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We can look a journalist in the eyes and tell them we're going to give them all the resources they need to do the best work of their career.

In the same way that the early folks on that Bay Area staff said no, originally most of the investors that ultimately invested in the athletic said no, and then we had to circle back.

Persistence in the face of rejection.

I mean, without that, you know, we would have stopped five years ago.

Welcome back to episode two of Dell Technology's small business conference series.

I am Jade Hoy, executive producer of the Athletic Podcast Network.

As you know, these have been trying times for small business owners across the world.

And for the second year in a row, Dell Technologies has assembled the best podcasters to tell their stories from starting up scalability and surviving.

In this episode, we will continue our conversation with the founders of the Athletic, Adam Hansman and Alex Mather as they detail the Athletics' rapid growth over the last five years.

How and why they decided on Chicago and Toronto and recruiting the best talent.

We will also be joined by General Manager of Content Strategy and Analytics, Achille Nambior, who was an integral part of the early years and one of the brains behind the Athletics' early success.

Let's start here.

Why Chicago, by the way, why Toronto?

Everyone would say go to New York or LA, obviously, but there's competition, but why those by Chicago and Toronto?

I think we looked at Philly and that didn't pan out.

So we said, well, you know, where do we think there's enough teams that like can get some signal and test this idea, hopefully pick a market where the teams were having some success or we thought could have some success.

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