Fubo’s David Gandler on investing in the product and going public
David Gandler, Co-founder & CEO of Fubo
Fubo, founded by David Gandler in 2015 as a streaming service for soccer matches, has pivoted over the last decade to offer the best of television in a single app. Today, Fubo is publicly listed (NYSE: FUBO) and hosts 50,000 sporting events on its platform, along with a range of network series and movies.
A seasoned advertising and video sales professional, Gandler worked for a number of media organizations, including Scripps Network Interactive, Time Warner Universal, and NBCUniversal’s Telemundo Media, before launching Fubo in 2015. A former soccer player and sports fan himself, Gandler founded the startup to address a specific problem: There wasn’t a single, unified platform to catch the games his friends were watching. Over the years, as the complex reality of licensing deals and deep-pocketed competitors set in, Fubo has expanded, endeavoring to aggregate the most desirable television programming on a centralized platform.
While still focusing heavily on sports, Fubo has consistently experimented with new streaming products. It was the first virtual multichannel video program distributor (vMVPD) to launch 4K streams that could be watched simultaneously on up to four screens. Gandler is particularly proud of the company’s tech innovations. “Big companies are not always good at developing great products,” he says, “so, on the product side, we can really differentiate.” In other words, Fubo’s relatively modest size amid a sea of massive streaming companies has allowed Gandler to iterate effectively, while remaining as focused as possible on the original mission.
Gandler joined Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake host, at Bloomberg’s Park Avenue office in New York City on Monday, June 17, 2024, for a conversation as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series. He shared the lessons he learned as a young entrepreneur operating abroad, how Fubo competes with more sprawling streaming empires, and the importance of creating companies that can respond to market dynamics quickly: “You’ve got to tweak, tweak, tweak to stay ahead of the pack,” he says.
An early entrepreneur learning to negotiate “on the fly”
Gandler always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. At 23, he moved to Russia to found a startup that would eventually flounder — “I didn’t see results quickly enough,” he says, and quit after a few years. “That was a huge lesson for me,” he says. “You really have to stick it out, you have to commit to your ideas.”
However, he also credits his experience in the country with making him a resilient businessperson. During the first few months he was in Russia, Vladimir Putin became President; there was a casual, contract-less way investors and partners in the country did business. “Outside of the West,” he says, “you’re gonna have to deal with a lot of issues, and you really have to learn to negotiate on the fly.”
Media was always Gandler’s first love. He likes to say he’s sold video in more ways than anyone else in the United States. Over the course of his career, he’s worked for both small local television stations and large cable networks. Then, in the 2010s, he built out the advertising capabilities for Drama Fever, a company that aggregated Korean dramas and subtitled them in Spanish, selling packages to streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Around 2014, Drama Fever was sold, “and then maybe a week later,” says Gandler, “I decided that the last bastion was live television sports.”
He partnered with two colleagues from Drama Fever to found Fubo. The company would evolve into something quite different from what he had originally planned.
Fubo’s David Gandler (right) talking with Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake host (left), on stage during the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series event at Bloomberg’s Park Avenue office in New York City on Monday, June 17, 2024.
Lessons about “friction and fragmentation” in streaming
Gandler has long been a sports fan, and a player himself: He had participated in Division 1 soccer when he was younger. But, he says it was a longstanding frustration that it was so hard to catch the games his friends overseas were watching; it seemed odd there wasn’t a single platform for sports. He endeavored to create something “without any friction or fragmentation,” he says. “We’re still dealing with friction and fragmentation, by the way.”
At first, Fubo tried to license World Cup games from ESPN, but executives denied the request. Then, the company licensed video clips from news organizations like Reuters, pulling them into a centralized, linear feed. The original idea for Fubo had been a sports streaming platform. Over time, it became “quite evident that’s not realistic,” Gandler says. “There will never be a Netflix of sports, because there are too many rights, and everyone is trying to get a piece of the action.”
“In the earliest days,” he says, “you have an idea, but then you need to figure out how to implement that idea, and find where the opportunities lie.” In the years since it was founded, Fubo has expanded into select non-sports streaming offerings, and experimented briefly with betting.
Through a series of acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships, Gandler says he strives to maintain flexibility while keeping the original dream for Fubo alive. “You need to be flexible and committed to creating optionality for yourself,” he says. “But you also need to be committed to your partners, to your employees, to your customers.”
To achieve these goals, Fubo focuses on a strong product experience and aggregating as much non-exclusive content as possible within the app.
Focusing on the “core business” amid stiff competition
Today, Fubo is a very different business than it was in 2015, but Gandler credits the company’s success with its ability to accommodate the dynamics of a rapidly changing industry.
“With startups, it’s not linear at all,” says Gandler. There’s no single ladder towards success, and many moves are lateral. “It’s not very sexy, either” he adds. “You have to deal with your internal demons, because you’re all alone.”
Particularly within the streaming and media industries, business plans change fast. Gandler prefers to think of the evolutionary process as a series of tweaks rather than full-scale pivots. The entertainment business can be tough, he says, and it requires a lot of patience and flexibility. He uses the example of Netflix, where a mail-order DVD company became a streaming company, and moved from licensing content to producing it entirely — a series of events that were difficult, if not impossible, to foresee.
Fubo’s had some challenges as a smaller, single-service company competing with cable giants and tech companies. But the organization’s strength lies in its scale and specialized vision compared to more sprawling streamers, Gandler says. He gives the example of Verizon go90, a mobile-first streaming platform that was one of Fubo’s highly visible competitors. The service launched and shuttered within the space of two years — larger companies are always throwing new ideas at the wall, he says, “but then they don’t get results, and they’re out.”
Gandler credits Fubo’s focus to its continued success, even in an occasionally volatile landscape. “If it’s your core business, there’s a high likelihood that you’ll do it well. And there’s a high likelihood that, over time, big companies will give up.”
You can watch the entire discussion below:
This article was originally published by Tech at Bloomberg.
