In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Jason Syversen, founder and CEO of SportsVisio, a company that leverages AI to automate basketball statistics and video highlights. Syversen shares his entrepreneurial journey, detailing his transition from military and defense contracting to sports tech. Sports Visio focuses on democratizing advanced analytics for players and coaches using AI. The discussion covers the company's beginnings, its customer development strategy, and the conscious decision to adopt a B2B model. Syversen also highlights the importance of balancing work with family life, his philanthropic endeavors, and the role of effective altruism in his life. The episode concludes with a brainstorming session on a potential startup idea in youth sports and a conversation on using business success for societal good.
Leveraging AI in Sports with Jason Syversen of SportsVisio In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Jason Syversen, founder and CEO of SportsVisio, a company that uses AI to automate basketball statistics and video highlights. They delve into Jason Syversen's entrepreneurial journey, including his previous success in cybersecurity and his unexpected return to the startup scene. The discussion covers Sports Visio's inception, product development, customer engagement, market strategy, and the challenges of integrating advanced AI in sports analytics. Jason Syversen also shares insights into balancing entrepreneurial endeavors with family life and the importance of using business as a vehicle for societal good.
00:00 Introduction to Jason Syversen and SportsVisio
01:19 Jason's Entrepreneurial Journey
04:56 Deep Dive into SportsVisio
06:43 Balancing Family and Entrepreneurship
18:30 The Genesis of SportsVisio
29:41 Building the Team and Product Development
31:55 Lessons Learned and Future Plans
36:14 Mobile Processing vs. Cloud Processing in Sports Tech
36:38 Challenges of Multi-Object Tracking in Basketball
38:44 Edge Processing: Current Limitations and Future Potential
41:42 Human in the Loop: Balancing Cost and Accuracy
44:42 Expanding to New Sports and Markets
45:59 Leveraging AI in Sports: Custom vs. LLM Solutions
54:10 Scaling SportsVisio: Goals and Strategies
01:09:35 Entrepreneurship for Societal Good
01:13:07 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
[00:00:00]
Jason Jacobs: Today on The Next Next, our guest is Jason Syversen, the founder and CEO of SportsVisio, a company that leverages AI to automate basketball, statistics and video highlights, making advanced analytics accessible to players and coaches at all levels. I was excited for this one because Jason is a multiple time entrepreneur.
He bootstrapped a security company back in the day and ultimately had a great life-changing outcome. Thought he was retired and was gonna manage the family office and philanthropic activities time, but ultimately got sucked back into doing something in sports tech. He's got six kids. He's been. An avid sports dad and sports coach, as well as a sports player.
He is a big basketball guy and he ultimately combined the two, and he started his career in military and defense contracting. He called up some of his old [00:01:00] buddies and coworkers there at places like DARPA and BAE Systems. Got the band back together and got to work. SportsVisio has been around for a few years.
They've raised, I think it's about 11 million in financing. He said they're at about a million in a ARR. And we do a deep dive. Jason's really generous with his time and with his knowledge talking about. How he came to start the company, the mix of customer development and product development in the early days.
We talk about the types of customers that they serve, how they made a conscious choice to be B2B rather than selling direct to consumer. We talk about what they learned along the way. Some of those mistakes. That they made and if Jason had a do over what he would do different. And we also talk about the future and what he is most excited about in terms of the company and also the market.
And finally, we have a great chat at the end just in terms of [00:02:00] philosophically. Uh, Jason is, he's a Christian, he's an effective altruist, and he cares a lot about. Using his lane as a capitalist and as an entrepreneur, and using those resources for good in a much more meaningful way than a little bit of giving here and there.
And he's been living and breathing that, and he made a pitch during the episode for others to take a page outta that playbook as well, which I think is great. At any rate, let's bring her out here. But before we get started.
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next. It's not really a show, it's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built, and selfishly the goal is for this to [00:03:00] help me better understand how to do that myself.
While bringing all of you along for the ride, not sure where this is gonna go, but it's gonna be fun.
Okay. Jason Syversen, welcome to the show.
Jason Syversen: Thanks for having me. Great name.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, exactly. All the Jasons of the world unite. But we have some other stuff in common too. You're a multiple time entrepreneur. I'm a multiple time entrepreneur. I have a couple kids and I thought that my kids' lives were keeping me super busy. I in my prep for this episode, I uncovered that you have six of 'em.
Jason Syversen: The technical term is a plethora.
Jason Jacobs: You are working at the intersection of AI and sports. I am considering working at the intersection of. AI and sports. And and then you have found success working with, I know you're your ex military defense contractor yourself, and you have a team of people, a number of which [00:04:00] came from that world when I started Runkeeper, actually it was the same.
I was not, but but several of the early team members came from that world. And yeah, and taking that kind of precision and applying it to fitness like we did back then, it sounds like you're doing now, which I highly endorse. That was an approach that worked very well for us. But thank you for making the time and I'm definitely excited to, to learn more about you and what up to with sports physio as well.
Jason Syversen: Yeah, great to be here. Enjoyed our discussion the other day and and your journey as you're trying to figure out what's next and the diligence you're putting into it.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah it's I love the learning phase. I'm impatient to build, but at the same time it, it's almost like the longer it takes me to anchor, the better crypto I'll be when I finally break ground. And so it'll be right when it's right. And I think I'll miss this phase when it's gone.
And so I'm trying to, as much as I'm impatient, I'm trying to relish the exploration part as well. Because if you Yeah, if you can get in the right mindset, I think it's a special time. But at any rate, kicking things off, maybe just talk a bit about [00:05:00] sports Vizio and what it is.
Jason Syversen: Yes. We use AI and computer vision to create stats, highlights, and analytics for sports. So we take video either from a customer or that we help them create of the event and upload to the cloud our AI processes. It. And then we create automatically create a box score of all the events. And we can create, we create highlight clips of all those plays, and then we do analytics and other enhanced content.
So we do AI writeups of the game. We add augmented reality. So you can add NBA Jams style fireballs onto your video. We can do shot charts, heat maps for basketball, track where players moved around the court. Look at things like speed or velocity or acceleration or other enhanced insights.
And then provide those to more people on the coaching side. People have asked me, is this for like parents, coaches or players? And I was like, yes. It really serves each of those demographics. Obviously in [00:06:00] different ways. We're not as advanced for a high-end collegiate coach in terms of pure analytics as like a synergy or somebody that charges three times as much per game.
We're really trying to democratize access to this technology, to the masses, but we do have lots of cool insights and analytics and content for coaches. And we definitely have way more content for the parent and player and the more casual league or the amateur league than those guys do. And we're also like a fraction of the price for Marmee cost sensitive, competitive programs we find overseas that, that want these kind of analytics but can't afford, the thousands of dollars for a high end program and they can get us for way cheaper and get 80% of the content for, a third.
The price.
Jason Jacobs: Jason what is the age range of your six kids?
Jason Syversen: I have a 24-year-old son 22 actually as of today. 23-year-old daughter. I'm gonna have to adjust that monologue.
Jason Jacobs: to your daughter?
Jason Syversen: Yep. And a 19-year-old daughter and 16-year-old daughter who I just went on a fun date night with [00:07:00] last night to the Amateur, which is a pretty solid movie. I would endorse. And then which is a fun stage when your kids can start to appreciate adult things and particularly fun if they'll go on a date with you.
'cause that was not always the case just a year ago. I was like, dad, I don't wanna do anything with you. And then we have identical twin boys who are 10.
Jason Jacobs: Nice. And in my prep for this discussion, and I know we, we talked a little bit the f first time we chatted, so you had a strong outcome historically in at that time you actually thought that you were retired, right?
Jason Syversen: Totally. Yeah. I've always been planning on quote unquote working for the rest of my life. My parents have, they're, my dad is in his mid seventies. My mom is six years younger than him. And they are still working. But they're phasing into retirement. They're just taking a lot more vacations and.
Maybe not working eight, 10 hour days, maybe working five or six hour days. But I appreciate that New England mentality of having a strong work ethic. And [00:08:00] honestly, there's a lot of data that shows people that have purpose and meaning and work and community and live longer, healthier lives.
