Imagine arguing about who scored the last bucket in your rec league—and instead of replaying grainy footage, your phone instantly shows you a perfectly tracked highlight reel, complete with stats and player tags.
That’s the world Jason Syversen, founder and CEO of SportsVisio, is building. But his path to this moment didn’t start courtside. It began deep in the world of defense tech—inside DARPA, the Pentagon’s secretive R&D arm—where he helped design systems that could see, predict, and react faster than humans.
Now he’s bringing that same precision to your local gym.
From Defense Labs to Pickup Games
Before SportsVisio, Jason wasn’t thinking about basketball stats. He was leading DARPA programs, hacking Wi-Fi cameras, and running a company that built cutting-edge cyber and vision systems for government and defense.
But after selling his previous company, he started coaching and playing again. One night, a classic rec-league argument broke out: “Who scored what?” That’s when he saw a Pivo ad—one of those rotating tripods that follow players automatically—and had the thought every founder knows too well: why doesn’t this exist for us?
That question turned into SportsVisio, an AI platform that captures games using ordinary phones or cameras and automatically generates highlights, stats, and analytics.
No expensive hardware. No human tagging. Just algorithms and data doing the work.
The Big Idea: Democratizing Sports Analytics
SportsVisio’s real play isn’t just automation—it’s access. Pro teams have had vision-based analytics for years; youth and amateur players haven’t.
Jason’s bet: every athlete deserves pro-level insights. And every game—from high school tournaments to adult rec leagues—should produce data that players can own and learn from.
The key insight? You don’t need fancy gear. SportsVisio is hardware-agnostic. Any phone can become your camera. Their AI handles occlusion (when players overlap), lighting differences, and the chaos of multi-court gyms. That’s what makes the moat deep: solving for messy, real-world footage.
Timing Is Everything
Jason says timing, not tech, makes this moment possible. Five years ago, cloud costs and mobile GPUs were too expensive to make the math work. Today, AI inference has gotten cheap enough that you can process entire games affordably and even start approaching real-time feedback.
That means leagues can finally make sense of hours of footage without spending thousands on analysts. And it means SportsVisio’s unit economics—unlike many AI startups—actually pencil out.
Go-to-Market: Leagues, Not Parents
Instead of chasing individual subscriptions (a death trap in youth sports), SportsVisio sells directly to leagues and tournaments. One deal gets them hundreds of teams, predictable data collection, and scalable distribution.
It’s the same lesson Jason learned in defense: start where the data is dense.
By owning the league pipeline, SportsVisio also gets a compounding advantage—thousands of labeled games that continuously improve the model. Each new upload trains the next generation of AI to recognize more sports, more contexts, and more subtle plays.
The Tech Moat: Thousands of Games, One Big Brain
SportsVisio’s vision AI has seen a lot. Thousands of games across different sports, camera angles, lighting conditions, and skill levels. Every correction from a coach or player feeds back into the system.
That loop—data → learning → accuracy → adoption—is the compounding engine behind the business. And because the input (user footage) comes from real customers, the dataset is defensible in a way scraped or synthetic data isn’t.
The Future: Robo-Refs, Smart Scoreboards, and Beyond
SportsVisio’s roadmap reads like the natural evolution of AI in sports:
AI-assisted refereeing, helping reduce disputes and improve accuracy
Real-time stat overlays and auto-generated highlights for livestreams
Instant scoreboards powered entirely by computer vision
Imagine walking into any gym, setting up two phones, and seeing a real-time scoreboard and highlight reel by the time you leave.
That’s not five years away—it’s already here.
Why It Matters
SportsVisio isn’t just another AI startup—it’s a glimpse into how invisible AI will become. You won’t “use” it; it’ll just quietly handle the boring stuff.
For sports, that means fewer arguments, fairer calls, better data, and—most importantly—more kids and amateurs feeling like pros.
For founders, it’s a masterclass in taking deep-tech expertise and finding a new, emotional application for it. Jason didn’t just port his skills—he repurposed them for joy, not defense.
Key Takeaways
Technical Moats Matter: Real-world data is the new barrier to entry.
Timing Beats Genius: Cloud and compute costs finally make vision AI viable.
Distribution Is Strategy: Selling to leagues compounds reach and data.
Mission Over Market: Turning rec players into “pro-level” athletes is both noble and scalable.
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Chapters:
00:01 From DARPA to the Driveway
03:10 Growing Up with Grit
06:45 Hacking for the Pentagon
11:36 The Spark: A Rec-League Argument
13:34 Building an AI Sports Platform
15:34 The Timing Advantage
18:40 Go-to-Market That Works
20:38 Cameras, Courts, and Chaos
22:20 Scaling Beyond Basketball
24:00 The A-Team Behind the Tech
26:18 The Hardest Problem in Vision
31:26 Learning from Thousands of Games
34:40 The Future: AI Scoreboards and Robo-Refs
37:10 Speed, Cost, and Scale
40:05 Lessons from Building Deep Tech Startups
45:15 What’s Next for SportsVisio
47:40 Closing Reflections
Transcript
(00:01:07) Brian Bell
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Jason Syversen on the mic. He is the founder and CEO of SportsVisio, a former DARPA program manager, repeat entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist. He’s now on a mission to democratize sports analytics with AI at my basketball league. That’s how I found out about him. Thanks for coming on.
