Episode 433: Roy Hotrabhvanon - CEO & Co-Founder, PlayerData

Speaker A: Greetings.

Speaker B: I'm Keith Klein, the host of the

Speaker A: Venture Fizz podcast where I interview the most fascinating people in the tech scene. This is episode 433 and today's guest is Roy Hachabhavanan, CEO and co founder of Player Data. Some companies seem like they were just meant to happen, which is certainly the case for Player Data. Back in 2016, Roy was on track to compete in the Rio Olympics for archery when a severe car accident completely derailed his plans. But instead of letting that tragic incident define him, Roy picked himself up and built a tech company around the specialized performance tracking tools he had originally hacked together to train his own body. He was using sensors and data to optimize his performance, which certainly was not common practice back then. His firsthand experience seeing what hardware, software and data could do for athletes sparked the foundation for Player Data. And his timing turned out to be absolutely perfect. Fast Forward Player Data helps athletes at every stage of their game build confidence, stay healthy and work smarter with the company's world class performance tracking technology. The company recently announced a $12 million round of funding from Kevin Durant's 35v Tennis Australia, Darko Capital and Pentland Ventures. And what is also really, really exciting is they announced the move of their US headquarters from Philadelphia to Boston. As you'll hear from this interview, Player Data is relentlessly innovating. In addition to their core wearable tracking platform, they recently partnered with Mitre to launch the world's first GPS enabled Conn, which is FIFA certified. Now coaches, trainers and athletes have even more data to optimize training and performance. In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of great topics, including a discussion on, um, what it takes to raise capital and build a startup in the sports tech industry. Roy's background story growing up in Thailand with entrepreneurial parents, his discovery of the sport of archery and how it forged his competitive drive Meeting Hayden Ball, his co founder and cto. Plus stories of the early days of Player Data's first generation products. All the latest at Player Data, including how some key early tech decisions help them prepare for the AI era, why they chose Boston as their US headquarters, and so much more. Okay, quick side note. Is your company hiring? If the answer is yes, then it is very important for you to understand what the journey of a job seeker looks like these days because it has changed drastically. They are now spending lots of time asking gen AI platforms like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini deep questions about your company, your leadership and cultural values. So in this AI driven era, do you actually have a Dedicated content strategy optimized for aeo. That's answer engine optimization. The good news is that we can help. A subscription to Venture Fizz includes a custom content video playbook specifically built to answer these questions and share all the details about your organization as told directly from the employees who work there. Reach out to info adventurephys.com to learn more about. All right, without further ado, here's my interview with Roy.

Speaker B: Roy, thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker C: Really great to be here.

Speaker B: All right, Roy, I'm excited to talk to you because I think this podcast interview, it was just almost destiny. So I was at this great organization, uh, that's called Sports Business Leaders. It's an organization that brings together like minded people in the sports industry for events. And there's a podcast, the founder, who I know well, has done an extraordinary job building out this community. So I was at the event and I met uh, this woman, Jessica, who is part of your company. And uh, she was talking to me and I was actually at the uh, Philly meeting and she said, hey, we just opened up uh, our US office here in Boston. And I was like, wait, that's what Venture Fizz does? We support Boston tech companies. Uh, so that was kind of interesting. So we agreed to do this podcast. As we're scheduling the podcast, my daughter who plays field hockey for Providence College tells me they just recently implemented Player Data to track their activities in terms of the day to day training and game performance. And I was like, wait, I'm actually interviewing the founder CEO of Player Data. This is super exciting. Um, so we're going to talk a lot about your company and what you've been building, your background story. But I just noticed you announced a series A round of funding, so congratulations. But I wanted to talk to you about, you know, uh, raising capital for a hardware software company in the sports industry. Right. Those are three things that are make it more complex and you know, there's a lot of capital involved in building the type of company that you've built. So I just wanted to talk to you about the fundraise and kind of what that process was like.

