i have two very special guest today their names are kimberly dodson and cat osborn kimberly is the chief executive officer and founder of excel sports kat osborn is the chief operating officer of excel sports what is excel sports here's i had forty percent of war after each of them yet the mainstream media only covers four percent accel sports aides to cover girls from high school college post coach professionals and of lympics to go where they haven't gone before i'm thrown to learn so i grew up in new york city and i have lived here all my life except going to high school up new hampshire boarding school college and then grad school but otherwise i've always been a resident of new york city grew up disciplines right now we are absolutely early on we both played three sports a year in school all through grade school cat stayed at the school she can tell you her background but we played say i played i moved i was the st woman in my family to go to you know after three generations of men on both sides i was very proud to be the st woman to be playing squash and tennis and yeah i played squash through your timing was because i'd started and run a different company for ten years so i like the starting of companies like the ideas the building creating so i want to do something new and i was trying to figure out sort of what the void was out there with the world needed and a friend of mine who'd actually played on the teams with me both in boarding school and college squash said what about sports athlete all your life you're crazy sports fan and the only person i know who goes to next game is by yourself because they're so they were so about a couple years ago and so i said well that sounds fun but i'm sure there are plenty of sites so i got thinking and looking and then about where you were boring and something about your growing up years so i was also going to york since we went to see an entry school and when you mention title nine we're actually an all girl school so ted online didn't impact us the way it would have at a coed school because the sports were obviously for women i did not leave for high school i stayed in play soccer basketball and softball and went to college for softball which i meet one year and then we played army and i figured i was good to institutional sales person there and stayed in wall street before i went to business school so you were a sales person well so that's good training yeah so i mean selling to titian's st and private clients so we had global private clients for the people i was working with and then i went to business school because i wanted to have better understanding the financial documentations and more of it and i came out did research for  know in columbia not easy to get to and then to finish the programs and it sounds like you kept you in your case what was your favorite sport where you were in graduate school actually of all things i ended up the co very passionate playing but also a big baseball family so my father remembered his grandfather taking him to baseball games and in the eighty's i was very fortunate we went to a few of the world series which wasn't too shabby but school and then we ended up working on a school project together she is a manager extraordinary and he only won two of taken the school benefit and i actually made a profit and then everything done on  spreadsheets and has changed how it's been done since and she dragged me into that with her kicking and screaming but that's how i knew that to be the perfect partner when i had already because she's so efficient also and i she's so smart she's founder and then we have an another partner who ironically went to the same and we're not the same here either so ironic that we all ended up with boys at the same school that is very great coincidence that all three went to the same grade school but was naming a school spends spends oh yes it's a great school it's a school where you really the main thing you're taught as a little kid is to be confident that you can do anything you want and that's way before the sort of empowering girls and listening to kat i mean you were an only child so you were the st son sort of because you were the st son and i was the st child so i was the st son of my dad's mind i it confused me obviously you could go to excel sports and maybe get the lowdown of what's going on there yeah well that's what hits the mean stream media so that's where you'll get that where you know we'll talk about players they just two weeks ago finished their their season the national women's national soccer league so that their finals so we covered each semifinal game and the whole thing what you brought up is an interesting point that we found in all our research the women's sports most so there's very little positive covered on women athletes and if you look at male athletes you look at a top basketball player and one of the best known ones you know what he eats for breakfast lunch and dinner you know how many kids he has whose wife is everything we went to college no one knows anything like that about women because it's not covered so we need to tell those stories and we need to create a landscape where people know that female athletes whether runners or soccer players or basketball ok so you're not limited to any one particular sport and your sport to has women and i think you go for like a mentor from high school college post college the professionals lympics will do profiles hadn't covered prior such as archery trysted in the mechanics of starting a you for who you are you've got a great idea you've got a t it doesn't happen overnight you got to put a business plan together you've got to go well how do we pay our so so tell us a little bit at the mechanics of starting up a start up it involves a kitchen table it involves a coffee shop right near our kids school it involves a lot of hours and a lot of notepads and pads and figuring out what the idea is and bring it down to a core focus and what are you nothing i mean what is what is your core mission our core mission is to build the be the go to source for all of women's sports coverage and additional resources around women sports post college leagues a whole community in our office people but we know it took us almost a year to really work on the idea and then cut my script together every penny we could because we needed to build the site to launch and that think the day before was maybe national clean up letter day or something what happened after that i said you know i think this does work we were unbelievably encouraged by a number of things one before we actually launched i particularly was spending a lot of time on linked in trying to sort of reach out to athletes coaches marketers nike and adidas whoever saying i'm starting this start up related to and women sports and i try and connect but nothing solid and these were summer olympic athletes somewhere or somewhere and within a month i had twenty olympic athletes come connect back to me on linked in saying you know not only connecting but a number of them saying what are you doing that sounds great coaches student athletes marketers and i said all right well i think we might have something here we also got unbelievable unbelievably positive response from people who we wanted to either help us as consultants or employees early editors people who were willing to really give up a lot to get paid very little to come work with which told me that there were thousands of people within four months had accepted that there was interest there and they were around the world they were just the swimming national swimming coach in iran i mean just unbelievable sort of selection of people we also sent a survey out to friends and family and it was allowed to be passed on with some very specific questions on the feedback we saw you know visually very graphically that few people in the media reach out to female athletes so the fact that we want to cover them we want to talk to them they're thrilled to talk to the olympians who you're in the olympics every four years and then after those two weeks everything sort of dies down for you we have one of our editors was actually an olympic swimmer she was in five olympic trials she want to meddle in beijing and she's our lifestyle out of her now but she really is an amazing job of telling the story of being an olympian in our own st y atmosphere and the environment you want to create so how many of these people do you have we have eight full time employees and clearly ourselves and we have to part time in place as well ok now and then about yeah twenty to twenty five freelancers and the freelancers because were based in new york but we don't want to be in new york centric they really help us tell the stories from minnesota california or say south africa and you know we have one of our writers is an indian woman who is in grad school in about his death very interested in growing by acquiring it's a possible virgin sport one day might come to you and say we want you to be part of our team that's possible i vision gets subsumed into the buyer and so we you know we have to see where we were at that point that being said they heard more than welcome to invest in us you know mary and we would love to meet mary and i really looking forward to getting back into squash i've had some pretty serious back and back problems thanks to squash and running with discs so i'm hoping that in the next year i can get back and