Andrew Yaffe has spent the last decade expanding the audience for the NBA across digital and social platforms. Now he’s tackling a company with an even larger online fan base on YouTube: Dude Perfect.
Yaffe will serve as the chief executive officer for Frisco-based Dude Perfect, whose five co-founders have amassed over 60 million followers on YouTube thanks to their videos of trick shots and interactions with athletes. Yaffe’s job is to turn that large audience into the basis for a family-friendly media company that spans TV, video games and live entertainment.
Popular YouTube channels make tens of millions of dollars from advertising on the site, as well as related sponsorship deals. The most ambitious of those channels have tried to leverage their followings into businesses including publishing, TV and commerce. MrBeast has started a snack business and a TV series for Amazon.com Inc. while former NASA scientist Mark Rober sells engineering tools and lessons for kids.
“Fundamentally what Dude Perfect wants to build is a world-class content company,” Yaffe said in an interview. “Fifteen years of growth and staying power on YouTube don’t happen by accident.”
Dude Perfect started when five former college roommates at Texas A&M University uploaded a video of their basketball trick shots to YouTube in 2009. The video went viral and was featured on Good Morning America. The popularity of their videos has already led to several related business ventures. The company created a couple of mobile games, produced a TV show for the cable network CMT and collaborated on a book.
But the dudes, as the five are known, eventually realized there was only so much they could do on their own.
“The five of us have had a lot of fun, but were bottlenecked in terms of what we can do to grow the business,” co-founder Coby Cotton said.
Earlier this year, the company raised over $100 million from Highmount Capital, an investment firm lead by Jason Illian, who used to lead an investment arm of Koch Industries.
They plan to use that money to increase their pace of output from a new video every couple of weeks to new ones every couple of days. Most of the videos will feature talent other than the original five.
The company is also building a family-friendly entertainment complex, has conceived an idea for a live tour and is planning new video games.
By Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg
