Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics

Intro: [00:00:04] We’ll come back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software web3, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:38] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Jake Schuster with Gemini Sports Analytics. Welcome, Jake.

Jake Schuster: [00:00:57] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:58] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Gemini sports. How you serving folks?

Jake Schuster: [00:01:03] Yeah, we we are a data science as a service company. So we are making predictive analytics accessible. And what we mean by that is, you know, most people have seen the film Moneyball that took place 20 years ago when the Oakland Athletics used mathematics to get an advantage on their opponents and won more games with 20 years ago, they were collecting about 50,000 data points per athlete per year. Now that number is between two and 3 million. And sports teams are hiring lots of data scientists. So we encourage that, which is just hiring more and more would be like asking Henry Ford for a faster horse. Someone’s got to build a car. There are automated machine learning platforms which allow non-technical people to do data science without having to write computer code, but they’re generic to industry and sports. People won’t use them. Sports executives won’t go pay for those platforms and use them because they’re not quite user friendly enough for their needs and the technical level. And they don’t contain APIs or data ingestion pieces for the sports data that’s being collected by these teams. So there’s too many steps for them to really harness that technology. We’re just bringing that kind of vertical SAS approach into sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:11] So what is the type of data that is important to these teams?

Jake Schuster: [00:02:17] Anything that will help them better make better decisions in how they acquire, develop and manage their athletes? So if you’re a professional baseball team in North America, you’re going to want to figure out which players to draft and which players to sign. You’re going to have long term development plans for those athletes that you need to optimize. And you’re going to want to keep those those athletes injury free and performing their best. And finally, you want to know which tactics to play against different opponents and to optimize processes. And so any data that’s going to help improve that process.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:47] And then where what kind of universe of data do you pull from to get that kind of information? You need to assess that. Okay. Let’s start Bill today and then Bob tomorrow.

Jake Schuster: [00:03:01] Yeah, great question. So you’d be surprised how few or how common these sources are the most teams are collecting. Every sport has a scouting database, every sport has an endgame statistics database. And then every sport will use, let’s say, about a half dozen of the same, you might call them biometric or performance and medical technologies. So jump tests that they do daily GPS and accelerometer metrics of how much an athlete’s running and game or running in practice, and therefore how hard they’re working your heart rate. Similarly, sleep is measured often, and lots of nutrition and psychological metrics are taken these days. And then each league has some specific stats, like something called second spectrum in basketball, and it looks at indoor movement tracking and other technologies that you see in different sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:49] So then the teams for existing players, they have access to certain data and then there’s probably just public information, right, that you’re you know, they’re these people are being filmed, you know, playing the game. So there’s data there. How do you kind of help them? Kind of first of all, take that public information and marry it to the private information that you might have and then and use that to make an informed decision whether, hey, maybe this guy’s hurt and he’s not telling us. But because I’m getting data that suggests that something’s a little off, but like like how is it used practically on a day to day basis?

Jake Schuster: [00:04:33] Well, our platform on a day to day basis, it’s important to understand that this is a tool in a user’s hands existing. I don’t like to use the word competitor because no one’s done what we’re doing before, but existing technologies out there are often third party or consulting style where they have to send you the data and then someone’s going to play with it and get back to you with insights. We are entirely, entirely putting capabilities in the stakeholders hands, so we do a lot of backend work that we automate and scale in terms of data preparation, making it easy to join databases and those different data sets that you mentioned. For example, our first piece of traction was publishing in an academic journal publicly available data on MBA injuries. Over the last ten seasons. It was the most accurate data model ever published to date in that space, and that was just to show that what we do is objective and academic, that it’s not a black box, it’s not a secret sauce. We are just using open source data models and wrangling them into a space that it’s easy for someone to use without writing computer code.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:30] But then it’s on the team to now take that data and then use it specifically to help. Them in some manner?

Jake Schuster: [00:05:37] Absolutely. I mean, we believe this is not meant to be man versus machine. It’s man and machine. And a lot of times you will see something where the computers are saying one thing and the executives are saying something else. And then this war takes place between departments. And that’s not how it should be. It should be that the machines are giving you some some information and you’re making human decisions based on that, not because of that or dictated by that.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:02] So what’s an example that the machine might help you make a better decision because it’s giving you pertinent information?

