Bill Simmons's Dad Helped Recruit Nate Silver To ESPN

Time.com's Jack Dickey, writing for Time, has a profile of Nate Silver, the data maven who will be bringing his number-crunching digital publication, FiveThirtyEight, to ESPN later this month. There's plenty of good stuff in there (for subscribers) about ESPN's courtship of Silver.

Including this:

Venture capitalists were eager to invest in a stand-alone FiveThirtyEight, and Silver had a chance to make a lot of money that way. But Simmons and [Grantland publisher David] Cho pulled him back toward ESPN. "The VC stuff looks great on paper, but that's putting a lot of pressure on you to thrive," Simmons told Silver. Even Simmons' dad put the screws to Silver while the pair watched a finals game. By July, Silver had capitulated. "It was the hardest I had ever tried to convince a girl to date me," Cho says.

[ TIME]