Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC - Mike Zisman

Nathan Latka: Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4200 to back into a revenue range that

Mike Zissman: would get you to about two thirds of our revenue. It's a good deal. More than the 44 million it's been. Company's been profitable since 2017. We have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised. 14 million in cash. Like, what the hell are we doing sitting on 14 million in cash? I can fund acquisitions. We've done 10 acquisitions.

Nathan Latka: What was your first year where you broke a million of revenue?

Mike Zissman: It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years to get to 50 million.

Nathan Latka: If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be esop or employee owned?

Mike Zissman: Almost 80%. Including. Including me and the other executives.

Nathan Latka: If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million, all cash up front, to sell the business. Do you sell? Hey, folks, my guest today is Mike Zissman. He's the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, launched back in 2009. He is a serial entrepreneur. Mike, I don't want to age you here, but first company back in 1979, formal faculty at MIT, over 40 years of experience building software companies. Mike, you ready to take us to the top?

Mike Zissman: I am. Great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me.

Nathan Latka: You bet. Uh, tell us more about what you're selling at Golf Genius, then we'll go back and get your backstory. Sure.

Mike Zissman: So Golf Genius Genius is the leading provider of tournament software to golf clubs, Private clubs, public courses, tours, associations. We provide sort of the very high end software for, you know, creating tournaments, doing registration, payment processing, live leaderboards, uh, broadcast feeds where we're working with, um, you know, like PGA or USGA tournaments. So it's a very deep product for providing the capabilities that golf professionals need. Typically our end user is a PGA golf professional in a private club or a public facility.

Nathan Latka: And is the group at the private facility, is that the owner of the facility or it's a player at the facility? Probably the owner.

Mike Zissman: Right? No. So you think about a club I belong to, Marion Golf Club. Right. It's a member owned club. We have a golf staff, uh, typically a head golf professional, assistant golf professionals. Our user is that director of golf or assistant golf professional. But we're really B2B2C Nathan, in a sense that all the live scoring is done by the players at that club using our live scoring app. So we provide software for the pro to set up the tournament. They say, hey, let's go. Then the players themselves are typically using our mobile app to actually do the scoring. The beauty is when the last guy walks off the course, click a button to resolve ties. We know what all the results of the tournament are, and it may have been, you know, many different tournaments all going on at the same time.

Nathan Latka: So just to put that on in a sentence, you're selling to the director of golf when they have a tournament, they're emailing all the players saying, download the mobile app before we start, correct?

Mike Zissman: Exactly. Most of them already have. And I mean millions of people at this point have our mobile app. So typically they. I don't have to but say at a charity tournament. You're absolutely right. There's people show up to play the charity tournament, they'll literally get something that says, download this app. We don't make them register. They're going to have a six character ID and they enter that ID and you know, they're scoring.

Nathan Latka: Very cool. Help me understand how you've thought about pricing, then we'll get the backstory here. What's the average director of golf paying you for the software?

Mike Zissman: So our list price, which we stick very close to at a private club today, is about $4,200 per year for essentially unlimited use of the product for up to, uh, two 18 whole golf facilities. So if you're a Pinehurst with seven different courses, that's all custom price. But it's actually, as I like to say, every business is price times quantity, P times Q. You learn in Economics one, we're relatively low, P high Q high quantity. We're in 11,000 courses, so we're pretty. Plus we do lots of other things. But it's certainly the most inexpensive software that club will have because they also need software to, you know, do their point of sale, to manage their T sheet, to do their website, to do member billing and things like that.

Nathan Latka: Give me the backstory here. How do you go from MIT IT professor to golf guy?

Mike Zissman: Well, I always love software. I think my happiest days were programming. They're still my happiest days. I don't do it anymore. Uh, I love coding. It just, it's magical for me. I think when some people appreciate a great poem, I appreciate great code. So I've always loved program. Very technical. As soon as I got to mit, I realized I did not want to be an academic, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I was there for two years, moved back to Philadelphia, where I was from. I went to graduate school, started the first company, Soft Switch, which was in the communication software business. It was very low Level communication software sold to, you know, Fortune 500 companies that was acquired by Lotus Development in 1994. And uh, then lo and behold, 11 months later, IBM came along and acquired Lotus. So in 11 months I went from a company of 450 people, my company, to Lotus, which was 6,000, to IBM, which was a quarter million. They were different. Trust me, they were different. Not, not good versus bad. Because it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have a quarter million people, you know, trying to do something. And I stayed at IBM for a while. I worked with Lou Ger, who was a just fantastic CEO. Uh, turned, he turned around IBM. Absolutely. And then that kind of ran its course, uh, and left IBM in 07. You know, I really don't want to retire. I love what I do. And I was always the guy organizing the buddy golf trip. You know, 12 guys go off some place to play golf. We're still service it. It's a small market, very price sensitive market, uh, and move from that to golf leagues, right? And so instead of 12 guys playing six rounds of golf, you got, you know, 60 guys playing 20 rounds of golf and then move from that to selling to clubs. But the real break for us and company, I often say if an entrepreneur tells you luck wasn't part of a success, they don't know what they're talking about. You know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. But you need some luck. And in our case it was building a relationship with the USGA to replace their tournament management system with ours, which really put the company in a whole different trajectory.

