Steve (00:00.6)
Great, so again, we're not live, so just anytime if anything comes up and you need to get a breather or any, I don't see it happening, but any dogs in the background.

Christian Magsisi (00:10.124)
I know. You might see some of the staff. The engineering team will roll in soon.

Steve (00:19.054)
Just give me one moment.

Steve (00:24.141)
if you don't mind.

Steve (00:49.346)
You know, far too often in our industry, in the business of sports, we can see very line item execution. If someone is working in sports marketing, might have player access and player needs, player services. Someone might be related to the logistics and operations at venue, security, all types of fan engagement services, fan attention services at venue. Someone might be outselling sponsorship.

in their primary roles in sales, cultivating relationships. And on occasion on the transaction report, we can attract someone who really falls across many, not all, but many of the fundamental areas of the execution of what it takes to implement what is that final product. That final product being the sports event that you and I might be watching on television, on streaming.

And so when you have someone who is at such a senior level of technology, data, strategy, research and development in the realm of being a vice president of the Los Angeles Kings or formerly of MLSE, the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Partnership. And by the way, for many Americans, I encourage you to look at the powerhouse of that organization where our guest today, Christian.

Maxisi was actually a vice president, venue in digital technology, but someone very involved and I can go on, but the beauty of today's discussion is we're at the seminal point, obviously setting AI aside in one context of understanding how to use technology, how to use it as a tool that ultimately unleashes a synergy within the mindscape of a consumer, a fan.

so that the entire ecosystem is accretive. It's bigger than it was yesterday. And with that said, now founder and CEO of KDA3, what a pleasure it is, Christian, to have you on the TransAction.

Christian Magsisi (02:59.724)
Thanks so much, Steve. And thank you for that introduction too. Super happy to be here and really excited for this conversation.

Steve (03:10.349)
And I am too, because when you look at technologies and understanding how do you deploy them for the betterment of others, we've seen over the last, believe it or not, it's only less than three years, two and a half years, or two and two thirds years since the advent of ChatGPT-3, November 30, 2022, where again, a tool is going to unleash or is unleashing creativity in a way

that the pie becomes bigger for many. Of course, there's attrition, but that's called, I have to respond to my circumstances and understand how do we evolve with the technology and do my best during this race to AGI and super intelligence for another time, another discussion. But you're steeped in another area of technology that's been around since 2008, and that's really the blockchain technology.

But the root of the blockchain that you're using at KDA3 is not necessarily about the technology. It's about what that technology is going to do for many stakeholders in the business of sports. So let's take one use case. our listeners, our viewers, many who control vast budgets in the brand sponsorship arena can really understand the novelty and what is this breakthrough moment.

that KD3 is now bringing to the business of sports marketplace.

Christian Magsisi (04:40.386)
Yeah, that's such a great starting point for this conversation because as a founder, it's one of the questions that I wrestled with the most. Does the industry of sport, does the industry of technology really need a KDA3? And maybe the starting point for that first is before I jump into sports specifically or the technology component is, I've been in technology for a really long time.

You see the birth of a lot of things, right? You think back to the AOL days. I remember when Gmail first launched. And this was such a different time of the internet where logging on the internet was the exciting part. And now, maybe both fortunately and unfortunately, when you go online now, there's no point of online because you're always connected. But then you're often going to the same places all the time.

And the people that really built the internet are the users, right? It's the people that go on and contribute to content, contribute to these platforms, whether you're a developer and you're doing open source technology or you're a content creator posting content and building a community. And KDA3 at the start of it too, when we were dreaming it up, we really wanted to get back to the roots of the internet where the internet was for the people.

it was for the fans. it's a hard concept to understand, but it's such a slight design shift. Now turning it into the sports world, fans make up the team. The reason the teams exist is because of the fans. It's because I love my club. It's because I tune in. It's because I have my WhatsApp group or my group text message after the match talking about, you know, the coach should have done this or.

the transfer window should have been, you we should have picked up this player. Those are the things that fuel the team. But in a lot of cases, when you think about it from a sports business perspective, as crazy as it may sound, the fans are the most forgotten person, because it's about the ticket sales, it's about the concession sales, it's about how many people logged into the website. And yes, obviously, the fan is a part of that. But it's never about, are we giving tickets to the right fans?

Christian Magsisi (07:05.632)
for example, or are we rewarding fans for the right behaviors? So to dive directly into your question now, the technology component, like one really tangible part of why KDA3 exists is to reward fans for actual fan behavior. There's a lot of reasons why the raffles and the contests that a lot of sports teams and clubs operate are almost like a coupon book on a website is one way I would look at it.