And as a Christian, I think people are put on earth for a purpose and meaning to love your neighbor and make a difference. So I was always planning on doing things the rest of my life. I just was excited about moving to the point where I had financial independence and wasn't driven by the universe of options being constrained to things that also paid me enough to provide for myself and my six kids.
So it's nice to take the financial aspect off the table and now I can really just try to maximize for impact and say, okay, where's the best use of my time for having a, an impact in the world? And and go from there.
Jason Jacobs: And when you w was Siege the main other company that you've, I lost track. Was, was that ha have there been several kind of rides as an entrepreneur or was
Jason Syversen: Oh, it's really just been siege. I did, so people do sometimes call me a serial entrepreneur and all that. I'm like, [00:09:00] it is true. I've started numerous companies, but almost all of them went nowhere. Like I started a company when I was 23 doing like software dev consulting right before the.com boom.
So it was like 2000, it was like 1999. And we'd got a bunch of contra customers lined up and then the market crashed and it just vaporized. But I hadn't quit my job as a side hustle, and then I started Sge Technologies doc SGE Technologies as a C Corp, Inc. And tried to do it on the side.
Didn't go anywhere. And I gave up and then I got that job at darpa, came out, started to seed technologies, LLC which took off and had this eight figure exit. While running it, I started several companies on the side one with a friend, but mul all with friends. And most of 'em didn't go anywhere.
But they, I, they were all side things. And I'm definitely noticing, at least in my own life, there's the things you do on the side and there's like your main thing. And if I don't go [00:10:00] all in and give everything I have, entrepreneurship is hard and, it's takes a lot of work. And if you're not willing to put all that effort in, it's very hard to have a side gig, turn into a giant, success.
So yeah after Siege looked at a few things, but then now running a sports physio. But those are sports, physio and cge, the only two I've done full time. And luckily those city ones that have also done pretty well.
Jason Jacobs: And when you built c I heard you talk about it before and it sounds like you you didn't have a safety net. I think there was a, I don't know if it was a second mortgage on the house, but it was like some financial stress, like there was a lot on the line.
Jason Syversen: Yeah. I took out a heloc, so like second mortgage.
Jason Jacobs: yeah. Did h how did you build that in terms of I was there a lot.
Was there a lot of balance in terms of leaving at the office and being around for the family or or did you miss a lot of things along the way? And same question just as it relates to kind of stress level and how well you took [00:11:00] care of yourself. I.
Jason Syversen: That's a good question. My answer to my wife would probably be different. She would say, oh, you traveled all the time. And, I would say, I think there was a fair amount of balance. As a, we did a lot of work for the defense departments. We actually track like time cards to invoice on projects and things like that.
And I think I averaged 45 hours a week. I work from home a few days a week. I did travel to see customers 'cause there's not a whole lot within an hour of my house in New Hampshire. I was getting on an airplane. But I would try to do it down and back the same day or maybe a couple of days out and be gone.
So I tried to measure nights away and really never be gone more than one to three nights a month. And that's less than three to 10% of the evenings I would be gone. And then I was working from home half the time and working reasonable hours. I still coached all my kids' basketball teams and soccer teams and I was leading a small group at our church for years and pretty involved in our community.
I think I did that well. And I think she'd [00:12:00] probably say that I did pretty well. But she also would talk about the times where she was experiencing being a single mom, and it seemed the kids would always get sick or the two foot snow storm would happen, or the roof would start leaking when I was on the road, traveling or something.
And those experiences she had which are valid obviously, of trying to say, okay, what do I do with, maybe four kids at the time and trying to figure things out when I'm away? And it was worse when I'd away, she couldn't even get me on the phone. 'cause a lot of times I'd be in a skiff and like I classified area, so I would just go radio silent for, eight hours or something and she might not hear from me.
I think that challenge was real. But I also think with a lot of friends, they're entrepreneurs. Some people go crazy and I talked to guys who flat out said, yeah, I work 40 hours a week and I work 40 hours at night and. But it's all worth it. My kids will understand someday, and it's all for them.
And I was like, dude, that's, I would not make that call. It's not the way I think that makes sense. Like I think being a good husband and dad is more important than being a success in [00:13:00] business.
Jason Jacobs: I wonder I wonder h how much the fact that Siege was bootstrapped helped with your ability to manage those things? 'cause I know I'm, and I'm not trying to suggest that Bootstrap as an easier path in, in some respects it's a harder path. But with Runkeeper we raised several rounds of venture and there was a middle part of several years long where.
We just weren't in a real healthy place from a business standpoint. We were burning cash. The category was getting more competitive. We were still growing but slowing growth the consolidation had started and we weren't getting calls, right? There was a lot of stress.
And I also had a lot riding on it personally, and felt a big obligation to shareholders, to employees, and to me and my family to, to land the plane, right? And so I was just gone. And I think that gives me a lot of anxiety as it relates to heading out. At this point to build another company that I [00:14:00] know that's not an option to just be gone because the same reasons you just said about kids and family and whatever.
And and I don't, at least if I do it the way I did it before, like it doesn't work. I won't do it. And so it's I want to build, but do I trust myself to be able to build different, and so that, that's why I that's where these questions were coming from is like then, with kids that were school age, playing ball and sports and coaching the team that you made the decision to then start another company when you financially didn't need to.
So was there any, was that a family discussion? Was there stress involved in that decision or or did it come pretty naturally to you?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, that's a good question. Wasn't really a family discussion. Obviously I wouldn't do it without my wife's. Sign off. But she knew that I was searching for things and I was like, Hey, this is what I'm thinking of doing. She's like, all right, cool. She was my number one cheerleader when I started Siege, and just, she really was pushing me to start the company, which was such a blessing.
And as you pointed out, we took out a home equity line of credit. We'd saved up 30 grand over the last few years [00:15:00] before I launched the company. And we basically put all that money into the company and, lived off savings and credit cards When we started the company that first year, I quit the government, April and I think it was April 29th of two 2009.
And we didn't get a paycheck until Christmas Eve was the first, so we had to live for more than half a year on just credit cards and, the heloc. So that was a, a. A 10th time we were really weren't sure we were gonna have Christmas. 'cause over that period of time, we'd basically spent down to zero.
And early December I was texting my, our co-founder, C-O-O-C-F-O and Hey, I think we might get a paycheck. And he is no, not quite there yet. And I was like, which, coming off on Christmas, what do you think? He's I think you can do one on Christmas Eve. So we truly spent it down to zero on Christmas gifts.
So knowing we got that first paycheck coming in, we were able to do some stuff. But I couldn't have done all that without her backing and support. And the new venture was the same thing. I do [00:16:00] think there are ways to be, people are always shocked when I talk about the things that I have going on.
'cause one of the things I did when I exited Siege was I signed up for a bunch of stuff. So I was like, oh, as in this exploration phase let me join some boards. So I joined some boards and I've stepped off some boards, but I'm still on, currently on the board of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
I'm on the board of New Hampshire Business Finance Authority. I'm on the board of Project Happy, which is a tech nonprofit trying to help young people get involved in volunteering. I'm on the board of, and the chairman of the board of the foundation that my wife and I set up. I run 10 X Venture Partners, which is an angel group.
I run the 10 X Venture Partners venture fund. And I have to do all the tax filings for that. And we're having a big exit and gotta handle all those finances. And I'm running this tech company and I'm captain of a men's basketball team and an A division and I've been coaching all my kids
Jason Jacobs: Why didn't you leave with that? That seems like the most important one. Out of all the stuff you rattled off.
Jason Syversen: Exactly. And so when people hear all that, and then I, mention to [00:17:00] them, I care about health and fitness and, I exercise, I try to exercise seven days a week. Some days I'll hit seven, some days it's four times in a week if I'm traveling or whatever. But seven is my goal. So that way I.
I know if I miss a couple, I'm still getting a lot in, and they're always like, how do you do all that? You must not sleep. I'm like, no, I sleep eight or nine hours a night. And they're typically shocked. But for me, it it's all about being strategic with your time. I might work at 10 o'clock at night.