Nathan Latka: What year was that?

Mike Zissman: That was 2016. So it started in 2009, as I like to say, we wandered in the desert. Entrepreneurs wander in the desert till you, uh, today we say product market fit. You know, do you have a product market fit? And we went from buddy trips to leagues servicing clubs and then, you know, really enter a relationship with the USGA to do tournament management. And then they came back in 2019 and said, hey, we also want you to build the new handicap system. There was a new worldwide standard for handicapping and we want you to build that and operate it. It's probably the largest pure play golf software company in the industry.

Nathan Latka: Measured by revenue or something else?

Mike Zissman: Revenue measured by revenue.

Nathan Latka: Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4200 to back into a revenue range?

Mike Zissman: No. That would get you to about two thirds of our revenue. But then we do all the handic. We also have other products. You know, we go to a golf pro. It's a classic suite Like I grew up in the days of Microsoft Office Smart Suite. We go to a pro at a club and say, look, you spend your time doing three things. You run tournaments, you run a golf shop, just a physical golf shop, a retail, and you do teaching and coaching. We have four software products that do all those things. We're very, very focused on coaching. And so we can sell an entire suite to that club. More than just handicapped. So when you roll it all up, it's a good deal more than, uh, the 44 million.

Nathan Latka: It's been.

Mike Zissman: Company's been profitable since 2017. I'd like to say we have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised, literally.

Nathan Latka: How much have you raised?

Mike Zissman: 11 million. That's all?

Nathan Latka: That's all. So as a capital allocator, you're just sitting on these profits now. You have over 11 million cash sitting in your bank today. What do you do with that? How do you think about reinvesting it?

Mike Zissman: That's a very good question. And I had that conversation with someone today. It's actually 14 million in cash. Like, what the hell are we doing sitting on 14 million in cash? It can fund acquisitions. We've done 10 acquisitions. And right now, you know, my view as an entrepreneur at our stage is there's always, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with rule of 40, right? Revenue growth plus profit margin. But there's a strong bias towards growth. If you want to get really good multiples, you got to be growing. I mean, people don't pay high multiples for companies that are just flat. They'll pay six or seven times cash flow. Right? And so, you know, we are very focused on growth and investing into it. So my view is, I've never believed in, you know, growth at all costs. Losing money. It's very hard to make the transition from losing money to making money. And you're, you know, the fuse is on. If you keep losing money, you know, eventually you burned out and, you know, bad stuff can happen. So my strategy is earn 20% and invest the rest. So we consistently earn about 20%, EBITDA, um, margin. Invest the rest.

Nathan Latka: Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, @founderpath.com if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check, because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up@founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com so you get going in 2009. What was your first year, uh, where you broke a million of revenue?

Mike Zissman: It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years to get to 50 million. And I look at SaaS, you know, when you're selling SaaS subscriptions back then it was like 2,500 a pop. You got to sell a lot of subscriptions. It took a while. Uh, funded the company m personally from 209 to 2020. I find I funded the company with about $10 million. My own money mostly is debt. What I love about our company is most of the stock is owned by employees very widely.

Nathan Latka: How much? If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP or employee owned?

Mike Zissman: It's not an ESOP, but it's. It's profit. Not counting. Well, almost 80%. Including me and the other executives. Yeah, because we raised so little money. We only raised 11 million bucks.

Nathan Latka: Okay, that's including you though. You plus employees.

Mike Zissman: That's including me. But if I take away the really senior people, it's still 60%. My biggest thrill, I tell people, honest to God, I will measure the success of this company by how many of our employees make a significant amount of money when we sell, when we exit. Or do a recap to me. I was successful in my first company. I didn't. Wasn't really focused on the money. So I was able to spread the equity out quite widely. And you know, we have people, you know, who joined us in 2010 and got what were significant slugs of stock because it was, you know, not worth very much. And, uh, we have incredible retention because of it. We have over. We probably have 6, 7% attrition, including in Romania for developers. I like that people, I say, well, it's either because they really like me or they own a lot of stock. I'm not sure which.

Nathan Latka: They tend to go together, don't they?

