18: Immaculate Grid Owner Sean Forman on ‘home run’ business decisions

Sports Reference President Sean Forman joins the podcast to share how he turned a lifelong love of statistics into a business that fuels data and information for the world’s top sports leagues. Sean also takes Vistage CEO Sam Reese through his pivotal decisions to stay out of the sports betting market but double down on the Immaculate Grid acquisition that changed the game for the business.

Key takeaways

1. Define and declare a purpose

➤ Forman’s “democratize sports data” mission gave his company clarity and direction.
→ Action: Revisit your company’s purpose. Is it clear, compelling, and lived out in daily decisions—or is it just a tagline? A well-defined mission builds internal alignment and external trust.

2. Build value through scalable features

➤ Sports Reference’s growth came from continuously adding new features that customers requested, delivering long-term user value.
→ Action: Identify simple features, services, or processes you can automate or scale to deliver exponential value over time.

3. Create systems that allow you to move fast

➤ Because of backend prep and team alignment, Forman could act quickly when the Immaculate Grid opportunity appeared.
→ Action: Assess whether your systems, processes, and people are primed to act when opportunity knocks. Speed often rewards the prepared.

4. Invest in employee growth

➤ Generosity with education created alumni who now work in MLB and the NBA, extending Sports Reference’s influence.
→ Action: Design talent development with a mindset of abundance. Great cultures invest in people knowing that some of your best may outgrow you — and that’s okay.

5. Foster honest disagreement to build alignment

➤ Forman actively encourages his executive team to challenge assumptions, believing that real commitment only follows honest debate.
→ Action: Normalize healthy conflict. Before your next strategy session, set the expectation that disagreement is a strength, not a threat.

Reflect: Are there any revenue streams we’ve accepted that might be eroding our brand, values or customer trust?

Transcript

Sean Forman: We went from having like 4 million page views a day to 10 million page views a day, and it was just kind of a mind-boggling growth curve for us. And so, there were reports that the Yankees were playing it on the team bus, and the Minnesota Vikings quarterbacks were playing it after their quarterback meetings, and Fenway Park, they put it up on the jumbotron during a rain delay and stuff, and so-

Sam Reese: Oh, wow. Wow, that’s terrific.

Sean Forman: Just all these people were playing it on air during broadcasts and stuff, so it just really caught on. I’ll be very fortunate if we ever have a deal that goes as well as that one does again. It was phenomenal for us.

Sam Reese: Welcome everyone to another episode of A Life of Climb podcast. I’m your host, Sam Reese. With me today is Sean Forman, President of Sports Reference. Sean, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Sean Forman: Sam, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sam Reese: I just want to start with your business just because it’s so cool, and I’m a huge sports fan. All of us have watched games or read articles, it’s filled with all these amazing stats, but I don’t think many of us think about where these stats come from. So the answer is your company. Tell me a little bit more about Sports Reference. Tell us a little bit about the business.

Sean Forman: We’re really just all about sports data. We run a series of seven sites, we call them the reference sites, Baseball Reference, Basketball Reference, Hockey Reference. I basically started out in 2000 and took data that was in the Baseball Encyclopedia and put it online as Baseball Reference in February of 2000. And it started just all the complete player stats, all the complete team stats, league stats, leaderboards, all that kind of stuff, and from there we’ve expanded dramatically. We also have every box score for every game back to 1901, excluding Negro League games. We have every NFL box score for every game ever played, every NBA box score, every NHL box score. We have a very complete record now of all these sports, and we’ve expanded into college sports, we’ve expanded into soccer.

Sean Forman: And so those are kind of the bones of the site. We’ve added a number of other things along the way. We have a game, Immaculate Grid, which hopefully some of the viewers like to play every day.

Sam Reese: I’ll ask you about that in a little while.

Sean Forman: Yes. And then we have a subscription product which is kind of allows you to get inside of our database and query. That’s been the basis of the business for the last 25 years, and we’ve been fortunate that there are a lot of sports fans out there who want to think about these things, answer these questions, and luckily they found us along the way.

