At nine years old, Julie Uhrman walked into a YMCA basketball league with her twin sister and found roughly 80 boys waiting. Their mother had pointed out that the letter M in YMCA stood for men. The sisters were untroubled. Uhrman remembers her own response with the economy of a point guard: give me the ball, let me show you what I can do, and then let us win.
It is almost too neat an opening for the woman who would later co-found a professional women's soccer club in Los Angeles. Yet the useful detail is not that she was fearless. It is that she wanted possession. The instinct was practical before it was symbolic. Get the ball. Read the floor. Make something happen.
That instinct has carried Uhrman through three decades of digital media, gaming, entertainment and sport. It led her into rooms that had not been designed with her route in mind. It also led to some very public experiments, including one small silver game console that arrived on a giant wave of expectation. Angel City FC, the club she built with Natalie Portman and Kara Nortman, is the more durable expression of the same impulse: identify an audience that institutions have underestimated, invite it into the building early, and ask it to help prove the future.
A career in sport she could not yet see
Uhrman grew up in Los Angeles playing basketball and visiting the old Westwood Arcade, where Galaga, Centipede and Dragon's Lair competed for her attention. At home, she dialed into bulletin board systems, downloaded games and learned Pascal in summer school. She once built an application for booking airline tickets, then decided she did not enjoy sitting indoors all day. The contradiction proved useful. She liked technology, but she also liked movement, competition and people.
At Washington University in St. Louis, she earned a business degree and captained the basketball team. Sport had taught her how to lead, lose, recover and depend on other people. It did not present itself as an obvious profession. In the 1990s, the sports job she could picture was agent, mostly because Jerry Maguire had supplied the image. Running a franchise did not cross her mind.
So she entered finance, games and digital distribution. She worked at Vivendi Games and IGN as entertainment moved from boxes and discs toward downloads. She later held leadership roles at virtual-reality company Jaunt, Lionsgate's streaming ventures and Playboy's media business. The titles changed, but the work kept circling one question: how does a product meet its audience when an old gatekeeper is no longer in charge?
A $99 box and an $8.6 million lesson
In 2012, Uhrman founded Ouya, an Android-based console intended to make television gaming cheaper and more open to independent developers. The pitch landed at exactly the right cultural moment. Mobile app stores had shown that small teams could reach huge audiences. Traditional living-room consoles remained expensive and controlled. Ouya promised a $99 alternative with games that people could try for free.
The Kickstarter campaign asked for $950,000. It crossed $1 million in eight hours and 22 minutes, then a platform record. By the end, more than 63,000 backers had pledged about $8.6 million. The campaign made a future product feel present. It also demonstrated the peculiar burden of crowdfunding: the customers arrive before the object, and their hope becomes part of the specification.
Three numbers, one operating instinct
The hardware never matched the clean inevitability of the campaign. Ouya reached market, drew criticism for its controller, interface and games library, and struggled to become a lasting platform. Razer acquired its software assets in 2015, and Uhrman left. It was an ending with scar tissue. It was also an education in the distance between a magnetic launch and a durable institution.
Years later, Angel City would once again require her to sell something before it existed. This time there would be a roster, a stadium, sponsors, league rules and a city full of sophisticated sports customers waiting after the pitch. Attention could open the door. Operations would have to keep it open.
The idea arrived after a basketball game
The next venture found Uhrman in familiar territory. In August 2019, shortly after the United States won the Women's World Cup, she played in a summer basketball game in Los Angeles with venture capitalists and women from technology. Kara Nortman, an old court rival, pulled her aside afterward. Nortman and actor Natalie Portman had been discussing an audacious question: why not bring a professional women's soccer team to Los Angeles?
Portman had reached a blunt conclusion after years of talking about inequity: if she wanted to affect the structure, she needed a seat at the table. Nortman saw the commercial tipping point around the World Cup. Uhrman knew how to turn a thesis into an operating plan. The three were unlikely partners in the satisfying way that useful teams often are. One brought cultural reach, one brought venture fluency, and one had spent a career shipping ideas into impatient markets.
They still had to persuade the league and investors that Los Angeles needed another professional team. Uhrman has recalled hearing roughly 100 noes while raising the first round. The objection underneath many of them was familiar: people did not watch women's sports, the audience was too small, the business was better understood as goodwill than growth.