And now we're getting to the point where instead of rewarding people to do things that they don't necessarily want to do, let's reward them for natural fan behavior. And then maybe, like yourself, Steve, maybe because you were surprised that we rewarded you for talking about the team tonight after the match, then maybe you will tell somebody else about your favorite club and say, hey, guess what my club just did for me tonight. Or maybe it's that upcoming match that is

really difficult to get a ticket for, your team emails you and says, hey Steve, you've watched every piece of content, you've liked every single post for the last month. We wanted to thank you for your commitment to the club. We're reserving tickets for you tonight. You may not want to buy it, but we're going to hold it for you for 24 hours. And I want to explain it that way to begin because the technology part, it doesn't matter. Coming from a technology executive, it's almost interesting because

Steve (08:21.975)
Yeah.

Christian Magsisi (08:35.445)
Technology is the reason why KDA 3 exists, but to the end user, it doesn't matter. Take this video call, for example. Very complicated piece of technology, but you just want it to work. You don't really need to know why and how it's working, but that it's working for you and it's delivering the value that you're looking for. So ultimately, to answer your question, we want to reward fans for real fan behavior. We don't want to force people to do things that they don't want to do, to earn points that then they'll end up getting something that they want.

We want to reward them for the things that they love doing already today.

Steve (09:11.325)
So let's unpack some of what was just shared so we can establish our foundation and our discussion because my fundamental interest is in the pain point that exists in the industry. And you started to evolve a narrative regarding what you feel and your team has defined as some of the challenges with respect to team and fan relationship building.

and the equitable nature of that relationship. And what I glean from what you've shared is number one, that you see an imbalance. Number two, that you've defined areas for which fans are exclusively engaged, and those fans can be corporate VIP hospitality fans, or the masses as relates to the individual or family or group of friends acquiring for a game or more.

Christian Magsisi (09:57.694)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (10:07.467)
And you described it as focused on the monetary objective. Ticket sales is very fan oriented. It's very group sale oriented. It's very corporate oriented. It's very oriented to the proxy who's going out to sell on your behalf. But it ultimately requires a fan to digitally hold that ticket and show up at venue. point one. Point two, when we talk about

democratization and the democratization of the internet. From my simple interpretation, if someone asked me on the street and I'd get a free ice cream out of it, which would you adhere to? The internet is democratized or not democratized? My first point of entry would be, well, first of all, are we talking about like I had in my hometown city of New York, where I'm originally from Scarborough.

My parents moved back into the city when I was a teenager and I lived in Manhattan for many years, Midtown Manhattan during COVID right across from the UN. And I learned the stark reality about our country that our mayor or governor had said, hey, listen, during this tough time of COVID, we're gonna all go online and the educational system is going to function in a remote basis. And there was an uproar 50, 60 blocks up,

Christian Magsisi (11:13.14)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (11:35.478)
town in Manhattan, and that area was called Harlem as one example. It wasn't restricted to that. And all of sudden, we found out that young children were camping out outside of libraries to gain internet access because, and I'll just take a kind of what would be the most representative sample, a young mother with multiple children who can't afford a router rate on a monthly basis.

But no one realized that there were kids in our own community that were not going to have. So to me, that was a lack of democratization of access to the internet. I know that's not your point about access and your equipment and machines, computers, and the gifting to kids of the technology to be able to ingest the internet. So first I want to understand is briefly, because I know we have a lot to cover.

But when you say there's a lack of democratization on the internet, please be very specific to where the democratization becomes more of a dictatorship.

Christian Magsisi (12:41.236)
So let's dive into the world of sports specifically, because we could have an entire podcast on the democratization of the internet. In sports, I'll start with fandom. So from a fan's perspective, I consume, for example, an enormous amount of sports content. On my drive in, I was listening to a sports podcast.

Before I jumped on this podcast with you, I checked in on the transfer window, who, what, where, and then I'm checking on training camps and there's so much to consume and the clubs ultimately want you to do that. The single problem in that is as a fan, I was not rewarded at all for any of the behavior that I exhibited between the time that I woke up and the time I jumped on.

here with you. And that lack of clarity and lack of understanding, even from the club's perspective, is such a missed opportunity. And then from a fan's perspective, when you say, when somebody says, you know, I'm the biggest name your team fan, there's no way for you to actually back that with any sort of data. And then you go into some other

scenarios where maybe you're not in close proximity to your favorite team anymore. Maybe you've moved somewhere else similar to you, right? You were in Manhattan before, maybe you followed a bunch of those teams and then now you're living somewhere else in the world. So then how do you measure Steve's fandom when he's now living in a different part of the world but is still a loyal follower of the team? So from a content consumption perspective, from a loyalty perspective,

The fans don't own any of that. And then also, which is even a bigger problem for your audience, the teams have no concept of that data. They have no idea that I checked in on the transfer window today. They have no idea that I plan to tune in or make a trip out to the arena or the stadium. None of that information is available to the teams today. So it is really large pain point. It's a very well understood pain point, but to date, it has a missolution for it.