Sam Reese: What a great passion that is. So data and numbers, those definitely have been your passion. And you got your Ph.D., and was your Ph.D. at University of Iowa?

Sean Forman: Yes, it was.

Journey from college math professor to startup founder

Sam Reese: You started as a math professor, and what made you take this leap and tie those analytical skills to sports? How’d you get here?

Sean Forman: I mean, to be honest with you, it was something that had been happening all along the way. My dad was a high school football coach, and every Friday night he’d bring the stat book home, and I was a fifth grader who was compiling the stats for him and helping add up how many rushing yards people had and things like that. Junior high, kept the tackle chart. In high school I played football, but I also was the sports reporter for the local newspaper. I grew up in a very small town in western Iowa, and so I did that as a job. And so it’s always something that’s been percolating in the background.

The ignition event for me was I was very into fantasy baseball and was in several leagues, I’d have to drive to Chicago for a draft. I had these very complicated, large spreadsheets that I had printed out and used and stuff. And so I started writing about minor league prospects and trying to predict who the best ones are, and that led to me writing for a book called The Big Bad Baseball Annual, and I thought, how could we promote this book? How could we get more sales on the book? And so I thought this idea of taking a sports encyclopedia, putting it online, would draw in a lot of users, sell a lot of books.

And it quickly, I launched it, like I said, in February of 2000, and within a couple months it was clear that this was kind of its own thing. And so we moved it, I got the name Baseball Reference, moved it off into that domain and kind of started it as its own thing there. So for the first six years I was doing it part-time, I was in graduate school at this time, started at Saint Joe’s here in Philly in fall of 2000. And so for six years I was doing this on the side. I probably could have stopped earlier, but I wanted to get… I felt like if this fails, if I do this before I get tenure, there’s no way I’m going to get a job coming back as a professor. And so I actually kind of stuck it out through the tenure process, got tenure, then took a leave, and then decided I was going to do the site full-time, and never looked back. So it’s been a very slow burn to kind of get to where we are at this point.

Purpose: Democratizing data

Sam Reese: One of the things I read about you, and maybe you could just add a little color to it, one of the passions that got you there is this goal that you called it democratizing data.

Sean Forman: Right.

Sam Reese: Tell me what you meant by that.

Sean Forman: We try to be very intentional about our purpose as a company. And our purpose is we democratize sports data so that our users enjoy, understand, and can share the sports they love.

For us, data democratization really has two major prongs. One is just making the data easy to use. There are tools on our site where you can download the tables you see into Excel, where you can in some cases purchase large data sets. I’d say every intern we’ve hired probably has demoed a project where they scraped site data from our site and used it in a class report or something like that. We don’t look down on that, we don’t discourage that. As long as you’re not impacting the performance of our site, we’re okay with that.

And so it’s really about making that data available so that everyone can have an opportunity to study it, to share it, and to enjoy it. The second piece of that is we really seek out data that for sports and for athletes that have been under-covered. We are the only site to have the complete history of women’s college basketball at the NCAA level. So back to ’82, ’83, when the NCAA finally recognized women’s basketball should be an NCAA sport, we have complete stats, season stats for all of the players who played in division one from that year to the present.

Sam Reese: Terrific.

Sean Forman: We have complete box scores for every women’s tourney basketball game as well back to ’82 to ’83. And so that’s an important thing to us. We’ve had full WNBA stats for over 10 years now. In 2020, there was a move to recognize the Negro Leagues as major leagues, several of the Negro Leagues as major leagues, and so we worked very hard on that. Within about six months, we got that up on the site, integrated those stats into the white major leagues of the time, and so now we’re showing Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston alongside Stan Musial, and Whitey Ford, and players like that. So those are the types of things that we like to do.

On being responsive to customers

Sam Reese: One of the things that we were talking about here internally that we’re fascinated is about the way you assign value to something like a sports statistic, and especially in those early days starting the company, and what did you learn about establishing yourself in the market and find a way to price and sell the service effectively? That’s what I think seems so hard is you see this incredible brain that knows how to put data together, but then to turn into a business, how did you figure all that out, and what’d you learn?

