planning for the May Department Stores Company.

At the age of 30, after he finally took the plunge and created pioneering book superstore BOOKSTOP, which helped change the nature of book shopping in America. This company was sold to Barnes & Noble for $41.5 million cash when it was 7 years old, and became a cornerstone for their industry-dominating superstore chain.

After he and his partners sold BOOKSTOP, Gary returned to his first love of understanding businesses, and began the company that became Hoover’s, the world’s largest Internet-based provider of information about enterprises. Hoovers.com covers over 40,000 companies around the world. In July of 1999, Hoover’s went public and in March of 2003, the company was purchased by Dun & Bradstreet for $117 million. Like BOOKSTOP, Hoover’s has changed the way we do things and today employs over 300 people.

Gary also ventured into the travel business with TravelFest Superstores, which failed when airlines stopped paying commission to travel agencies, and the museum industry, a work in progress. He continues to keep over 100 ideas for new businesses on his list.

In the autumn of 2009, Gary was appointed Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin. There he focuses on inciting and inspiring entrepreneurial thinking among students of all types, graduates and undergraduates, inside and outside of the business school.

Gary lives in Austin, Texas, with his 50,000-book library. He has consulted, spoken to conferences, and worked to encourage entrepreneurial thinking on every continent and in every industry, for profit and not for profit. He has also supported the University of Chicago. In 2009 he launched www.hooversworld.com, a blog which includes reviews of books, ideas, and places from Gary’s iconoclastic angle.