Speaker C: Yeah, you know, we're first off, you know, we're very, very fortunate to have a great, incredible set of investors, um, uh, that understand our mission, that believe in our vision, believe, uh, in our vision, and uh, willing to back us to achieve that. You're right. Uh, being a hardware company, uh, makes it a degree harder. Being in sports also makes a degree harder. And you add that all up, um, um, it becomes even More difficult. But fundamentally what we've seen is that if you have, uh, investors that share the same values and believe in the mission and um, you can demonstrate a clear need for the capital, how we're going to deploy it, how we're going to use it to grow, what the TAM is, what they teach you when you're raising money, the core fundamentals, the, uh, process becomes a little bit easier to do. And that's what we're really. We've been building out. We spent the last few, uh, years, especially in the US Building, um, out is when we entered the US Market, learning about the markets, getting early data points, showing trends, building that, um, and even more so on the hardware side.

Speaker B: Well, I think the timing of your platform and we're going to talk about AI and everything that's coming along with it, uh, and the, you know, focus on performance and using data to make better decisions around recovery. Like there's so much going into athletic performance now. So the timing and the history is also, I think, really important that we're going to talk about too. Now one of the things about player data like this was your Series A yet Series something, A, B, C, D. You know, like there's seed, uh, rounds now that are like $100 million in funding. I think those letters don't always match up because this wasn't necessarily the first round of funding that you've raised where one would imply Series A maybe could be after seed or pre seed. Right. But, uh, there's other rounds that have been raised in the past.

Speaker C: Yeah, we've done several rounds. I mean we started in 2017. Very, very small. First check in was under $200,000. Uh, and then that, that lasted us a few years. I think that would be pre, pre, pre seed. Um, but, uh, you know, we're at Series A now. It's more, it's the. Let kind of the stage we're at, the rate that we're growing, uh, you know, where we are. So from a U.S. perspective, uh, and from a global perspective.

Speaker B: All right, well, your background story ties into your company perfectly. So let's talk about your background. So where did you grow up? What were you like as a child?

Speaker C: Um, I grew up in Thailand. Um, so I, So my parents are both, uh, business owners, I guess you could say. Uh, they're both entrepreneurs. Um, so my childhood was essentially sort of sitting in, you know, spent at their work, ah, at uh, at their business. They're, they, they are, ah, they are, they were jewelers. Um, so they basically my, uh, dad Moved over from the UK when he was ah, when he was young, set up a jewelry business, taught himself how to make jewelry, built a factory. And I basically grew up in that factory. Um, and um, my childhood was essentially dominated by sort of going to school, going to factory, learning from my dad, fixing. And I got into computers. The techie side of me got into computers because someone had to fix all his tech and all his computers and I was the designee to, to do that. Um, and then when I was 16, moved out of the UK to study um, uh, and then went to university in Edinburgh where kind of like the player data journey really started. Growing up I didn't have a chance to do sports. Um, it wasn't really sort of part of the culture and Thailand is very academic focused. Um, but when I was in Edinburgh I picked up archery and, and absolutely fell in love with it. Um, realized that I was deeply competitive and because I was doing my CS degree at the time I was like okay, maybe I can do something here and uh, build something to help me get better. So I started playing around with sensors put on my body, collected a ton of data and started to build a system to coach myself. Um, and uh, that went remarkably well for me. I went from beginner to Olympic level, uh, in a few um, and I was on track to go to Rio 2016 for Thailand, um, hadn't it been for an unfortunate car accident, uh, a month before the Olympics. And uh, that is kind of like the origin story of player data which

Speaker B: is fascinating because this was like 2012ish timeframe, correct?

Speaker C: Yeah, 2012 I went to uni. 2016 was when sort of went through my degree and you know that that was the Olympics I was working towards. And at that point, um, 2016 I went, okay, I'm not going to wait another four years for the Olympics. What can I do now? I just finished my degree, I didn't have a job. I wanted to do something and I knew that I want to do something with a tech. I built and decided uh, to build player data, um, with my co founder Hayden, um, to basically on the mission to, to give people the ability to have the same journey. I did take elite level tech and bring it to everybody. And it just happens that uh, the biggest market in the world and we were in Scotland is global football, soccer and that's where we started.

Speaker B: How'd you meet Hayden? Was that in university?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, uh, we met during uh, uni. We were doing the same degree, computer, um, science and electronics. It was a Niche course. There was about 10 of us in total on it. And yeah, we just became friends through that.