Sean Forman: I wish there was some master plan, but it’s really just kind of coming up against an obstacle and trying to overcome it at each step. So we are largely advertising supported, so it’s not like we don’t have a lot of pricing power over the people who come to our site and advertise. And a lot of it’s programmatic at this point, so we may not even know who the people are. So for us it’s really about demand generation, and so getting as many people onto the site.

And so a little bit of it was we moved very early, and so Google was very good to us, and we became very ingrained in our SEO, and did really well in terms of driving audience that way. But also even from the start, and we still do this, we answer every user email we get. So I think we’re very in tune with what our users are looking for and what our users want in the site, and it allows us to perhaps be a little more responsive.

I know early on when I was doing, when I was working on the site, I was doing a lot of the programming. We were a very small team at that point, 3, 4, 5 people. And so I was answering user emails as well. And so very often something would come in, I’m like, “Oh, that’s a great idea, we should just do that,” and then spend the afternoon on it and get something out there, kind of iterate on it a couple times.
And so that feature that we built in 2005 now has continuing value for us through 2025, and so I kind of view each of those features as kind of an annuity that’s paying off over time. And we’re making this upfront investment, but that feature as users come to it, it’s automated so it updates every day.

So it’s been kind of how I view the business as we’re kind of building all these little mini features and they accrue value over time, and are paying us off over the long haul. So far it’s worked, and we’re hoping to continue that model, and doing subscription features as well and things like that.

Sam Reese: Is there anything you would’ve done really differently or advice you might give another leader about bringing a new product to market that were lessons that you learned?

Confidence in decision-making

Sean Forman: It took me a long time to become confident in my decision-making abilities, and that the things that I was thinking we should do are worth doing. And I think that’s been the biggest benefit to me of Vistage and working with Vipon Kumar, the leader of our group, and just having somebody who holds me accountable for what I’ve planning to do, and having somebody who reinforces my intuition about how we should approach things has been really helpful. And I think that’s why we’ve gone from in 2019 we had 11 employees and now we have 43, and it’s really because of growing confidence and growing capabilities in that regard.

Leadership tenant: Generosity to others

Sam Reese: So moving forward, in your timeline, one of your tenants, leadership tenants is, it says “Generosity to others.” And tell us a little bit about how that creates value for you in return as a leader.

Sean Forman: A little hard to put into words. I feel like the more generous we are with the users, the better long-term success we have. There are different places where I know that we’ve left money on the table, maybe we don’t have as many ad units as we could have on our page, or maybe there were partners, civic partners we could work with. But in terms of treating the users well, I always feel like that over the long term it’s going to pay off for us.

And there’s that, but I also think investing in our employees is part of that as well. We have a very generous continuing education benefit, and some people have used them for, one of our employees just finished a Masters of Fine Arts, he’s writing a novel.

Sam Reese: Wow.

Sean Forman: And I would be sad if he left the company, but if he becomes a famous novelist, I think that would accrue to our benefit going forward, and that would be a feather in our cap. And we also have a very, very elaborate internship program as well. We bring in industry experts, often former interns to come and speak to them over the summer, three, four times a year. It’s short term, it’s a cost, it also takes some time for us to manage that program, find things for them to do, things like that. But we’ve also hired three very excellent full-time employees out of that program as well. And so they’ve become long-term members.

We have former employees who are working for the Oklahoma City Thunder. We have one who’s becoming an assistant pitching coach for the Toronto Blue Jays this year, we have another who’s an assistant GM for the New York Mets, might be GM someday. So all those things I think accrue to our benefit over the long term, and I also think is something that we as a company take a lot of pride in.

Sam Reese: You made a big decision a few years ago to not get involved with legalized sports gambling, and this is just such a huge growing industry that I’m sure probably offered some pretty big immediate financial opportunities. So walk us through how you made that decision here, because it had to be tempting.

