Brian Verne and the fans who never left

In July 2014, Brian Verne and Michael Eppich went up on the roof of their Cleveland office building with paint and a proposition. LeBron James was considering his future. They were trying to get a startup called Phenom noticed. The resulting mural invited him home. The offer attached to it was a one percent stake in their company if he returned to the Cavaliers.

It was an ambitious recruitment package from two people without an NBA franchise. Verne later called the mural “merely a stunt.” As an expression of his interests, though, it was unusually efficient: Cleveland, athletes, entrepreneurship and the practical business of getting somebody to look.

Years later, as co-founder and CEO of Wave Sports & Entertainment, he would help build a company around getting people to watch athletes in different circumstances. A game supplied one kind of drama. A conversation could supply another. Before the Kelce brothers had become a weekly appointment on millions of phones, Verne had already spent years trying to connect sports people with the people who cared about them.

An outfielder with a classroom project

Verne grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and played baseball at Oberlin College. His 2009 roster biography describes a senior outfielder who could cover all three positions and use his speed to get on base. He was a four-year starter and a team co-captain. Kenny Lofton was a favorite player. An outfielder admiring Lofton requires very little explanation.

His childhood ambitions stayed close to the field: Major League Baseball player, SportsCenter anchor or sports agent. There was room in that list for playing, narrating and arranging the action. Sports remained the fixed point even when the job description changed.

During his senior year, he took a different kind of organizing problem to the principal of Prospect Elementary School. Nine Oberlin baseball players eventually worked in three fifth-grade classrooms, helping with schoolwork four days a week. Verne wanted the team to become more involved in its surrounding community. The program put athletes close enough to children to be useful, rather than simply admired from a distance.

Oberlin athletic director Joe Karlgaard later described a captain who also rallied teammates for voluntary winter practices and kept spirits up during early workouts. At the end of the tutoring program, the children came to a baseball game; players cooked a meal for them afterward. It was a small audience, with a much more demanding measure of success than a view count: someone had to show up again.

First, sell the hometown

After college came CnXn, pronounced “connection,” an athletic apparel business built with fellow entrepreneurs including Eppich and Oberlin teammate Jack Dunn. Its organizing device was the area code. A number on a shirt could tell somebody where you belonged before you said a word. Cleveland’s 216 made a sensible place to begin.

The business supplied local school and youth teams. In 2010, Verne described a plan to return 15 percent of each sale’s profit to student-athletes in the corresponding area. By 2012, the venture also described regional online networks where athletes could share footage, photographs and statistics, and find local sporting opportunities. The shirt and the network served the same appetite for recognition.

The working conditions were less polished than the branding. Verne recalled printing shirts in an East Cleveland warehouse that lacked temperature regulation, adjusting his wardrobe to the season. The partners traveled to tournaments and sold from the back of a truck. After three years, he said, they had accumulated $150,000 in revenue and wanted to put the proceeds toward a technology startup.

That became Phenom, a community for young athletes to share their achievements and the products they used. By early in the second quarter of 2016, the company reported more than 75,000 users. It joined 500 Startups’ sixteenth accelerator batch. Sportswear had led to sports software, with the athlete still at the center of the picture.

A Honda Civic heads west

In a January 2016 essay, Verne explained the move from Cleveland to San Francisco in terms that sound more like a player seeking stronger competition than a founder shopping for a fashionable address. He wanted to improve as an entrepreneur and compete with capable peers. He packed his Honda Civic, brought his dog Maggie and drove across the country.

The essay is revealing about what held his attention. Athletes had individual stories. Talking to younger users brought him back to his own childhood and playing catch with his father. He was interested in the emotional content of sport alongside its commercial possibilities. An athlete’s ordinary account of effort could matter to another athlete.

Phenom offered brands a reason to participate, too: insight into what younger athletes used and liked. The commercial question was already present. How could a business make the relationship between a sports audience and a brand useful enough for both sides? Verne would keep working on versions of that question after Phenom.

His eventual Wave co-founder, Ishaan Sutaria, had also worked at Phenom. When the pair founded Wave in 2017, they were entering a media industry busy debating whether younger people were losing interest in sports. Verne thought the diagnosis had mistaken a change of venue for a change of heart.

