Myla 🐻

Everyone is talking about Cal's landing the first jersey patch deal in the ACC, across all 30 sports, with @dialpadhq. Because Dialpad is a B2B company, that changes what this sponsorship is actually worth from my seat. Many jersey patch and stadium deals are consumer plays. The sponsor sells something to the fans in the seats, so more eyeballs means more customers. Dialpad is a different animal. It sells AI business communications software, phone systems, contact centers, and customer support tools, and the buyer is a company, not a fan. For a lot of B2B software brands, putting your logo on a jersey would be a strange use of money, because the audience and the buyer usually are not the same people. Cal is the rare place where they are. Start with the market. Cal sits in the Bay Area, which is about as dense a concentration of businesses and B2B buyers as exists anywhere in the country. Dialpad itself is a Bay Area company, headquartered just up the road in San Ramon. The people filling Memorial Stadium and following Cal Athletics include a huge share of founders, executives, IT leaders, and the exact decision makers who sign off on the software a company runs on. Then look at the alumni base, which is where it really lands. Berkeley undergraduate alumni have founded more companies than those of any other school in the world, over 1,300 of them, just ahead of Stanford. Every one of those companies buys phones, support tools, and communications software from somebody. When Dialpad puts its name across Cal Athletics, it is putting its name in front of a network of people who both run businesses and feel a real connection to the school on the patch. That is what makes this so smart. A consumer brand pays for reach and hopes some of it happens to land on buyers. Dialpad is getting reach that is already stacked with its buyers, plus the good will that comes from backing their team. For a B2B company, that is about as efficient as sports marketing gets. Cal found a partner whose customers are sitting in their own stands and spread all through their own alumni network. Excited to see how many other B2B companies notice what Cal just figured out.