Steve (15:04.993)
Okay, so if I understand again, just because I think the foundation is so important, it's the essence of what you're doing. So I think while our objective is not to talk about democratization, the entire program, it is to lay the foundation. And what I'm hearing from you is the iniquitable balance where there is just lack of parity. And if I, I'm going to take a leap forward in saying based on what I heard that when you surf on that side of that team, that team,

might be selling online ads. That team might be monetizing your patronage that was so important to them. But you, in your process of engaging this product, there seems to be a one-way street on who is reaping the benefits of what is a dialogue, what is a conversation, what is a mutually equal relationship, if you will.

Does that represent part of your messaging?

Christian Magsisi (16:06.256)
It does. I would also characterize it this way for this audience. If you spoke to any chief business officer, chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer of a team or league, and you asked them, who is your biggest fan? The really disappointing part is none of them would be able to answer that question.

Steve (16:30.677)
I do have an obligation to say in the transaction report, I'm going to make the introduction because it's going to be so meaningful for you and her, but April Seifer, who's the founder of Sprocket, who's a PhD in clinical psychology, she's a fan super psychologist, and it's all about fan persona. And you're right, except only now in the last several years, there are new organizations

Christian Magsisi (16:47.473)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (16:58.305)
that are really going into the depths of understanding who are the fans, what are those strata, give me my six, and literally, with nine psychographic data points out of thousands that are collected by the team and her organization, that with about nine, they can have a very strong understanding.

of the core behavior of this particular fan, for example, in one of her clients, the Minnesota Vikings. So I just want to parenthetically mention, there's a match to be made that I think will be very meaningful to both of you. And she was just, I mentioned this because we just released a show with her a few days ago, okay? So with that said, what I'm hearing from what I've understand of the materials of what I've read on your organization, and again, recognizing this is in the embryonic stages, that what you're building,

Christian Magsisi (17:22.768)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Magsisi (17:27.526)
Love that.

Christian Magsisi (17:33.444)
Got it. Okay.

Steve (17:48.906)
is a technology enhanced opportunity to bring, frankly, to bring more recognition by the clubs themselves. It's kind of a two pronged benefit. Number one is I need to know more about my consumer and in knowing more about my consumer and getting really into the trenches of how they behave. If I can facilitate that platform for them and really chronicle, as you said, Christian, your own behavior.

of listening to the transfer portal and then of course whether you're intending to attend a game and many other behaviors that you exhibit, that there's going to be a much bigger pie you're going to, again, according to many, many Deloitte studies, the greater that fan feels that he or she is being paid attention to and in very subtle ways rewarded for their loyalties, that they end up frankly increasing much greater spend.

going toward that team with a sense of pleasure, delight.

Christian Magsisi (18:51.265)
Absolutely. If we look at it even just from a feature perspective, one of the key features that KDA3 brings to the market is the ability for clubs, leagues to have a white-labeled endpoints program. And the concept is not new, and everybody understands it, but the one point that I would make in the subtle shift of our product design is

the comparison of loyalty programs and things like airlines. So for example, yesterday I had to book a flight and I didn't particularly love booking that flight, but I booked it with the same airline that I typically book with because I get points. And in the same relationship that a loyalty program has for an airline, the relationship with a sports team is so vastly different.

But more often than not, we see people trying to take patterns from other industries like airlines, where I don't particularly love my airline, but I love my team. So it's interesting that we've taken a pattern in a different area of the industry and applied it to sports when fundamentally the relationship is different. So my club or my team doesn't have to win my loyalty. They have it explicitly.

to get me to come back is not necessarily the problem. The problem for us that we've shifted in our product design is rewarding the right behaviors. And those behaviors we talked about earlier is the areas that we focus in on the most.

Steve (20:33.325)
So the core pain point that KDA3 is filling is the recognition of how to have a far more sophisticated, precision-based fan reward system. And please add on what I missed in that expression.

Christian Magsisi (20:54.509)
Yes, it's definitely one of our core pain points that we're trying to solve. have several others as well, but that is the starting point of our journey.