Sean Forman: We certainly considered it pretty strongly. We actually hired a banker to kind of go into the market and see what kind of opportunities might accrue to us if we did. This happened, I think 2019 is when PASPA maybe was ruled invalid by the Supreme Court. And so that kind of opened this tidal wave of legalized sports betting state by state in the United States. And so obviously we have users on our site who are coming because they want to get information for doing sports betting. We have users who love sports and would be prime targets for sports betting as well.

Sam Reese: Yeah.

Sean Forman: And so as we were going through this, I think we kind of had this feeling, oh, we’ll just kind of put the gambling stuff over there and then it won’t really spoil what we’re doing fully, and kind of became clear that we weren’t being serious in how we were engaging this. And so I kind of brought it to the team. If we do this, the expectation is that we’re going to put gambling everywhere, and that they’re going to have to… It’s going to be in your face, because they’re going to want a return on their investment that if they’re putting half a million dollars or something like that into the site over a year, they want get that return back.

And as we are looking at the revenue models and things like that, kind of what we landed upon is we didn’t want to win if our users were losing. And that’s really what it felt like because a lot of these deals involved us getting a cut of whatever your losses would be if you sign up through our site.

Sam Reese: I see.

Sean Forman: We’re not opposed to sports betting. I do a little bit of sports betting just for fun, but we’ll allow you to advertise your sports book on our site, we just don’t want to do any of these revenue share deals where we’re winning because you’re losing hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars every other month. We set a decision, that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve stuck to it since then.

I think Ben Thompson talks a little bit about a strategy credit where maybe a decision you’re going to make anyway has some strategy value, and to us, I think the industry right now is just so inundated with gambling messaging, that we’re a little bit of an oasis in that way, and I think a little bit of a safe space for people who want to avoid gambling messaging. And so hopefully that’s been to our benefit. I certainly don’t feel like it’s hurt us financially. Maybe we’ve forgone some marginal revenue. We’re still doing well and still happy with where we’re at.

Acquiring Immaculate Grid

Sam Reese: Tell me about this other decision we mentioned a minute ago, but this decision that you made, the acquisition of that viral baseball game called Immaculate Grid, which has sort of been described as, I love the Wordle of baseball. How did you spot that opportunity? And it seems like a big shift, tell me how that all came together and how that’s helped your business, because you’ve got like 20 million people coming to your site now.

Sean Forman: So Immaculate Grid, it’s a 3X3 game, basic premise is across the top there’s a category, down the sides there are categories, and then you find a player that matches the two categories. So maybe it’s New York Yankees, 30 home runs, so maybe you put Aaron Judge in there. Or maybe it’s Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, and then you put Mike Stanley in there or somebody else. So this is one of those things where having this stage as a resource has really helped me, because I’m not sure we would’ve jumped on it as quickly as we had if I didn’t have that group to bounce things off of. But this was 2023, and the game launched, another gentleman, Brian Minter created it, and that game launched in April of 2023.

And I started noticing our baseball traffic numbers are actually rising substantially over what they were last year. So maybe we’re like 10, 15, 20%, which was kind of unexplained, because people were talking about baseball being kind of down a little bit in popularity and stuff, and pace of play, and the game, and stuff like that. And I think that had, when they just started doing the pace of play stuff. Well, I thought, maybe pace of play is fixed and people are back to baseball now.

Started doing more research and it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that what was happening is people were either cheating playing the game, coming to our site, or they were checking their answers afterwards and looking for other solutions to the game. And so it became very obvious very quickly that there was kind of this synergy between the game and our site, and that they were really kind of feeding off each other, and that there was an opportunity there.

So he had only launched it for baseball. We also had basketball, football, hockey, soccer. And so we really saw an opportunity there to take his game, it would work exactly the same for these other sports, and we’d always seen the opportunity there being a platform for all these sorts of things across all of the sports. And so we had done a lot of work to standardize things across the sports already. And so it really plugged in almost seamlessly. And to be honest, he actually approached us first, because I think he saw the opportunity as well. Part of the, like I said, having a good reputation is with your users, opens up some of these opportunities as well.

