Overtime

Sports network · Verified

Brooklyn’s Gen Z sports empire: viral highlights, Overtime Elite, OT7, and OTX — the company that built its own leagues.

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3,940,000YouTube followers

About Overtime

Overtime started as a workaround and became an empire: a sports media company that couldn't afford pro highlights, so it made the next generation of athletes the stars instead.

The company was founded in late 2016 in Brooklyn, New York, by Dan Porter and Zack Weiner — two former executives at the talent agency William Morris Endeavor with wildly different résumés. Porter started as a high school teacher, ran Teach For America, then pivoted to tech and sold two companies before landing in digital talent. Weiner is the younger half of the partnership: a three-time Ivy League chess champion with degrees in mathematics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, who founded and sold a sports media company while he was still a student. They met as coworkers at WME and left to build something of their own.

The founding insight was a constraint. Overtime couldn't afford professional sports media rights, so it built its own content pipeline around high school and amateur athletes — short-form clips captured with iPhone technology that Porter and Weiner developed to simplify production and distribution. The bet was that Gen Z fans would care as much about a 16-year-old phenom's mixtape as they did about a pro highlight reel. They were right: Overtime's content now reaches more than 40 million followers and gets streamed roughly 1.7 billion times a month.

The early years were defined by discovery. Overtime's clips helped turn Zion Williamson into a phenomenon before he played a college game, and did the same for Trae Young. The company figured out something the legacy networks hadn't: in the social era, a high school player's personal brand can be bigger than a TV market, and the kids with the phones are the scouts now. As one young fan told a Wharton sports business panel, Overtime became "a credible source for all my sports information" — and for the athletes, the platform became a recruiting tool.

The money followed the audience. Overtime raised a $2.5 million seed round in 2017 with former NBA commissioner David Stern contributing — Stern became an advisor and investor. A $9.5 million Series A in 2018 brought in Andreessen Horowitz, BoxGroup, and Kevin Durant. A $23 million Series B in 2019 added Spark Capital, MSG Network, Sapphire Ventures, Victor Oladipo, Carmelo Anthony, and Baron Davis. Then came the headline round: an $80 million Series C in April 2021 with Jeff Bezos, Drake, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Devin Booker, Klay Thompson, Trae Young, and Pau Gasol all contributing. An August 2022 Series D added another $100 million with Liberty Media Corporation and Bezos returning. Total funding to date: well over $250 million.

But the defining move wasn't a funding round — it was a league. In 2021, Overtime announced Overtime Elite (OTE), a professional basketball league for 16-to-19-year-olds that would pay players six-figure salaries, provide health and disability insurance, let athletes profit from their name, image, and likeness, give them equity in the company, and cover up to $100,000 in college tuition for anyone who didn't go pro. The league launched that October in a new 103,000-square-foot facility in Midtown Atlanta. It was a direct answer to the NCAA's amateurism model: why play for free when you can get paid like a pro and keep your education?

The validation came fast. The Thompson twins — Amen and Ausar — came through Overtime Elite and went 4th and 5th overall in the NBA Draft, to the Rockets and Pistons respectively. A league that launched in a converted Atlanta facility had produced two top-five picks. The pipeline worked.

Overtime didn't stop at basketball. In June 2022, it launched OT7, a low-contact seven-on-seven football league, with Cam Newton investing in the venture. In August 2023, it held its first Overtime Boxing (OTX) matches at the Overtime Elite Arena in Atlanta. The company expanded into medium and long-form content, launched OT Films with docuseries on Cade Cunningham and Justin Fields, built a college athlete creator studio, and in a first-of-its-kind national partnership, teamed up with the NFL to produce Gen Z-focused content across its platforms. Daymond John joined the board in 2022.

The business model evolved with the company. What started as highlight clips became a flywheel: the media audience feeds the leagues, the leagues produce stars, the stars feed the media audience, and the whole thing monetizes through brand partnerships, merchandise, and sponsorships. Overtime's apparel line — the hoodies and the hand signal — became street-level currency. As Weiner has said, walking down the street in an Overtime hoodie gets a shout-out from teenagers who throw up the brand's hand sign. That's not a media company; that's a culture.

It's worth remembering how unlikely this was. In 2020, Overtime laid off 23% of its workforce at the onset of the pandemic and was described as being in "survival mode." Two years later, it was raising $100 million and launching leagues. The comeback is the story: a startup that bet on kids with iPhones outlasted the crisis and came out owning the pipeline to the pros.

Previously covers Overtime because it rewrote the rules of sports media — and then it started rewriting the rules of sports itself.