Last Thursday, I found myself in a room that captured something I've been feeling about the sports investing world for a while now: it's still figuring out how big it's about to get.

The occasion was a live taping of "The Deal," Alex Rodriguez's sports-investing podcast, recorded as part of a Bloomberg-sponsored sports conference. Rodriguez has built the show into one of the better windows into how capital is actually moving through sports right now, team ownership, media rights, athlete-adjacent ventures, and this session didn't disappoint. But the moment that stuck with me came from his guest: Alexis Ohanian, Serena Williams' husband and, in his own right, one of the more prescient investors in women's sports over the last several years.

Ohanian talked about how his conviction here dates back to 2019, before Angel City FC, before Athlos, before any of it was fashionable. His logic was simple and, in hindsight, obvious: women's sports figures had already built follower counts and cultural relevance that rivaled or exceeded plenty of male athletes competing for the same sponsorship dollars. The audience was there. The infrastructure and the capital just hadn't caught up yet.

What made the conversation land, for me, wasn't nostalgia about being early, it was his insistence that we're still early. He pointed to the valuations now attached to teams like the Golden State Valkyries and the New York Liberty as the proof point. Two years ago, a lot of well-informed investors would have called those numbers implausible. Now they're the case study for why the category has legs beyond a single breakout team or athlete.

Sitting in that room, I kept thinking about how this mirrors patterns I see constantly in my own work across preferred equity, credit, and venture, the assets that look overpriced in year one are often the ones that were simply priced for a market that hadn't shown up yet. Ohanian didn't wait for consensus. He built a thesis around underpriced attention and stuck with it long enough for the market to agree with him.

I didn't come away from Thursday with a new deal or a new thesis of my own. I came away with a useful reminder: the best investors in the room are rarely the ones reacting to the valuation everyone's already talking about. They're the ones who were talking about it three or four years before anyone else cared to listen.