My wife goes to bed pretty early, so she's often in bed at 9, 9 30, 10. So I might stay up till 10 to midnight and bang out those couple of things that I couldn't get to during the day. But I think if you're flexible about time, and I'm willing to take off an hour in the middle of a day if I need to do something with my kids or like you said, stop work early to catch a ba a game that they're in.
So I stop at four, but then I might jump on at nine that night and finish what I needed to do. So I think if you're willing to give for the benefit of your family, you also want to give your own [00:18:00] time to help the company to make sure that you're able to. Satisfy the obligations you have and stay on top of things and then also build a super strong team.
It doesn't work if you don't have, if you're trying to do all this stuff yourself it just won't scale. But if you build a phenomenal team, my goal is to be such a great CEO that I could disappear for a month and the company would just keep growing and kicking butt without me. That's obviously hard to do early on.
But as we grow that continues to be my North star is to manage myself out of a job because I've done such a good job building a strong leadership team and culture.
Jason Jacobs: So with sports physio were you looking to start another company and evaluating different ideas, or how did it come about? Because I, I heard you talk about it. I know that your kids play hoop and you like hoop and those words collided. But what I didn't catch in the story when you told it before was just, were you seeking or did you just stumble upon
Jason Syversen: Yeah, I I ran for Senate in 2020, lost by 3%. So after that I was like, all right. Not doing that. What am I doing the rest of my life? I had been joining [00:19:00] these volunteer boards. I was doing a lot of investing. I think I'd done 30 something investments at that point. I'm up to 43 now.
But four years ago I was like, all right, love investing. Could totally see doing that to the rest of my life. But I got to the point where I needed to slow down from a portfolio theory perspective. So I was like, all right if I'm not investing, not doing the Senate thing, am I just joining a nonprofit?
Am I starting a nonprofit? Sorry, I have a landscaper here today. And the dog is flipping out every time he sees them
Jason Jacobs: all right. It humanizes the discussion. I
Jason Syversen: penetrating the property, he is who are these intruders to my domain? And yeah. So I was looking at a bunch of options around volunteering take, getting a job and donating my salary to help fund the non-profit stuff.
Hanging out with my kids more and just, is it good to, should I just be a full-time stay at home dad, I already have a stay-at-home wife. We already have, enough money, we pay someone one day a week to come in and be like a mother's helper so my wife can go hiking or go the park. [00:20:00] Sorry.
Now they right at the window of the dog. It's I'm gonna kill this person. Stop. Hey.
All right. So
Jason Jacobs: you're saying you have a mother's helper, so your wife can
Jason Syversen: yeah. Yeah. So I think that is helpful. We're actually now able to pay one of our daughters, which is super cool. She's a young adult and she was just talking about how blessed she is. She's I'm getting paid to come hang out with my brothers, and what a blessing it is.
And they're a lot younger than her, so she really treasures that time. And for us we're willing to spend a small amount of money just to have that, people say money can't buy happiness, but it's it's not always true. Like in the general case, it is absolutely true. It doesn't go to infinity.
But there are very clear specific times where this small amount of money will make you happier. Like flying in first class versus not would make you happier. I don't do that 'cause I'm so frugal. That date night spending that money on a babysitter and dinner will make you happier than sitting at home every time, right?
Spending money to spend, a hundred bucks for a day. You have less pressure and [00:21:00] you're, in my case, my wife can go out and just, go for a hike during the day and get time to herself and not just feel like her identity and time is consumed with with the kids is super valuable.
And she will be less stressed and she'll be happier. And that's a trade off I'll make every time. If I can ever take money and trade that for peace and, less stress, paying someone to be a house cleaner, which is something we started doing a few years ago. Another unique thing, which as someone who grew up poor, I never thought I would do.
And my wife either, she actually was offended when I suggested it to her. It's you think I don't do a good job? That's my job is I'm like. I get it. You do a good job. You love keeping a clean house. I'm like, but if we can pay a few hundred bucks to someone who wants work and they're willing to come in and do all that stuff do you love scrubbing bathrooms?
It's no, I don't like it. She's but that's my job description. I'm like, I know, but there's so many other things you can do. She started a nonprofit and she wrote a book and does a lot of volunteering. I'm like, you're a hard worker. I'm not worried you're gonna sit on the couch, eating bond bonds and watching TV all day you're gonna pour more time in the kids, right?
You're gonna [00:22:00] be spending more time for yourself. You're gonna be volunteering. If those are valued things that bring you more joy and peace and purpose. And we're privileged, not that we can take a small amount of money, give someone else work, and that gives us time back in our day that we can add value to the world.
Again, if you were sitting around watching soap operas all day and I'm like, oh, maybe you should go clean something like, this is not a good use of time or money, but she's not, and she's not that person. And so we've done it and now she's oh, I can't imagine going back. She's that was the best decision.
So I think a lot of times, especially in America. It's very common in other cultures to trade money for time and to do things like that. But in America we have a more materialistic mentality where the more money you have, you just want more of it and you need more of it, and you spend it on things I don't really find that's very helpful.
I'd much rather trade it for time or experiences that, add more value to your life. And I obviously in the US it is expensive to hire people, but if you have the resources, anytime you can make that trade, I think it's a good one if you're able to afford [00:23:00] it.
Jason Jacobs: So you were trying to figure out what to do and and then what was the initial germ of sports Vizio? How when did the, i, those, like the passion and the business side start intersecting? And and then what were the first steps to to get those initial sparks going?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, great. Great question. So yeah, as I was looking at all these options, I looked at raising a venture fund, actually started a pitch deck and was talking to folks. But, having grown up rapport and having bootstrap my company, I just didn't have a ton of rich people in my speed dial.
And my angel portfolio is pretty early, so I was like, I really should do another company. Once I honed in on that I I was reading some stuff in effective altruism and other groups about impact and really was concluding that's probably if I had a 20% chance of a nine digit exit, the expected value of that kind of return would dwarf.
Of any individual contributions I made as a individual contributor in a job or in a volunteer role. So yeah, I looked at a bunch of things, looked in cybersecurity, obviously, where I had spent my [00:24:00] career, but I don't really love cyber as a market. We did a lot of offensive work at my company, which was super fun and amazing.
And offense adds value, right? You're helping track down terrorists or you're, monitoring foreign hostile governments and you're protecting human lives that might have to go collect human intelligence or put themselves in harm's way. You're identifying threats that could protect human lives, and you're helping our national security posture, which is super cool.
Defense is not that way, right? In defense, they spend lots and lots of money, and if you do a great job, nothing happens. You're fundamentally about the avoidance of the subtraction of value, and that's hard to get excited about. We have the best product in the world and people buy our stuff and.
Usually nothing happens. Sometimes they still get hacked, it's not our fault, somebody else's fault. And it's just not a, it's like like selling insurance maybe, but worse 'cause it's a lot more money. And to sell it, you're like hyping up. The more afraid they are, the more likely they are to buy.
I'm like, eh, it's just not a thing. And then [00:25:00] there's thousands of companies selling tens of thousands of products and they all claim to solve your problem. So the ones who win tends to be the ones with the loudest voice who raise the most money and make people afraid the most. And it's not really about building an innovative product.
So I wasn't super excited there, as you can tell. And then I looked at a bunch of other markets. I had a idea for kind of a technology around landscaping and outdoor stuff. But the market there was not good because there's so much demand for labor that a tech platform to map labor to people was not needed.
And then one day I was playing basketball and I have a buddy who was at the game and. He's a good friend, but an eccentric character a little bit and talks a lot. And he's talking on the sideline. He is telling me and my other friend, he's dude, I had 20 points, 10 assists and no turnovers.
It's such, I played so great tonight. We're looking at each other what game was he at? I don't remember that happening. And but we, we didn't have stats. I don't know. I was like, maybe he did. Maybe I don't, I'm not paying attention to his. I don't remember that happening, but sure it's possible.
And so I go [00:26:00] home and usually my wife doesn't ask too much about the game, just how'd to go, but she's like, how'd it go? How many points did you have? I'm like, I don't know, 8, 10, 12, 5, 6 shots. Seven. I probably forgot, maybe nine. I don't know. I think I had more points than shots, which is usually my goal.
