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4 episodes with luke bonner
6 episodes with luke bonner
In this week's episode of The Game Plan, we venture into the wild, wild west of the internet: Digital collectibles, NFTs and Web3. What does it mean for athletes, how is it changing how athletes think about their personal brands and ability to monetize their work on and off the field, and who the key stakeholders in this new tokenized world are and will be. Our guide through this wild and rocky terrain is Luke Bonner, former pro basketball player who has spent his entire career, helping his peers and those that came after he think about brand development and ownership, well before NIL became a buzzword. Luke played both overseas and in the NBA D-League, after which he spent many years advising college and pro athletes on the key labor relations issues of the last decade. Looking ahead to the next decade, Luke is now applying all of his knowledge to building PWRFWD, the definitive athlete-to-consumer marketplace. To-date PWRFWD has worked with athletes including Sue Bird, Mo Bamba, Breanna Stewart, Sony Michel, Tacko Fall and more. Special thanks to our friend and PWRFWD investor Jordan Fliegel for the intro to Luke. About The Game Plan The Game Plan is a weekly podcast hosted by venture capitalists Jay Kapoor and Tim Katt. The show highlights professional athletes' stories that will help our listeners raise their game both in business and in life Did you know you can watch, as well as listen to The Game Plan? Check out our YouTube Page for full-length episodes and fun video clips You can follow us on Twitter (@thegameplanshow) and Instagram (@gameplanshow) for show news and updates, to recommend guests, and for bonus content! Follow co-hosts Jay Kapoor (@JayKapoorNYC) and Tim Katt (@Tim_Katt) for all things sports, media, tech, and venture capital. Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at hello@thegameplan.show
Luke Bonner is a former professional basketball player and current CEO / Co-Founder of PWRFWD, a company that turns athlete passions and performances into products, and have worked with numerous athletes including Sue Bird, Mo Bamba, and Breanna Stewart We discussed: - How PWRFWD began - The growth of women's sports, primarily the WNBA, and why Luke has such love for the women's game - Celebrating Renee Montgomery and Kelsey Trainor - Luke's thoughts on Web 3 and NFTs and what PWRFWD is doing in the space - Fan responses to athlete merchandise on PWRFWD and how a purchase is directly supporting that specific athlete - NIL involvement - How the process works with athletes - Luke's experience and playing career overseas https://pwrfwd.co __________ We Need To Be Doing That is a HEARTLENT Group Production WNTBDT.com @ElliotGerard // @jonahballow // @keiths
Our first episode in our Baller to Business series features former pro Luke Bonner who takes us through his journey post playing career. Luke is the CEO of PWRFWD, a product and brand creator for athletes. Luke takes us through his transitional process and discusses how his playing career and interests throughout, helped mold his business. An advocate for athletes and a hilarious guy, Luke Bonner on this episode of Overseas Famous.
In episode five of Unstack's Zero to a Million, CEO Grant Deken and VP of Sales & Marketing Zach Rego talk with Luke Bonner, founder of PWRFWD.Luke is a former professional basketball player and his company, PWRFWD, is a marketplace that empowers athletes to connect with their fans on a deeper level through their own custom made products. It’s an end-to-end solution for all the tricky parts of e-commerce — development, design, marketing, manufacturing, fulfillment, and customer service.Ultimately, Luke and his team at PWRFWD enable athletes to create products that speak to their on-court performance and off-court interests, bringing new avenues for fans to engage and support their favorite players — through meaningful, high-quality products.By eliminating the headaches associated with digital entrepreneurship, they make it easy for athletes to build and grow direct, authentic connections with their fans.Connect with Luke: LinkedIn | Twitter | PWRFWD.coThis episode is brought to you by Unstack.