(00:01:26) Jason Syversen
Thanks for having me, Brian.
(00:01:27) Brian Bell
So we’d love to get your background. What’s your origin story?
(00:01:30) Jason Syversen
Yeah, so I was born in the New York suburbs. Some guy in a pickup truck tried to abduct a girl on our street and circled the neighborhood looking for her, which I thought was pretty exciting because I got to go to the police station, meet the detectives. My parents did not share my enthusiasm over the experience and decided to relocate our family to Maine. I bought a house up on the ocean. My dad was an engineer working for the paper mills. And then the paper mill started shutting down and he lost the job and we ended up being very poor for the next, for a long period of time after that. Bounced around, rented. We were actually on food stamps, welfare. We were homeless one summer, lived in a pop-up camper in someone’s backyard. I still have like toes that are like bent in because I wore shoes that were too small and fun stuff like that. Got a free ride for college, went to University of Maine for computer engineering, and then worked at Lockheed Martin’s electronic warfare division in New Hampshire, about an hour north of Boston. Did a leadership program, rotations every six months. Ended up going to grad school at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in electrical engineering, focused on cryptography and security. You know, I was very fortunate to be in middle class. I was super excited about having like food in the fridge and a car that worked and all those fun things and started getting into hacking pretty much first week on the job. I couldn’t get some software I needed to do my job and the guy wasn’t around to install it for a week. I was like, I’m allowed to install the software? Like, yeah, yeah, but you know, Bob is away. I’m like, but it’s okay for me to install it. Like, yeah, but you can’t because you know, it’s not here. I’m like, well, let’s see about that. So I started poking around and figured out how to bypass the protections and install the software. And that led to a new hobby that led to playing pranks on coworkers and taking over the corporate network with permission and HR visiting my desk occasionally gave me a lecture. I ended up starting a cyber warfare group inside the company with an older guy. Really cool projects came out of that. My favorite was the James Bond Ocean 11 speed thing where we hacked a Wi-Fi camera surveillance network, intercepted the video, updated the timestamp, and injected the recorded video back in the target. I got to demo that at San Clemente Island off the coast of San Diego for Special Forces guys, which led to SEAL Team 6, DevGuru, recruiting me to join their team in Virginia Beach. I turned that down actually, but a couple of years later, I was recruited to go to DARPA, which is this building over here. I ran a $100 million portfolio of classified programs for the Defense Department. I transitioned those to Air Force, Army, Navy, CIA, NSA, and another classified DoD element. Left, I commuted from New Hampshire every week for the two years I was there. It’s a two-year government appointment. And then I started my own company, CH Technologies, which was a cyber warfare R&D company. Started in 2009, did a million in revenue in 2010, two million the year after that, kind of kept growing. Ended up selling to a private equity-backed firm in 2016. My wife and I had an eight-digit exit from that. I took enough to live on and donated the rest to a charitable foundation. So I guess I’ll stop there for the origin series that moves into the more current times.
(00:10:09) Jason Syversen
What an amazing journey. And I also grew up poor and welfare, the whole sad story. So I can totally relate to that. So thanks for sharing that. Not everybody tells everybody that.
(00:10:18) Brian Bell
I never used to share that. You know, I ran for Senate and New State Senate in 2020. And that was really the first time I started sharing that. And I remember getting choked up the first couple of times I did it. Like, oh, there’s there’s some stuff here I haven’t really unpacked. I haven’t really been kind of running away from that. I just kind of am more comfortable sharing it because after you start talking about those things, they kind of lose the power that they had. But it was a cool way to connect because going door to door, you know, I walk on, you walk to some really nice houses. You got to walk up a long driveway past the BMW or Mercedes. And then you’re in like an apartment complex with some rundown places and parents yelling at their kids.
(00:10:54) Brian Bell
I was the poorest kid in my neighborhood. I remember I had the kind of scarlet letter, you know, and it was tough. It was tough to be from the background and deal with that, you know, and I think it drives and makes us who we are today.
(00:11:05) Jason Syversen
Totally. In hindsight. Josh Wolf from Lux Capital has that quote, “Chips on shoulders produce chips in pockets,” which I think is pretty funny. There’s definitely some truth to like, that drive to not be there anymore and prove you have something and kind of pushes you a lot harder than someone with a silver spoon.
(00:11:23) Brian Bell
Well, when you come from nothing, you’re not afraid of anything. You know, you just like nothing scares me. I’ve seen the bottom. I can only go up from here, you know. I love that. Wow. There’s so much to unpack there. You know, maybe some lessons from bootstrapping Siege from your living room. Kind of what did that story, how did that all unfold? And then we’ll get to SportsVisio, of course.
