Jim Bankoff: SBNation’s Passion Play
Jim Bankoff is not new to this Internet thing. As a longtime exec at AOL, he had a hand in launching everything from Moviefone to Mapquest to AIM to TMZ, plus winning the first-ever Emmy for a webcast (Live 8), back when multi-media multi-platform event coverage was pushing a new frontier. Since leaving AOL he’s switched focus, from top-down at the web’s then-biggest monolith to bottom-up with online grassroots sports-fan network, SBNation, of which he is CEO. Through SBNation’s network of over 250 individal sports sites, most of them fan-based and root-roo-root-for-the-home-team-specific, Bankoff and his team reach almost 4 million unique visitors — at around 9 million+ pageviews — and climbing. This month, SBNation ups the ante by cutting a swatch across Sportsville U.S.A. with 20 new local sites in 20 days, including Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York.
A disclaimer: I work for SBNation as an advisor — and for Jim, who hired me. So take this with whatever grain of salt you may. Even so, as an old-new media guy building up a new-new media initiative he seemed perfectly poised for some I ♥ Work examination. So without further ado we’ll do just that.
With SBNation, you have had the chance to reinvent your workplace – to go from the highly-structured, institutionally-establshed world of AOL to a D.C. townhouse with a bunch of kids in ballcaps. What’s different about your work life now?
Structure and focus are probably more important in a smaller company like ours than in a bigger company with an established way of doing things, so we place a real emphasis on planning, metrics and analyzing what is working, what isn’t, why and what we are doing about it. Another key difference between a big company and a small company is that every member of the team has to pull their weight for the small company to succeed. In bigger companies, it’s much harder to understand how what you do on any given day moves the needle. That can often breed low morale or even complacency. It is both empowering and daunting to know that the enterprise won’t win without your contributions. We like folks who crave the challenge of knowing their actions make all the difference.
What were some of the priorities you had for establishing the corporate culture at SBNation?
We’ve emphasized creating a really strong culture that we hope to maintain as we grow. We are able to successfully manage the company with nearly half of our employees distributed across the country. So, we need a culture where people are trusted and expected to get their work done independently, but then communicate and collaborate in a very strong way, since the informal opportunities often don’t exist. People have to buy in. You can’t get lazy with process or things fall through the cracks. You can’t be a prima donna and expect to do well here or fit in. We fly everyone in for quarterly meetings to review priorities, brainstorm, analyze what worked and what didn’t and why and make plans.
SBNation runs on passion – literally. It’s a site for sports fans by sports fans, built from the grassroots up. Have you seen a difference in how your contributors and employees here perform because of this?
We are really fortunate that ours is a topic that is fun and generates so much conversation and passion. We do see a difference. It’s motivating to come to work every day and focus on a subject that is fun, that is relevant to you in a setting where you have an opportunity to share what you create with a large audience of like-minded people. We have a few folks on our team that were less successful in jobs that didn’t inspire them, but are top contributors here because they really care about what they do.
What kind of priority do you place on mentorship? Who were your mentors?
Mentoring is something that you owe your employees. I’ve had great mentors in my life, starting with my father, who continues to impress me to this date with his energy, work ethic and intelligence. At AOL, I was fortunate to learn directly from some of the brightest minds in the interactive business at that time. Notably, Ted Leonsis, who remains a close friend and investor in the company, as well as others like Steve Case and Jon Miller. It’s like an implicit contract in the workplace that the part of the value of your employment is what you will learn and pass down. Having said that, if you hire the right folks, the mentoring goes in all directions. With a group of talented people, everyone learns from one another. Every manager makes every attempt to hire people that are smarter or more experienced than them in some way.
How do you take in feedback and ideas?
One of the things I love about our company is that it is set up as a large feedback loop. We have over 250 sites, each managed by a different person. When someone has an insight about how to make their community stronger, they immediately share it with their peers who can choose to apply it themselves. So, learnings are captured and spread rapidly. At the management level, we are fortunate because we can be inspired by these insights, get direct ideas and also test our ideas live in the field with some of the web’s strongest communities 
and best bloggers. We also seek outside influences. All of our investors were selected for their ability to help mentor me and the rest of the company. We’ve engaged remarkable internet pioneers like Ted, Shelby Bonnie, Jeff Weiner, Chris Schroeder, not to mention our Board members from Comcast, Accel and our founder Markos Moulitsas. We’ve supplemented this group with expert advisors from different walks of life such as Will Leitch, Jimmy Yaffe, Mark Lazarus and of course Rachel Sklar. It’s important to us to take inspiration from all quarters.
I commend you on your excellent hiring choices! What do you love about your work?
I really feel blessed that I am given the opportunity to innovative and democratize media with people that I genuinely admire and like hanging out with. Nothing gives me more pleasure than empowering talented people to create the media brands of the future, at scale. We get to see the results of our work translate into fast growing audiences and revenues. We take our work very seriously and make certain not to take our selves seriously at all. All in all, it’s just great to work in an environment that is both inspirational and fun.
What’s your team, by the way? (I should know that.)
I was born a Yankees fan. I’m also a Jets fan, which makes me a rare combination. Living in DC for so long has also turned me on to the Caps, Wizards and Georgetown…and always hoping the Nats do well too.
Further Reading:
Sports-Centric Web Sites Expand, and Bias Is Welcome [NYT]
SB Nation’s Jim Bankoff Speaks! [All Things Digital]
A New Arena for Hard-Core Sports Fans [Washington Post]