Steve (21:06.285)
So let's look at, we had a guest just the other day who in 10 days, two weeks has one of the largest golf tournaments in the world for which he's the CEO, the executive director of the Tour Championship, $40 million prize money, 10 million to the winner. It's the last event on the PGA Tour of the year. They moved it in the last few years to the end of August, smart move, not competing with football season. And it is the 30 player end of the season event, FedEx Cup Series.

With that said, the tour itself, as well as that particular event, has dealt to airlines as the official airline. So let's create just a quick model use case. From a KDA3 perspective, one that is using blockchain technology as a base foundational means of perhaps engaging the reward system as a secure environment.

for the rewards themselves, how they're distributed, who accrues, how they accrue, making sure that there's no corruption of data, knowing that this is highly reliable platform. Help us understand if you were guiding the PGA tour, what would be the messaging of KDA3 that, because I think this is so important for the folk on this side of the viewership, understanding

This is not just another reward system. This is not just another relationship because if you look at many, many team representatives, they will tell you that they are steeped every day in fan rewards, fan monitoring, policing their behavior, knowing they came through with clear, streamed through, came in seamlessly.

know what time they arrived, understanding the proclivities of consumption and concessions, merchandising acquisition, and having the ability to erect, and it might be lot of inefficiencies here, obviously, but their own perceived fan reward system that they believe has some validity and is working for them. So using the PGA Tour, Delta is their official airline. I know you have relationships with, you know, Basketball Canada, the national...

Steve (23:34.414)
organization that represents all Canadian basketball. You do have one with the Serie A team in Napoli that you're doing some great work with and others soon to be announced. But let's just take that as a use case. Tell us if you could highlight when they will and you receive this all the time. We go through it every day in our own world. Explain to me the distinction very clearly of what makes this a unique platform.

from all the other solicitations we get when it comes to fan engagement.

Christian Magsisi (24:06.338)
Great, great, great setup to the question. The headline I would give you is that the clubs, the teams, or the PGA Tour in this scenario would be monitoring FEND behavior for the data that they have access to. And they're rewarding people based off of the partnerships and inventory, marketing inventory that they have, and not necessarily the behaviors that they don't have access to. What I mean by that is...

As an example, just before this call, me and nine of my friends, we did a simulated draft for the, for exactly the FedEx cup. So it's really interesting that you use that as an example. The PGA tour has no idea that that happened. They're, they're monitoring their CRM data. They're monitoring their social media data. They're monitoring their, their ticketing data, all the traditional data sources that they have. But this real again,

real fan behavior of people doing mock drafts, having discussions, those behaviors aren't being rewarded. And if they're not being rewarded, then you're not creating new fans as well.

Steve (25:17.933)
There many interjections for one thing before you go on. So this would reside where? They're not monitoring it because it resides in which substrate? Where is this being housed? Is this notebook that you and your friends mocked up? Is this something among friends you shared files about? Is this publicly accessible that they could monitor it? And then the question is, why should they monitor when a group of, let's say 20,

Christian Magsisi (25:29.088)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (25:47.0)
come along for a mock draft? What is so critical about monitoring it? And those would be my questions, if you can recall them. If not, I'll readdress them if you need me to.

Christian Magsisi (25:53.873)
Mm-hmm.

clubs and teams will often, and every season there's a slide that gets shown and you this is who the demographic of our diehard fans is. for by definition, me and the nine individuals that were speaking about the PGA tour an hour ago, we would be considered diehard fans. But that information isn't publicly available.

Steve (26:10.978)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Magsisi (26:23.942)
One, because the PGA Tour hasn't given an ability for the fans to provide them that data. And then the second, and again, most importantly, there's no reward for that behavior. You use your example of the Delta Airlines or PGA Tour, you could pick any sponsor. And oftentimes what would happen is they would promote their product. So the sponsor would promote their product.

at the upcoming tour of the FedEx Cup, and that becomes the headline. Not the headline of, thanks for waking up at eight o'clock in the morning and talking about the FedEx Cup. It's, here's our sponsor, here's our contest, here's our raffle, here's the thing that we want you to do. We want to extract something from you. And then in return, you have a chance to win, or we will give you points for largely unnatural behavior.

The behavior that I was talking about earlier is very natural. We do it often every once a month. And if the PGA Tour knew those nine individuals, then we should be at the top of the list of people to market to, whether it's to go to the next tournament or to buy merchandise or to buy gear. But none of that information is readily accessible to them. With a white-labeled loyalty program that we're offering, it allows them the ability to

not only reward that behavior, but also capture that data.

Steve (27:55.82)
Hmm. It's interesting. So, so if you will, is it capturing because now that Christian and his eight other friends established the draft for the PGA tour or for the event or whatever you chose to do, is it that the host, that they recognize the fan behavior in a way that the source location changes and that you're now doing this under the auspices?

of their platform.