(00:11:46) Jason Syversen
Yeah. So, you know, I was leaving DARPA after commuting from New Hampshire to DC every week for two years. So I couldn’t sell my house. My wife and I had our fourth child during this time. And I remember waking up — and they were all young — so we would literally wake up on a Monday morning at like 4:30, pack the kids all in the minivan, she’d drive me to the airport, drop me off, turn around, drive back, unpack all the kids, put them to bed. Luckily, she was homeschooling, so they didn’t have to be late for school. But we didn’t have a garage, so sometimes it just snowed, and I’m out there shoveling the car off, always pack all the kids. Anyway, we’re done with that, and we’re like, all right, now what are we going to do? We’re kind of stuck in New Hampshire. We couldn’t sell the house during the crash in 2007 and 2009. So I was like, well, I can go back to the big company — really want to do that? I can drive to Boston — that doesn’t sound fun. I can start a company division for somebody else, in which case if it takes off, I might make a couple hundred grand, and if it fails, I get fired. Or I can start my own company, which if it takes off, I make millions. And if it fails, I might lose 20, 30, 50 grand, whatever. So thought about it. It’s like, that seems like the most logical choice. But really talked to my wife too. We’re both Christians, and it’s like, hey, if we’re going to do this, I could just move somewhere else and get a job. If we’re going to do this, that’s a lot of stress and risk we’re taking — for what? Why are we doing this? We’re not really money motivated. And she’s like, well, let’s use this for impact. How can we make this a thing that we kind of make a difference in the world? And I was like, I love that because I’m an engineer nerd guy, and I don’t really feel like I’ve had a lot of value in the world other than making electronic warfare systems slightly better and maybe going after some enemy systems via cyber. So yes, we decided from the beginning, the plan was to kind of donate the majority of what we made to charity. And we were able to do that. So yeah, we had a low eight-figure exit and took enough to live on it and put all the rest in a charitable foundation we set up. And she, over that time, was running a group fighting human trafficking, started a different group fighting sexual exploitation. We were foster parents. We adopted our twin boys. You know, so we use a charity to back similar causes. So I’m on the board of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. I’ve served on the board of a bunch of other charities, and we back Hope International, which is a third-world economic development org — they do microloans, community savings programs. 500k is a missions group in India. And then some stuff with like more local charities and foster care and things like that.
(00:13:22) Brian Bell
That’s great. Yeah, I haven’t put together my charitable cause yet, but it’ll definitely be something about my background, you know — son of a drug addict, you know, things like that — and try to put something together. I don’t know what it is yet, but yeah, I can’t imagine I’m just sitting like Scrooge McDuck in it, you know, in my 70s, you know.
(00:13:43) Jason Syversen
Sadly, a lot of people do that, but especially with your background, you understand those needs. It’s amazing what small amounts of money can really have crazy impact. Not as much in the US, particularly second and third world countries, but our church built an orphanage in Haiti. It costs $8,000 to build and $500 a month to run — that was a dozen years ago. I don’t know, double those numbers now, whatever, but it’s still insane. Even $1,000 a month, if you can back an orphanage that’s had 32 children living in it. Like, you know, that’s the kind of thing I want to be doing. And you realize how powerful, even small but carefully targeted donations can really have such an impact.
(00:14:19)
Yeah, totally. And then somewhere along the line, you became an investor yourself.
(00:14:22) Jason Syversen
Yeah, that’s right. So I always wanted to get into investing. After selling in 2016, I took over 10X Venture Partners, which is an angel group. They were about a decade old. The people that founded it were kind of slowing down investing and moving into other things. So I ended up taking over, started a small venture fund about five years ago. I’ve been investing out of that fund. The charitable foundation — I’m chairman of the board, chief investment officer. So we have a five-person independent board, but I’ve been authorized to kind of manage the assets. So I invest in a couple of funds, in some real estate and private equity stuff, and then a lot in early-stage tech through 10X, the angel group. And then we have the fund that 10X has, and then some of my retirement. So I’ve been kind of investing out of all three pools of capital. So I’ve done 43 investments in tech companies at this point. The fund actually just had our first exit. So our first check we wrote five years ago, we just had an 8.5X exit after five years. It was actually seven years and 11 months that they contacted us like, “Hey, we think we’re ready.” And then we were like, “Oh, wait a month,” and they’re like, “Okay, sure.” So we got QSBS for that, and that was a great first exit.
