VRTL founder Courtney Jeffries describes herself as a “recovering sports executive.”
“That was my entire career before I threw it away to chase down my startup dreams,” Jeffries told TechCrunch.
After playing softball at the University of Washington, she spent almost 20 years working in marketing and sales for teams like the Oakland Raiders and the New York Rangers. But while Jeffries was leading fan retention initiatives at Madison Square Garden, she noticed a glaring opportunity.
“My whole job was to focus on extracting the lifetime value out of the fans, but quite obviously, there’s an over indexing of attention on fans in the building,” she said.