Seattle Kraken owner Samantha Holloway leans on tech startup experience to lead NHL franchise

You can’t exactly grow an up-and-coming professional hockey franchise in the same way that you’d scale an early stage software company.

But Samantha Holloway is certainly using lessons learned from years as a tech startup founder in her role leading the Seattle Kraken.

GeekWire sat down with Holloway for an interview in Seattle last week, just before the Kraken’s fourth season in the NHL begins Tuesday.

Holloway joined the team as a minority investor when it debuted in 2021. The following year she was named chair of the team’s executive committee.

She later became a co-owner alongside her father, billionaire businessman and Kraken founding owner David Bonderman — elevating her to the top of the organization and making the 44-year-old one of the few principal female owners of an NHL franchise.

Holloway’s path to pro hockey included unique pitstops along the way. The Washington D.C. native earned a graduate degree in forensic psychology, launched a high-end women’s boutique store in Denver, and then had a nearly decade-long run as co-founder of a Denver startup called GoSpotCheck, which was acquired in 2020 by Form.com.

Her tech startup journey began inside the 2011 cohort of the Techstars Boulder accelerator, where she helped pursue an idea related to renting maternity wear to women.

But her team quickly shifted gears after customer focus groups and investor apathy forced a new direction.

A couple of pivots later eventually turned into GoSpotCheck, a B2B software product used by beverage, retail, and consumer goods companies to audit products in stores.

“It was a huge learning experience,” said Holloway, who was the company’s chief customer officer.

In many ways, she’s doing the same job today.

Holloway is constantly looking for feedback — surveying season ticket members or asking fans in the elevator at Kraken games about their experience.

“If your customer isn’t liking your product, there’s going to be churn and it’s going to be hard to grow,” Holloway said. “So for us, it’s really important to listen to the fan.”

Speed also matters — not just on the ice, but also in execution of front office initiatives.

Holloway said the team leans on “iterating quickly.”

“That’s not being reactive,” she said. “That’s just being able to move quickly without a lot of red tape, and I think that’s important. It’s similar to a startup.”

Technology, meanwhile, is “in the DNA” of the franchise, said Holloway.

“This is a sports team,” she said. “But it’s really enabled by technology.”

That shows up in various forms — from the team’s smartphone app (which doubles as a free transit pass for fans), to the new first-of-its-kind live game streaming deal with Amazon.

It doesn’t hurt that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is a Kraken minority owner. He was “instrumental” in building the team’s app, Holloway said.

“Andy is great,” she said. “He is extremely smart, but also empathetic and a great partner. And he loves hockey, so that’s the most important thing.”

Amazon’s cashier-less Just Walk Out technology is also embedded in several retail stores around the team’s Climate Pledge Arena — which bears the name of Amazon’s environmental initiative and is a stone’s throw away from Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle.

“They’re obviously huge and moving quickly and doing really interesting things,” Holloway said of Amazon. “We’re certainly very lucky to be associated and working with them.”

The Kraken made it to the second round of the NHL playoffs in 2023. The team struggled last season and finished seventh in its division, but home attendance metrics remain strong.

The goal, of course, is to win a Stanley Cup — something not done in Seattle since 1917.

But there are other ways to measure success, said Holloway, who still keeps one foot in the startup world through a venture fund and startup studio.

She points to helping teach kids how to play hockey outside her office window at the Kraken Community Iceplex, or broadening the sport to new fans.

Seattle is also a reported front-runner to land an NBA expansion team in the near future — an effort that would be led by the Kraken ownership group.

“As we grew GoSpotCheck, we didn’t think too much about the end game,” said Holloway, who moved to Seattle in 2022. “You focus on building a great business, and then something great will happen. In a lot of ways, that’s what we’re doing here as well.”