(00:20:00) Jason Syversen
So yeah, I love the tech investing side. It’s kind of where I want to be long-term. You know, when I started SportsVisio, that was after the Senate run — I’d lost by 3% to the incumbent. And I was like, all right, what am I doing the rest of my life? Am I just hanging out on the couch? Am I playing basketball all day? Am I hanging out with my kids? Am I volunteering? And I was like, you know, I really — I’ve looked at raising a fund, but having grown up poor, having bootstrapped my company, I didn’t have a huge Rolodex of rich folks to put in. And my angel portfolio was pretty early at that point. I’d done maybe 10, 15, and they were mostly early. So I was like, you know, I really need five years to let those kind of season and grow. And really, I would be a better investor if I’d actually raised money before and done a venture-backed startup. And people kind of pegged me as like a cyber one-trick pony. Like, oh, you’re a cyber guy, just do hacking security things. It’s like, yeah, no, I want to do other things. I love that, I’m good at that and very well connected there, but there’s just so many other interesting challenges. I don’t really like defensive cyber. The offensive world is super interesting. The defensive world is saturated with hype and marketing crap, and I don’t love that generally. So yeah, I decided to start SportsVisio. So I was looking at other companies and just nothing really jumped out at me. And I was playing basketball one day, and a buddy was like, “I had 20 points and 10 assists and no turnovers.” And guys on my team were all like, “What game was he at? I don’t remember that.” Exactly. This was a men’s league we were playing in, kind of a competitive league. You know, but we didn’t say anything. And then I get home that night, my wife — who doesn’t normally ask — was like, “How many points you have?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Eight, 10, 12 — kind of normally what I do.” I try to — I care more about my shooting percentage. I try to get up, you know, five, six, seven shots, get 10, 12 points, and have a good night. And then I saw an ad for this product called Pivo, which is a Bluetooth-controlled motorized actuator. It sits there and it kind of pans back and forth, and, you know, it’s girls doing selfie videos or cooking or horseback riding. And then in the ad, they showed a guy doing a basketball layup. I was like, that’s kind of cool. So I go to the website and it’s trash if you play basketball games — it just gets lost in the crowd, doesn’t really follow the ball. And I was like, you know, I was at DARPA. Like, I know PhDs, people who run like the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT or Sandia National Labs — these PhD genius type people. I’m like, I could probably find some smart people that could do this. So I called a couple folks and they’re like, “Yeah, you could absolutely do that.” And so we went through and it was like, you know, three, four people for a year to get something out the door. And I was like, all right. Then I called customers — I was like, “Hey, would you buy this?” They’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’d be amazing.” So I kind of sketched out the market and concluded it’s about a $1.5 billion market for just basketball. And then you look at all the other sports, you know, it’s a $10 to $15 billion global market total. Yeah, it’s like — that’s — you know, it’s not cyber, which is like a hundred billion or a trillion or something crazy, but it’s big enough to be a venture-scale business, right? And the competition are big private equity companies like Hudl that do about $750 million a year, and they pay tens of thousands of humans overseas to watch video, type like the cat video into a video, and do all the tagging. So I was like, that’s kind of what I like as a VC — you want to invest in those new disruptive technology companies that are disrupting legacy incumbents that have kind of done things the same way for a long time and are profitable.
(00:22:48) Brian Bell
Yeah, how long has Hudl been around? And Hudl, for folks listening, it’s H-U-D-L — it’s kind of like the leading sports recording company out there.
(00:22:55) Jason Syversen
That’s Breakdown Company. They probably have 70% of the high school market, decent penetration collegiate and some overseas. And they’re now like private equity-backed under Bain Capital. So they’ve bought a bunch of different companies. They did actually buy a small AI company in volleyball. But yeah, so their synergy does like $250–300 million a year. They also dominate most of the high school manual breakdown market. So yeah, so I was like, all right, that seems like a good opportunity to kind of go after those guys and build something new. And honestly, people assume we’re going after the high school market because that’s kind of what you recognize for the stats and highlights. But we’ve found so much success in places like where you played, Brian — where it’s just men’s leagues and adult rec — because we’re using AI, we’re like half the price or less of Hudl. So we’re opening up brand new markets that can’t afford Hudl and love the product. And they’re like, “Oh, it’s a dollar something per player per game?” Like, yeah, of course. “Why do we not have this already?” And they just sign up. And so we’ve really been kind of creating new markets as opposed to taking a lot from incumbents, which has been pretty fun to see. AAU is the other big market we’re going after because these tournaments — again, there’s a lot of video there, there’s people there, there’s people spending thousands of dollars for their kid to play a sport. And yet they’re like, “Would you spend an extra 50 bucks a year or whatever to get stats and highlights of all the games?” They’re like, “Of course we would.” Some of them are literally paying hundreds of dollars to someone to manually go through all the video and cut and splice. But SportsVisio — you don’t have to do that. We already tag all the clips for you. So you can just kind of build whatever you want.
(00:24:29) Brian Bell
It strikes me as an investor as like kind of the right time. You know, I think AI vision technology just got good enough to do this at scale very well, cost effectively, at a price point that people would want to pay for versus you probably could have done this, you know, five or ten years ago, but it would just cost a lot per game to process all that video.
