Risa Teksten on Operating at the Speed of Sports Media

Risa Teksten, Managing Director, Commercial Operations & Growth, joins the conversation for a candid look at the career path, instincts, and operating mindset she brings to NASCAR. From the power of live sports and fan storytelling to sponsorship, audience growth, and the partnerships shaping the fan experience, Risa shares what has stood out from inside one of the most distinctive properties in sports media. It is a conversation about the person behind the role and the perspective she brings to an evolving commercial ecosystem.

TRANSCRIPT

Adam Katz
Welcome back to Breaking Through the Mayhem, episode 65. We have our friend, Risa Teksten with us today. She is the Managing Director of Commercial Operations and Growth at NASCAR.

Wow. Who's Risa? Who are you?

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Risa Teksten
Who am I? Well, today, right now, like you said, I've been at NASCAR for a little bit under a year, and work alongside our Chief Commercial Officer and our Chief Revenue Officer, doing all the back of the house work. I stand on the shoulders of a very, very talented team of people who have been at NASCAR for much longer than I have.

They definitely understand the backend and the sport much better than I do. So I get to work alongside them and they're an awesome team and we do everything from revenue strategy, to commercial operations, to our digital side, our track side, so it's great. And I'm learning, I'm still in season one of the sport and that's super exciting.

Adam Katz
Did you ever think you'd be in sports?

Risa Teksten
No, absolutely not. I grew up a bonafide nerd. Not that you can't be a nerd in sports, but I grew up during the first Gulf War, when CNN first emerged.

I wanted to be Christiane Amanpour's producer, like I wanted to work in news. I was like a very serious, I'm going to be a hardcore news person. I have foreign policy degrees, like I, and I did, but by my first, my first job is out of college, I, you know, sometimes I think I peaked early because like I got the job that I had always dreamed of, like right out of college.

I hustled for it. I got it and I worked to get there. But, yeah, after like five years, I was like, oh wait, I'm only 25 and there's a lot more ahead of me.

So, yeah, never, always been a sports fan. It's pretty much religiously the only thing I watch. I'm not, I'm not a good person at a dinner table to ask about Succession and, and, you know, all the different binge worthy shows, like, but I, I pretty much will watch whatever game was on the night before and whatever sport.

So always a fan, never a caller as it were. Uh, and, and this is really my first foray and it's awesome. That's really awesome.

Adam Katz
That's so cool. I mean, listen, um, sports is everything to me, so that's so cool to hear. Who are you watching nowadays?

Who are the teams that are really keeping you going?

Risa Teksten
Well, going to tonight's preseason game for the Pats. So that's always fun. I've got a 16 year old son, so he kind of dictates whatever we have on.

The Red Sox have been, I live outside of Boston, so that is a big dictator of kind of what we watch right now. Um, so we'll sort of follow the trend. I I'm excited about college football season.

but you know, we'll sort of get there in a couple of weeks. I'm more of an ACC fan when it comes to college football, but you know, Uh, I, I went to UVA, so I'm a big UVA person in general, but like not for football. Right.

We can't really get there. As long as ACC is sort of on, I'll watch it. Um, but honestly, like, I feel like the talent and we shouldn't, we won't get started on NIL and this one, but you know, I do feel like across the board.

My favorite thing about sports is the storytelling. I actually, I grew up with my dad watching boxing. My dad, we watched Friday night fights.

That was what was on. Max Kellerman before he went to ESPN was like a, you know, a cable access, New York TV guy for boxing. Right.

And we used to watch that so it was Friday night fights on Friday and then golf on Sunday, on Saturday and Sunday. So some of the traditional sports weren't really on when I was growing up, but boxing was always on and I do think the one thing about boxing that stayed true in the eighties and even before that with Muhammad Ali and really pervades around sports now is the storytelling.

Right. So you had like part of what made Muhammad Ali such a great athlete was the storytelling that was made around him and Norman Mailer writing about him. You have all the great journalists of the eighties.

You just have great storytelling across sports.

Adam Katz
So I know very, so I know very, very well.

Risa Teksten
Yeah.

Adam Katz
A hall of fame boxing writer.

