‘Baller GC’ Is Next Chapter for Former Big Tech Legal Chief

Burned out after three decades of legal practice and a slumping technology market, former Twilio Inc. lawyer Mark Kahn seized a chance to return to his lifelong passion—baseball.

The former general counsel for Segment Inc., a customer data company sold a few years ago for roughly $3.2 billion to Twilio, is now all in with the Oakland Ballers, having become an investor, legal chief, and as of last month, the public address announcer for all of the Pioneer League team’s 48 home games.

“I’m doing in-stadium stuff, so announcing the lineups and doing ad reads,” Kahn said of his latest gig for the newly formed independent minor league baseball team. “I’m trying to find my voice—I got booed the other night because I got the score wrong. There is so much going on to keep track of.”

Mark Kahn

Photo courtesy of Brendan Colthurst

In a way, his new roles are a full-circle moment for the 54-year-old Kahn. Before finishing law school he managed ticket sales for Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics, a storied club now poised to leave the Bay Area for Las Vegas after a short stopover in Sacramento.

The pending exit of the A’s has been hard on Oakland. The city saw the NFL’s Raiders depart for Las Vegas in 2020, while the NBA’s Golden State Warriors moved across the bay to San Francisco in 2019. Hence the Ballers.

“We think professional baseball has a place in Oakland,” said Kahn about the impetus for the Ballers, whose nickname the B’s is partly an homage to “Moneyball”—the best-selling book about the A’s use of data that revolutionized strategies in both baseball and investing—and a nod to moving on from the MLB team. “This is an opportunity for us to do something that is good for everybody, particularly the community,” Kahn said.

The East Bay’s scrappy attitude—yes, Scrappy the Rally Possum is also the name of the Ballers’ new mascot—and an ownership group led by locals Bryan Carmel and Paul Freedman who started the club with $2 million in seed funding from more than 50 investors led Kahn to come aboard in February.

All in a Day’s Work

Kahn has handled myriad construction, land use, and real estate issues for the Ballers, as well as employment and insurance matters as the new club sought to construct a roster and home field, he said. While the team uses outside counsel—Morrison & Foerster handled the Ballers’ trademark—one reason for bringing on Kahn is to cut some of those costs, such as negotiating contracts.

Within the past few months Kahn and other Ballers staff have worked overtime to get the team ready for its first season in the 12-team Pioneer League. When the Ballers debuted at home June 4 before a sellout crowd of some 4,100 fans—nearly outdrawing the A’s that same day in Oakland—it was in a forum that until recently was a city field.

Raimondi Park, the newly refurbished stadium for the Ballers, required more than a “few trips to Home Depot,” Kahn said. The team secured $1.6 million in private funding to renovate an area named after Ernie Raimondi—a former Oakland ballplayer killed during World War II—that had fallen into disrepair.

Kahn said the small ballpark is a work in progress, and the Ballers expect to continue improvements over time. Oakland, meanwhile, is moving forward with a plan to sell the A’s 63,000-seat stadium, which the MLB team’s ownership had for years sought to replace before deciding to relocate the team to Sin City.

Back to Baseball

It was Kahn’s time with the pre-Moneyball version of the A’s, then run by a mentor of his in Harvard Law School Richard “Sandy” Alderson, which sowed the seeds for his return to baseball. During his time with the franchise, Kahn and a colleague came up with a ticket promotion that took off—$1 tickets and $1 hot dogs, better known as Double Play Wednesdays.

While the ticket price was eventually raised to $2, along with a spike in hot dog costs, the promotion’s enduring popularity with A’s fans helped Kahn. The Ballers’ co-founders, in high school when Kahn worked for the A’s, remembered it fondly when he introduced himself to them, he said. The group also owns the Pioneer League’s Yolo High Wheelers in nearby Davis, California.

The Pioneer League is an unaffiliated partner of MLB, which means its players are not under contract with major league teams. Kahn, a native of Savannah, Georgia, grew up rooting for the Atlanta Braves. Baseball, however, seemed like a passion he would need to put on the back burner for professional pursuits.

In his final year with the A’s—1997 was also baseball legend Mark McGwire’s last season with the club—Kahn was eager to reap the benefits of the dotcom boom. He landed summer associate jobs at Fenwick & West and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe before joining litigation boutique Rogers Joseph O’Donnell. Kahn moved in-house in 2006, rising through the ranks of Palm Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and Evernote Corp. In 2014, he joined WhatsApp amid the mobile messaging service’s $19 billion sale to Facebook. Segment hired Kahn in 2018.

He enjoyed the startup atmosphere and stuck around in an ethics role after Twilio, a cloud communications giant, acquired the company. But the pandemic struck an urge for change in Kahn. He tried executive recruiting, but it didn’t “scratch an itch” for him. Being a remote worker at another outfit where Kahn didn’t know anyone felt less than ideal, and then the technology market tanked.

Baseball beckoned.

Kahn had remained involved in the sport—he’s president emeritus for San Francisco Little League—and he knows entrepreneurs from his time in Big Tech and elsewhere. When Kahn heard about the Ballers late last year, the idea of joining another startup intrigued him.

“I enjoy being in person with folks,” said Kahn, adding that he has no plans to leave life at the ballpark.

He also doesn’t anticipate taking on any further duties for the Ballers.

“Not unless they need a 5-foot-6, over-the-hill second baseman,” Kahn said.