(00:24:49) Jason Syversen
Exactly. It’s honestly still too expensive. We’re doing the math and we’re not making very much money per game because the GPUs and everything are so expensive because we have to process all the AI ourselves. We can’t use an LLM. We built all the code. But the good thing is we are profitable on a gross margin basis today, and it’s just getting better every year.
(00:25:11) Brian Bell
Yeah, I mean, every year it’s going to get faster.
(00:25:13) Brian Bell
Exactly. So I’m like, and the VCs are comfortable with it. But to your point, just three years ago, even the math would just not work.
(00:25:21) Jason Syversen
Yeah. Market capture. Yeah, right time. That’s important. And what we were doing at Lifetime for eHOOPS is we’d have a couple guys on the sidelines, probably being paid, I guess — I don’t know — but they’re usually other basketball players who weren’t playing the 6 o’clock game. They’re playing the 7 o’clock game. So people would kind of shuffle in and out and try to keep the stats, and they’d get them wrong, right? A lot of human error. Like, “No, I don’t think I had two turnovers,” you know, like stuff like that. Yeah, so it’s been really fun.
(00:25:54) Jason Syversen
And so they say that, you know, like, nah, it doesn’t sound right. One of the great things in the app is this just happened to me actually the other night — I got marked a turnover on my Monday game. I’m like, I don’t think I had a turnover. So I went and pulled up the video, and they show you can pull the video clip of the turnover. And it was my buddy who whipped the ball down the court in front of me, and I’m running full speed and I never touched the ball. So I put a little thing and I said, “Hey, I got tagged this turnover, but it’s actually the number six. That’s why he slaps the ground in frustration after he made that pass.” And so it popped up a little thing. It was a little AI chatbot. And, “Oh yeah, we’ve corrected it.” So they do a review. But that’s what you can do when you have video evidence, and you can’t really do that when it’s just a human kind of throwing down whatever they feel like.
(00:26:45) Brian Bell
Yeah, it’s a pretty amazing app actually, because you play your game on a Thursday night or whatever, and a day or two later you’ll get all your stats, you get the AI summary, you’ll have all your clips, everything that you did in the game basically.
(00:30:43) Brian Bell
That’s awesome. Well, let’s talk about the future. What are you excited about over the next few years? For the company, you’re saying? Yeah, I mean, for us, you know, we’re we’re excited about thinking about our next sport’s going to be. So we’ve got basketball and volleyball. We’ve got a bunch of sports that we’ve looked at. We have a baseball prototype we’ve developed. We’re trying to think about what to do with that. We’re looking at things like everything from racket sports to soccer to less common sport and different things. So we’re trying to figure out what is that next thing gonna be that, but we’re also interested in expanding within basketball. So I really envision a future where we have robo refs. And instead of a three ref system, you could have one ref with an iPad maybe a two or four camera setup, and then it’s calling the game for him. And then I think if we could build a system that 90% of the time he agreed with and maybe 10% he overruled, that’s a production system that people would use. Because when you look at the economics, I’ve talked to a number of leagues and refs, they’re paying like 50, 60, 70, 80, $100 a game to refs per person to ref a game. It’s crazy money because no one wants to do it. So the money has just gone up and up. Well, yeah, you’re just getting yelled at all game by the players, by the parents. Yeah. You gotta run around, you get yelled at. They’re like, I don’t want to do that. Like most people it’s just not worth it. And so they keep paying more, paying more. And there’s threats of violence in some places. Like we’ll just don’t want to do it. I’ll see you in the parking lot. You know, I’ve actually heard it. You know, I’m like, whoa, gosh.
(00:32:03) Jason Syversen
So people are getting, you know, literally 60, 70, $80 a game. And then you’ve got three refs in some at a higher levels and two refs at every level. So I’m like, well, two refs at that’s $160 a game. Yeah, if you can cut that in half and then make it easy. And then it creates plausible deniability about calls where you’re like, well, the AI thinks this. I have the iPad. I have the instant replay. I agree with the call. So. And here’s a clip. Yep. Yeah. So that’s something I’m excited about for the future. Uh, AI scoreboard is another one. So at almost every one of these venues, you’re paying someone 15 to $20 an hour to sit there and press a button when the ball was in the hoop. Why that’s crazy. Uh, especially at tournaments where they’re doing hundreds of thousands of games. That’s literally all off the tournament providers, uh, bottom line. So the problem. Yeah. You could imagine like an AI enabled future where like every game is like an NBA game with instant replays, perfect roughing, you know, just perfect stats, you know, instant replays up on the, on the T big screen TV above the bench, you know, replays and things. Yep. Yep.