Speaker B: So this is interviews that I love to have because over that four year stretch, 2012 to 2016, you built something right, that was based on your own personal use case that addresses obviously a bigger market. But at the time you're like, I want to build this for myself. So it would be fascinating to actually like, like what were you starting to track early on in these early prototypes that you didn't even know you were going to end up building into a company?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think um, the concept that I was playing around with at the time was that um, it was that given uh, enough data, uh, and given enough uh, training, I could build a model that would give me feedback that it was specific to me, that taught me, you know, because, you know like one of the great things about archery is that it's like a, it's a very sort of like the outcome is very defined. You shoot the arrow and it goes into a, you uh, get a score immediately. So what you can actually do is you measure everything about your biomechanics of going in and then comparing to what going out. You can actually spot trends of, hey, this is what happens when your, your body is in this position and does this when it's a 10. Um, so you know, there basically I just built something that let me optimize it and find what made me tick and me specifically. And that's what a good coach would typically do for you. Uh, um, I just hacked uh, my way around it,

Speaker B: but it's an amazing uh, background story. And then you know, um, on the Olympic path and then the car accident happened. So that must have been deeply disappointing. But to take something instead, build into a company, obviously must be incredibly satisfying.

Speaker C: Yeah, it was. Um, look, it's like things happen for a reason. Uh, I think decided to sort of make the jump to Bill Playerdata off the back of that. And really uh, looking at hindsight, just the incredible journey that we've been on and what we've been able to do with it is just. Yeah, okay.

Speaker B: So the early days of player data, you're like, okay, we're going to build a company and um, you know, we've got Global football or American soccer, however you want to phrase it. How did you get started? Like again we're talking like you were doing this for your own personal use case. Now we're going to build something that's going to be used by others athletes. There's a lot involved in what you do. So what was the first kind of generation of products? What did those look like?

Speaker C: So look, I think truly the archery, the first product that we wanted to build was kind of like, uh, was a motion capture suit. So it was basically, uh, a top and some trousers just mainly focused on the top that had little sensors built into the clothing itself that basically would measure your full sort of, uh, upper body posture. Um, and, uh, using that, we could apply it to, uh, team sports, individual sports, think like golf, tennis, like anything that, you know, with a repetitive motion or something you want to train. Um, when building it out, we went, okay, look, you know, we, you know, we're putting sensors in clothing. People are not going to want to wear the same shirt over and over again. We have to split out the product. So we put all the expensive stuff in a little puck that sat on the back as like the main brains. And then we put all the cheap, like the sensors in the shirt so people could swap, click in and swap out kind of like the razor and blade model in, uh, sports. And, uh, we built that out and, uh, the University of Edinburgh ladies, um, rugby team reached out to us and said, hey, we've been having you guys, we heard that you guys are fairly technical, um, working on this project. We're having problems with our GPS tracking solution right now. Um, so I turn up to a training session. They show me what they have, like a pile of USB cables, these tracking trackers that don't work. And then they told me how much they pay for it. It's like $5,000 a year at the time. And I went, holy, holy crap. This is a lot of money for something that's really hard to use. It doesn't work. So I went, okay, well, you don't need the tops. We'll just sell you the little, the control modules, just the brains, because that's all you need. And we'll sell you 20 of them. And we built some software for them, for them to track and give them all the metrics. And we made up a price. And here you go, Ah, uh, this is your solution. And then, um, about two weeks later, we got a call from, I think it was Scottish hockey and went, hey, um, we heard that you're the GPS company selling, uh, selling GPS wearables. Can we get a set as well? And it went, uh, okay, you know, we're trying to build these full suits, like, okay, another 20 sets. No suits, we'll just sell, sell another 20 sets to make another 20 sets for them. And then, you know, when Your investors hear that you've made money off something, you know, all bets are off.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Go make that right.

Speaker B: Product, market, fit. Yes.

Speaker C: Um, and, you know, through word of mouth, you know, that's how it was for the first year. It's like, hey, we heard you have this thing. And we heard great things. It's, you know, you're a GPS company. Can we get 10, please? Can we get 15? And we naturally expanded around Scotland through word of mouth alone, off that. And we quickly sort of. Whilst Hayden and I were trying to build this full suit, you know, the full. Sort of like the dream, uh, we ended up, um, following, you know, building out what the market actually told us what they wanted.