Risa Teksten
Yeah.

Adam Katz
Very well named Jack Hirsch. Oh, wow. And, um, it's one of my closest friends, wife's dad.

He was inducted into the New York state boxing hall of fame for it.

That's great. I heard a lot of this retelling stuff there. I watched a lot of boxing too, growing up now, big UFC watcher more than I am.

Risa Teksten
I don't watch as much of that now, but, but I do, but I, I think all, I mean, at the end of the day, it just comes down to, and I think that's where we are right now, the reason why there's so much money flooding into sports too, um, across the board, whether it be women's sports, whether it be, you know, college athletics is just, I think that there's still a universality to people working really hard to accomplish whatever it is that they want.

It's really basic storyline. Like it's nothing that's really evolved or changed.

Adam Katz
It's real life reality TV. And so ultimately it's real life reality TV. Now you could be locked into every moment too much.

Risa Teksten
Yeah. Very true.

Adam Katz
And ultimately it's eyeballs that are paying close attention.

Whereas most things nowadays, people are kind of half in half out.

Risa Teksten
Yeah.

Adam Katz
Big, big thing. So you move them to NASCAR. I mean, obviously the fastest type of sport, right?

So things are moving. Have you gotten to go to the events? Like, have you gotten to be at some of them yet?

Are you excited to be at some of them? And then also, and then also I feel like, you know, your background was, was at some of these bigger technology companies prior, right? So like how are you kind of weaving in what you've done, what you're doing now, and kind of this live element and what's kind of going through your head with that?

Risa Teksten
Yeah. Yeah. I'll start with the NASCAR piece right now, which is awesome.

I, we got to get you at a race. First of all, we've got every, you just get anyone to a race and like, you've got yourself a fan. I will say that.

I'd never been to a race prior to working there. My first weekend working at NASCAR was for our championship race last year in Phoenix. It was amazing.

The racing itself, the experience is like actually like your nervous system feels it like at night you still feel like the reverberations of the cars and the motors. Um, it's a full sensory overload in kind of the most magnificent way. Um, the fans are all a part of it.

I've never been part of an experience where like there's tailgating, right. And there's, there's great tailgating and, and then there's NASCAR, which is like on a totally different sphere of it because you literally have families moving in with you for the whole week prior, like all of our, we, we own about 60% of our tracks and there's campgrounds that surround or are within most of them. And so for the whole week prior, you have campers and RVs and they're everything from like the little old kind of, you know, little RVs to like really nice luxury liner suites of campers coming in and people are living there.

They're living with their families. They've got their aunts and uncles. They've got their grandparents.

They've been coming through. We've been talking about, you know, sports and lineage and someone passing down, you know, their fandom. Like that happens at such a huge rate across the sport.

And then you've literally got, you know, our, our drivers will stay in the same RVs on the track as fans. So this separation of like the athlete to the fan is completely non-existent in racing. If you think about like, I've gone to the U S open, right.

And you think about any major tennis championship and obviously a very mental game, the athletes will, you know, lock themselves in whatever they need to do to get in the mental state to come out. These guys will literally be right up against fans up until seconds before. They get in the car and shoot out at 200 miles per hour, like without even skipping a beat.

So there's just a lot of stuff there that I never expected that I knew. I just assumed.

Adam Katz
Doesn't it show you like these, like these guys, this is just normal.

Risa Teksten
This is so normal. They live, their level of normal is so different. And I just assumed that like, okay, you know, the, the, the drivers are probably like somewhere.

Nope. Like they are fully immersed in the entire experience. And so everyone's just held it all together.

Another thing that I love about racing, and then I'll talk a little bit about kind of coming back from here, but, um, there's a, there's a tradition that everyone comes and signs the finish line. So everyone kind of has a Sharpie and they come and you sign the finish line. And then it's the national anthem and then the jets fly over, you know, all the fanfare.

But you essentially have the entire crowd like on the track seconds before the race is going to get our minutes before the race is going to begin. And then they basically, everyone just knows to go back to wherever, wherever their seats are, they go in the infield. And you just think about that analogy.

Like, imagine if the entire fan base was on the field of a football game right before the kickoff. Like you'd never get people out of it. You like, there's just something about everyone coming together.

And like, I would say, understanding the assignment, right? Everyone gets it. They know the program, they know what to do.

They, and it's a rowdy crowd. I mean, it's lots of fun. It's, it's, you know, it's talented.

All these things are a good time. And yet there's so much respect and reverence for what the sport is that when it's time to get off that track, like no one clowns around everyone just yep. Goes and leaves.

And so things like that are just things I never expected.

Adam Katz
You said something interesting earlier, right? Like obviously you're in growth and strategy, right? So you want to grow the sport.

Yes. Right. So what you're talking a lot about is like people who know already.

Right. But then there's the getting them to the track that gets them in. How do these new people learn the traditions?

Is there like a, you taught at the track?

Risa Teksten
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that's, yeah, that's exactly, I love that you asked that.

That's exactly what I think we're doing both on our competition side, but that's exactly where our conversations tend to be on the sponsorship side. The good news is that we have a lot of new people coming into the sport. So last year, our biggest driver of viewers came from 18 to 34.

When we had two of our races this summer, we had the first time, and this is one of the ways, right? So we had the first time that we had a street race at the Naval base in Coronado. So it was at a military base.

67% of the attendees had never been or were new to NASCAR, right? And then a few weeks later, we had something in Chicagoland, a race that was there previously, but even there we had 50% new to NASCAR attendees. So some of what we're doing, I think, and I think this is happening across all of sport is bridging the new and the old.

So we have experiences for our fans that are sort of taking in some of the more contemporary experiences. So our competition side, for instance, had a new ticketing system called the 1948 club. Now, 1948 refers to our founding year, but it's like a really nice contemporary hospitality experience that you could have.

So that's like one example of where we take the old and the historical part of it and the heritage part of it, but bring it into the new realm. It's a little bit like a map and flag, if you will, for the masters we are now building out for NASCAR. So that's part of it.

One personal, like my affinity that I've said a few times to people is I think a great way is something like, I think NASCAR should be the next official bachelor and bachelorette party destination. Forget Nashville, forget, you know, New Orleans, forget Vegas, like truly, truly, truly to have a good time, to have something that's finally different than all your other, when you have the nine, you know, nine weekends of weddings and bachelor parties and bachelorette parties that your NASCAR really would be.

Adam Katz
You guys need to come, you guys need to think about like the Phoenix Open in golf and how the Waste Management Open learned how to become a party.

Risa Teksten
Right.

Adam Katz
People that don't like golf. I know a lot of people that would go to that, that don't like golf.

Risa Teksten
So like, maybe that's- And I love golf, so it kills me to see the people who don't like golf. It kills me a little bit. Cause I'm a purist in golf, but yeah.

Adam Katz
You hear yourself, like you're a purist, you want to do fans, but then you want- I know, I know.

Risa Teksten
I, you know, I can live in both worlds.

Adam Katz
I think what you mentioned is- I just want to make sure you're hearing yourself.

Risa Teksten
I do. I do. I can, I can, I can co-exist.

I can co-exist. I do think what you mentioned is interesting, right? Like it's the Waste Management Open.

And I think that's where we're having this on the business side, right? Is like, we're not going to build. So we can build out something like the 1948 Club, right?

That's something that we built out of our own team. But I think the ultimate experiences that we can really do to propel the sport comes through our partnerships, right? So we just signed Jose Cuervo this past year as official tequila.

We just announced Wheatley Vodka. Those happen to both be in the spirits category. But we just did some work this year with Airbnb and looking to expand that.

So a lot of what we want to do, we're not going to bring the entire experience in full stop to the fans and to the new audiences. But with the right type of partners and the right type of sponsors, it opens up a whole new category of ways for fans to experience NASCAR, to think about NASCAR. And ultimately, like, again, once you're there, it's really hard not to be like, oh, look, it's awesome.

Adam Katz
I mean, my favorite athlete of all time, Michael Jordan, is obsessed.

Risa Teksten
Yes.

Adam Katz
Right. So but so I would say like. But, you know, it's been interesting, unfortunately, you guys had a terrible death this year in that in the sport as well.

I mean, my biggest experience of NASCAR was I love Dale Earnhardt.

Yeah, as a kid, so like seeing that kind of was like a very traumatizing moment for me in NASCAR. It's bounced back since. So like it's a it's interesting because like listening to you, it's like the spectacle seems to be the sport, not the driver.

So like how do you guys kind of blend that driver sport narrative as you guys kind of move forward?

Risa Teksten
That's a that's a really great, great, great point. I would say two things to that. One is one on the driver side.

We have we have a remarkably talented group of drivers, not just as drivers. But I think for in the world that like all athletes are doing, I actually watched just last week on YouTube. It was Ryan Blaney, one of our racers with with Keegan.

Keegan-Michael Key, is that how you pronounce his name? With it was a I mean, I watched for like thirty five minutes. He took laps and it was kind of like a Seinfeld like coffee in cars, but like you're in a race car and answering questions.

So when I say that our drivers are great, they're dry. They're great on the track, but they're also great in understanding both the world of social media, the world of sort of content, the world of celebrity and fanfare in general. So I feel like that you can't really train like it's it's hard for athletes now, ultimately, truly have two jobs these days, right?

You have the sport, which is the real sort of talent that you have. But basically, every athlete also has to be. It's beyond like media training, right?

Like back in the day, you were ultimately an athlete. You got pounded in some media training. And like if you could speak intelligently, maybe you got on camera more than others.

You know, the front office might pull you back if you just weren't good. You really don't have that liberty anymore, right?

Adam Katz
Like to be watched 24 seven. They're basically they're basically. Celebrities in the sense of like they can't walk out of a house..

So I feel like one of the things that helps some of the NASCAR drivers, historically, at least, yeah, is that they're a little more unapologetic about their opinions. This is true. It helps them, though, because they don't have to be as concerned with how they see themselves being viewed.

Risa Teksten
I think you're right.

Adam Katz
Which is an interesting piece for NASCAR. So I just think it's different. You know, like I think but they are.

It's just you're right.

Risa Teksten
They are real competitors. Look, if someone is, can I curse on this? If someone's riding on your ass at 100 at 200 miles per hour, it gets real.

So even like you mentioned, when Kyle Busch died, which is a tremendous tragedy, tragedy for the sport, you had like you said, you had like some real authenticity from even like the tweets coming out, you know, from other drivers, which was like hated you on the track, loved you as a person. Right. But that that competitiveness was always still there.

And that didn't even go away in in his death. You know, like that competition is real. It is real because it's legitimately visceral on the racetrack.

It isn't just like taking an elbow to the face. It's it's real. And then I think the other thing you mentioned, though, before in terms of I think what we're just able to do and I think we're able to do this probably better than other sports is just widen the lens to the storytelling.

So another great piece, like one of the things I love that I didn't know that's beginning to come around now, especially from some of our team and drivers, is that most of our pit crews are former D1, generally football players. If you think about the weight, yeah, like they're almost exclusively all former D1 athletes. So if you take a look at the weight of the tires, the weight of the gas cans, all of that stuff, you basically need to have a linebackers girth and like strength just to be able to handle the pure athletic competence.

It's a competency that you need to have only if you're also an athlete. So I think going back to your question before, like we're taking the drivers, we're taking the racers, we're just widening the lens. There's so many other great stories.

My favorite thing is watching the pit crew honestly warm up before a race. They're fully warming up as if they're warming up on the sidelines of like a college football game. Truly, truly.

They're stretching, doing their knee high. Like they're fully warming up for being in the pit. And the same way they did.

So you can just keep on widening that lens and just keep on grabbing interesting people, interesting stories. And I think that's what sort of makes it really fun.

Adam Katz
I mean, for me, this is just like I can ask a thousand questions just about the sport alone.

Risa Teksten
So great.

Adam Katz
It's just intriguing. I've actually never been to a NASCAR race.

Risa Teksten
So we will change that. We will change that. Now I will get you to one for sure.

Adam Katz
And maybe I'll report back. But I will say, like when when you think about it, it's interesting because there's a lot of crossover between a lot of what you're saying and just, you know, other competitive sports. But, you know, like during NASCAR, like the part that I find interesting is like there's like unlike like a horse race where it's just over.