So I actually had a Vistage meeting maybe the day after he reached out to me. I prepared something quick, talked it over with Vipon, presented it to the team, and they’re like, “What are you waiting for? Why haven’t you jumped on this?” And I had an executive team meeting and everybody kind of reaffirmed that decision, and so quickly negotiated a deal with him. And I think it took us maybe two weeks from initial discussion to signing the deal, and then another week to get everything done for the baseball site, moving it over to our infrastructure, using our images, stuff like that, our logos. Thanks to all this standardization we had already done, it took us literally four weeks to get it out on basketball, football, hockey.

Sam Reese: Wow.

Sean Forman: And we went from having 4 million page views a day to 10 million page views a day, and it was just kind of a mind-boggling growth curve for us. And so there were reports of the Yankees were playing it on the team bus, and the Minnesota Vikings quarterbacks were playing it after their quarterback meetings, and Fenway Park, they put it up on the jumbotron during a rain delay and stuff.

Sam Reese: Wow, that’s terrific.

Sean Forman: And so yeah, just all these people were playing it on air during broadcasts and stuff, so it just really caught on. You know we’re… Branch Rickey I think, “Luck is the residue of design,” but we were fortunate to be in a position to do that. It kind of pulled on a number of things that we had been doing already, kind of planning for the standardization. I’ll be very fortunate if we ever have a deal that goes as well as that one does again, but it was phenomenal for us.

Sam Reese: Well, I can’t imagine you’ll, you’ll ever forget having at Fenway Park showing up on the board.

Sean Forman: Right.

Sam Reese: I mean, that’s something you dream about. What an incredible milestone for your business here.

Sean Forman: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Challenging assumptions

Sam Reese: Well, I don’t usually do this, but I wanted to read a line from this Vistage Leadership Award nomination, because I think it just says a lot about you, and this is a quote from one of your employees talking about how you handled that acquisition. Says, “A good leader would have considered all the potential implications and effectively communicated why the path they had decided was the best path forward. A great leader welcomes the challenge to their assumptions.” So they talked about you. So where did that come from for you that you were open to those challenges, and wanting your people to question you on the assumptions?

Sean Forman: One of the management gurus that I really like is Patrick Lencioni, and he really talks about fostering a executive team situation where everybody’s free to say what they want, and they can be direct, and they can really surface their disagreement. Before our executive team retreats, before our strategy meetings, things like that, I tell our team, “Disagreement is good, don’t hold it in. If you disagree with what’s happening, you need to say so, because otherwise you’re not going to commit to the path forward.”

I try to really foster that, I try to draw that out, use some of the examples he has in his books about pointing out when good disagreement is happening in meetings to encourage more of it. And so, that’s something that I’ve actually had to work on. And I’m a bit of a conflict-averse person myself, and so been working really hard on more direct communication, thinking really about why am I feeling unsettled about this, and actually voicing it, and elaborating on it. So it’s taken work to get to that point.

Sam Reese: Well, you’re following a superstar. He’s a great friend to Vistage, and Lencioni’s just done a ton of work with us, and I think it’s like the standard book all leaders need to read is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Sean Forman: Right.

Sam Reese: It all starts with trust. If you don’t have trust, then you’ll never entrust. You have to have those difficult conversations here. I know as I was listening to you, I know early on my days as a CEO, I definitely had some imposter syndrome. Has that ever crossed your desk as well?

Sean Forman: Of course.

Sam Reese: It does? Yeah.

Sean Forman: Absolutely. Yeah.

Sam Reese: Where does it come from from you? I want to… What is-

Sean Forman: I mean, I don’t have an MBA, I did not go to school for business at all. My parents, my dad was a teacher, my mom was a medical records administrator, so it’s not like I grew up working in a business, so it’s probably that lack of experience.