Speaker B: Can I deviate for a second about the suit? Meaning my question is, does one exist for golf? Okay, so when you're talking about archery, I guess, you know, posture would be so important. Right. And consistency of everything that you do, repetitive motion. Same thing with golf. When I think of my swing and how terrible it is, yet it's the same swing almost every time. Right. Like, there's, you know, shaft lean and everything. Uh, but is there something that is a training aid that's like that type of mechanism that would just be like, you gotta sit in this posture every time. Keith, stop moving around while you're training aid.

Speaker C: Well, as far as I know, and I do check periodically, nothing like that exists still. But at this point, it's gonna have to be a different company that we built to do that. Exactly.

Speaker B: We've moved beyond that. I was just curious, because I'm like, yeah, because as soon as you start talking about posture, I was like, this sounds like it would be good for golf. Uh, so anyways, okay, back to player data. Um, okay, so you're building software. You got to build hardware. There's. And from what I. In my research, you love hardware. Like, you're in the weeds even today. Building hardware. Hardware's, um, hard, Right? This is always that phrase, and then you gotta have manufacturing. Right. So how did you go about building something that, you know, once you went into this direction? Right. How did you go about building the sensor, you know, that was on the back to, um, you know, manufacturing it and making sure it was working properly?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. Hardware is hard. And, um, look, you know, I think the lesson that we learned on hardware that just continues to sort of pay dividends every day is that we didn't have any prior experience in it, and we didn't have any biases, so we didn't know what the industry way of doing stuff is um, so when we went to make our first hardware, we went to a consultancy and we went, hey guys, look, we have this idea, we want to make this. And they told me, they came back to me and said, okay, it's gonna be $5,000 and it's gonna take us a month to do. And I went, I don't have $5,000 and I don't have a month. Like this is crazy, I have to do something else. So I just went onto Google and started learning about uh, hardware, how to make, make, make stuff. You know, what are all the key bits, what can we do in house? And we started, what we worked out really, really quick early on was that um, we can, uh, there was a couple bits of the supply chain at a time for hardware around PCBs that were really, really commoditized. So you can create a design, you can get it uh, made in Asia and then it gets to you within like two days and then you can assemble it up and test it. Uh, and I realized that, what we realized at that time was that because it was so cheap and so quick to do that if we did all the rest of the assembly in house, we could take a fail fast approach to hardware. Which means as like every week we could try something which is actually unheard of in traditional hardware. Um, and that's kind of how we learned how to do hardware from day one. It was part of our process. Every week there was a new design, we just tweaked, we make some fixes, we got in our hands, we tried it out, we took out our customers to try it, we got feedback, we made tweaks and we got a new version the next day. And that's how we really quickly iterated. So we had like 50, 60 different prototypes, uh, iterating. Um, and then once we sort of started to converge on a happy point and things were developed and things were stable, uh, we also realized that if we made small investments, uh, and it was like small investment at the time was like $5,000, we buy some machines so that we can actually speed up that assembly step and do that in house and do sort of really, really low volume manufacturing in house. Uh, so we did that for a bit and we did that for maybe our first sort of 30, 40 clients as we made everything in house, uh, from scratch. We'll get the PCBs, we'll get all the components, we'll assemble them, we'll touch them up and put them together. Um, and what that taught us was that one that gave us flexibility to try different things and be really uh, fast moving. But the second thing it taught us is that because we're doing everything in house, we had to make it as easy as possible to make the actual product. So when we went, when we were ready to go, when we exceeded our in house manufacturing capability, which was only until like year sort of I think like 2018, 2019, when we went to a manufacturer, they went to us. This is the easiest product they've ever made. Well yes, because we had to spend time making it. So we optimized everything. Um, and we uh, still run that process today. So we'll spend quite a lot of time in this sort of fail fast approach in hardware where we're not afraid to make a piece of hardware, try it and then throw it away, try the next one and get uh, to the point where we're happy with a prototype that we then we're now fortunate that we have manufacturing partners where okay, we're happy with the prototype. This is what we now need you to make 10,000 and they'll scale it up for us so we've got, you know, we still own the bits that we need to own and then we have great partners that take us and scale.