And and my kids asked the same thing. I was like, and then that night I saw an ad for a product called Pvo. Which is this cool little motorized Bluetooth actuator. So it's, its an a motor uses Bluetooth to the phone and they have some software on the phone and it'll pan the phone back and forth.
You can see in the back it's all like girls doing selfie videos or people like doing a cooking video. But in the promo ad they showed a girl riding a horse and then they showed someone playing tennis and they showed a guy doing a basketball layout. I went, get on the website.
I'm like, would this work for a game? And and they're like, everyone's no, can't do multi object tracking. It's really a single object tracker that works. But I was like, all right I was at darpa, like I know some PhD [00:27:00] AI people I bet we could try to pull together a multi object tracking system.
And what if I took a device like that? We wrote the code, we actually pan the camera, could actually track all the players and then create a full stats, platform using ai it's not a product people would buy. So I started calling customers. My kids played a U ball. I called the AAU coach. He's oh my gosh, that would be amazing.
We looked at paying huddle, but it's like a thousand dollars a season and we just can't afford that. I was like what would you pay? He's oh, I'd do I was like, a hundred, 200 bucks. He's oh, I do three 50 in a heartbeat. I'm like how many programs do you have? He's oh, we've got, 20 teams.
He's but I probably only do it for the top like 12. So I start doing the math. I'm like, all right how many seasons? Oh, we do fall ball and spring ball and winter session, and then we have a summer league. It was like 10 grand in a RR for that customer. And then I called the men's league I was at, and they've got multiple nights a week and they play, and I played in that.
It was a league where I had that experience, and he's oh my gosh, it'd be amazing every week people ask me for that. I was like, what would you pay for that? He's I don't know. We did the [00:28:00] math. It was like 20 bucks a game, and then you do all the math out again. It's another $10,000 a RR deal.
So I'm like, wow, I made two phone calls. I've got 20,000 a RR lined up, how big is this market? So I got on Excel and I researched the state of New Hampshire and figured out every possible customer in New Hampshire multiplied that out into the state, into the US and then globally looked at the market and basketball alone was about a one and a half billion dollar market.
And then you add in volleyball, brings it close to two, soccer obviously brings it over a $10 billion market. You add in all the sports, it's a $15 billion global market. I was like, that's a venture scale business. It's not a hundred, it's not 200. Cyber might be, but if I can, you've got a 10 plus billion dollar addressable market of like real customers who would really pay for this and be super excited to do it like that sounds like a business.
That, and then the competition, I looked at landscape, there were like three or four companies in soccer. You got Trace Veo stats Bomb Track one 60. They've raised, a couple hundred million dollars. [00:29:00] And then you look at basketball and there was. Crickets chirping. It's all manual, huddle and synergy, paying tens of thousands of people in India, apol, Pakistan, Philippines, to manually do it.
And then you go down market and you had swing vision and tennis sports logic and hockey a couple other companies out there. And that was the landscape. I'm like, all right, I like the idea of competing against manual private equity backed old school companies and, take a DARPA style AI team and go after the market and see what we can do for this this economy.
So yeah, I put a half million dollars in my retirement in, and then we raised money and did the venture thing and launched the product in 2023.
Jason Jacobs: And so the, that DARPA team, did they at what point did they leave, did it start out moonlighting or did they step in right away full time?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, good question. Yeah, almost our whole leadership team has been part-time. Off and on. I was always full-time, our sales team were always full-time, but our [00:30:00] COO was like part-time ramping a full kind of 30 ish hours. So he was able to consult, he's had a really amazing career and so he had people who were paying him as, as much as a thousand dollars an hour at one point in his career to consult.
So he and I were both like, okay, it'd be stupid to not do that. You can consult for five hours a week and make more than we can pay you, in in a year right now. He's close to full-time but never was quite full-time Our CTO and, a couple of the other guys, like our AI lead and software lead have been somewhere between full-time and part-time, depending on where we were cashflow wise.
Early on I was like, oh, let's do full-time ramped up. And we hired a lot of folks. But we were spending a lot of money trying to build a product and then I realized okay, this is gonna take time. We had to be more judicious and we moved to a part-time where they might have another thing going on or consult and then be paid or we, sometimes they were full-time or, but we were paying them mostly in [00:31:00] equity so that way it was reducing our cash burn.
So we have a whole but bunch of options we did and then, the tech team were pretty much all full-time. But I think it's a key part of my strategy was hiring more senior people on the leadership team so people I can trust that are responsible, can work independently and I don't have to hold their hand to know what to do.
Which is a cheat code I think for leadership is 'cause I'm not sure, I'm always great at developing leaders like, I will model behavior that I wanna see and try to be very supportive, but I don't always think about their needs and how to like, give them the right amount of information to lead them along the journey to get where they need to go.
So folks that are, have less high agency or need more structure and support, I don't know if I would be as good a manager, but if I hire strong people who are independently driven, I can support them and treat them as a peer and we all work together and solve the problem and that, that tends to work really well.
Jason Jacobs: So in the earliest days how did you balance technological development [00:32:00] with spending time with customers? And also how did you balance the underlying tech that makes it possible with the experience side of development and design?
Jason Syversen: Yeah. Honestly I don't think I did a good job in the early days. We tried to take on too much. I. So I tried to, the darpa at darpa, they literally laugh you outta the building if it's on a DARPA hard problem. So if you're trying to just do something incremental or evolutionary, they're like, no, it has to be a revolutionary transformational, disruptive new approach.
So I, I knew this wasn't the case, but I definitely had some of that mindset I was bringing to bear. I'm like, oh, we throw enough money at it, smart people like we're gonna do. So I tried to build three or four products at once. I tried to build that painting camera product that would ingest the recording and that was like that tracker.
And then that was the recording that would record the video and upload it to the cloud. [00:33:00] And then the whole stack and processing architecture in the cloud and the AI system, and then a user app that would present that on Android and iPhone. And what I realized, a year into it was we had a partially working recording app.
And Tracker and we had a partially working AI system. We had a kind of buggy user app. I was like, this is not working. Like we can't do all these things. So I said, you know what? I'd rather have one great product and let the users figure out the video side themselves than a bunch of things that are crappy.
So let's shrink down what we're focusing on. So we shelved the AI camera, we shelved the recording app. We put out all the engineers onto making a great user app and said, Hey, look, let's, the AI may not be a hundred percent accurate. Let's have humans do QA to get the accuracy to where we need to be for the customer.
I really wanted that 95, 90 7% accuracy and the AI was not there. It was like in the [00:34:00] sixties and it was in the seventies. And so I was like, let's just launch the product. We'll do human QA to clean up the data to make sure it's accurate. And we can still be profitable at that point. Just not very profitable.
And then once the AI catches up, we'll be ready to remove them. So we launched in 2023 with that approach. But early on I was spending almost all the time on technology a little bit with customers, but we were trying to figure out what the ideal customer profile was. So I was going to like the Sloan Sports Analytics conference in Boston and talking to NBA teams.
We're talking to college programs locally. I'd be talking to, men's leagues and some AU programs and trying to figure out that ideal mix. But we didn't have a customer in their, a product in their hands. So if I was doing it again, what I'd really do is start with a simple, dumb product that is just solves a small specific pain point and get in the market and then keep expanding from there, because that gives you organic user engagement and feedback and [00:35:00] customers that you talk to.
'cause talking to customers who don't have anything in the market is. It's a little bit pointless. 'cause they're like, oh yeah, that sounds cool, but you don't know if they're really willing to pay. 'cause you can't actually test that by saying, okay, would you buy this thing? So you're getting a lot of feedback, but it's all over the map and you don't know how real it is because you don't have a way of validating that.
Jason Jacobs: But once you have a product in the market, you get a lot better feedback on what people like and don't like and what they use and what they'll pay for. So yeah, that's a takeaway I had.
So I've done some episodes with a few people that have threads that are relevant.
Jason Jacobs: One is working in mental health. So using AI to power mental health support for kids and families. And in that case, human in the loop is very important. And so I think pulling on that human in the loop and when does human need to be in the loop? How is human in the loop? I think that's something I'd love to just double click on.
