Why I keep building platforms

Adapted from Peter McClung's essay, Why I Keep Building Platforms, for the Team Scout audience.

I could have stayed in corporate. By my early 30s, I was a VP at UnitedHealth Group, in the top 150 executives of a Fortune 25 company, managing teams of 40+ with serious budgets. The trajectory was clear: keep climbing, keep collecting titles, retire comfortably.

Instead, I built an agency. That turned into a social platform. That created a TV show. Thanks to COVID in 2020 and some founder disagreements, The Jump led to two more focused ventures — Creatorspace, a marketplace connecting brands with creators, and Team Scout, a comprehensive platform for youth sports programs.

The honest answer

The honest answer to “why?” is that I can't stop seeing problems that should be solved.

I watch coaches struggle with platforms that look like they were built in 2008 and I think: this should be better. I watch parents try to keep up with three different apps, two group texts, and a calendar nobody updates and I think: this should be simpler. I watch program directors spend their Saturdays reconciling registration spreadsheets when they should be coaching their own kids and I think: this should be automated.

At a certain point in your career, “this should be better” becomes less of an observation and more of an obligation. You've got the skills, the network, the time, the capital. Not fixing it starts to feel like a choice.

What 25 years taught me

Five ventures is enough to notice some patterns.

One. The platforms that last don't win on features. They win on feel. The experience of using them, day after day, is what builds the moat.

Two. You can't outsource product understanding. If you're not in the building with the people who use your software, you'll drift within a year.

Three. Business model is product. A company that monetizes engagement will ship different software than a company that monetizes outcomes, even if they're in the same category. If you want to know why a product feels the way it does, look at the revenue model first.

Four. Fortune 100 experience and founder experience teach you almost opposite things. The corporate side taught me governance, structured thinking, fiduciary responsibility. The founder side taught me that governance and structured thinking are useless if you can't ship. You want both, in that order.

Why youth sports

I serve on the board of AIR T, Inc. — a NASDAQ-listed diversified holding company. I chair the Compensation Committee. I've spent eight years thinking about organizational design, capital allocation, and the boring mechanics of how large enterprises work. It's fascinating work.

But the thing I find myself talking about at dinner is the conversation I had with a football coach last week who hadn't figured out how to change the schedule on his team's website because the person who originally built it moved away three years ago. Or the booster club president who's running her entire program on a personal Venmo because the platform they pay for doesn't do payment plans.

These are small problems. They're also universal. Every program in the country has some version of them. And almost none of them are getting solved by the companies who are supposed to be solving them.

That's the opening. That's why Team Scout.

The current bet

I've told my investors and my family the same thing: maybe this is the billion-dollar venture. Maybe it's not. Either way, I'll learn something, and the programs we work with will be better off than they were.

That's enough of a reason to keep building.

Read more about Peter and Team Scout →