Speaker B: Yeah, like what you were saying is almost like an oxymoron, like rapid prototyping for hardware is something people are like what? Like that's not. Yeah, so that's fascinating. I think that's a good lesson learned for other people building hardware because traditionally you'd go through a cycle of months like you said with the contract manufacturing organization or the design shop, whatever and then you'd like select a partner and pray that you pick the right partner and yeah, it's for the manufacturing only to get the device. And being like this is not functional, it doesn't work or whatever problem you have, you got to then go back to the drawing board to fix uh, it. So that's really nice.

Speaker C: And the key cost out of that actually isn't the money, it's the time that uh, it's a time and the opportunity, um, opportunity cost out of that. That's what we learned is that if we could iterate very quickly then we can cut that down. And we have taken products from sort of zero to um, uh, sort of mass production in a year, uh, like a brand new products before. And the latest one I'm working on on the camera, we started that uh, seven months ago and we're gonna launch it in a month. Two months like A completely brand new product, not been done before but like same process for us.

Speaker B: Well let's get into the weeds of what you're doing like today with the company. We talked about the history and your iteration and prototyping. So player data today like talk about the company, the platform and how it all works.

Speaker C: Yeah. So player data today we are a sports uh, uh, the sort of one stop shop at the moment for physical performance. So we make this uh, wearable. It is a tracker. There you go. It's the smallest in the world. It has gps, it has an IMU in it for accelerations, it has lps so ultra wideband for indoor tracking. Uh, and uh, it has a 12 hour battery life. So what athletes do is they wear these units in our vests and they will uh, do their training or the match and we will, we will either stream the data live or uh, they sync them after. And the athletes and the coaches get the insights to that training session. Insights around uh, what load did they achieve during that training session, how distance they covered, but also insights around the tactical side as well. So like in matches you get positional, keep maps of where you played, where were you relative to the other players, uh, and all the information a coach would need to help sort of communicates with the style play and make improvements. And that's been sort of like that was a foundation play. That was phase one for us that uh, up till sort of last year that was our only product and our core product. What we realized was that the physical side of uh, physical performance side of the athlete was great positional side. But actually you really need context of the game. And that's where we uh, started expanding into smart uh, balls. Because the primary sport model soccer is like how do we track the balls so that we can get the context of what the ball's doing in the session to imbue that context in, in the reporting. So now that we have, we have the world's first GPS smart ball. And I've, I've got one here.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, this one is one we've done with Mitre. Um, it's got a GPS chip inside the ball itself.

Speaker B: And is this something that's used in game or just practice or both?

Speaker C: Both, both. So it can be used in game and practice. Um, and what this allows us to do is now that we know the position of the ball. So like in matches for example, you know where the players are, you know where the ball is. I can completely recreate the game. I can tell you who passed to who was it successful? Was it not successful? What was possession? What the shots on goal are. And this is without someone needing to watch it or tag it or expensive like sort of camera, uh, set up to, to, to track every. Or uh, we, we just do that automatically on any field.

Speaker B: Wow. Okay. Wow. I assume this is patented.

Speaker C: Yeah. So patented protected. It's part of our, our ecosystem. Yeah. It's uh. And like this was a journey. Journey itself. Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, that's why I like, like training ball would be one thing for practice, but to have that end game that's so valuable, that data and that information. Yet I could see, you know, different leagues being like this is not approved because you know it's going to be a heavier ball. Like how do you get the weight adjustment? So it's considered the flight of the ball. Like there's no intrusion.

Speaker C: Yeah. It's a FIFA quality Pro certified ball, so it could be used, uh, at the very highest level of the games. And we're very proud of that. But just touching on the training session as well, one of the things that we are really proud of is that it's not only for matches. It's the first time that you can get this day in training sessions as well. So you can have our system so scalable. You can have 20 balls on the pitch, 20 athletes, and we'll track every ball individually and we can distinguish who has which ball at what time. So in training now, you know, you know, what load, like what is the kicking load for each athlete during that session you can get tactical information about the drills that you're doing, uh, as well in training. It's, it's. Yeah, it's very, very powerful.

Speaker B: So the thought there is basketball next. Football, like American football, like branch out into other categories.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think next year we'll start to look at different sports, but right now we're really, really focused on soccer. It's, it's, it's our biggest ver. But uh, you know, we, Basketball is fast growing for us and we have the relationships to expand there.