Christian Magsisi (28:25.939)
No, it's not that it's their platform. It's that the platform, going back to our democratization conversation, the platform is the internet. In a scenario, the platform is the blockchain. So that data is written on the blockchain. And two really important events happen. One is my fandom, Christian, as a fan of the PGA Tour. I have a record of that event occurring. And when I can go back in history and kind of relive my fandom,

of the tour of the season, can look back and say, yeah, I remember I drafted that player at that event. Or maybe even better than that is like, won that draft. Or this is where I was when I was watching that tournament. Or I attended that event. That is why a lot of the current dominators of the internet have such a stranglehold of the system because

you want to relive those experiences. So that's one, that's on the user side, on the fan side. And on the team side, the wealth of data that you have access to, because fans are freely wanting to give it to you to show them, here is who I am as a fan. Not the way you see it. Because right now you see it as people buying beer, or hot dogs, or tickets, or opening the emails. Those are unnatural behaviors.

and sports. That is not what makes up fandom. But to the leaders of these organizations, unfortunately, that's the only data access that they have.

Steve (30:05.557)
Yeah, so this is this is what we're getting into. it's you know, it's it's the conversation that that kind of has to be had and we need to get at least into it a bit without overwhelming those who when they hear cryptocurrency or blockchain, they either feel there is something a little bit. I don't want to call it casino esque, but there there is a kind of at this stage.

Christian Magsisi (30:19.914)
No.

Christian Magsisi (30:29.395)
No.

Steve (30:35.597)
in the 17 year history, still a sense of, and obviously we've had some pretty high profile breaches of ethics that became headlines for a long time. We saw steep declines of steep rises and then dramatic declines of valuations of currency of blockchain. And then we saw steep rises again.

And so I think for many, can be some folk, depending on your target market, can kind of immediately shut down almost like we're talking calculus. And we also know that like Steven Strogotts, the great professor and author at Cornell, calculus can actually be made fun and interesting. And I recommend all of his books. Setting that aside, let's see if we can just easily

flow through this because you're not about attempting to educate various Gen Z wise baby boomers and others alphas about the technology itself. That's not your mandate. Your mandate is to expand from what has been in many ways and I'm starting to understand your your Welton shong a lot better, right?

Your worldview is coming into frame. I'm getting it that this, this I have one source for an expression of my relationship. is very controlled by those who determine what to, they want to share with me. And if I'm interested in that team or that athlete on that team, very often while there's a lot of progress that's been made over the last decade plus at the same time,

Christian Magsisi (32:02.057)
Hmm.

Christian Magsisi (32:08.307)
Correct.

Steve (32:30.003)
I have restricted universes or locations addresses called URLs that will drive to that content. And very often, not always, but very often, and this is where again, viewers, this is the beauty of what Christian is saying. I think you've made it intuitive yourself, but it's not to suggest that the initiatives that have been taking place in fan reward, in the fan reward environment are for naught.

Christian Magsisi (32:34.291)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (32:57.685)
It's just that there is a universe that is so much bigger, so much more fluid, and quote unquote democratized because it's not dependent upon what has been presented to me and I need to interact with that unilateral distribution of data. I am now a participant in the content creation.

Christian Magsisi (33:19.625)
Yeah, the starting point for that conversation, if I look at it from a fan's perspective, is being able to carry your fandom from, let's say, one sport to another. So I grew up playing American football and basketball. And more recently, I've been really introduced to new sports.

One that is an old sport, so it's staying on the golf topic. Indoor golf is something that I've paid attention to a lot and I'm really excited about what the TGL is doing, for example. And it's given me another frame of golf that would be really interesting to the PGA, for example, if I could take my fandom of NFL, of NBA.

and PGA Tour and then give that to TGL. Imagine you can sum up all of the experiences, all the events, all the content, all of the conversations, all the WhatsApp groups and say, here's my fandom, New League. Can I be one of your fans? Can you market to me properly if I willingly give you that information? So that's from a fan perspective, which is not a difficult concept to understand, but technically really difficult to.

to execute. And this is where the promise of blockchain comes in. So we have a technology partner in Bear Chain, and I always consider them our operating system. So as a software engineer myself, I'm a trained software engineer, I started my career as a developer. Blockchain is still complicated to me, because I came more from a Web 2 world. This whole concept of Web 3 is still very much emerging, it's still very much maturing. So

to a technical person, if it's complicated, then it has no chance to be able to make the sleep towards consumers. So when we have our relationship with Bear Chain, they abstract all of the technical components of the blockchain, the ERC 1155, the ERC 721, the swaps, all of those terminologies don't mean anything to a fan.