And then the other thing that comes to mind is swept no from swing vision. You mentioned swing [00:36:00] vision. We we'll be publishing that episode soon. It'll probably be out by the time this one goes out. But one of the things he talked about was that because he came along before the LLMs existed they they did, they essentially built their own private LLM.
And one of the things that enabled was doing all the processing on mobile, which ended up being a big. Competitive advantage because doing in the cloud is a lot slower and too slow for some of the use cases that they were doing in racket sports. So it'd be great to just hear your thinking and learnings on each of those things.
The human, the loop part, and then the LMS versus not LMS and processing in the mobile versus processing in the cloud.
Jason Syversen: Yeah I love what they built. Honestly, if I was able to go back in time like that, swing vision's the perfect product because they're able to, because they're just doing ball tracking. They don't need multi object tracking. We're tracking 14 to 20 objects at any given time. 'cause there's 10 players on the court.
You have two or three reps on the court. You're also tracking the ball. So you [00:37:00] have a minimum of 13 or 14 objects. But then you have players on the edge of the court that step onto the court. Maybe the coach gets on the court. People are constantly moving in and out and you're tracking those objects too, of oh, what is this?
Is this a player coming in? Are they leaving? And so it's a huge computational lift with high degree of occlusion. Volleyball is the dream scenario or basketball, or sorry, tennis is the dream scenario. You have two people on opposite ends of the court who never touch each other. Lots of open space in between them, and they hit a clearly defined ball back and forth with the net.
All you have to do is track that. I'm sure they had to do some good hard work for that. I love, I think they use lidar off the camera on the iPhone to actually identify spin and things like that. So great engineering smart guys. But the problem space is just so much easier to solve. Which allowed them to build a great product and get into market quickly, as opposed to us the suckers who were like, oh, I'm gonna, there's no one in basketball.
That's a huge market. Lemme go after that. I was like yeah there's partially a reason for that. Turns out it's like a challenging problem. And so good thing is now that we're [00:38:00] solving it, we're in the market. We, we really are in a good position and we chose basketball. Not because I played, I've been playing for over 30 years and all my kids have played, and I've been a parent and coach for over 20.
But it was the second largest global sport. So you have, soccer is the largest global sport by far. And you've got multiple companies with hundreds of millions of dollars going after this. And then you have basketball and it's cricket chirping, and then you go down market to smaller markets like tennis, and you have companies already in that space.
So I said, all right, let's go after the second largest market. Seems solvable. It's not as hard as like football or rugby where they're like hiding the ball and running. You got 11 people to track on each team and outdoors in the rain at night, which is like the hardest problem, I think. So yeah, so that, that's why we stuck there.
And your question was about edge processing versus cloud. Is that kind of the
Jason Jacobs: yeah. One is just, yeah, processing, so are using LLMs, right? So that's just,
Jason Syversen: We don't use an LM for almost anything except for the game writeup. So [00:39:00] we do use an LM for the game writeup 'cause it's text and LLMs are really good at text. But all, everything else in all the AI that we do, the augmented reality, the player tracking, the multi object tracking, the ball tracking stats creation, all of that is custom our own code running in our own cloud.
Jason Jacobs: And w why in the co I guess would there be a benefit if it ran on mobile and
Jason Syversen: percent. It'd be amazing. But it's just, it, we're taking, we're renting like high-end GPUs and it's running eight to 20 hours depending on where we are that week and the optimizations and the complexities or whatever on a high-end GPU in the cloud. So we think someday there will be, we will both have refined the algorithms enough that we can push it to the edge.
But we're a couple years away from that. I think still right now, it takes a lot of compute power.
Jason Jacobs: so it probably, swept no's not here to chime in, but I suspect it probably gets back to the simplicity of the problem. Because the racket supports a [00:40:00] simpler problem. It uses less processing because it uses less processing.
Jason Syversen: We can do single ball tracking right now. Like our code, like I mentioned when we were using the Pvo stuff, we could put an edge tracker on a phone that just pans. We can do that in real time, we can do that. Right now a phone gets hot, it runs and you can do that on a normal phone.
But as soon as you add multiple objects, 2, 3, 4, now you got a big problem. You get to 1215 occlusion jersey. Number identification, gate detection, facial recognition, any, all the other things you might do to try to recognize players on the court. It just, the complexity goes up so drastically that yeah, we're not at a point where any edge computing mobile device, even a laptop isn't gonna be capable of running it in real time today.
In the future though, I think we'll get there and can be real time, but the question will be what gets interesting is how much accuracy do you potentially lose, right? Maybe we can run it in real time at the edge, but you can only be [00:41:00] 90%, whereas maybe the core AI platform is 97. So are you willing to do it for 90%?
I think there are use cases where that will work. But I suspect we're gonna have a gradation of customer profiles where sometimes they just care about speed and they want a triage thing that they can take in a halftime that's close enough. Or they wanna highlight clip tool. Others are gonna be like, they want 99.9% accurate and they don't care if it takes, a day to get there.
They want human white glove review. Even if the AI is 99.4% accurate, they want a human to get them that extra half a percent. So you're gonna have a range of customer demands and I think we're evolving to try to figure out how to meet all of those in different ways.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And the human in the loop. You mentioned with Hudl, one of the reasons they're so expensive is because it is purely human. Is the human in the loop just training wheels until you don't need it anymore? And also how do you do it as a startup in a way that doesn't, you completely make the cost [00:42:00] structure unviable before you even get outta the gates without raising boatloads of venture to to fund the unsustainable business delivery. Service delivery.
Jason Syversen: Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, it is. We thought it was just training wheels at first, but then I realized, the colleges, the pros. The pros still, the NBAI say there isn't much in basketball. It's a little unfair. 'cause there is a cool company called Second Spectrum that has a computer vision, AI for basketball and other sports.
It's not. In our market because they require lots of fixed mounted cameras and known locations that are calibrated to the court. And they're like hundreds of thousands of dollars for them to use. But I found out they also use humans still at the NBA side, even though they have a dozen PhD type AI people in this big company, 500 employees, whatever they have.
They still use humans for NBA games because the NBA doesn't care about saving money on stats and highlights. They want that perfect accuracy. People are [00:43:00] betting millions of dollars on games. There's huge amount of demand. So that white glove model, I was like, you know what, even if we have amazing computer vision and pro contracts, they're still gonna want some human involvement potentially.
We need to consider the variety of options. So yes, it's a training wheels for the mass market and then eventually the mass market. We will have tons, we do pure AI for some of our offerings, like some of the coach premium, like shot chart seat maps, pure AI running today. We're very close for pure ai, for rec leagues, like middle schools, like cost sensitive customers who want to pay as little as possible and still get the base product.
We're probably within six to 12 months from an accurate enough system where we can go pure ai, no human review ever for that market, but then that mid-tier that want the high accuracy, like even where we are now with human involvement, we still have people complain about a stat, oh, you missed my one corner rebound or the worst, which is really funny.
The [00:44:00] stat, the people keeping the score at the table, they screw up and then they come to us and they're like your stats and highlights are wrong. We're like, actually, no, your dude missed. Like that basket in the second quarter. 'cause he was on his phone or talking to the other person and he missed that basket.
They're like, they did yeah, here's the video proof I could show you. And they're like, oh, you need to like, make your score, match their score. 'cause that's the official score. I'm like, I'm, that's fine. You tell me what you want me to delete. It's an awkward conversation that we have.
So there, there's always these like real world discrepancies that you encounter and we're thinking through the strategy. So yeah, so the people, but the reality is again, the human are gonna be for the white glove premium customers and training for new sports. As we add new sports to the mix, we're gonna be adding that, that dynamic.
We added volleyball this year. We have a baseball product. We're looking at other sports like soccer like tennis or racket sports more broadly. What's the next thing we should be tackling cricket? I've had a few folks say is, the largest sport by engagement. Is that an interesting market?
So we're trying to figure [00:45:00] that out. But, we will have training the system, right? There's a lot of labeled training data you need, so we need more and more games and to do that we are trying to explore ways to use AI to train ai. But in the interim, paying humans to do that as part of the mix is part of the way you accomplish that.