The audience had moved

The television set provided an incomplete count of fandom. Verne saw fans watching and discussing sports on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and, increasingly, TikTok. The practical response was to make programming for those places. Waiting for the audience to resume an older habit was an awkward growth strategy.

Wave assembled separate communities around separate interests. Basketball fans could find Buckets; football fans could find Jukes. Baseball, hockey and other sporting enthusiasms had their own destinations. Verne described working through sports and fandoms individually, learning the formats and small editorial decisions that made a particular platform work.

There was also an archive to unlock. Leagues and other rights holders already possessed sporting footage with a useful second life. A clip could be edited and given context for a viewer discovering it on a phone. The resulting programming could run for minutes instead of filling a television hour. The business required rights relationships, editors and an understanding of how people actually watched.

By November 2019, Wave had more than 38 million followers across its channels. Its operation included 30 full-time editors and roughly 150 paid contributors, producing upward of 750 pieces of content a day. Among its contributors was an 18-year-old high school student leading Cleveland coverage. Knowing the community could be a qualification of its own.

The scale grew. In June 2020, Wave’s portfolio was reported to have more than 60 million followers and subscribers. In 2021, the company adopted the Wave Sports + Entertainment name and opened an 8,500-square-foot Santa Monica studio. A business built around feeds now had more physical room for the people who might fill them.

Two brothers, then a wider conversation

New Heights, launched in 2022 with Jason and Travis Kelce, gave Wave a particularly useful combination: accomplished athletes who were also brothers. Their professional lives furnished stories. Their family relationship gave those stories an additional audience. People could arrive interested in football and stay interested in how these two talked to each other.

The company made video a central part of its original programming. An extended conversation could produce short excerpts for Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, allowing somebody who had never sought out the full show to encounter it in a feed. Wave’s experience with small pieces of video now helped introduce longer ones.

Ahead of the brothers’ opposing Super Bowl appearances in February 2023, New Heights generated more than 66 million social views in two weeks, according to figures Wave shared at the time. It added more than 500,000 followers across its social channels during that period. Those numbers describe a particular moment, when a family story and a sporting event happened to share a schedule.

Wave also developed Podcast P with Paul George, and its slate expanded to include Carmelo Anthony’s 7PM in Brooklyn. In 2023, Verne celebrated having two sports shows in the category’s top ten on both Spotify and Apple. The participants had acquired a place to discuss their own careers while those careers were still unfolding.

The audience widened again with Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce, Straight to Cam with Cameron Brink and House of Maher with Ilona Maher and her sisters. Wave’s executives said women had already been listening to its existing shows. Each of those three new programs secured seven figures in brand deals before its content launched, according to the company’s account in July 2025.

Keep your word. Let people work.

For somebody who earns his living amid changing platforms, Verne’s stated leadership principles are quite old-fashioned. In a 2021 interview, he recalled his father’s advice: “If you say you’re going to do it, do it.” He connected keeping promises with integrity, then added a second operating principle: be nice to people.

He described giving employees resources, clear expectations and freedom to act. Understanding the individual mattered; different people needed different kinds of support. His preferred organization was one that could keep working when the CEO stepped away. The college captain who organized teammates had developed a management philosophy that left other people room to perform.

The ambition has continued to widen beyond sport. TIME included Wave in its 2025 list of influential companies. By February 2026, Wave was working with Andrew Santino’s Whiskey Ginger on distribution, marketing and advertising sales. On October 5, it announced an ad sales and distribution agreement for Bad Friends, hosted by Santino and Bobby Lee.

“If you say you’re going to do it, do it.”

Brian Verne, recalling his father’s advice, 2021

Those arrangements bring the company into comedy while preserving a familiar business problem: give a recognizable voice the production, distribution or commercial support needed to reach an audience. Verne’s expressed ambition in 2025 was to provide talent with infrastructure and tools for building a business and a digital brand. The sports company had accumulated skills that could travel.

There is a pleasing distance between an area code printed on a shirt and a conversation watched around the world. Both depend on someone recognizing something of themselves. Verne’s career keeps returning to that exchange, whether the setting is a fifth-grade classroom, a tournament parking lot or a podcast feed. The rooftop paint was an early attempt to make a connection. He has since found more repeatable ways to do it.