Scale Like a CEO

Leading Through Crisis: Empathy, Pivots, and The Future of Media

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 62

Share episode

What does it take to pivot a public company under real pressure and come out cleaner, simpler, and stronger? We sit down with Matt Edelman, CEO of Super League, to unpack the strategy and humanity behind a turnaround that moved the business from live esports events to scalable digital engagement while restoring investor confidence and partner trust.

Matt traces the journey from Marvel’s early entertainment studio to a front-row seat in the gaming economy. He explains why Gen Z now spends more time playing games than watching social video and what that means for brand marketers who still treat interactive worlds as side projects. We dig into the executive lag—many current decision makers didn’t grow up inside multiplayer environments—and how the next wave of millennial CEOs and CMOs will likely redirect budgets toward play-first platforms where attention, engagement, and conversion stack together.

The conversation gets candid around leadership in crisis. Matt breaks down the headwinds from platform changes on Roblox, the decision to reduce staff, and the discipline required to align bankers, investors, employees, and partners around one consistent narrative. He shares a clear execution chain: restore Nasdaq compliance, eliminate unsustainable debt, simplify the cap table, clean up payables, and then invite strategic capital—proving each step before telling the next chapter. Along the way, he outlines his three rules for compassionate separations and how a profound personal experience reshaped his voice as a leader, making empathy a precise tool rather than a platitude.

If you care about the future of marketing, brand safety in gaming, or the nuts and bolts of public-company turnarounds, this conversation delivers practical insight and human depth. Subscribe, share with a colleague who leads teams through change, and leave a review with the one lesson you’ll apply this quarter.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. In this episode, we are joined by Matt Edelman, CEO of Super League. Matt takes us on a journey from his early days at Marvel to leading Super League through a critical pivot. He shares candid insights on crisis management, the power of empathy and leadership, and what the future holds for digital engagement.

SPEAKER_01:

Matt, thank you so much for joining me on Scalic the CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a little intro to use yourself and your business.

SPEAKER_02:

Sure. Thanks, Justin. I'm really happy to be with you. I've been in the working world for more than a couple decades. That's usually as much as I admit to. I am from New York, moved to the West Coast shortly after college, which was also back east. And I have spent my career at the intersection of content and media and emerging technology. I really had an opportunity, unlike many others, at the very beginning of my career, to help build the brand new entertainment studio for Marvel Comics. And since then, have done a lot of work both in small companies and large. Just before coming to Super League, I worked for one of the other large businesses, now named Endeavor, formerly known as WME IMG, helped them set up a joint venture in the gaming space, among other things that I was working on. And that led me to Super League, where I've been now for about eight years. And Super League started off in the live activations business in gaming, really through the lens of esports. That ended abruptly. So I was the chief commercial officer at the time, had to figure out a commercial pivot. We figured out a way to help our partners who were largely brands and their media agencies get engaged with gaming audiences through digital platforms instead of through live events. That became the focus of the business over the COVID years, led to a lot more growth and opportunity. And I then became the president of the company and most recently became the CEO on April 1st. We are a public company, and there are some great developments and stories over my short tenure as CEO that we may have a chance to talk more about.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, excellent. So I'd love to hear a little bit more. So you've made the pivot since COVID kind of from a focus on engagement in live events to kind of virtual or digital events. Tell me a little bit more about kind of what sort of problem are you solving and why does that matter?

SPEAKER_02:

It's a problem around engagement, right? So brands spend effectively all of their marketing dollars to bring consumers along a funnel and high level that funnel is awareness and that leads to engagement and that leads to conversion. The question is, where do you find people when it comes to awareness and what channels are good at getting attention and then translating that attention into interactivity or engagement? And then how do you convert that into a sale or a commitment? And what's happened over the last 15 years is the amount of time spent by younger audiences in interactive environments, primarily games, has skyrocketed. At the same time, while there is still a massive amount of video consumption, the pace of growth in time spent gaming every day has outpaced the growth of time spent watching video. We're now at the point where the average member of Gen Z spends more time per day engaging in video games than they do per day watching videos across all social media platforms combined. So the problem that we're tackling and that we're helping brands solve is how to connect with the younger members of their consumer target segment and giving them solutions to do so based on that consumer's love of play.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. That's kind of fascinating, just thinking about being a part of the big the first video game generation, you know. Like I remember having an Atari and Nintendo and all of that. And so it's interesting to hear the that the how much time this younger generation is spending in playing games and online games.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's interesting if you think about demographics, right? If you're a member of Gen X, which I am, when we wanted to play video games with our friends, we had to go over to their house. Millennials started to experience playing video games with friends with multiplayer massive online role-playing games. And that carried through their 20s and 30s, and still there are many millennials who play games today, you know, in their 40s, not yet approaching 50. Next generation, Gen Z, their entire brains were wired differently because between the age of seven and thirteen, they were introduced to smartphones and Facebook and YouTube and multiplayer games and Instagram and X now, Twitter, now X. And from the very beginning of their opportunity to interact with people, they were on a screen and they were interacting with the screen, and then they started interacting with other people through the screen by playing games. Gen Alpha, forget about it, it's a totally different story. But when you think of that demographic shift, there's another side of that equation, which is the demographic shift at the executive level. So if you're a member of Gen Z and you didn't play games online with other people when you were growing up, then while you might do it now if you happen to be a gamer, that's not part of your DNA. That wasn't part of your formative content consumption experience when you were first learning what you liked to watch and what you liked to do. And as a result, the decision makers in the C-suite are still people who didn't grow up playing multiplayer games. Over the next five to seven years, that is going to shift. And millennials will be the CEOs, and millennials will be the CMOs and the heads of marketing and be in charge of more budgets. We believe that will represent a shift of dollars to more interactive environments.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, those demographics are so it's interesting. I want to dig in a little bit more to that later. Um I want to pivot a little bit and talk about a bit of your evolution as an executive. So you've kind of been growing with the company. As you mentioned, you were the chief commercial officer, and then you were president and now CEO. And I'm curious as you've navigated that transition to be the CEO. And Super League's around 100 employees, right?