The cool thing is we're able to do it and still be profitable. So we hired some outsourced kind of teams, tried a whole bunch of different countries and teams. We've actually started built a small subsidiary that can hire a couple of folks directly to get our costs down so that way our margins couldn't get up high enough.
'cause the problem is, right now we're adding margin, we're adding revenue, but we're not seeing a bunch of that revenue we can pour into growth. So by, moving away from those firms that are marking everything up, we're able to bring our margins up where we'll actually be a half the price of huddle or a third of the price of synergy.
And still have a decent margin that can invest in growing the business. And then the AI that takes off will be super profitable, which is an exciting place to be.
Jason Jacobs: And [00:46:00] how do you think about your own AI code models, et cetera, versus the LLMs? Do you only do it yourself because you need to, and as soon as the models do it, you'll, outsource whatever you can. Or how impactful do you think the the model evolution, the, the open ais and philanthropics and is that stuff that's relevant to your world or is it on the periphery?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, it's a great question. It's relevant for sure, what we've seen is most of their. Work was done around content generation, not so much content analysis. So you can ask it to summarize text for you and things like that, but the video analysis is the weakest area for an LLM.
If you want to generate video, you can have it make movies for you and clips, which are super cool if you wanna generate text. It's amazing at generating text. If you want to analyze text it's solid. And very good at that. If you want it to catch key details [00:47:00] for a legal document it depends.
You usually need a custom trained LLM just on legal docs, because what happens is the LLM itself, it just is a sequence predictor, right? So it, it creates all these tokens and it just predicts the next letters and the sequence that would likely fit, but it doesn't have true like intelligence in that it understands the content, the way we understand content of building Trees of logic and what case law maps it, it really just flows down. Looking at these texts and all the trillions of examples I seen before that, what would be the most likely thing to come after that? So that means it can do a lot of things that look correct, but when you dig into it, it is actually incorrect in key places.
So because of the standards of accuracy we have you could feed an LLMA basketball video game, clip of a basketball game and it, and say what is happening here? And it might say, oh, this looks like a basketball game. And it might even say something about oh this player is taking a [00:48:00] lay, 70% of the time it might be right in the number and 30% it either doesn't give you a number or it's wrong.
Oh, is that useful for a product? It takes a bunch of time to run and it's gonna be inaccurate that time and it's gonna cost you money to run it. So that's not really something we're concerned about today. Now. That's the state they are today. And we started this four years ago. I think at some point some the big AI systems will eventually build platforms that are more accurate.
I don't know if LLMs by themselves will ever get there by as in their just raw form, but, will they provide some really amazing image tracking? So track this ball around the image for me and tell me exactly what pixels have it. So maybe it supplements your AI system with some of their raw line calibration, court calibration, player tracking jersey number analysis.
Like I, maybe I could take a picture of a person that's fuzzy and feed it in and they might be better at interpreting the number on that jersey than our stuff that, that's very [00:49:00] possible and I would argue likely for components in the future. So for now we're just tracking it and trying to see where it makes sense.
And part of the reason we're trying to move fast and raise, we could have done this as a lifestyle company, right? I could have just bootstrapped it and paid, but part of the reason I wanted to raise venture money is I don't want this to take 10 years a 'cause I'm impatient. But BI also think that would be a bad strategy because others are going to do this.
Like part of my belief in starting a company is do you think it is inevitable that this product is going to exist? Like the future will not look the same as it does today? And then the question becomes, if you believe the answer is yes, it is inevitable, this is going to happen, then the question just becomes do I wanna be the one to build it or do I wanna let someone else do it?
And in this case I was like, Hey, I think we wanna be the ones to build this. Let's get in the market, let's start taking market share and key segments where we think this is compelling and scale this thing up.
Jason Jacobs: One of the themes that I've been coming across as I talk to different founders, building in different areas is just that the, the AI is [00:50:00] evolving. So quickly that there's always just the question about do I hunker down and go get the team to solve this? Or do I just wait for the AI to do it under my feet?
That, that came up in a I had the, a company called Val Town, the CEO came on the show, Steve Kraus. And he was talking about how he's helping his brother learn to code. And there's always a question when he is learning to code about should he go and learn this thing that he can't do?
Or is the model just gonna do that in the next few months? So are you coming across similar or, I guess what gives you the confidence that all the money and resources that you're investing in innovating isn't just gonna get supplanted by the model?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, that's a great question. We are looking at that stuff as well. It's why we didn't do the text ourselves from scratch is LLMs are great at that. So we create js o files of all the events in a basketball or volleyball game. I. Baseball game, we can feed that into an alum and say, Hey, describe what happened.
And you can even do that in a tone of do it like Dickie Vitale, do it [00:51:00] like a hometown sports reporter, do it like a, whatever an NBA reporter would. So you can change that. And that, that already works today. It's great. Like why would we build that from scratch? But other things we're doing ourselves I don't think there's a, I think the, there's no perfect answer to what you're asking.
I think the general answer is you gotta know what's going on, pay attention and always, constantly be evaluating, buy, build decisions, right? In anything you do we host the infrastructure? Do we write the API ourselves, or can we use an AWS one? Do we build this algorithm? Is there an existing algorithm that's better?
Open source or an academic, or is there somebody else's commercial tool set or is there an LLM or some OpenAI platform that can do this? And if not today, are they gonna do it close? But generally, if it doesn't exist today, like you have to just do it yourself. You can't sit around we'll hope that maybe in the next six months that someone will build this.
If we need it, we just go build it. And that's part of what's compelling about our business and why we've had some success raising venture capital. We're not an [00:52:00] LLM wrap, right? A lot of these companies, it's convenient to go to market quickly if there's low barrier to entry. But it also means that you don't have a moat, right?
There's actually some value in building a business that's hard to get into because everyone else can't just jump in and compete with you. We've raised almost $9 million now and spent most of that money was on technology. We don't have offices, we don't have ice sculptures in the lobby. I'm not flying around first class and flying coach and we're, I don't even take a salary.
We're pouring all of our money into building cool technology. You spend that much money on building hardcore advanced technology, like it creates a real competitive barrier for others to come in and try to go after your market. So I think there's a real argument to be made for finding white space markets that are not easy to get into, and you can't just wrap an LLM and jump in to build something of compelling value.
Jason Jacobs: What about in terms of how you're building the product? How much as a [00:53:00] team are you leaning into these AI tools in the development process, if at all? I.
Jason Syversen: Yeah, we definitely are using them in our development. All of our engineers have used those various systems and use different ones at different times. We use AI note takers in meetings. We're using AI to help on sales and marketing CRM kind of tool analysis, creating content for, the marketing side.
We're using AI for software development. It's not as advanced on the computer vision side, but definitely can help in just generic software development across the board for both mobile cloud and like the AI side which are all different architectures or languages. But yeah it's a big thing and I'm constantly pinging my team about, Hey, did you guys see this cool new tool?
Because I'm also an investor and fairly online on X and LinkedIn and read a lot. I'm always stumbling across cool startups or innovations these guys are doing that. Maybe the engineering team doesn't always get to see because they're heads down like writing code. [00:54:00] So I'll send it over to them like, Hey, did you check out this cool new tool this group has?
Or whatever. And sometimes they're like yeah, we already know that. And sometimes oh no, that's cool. Let me let me take a look.
Jason Jacobs: So what does the future look like? First sports, physio. What are the key priorities if you look over the next? Say 12 or 18 months.
Jason Syversen: Yeah, it's really scale, so you know, we're. Close to a millionaire are now, and really trying to get over two this year. I think if you Google AI stats, basketball were like the first or second hit on Google LLMs were like the first or second company suggested in the market. The problem is most people are not looking up AI, basketball and stats or analytics.
They just don't know. You can use AI for this. Like self-driving cars is a thing where people still are like, what? AI can drive cars? They're like, yeah, that's a thing. I drove my Tesla from Boston to New York without touching the steering wheel. You can do that today. But a lot of people still don't realize that.
They really don't know you can do this for basketball. That's a less tech savvy market. Generally the random suburban or urban dad who's got a kid playing hoops is not [00:55:00] thinking about, oh, what if we could use AI to create all these stats? If they did, we do really well when they reach out and get a quote and we close 80 plus percent of those deals.