Steve (35:38.189)
Christian is your attorney. Your honor, my client will stop there with the acronyms.

Christian Magsisi (35:41.967)
Yes, that's the last accurate if I promise. But the point that I'm trying to make is all of those things don't matter. What matters is the fan behavior. So bear a chain as a layer one technology to us. They provide the infrastructure, the operating system. then we also have what technology has this great ability to repeat itself. So if we take a look at the rise of mobile for a moment.

Steve (35:48.117)
You

Christian Magsisi (36:11.347)
There was the emergence of iOS first. And everyone knows the iconic Steve Jobs holding up the iPhone. There's lots of business schools that have studied this, speech analysis on it. But the real revelation of the iPhone wasn't the operating system. Actually, if I remember buying the first iPhone, it wasn't particularly good, to be honest. There was some cool moments to it, but the real revelation of the iPhone was the app store.

So if you were to go and build a new app today, you wouldn't build from scratch. You would log into the developer portal that Apple makes available to you. And things like pinch and zoom, a developer and engineer designer doesn't need to recreate that Apple solved it for you already. So it makes this lead time of getting the market a lot faster. So bear a chain in our scenario is both the operating system and the App Store. They build all of these components for us so that

a company like KDA3 can exist and traditional software engineers and developers that are part of my staff can build these tools with the abstraction of all the technical complexities of blockchain and build something directly for users. And that's makes it available for us to take your fandom and put it in a data repository. In the blockchain world, we would call that a token or a wallet. And you can carry that with you everywhere. So maybe you decide that you're...

really going to get into pickleball. And maybe there's this pickleball league that you're trying to follow now. And you want to be able to prove to them that you are a loyal follower of your sport or your league. And you can take your fandom with you there and that they should treat you differently than the way they should treat somebody that's just starting into following sports because you plan to really invest your time, money, energy into the sport. That's the

That's the promise of blockchain in the use case of sports.

Steve (38:14.381)
So in a perfect world, two things come to mind. First and foremost, if we're democratizing and we're creating a universal platform and that data is always out there resilient, unscathed, always clean, because the blockchain assures its authenticity.

It seems like with your announcement of Basketball Canada and Napoli in Syria, football, soccer, as an example, that there are deals you have done directly with properties, with teams. What prevents you from establishing this as its own independent and universal platform, independent of the teams themselves?

Christian Magsisi (39:04.752)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (39:07.745)
where obviously there's a monetization relationship that comes into play because teams typically are not going to just volunteer data to anybody without a financial, you started off the conversation by talking about ticket sales and merchandise sales. And it's not really about the fan, it's about metrics. so why, first and help us understand, why does your organization, the KDA3, require

this bilateral relationship with the team and this cannot be done as its own independent platform.

Christian Magsisi (39:42.743)
It's by design is the first answer to the question. And as we researched, as any founder would, and see who the competition is and what other people are doing and learning from the mistakes, we found that fundamentally we should not create a friction point between us and the team or the club or the organization that you love.

So for example, in maybe a parallel universe, we're doing this podcast and I'm telling people go to KDA3.io and register for Napoli or register for Canada Basketball. In our scenario, we're saying no, actually. You should go to unifi.basketball.ca, which is the membership program that Canada Basketball has launched. And you should register for that. The underlying technology is provided by KDA3, but you won't actually find any logos.

about us, Unify Plus, because the thing that you love is basketball, or basketball in Canada, or Napoli because they won the Scudetto this past Syria, and you want to be immersed in that community and that culture. We shouldn't create that friction point. So the first answer to your question is it is by design. We don't want to create the centralized organization that is funneling all of these fans or users.

Steve (40:52.717)
Hmm.

Christian Magsisi (41:04.214)
into their respective clubs or teams, we want you to go directly to the thing that you love, which is Napoli or Canada basketball. And we're, we're having a lot of interesting and a lot of creative discussions with the clubs as well as we continue this journey of partnership. And the clubs I find are so engaged because they're building something for themselves. It's not servicing a partner. It is in, in, in,

By definition, it really is a true partnership because we're bringing something to the table that they need. They need points, they need rewards, they need community discussion, they need content consumption, all of the modular pieces that make up fan engagement we provide in technology. And my team will continue to build those out, but it's going to be in the marketing and the messaging of Napoli or TGL.