The founders treated that consensus as unpriced demand. They assembled an ownership group heavy with athletes, entertainers and business leaders. They sold season tickets before supporters could see a lineup. On July 21, 2020, Angel City Football Club was formally born. It began NWSL play in 2022 at BMO Stadium.
Listening became part of the business model
Angel City's most transferable invention was quieter than its ownership list. Before the club chose what community impact should mean, Uhrman joined a listening tour with more than 50 Los Angeles organizations. The needs were unromantic and specific: food, transportation, sports bras, access to coaches and places for children to play.
The commercial answer was the Angel City Sponsorship Model. The club committed 10 percent of each sponsorship dollar to community programs tied to its partners. Purpose was no longer an annual donation made after the serious business was complete. It sat inside the deal.
The Angel City sponsorship loop
This is where the phrase “mission and capital can coexist” gained weight. A mission printed on a wall can be redecorated. A mission written into contracts has owners, budgets and consequences. By late 2023, the club had secured $55 million in sponsorship agreements through 2025 and allocated $2.3 million to community organizations. A partnership involving DoorDash helped deliver more than one million meals across greater Los Angeles.
The model also made a shrewd business point. Fans do not separate a sports team into product, employer, neighbor and symbol. They encounter the whole creature. A club that reflects its city can make belonging part of the matchday value. The community work was morally serious, but it did not have to pretend commerce was absent.
Brand success did not cancel sporting impatience
Angel City became a conspicuous business success. It drew large crowds, led the NWSL in attendance in two of its first three seasons and generated $33 million in 2023 revenue, more than twice the figure attributed to its closest league peer. In 2023, it became the first women's team to win Sports Business Journal's Sports Team of the Year award. In 2024, the club received the ESPY Sports Humanitarian Team of the Year award.
That summer, Willow Bay and Bob Iger acquired a controlling stake in a transaction that valued the club at $250 million. The number supplied a clean rebuttal to the old charity argument. It also raised the expectations that arrive whenever the market finally recognizes an asset.
The pitch remained less tidy. Angel City made the playoffs once in its first four seasons. Attendance softened during a difficult 2025 campaign. Uhrman did not hide behind the strength of the brand. Entering the club's fifth season, she said it was time to win. The sentence mattered because a sports institution cannot live forever on the novelty of its founding. The product eventually kicks off.
The founder's second kind of courage
On March 31, 2026, Uhrman finished her last day as Angel City's CEO. The next morning she became principal advisor to ownership and continued as a board member. Her own account was exact: she was not stepping away, but shifting seats. She would remain involved in the club's long-term vision, brand and sporting ambition while Bay and Iger led the next chapter.
Founders are trained to narrate arrival. They remember the napkin, the first investor and the day the doors opened. Far less language exists for the moment when an institution needs a different arrangement than the one that created it. Leaving the center can feel like an argument with your own identity. Staying close without trying to occupy the old chair requires another kind of discipline.
Uhrman's shift did not end her work in sport. In February 2026, USA Rugby elected her to its board, adding her experience in entrepreneurship, professional teams and governance as American rugby prepares for a run of major global events. Angel City, meanwhile, was named among USA TODAY's 2026 Women of the Year. In August, she returned to the origin story on a long-form podcast, discussing the early noes, the culture of women's sports and the toughest decisions along the way.
Her aspiration has remained larger than one title. She wants a world that looks at sport without a gender filter. The route there is neither rhetorical nor mysterious: make women's games easy to find, invest in the players and product, tell the audience when the numbers work, and give children enough access to imagine themselves inside the industry as well as on the field.
There is also a wonderfully human loose end. Uhrman has worn “Volemos,” Angel City's “let's fly” slogan, as a temporary tattoo. She has said it will become permanent when the club wins a championship. The ink is waiting on the soccer. So is she, now from a different seat.
The girl in the YMCA gym wanted the ball because possession made possibility concrete. The executive who followed kept finding larger versions of the same play: an open console, an unbuilt club, an overlooked market, a city invited to participate. Angel City is still unfinished, as every living institution should be. Uhrman's particular contribution was to make it visible early enough for other people to run toward it.