So what we need to do is just get the word out. So tell people what we're doing, show them the product and then scale the business. So we're looking at big partnerships au tournaments leagues. We have universities, high schools, semi-pro clubs, talking to NBA teams which is an interesting problem 'cause they still need help and they're excited about what we're building, but the product as isn't really suited for an NBA team.
So the question is, what on the tech side have we already built or could we build that helps them from a performance perspective, from a fan engagement perspective, from a scouting perspective. Those are some things we're looking at. But yeah. And then it's getting our baseball product into market. We built a really cool baseball product.
We can actually take a photograph of a paper scorebook and then just video of a baseball game. And we can create full custom highlights of every player. And like full electronic box scores and all this cool stuff, writeups of the game. But, we don't have a go to [00:56:00] market. We don't have an app, we don't have a gui.
We were doing that with a local partner that's in financial difficulty. So we're trying to think about who do we go to market with that, who wants to, who has a product already to do those things or could use one as well as, scaling the basketball and volleyball product and then thinking about the next sport.
So that's in the goal in the next year is start building out what the next sport will look like and scale that up a bit.
Jason Jacobs: So in, its in its fullest form. If you let your imagination run free and think like the the most ambitious version of what sports his can become, what does it look like?
Jason Syversen: Love that question. Yeah we're automating the infrastructure around sports, so I. There are no human scoreboard operators who are doing full ai autonomous scoreboard operation refs are automated with ai. So we'll probably start with one head ref and then could eliminate the other two refs with a couple of cameras, and then they get an iPad and we're calling the [00:57:00] game for them and they're just overruling or agreeing.
But eventually you're automating that whole process. Basically all the probably media production and recording of games all of those things are done with AI and software. So that way the only people who have to be on the out there are the fans enjoying the game and in person and the players and the coach doing their job.
But all the other components of putting on the business side of sports that we can automate that as much as possible with ai. So that market is huge. Groups like Three Step, they do 350,000 basketball games a year in their tournaments, and they're paying someone. $20 an hour, $20 a game to sit there.
You realize you're spending $7 million a year just on scoreboard operators. That's crazy. So you realize that those kind of opportunities are out there. And that's something we're pretty excited about tackling as part of the broader vision of what we're doing. We really wanna be that deep tech ai, computer vision company in sports.
So [00:58:00] wherever the hard problems are behind the scenes that help people have a better experience higher performance, faster learning per recruiting media, and then thinking about the business operations side, as we're trying to be strategic in which problems we solve that have the highest pain point in an addressable market.
But yeah, there's a lot of opportunities out there. So we're trying to stay focused and not take on too much, but it's exciting to think about the opportunities.
Jason Jacobs: Jason I know we're just over the hour mark. Would it be okay if we take a few minutes and switch gears and I get your feedback on something that I've been thinking about?
Jason Syversen: Sure. Absolutely.
Jason Jacobs: Great. I'm really glad to have that context and I think it's exciting what you're doing. As we talked in our initial discussion, I haven't anchored anywhere.
Cautious to anchor before I'm truly ready. So this is just ideating and brainstorming. I dunno if it's gonna go anywhere, but similar to you. I just stumbled upon this area because my kids are 13 and 10. My [00:59:00] 13-year-old specifically is playing sports pretty competitively.
He's a hockey kid. And him and the other kids that play at his level, they do a lot of extra stuff, right? So they'll do their club stuff, but then they'll go to skating edge work, skating. They'll do shooting, they'll do stuff in the gym. They'll do, sprinting or p trics or stretching and mobility.
They'll watch game footage. They'll like, they, they do a lot. It's an arms race of sorts for better or for worse. And as a family, you end up dragging the kid. All over town. It's expensive. It prices a lot of people out. Unfortunately and it's just a big wear and tear.
It's wear and tear on the kid. It's wear and tear on the parent and family. A lot of time in the car, sitting in traffic, a lot of costs, and there's a lot of this stuff. So one, like the experience is pretty disjoint. You go to different instructors for different things and at the end of the day, the coaches are great, but they don't have time to go and do a deep dive and watch all the game footage of each kid and give them personalized instruction.
Like you have to hunt and pack and like piece together. Like, how's my kid even [01:00:00] doing? Let alone, what should he do to improve? Just what's the baseline? What's he doing well, what's he not doing well? Et cetera. And and then as a, like as a parent, you spend a lot of time thinking about what are the things I.
My kid should work on. And so one of the things I've been thinking about is just if there were a system that was almost like a trainer in your pocket that understood how you were doing over time, maybe from ingesting video footage or whatever that could tee up what you should do each day.
And some of the stuff is stuff you can do at home. Some of the stuff might be stuff you do outside with experts, but has that holistic view and then it gets to know you over time. It gets to know like your game, what you're doing well, what you're not doing well, what you could work on. But it also gets to know like, how are you feeling?
What kind of training do you like to do? What do you wanna work on? And it just makes it fun. And so there's a single player mode, but also it can tell you like how you're doing versus others in your age group. Others that play at a similar level. Maybe there's some challenges you could do with your friends if you wanna make it like a team thing where you're training together and trying to one up each [01:01:00] other.
But almost a like Duolingo for youth sports skills training is the best way that I could describe it.
Jason Syversen: Yeah, I I remember you sharing that earlier. I think it's at the high level, I think it's a good like it fills a market need. One of the things I've learned about business is there are things that everyone would like, but sometimes we are blocked from getting to buy because the, there are other reasons.
Regulatory sustainable sustainability environmental, like capital requirements go to market, obstacles, things that just mean, even if it's a thing that most people are like yeah, I want that, but then the, you can't find something that has critical mass to make it happen. A good example I'm sure there's many, but I can just come to mind, is like voting, probably 98% of people you talk to.
Don't know most of the [01:02:00] people on a ballot, and if you ask them, Hey, would you like to know all the people on a ballot? And if they're like you and people you'd wanna vote for before you voted, they'd be like, yeah. Like you might even say, would you even pay a small amount of money for that? Or two bucks?
Or would you like the government to fund something where that's information is like standardized and available and sure. But no one has that, A bunch of companies have actually made those. But then when you realize like how people actually operate, most voters show up at the booth and they have no idea who 80% of the people are.
They just vote at the top of the ticket and they vote party line down, or just don't vote at all, or whatever. And it's why is that? And it ends up being this like tragedy of the commons economics incentive problem where yeah, there's a desire for that, but is it willingness to pay? Is there a business model for that to get to the fidelity of every state candidate, every race, every town race for these tech platforms to roll out?
Or to try to get people to put all their information in, but now there's a whole bunch of them. So the candidates are like, I don't want to spend days of my [01:03:00] life randomly going on those websites that almost no one uses 'cause the market's fractured and all these things. So there's all these challenges to doing that and I wonder if some of those might exist for you and they might not.
Duolingo obviously broke out of the, there's a lot of ways of learning languages and they managed to consolidate a lot of that market and become a brand that people go to. But there's a lot of training stuff out there for every sport and building something. 'cause you're not gonna do every sport at first.
You're gonna pick a sport and then you're gonna work on like expanding within that sport and then you're gonna take on a second sport and keep expanding. And there are tools by sport. Home court is one I know, 'cause I know basketball fairly well where you can. Go in your backyard and you can compete with other people, you can shoot hoops and it'll tell you how you're doing.
It'll give you a training regime. You can pay for a premium thing to gamify basketball training at a hoop or by yourself. Soccer's, there's all these like dribble [01:04:00] up in these app, balls you can get for dribbling a ball or dribbling a soccer ball and you buy a piece of hardware and they try to video game it and do other things with it.
And they've got some niche market traction and doing moderately well. So I think the hard part is, how do you separate yourself from the noise, be unique and compelling within that sport. And then how quickly can you expand to other sports to achieve that big vision? Duolingo, I think it's easier because once you have a library for a language, like adding other languages pretty quickly is not as hard.
