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Tiffany Kelly has always loved sports and math. At St. Joseph’s Academy, this 2012 graduate was a four-year member of the volleyball team, and she enjoyed courses focused on statistics and economics. As a senior, she worked with the New Orleans Hornets NBA franchise in its statistics department.

It was only natural, then, that Tiffany would study Sports and Recreation Management, Statistics and Computer Science, earning a bachelor of science degree in May of 2016 from Nova Southeastern University (NSU) in Fort Lauderdale. She received the James Farquhar Award, given to one graduating student on the basis of scholarship, leadership and service excellence. As an undergraduate, she completed internships with the LSU Athletic Department, Miami Heat Basketball Operations, 24-Hour Fitness Rock City Hoops Basketball League and Fast Twitch Under Armour Training Facility. She also created the first sports student organization open to NSU undergraduates.

Diploma in hand, Tiffany joined the Stats and Information Group at ESPN as a sports analytics associate. She was the first woman of color on the sports analytics team. Using self-taught coding skills, she created ESPN’s College Football Fan Happiness Index, which quantifies the emotions of fan bases using seven variables. “It was super popular and got over a million views in 24 hours,” Tiffany said.

While at the sports media giant, Tiffany noticed what would eventually become a seismic shift. As early as 2017, the creator economy began to dilute and decentralize traditional sports media, making audiences more fragmented and harder to reach. Individual creators and small niche media companies began driving content consumption, especially in the sports industry.

In the summer of 2019, shortly after Tiffany left ESPN, the NCAA announced it was considering allowing student-athletes to monetize their name, image and likeness. Three little letters – NIL – would be the catalyst for Tiffany to launch Curastory, a platform to help professional and college athletes create and monetize video content.

Based in New York, Curastory is the first online marketplace connecting brands wanting video content to athletes, influencers and actors who create it. The company offers free editing software; access to a music library; and distribution on Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Advertisers who don’t have time to sift through videos to find the best content providers for their brand are automatically matched. Curastory also tracks metrics.

Raising more than $3 million from high-profile investing firms, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Google, Tiffany was named to Forbes’ 2023 30 Under 30 media list. Forbes cited her “power moves at the intersection of sports and data” among its reasons for putting her on the prestigious list. She “is featured alongside 29 other media mavens shaping our digital landscape,” Forbes said.

“Since I incorporated Curastory on August 29, 2019, it’s been a crazy dream,” Tiffany said. “Learning about finding investors, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, learning how to actually run a company and how not to run a company, all these pieces have to come together. Hiring is also a big challenge. I think it’s the most humbling experience ever to have someone’s livelihood in your hands because you pay them. And you have to hire the right people. In a young company, you have to hire extremely optimistic people who really believe in what you’re doing. But I’m learning every day. Being a business owner is the best experience and most humbling experience, and I’m happy that I’ve gone through it.”

NBA stars including Isaiah Thomas, Kelly Olynyk and Langston Galloway have used Curastory. There are approximately 40,000 users on the app, Tiffany said, including sports, fitness, food, gaming, skincare and beauty creators. “We have a deal with the Pac-12 Conference where all 10,000 student-athletes can monetize their game highlight footage and monetize in their school logos and marks for the first time in history,” she said.

Tiffany said she wants to continue to launch tools that allow creators to build their own media companies. “Video enablement is what we call it,” she said. “That’s our north star: continuing to disrupt and build the best solution in advertising for programmatic influencer content. I want to continue to change the face of the media and allow content creators to really create videos and to monetize those videos and build media side hustles and businesses.”