Speaker B: Next. Okay. The, the other key thing about your platform is ease of, ease of use. Right. And set up right. So um, you know, there's no, like, you got to hardwire this thing into your field, arena, stadium, like it's, it's transportable.

Speaker C: Yeah. So the um, ease of use has always been a core tenant of our tenant for us. And that kind of, that part of the mission really goes back to our early days. You know, if you think about the early customers that we served there are grassroots teams in Scotland. This was a coach that was the physio, the medics, like the drive, the bus driver. They did everything the system had to be. They didn't have a big team around them, they were doing everything. And so the system had to be super easy for them to use and quickly understand and they had to get value from it. So that is the, that was the reason why. So from day one we had to solve ease of use for the adoption technology. Now what we didn't really fully anticipate was the effect of solving ease of use to larger professional organizations. Um, we uh, back then wrongly assumed that larger professional teams like premier league teams had whatever resources they want. Um that is true in the first team but actually not true through academy systems. So our first entry in the US market was actually um, MLS academies, uh Atlanta United in particular where the uh, director of performance there went hey look, you guys got the perfect solution for us. We can track now currently only tracking 40 athletes in Academy. We can track 200 athletes in the academy, save money and we don't need a staff increase. Do everything you want. Um so that's been very very very powerful for us and something we continue to spend a lot of time on.

Speaker B: And it's also the, from what I've seen so far the athletes have access to a lot more data than other options.

Speaker C: Yeah and that again is again part back to our roots is that the moment that the coach finished the session the athletes would ask the coach to see the data. So we just put the data in their hands. So the moment the coach uploads the data, coach gets to see their data, see the whole team's data, athlete gets to see their own data. It's a great one is the right thing to do and two it's just great to, great to have that fast feedback.

Speaker B: This is going to go, this point is going to go a little bit above my technical know how understanding. But from what I read you were always thinking about the data and you made a decision that really played out well especially as the movement towards AI of you know your cloud first architecture. GraphQL. The GraphQL piece I wasn't familiar with uh, but it sounds like that's the part of really worked out for that decision has worked out well for yeah

Speaker C: in 2017 when we're building this business right we you know we, Hayden and I made a, made a early bet like a, like a long term bet that look you know sometime someday down the line uh an Apple, a Google, a blue chip company is Going to build some sort of foundational AI that will really unlock our data for us to take advantage of that. Our data has to be not isolated on people's phones or laptops or specific laptops that use. It all has to be easily accessible from the cloud. Um, so the system was built cloud first from day one, uh, to do that because we knew that the value actually of putting everything in one place that can be accessed from like for example right now. So if I was running a live session right now, uh, let's say that I was in Brazil, uh, I. And you know, the coach in New York on their phone can view the data from, from that live session because it's all going to the cloud in real time. You know, it's just, it's just little things like that, that, that uh, that opens up possibilities. Um, so being cloud first was, you know, a big early move for us and drove everything architecturally. And it's the sort of thing that you could spend years on retrofitting if you didn't do it the first time. Um, the second thing that we did, and not to get too technical, you mentioned GraphQL, we decided to not go with a traditional API approach. So a traditional API approach is that you have, ah, a query that goes, hey, give me a list of all the sessions and then you get, I have another query that gives me a list of all the athletes and then you get the list of session list athletes. And then you have to do your own thing on your side to put the data together. It's called a REST API. What is powerful with GraphQL is that it lets you ask for exactly what you want in the format you want it in, in the query itself. So I can write a query that goes, hey, give me all of Keith's data, you know, top speeds in, you know, for the last five sessions. And I would get that. So it gives you ultimate flexibility in terms of, uh, building and getting whatever you want, either from building an app or hooking up different APIs. But, uh, it was a powerful choice for us.

Speaker B: Okay, so you had this vision and your vision became a reality, right with the movement to. Now we are in this AI era. So what are the use cases for leveraging AI within your product?