(00:33:08) Jason Syversen
Yeah. So that’s one thing. And then the other big thing we’re excited about with the app is speed. So right now the AI takes like 16 hours to run in the cloud. Yeah. To run a single hour long game? It takes 16 hours of processing. That’s a lot of inference. 22. Actually, I think it was a 50% drop, we were at like 22, 23. So we might maybe we might be like 13 or 14. But it’s many hours is why the margins are not great right now. Wow, that’s significant. Yeah, and these are expensive GPUs that cost $8 an hour or whatever, you know. Right. Well, we’ve got some that are not that bad. They’re like one or two. um, and we haven’t negotiated volume, but it’s expensive. So the plan is to get that down to real time. So what can we do to optimize and improve and tweak the algorithm so we can get down to like. Or maybe even run on local devices, right? So you license the software and it runs on my Galaxy S28 because it has enough GPU horsepower. Exactly. That’s the dream. Eventually we’ll get there. You know, it’s going to be a while till your phone is that smart.
(00:34:10) Brian Bell
I’ll say this, like if it was five bucks a game and I could run it on my RTX 4090 at home, I’d do that. You know? Yeah. Right. Even just doing the ball tracking that we did with that Pivo camera, the phones were like getting super hot just from like tracking the camera and just trying to deconstruct all the players. But when you add in like Jersey number tracking and player tracking and action detection with 2d homography and like player position on the court and all the other things that go into it gets very computationally complex to do it accurately to get something that’s a crude estimate. It’s not terrible, but you want 50% accuracy like You can do a lot as soon as you want to get to like 85, 90, 95. You’re like, okay, like you said, 10 times the compute costs. So, but eventually I think we’ll get there. Some of that is we can just continue to improve the algorithms. Once we get super accurate, then we want to work on how fast can we make it and can we triage and build a version. Maybe you don’t get full stats. It’s like speed, cost, and accuracy is the triangle there, right? You got it. Yeah, exactly.
(00:35:01) Jason Syversen
So I’m excited about that because that actually opens up markets like the NBA. So we really are targeting the mass market right now, but Right. Yeah. Just kind of keep moving up from rec leagues to a, a, you, to high school, to college. then. And NBA comes knocking. They’re like, Hey, I’ve seen this as like 99 point whatever percent. Well, it’ll be a new product. So we’re in colleges and high schools and AU and all that today, but for the core product. But what we would do for the NBA is like a fan engagement tool because I’m confident, you know, you’re not going to go to your nieces middle school basketball game and be getting real time highlight clips of Sally that you’re sending to grandma. Like, Sally had a great shot and grab those from the sideline and send them over and then go to your local NBA game, go to you know, whoever, and then watch them and not be able to do the same thing. Like that’s just not going to be a universe, I think, that lasts very long. So the trick is how do we get it from hours of processing down to seconds and, you know, where you can process a game in practically real time. And then that opens up this whole opportunity for fan engagement, for, like you said, in-venue replays, for ref analysis and things like that. And that’s when stuff gets really exciting. That’s really cool. Well, let’s wrap it up with some rapid fire. Sounds good.
(00:36:20)
So you’ve lived at the intersection of hacking, defense, startups and sports. What thread ties all this together? I think innovation, disruption, thinking about, you know, I have ADHD and so I’m not, I’m good at seeing things as they aren’t and saying, what else? Are you like diagnosed or you just think you have like you’re pretty sure you have it? Yeah. I didn’t know I had it my whole life, but my son was getting tested in high school and I took the test for him. And does Caleb have this? Yes. Haha. That’s funny. I do too. 17 questions later. I was like, so apparently he has, apparently I do too. And I wasn’t going to do anything about it or get diagnosed officially and.
(00:36:53) Jason Syversen
I was telling someone that my wife’s like, why not? Why not try something? I was like, oh, I mean, I guess I could. So I went to a doctor and did the questionnaire again and he gave me the diagnosis. Like, yep, pretty common. You have it. Did you take any medication for it? Yeah, I tried Adderall and it was amazing. I mean, it’s kind of amazing. Adderall is amazing. I was like, have all these stacks of paper at my desk. And I just like one afternoon I was like, all right, I’m gonna try it. I plowed through all the paperwork. I filed everything properly. I was like, wow, like the noise was kind of quieted, everything stilled and I only took it the one time.
(00:37:25) Brian Bell
I’m pretty sure I have ADHD. should take this test. Maybe you can send it to me after the recording. But I think it makes me a good investor, because in pre-seed, I’m constantly surfing the of chaos all over the place. It’s like squirrel, squirrel, Startup, startup, It kind of suits what I do. Right. Kind of why I want to be out of the running a startup and in the investing side is I love the diversity and the challenges of being working with early stage founders. yeah. So anyway, all of that. How do you balance everything? mean, because you have the foundation, it sounds like you’re still kind of deploying capital. You’re running a startup. How are you balancing all this all at once?