“Boy, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad we don’t have practice this week or next week.” I’ve never seen a coach so openly defeated after a loss. There’s no stoicism here, no talk about being proud of his players, no looking forward to next year. There’s no energy left for that. Here is the great Jerry Tarkanian, a coach I’m used to seeing emanate such intensity that he has to bite on a towel during games, and boy, he’s just glad it’s over.It’s one of the final scenes from Between The Madness, the 1998 documentary following the Fresno State men’s basketball team over the entirety of their disastrous season that year. A baby faced Andy Katz is standing with Tarkanian, looking in this moment more like a friend lending an ear than a sports reporter for the Fresno Bee. The two are in the bowels of Madison Square Garden after Tarkanian’s team lost a heartbreaker in the NIT. It feels like a private moment between the two, but there’s an unseen third party holding the camera, peering at Tark’s exhausted looking face from around Katz’s shoulder. Whoever holds that camera spent the better part of their year watching from close distance as the team broke apart in headline grabbing fashion. As I watch this scene I wonder if that person is glad it’s over, too.Fresno State entered that season with a loaded roster predicted to make the Elite 8 by Sports Illustrated. Tarkanian assembled an unprecedented amount of talent for a Western Athletic Conference team with four players that would go on to play in the NBA, and more that had the potential to. Despite their talent the team never found consistency due to player suspensions for violations as trivial as smoking weed, as serious as domestic assault, and as unbelievable as threatening with a samurai sword. So much s**t hit the fan in Fresno that Mike Wallace brought his 60 Minutes crew to campus to file an expose on the program. I have to link to Wallace’s GOTCHYA segment on the program here, not because it’s good, but because it’s a chance to hear Mike Wallace muster up all his 60 Minutes gravitas to say the phrase “White (blanking) honkey b***h.”Between The Madness first aired on Fox Sports One on Thanksgiving, 1998. The film’s producers agreed not to show NCAA violations (Fresno State would later vacate wins for the following season and the two after that), but otherwise had creative control and unprecedented access to the team for the duration of their season. The resulting raw behind the scenes feel was jarring to me as a modern viewer accustomed to careful brand curation that has a firm grasp on modern sports media. Before watching this film I didn’t realize how thoroughly conditioned my expectations have become by our era of Players’ Tribune, sportswriters guaranteeing brand-friendly coverage in exchange for access, broadcasters employed by the team, and player produced documentaries.There are some similarities to The Last Dance, the docuseries that drew millions of viewers when it aired on ESPN earlier this year and now lives as a binge friendly hit on Netflix. Both make use of beyond the norm access to tell the inside story of a season, and incidentally both had cameras rolling in the same time of the same year. The differences are more interesting. While Dance uses interviews taking place in our time to look back, in Madness the viewer is trapped in the moment with no faces from the future guaranteeing a happy ending. Dance, being a product of our time, also required sign-off from it’s billionaire star subject so predictably avoids venturing far from corporate interests. Dance may make you feel like you’re finally getting the real story, but ultimately it’s the same story you’ve gotten all along, the tried and true one that has been told in two minute commercials for decades. The crew behind Madness had license to tell whatever story they felt was most worth telling, and the result feels a lot more human and interesting. While Jordan and Phil were masterminding their final triumphant season in Chicago, in Fresno there was a group of young players caught in bad situations made worse by draconian NCAA policy, while the national media shook their collective finger at them for having it too good for too long. If The Last Dance shows us the system working perfectly to reward talent and effort, Between The Madness suggests that’s more an exception than rule.I’m hyping this film up knowing you can’t watch for yourself and disagree, because some years ago Between The Madness disappeared. Internet searches bring back only a few clips and some old message board posts written by fans trying to track down a copy for themselves. It can’t be found in any great online warehouses or auctions or pirate sites. The film is unavailable, but just because something is unavailable doesn’t mean that it’s entirely gone. I first heard of Between The Madness in a bar in Austin, Texas in 2016. I was there performing in my first ever comedy festival, which was being held during South by Southwest but was not an official part of that indie rock fest turned thinkfluencer/tech/media/music/whatever/free stuff bonanza that is modern South By. The fest I flew in for was an independent venture put on by the local alt-comedy club opportunistically timed to siphon off some SXSW asses for their seats and attract sponsor dollars from players too small to buy-in to the main event. Getting suckered into paying your own way to a bad festival is a stock comedian story, and this one turned out to be mine. The day of the festival I learned my involvement consisted of one ten minute set, to be performed in the lobby of the club, in the early afternoon, standing alongside sponsor booths as they handed out free samples. I’d had rough sets before but this was the first time I’d been upstaged by organic soybean chips.The chips were not good but they were my compensation, so I finished my set and stuffed my bag full of them before heading back out into broad daylight to find a drink. Walking through the towering corporate absurdity of SXSW was a welcome distraction. I remember AMC promoting a new show about a Preacher teaming up with a vampire by constructing a massive upside down church. USA Network set up an entire carnival to promote Mr. Robot in all it’s corporate approved anti-corporate splendor. I saw handsome Canadian basketball legend Rick Fox for the second time in my life. My bleak festival debut was forced into the backseat.I was staying on the couch of my friend, the hoops writer Ananth Pandian, and I met up with Ananth and his friend Luke Bonner at a bar. Luke starting talking about Between The Madness. I had never heard of it. He told us he saw the film only once in his life, when he was heading into his freshman season at West Virginia, and called it one of the biggest learning experiences of his time in college. Sitting there in summer class, before his freshman season had even started, Madness gave Luke what he felt was his first real look at the world he was entering as a college basketball player. Line cast and hook set, he reeled me in: He’d never been able to find the film again. He’d been trying for years, he said, and it didn’t seem to exist anymore.Learning that an obscure and noteworthy documentary