Podcast
#413 How to Run Down a Dream
Founders
- Sam Hinckley Quit Bain To Build A Sports Analytics Career
- Sam Hinckley quit Bain, read Moneyball, and relentlessly pursued a sports front-office career by sending physical letters and unpaid internship offers to NFL teams.
- He built a draft-evaluation tool at the Houston Texans and flew frequently to be in the building, sleeping on an inflatable mattress while working 6 a.m.–midnight. Transcript: David Senra Sam was born in the Netherlands, where his father was working at the time, but he grew up mostly in Marlowe, Oklahoma, a town with a population just under 5,000. Sam’s dad worked for an oil and gas company. Sam was gifted with intelligence and was his high school’s valedictorian. From an early age, he loved numbers. He loved math. He was fascinated by the power of exponential growth. At the University of Oklahoma, he majored in finance. He loved sports. He briefly considered becoming a coach, but if you had asked him at the time, Sam probably would have told you he wanted to become the CEO of an industrials company or something like that. After his freshman year, he applied for an internship at Conoco. He was invited in for an interview, and it was all going well until the interviewer asked Sam where he imagined he would be in five years. Sam was honest. He said he figured he would go to business school. The interviewer was like, what? You don’t want to work at Conoco in five years? And Sam said, no, definitely not. I’m not interested in that. Instead, he interned in the accounting group of Ernst& Young, which happened to be the world leader in providing third-party opinions on the purchase of professional sports teams, Giving Sam some early exposure to the world of sports business. After he graduated, Sam was offered a job at Bain Capital. He was the first University of Oklahoma student ever hired by Bain. He enjoyed the work at Bain. It was long hours of rigorous analytical work. He liked to bring large amounts of data to important decisions. About 18 months into his time at Bain, Sam was at lunch with some other young analysts and two men he considered mentors. The two older men went around the room asking the young analysts, if you could do anything, any job in the world, what would you do? Most of the answers are something along the lines of private equity or CEO. When they got to Sam, he just said, sports GM. It was the first time he verbalized this idea, but it had been forming in his mind for a while. I remember they laughed at me. It made me so mad, Sam said. At the time Sam said this, almost nobody was bringing the tools of data analytics into the world of professional sports. Then in 2002, the Boston Red Sox hired Theo Epstein, an espoused fan of advanced data analytics, as the team’s general manager, making the 28-year Epstein the youngest GM in baseball History. As Sam was thinking about all of this, the author Michael Lewis published the book Moneyball, which is a look inside the innovative approach of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Bean to assemble a competitive baseball team on a small budget. Sam read Moneyball in two days. He loved everything about it. He could not stop thinking about it. Sam decided he was going to quit his lucrative job at Bain and start working towards his dream of becoming a general manager. When he told his parents, they confessed that they thought he was crazy. At this time, in every meeting Sam had, he would give his one-minute spiel about wanting to disrupt professional sports by using data to make better decisions. In all these meetings, you could just see their eyes roll, Sam said. And so at this time, Sam starts going to business school at Stanford. At Stanford Graduate School of Business, Sam was able to take a sports management class for the first time. He also reached out to Parug Marathoth, the former Bain analyst who was already working with the 49ers. Sam had never met him before, but told him in an email that he had heard of him, that he thought his path was interesting, and that he’d been thinking a lot about this and would love to ask Him some questions. Parug agreed to meet. We went and ate burritos across the street from Stanford, Sam told me. And I didn’t ask him 20 questions. I asked him 200. While attending Stanford, Sam also met with Billy Bean, the A’s general manager at the center of Moneyball. He spent time with Michael Lewis. During his first year at Stanford, Sam also sent both emails and physical letters to NFL franchises all over the country offering to work as an unpaid intern in the front office. He suggested that he could bring a new way of thinking about value in the salary cap era. His pitch was simple. I can help you. You have a limited pile of chips and you need to turn it into as many wins as you can. I can help you reduce risk and boost return or both. I’ll be in your town. We should talk. When spring break came around, most of his fellow students went to places like Aruba or Cancun. But Sam was focused on his goal. Instead of a trip to the beach, he went on what he calls a road show on Southwest Airlines. He visited five or six different football teams that week, mostly to introduce himself. I was just trying to get a foot in the door, Sam said. One of those teams was the Houston Texans. Sam was invited to intern at the team’s front office. The initial internship lasted eight weeks, but the team asked Sam to stick around during his second year of business school, which meant Sam had to fly back and forth from Palo Alto to Houston several times a week. But Sam was willing to take every chance to be in the building. He asked questions as often as he could without burdening anyone. In most meetings, he didn’t say anything at all. I’ve had a few meetings, a few conversations with him that were like that. He spent most, I’m talking about Sam Hinckley, by the way, which I’ll get you in one second. He spent most of his time building a software tool for the draft that could help the team evaluate each player’s relative value in an effort to maximize return on draft day. With ample data, Sam could explain why a mid-second round draft pick is often half as valuable as a first round pick, but at 10% of the cost. (Time 0:00:00)
- Sam Helped Daryl Morey Build NBA Analytics
- At 27 Sam was hired by the Houston Rockets as special assistant and worked long hours building analytics with Daryl Morey, becoming the youngest VP in the league.
- Together they created the top NBA analytics department and changed personnel decision-making. Transcript: David Senra They talked about how data could be used to make better basketball decisions. Les was a bond trader in the 1980s, so when Sam talked about reducing risk and boosting returns, Les understood immediately. At just 27 years old, he was hired as a special assistant to the general manager. Sam and his wife moved to Houston and slept on an inflatable mattress while Sam worked from 6 a.m. Until midnight every day. Within a year, Les Alexander hired Daryl Morey as the team’s assistant GM. Daryl shared Sam’s analytical philosophy. A year later, Daryl was promoted to general manager, making the Rockets the first NBA franchise to hire a GM dedicated to integrating advanced statistical analysis. Sam was promoted to vice president, making him the youngest VP in the league. Together, Daryl and Sam built the best basketball sports analytics department in the country. (Time 0:05:51)