(00:37:59) Jason Syversen
Yeah, I mean, think it part of it is there’s a lot of synergy like raising money for the company, your meeting, you’re going to founder events and networking events. So I’m talking to founders about my startup and then I’ll ask them about their startup and sometimes, oh, I run a group when we should talk about investing and where I’m talking to other investors. may talk about, just ran an event last night or no, two, no last night in Boston at a brewery with 30 investors from the area and didn’t talk about my company at all, but like building a network of investors, like obviously strengthening that is helpful when you’re raising money and hearing what they hear in the market. Like there’s a lot of synergy between those worlds. So I find it, I have three browsers open. I have Firefox, my personal browser, have Chrome set up for my investing stuff. And then I have a different Chrome persona for sports videos. So kind of switch tabs and I’m switching contexts. And you know, I’ve spent 40, 45 hours a week probably on the startup.
(00:38:47) Brian Bell
sometimes more when I’m traveling and then, I mean, sometimes I’m up till like one in the morning catching up on things, but I, you know, I’m trying to be a good husband dad. Yeah. You’re not doing nine, nine, six. mean, are you even a founder? I tell my founders to not do that, you know, like work at a sustainable amount. Like I know like at about 60 hours is where I start burning out. So I try to keep it around 55 hours a week on team McKnight. Like that’s why I just start burning out. It’s just not good for anybody. You know? Right. Yeah. There’s, want to have enough reserve that you can sprint for things when you need it. So like, don’t stay up till one or two in morning often, but if I’m behind and I was out for that whole day and I got back late and I was like, you know what I have critical stuff. It’s do, uh, we have this big proposal for sports physio to do tomorrow. And they’re like, Hey, can you give a review? I’m like, I’m going to do that when I get home. It’ll 10 45. And so I worked on that for an hour and then I had some other big stuff I had to do. So, yeah. So I think, you know, you mix.
(00:39:47) Jason Syversen
I don’t know that I’m great at it. Um, but I’m very competitive and like have a high fear of failure, which I think has helped temper and manage my age. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I’m just also a competitive person. Like I want to win every game, bike, play ping pong, a video game, a board game. I’m like, I just walk. That’s the chip on the shoulder from our backgrounds, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I won’t even play. I won’t even play board games with my kids because I’m too competitive. Like I take it too personally. Like you don’t want to see dad on the chessboard. All right, you just. Just keep me off the chessboard. That’s how I’ve compensated for that. My son is more easygoing than I am and he really struggled in high school because he is just more laissez-faire. like, it’s okay, dad. I studied for like 20 minutes. And whereas a couple of my daughters got my personality of like, one of them’s on the National Honor Society. She’s not gifted intellectually, but she is such a hard worker because she has this incredible high fear of failure. I’m gonna fail. I’m gonna fail. I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. So like, I’m gonna study for like five hours. And she gets great grades every time because that pushes her so that.
(00:40:00) Brian Bell
I told my son he’s in eighth grade and he’s starting to get a couple of B’s. Maybe someday he’ll listen to this podcast and be like, yeah, I remember that. And I’m like, dude, you’re in like public school in eighth grade, you should be getting straight A’s. There’s no excuse. Like I expect straight A’s from you, you know? Speaking of failure, what’s a failure or misstep you learned from the most?
(00:40:23) Jason Syversen
That’s a good question. I don’t know. There’s bigger ones and then ones I’ve learned from the most. I don’t know if they’re always the same, but I can say that what I’m going through right now is I am now the majority owner of an indoor softball facility in New Hampshire — 30,000-foot building. A friend of mine was going to be owning a third and his daughters had played competitive softball for a program, and the guy who ran the program wanted to start this building. So my friend Sam was gonna come in for one third and the guy was gonna own two thirds with his wife. And then Sam’s like, hey, you wanna split my one third with me? We’re partners on a bunch of deals. He’s like, I’m gonna mentor him on the finance business side, because he’s not a sharp operator. But you know, softball’s got a good network and all the economics look good. I penciled it out. Everything’s great. I’m like, yeah, sure. And it’s been a disaster — like losing 50 to 100 grand a year. You know, my friend Sam sold his shares out to another dude who now is like so upset and disgruntled, he just like walked away from his portion. We had to keep putting money in. So now I now own 52% of it. The main guy and his wife own 48%, and the bank might be taking it over because it’s behind on payments. So it’s just taught me a whole bunch of things. One is not to personally guarantee big investments. Two, if you do personally guarantee something like your house, make sure you are the guy operating it and it’s your baby and not you’re trusting someone else to manage this thing you have significant liability for. Three, not to invest in stuff you don’t know well, which is always a good reminder as an investor. Four, not to go in trusting other people’s diligence and other people’s assessment of a market or a business. Again, I’ve been burned in the investing world doing that, but I trust my friend Sam so much. I was like, all right, you think it’s good? I’m just pencil writing, passive guy coming in behind you guys, like what’s the big deal? But now it’s sucking up my time and I had to go meet with the bank and I had to talk to a lawyer this week and like, I don’t want to be doing this. It’s not what I want to be spending my time on. I just thought it’d be a fun kind of side passive investment. So total, a whole bunch of lessons there, including not to think too highly of yourself. And even if I have that great venture exits and those other things, you’re like, well, but you could also still suck at investing. And as soon as you get outside what you know and trust other people’s diligence and that it’s all gonna work out, like you could still have a big problem and have something blow up in your face.
