Choose your own adventure. A career at ESPN

When I was a kid my favorite books were the Choose Your Own Adventure Books, where you’d read along and come to a decision point — do I take the mountain path or the jungle path.  Since my first job at RIT, I’ve always treated my career a bit like a choose your own adventure book (blog post here)– where you flip the page and a really awesome opportunity comes along and you have to make the decision to go after that opportunity — or stay the course.

I’m at that page in my book today and I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined ESPN as Sr. Director of Product and will be focused on digital products across all screens: including ESPN.com, Mobile (scorecenter, SportsCenter feed), WatchESPN, ESPN3 & ESPN Fantasy.  ESPN has been a big part of my life ever since the days of watching Michael Jordan highlights on SportsCenter before school.   More importantly, ESPN is an important brand in 10′s of millions of peoples lives around the world.

I’m a tech geek at heart and have always loved product — the combination of that plus the ability to create product in a huge space that i’m personally passionate about is an adventure that’s hard to turn down.  At it’s core, ESPN is a technology company with the deepest well of content and talent available in the sports world today.  Right now, ESPN is embarking on a revolutionary journey to reinvent the way that we consume, share and create content around sports and I’m super excited to be able to help contribute to that vision.

Of course, by choosing this adventure — I’m leaving something behind.  It’s been one of the greatest pleasures of  my career being a part of the Polaris family.  I’m humbled by the opportunity that this awesome group of folks gave me to learn the venture business, contribute to the portfolio and  to help entrepreneurs succeed in building some awesome companies.  I’m forever indebted to the partnership, but especially to Dave Barrett who took me under his wing and spent the time to teach the craft of venture capital to a complete greenhorn.   The guys on the tech team (Jon, Peter, Terry, Jason & Noel) are first-class and I look forward to continuing to stay involved and  working with them outside of  my day to day at ESPN.

While I won’t be as deeply involved in the community as I am today, I’ll be intently watching the tremendous renaissance that is happening in our ecosystem.  There is so much to be excited for in Boston — I’m tremendously bullish on the future & you should be too!

So this isn’t goodbye, it’s jumping to page 183 — the ESPN path.  For those that want to keep in touch, my new email is gus.d.weber@espn.com.

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