I fell in love with growing sports audiences on social media. In 2014, I started uploading sports edits on Vine and grew to 75,000 followers in nine months. Then from 2015 to 2019, during high school, I built @bball on Instagram to more than 900,000 followers.
Through this journey, I developed an intuition for creating highly engaging content, the power of consistency and collaboration.
As a freshman at Duke, I wasn’t fully aware of this intuition and lacked a sense of direction. Building faceless social audiences felt risky. I didn’t own the platforms and I had been hacked before.
Then, on Feb. 19, 2020, during second semester of my freshman year, my oldest brother, Louis, texted me an idea: a real-time sports app to discuss and react to NBA play-by-play data. This was the origin of our fan-engagement platform, Real.
From that day forward, we had a vision to change how fans engage with sports. With my experience growing audiences and Louis’ full-stack engineering expertise, we had the skills to build it.
Duke fueled this vision with like-minded peers and mentors from Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Fuqua, Duke Wrestling, and the Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs program. They supported me through critical moments, from the daily challenges in our early days to scaling Real to millions of active members today.
My north star is to make an impact in sports. Duke helped uncover and fuel this north star, providing invaluable mentors and memories I’ll cherish forever. Whether it’s Real or another future endeavor, I have what it takes to keep going. I will forever be grateful.