Speaker C: Yeah, like, you know, it was, you know, when LMS came on the scene, it was very, very easy for us to, uh, and I think we were definitely. The first was we had basically built a chatgpt but for your data. So coach should go in. This was, I think it was two years ago. Now, um, coach would go in, had a little chat interface, and go, hey, show me all of Keith's top speeds in the last three weeks and explain to me the trends and it will show it to you. Or compare, uh, games that I won versus I lost. Uh, you know, coaches that we work with, they always have these questions that they're trying to ask and get answered. Uh, they'll probably have like a assistant or sports scientist that can help, you know, pull the reports, and they'll go and spend some time, 30 minutes, an hour, pulling reports to help answer the question. This just helps speed that whole process up and puts in any hands. Uh, so that is, you know, that was a big feature that we launched, um, that people talk to every day.

Speaker B: All right, let's talk about your company. Um, at what point did you decide to expand into the US and today, what does the team look like in the US for Boston?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I think it was 2022 or 2023 that, um, we started to think about the US and we went, look, we were growing great in the UK Market. We had incredible traction across the use semi pro, but the US Was the biggest market in the world. How do we get there? Uh, we went through techstars accelerator in Indianapolis. Um, that, uh, helped us sort of build sort of initial sort of book of contacts. And then, uh, I was very, very fortunate. Um, after we sort of met our first MLS team around that sort of problem, the academy problem that I spoke about earlier, uh, that was connected to incredible group of investors that saw the potential, potential of what we're building and uh, led our, uh, you know, uh, $5 million round, uh, to really, really, um, build, uh, out the. The US Model. And that's when I met Jess, and Jess came on board as well.

Speaker B: Very cool. And why did you choose Boston?

Speaker C: Yeah, so Boston is just incredible city. Uh, from a, From a, uh, really practical perspective, we have a lot of, uh, a lot of our team members already in Boston. I think like, uh, eight to ten of them are within the Boston area. And that made, you know, made the most sense for us to put, um, uh, headquarters there. Um, there's also a lot of other sort of tech companies in the area. That's incredible talent pool that can hire from sports, sports talents, tech talent there. So very much easier than other cities to hire from. And uh, you know, just being able to see the buzz of having people, uh, in the office as well in Boston, uh, has been incredible. It's been well, well worth it. In the short time we had the office

Speaker B: what's the scale today in terms of athletes, customers, teams, however you like, like whatever you can share there.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we are in about. We're 1500 teams, uh, with 100,000 athletes.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: Um, we, um, you know, in terms of like scale of tracking, I think we have tracked data on 95% of all pitches that exist in the UK. For example, product has been used on, uh, our product's gonna be in every single World cup game this World cup, because the refs are wearing it.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: In terms of like team members, we've got, I think we're about 75, 80 people now. Um, almost split 50, 50 between UK and US. Um, and we're continuing to grow. Like our main focus right now is just to continue to grow. Um, um, and we've been doubling every year for several years now as a business and we've got a great path to continue doing that.

Speaker B: And what has your go to market approach been? Because the way I see your website and branding and everything, it's like we want to make this accessible to the masses, not just the premier elite professional clubs. That this is something that it could be high school, could be club teams. Right. Like, it's not just the, you know, the professionals that have access to this information.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we, what we've done in the US has been really so strategically we have an incredible sales team with different. Responsible for different verticals, but really strategically try and sort of land clients in key areas that we, uh. Because there's, there's a ton of terrific, uh, network effects in sport. Once people use a product they talk about. It was seen in Scotland, the natural network effect. Um, so what we've been doing for the last few years is just seeding different areas of US market with key clients, uh, from the top to the bottom and to try and get as much coverage as possible. And we're starting to see those flywheels really, uh, work really well for us in the US Especially in soccer. Um, and um, in the uk we took a sort of more traditional sort of, um, uh, marketing led approach. When we built them, when we built, uh, when we built the business there, it was uh, ads that you know, then gave uh, us leads and the salespeople closed the leads. But that was, that only really worked for us in the UK because the UK as a country is quite small geographically, um, and quite dense. And when we tried to do that in the U.S. it just, the economics of that didn't really work. So. But the model we have right now, uh, is working really, really well.

Speaker B: Well, I do need to give a shout out to your head of marketing, Luke Bonner. I don't know him, but I know of him. We went to the same, we're both alums of the same high school in Manchester, New Hampshire. Trinity High School. He was an outstanding basketball player. So shout out to Luke. Um, all right, looking ahead. What's next?

