In January 2024, Kara Nortman, Julie Uhrman, and Natalie Portman, the founders of Angel City Football Club (ACFC) were developing the club's first three-year strategic plan. Founded in 2020, ACFC had a star-studded investor group, including Portman and celebrities such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner, Billie Jean King, and 13 former players from the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team (USWNT). As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. They had harnessed digital platforms to establish and cultivate a global brand. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, Angel City had inverted the model, generating as much global as local interest in the club within the first three years. ACFC's success was reflected in its estimated private market valuation of $180 million, the highest in the league. But perhaps equally important to ACFC, the club had made a positive impact on its local community and had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women's sports-the club's ultimate goal. The founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club's momentum. There were opportunities to build the brand further globally and to build out fan engagement and membership in the mobile app, but these would require investments in digital content and production, CRM systems, and e-commerce. There were also opportunities to build the "on-field product" (team and facilities) that would demand budget allocation to training facilities, the field, coaching staff, and medical rehabilitation facilities and staff. The founders weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget dollar to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product?

Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households to the electricity market as "negawatt" hours. For each kilowatt-hour of electricity reduced, OhmConnect was paid the same as if a fossil fuel-powered "peaker plant" had generated that kilowatt-hour of electricity. OhmConnect shared a portion of this revenue with its customers in the form of rewards and prizes. By lowering energy demand when the electric grid was stressed, OhmConnect reduced the need for peaker plants to be fired up, saving money and reducing pollution. As of 2022, the company operated in three states in the U.S. with approximately 215,000 users. As a Series D venture that had raised more than $95 million in VC, OhmConnect was under pressure to grow. Yet regulatory hurdles and long lead times on electricity capacity procurement contracts had created significant challenges to scaling. OhmConnect needed to decide whether to continue to expand into new markets one-by-one with its existing business model or pursue a new national product that could attract national marketing partners, possibly lowering OhmConnect's customer acquisition cost. Establishing a national footprint could also enable OhmConnect to build a national data hub on home electricity usage, which, in turn, might open doors to alternative monetization opportunities down the road and allow the company to access broader funding sources, including from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).