I’m Sheldon Day, and this is my story…

I’m an Indianapolis native, community leader, Notre Dame graduate, financial literacy advocate, NFL player, and co-founder of The Players Company. Today I’d like to shed light on why I’ve made it my personal mission to build a better system to help members of all communities build meaningful wealth and how web3 has unlocked the path to doing so.

I was born and raised on the Far Eastside of Indianapolis, words that were often used to describe my community were ghetto, the hood, poverty, but it was home to me, and all I ever knew. I am the youngest of nine children, (allegedly) my dad was a rolling stone. (And for those wondering no my mom didn't have all nine of my siblings.) I grew up with my mom who was a single parent trying to raise three kids. She worked two to three jobs just to provide for us. Money was tight… We lived paycheck to paycheck, a single unexpected financial expense would set us back months. At one point things had gotten so tight that I remember my mom going to the bank to get a loan for assistance just so we could maintain. She was denied because her credit score wasn’t high enough. She never shared the details of the loan until years later, but it motivated my deep dive into the systemic inequalities built into our banking system.

Furthermore, understanding my mom’s experience trying to procure a loan and being denied was commonplace for many in my community,

I frankly concluded the system was broken.

How is it that the credit system serves as a gatekeeper to wealth building for communities with the highest barriers… when we need the capital the most?!

As a kid growing up in poverty we knew there were only two paths to financial freedom:

One, unfortunately, was going the street route, And the other option was sports - which is what I chose and luckily it panned out. I’ve been in 4 NFL locker rooms now, and the same problem persists, the less talked about emotional side of financial literacy. Many of my teammates come from similar impoverished upbringings as myself, we might’ve been the kid who got made fun of for our dirty shoes in elementary school because our mom couldn’t afford to buy us a new pair. We bring that feeling of rejection and desire for acceptance with us throughout life and when we come up, we vow to stunt on everybody that said we’d never make it. I know this… because that was me. The NFL locker room, and society as a whole, has been infected with an ever-persistent desire to ‘Keep up with the Joneses,’ exacerbated by the pressures of social media, and fueled by our insecurities.

But don’t blame the players blame the system.

Now couple our insecurities with a misaligned system. For an incoming rookie, the system works as such – you first sign with an agent to forgo your eligibility, your agent will cover the costs associated with combine training, and depending on your draft projection, they may even provide a High-interest pre-draft credit line. The agent will typically recommend a FA or CFP, who you may hire, but oftentimes do little to no due diligence before making that decision. Then you are drafted or picked up, arriving in a new city with your new team bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with little knowledge of what’s to come next. You are thrown into a world where many of us become the bank of our family, trying to navigate how to help, flex and maintain with little understanding of how to do so. We get paid over a 36-week pay schedule and once games stop the checks stop. In my first off-season, when it was only a 17-week pay schedule, I truly saw how hard it can be for players when the checks stop coming in and they don't budget properly. Now take into account how short the average career is, and you’ll see, that we don’t get much time to figure it out…

Taking it back to little Sheldon from the Far Eastside

Money typically represents two things, survival or opportunity. For my entire adolescent life, it represented survival. I was never taught about credit, investing, or budgeting. It was never even a topic of conversation. I just knew one thing, that if I ever got money, I wasn't going to lose it because I needed to survive. So the question becomes… How can you expect someone who was never taught about money to responsibly leverage a line of credit, budget properly for the half of the year when you aren't getting paid, make an informed decision on a financial advisor, invest early and often, all while figuring out how to responsibly help your family, and live your life? Literally overnight! One day I was a broke college kid, the next I had 6 figures in my bank account. YOU CAN’T.

Again I concluded, that the system was broken.

So how do we solve this problem, how do we create a system that serves the people rather than exploiting them for economic gain?

Enter web3…

The solution rests in a community, a community that is aligned on all fronts both economically and socially. The current system optimizes for profit, while web3 creates a world where we can optimize for value, shifting value back to our community. Who better to dictate what is in the best interest of the people than the people themselves?

When we started to build The Players Company, we spent months trying to identify the foundation of our improved system, after being introduced to the concept of web3 we quickly fell in love. It provided the basis to create the ideal community: One that is run for and by the people, one that is representative of the individual, and one that is built on equity.

From there we started to reimagine what a value-based financial system would look like, which included 5 distinct pillars:

Mentorship fuels human capital
Education is the fertilizer for wealth
Opportunity fosters growth
Growth creates opportunity
Community lays the foundation for it all

We sought to build a community centered around the concept of mentorship, creating a structured forum for the community to impart knowledge, information, and experience to one another, making wealth-building a team sport.

I am excited to introduce… The Players Company DAO

The Players Company DAO is a collective of professional athletes who have committed to leveraging our influence and platforms for social change. Beneath The Players Company DAO we will collaborate with financial professionals, educators, and business leaders to build systems and products to enable wealth generation for the broader community in web3. We are solely focused on community building and opportunity curation. Our mission is to equip our community with the knowledge and opportunity to build meaningful wealth. At the heart of our country's wealth gap rests an underlying opportunity gap, and we aim to close that gap even ever so slightly!

This is the system we need. The system I needed as a child and the system I need now, one that is focused on pouring into the consumer, one that is focused on education, one that is focused on providing opportunity, and one that is focused on the people.

This is our system.

Life is the ultimate sport, and we are all players in the game. We are your team.

The Players Company.

Building in Public