Women in Business | Ishveen Jolly
CEO and Founder of OpenSponsorship Ishveen Jolly (2003 Economics and Management).
As part of our series highlighting alumnae who are leaders in business, we were delighted to speak to Ishveen Jolly (2003 Economics and Management), CEO and Founder of OpenSponsorship, a digital marketplace connecting brands to athletes for digital marketing campaigns. Ishveen is a trailblazer in the sports marketing industry, having built OpenSponsorship.com into the world's largest marketplace. Her accolades include getting on the Forbes 30U30 sports list, Inc's Top 100 Female Founders list, and raising over $5M for the company. The marketplace has 12,000 athletes, 60% managed by the major sports agencies and 40% direct.
What was Keble like when you were here?
Amazing. The friendships I made, the accommodation (I was lucky to live in College all three years), the emphasis on doing more than just studying (I spent a lot of my time playing sports and was JCR Treasurer), the learning emphasis around questioning and understanding vs just regurgitating.
So much of my personality today is thanks to my time at Keble—even my extreme minimalism towards interior design and belongings which I recently reflected upon is probably due to the effort of unpacking and packing so many times a year—by the end I only brought the essentials.
Could you give us an overview of your career to date?
I interned at E&Y during my 2nd year summer, it was a super fun experience but I realized that I didn't want to do the big corporate thing. I remember them offering me a job and me thinking “but I've not really made any impact here”—clearly from a young age I cared about my work and time making a difference. Post graduating, I joined a boutique management consultancy in the retail sector—Javelin Group. I loved the people, the work and the skills I learnt that I still use today (complicated Excel formulas and perfectionist PowerPoint formatting!!). However, about two years in, I realized that my love for sports was bigger than me just wanting to play netball after work so I decided to take a role in a sports agency, Commune. It was 2008/9 and the recession was looming so I took a chance and moved to India to pursue this. My main two clients were the IPL team Mumbai Indians and the brand Hero Motocorp. Here is where I fell in love with sponsorship as a form of marketing. I was brokering deals between brands and athletes, teams and events, then supporting the activation of them. Fast forward, I moved to the US and it was here that I decided an Airbnb of sorts for the sponsorship industry was needed and started my current company OpenSponsorship.com. Today we are the largest marketplace globally connecting brands to athletes for marketing campaigns. I moved back to London during COVID and I run the US-based company from here.
Can you tell us about some of your career highlights?
1) Raising money is so hard but so rewarding when people believe in you and invest in you. We are really lucky to have some amazing investors, including Serena Williams. She's amazing and I'm so so proud to call her an investor. Others include Blackstone executive David Blitzer, Eric Stern, and NBA all-star Baron Davis.
2) At OS, we have done tens of thousands of deals and that feels amazing for me and the whole team. We have worked with top stars like Premier League footballers, world class golfers and F1 drivers which is fun, and also delivered sponsorship deals to amazing athletes who really need the support, such as Paralympians, trainers, marathon runners etc. Sponsorship is a wonderful form of marketing but is just too insular and complicated—by simplifying the process we are ensuring more deals can get done.
3) Building a team has definitely been a highlight. Managing is tough yet so rewarding. As a woman in sports from a minority background, being in the CEO position has meant I've been able to make real change—our team is arguably the most diverse in the sports tech industry and that shows in the strong results from diversity of thought.
Has being a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated sector presented any particular challenges to you?
It’s hard to say what's helped and what's hurt. The environment today is good for Female Founders but of course this is a correction because the prior status quo was so bad. Today, it helps in raising, hiring, PR, but it wasn't that way when I started the company.
What are your plans for the future?
We are in sustainable growth mode right now; the advice being given to startups is to try and get to profitability with a strong focus on healthy unit economics. So that's the short-term plan and then the longer-term plan is to grow, either by raising again and maybe even making some acquisitions of our own, or finding a bigger company to be a part of.
What advice would you have for Keble’s students today?
With AI, it's a whole new world for folks entering the job market. I can't tell you which roles we will need people for in five years’ time and which we won't. Already in sales and marketing, our team can do way more with so much less, thanks to AI. What's carried me professionally has been hard work, passion, resilience, and the desire to keep upskilling and learning. I'd suggest students lean into skills and their passions. Start a blog, do your own projects to show off your abilities.
I was also fortunate in my sports agency role to start working in sales early—we are all selling something—a product, a business, an idea, a way of doing things, ourselves—so learn how to communicate with many different people, get out of your comfort zone and learn the art of selling.
