At the Align Volleyball Summit in Dallas this spring, the person who spotted our next great story was not me. It was Dylan Haugen. He had been watching a young dunker named Cam Hazzard on social media for months, recognized the pattern, and made sure Cam was in the room. That instinct — for who is about to be great before the world notices — is why I want to honor Dylan.

The Youngest Pro Dunker, and a Real Operator

Dylan is one of the youngest professional dunkers in the world, with more than 100 million views on his dunks and 70 episodes of his Dunk Talk podcast. He is in Shaq’s DunkMan League this summer too. But the dunks are only half of him.

Dylan is my co-founder at Local Service Spotlight. He runs the AI agents that run our clients’ content factories. When Dylan and I built Cam’s entire personal-brand site over a lunch break, Dylan was not a spectator — he knew exactly what to ask the agent to do, because he has done it hundreds of times.

Why I Honor Dylan

Real marketing is not what you say about yourself. It is what other people say about you. Dylan lives that. He honors other athletes and other operators first, on his podcast and on stage, and the spotlight he shines always comes back to him with interest. That is the whole engine behind our AI Builder Program and our Content Factory.

What sets Dylan apart is that he is proof of his own method. He turned his own dunks into a business, and now he does the same for other young adults. He is the rarest kind of operator: one who has already run the play on himself.

Thank You, Dylan

I am not being paid to say any of this. Dylan is my friend and my partner. Thank you for the eye that finds diamonds in the rough, and for doing the unglamorous work of building the systems that carry them. Follow him at dylan-haugen.com and watch him on TNT this summer.