Jake Schuster: [00:06:10] Sure. So our first pilot project we did with an NBA team where they wanted to know how to manage their busy schedule. The MBA schedule is famously hectic and challenging and causes a lot of injuries. And so you want to find where you can get a day off any place you can are algorithms show the the wind probability of every game across the season based on travel, based on time zones, density, things like that, amount of rest and so forth. And within them it was very obvious how much better their star player was getting when he had a certain amount of rest. So we looked across the schedule and identified about 20 different times that they could give the player a pre pre-planned day off based on our metrics, and they got to pick the five that they wanted.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:54] So like I use a Woohp fitness product and then so it tells me like, hey, you have good recovery today, you have bad recovery today. Is that something that you can take that data then and then integrate it into your data so that you know that if I’m having a bad recovery day and it’s kind of near the time for this person to have a day off, maybe we should make today. That day.

Jake Schuster: [00:07:18] Absolutely. And a number of teams are using MOVE. It’s a little bit more consumer grade technology, but they’re using similar things that are a bit more precise. And that’s exactly how it works, where many people you might see tweeting or posting online, observing that their sleep metrics are very poor after they have alcohol the prior night in a similar situation with an athlete or with a consumer, the technology isn’t saying don’t drink. It might not even be that smart, but it’s going to show you what happens when you drink and then you or your coach or someone involved has to help you make the decision to not drink.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:53] Now, is this primarily geared to professional sports leagues, or does this trickle down to college and high school?

Jake Schuster: [00:07:59] Yeah, we’re already we’re about to be able to announce a partnership with a Power five college that we’ll be working with. I think high school doesn’t quite collect enough enough technology yet, although we’ll probably work with some AA groups. College is absolutely a market that we’re working in.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:14] And then so when you had the idea to do this, how did you kind of create the company behind it to help and roll it out? Like what? Like did you do this kind of on your own as bootstrapping? Hey, I got this idea. Let me just play this out. Or were you like, right away? I’m going to I’m going to scale this thing and I’m going to build the team.

Jake Schuster: [00:08:36] This bootstrapped for a long, long time. You know, self belief and traction have a funny parallel journey together. And I had this idea back in 2019, and I’ve been talking about it with my partner, Jose Fernandez, who’s the head of sports science at the Houston Astros, when they won a World Series with the biggest analytics department in sports. And he saw this problem and he saw that they needed software on top of all those developers. And we went around, we publish this paper, we did a pilot project. I went full time last August. We raised a small, small round of angel investment, put that into product design, and then went around with that product design and pitch venture capital and recently raised $1,000,000 combined from lead sports known a group, which is the combination of the grandchildren of the founder of Adidas with the honor of a Premier League team and Florida funders who are the most active venture capital firm in Southeast.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:29] Now, was it always kind of just aimed at the professional team or is it going to eventually trickle down to, you know, gambling and fantasy football and things like that?

Jake Schuster: [00:09:40] It’s funny how often we get that question, and I don’t have a great answer. My sense is that someday we’ll build a parallel product in that space. Everyone wants to know if the numbers can can give more accurate betting odds and things like that. I think the market is plenty big just to help out elite sports teams around the world, but I’m sure some investor will convince me otherwise at some point.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:03] Well, because if you’re capturing this data and like you say, it’s self serve, and if I’m able to take what exists, that’s in the public domain and then get an edge. I mean, that’s what all of these, you know, games of chance, that’s what it’s about, right? You want an edge?

Jake Schuster: [00:10:19] Without question. Without question. I think the important thing to understand why I’m a little bit defensive about that notion is that trust is everything and data security is paramount. And we’ve built out redundancy after feature after redundancy in our platform to ensure the security of athlete data and proprietary team data, which obviously we know is important because we’ve been in those positions working for those teams. There will come a point in time where the value proposition becomes what my original idea for it was, which is this big snowball of combined data that teams want to plug into because 30 to 32 teams worth of data is a lot more useful than one team worth of data, and the betting companies will be thinking exactly the same at that point.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:00] Right. But even if the yours is just the proprietary individual team data combined with the public domain data and if the consumer is just the public domain data, I mean, for a lot of people, that would be enough for them to, I would think, have a subscription. Now, what’s been kind of the funnest part of being a founder and what’s been the most challenging part?