SPEAKER_02:

We were close to 100, more like 75 when I started as the CEO. But unfortunately, the company hit some headwinds in late 2023 and early 2024. At the time, those headwinds were largely a result of changes made by Roblox as a platform relative to how companies like Super League were able to generate revenue. And that caused the company to pursue different financing structures in order to continue operating the business that unfortunately backed the company into a bit of a corner by the end of 2024. At that time, the prior CEO, who was still on our board and a great partner, and the board sort of believed there might be an opportunity for the company to tell an updated story and for the stakeholders connected to Super League in the investor marketplace and the partner marketplace, et cetera, to hear a new narrative. The conversations began about me coming into the CEO role, which is what began on April 1st of this year. Based on the state of the business at that time, one of the changes we made was a relatively significant reduction in the staff. And so we're down now to closer to 35 people.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. And so I'm curious, telling a little bit about as you've navigated that. And that's a pretty big thing to navigate, right? Taking over the CEO and then navigating that a reduction in force. Tell me a little bit about some of the challenges that you faced in that, because that's something that's not unfamiliar, I think, over the past two years. A lot of um CEOs and executives have had to deal with those dynamics. So tell me a little bit more about some of the challenges and how you've successfully navigated it.

SPEAKER_02:

There are a handful of terrible situations when you are a supervisor at any level in any company that you hope to never have to face, and top among them is letting people go. There are really three things that I think can help guide somebody in that moment. One is compassion has to be the guiding theme for you in those communications. And when those communications have to be written instead of verbal or remote instead of in person, finding a way for compassion to still kind of lead that communication is quite important. I think the second is to understand that saying sorry is not appropriate. You might feel badly and you might be compassionate and you might be sorry, but the person on the other end of that communication doesn't want to hear that you're sorry for upending their life and taking away their ability to earn a living at that moment. They want you to be sensitive, but it's very hard for them to compute that you could be sorry based on the severity of the message that you're delivering. And I think the third is you have to understand that that conversation is only about the person who's being impacted. It's not about you as the person who's delivering the message. And so how you feel and what you would do and, you know, telling a story about you how you might have been fired someday, which I have been, doesn't matter and doesn't belong. It is really about what that person is going through and how, you know, how they feel and how to support whatever it is that comes out of their response to that communication.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I've you know, I've had to do a number of separations over my career, you know, with different various circumstances, both from you know kind of a rift perspective and from you know just a straight-up termination perspective. And it requires so much empathy. And, you know, what you're talking about there, you know, they don't want to hear your story of when you lost your job or anything. What's most important is what's going on for them right now. And I think it it really requires you to call on just such a high level of empathy. And so I'm curious over your career, how have you developed that level empathy to be able to, you know, have those conversations successfully as, you know, as successfully as they can go?

SPEAKER_02:

