Erika Ayers Badan is moving on to her next challenge after she says she “exceeded” her “wildest expectations” as CEO of Barstool Sports.
Ayers Badan announced in an emotional post on social media Tuesday morning that she’s stepping down from her role as the top head of the ultra popular sports and pop culture website.
“I feel super sad about it,” Ayers Badan said in a video posted to X, the former Twitter platform. “I was just crying on Metro North which is one of the least attractive things imaginable. I wear too much eye makeup for that, but it’s been a wild run.”
“I am so grateful and feeling sentimental,” she continued. “I think back to 2016, and they went through 70 candidates and all that. I kind of think either nobody wanted the job and I did, or they were stupid enough to not see what it could be and I thought that I could make something of it.”
Swampscott native Dave Portnoy, who founded the company in 2003 in Milton, hired Ayers Badan in 2016. At the time, Barstool had been in the midst of moving its headquarters from Boston to New York City.
Shortly after Ayers Badan posted her decision, Portnoy took to social media and refuted her claim that “nobody wanted the job.”
“Only correction is everybody wanted the job,” Portnoy said. “We just didn’t like anybody except her. There is no doubt @erika_ was the perfect and probably only fit for us. It’s been quite a run and we couldn’t have done it without her. She was everything I dreamed she’d be and more in a CEO.”
Ayers Badan highlighted how “the expectations or desire that Barstool would fail were really high” at the time she took over. But over the past eight years, the company grew 5,000% in revenue, she said.
In an email to employees, Ayers Badan, former chief marketing officer of AOL, rehashed moments of her tenure including how the Barstool Fund donated $40 million to small business owners who were reeling from the effects of the pandemic.
After selling Barstool to casino and online gambling operator PENN for $550 million, Portnoy got the company back last year for $1.
“I feel like the work I came here to do is done,” Ayers Badan said. “I am so proud of it. Everything that I could have ever imagined and wanted to achieve, we did. I feel so good about Dave. I’m so grateful to Dave for giving me a chance in the first place. I trusted him and I still trust him. He’s the right person to make this a pirate ship.”
In an interview on Barstool Radio later Tuesday, Ayers Badan reflected on how she came to her decision to step down.
“Does it still scare me? Is there a challenge that I haven’t done here? That’s where I really got to [be] like ‘God, I gave it all. I left it all on the field. I gave everything I have,'” she said. “I want to go scare myself again, and I think I will.”
Employees shared their reactions to Ayers Badan stepping down on social media throughout the day many reminiscing on how much she meant to their individual careers and to the company as a whole.
“An emotional day and the end of an era,” wrote Maria Ciuffo, a podcast host who started as an intern in 2016. “ I was the only other girl in the office at the time and she answered every text of mine with patience and didn’t fire me for being an idiot and for that I’m forever thankful.”