Jake Schuster: [00:11:24] The most fun part is easy. That’s working with incredible people. And I know it’s a cliche, but being the least intelligent person in the room every single day is really fun. And this incredible caliber of advisors and investors and employees that I work with just blows my mind every single day. So that is just caused me to level up enormously as a person. The least fun part is how I’ve come to accept this, but it’s still not fun. People like you when you’re winning and people don’t want to have as much to do with you until you’re winning. And and traction is everything. And it’s it’s very interesting seeing who gives you the time of day at certain points and who doesn’t. And I think you just learn that that’s one of the few ways that the world works, and you’ve got to run with it.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:11] Now, for you as a founder, what’s kind of your superpower that makes you the right person to lead this adventure?

Jake Schuster: [00:12:22] I know how to, and I’m able to get the right people in the room at the right time.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:28] And then as part of the fundraising process, which has his own job, obviously. But how did you kind of stumble upon Startup Showdown and Panoramic Ventures? Was that just part of your due diligence of looking out for, you know, opportunities to tell your story and to, you know, see who’s out there doing what?

Jake Schuster: [00:12:48] You know what? I was trying to remember the name of who did it. I apologize that I can’t. But someone put it into the Miami Tech Life Telegram chat run by Ryan Wray and Damien DiMeo. Some information about this event and encouraging people to apply. So I applied and then frankly, I forgot about it because I applied to a lot of stuff for that period of time. And then I got an email that I was, I think at that time a semifinalist and went through the rounds and then it happened. And you know, the support along the way from the likes of Stephanie and Tammy was, was amazing. And that that’s what helped the group stand out.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:22] And then so what specifically were they doing? Were you’re like, hey, this is a good use of my time. I’m glad I participated in this.

Jake Schuster: [00:13:30] Well, if I remember it right, if it was the semifinal kind of round where you had, it was almost like a speed dating pitch. You gave your pitch, I think, five times in a couple of hour period to a bunch of different investors. And they gave great feedback each of them. They gave great criticism and great advice, and all of it was useful.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:50] And do you have a mentor or is there somebody that’s kind of your person that you’re aiming at? If this is the type of leader that I want to be or this is the type of leader that I can learn from.

Jake Schuster: [00:14:02] I have a lot of mentors. I would say, you know, it takes a village. My my advisory group is incredible. So whether that’s my my CFO, Johan von Leek, telling me about how to financially model and how we can move forward with this business really economically, or where some of our angel investors and advisors like Chris Haskell and Flynn and Joshua Tony, who have all run multiple companies, all work in and around professional sports, and all gone and done exactly what I’m trying to do. I just observe how these people live their lives and run their businesses. And that helps me do. Do mine.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:34] And any advice for other startup founders out there?

Jake Schuster: [00:14:38] Just keep going.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:41] But just keep moving.

Jake Schuster: [00:14:43] Be relentless. Be persistent. Persevere. If I had to give a big cliche, it would be that whatever you’re working towards is just on the other side of whatever you’re you’re working through right now. Like, I really think pain tolerance is one of the most important qualities.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:59] Yeah, that resilience. They don’t teach you that in school?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:03] No.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:05] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:08] I really appreciate you asking. I think being on this podcast is perfect because I think marketing is is a luxury, not a necessity at such an early stage. And we’re really fortunate that our first 25 customers are all going to come from direct relationships that we have right now. But what happens next? Right. So general exposure and general awareness of people about Gemini Sports Analytics is always appreciated. So I think being right here is great.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:39] And if somebody wants to learn more, get a hold of you or somebody on the team. What’s a website?

Jake Schuster: [00:15:44] Yeah. Gemini Sports Dot I and I’m at Jake Gemini Sports dot II.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:50] Well, Jake, thank you so much for sharing your story, doing important work. And we appreciate you.

Jake Schuster: [00:15:55] Thank you, buddy.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:56] All right. This Lee Kantor will show next time on Startup Showdown.

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