Love that you asked that question because I was not artful in many of those circumstances in my past. And I think it had to do with a level of hubris, a lack of experience, and and really thinking more about my own lens than the lens of the person across the table. And so I definitely learned from some mistakes. There's one in particular I can remember where a person I had to let go from a company posted something on social, not specifically about me, but about learning what kind of leader they did not want to become. And I knew that was directed at me. And that will stick with me, frankly, for forever, because I at the time felt like I was, you know, a pretty good leader, and clearly I was lacking in certain areas. But you asked how I developed the compassion, and I will get to a little bit of a personal, you know, sort of component of my life here. So my daughter is nearly, well, she'll be 15 in about four months. When she was born, she was diagnosed with a very severe form of epilepsy and had to have brain surgery when she was six months old. Still to this day has daily seizures. She is not able to walk or not able to talk. She can't have purposeful relationships, severely cognitively impaired, a part of life that you can't prepare for. It's a club you don't ever want to be a part of. And it creates sort of a daily weight on your existence. I liken it sometimes to what a person experiences when they have a ringing in their ear. You filter the world auditorily through that ringing. Sometimes the ring is very noticeable and gets in the way of what you really want to be focused on that you're listening to. And sometimes your brain ignores the ringing and you can hear perfectly from your own perspective. That's a little bit like the feeling that you have as a parent of a deeply handicapped child. In the first several months and couple of years of having our daughter, my entire sense of the world shifted, as you might expect. And the notion of compassion took on a different meaning, and the notion of sensitivity took on a different level of importance. And my entire voice changed, the way I communicate changed, the way that I wrote changed, the way that I expressed myself shifted. And so I think, among other things, the learning experiences, but that profound life event definitely altered my ability to develop a sense of compassion in all parts of life, but certainly in the workplace.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for sharing that. And that's you, I think it so much demonstrates this kind of to bring it to the conversation of, you know, so many folks want to still separate the idea of kind of work and personal and, you know, constantly say it, like our one person, and we bring that one person everywhere we go. And what your story illustrates so much is how much, you know, events in our personal life can impact us in the way that we show up for others in the workplace and how that's impacted the way that you show up as a leader, which you know is great that you're able to kind of parlay that lesson into the way that you're leading in the workplace.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you. No, I think you're right. And you know, without staying too deeply on the personal angle, I think the the idea that it's possible to separate has become more challenging since COVID because of the nature of work. And, you know, the fact that so many companies and so many people still work remotely, yet as part of teams, means there is less separation just by definition because you're working out of home and a dog might walk by or a child might walk by, or you're accepting a package, it's a delivery, and suddenly there's a little bit of a window into a portion of your personal life, even what you have behind you or you know, on the walls, or or if you choose to have a background so that nobody can see what's in your life that says something about you and you know your desire or ability to separate. But what more than that has happened is the change in the workday. There are a lot of studies that demonstrate and show even people who go to an office, the most common drive times now are 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. They're not 8 to 9 a.m. and 5 to 6 p.m. And that's a nationwide study. It's not, you know, necessarily the same in every town or city, but it it shows that there are people who are choosing to take care of things at home at times when it's most important, whether it's with family or you know, doctor's appointments or whatever it may be. And employers, generally speaking, have just accepted that that is now a blurred line, that the personal and professional are much more interconnected.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, most definitely. I mean, the pandemic changed the way that we work and live so much forever, even though I think some people think we can just go back to where we were in 2019. It's just not possible. I want to pivot a little bit into one more topic before we go. I want to go back to this transformation that you're a part of in the organization. And I'd love to hear a little bit about what has been challenging as you kind of pivot the narrative, pivot the story, and create new alignment for the organization around this path forward that you're taking.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks for asking that. Look, that has been the predominant focus for me since April 1st. And I think you used some very key language in asking the question because it's effectively been the focus of what I've had to do over the last several months. And that is to weave the right narrative and to realize that that narrative has to be consistent across multiple constituents, multiple stakeholders, but most of them want to hear that narrative in a different way. It goes back to even the conversation earlier where the narrative has to appeal to the person who's listening to it based on where they are coming from and what their filter is and what they care about, even though it has to be aligned with what you're trying to accomplish, whether you're talking to a banker, whether you're talking to a debt holder, whether you're talking to a common shareholder, a preferred shareholder, an analyst, an employee, a partner, a board member, and an advisor. I mean, the list sort of goes on almost endlessly, you know, when you are running a public company. The trick for me was how can I learn how to communicate with all of these stakeholders around the same narrative, but bring them along, the story that I wanted to tell and the outcome that I wanted to weave together. Thankfully, it has worked out in sort of the first critical stage when I took on the CEO role. We had three NASDAQ deficiencies that could have threatened to delist the company. Now we are fully compliant with NASDAQ's listing requirements. We had an unserviceable debt load, we are now debt-free. We had a very complex cap structure with different classes of shares. We now have a streamlined cap structure. We had a cost structure that we weren't able to bear relative to the size of our business. We were able to find the right way to reduce our cost structure and are now starting to regain momentum with a smaller team. We had outstanding payables with partners who were not feeling very patient with us. We were able to solve those issues, and now our partnerships are as strong as they've ever been. We had bankers and advisors who were finding it challenging to help the company forward, but we were able to. Realign those conversations and they ended up being instrumental in helping us get to this point. And perhaps most of all, because we kept accomplishing the objectives we set out to accomplish, and we were very transparent publicly where we could be and privately where we needed to be. We were very transparent with potential investors. And the cardinal rule when you are seeking capital from a strategic investor is to be able to tell them what you're going to do and then to actually do it. Doesn't always mean you're going to get the money, but if you didn't take that step and get it done, you're definitely not getting the money. And so we were able to be honest about what we were trying to do. We got those things done. A strategic investor came in and led our round. And we are now sort of looking at a fresh start with a fully funded business and an opportunity to turn Super League into something meaningful.

SPEAKER_01:

That's great. It sounds like you've done an incredible job of getting things turned around and getting on a great track for the organization. I want to thank you so much for joining me on Scale like the CEO today. If folks want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to do so?

SPEAKER_02:

Look me up on LinkedIn, Matt Edelman, just as a sound. Matt with two T's, Edelman, E-D-E-L-M-A-N, Super League. DM me on LinkedIn anytime.

SPEAKER_01:

Great. Well, Matt, thank you so much for the time today.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you very much, Justin. It was great.

SPEAKER_01:

Pleasure talking to you.