Speaker C: Oh, finish up the platform. Ah, you know, finish the, continue to scale our products. You know, we've got a camera launching in a few months.

Speaker B: What's the camera like? What is the camera doing like? What's the use case there?

Speaker C: Um, I can talk about a little bit, but it's basically, you know, a sports camera that will record the whole field. Uh, and we have deep integration with our units so we can look at uh, the video, we can look at the tactical data, we can look at the physical data all in one platform. Uh, but uh, when we formally announce it, it will be uh, a world first in many respects, which we're really proud of.

Speaker B: All right, advice for founders on building a tech company in the sports industry. What have been the lessons learned there?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the uh, probably the biggest sort of piece of advice you can give is, um, get out to, you know, get out to your users as quickly as you can and as early as you can. Like, don't sit on your ideas and wait until you think it's perfect to get it out there. Get it out there the soonest anyone can practically seen it because what you probably built in your head is wrong. Uh, and the market will tell you that quickly. And the biggest thing you do is, you know, get as many sort of um, uh, people on board and be part of your journey, give you that feedback to so you can iterate as fast as possible. And sports, you know, is a really unique market to grow in. Uh, because a lot of these coaches and sports scientists, they all are really competitive and they want every single edge they can get to win. Um, so, you know, they're in the same camp as you if they feel that, you know, you guys, a mission aligned. It's, it's a great community to be part of.

Speaker B: Day to day use of AI. That's a question I've kind of baked into my podcast now. Like, are you, like, are you using different uh, you know, tools, Claude code? Like what? Like, like how are you using AI for your day to day? Either business, building a company or even personal.

Speaker C: Yeah, so I'm, I, I uh, I uh, personally use uh, AI quite a lot. So I use it for orchestrating Organizing, keeping, uh, track of all the threads that I'm a part of and making sure that I'm surfacing signals is a big part for me. With what I do in the company and how many people we are, there is a ton of noise. So it's very, very helpful for me to surface signals that I need to see. And then, um, AI has been incredible, powerful me as, uh, I've been able to individually contribute and directly try and test things myself again without having to bother the team or distract them from what they're working on. I can just go, right, I'm gonna build myself. Try it. I'm meeting with a coach in an hour and try it. So I've been using it extensively to do that as well and validate theses that I have.

Speaker B: Um, all right. Three apps you can't live without. Can't be slack. Email or calendar.

Speaker C: Ah, okay. I. Three apps I can't live without. No one's asked me that before. I, uh. Well, I'm gonna cheat here because, uh, I am big fan of Superhuman, which is technically email.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker C: But it's not traditional email. It's kind of like a.

Speaker B: Right, that's allowed. It's allowed.

Speaker C: So good. I can power through and quickly, like with keyboard shortcuts. Just quickly do what I need to do with it.

Speaker B: Superhuman, um,

Speaker C: Flighty, uh, uh, as well, is another one I use really heavily. I have spent half my year traveling and on the road, and it's great for tracking flights. Is my incoming flight delay, what gate I don't have, what, where I pick up my bags. All that really great. And then Spotify. I like, uh, to listen to music and just put something on to calm the noise.

Speaker B: Me too. Listen to music all day long. All right. Podcast book recommendation for entrepreneurs.

Speaker C: It's a book called Chicken Hawk. It's about a, um, the story of a Vietnam, uh, a Vietnam, uh, war helicopter pilot and just his experiences through that. Just incredible, incredible read. I really enjoyed that. Not a business book, Nothing. Anything useful. Just a great story, uh, and a bit of world perspective, I guess.

Speaker B: What do you like to do for fun outside of work?

Speaker C: Um, at the moment I, uh, Whatever spare time I have, I will either sleep or spend time with my partner.

Speaker B: It's kind of a silly question sometimes when I ask that because I'm like, there's not a lot of time be doing those, you know, hobby things.

Speaker C: So I guess my hobby. I guess my. If I had one hobby and my partner would agree with me, she would say that I enjoy eating good food. And seeking good food. Big foodie. Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, perfect. Well, Roy, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your professional journey. Obviously, all the great work you and your team are doing at Player Data, and, uh, all the great advice and thank you for choosing Boston for your U.S. headquarters.

Speaker C: No, thank you. Thank you for having me today. Really great to chat with you.