The first version of SponsorUnited had the technical splendor of a school project. Bob Lynch arranged boxes in PowerPoint until the slides resembled a website. Behind this imaginary interface sat Google Sheets, those gray grids in which optimism and arithmetic are forever negotiating. The Los Angeles Chargers used the sheets. More important, they liked them. Somewhere between the cells and the enthusiasm, a company became visible.
People around the young venture gave Lynch a nickname: “Bobby Spreadsheets.” It was affectionate, and it captured the useful absurdity of the exercise. Here was a longtime seller of media and sports partnerships, with no background in software or data, attempting to map a business whose defining feature was that nobody had mapped it. The prototype looked humble because the available ingredients were humble. The ambition was not.
Walk into an arena and sponsorship seems impossible to miss. A bank owns the club level. A beverage owns the cup. A telecom company appears on the replay. Yet, from Lynch’s seat inside the Miami Dolphins and later BSE Global, which included the Brooklyn Nets, New York Islanders and Barclays Center, the market itself was oddly invisible. Who had bought what? Which assets came with the deal? What did a comparable partnership look like in another city, league or category? The logos were public. The useful context was not.
“There wasn’t one moment where I had the idea.”Bob Lynch, on SponsorUnited’s origin
Learning to see the fog
Lynch came to sponsorship by way of media. Early in his business career, he prospected through the Boston Globe, physically pulling out small advertisements, writing letters and making calls through gatekeepers. He worked in sports radio and sales roles associated with Entercom, Clear Channel and Westwood One. Advertising then could feel agreeably finite: a 30-second spot, a 60-second spot, a known piece of inventory.
Sponsorship was unrulier. A wall could become a branded club. A community event could become content. A sign, hospitality package, social post and naming right might share a contract but little else. Flexibility made the business creative; it also made comparison painful. Lynch noticed that his confusion was communal. Colleagues had the same questions and made do with the same scattered answers.
This distinction matters. He did not begin with a fondness for databases and go hunting for a market. He began with a market ache that followed him from job to job. By 2016, after senior partnership roles with the Dolphins and BSE Global, he understood the ache well enough to leave the arena business and try to treat it.
Downstairs, with a mortgage
The leap arrived with bad timing, as leaps generally do. Lynch and his wife had a newborn, a two-year-old and a mortgage. They lived in Brooklyn. He had a good job and a growing suspicion that he was professionally repeating himself, “playing the hits” while his skills slowly stopped stretching. His father’s death had also sharpened the question of what he wanted the next several decades to add up to.
His wife supplied the practical poetry: go downstairs to the basement and work out the idea. It was a generous instruction because the risk belonged to the household, not only to the founder. Lynch used savings and accepted that the investment could disappear. The basement became SponsorUnited’s first office, though “office” grants a little ceremony to a room reached by stairs from family life.
There was a near miss with venture capital. An early investor offered terms that at first made Lynch feel astonishingly validated; his idea had been valued above a million dollars. A closer reading changed the mood. He declined and kept bootstrapping. With money scarce, the team could not purchase elegance. It had to invent cheap ways to collect data, stay close to customers and ask what work was truly necessary.
The economy of those years produced one of his favorite memories. He was earning nothing and paying bills from savings, but one Tuesday he could leave the basement and have lunch with his wife. The ordinary freedom made him happier, he recalled, than a large NFL bonus accompanied by all its stress. Founding a company is usually described through scale. Lynch’s memory is about a weekday.
The moment the spreadsheet answered back
Jim Rushton, then with the Chargers and now a senior executive with the Washington Commanders, was an early sounding board. Lynch showed him the PowerPoint simulation. Rushton saw the possibility of valuable reports if the thing could actually be made. That conditional was enough. Once the Chargers were using the sheets, interest stopped feeling like politeness. A real customer was organizing real work around the data.
SponsorUnited launched in 2018. It grew beyond teams and leagues to serve the other seats around the table: brands, agencies, media companies and rights holders across sports and entertainment. By the time Spectrum Equity invested $35 million in 2022, the company tracked more than a million sponsorship and media partnerships across 250,000 brands and properties. The round brought total capital raised at the time to $38.6 million and valued the business above $100 million.
The funding marked a change in method, not a repudiation of thrift. SponsorUnited had reached customers with more complex needs; its data collection and product required more sophistication. “Do things that don’t scale” had carried the business to the point at which refusing to scale would itself become a mistake. Capital, once declined to protect the experiment, was now accepted to extend it.
There were public scoreboards, too. SponsorUnited placed No. 145 on the Inc. 5000 in 2022, No. 519 in 2023 and No. 1,009 in 2024. Rankings naturally celebrate velocity, but the more revealing metric came from how the product was used. At the time of the Spectrum investment, more than a thousand of its most active users logged in daily and spent an average of 29.7 minutes there. A spreadsheet had grown into a place where professionals stayed.
“The goal isn’t to replace expertise. It’s to amplify it.”Bob Lynch, on the company’s use of AI
What the founder has to unlearn
Lynch’s career now makes a neat technological arc: newspaper clippings, phone calls, spreadsheets, software, artificial intelligence. He resists the neatness. Skills, he argues, have a half-life. The founder who was once forced into discomfort can become insulated by the success that follows. The remedy is to choose unfamiliarity again.
SponsorUnited’s current language is far from the improvised Google Sheets era. The company calls its platform an AI-native operating system for sponsorship. Its tools can evaluate proposals, compare pricing, identify open categories and answer market questions using proprietary data. The company says more than 1,100 organizations use it, while its fully remote team spans more than 50 countries. In 2026, it appointed Tim Braz as its first chief commercial officer as the AI product entered a broader commercial phase.
Yet the job Lynch describes for the technology sounds remarkably like the original job. Professionals should spend less time collecting fragments and more time deciding what to do. The machine gathers and arranges; the person judges, negotiates and builds trust. In a business famous for placing names on things, the deeper opportunity was to name the patterns between them.
Lynch remains unusually candid about doubt. It did not vanish when customers arrived. It did not wait politely outside after the funding round. There was always a fire, a mistake or a staffing choice he would reconsider. His lesson is not to conquer doubt but to decide when it deserves authority. He wishes, for example, that the early company had recruited certain skills sooner. He also wishes he had asked customers to pay subscriptions upfront, a wonderfully specific regret that only a bootstrapper could treasure.
The origin of SponsorUnited therefore resists the lightning-bolt mythology. The idea accumulated. A media seller entered sports, found a mess, watched others struggle with the same mess and slowly became qualified to describe it. PowerPoint allowed him to show the wish. Google Sheets allowed a customer to test it. Software allowed the company to scale it. AI may allow the questions to arrive in ordinary language. Each tool made the market a little more legible.
The useful ugliness of version one
There is a temptation, looking backward from an established company, to make the first version resemble destiny. Lynch’s story is more amusing and more useful when left in its original clothes. A father walks into a basement. He has sales experience, a criminal justice degree from the University of Delaware, no technical pedigree and permission from his wife to investigate an obsession. He draws a website that does not exist. Then he fills cells.
The beauty arrived later, if it arrived at all. Markets do not reward prototypes for their manners. They reward the relief they offer. The Chargers did not require a grand theory of sponsorship intelligence before using the sheets. They needed the information. Their behavior gave Lynch the answer that pitch decks cannot: the problem was real enough for someone else to change how they worked.
A decade on, the spreadsheet nickname feels like a tiny monument to this sequence. It preserves the era before the platform had millions of records, before the rankings and the investment, when SponsorUnited was chiefly a stubborn act of organization. Lynch saw a market crowded with signs and starved of sight. He did not begin by predicting the future. He began by making a list.