But sports, part of the reason VCs don't like. When they don't like sports or what they struggle to invest in, in sports is the fractured nature of the market, right? Is and then the B2C side of what you're trying to do of try to like mass market, selling into fractured markets, that's a, is a hard problem.
So something I don't invest in a lot of cybersecurity companies, not because I don't like their business or the team, but if they [01:05:00] don't have, like they think it's the product, right? Oh, I have to solve this problem that people have. I'm like, it's not about solving the problem, it's about your go-to market strategy.
Because if the tree falling in the forest problem, if you build a cool technology and no one knows about it, why do I care as an investor? Like you have to have, you have to have an inventive go to market strategy on top of a product. I'm like, I'll just assume that your product does all the cool things you say it does.
Let's just start there. Let's assume it's magical and does these great things, convince me why I care, why people are gonna find out about you, why you're gonna buy it over everybody else, how much money they're gonna give you. That it's a scalable business and you can actually break out and grow. So those are the questions I'd have for you.
It's not so much, do the things you're saying make sense? Do parents want, do kids, are they addicted to video games? Absolutely. You would, parents and even some kids like to be more motivated to spend time on training and do that. Like absolutely. Do parents spend a lot of money on their kids' sports and Absolutely.
So like those [01:06:00] things are there, but the question is like, what sport are you gonna do? How are you gonna make it compelling? How are you gonna get enough people to find out about it? How are you gonna get to scale? How is it gonna separate from those? How are you gonna add all those other sports?
Those are the questions I have. And I'm not saying you can't do it, just that's where I would spend my time and energy trying to solve that part of the equation. Because I do think, like you said, you already hit some buzz buzzwords. If you gamify, you make it fun. Just not a given. But assuming you do those things and you're already aware of them, and I'm sure would do a great job at it.
Then the harder part is how do you get this thing not to be just a niche, one-off of many training tools, but something that really can get to dual lingo type scale. And I think it's doable, but I think that is the hard problem. And from my perspective, but obviously you did runkeeper, that's, that was a crowded sport, so I'm sure you learned some powerful lessons there to try to get to that kind of scale and exit.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, and I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I think that's all great advice and important stuff to think about. I think. [01:07:00] My, what my spidey sense is telling me is that is that if someone were able to build the brand that became the trusted brand, that if you're serious about your craft, like you are at a disadvantage if you don't use this thing.
Because they have their stuff together and it's industrial strength and it's well run and it works and it's reliable and it's, scientific, it's it's like they, it's they incorporate best practices from the best coaches with the best, with the best. He, fitness data, with the, that's age appropriate, that is tailored to the ability le like it's a, it's that's cognizant about overtraining.
Jason Syversen: fun. Fun
Jason Jacobs: What's that? Yeah. Yeah. And it's gotta be like it's have you tried it? Like it's unbelievable. Like I eat my vegetables, but they're delicious. Yeah. And it's do you know how hard it's to do that? It's yes, I know how hard it's to do that. Do I think that a big company could exist that's able to do that?
My spidey sense says that it [01:08:00] is, but that doesn't take away how hard it is. And that, I think that's, that's the challenge in consumer in general, right?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, a hundred percent. No, I agree with everything you said. I think it's possible. It's just going to be hard. There's some business you're like, oh, that's actually gonna just explode. And if you could do that, you look at like open ai, like I think they did no advertising and they just built this super cool LLM and put it on a little test site.
It was like they didn't have to do sales and marketing because people just heard about it. 'cause the product was that amazing. You look at a SpaceX, they had to sue the government to be able to bid on a contract, but if they, you invent the thing, sometimes that engineering mindset can be effective.
You if you just build a self-driving car, or you build an LLM that sounds like a human you're talking to, or you can build a ship that flies back and forth for a 10th of price. Like the go to market's pretty easy. You just, the scale is pretty easy. It just, you build the amazing thing and you gotta do a little work, but it just rocket ships off.
This isn't gonna be that this is, and that's good for you, right? Because your forte is [01:09:00] handling that B2C scalable business in that market. So you're gonna understand how to tackle all those challenges.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. And I don't look, yeah. Again, I don't know if I'm gonna do it. But yeah, no I'm grateful to talk about it and get your input and I think you while we have very, we're thinking about very different things, I think certainly there's some, I. Overlap and the experiences that you've had building sport vio or sports vio are quite relevant.
We're coming up on time. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I did? Or any parting words for listeners?
Jason Syversen: Yeah, I guess the only thing I would mention that I'm passionate about is entrepreneurship is a vehicle for societal good and impact. So I actually wrote a paper in the article in the New Hampshire Business Review about that topic. And, I think there's a false dichotomy in society between a do-gooder who, lives in a hot in Africa, helping.
People in a rural hot, village working for the Peace Corps, a missionary, or [01:10:00] you're rapacious venture capitalist, entrepreneur, doctor, lawyer, you just make a much money for yourself and your kids and their kids. And maybe you give a 10% penalty to your church or your local whatever, and you feel good about yourself.
But I, I don't think that those are the only paths. And I wanna encourage people to think about this middle ground of saying, look like I really do care about impact and making the world a better place, and I don't need to live on more than 200 grand a year, or 300 grand or 150, or whatever your magic number is in the us.
And like at that point, everything above that, you have a chance to be transformational and help, orphans in Haiti or people starving in, Sudan or people affected by war or refugees or rape victims or whatever. And actually do something meaningful in the world. And you get to do the things you love and are good at.
And be a doctor lawyer in venture, entrepreneur, investor, and use those resources to drive capital into high impact causes aggressively, not 5% or 1%. I think the average [01:11:00] giving in the US is two and a half percent or something. But give 50%, give 70%. But the giving pledge, the billionaires do of 50% is not exclusive to billionaires, but I'm pretty sure if you're a sent a millionaire, you have a hundred million dollars.
You could also sign that and I would bet even a deck a millionaire, you could do that. So if for those of us that are in positions where you're making six figures and potentially building businesses, or are having outcomes that could produce seven or eight or nine digit outcomes, to really think strategically about that and do it early, right?
Because if you give that before an exit, you don't pay taxes on all those. On those gifts, you can give a hundred percent of that stuff to charity and identify the causes that you care about, where you can help the world be a better place. And then using our careers as a way to have impact is something that, I love talking about, and I just don't feel like others talk about very much because they, you feel like there's this bifurcation.
But I think and particularly I find folks that feel like they have to go down impact. So they have to go work for a nonprofit. I'm like, Hey, [01:12:00] if you care about impact, there are other ways. Do this thing that creates a ton of value in the world and use the value that's created by this endeavor you're pursuing and then drive those resources into helping other people that might work on the putting you into the spear, helping others is a career path that I think more should consider.
Jason Jacobs: I think that's great. Yeah. And I don't know if this exists, but I think for people that find themselves in that position and are motivated to try to figure that out, I think just having resources about like how do you get started and how should it be structured and. How, like what percentage should you give so that you can keep giving in an enduring way and how to assess that the, that it's going to good and what vehicles should you be using and and
Jason Syversen: a lot of time on all that stuff, so if anyone's interested, happy to chat. There's a bunch of groups out there. I've organized some dinners, I've connected folks to other groups, and there's mentors, there's organizations that help, but it is, it's a whole process. I spent a couple of years like digging into that stuff after I sold Siege and [01:13:00] before.
So yeah, I've learned a lot. Happy to share what I know and would love to learn from others that, that have some insights as well.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Jason, this was a really terrific discussion. I'm really excited about what you're building at SportsVisio. I look forward to watching your progress. I'm excited also about some of the stuff you were just talking about in terms of just, putting your capitalism to work for good.
And excited to continue the dialogue as well. And to the extent I can be helpful at all on the sports physio journey, reach out and I'll keep you posted on my stuff as well, and I appreciate the feedback on it.
Jason Syversen: Sounds great. Nice. Nice talking to you again, Jason, and look forward to talking again soon.
Jason Jacobs: Sounds good.
Thank you for tuning into The Next Next. If you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player in addition to the podcast. Which typically publishes weekly. There's also a weekly newsletter on Substack at the next next.substack.com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground I'm covering, areas I'm tackling next, and where I could use some help as well.
And it's a [01:14:00] great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.