Mike Zissman: Maybe. But to me, I want to make sure my philosophy of company is we're all in this together. I like to say, I couldn't build a company with 300 Mike Sissman at different skills. I couldn't build a company with 300 Alex's who runs development. What I love about an entrepreneurial company is bringing together a bunch of people with different skills. To accomplish something none of them could accomplish on their own. That's what a company is about. Can you bring together a set of skills, marketing skills, sales skills, finance skills, development skills, support skills, to accomplish something together as a team that none of us accomplish on our own? To me, that's where the juice is in being an entrepreneur.

Nathan Latka: So just to summarize, that cap table, which I'm so impressed by, again, we'll take 100%, subtract down 20, about 20%, which investors own. Employees, including you, own 80%. But even when you take out Mike, you plus other senior folks, all the other employees still own about 60%. So you and seniors own about 20%.

Mike Zissman: Yeah, well, that's probably not quite right. Let's say me and the other seniors own 30%, 40% still. It's. It's a lot.

Nathan Latka: Same concept.

Mike Zissman: Yeah.

Nathan Latka: A lot of employee ownership. That's awesome.

Mike Zissman: Yeah, it's a. Um. To me, it's. What's very gratifying is that, you know, and so we're all, you know, as I like to say, we're all pulling on the same side of the rope. We all have the same motivations. We're always.

Nathan Latka: I always joke, Mike. I say. So just to summarize again, you said it took you eight years to get a million, another eight to break 50 million. That will put you at 1 million ARR. In 2017. About 50 million is where you wrapped up 2025.

Mike Zissman: A little more than that. Yeah, more like 50, 53.

Nathan Latka: And what do you think you'll break at the end of 2026?

Mike Zissman: Our plan right now is a little over 60.

Nathan Latka: Okay. So that plus your profit margin, you still think you can hit the rule of 40?

Mike Zissman: We will not hit the rule of 40 this year. Our growth is to get bigger and bigger. It's harder and harder. If you look at SaaS companies, it's fascinating. It makes perfect sense. If you look at SaaS companies, as the companies have got larger, the growth rate's gone down.

Nathan Latka: But I see sort of three phases. With your acquisition strategy. In 2020, you were rolling up sort of legacy desktop tools to lock in supply courses and tournaments.

Mike Zissman: Yes.

Nathan Latka: 20 provided a very simple increase, I think, probably in recurring usage. And then 2024, you got really aggressive with consumer and mobile GPS apps, coaching and data. Please correct me if your strategy was different than that, but if that is accurate, why that pattern?

Mike Zissman: Well, so, you know, when we came into the market and really started selling to clubs in 2014, as I said, when you do an acquisition, it's some combination of technology or product talent and customers. The best acquisitions are all three. Some of them is just buying customers. So our first goal was let's go get those customers. We had no interest whatsoever in their old desktop software, but we acquired a whole bunch of customers. And then after that was really an aqua hire, a guy who wanted to be in the business. It was clear, like, just come join up with us. And then we acquired a few other firms. And then, you know, in 2023 we made the strategic decision. It was important to expand from B2B selling the clubs to B2C selling directly to golfers. It's a lot more golfers than clubs. Right. And so, you know, we entered that market with two acquisitions, you know, Golf Shot and Swing U that have been able to put them together. We run them as separate brands. Right. So it's a house of brand strategy, if you will. Most of the companies we've acquired, we've kept their brands because they had brand equity. Disappointment to me in 2025 was they didn't do any acquisitions. And we looked at some, but we couldn't get together on, on price. I think things are probably getting, you know, a little more reasonable now and kind of what I, I mean I, I acquired my first company in 1984. So I've been on both sides of the table many, many times and hope to do some.

Nathan Latka: This is why I want to dive deep on this. I mean we're, you're glazing over it, but this is something I want younger entrepreneurs to learn. I'm um, like, this is why I love doing this show, right? Because if I ask my audience, just guest revenue, with all due respect, like it's not sexy web 2.0, uh, it's none of that. And the reason is because you've got all these other go to market motions that are really sexy. 8 million user mobile apps for consumers and sort of other things. But 60 north of, you know, approaching 60 million bucks of revenue here is obviously an impressive story. How do you think about sort of your legacy, right? If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million, all cash upfront to sell the business, do you sell?

Mike Zissman: Would you?

Nathan Latka: Well, you're growing from 50 to 60 million year over year. You're printing cash flow, I don't know your personal life situation. You have employees that have been on the cap table, potentially some of them for north of 10 years. I don't know if you've offered them liquidity in the past with the raises that you've done. If you haven't, it could be an opportunity to do that.

Mike Zissman: Yeah, we do. So it's something. Look, you have to think about. You have to do what's best for your shareholders. But, uh, you know, and people like me, who you, uh, know have been at this for a long time, but, you know, right now, you know, we're very, very excited about our prospects. I'm, um, I'm. Like I told someone the other day, I'm more juiced up than I've been in years. I look at all this AI stuff. I'm a geek.