Even after I had been teaching for a number of years, I would still have nightmares the week before classes started that I had forgotten where the classroom was, and all that stuff. And I was speaking to my dad and he had taught high school for 30+ years and he said, “Oh yeah, I still got those, even after teaching for 30 years.” So I think it’s a natural thing. And I think if you’re… The people who don’t have the imposter syndrome are kind of the ones I worry about a little bit. I think having a little bit of that humility and feeling like you don’t have it all figured out can often be a good thing.

Sam Reese: I want to ask you about your experience with Vistage, you told a great story about how you found sharing some of those challenges with your group, both getting advice. It was interesting, I remember I had a similar situation on acquisition almost 20 years ago and everybody said, “Why do you not already own that company?” Can you just talk through a little bit more about the value you feel from the interaction of your specific group, just how that supports you as a leader?

Sean Forman: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in the group now five years. I actually got my five-year little trophy yesterday, so-

Sam Reese: Congratulations.

Sean Forman: … thank you for that. So yeah, there were a group of about five of us who have been there for five years. So being the leader is sometimes a lonely job, and so having other people who are going through similar situations to you, or seeing other people have to deal with issues not necessarily of their own causing that are more significant than the ones I have to, also kind of puts my problems in perspective, and makes me feel like I can certainly manage this if they’re able to manage that. And also just getting people who will check in on me if something has been difficult or something like that, it’s really been helpful.

Sam Reese: Before I ask you about other advice you might give other leaders here, what’s the sport you’re most excited about? Because you’re a guy that digs into the numbers here. Is it baseball? What’s the one that you just get geeked out on?

Sean Forman: So historically it’s baseball. I grew up a huge baseball fan, played baseball, fantasy baseball. Kind of walked away a little bit from my baseball fandom. I still go to a number of games, still watch a few games. I’m really into soccer now, so I’ll be watching the US men’s national team tonight, I’ve been to a number of their matches, I’ve been to Europe several times to watch matches.

So I think for me it’s kind of the new thing, and it’s such a rich world, and there’s so much kind of cultural aspects to it, tied into it. So I really… And we launched our soccer site I think seven years ago now, so I really felt I had to immerse myself in it before I could create a site for it. And so that was probably a five to six-year process, because it was one of those cases where I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know a lot, and so took me a number of years to figure out how the soccer world worked, and what the stats looked like, and things like that. But I’ve really come to enjoy it, really come to love it, and I watch quite a bit of soccer now at this point.

Sam Reese: I’ll ask you one other question. Any other advice you’d have for other leaders out there that you’ve learned in your journey that might be helpful to them?

Lifelong learning

Sean Forman: I mean, for me it’s really just been a lifelong learning about it. There’s so much free information out there. There’s information, it’s not free, but I mean information that Vistage provides as part of your membership that I’ve gotten a lot out of, that you mentioned some of the speakers, and things like that. But also things on blogs, the newsletters, Harvard Business Review subscriptions. I mean, so many books, I’ve read probably hundreds of business books. And you mentioned Patrick, I think I own at least eight of his books, I’ve probably read them like 27 times if I count them all up. For me, it’s just that continuing to learn and continuing, as a new problem comes up, a new opportunity comes up, for me it’s really about reading, and learning, and thinking about how to approach that.

Sam Reese: Well, I’d say that’s definitely better than an MBA. That is much better than an MBA. So I think you’ve was surpassed it with your success, and staying with continuing learning, and plus you’re reading the right, those are the big names in it. But what a pleasure, Sean, spending time with you. What an incredible story. It’s so easy to see, just spending a few minutes with you, how passionate you are about what you do, and how important it is for you to lead a great company. I have to thank you for being a Vistage member, because that’s just what makes our company great is being able to serve people like you.

Sean Forman: Well, thank you Sam for having me, it’s been a pleasure.

Sam Reese: Thanks for joining us for this edition of A Life of Climb podcast. Friendly reminder to please subscribe or follow the podcast to get all the latest episodes. And please visit vistage.com/podcast for more resources to support you on your leadership journey.

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