Unrivaled is rewriting the business of women’s basketball
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Women's sports are continuing to thrive. Record-breaking WNBA viewership, a flood of new brand investment, and now Unrivaled: the women's basketball league built by players, for players. Commissioner Micky Lawler joins Rapid Response to pull back the curtain on what it really takes to launch a high-stakes sports startup in the full glare of the public eye, from signing Sephora and Samsung to selling out arenas. The question is no longer whether women's sports can compete. It's how fast they can grow.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.8 | Startups grow in unpredictable ways, but your infrastructure shouldn't. |
| 0:04.9 | Deal scales with you from employee one to employee 1,000. |
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| 0:23.0 | specifically for high growth teams. Deal is the fastest way to hire, manage, pay, and equip |
| 0:28.3 | anyone anywhere. Deal, your Forever People platform. Visit D-E-E-E-L.com slash M-O-S to learn more and book a demo. |
| 0:40.0 | On Masters of Scale, we talk a lot about inflection points, those moments when a technology |
| 0:46.0 | stops being optional and starts being fundamental. |
| 0:50.3 | AI presents one of those moments, and behind every breakthrough, whether it's medical research or education or even cinematic visual effects, there's infrastructure most people never see. |
| 1:03.3 | As the essential cloud for AI, core weave is building that foundation. |
| 1:08.4 | It provides a purpose-built AI cloud designed specifically for pioneers at leading |
| 1:13.6 | AI labs and enterprises ready to power the biggest ideas and the boldest ambitions. |
| 1:20.4 | Ready for anything. Ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, |
| 1:26.8 | go to CoreWeave.com slash ready for anything. |
| 1:34.8 | Unrivaled is transforming the professional sports ecosystem. |
| 1:43.7 | If you can find the sweet spot between an intimate kind of wow viewing experience, |
| 1:51.0 | and then do your tour stops to get the players in front of as many fans as possible, |
| 1:57.0 | the players were very, very fast to understand that the more unrivaled grew the better for them from every angle. |
| 2:05.6 | The more that they could participate in telling brand stories, the more their own story would be relevant. |
| 2:12.6 | That's Mickey Lawler, Commissioner of Professional 3-on-3 Women's Basketball basketball league Unrivaled. Unrivaled was co-founded by WNBA stars Breonna Stewart and Nefisa Collier, and it's already making waves in just its second season, with sponsors from Sephora to Samsung and an active-engaged fan base in person and on TV. Mickey became commissioner at Unrivaled |
| 2:37.8 | after having run the Women's Tennis Association, the WTA, arguably the sports pioneer in |
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