Nathan Latka: It's great. I want to see more entrepreneurs build their company in a profitable way where they keep full control. I. You are the definition of that now. Everyone is not as wealthy as you are. When they launched their company, right. You already had success. But there's still some good lessons here. I want to round out that employee sort of liquidity offering for a second. If they joined in 2010, I'm m making these numbers up, okay, at a dollar exercise price. And your most recent 409, A. Let's just make it up, was 10 bucks. And let's say I've got a thousand shares. There's some town in Romania that you're making very rich. Everyone's. The real estate market's going up. All these people, these hundreds of these dozens of engineers, you're just making very rich, which is great.

Mike Zissman: Something you'll find this hard to believe, Nathan, includes roman. There are 2300 software companies all over Romania, just in Romania, in the town of Cluj. Just think about. Cluj is the Silicon Valley of Romania. So you have Bucharest in the south. Cluj is the kind of the university center. It's where many of the universities are, uh, an enormous number of, you know, outsourcing firms and things like that. And so we're able to still maintain, you know, very high retention. One other thing I would say is at 300 people, we're still totally virtual. We have no offices. You know, I just think, you know, to me it's, uh, it's one big team.

Nathan Latka: We're.

Mike Zissman: We're all in it together.

Nathan Latka: Yeah. Well, I'm predicting sometime in the next six months I'm going to read a headline like Susquehanna or Main Sale has come in and, you know, bought a 30% sort of minority stake for whatever, 200 million bucks, and you're going to keep control. And then they're going to say, michael, you've bought. Mike, you bought 10 million. You've, ah, bought 10 companies today. I need you to buy 10 per year going forward because that's the private equity playbook and we'll see what you do.

Mike Zissman: That is the playbook. And you know, fortunately, when I sold my first company to Lotus, the venture capital firms that had financed Soft Switch invited me to become a limited partner in their firms. So I've been a limited partner in venture capital and private equity firms for like 25 years. And so I know the drill, I know the model. I've been on both sides of the table. And yes, I mean, the big PE firms want you to be a platform and an aggregator. We are a platform. I mean, we have over 100 companies interface to our software through our APIs. And you know, I just see, really just keep doing what we're doing. What you have to focus on as an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is growth. Profitable growth. Right. And because if you want to get real multiples, someone has to believe the growth is there. Right? Have to believe the growth is there. And so you really, in our case, we have four areas of growth. This is what I focus on, is, okay, what are we doing in each of these areas every day to drive growth? You know, one is our private club space. We're very dominant. One is public courses, one is international, where although we're in 62 countries, it's uh, hand to hand combat in each of these countries. They're all different and it's a struggle. And then we have some other, I wouldn't call them moonshot by any stretch, but really interest things we're doing that we'll be introducing in the next year. But how, how are we growing? Where's the growth come from?

Nathan Latka: Well, Mike, if people want to follow your story after they're done listening to this interview, where can they find you online?

Mike Zissman: I'm Mike golfgenius.com or I'm on LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka: Guys, there you have it. He had a lot of success in the 90s at his first company, ultimately in 2009. You know, he was sick of his golf buddies complaining after work trips if they got stuck playing with the annoying guy and they wanted to play with

Mike Zissman: no one like playing with Nathan.

Nathan Latka: No one liked playing with Nathan. No one liked playing. No one liked playing with Nathan. They all wanted to play with Mike. So he said, you might want to do something about this. His first customers were his golf buddies back then in 2014 he started selling to courses and a big contract in 202016 got going with the US GA he's now handling the full handicapping algorithm. PG of America, etc. Profitable in a million bucks of revenue in 2017. By 2020, it obviously scaled self funded. 10 million of his own money. Did over 10 acquisitions last year. In 2025, broke 50 million of revenue. Now today recording here in March of 2026. 14 million cash in the bank. 20% EBITDA margins. 300 folks full time including a massive team include Romania. 50% of the team are engineers. They're targeting over 60 million of ARR this year as they continue to scale again. 11,000 clubs across. He's using them. On average he bills 4200 per year plus sell some other things on the side. And he gives back to his employees. They're all invested. Cap table today is roughly 50% of it goes to his employees. 20% are to investors. And the other 30% roughly to Mike and his senior folks. Mike, what a story.

Mike Zissman: You did a better job summarizing the company than I could. You want to come work for us?

Nathan Latka: I appreciate you. This was great. Thanks for taking us to the top.

Mike Zissman: Take care. Bye.

Nathan Latka: You won't believe this. CEOs revenue. Click here to watch the next episode. Right now.