Defector’s Jasper Wang and His Unvarnished Truth

Annual reports are generally pretty boring documents, bogged down with numbers taken out of context and marketing-speak about “thriving in the face of unprecedented challenges.”

Not Jasper Wang’s. At the end of 2025, the cofounder and vice president of revenue and operations at Defector—the pioneering worker-owned sports site that grew from the ashes of Deadspin—managed to reinvent the genre, writing a riveting six-thousand-something first-person words containing not only full transparency on the company’s revenue and costs, but also a meditation on the past, present, and future of worker-owned co-ops. “When Defector staffers speak to journalists interested in starting their own publications, with some frequency we sense that they are naively imagining worker ownership as a panacea to the ills of their previous workplaces, and treating meaningful subscription revenue as a foregone conclusion,” he wrote. “But the truth is that launching your own business is hard, and much harder today than it was five years ago.”

As I started thinking about what The Kicker could sound like with me in the host chair, I knew immediately that I wanted to interview Jasper first. Narratives about exciting new business models like worker ownership often get flattened; rooting for them to thrive can sometimes mean talking less than honestly about the challenges as well as the triumphs. Despite Defector’s innumerable triumphs, Jasper never falls into that trap. Listen to his wisdom wherever you get your podcasts.

SHOW NOTES
Defector Annual Report, September 2024–August 2025

Host: Megan Greenwell

Producer: Amanda Darrach