Making Media · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

Undisputed Media Lessons with Mike Stricoff

·57 min·3 clips

The moment Mike became line producer for a show that would change sports media forever

The resume sets the table. Mike Strickhoff comes in with time in national sports television, platform content, advising, and connecting investors with content producers. The hosts start with Undisputed, where his work alongside Skip Bayless, Shannon Sharpe, and others opens up a bigger conversation about personality-led shows and why audiences keep coming back to them. Then the model stretches. Sports talk is no longer only a television product here. The episode tracks how it moved through national TV, tech platforms, and the space now open to independent creators. Snap becomes the hands-on case study. Strickhoff talks about arriving after Discover had launched, as the company was building publisher style formats on top of an app people mostly used to message friends. Our Stories gets the closest look. Teams pulled public snaps from live events, especially sports games, and shaped them into short three to five minute videos that told the game story through the crowd. His work was practical: which events to cover, which sports made sense, and how to coordinate with leagues for access, footage, marks, and partnership needs. The platform piece is the useful part. Snapchat was not YouTube or cable. People came to chat, keep streaks alive, use AR and filters, and maybe watch something while they waited. That tiny difference changes the programming math. The content had to fit spare attention, not a full lean-back viewing session. The debrief keeps that wider lens. Strickhoff becomes a clean read on a business that moved from live production habits toward platform-native media and creator opportunity. The hosts also get honest about timing. Small platform advantages disappear once everyone sees the trick, but the people closest to the edge sometimes spot dials latecomers miss. The closing banter admits they are nearer the tail end than the bleeding edge, which gives the whole thing a nice, slightly self-aware bite.

As heard by us

A practical tour of sports media, platform strategy, and the business behind personality-led shows.

Making Media uses Mike Strickhoff's career to show how personality-driven sports media gets built, then rebuilt, as platforms shift around it.

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Want the business logic behind personality-driven sports media?

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