Steve (42:03.991)
You know, having been over the last, I get the pleasure in frequenting the number. It's now my 36th year in the business of sport, started out in Asia. And I relish the fact that it's been a journey that one in which it's infinite in the learning curve. It's you think you know something and it really fills that cliche of just the more you know, the more you realize you just don't.

So from my vantage point, having worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies in the sponsorship realm, sponsoring events I used to own and various sports, membership programs were very commonplace. One that comes to mind immediately was it was the first time ever an orange sales group, fruit group, a produce group called, God, Span, Span. It will come to me.

Christian Magsisi (43:00.898)
Yeah

Steve (43:04.205)
Outspan was my client, met with the board, they were from South Africa, but Asia was their focal point. And it was the first time in history that they outsold SunKissed in their 50 years in Asia because of the membership program and rewards program we had developed for them. With your group, you mentioned the facilitation of the rewards. Are you going out and actually going to the deltas of the world?

and assembling these benefits for the team so the reward structure is a one-stop shop when they're using KDA 3 and the fans have an opportunity to join the Unifi Plus program as relates to, by the way, is the moniker for all programs Unifi Plus? Yeah, of. Yeah, Napoli is.

Christian Magsisi (43:54.837)
No, this is specific to Canada basketball. Napoli's will be different. Yeah, it'll be their own branding. Correct.

Steve (44:03.733)
Okay, so I'm Unifi Plus and I'm following Canada Basketball. And obviously, as I've read through your release, focusing a lot on future stars and young players who are coming to the fore and relationship building. And they're frankly more accessible than attempting to secure some veterans that, know, whom they might be interested in who are very active in their prime and getting paid, you know, $70 million a year. So with that said, however, there can be many ways to reward a fan.

without having to have the touch of the athlete. And by the way, with AI today and going to digital twins, there are enormous ways to bring a personalized engagement with an athlete who is the goat of the generation and do it in a way where, sure, it might not be the biological male or female athlete for whom you find to be your greatest athlete of all, but at the end of the day, you can have a lot of interaction.

and we're going deeper and deeper into that world in our industry and across the board and everything that's going on. So with you, is part of this the fact that you're a one-stop shop or are you facilitating the rewards that each team uniquely brings to the table?

Christian Magsisi (45:12.002)
We are absolutely enabling the partnerships. The one stop shop is not the goal or the dream because modularity and flexibility is part of who we are as KDA III. And if one of our partners wanted to bring on one of their new partner or one of their long standing partners as part of the program, that is something that we enable because all of the fan engagement tools that we have

need some of those sponsors and partners to be a part of, whether it's providing marketing inventory, which has largely been one of the challenges for membership programs. And now we're really getting into the business of sport because all membership programs, as we've conducted our research and talked to other clubs and teams, one of the biggest challenges is actually having the marketing inventory to put into the membership program because this is something that

is often used as inventory to sell to other partners. So in our scenario, if we can secure that marketing inventory for the membership program, but not consume it as KDA 3, but give it back to the organization, give it back to the fans, then it creates this flywheel that becomes really interesting now because the organization is generating revenue because we're acquiring the marketing assets. And then at the same time, those marketing assets are going back to the fans.

So we're talking about money can't buy experiences. So with Canada basketball, for example, we're going to be able to send you to your favorite Canadian basketball players home city for a home game and watch them play live. Those are things that are, and get to meet the player obviously. those are things that you couldn't log onto a website today and buy a ticket for that.

Steve (47:03.851)
And that happened because of a reward structure for a particular individual who demonstrated some type of accrual of support of that team expressed, if you will, in a point system. There is a merit. This is not just a charitable endeavor. This is based. This is a meritocracy here. And the more that you and your partners in the team define as

Christian Magsisi (47:23.905)
Correct.

Steve (47:33.793)
behavior that's warranted to elevate that fan's connection to the team, you might be in the position to facilitate that trip to that home game.

Christian Magsisi (47:43.361)
Absolutely. And the most important part that all operators in the sports business space need to understand about us and how we view the world is we need to be rewarding people for real fan behavior so that we can get them to that trip. What I mean by that, real fan behavior so that we can get them to that trip. watching content is real fan behavior. Listening to this podcast is real fan behavior.

Steve (48:02.443)
real wood

Christian Magsisi (48:12.704)
going to an event, maybe not necessarily the event at the arena or the stadium or the pitch. That's real fan behavior.

Steve (48:22.679)
they, by the way, back to your earlier points, so that it's not dictated to them, do they actually identify what is the desired fan behavior? Or is this, again, the one-way street you talked about earlier?