Yeah. And then there's this huge break. But like NASCAR, there's a lot of like it feels like a break, but it's not really.

So it's interesting for me, like as I kind of think about that to like how that works. But I would like this to think about my my going. But what comes to mind for me as well is like, obviously, you're a huge sports fan, which I think played a lot into why you're in sports now.

Yeah. Right. But like what's next for you in sports?

Like, is it take this to the oomph degree? NASCAR try to be like a head of marketing at a sports play? Like what's leading now?

Risa Teksten
Honestly, right now. And I've said this like I this is as happy as as as I've ever been in my career. Truly.

And I really believe in the sport. I really believe in like the potential of what these next many years have ahead of us. So right now I'm fully staying in the present.

I don't even it really doesn't even cross my mind. The people I also it's interesting is there's something we said. And this goes into a little bit of like my previous life working in tech companies.

I've been very intentional with my career, but it's also been very nonlinear to your point. Like, how did you wind up in sports? You didn't you start up as a foreign policy major.

Like, how does that get you to sports down the line? Right. But it's always been really intentional.

And I think that one of the things going back to my original love that I had with news, I actually think more about now than I ever have in my career before. And a lot of that is because what I think I realized is that I love being in that kind of like dynamic real time environment. So whether it be a newsroom with, you know, I was there for the 2000 elections and the hanging chads in in Florida, I was there for 9-11.

Like there's so many things that are happening at any given time in a newsroom, and I really thrived in that environment. And I'm seeing so much of that now in my career as well. And I think the biggest thing that I like about that is, first of all, like, you know, the ability to just make decisions on the fly, input, taken inputs that the number of things that, like I say, we're not on my bingo card for that day that are like all of a sudden coming in.

And you kind of ride that high on a race day or a race weekend. But I will say the biggest thing that I enjoy from that and I had from news is I've never gotten this close to my co-workers faster than in my 20s, which is also my 20s. So it's easy to just like fall in love with all of your co-workers.

Adam Katz
You're learning from them every day. You're hanging out with them. The ambiguity makes you guys have to think strategically together.

So it's like, yes, it's and the red tape seems to be down, even though it's a great organization.

Risa Teksten
So, yes, yes. And that's true. Yeah.

So I feel like that's also so that part, I think I will never, you know, what I do know moving forward is recognizing that that is where I thrive, right in the space where multiple things are happening at any given moment, where you're having to work together as a team. And again, we you can talk about teamwork, you know, until your face goes blue in any category of work. But we all know there's like teamwork and then there's like teamwork, you know, where you're actually relying on the other person and everyone's sort of, you know, dissolving whatever it is, their role and title.

We quick little anecdote. We were in Talladega and ee were kind of by our RVs on right by turn one coming out of the pit, and it was before the race and someone came up to us and said.

So we just got a call that Zac Brown from Zac Brown Band is like there's most of the tracks have like a little private airfield right by it because it's just space that we have on land. So Zac Brown Band's going to he's going to be the official of the race for Talladega, and he's about to touch down. And and and literally and he's going to come into this RV.

So when I tell you that, like people with C titles to interns, like we were all just like grabbing water to like fill the you know, like the degree to which everyone reduces the pretense of what they do or what they're meant to do or what their job title is. And it's like we've got a guest here who's coming. He wound up going somewhere else.

So we didn't have to worry too much about it. But like just that moment of everyone stopping what they were doing and literally just like carrying boxes of water to replenish the refrigerator. Like it's stuff like that, that I feel like that's when you break down to a point of like you really are a crew and a family.

And it's just like, oh, we got like we got to get in the motion and things need to happen. And if you're in front of it, you solve the problem.

Adam Katz
Wow.

Risa Teksten
It's fun.

Adam Katz
I got like nothing for you.

This is, I learned a lot about NASCAR, speed, culture, how it all works. So thank you so much for joining us.

Risa Teksten
Thank you so much. I appreciate it, too.

Adam Katz
Thank you Risa!

Risa Teksten
Awesome.