Bloomberg: "To Make Golf Fun, Just Add a Nightclub"

Topgolf gets the Bloomberg treatment and while there have been many profiles of the indoor-golf-driving-range-hipster-21st-Century-bowling-alley, Ira Boudway's story features plenty of fresh anecdotes.

A couple of highlights, starting with this on how CEO Erik Anderson, founder of private equity fund WestRiver Group brought the idea stateside and made a key move: TV's in the hitting bays.

In 2009, Anderson and a group of U.S. investors bought Topgolf’s technology for an undisclosed fee and decided to overhaul the floor plan for future locations. They added a third level, tripling the size of each venue to 65,000 square feet; replaced the buckets with motion-sensing ball dispensers; and, in a key change, put TVs and lounges—effectively, the entire sports bar experience—at each bay. “We realized that this was really an integrated entertainment and sports experience,” Anderson says.

There was also this on the financing side...

In September the company lined up $275 million in financing to build 7 to 10 locations a year. (Each costs $20 million to $25 million to open.) “We think there’s room for 100 or so in the U.S. and an equal amount globally,” Anderson says, though other than the original locations, the company hasn’t yet opened any outside the U.S. Revenue last year was about $300 million; this year it will be about a half-billion dollars.