existed, and that was difficult (impossible?) to find was like a designer drug created specifically for the part of me I’ll describe as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons but for basketball. I had to find it. I would find it. Then I would judge it. When I got back to Portland I started searching online and two things kept happening: I would not find the film, and I would learn a more about that team’s notoriety that made me want the film even more.As my obsession grew and online searches failed I decided to start reaching out to anyone I could who was associated with the film over social media. I told them I was creating a podcast about my search for the film and that I’d like to talk and, oh yeah, do you happen to have a copy? That podcast never got off the ground as I imagined it but now, three years later and thanks to a pandemic putting stand-up in a choke hold, I had time to go back and re-listen to the interviews from 2017 and share them, finally.I eventually watched the film courtesy of Paul Doyle, the Director, who I tracked down using LinkedIn. By that time Paul was living a different professional life running a business that helped seniors find various services. Along the way I also talked with Terrance Roberson, a star on the team and one of the main subjects of the documentary. Terrance is the first player interviewed in the film, as a sophomore sitting alone in the locker room he tells the story of his mother dying in front of him after suffering a heart attack in church, and the tone is set. Terrance was the only member of that team to play four seasons at Fresno State and talked about his standout career there, regrets, and current life as a mentor to basketball talent and a mental health technician in his hometown of Saginaw, Michigan.My first break, though, was talking with a member of the film’s crew named Stephen Mintz. I came across Stephen’s name on an old Fresno State message board where someone mentioned he made the film and had since become a stand-up comedian in Fresno. I found his comedian page on facebook and soon we were talking via Skype about his experience chasing around the team with a camera on his shoulder for six months. Mintz developed an attachment with the team that would strain after filming. After the season, still wanting to be close to the team, Mintz took a job as statistician and academic advisor. In the latter role he gained notoriety when he told a newspaper that he wrote papers for players in exchange for money, part of a scandal that got his name everywhere from the Fresno Bee to the New York Times and made him persona non grata to the program. He talked about all of it. Later I’d meet Mintz in person when he got me up on a stand-up show in Fresno and get to talk comedy-shop, basketball, and about his gig at the local Haunted House.Paul, Terrance, and Stephen all spoke with reverence about Tark and shared stories of their time with him. They talked about the emotional toll of that season, the mixed feelings they have, and the impact the film had on their lives nearly twenty years later. And, of course, I got their inside perspectives on the samurai sword incident for the record. I forwarded the film to Luke Bonner, now retired from basketball, who finally got to see the film that hit him so hard as a teenager. Luke thinks the film is still great, and I agree. Since there are no plans to re-release the film these interviews are as close as anyone can get to the experience. I like to imagine another basketball obsessive will come across them while conducting their own search for the film.Now with time to reflect I’ve been able to feel gratitude for how much better it was that I couldn’t simply order Between The Madness from Amazon. It’s unavailability gave me a quest and conversations with people I’ll never forget. Despite how bad that comedy festival was I’m glad I decided to use my “emergencies only” credit card to pay my own way. F**k all soybean chips forever, though. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sethallen.substack.com
In Forward, Thinking | Episode 14, David and Ricky are joined by CEO & Founder of PWRFWD and NBA veteran, athlete activist, and author Etan Thomas.Luke discusses what influenced him to become an activist for athletes' rights, the state of name, image, likeness, and athletic reputation rights for college athletes, and what he's currently working on with PWRFWD.Etan discusses the political and societal climate in the US, how the culture of the NBA has changed Adam Silver comparative to the David Stern era, how athletes can use their platforms for good, his open letter to Adam Silver regarding the NBA restart, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bro. Luke Bonner // 08.11.19
Paul and Chris talk presidential hopeful US Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), then Paul speaks with Luke Bonner, Executive Director of the Rock On Foundation, about the upcoming Rock On Fest.
Former NCAA and professional basketball player Luke Bonner joins the show to talk about his new life as a player advocate, taking us behind the scenes of NCAA hoops and outlining how he'd like to change the broken system of so-called "amateur" athletics. He shares tales of his time playing ball for both West Virginia and UMass, as well as his tenure in the Lithuanian league—letting us know just what the Ball brothers should expect over there, and rhapsodizing about his life-changing experience seeing ELO in Vilnius.
In this edition of Innovating Business Senior Economic Development Advisor for the City of Sterling Heights, Luke Bonner, talks with Auxiom CEO, Matt Loria, about providing IT services and solutions to small and mid-sized companies.
In this edition of Innovating Business Senior Economic Development Advisor for the City of Sterling Heights, Luke Bonner, talks with Transpak Inc. President, James Hadel, about growing his family owned business.
In this edition of Innovating Business we highlight Tarus Products Inc. CEO, David Greig, talks with host Luke Bonner about the business his father built from the ground up, providing clients with American made machines, new innovations, and company culture.
In this edition of Innovating Business we highlight Coliant Corporation. CEO, John Swiatek, talks with host Luke Bonner about taking an idea, developing it, and starting up a successful business.
In this edition of Innovating Business we highlight SRC Refrigeration. President and CEO, Steve Lemieux, talks with host Luke Bonner about providing high quality, custom refrigeration solutions in an extremely responsive manor.
Former NCAA, Euroleague, and D-League player Luke Bonner joins the podcast during SXSW. The former professional basketball player talks playing in rural Lithuania, trying stand up in a club in Toronto, and rooting for his brother San Antonio Spurs fan-favorite Matt Bonner. Follow Luke: @LukeyBonner
In this first edition of Innovating Business Tweddle Group Vice President of Content Development Operations, Rob Marcott, talks with host Luke Bonner about company culture and providing Tier 1 information and solutions to the auto industry in an ever evolving business environment.
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