(00:42:09) Brian Bell
Small businesses are tough as well. I mean, that’s a small business. Yeah. Brick and mortar, small business.
(00:42:16) Jason Syversen
And that industry particularly is hard. It’s just like athletic facilities, or just... One I was just talking to a friend about that this more yesterday, know, I think the biggest one I see in the sports world Sports tech world. I very rarely invest in sports tech companies Because the big problem in sports tech founders is they either go after the upper end of the market and they’ve got a product for pro teams and they’ve got great cacti LTV They’ve got a cool product, know, they’re Cact might be eight grand and they’ve got an eighty thousand dollar LTV um, 20 grand a year and turn after four years or whatever. But the TAM is like $2 million. And they’re like, well, when we expand to college, it’ll go to five. Like no one cares. This is not a venture scale business. Like there’s like 30 teams that do what you do. And you’ve got three of them already. And like, even if you took the universe of all of them, it’s just not a venture business. Like you don’t understand you’re raising this thing at like a five or $10 million valuation, but your business is never going to be worth more than 20.
(00:43:45)
And that’s generous, right? That’s at a 10x or 20x multiple or whatever.
(00:43:49) Jason Syversen
Yeah, exactly. and then, the other side of the market, they go after the mass market. They’re like, I built an app. It’s a pose estimator. It’ll analyze your golf swing and tell you how you’re doing it wrong or your batting swing. And it’s — you put it on your phone and it’s going to be 20 bucks a month. And they show this curve that goes to infinity on their revenue chart. Yeah. Exactly. I’m like, but they don’t understand CAC to LTV. Right. So their CAC is like $74 and their LTV is 60. And you really, cause these people use it for two, three months and then they churn and they don’t understand that you’re literally setting money on fire. Like, and I’ve tried to explain that you could build any business and make money. Every single business, any business on the planet can bring in revenue. The question is, is it profitable revenue or not? Because I could build a business selling poop on a stick. My CAC might be $3,000. My LTV might be one. But hey, if you throw enough money at it, I can build that revenue curve. But is that a business that anyone wants to be part of that they want to invest in? I would argue no. And they don’t understand unit economics and go-to-market strategy and how cacti are living, why that stuff matters.
(00:45:13)
Cack.
(00:45:15) Brian Bell
That’s, yeah, well said. So Siege was customer funded, you bootstrapped it. SportsVisio is VC backed. If you had to start from scratch today, which route would you take?
(00:45:26) Jason Syversen
you know, I’m a big fan of the answer to the most complicated questions is it depends. And I would certainly say that’s true here. It, when I was advising someone or myself, it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, right? Is the goal people think the VC path is like where it’s at. You need to build a VC business. I’ll be like, no, VC is horrible. You only need to do this. Like all those people are wrong. It’s very dependent on your situation, what product, what technology, what you’re trying to accomplish, how fast you need to get there. What your desired outcome is, are you trying to build lifestyle business? Do you want a generational business you pass on to your kids? Are you just trying to do this and hit it as hard as you can and dominate a market in five years? Are you building something where you’re competing with, you know, very large incumbents and you need some rapid competitive edge with some insight you have? Are you building something that’s more consulting oriented and never going to be VC investible? Like all of those things change the answer.
(00:46:36) Jason Syversen
For me, my longer term goal would be is to just go into investing full time and empower other investors. So I’ll spend a lot more time focusing on VC backed companies. But I’ll also help friends that are doing, you know, bootstrap businesses. And honestly, I think the default answer for most founders should be bootstrap. It’s always a better option. You have better.
(00:46:57) Brian Bell
At least until the first 100 or 200k.
(00:46:59) Jason Syversen
Totally. As far as you can go, like bootstrapping is a great option. It allows you to have, you know, a good, you can get bought for $5 million and have that be life altering money. Whereas most VC backed companies, you start with them $5 million valuation or $3 million valuation, and you would never sell for five because it’s too little and no one gets a return. So, but if you bootstrap it, you get a $5 million exit three years later. Like that’s, that was a pretty good return. People don’t realize that. So I always try to push people to think about.
(00:47:30) Brian Bell
Pretty good money. Yeah.
(00:47:32) Jason Syversen
bootstrapping, build a good business, think about your revenue, think about your customers, Cactail TV, all that stuff is very clear when you’re building it. It can get murky when you’re building a VC business. It’s a different game and I think way too many people try to play it unsuccessfully.
(00:47:52) Brian Bell
Well, I really enjoyed the conversation. I could talk to you for another hour. thanks. Thanks a lot for coming on. I’ll let you go. Cause I know it’s a late on the East coast.
(00:48:04) Jason Syversen
Yeah, I appreciate it, Brian, and I enjoyed the questions and hope to connect again in the future.
(00:48:09) Brian Bell
Likewise.