Christian Magsisi (48:33.888)
It's absolutely a two-way street for Canadian basketball fans or fans of Napoli and Serie A. We'd love to hear what other activities that they're doing that we don't necessarily are tracking today, but is a very simple technical task for us to complete on the blockchain to start tracking that behavior and rewarding them for, again, being a loyal fan of the club and following.

Steve (49:00.461)
So there's a huge, huge network effect. Setting aside the flywheel of just being able to understand through increased numbers of participants, more refined analytics. In this case, the network effect is really essential to this platform.

Christian Magsisi (49:17.276)
Absolutely. And to be candid and transparent, we're still learning too. As like you've been in the sports business for a long time, and I'm sure this platform you've created, you get to learn a lot. And as we scale globally across all different types of leagues and sports in different parts of the world, we're learning that the fan behavior in Naples is very different than the fan behavior in Toronto. And we...

Steve (49:45.409)
Well, so.

Christian Magsisi (49:46.815)
want the fans to engage with us. Not only engage in the way that we believe that they're being fans of the clubs and the teams, but we want them to tell us, hey, we should track this behavior and then be rewarded for this as well. Or here's one way that I'm expressing my love for Canadian basketball. Is this something that we can earn a trophy for, get a reward for on the platform?

Steve (50:13.111)
Yeah, you know, it's very much we had on and I usually don't reference past attendees or guests of ours, but Mika Morris White, who's I think the CRO, head of sales, very senior executive at the Chicago Bears. Again, another person that's very good for you to know. She referenced during our discussion months back.

a book by Will Godara called Unreasonable Hospitality. I don't know if you ever have heard, come across that book and the essence of it, he was in the restaurant, this is a restaurateur, and it's about the remarkable power of rewarding customers more than they expect, right? And that, he called the title book again, that's the subtitle, but the title is called Unreasonable Hospitality. And...

What I'm hearing it get distilled down to is, you know, seizing at a time where teams are recognizing, and maybe the PGA, going back to the PGA is a really good example, perhaps, where when you are a team very often, depending on what your geography is, you can have a monopoly mentality.

It's very easy, particularly if you're a one and done in that city and you don't have the jets and the giants, you don't have the Yankees and the Mets, you don't have the Rangers and the Islanders, right? And we can go on and on and on where a city that size can capacitate geographically, monetarily, et cetera. It is interesting that we're at that clear inflection point where there is an opportunity to introduce

And it's not about bucking the system. It's completely about rewriting the rules in a way to say, remember that old thing, the first rule is remember the rules. The second rule is don't forget the first rule. But here it's the opposite. The second rule really is, but you wrote those rules a long time ago. And you know what? The world has changed since those rules were written. And there is, again, if you just open up the mindset,

Christian Magsisi (52:18.194)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Magsisi (52:23.326)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (52:30.219)
There is so much more for you to gain. There is so much untapped value left on the table. And we here, and I'm not an equity owner of your business, but clearly based on what you've represented and knowing some of your advisors and who's a part of you, Winstock being one of the expert in gaming, leading preeminent experts in gaming, truly eminent in his field.

The deployment is clearly across many areas of entertainment and it's exciting that with your long-standing background in sports, I know this is not a Canadian-based while headquartered in Canada, Toronto, you're universal in your application. It's an exciting moment in your development of what you're trying to do to solve pain points in this industry. And it's great for our viewers to...

understand again without getting overwhelmed because this is not a technology play. This is really ultimately about how you universalize and reward in a way that it becomes far more elevated. The pie gets bigger and obviously how you choose to monetize the relationship with the teams, you know, it's obviously a fair based reward system for them that there's a motivation.

to provide the necessary content that is so needed to get off the ground and build this foundational model. So with that said, what a pleasure. I mean, this is one of those I have to tell you. There are certain conversations you can conclude. are so many. I I thought I would spend 45 minutes talking to you about some of the observations of fan behavior, of spending behavior of

Christian Magsisi (54:07.761)
Yeah.

Christian Magsisi (54:22.344)
Mm-hmm.

Steve (54:22.409)
psychographics of fan. But again, perhaps that will be another time that we'll revisit that. But a very, very interesting endeavor. And we wish you and your colleagues at KDA3 enormous success in what is a vital, critical need, which is talked about all the time, fan engagement, but doing it in a far more progressive 21st century 2025.

methodology that will yield more and increase the pie for everybody. So Christian Maxici, again, founder and CEO, what a pleasure it is to have you on the Transaction.

Christian Magsisi (55:03.901)
Thanks so much, Steve. It was a lot of fun and look forward to catching up with you in the future and letting you know how our launch is and our fandom product is doing out in the world.

Steve (55:17.238)
looking forward to it. And we're going to hold you for one moment.