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Imagine you’re at a buffet where half the dishes are behind a velvet rope. You can see them—private equity, venture funds, secondaries, slick CRE deals—but there’s a sign: “Accredited Investors Only.” Most people either walk away or hop the rope blindly. Both are bad strategies.In this conversation, Leyla Kunimoto—co-founder of Accredited Investor Insights—opens the rope, explains what’s actually on the table, and hands you a fork and a checklist. If you’re curious about alternatives but allergic to hype, this is your field guide.The Big Picture: Access Is Rising, Asymmetry Still RulesOver the next decade, more retail capital will be invited into private markets through friendlier wrappers (target-date funds, interval funds, feeder platforms). That’s the access story. The catch? Information remains uneven. Pros look beyond glossy decks: position sizing, manager selection, reporting quality, and exit pathways matter more than any single “hot” thesis.Translation: It’s becoming easier to get in; it’s not getting easier to be good.What Leyla’s Learned the Hard Way* Diligence ≠ Googling. Real diligence feels like investigative journalism: triangulate sources, verify track records, and separate marks from money.* Illiquidity bites twice. You pay a time tax (can’t exit) and a behavioral tax (panic when you want out but can’t). Price that in.* Secondaries aren’t a magic escape hatch. A $50k LP slice is often too small and too fussy to move quickly at a fair price.* Tokenization is plumbing, not pixie dust. Digital rails help with settlement and fractionalization, but they can’t fix bad underwriting or poor reporting.* Concentration is earned. Start diversified while you learn. Concentrate only where you have repeatable edge.The LP Quickstart Playbook1) Pick Your Arena (Before Your Deals)* Define your why: return profile, time horizon, risk appetite.* Choose 1–2 core arenas (e.g., early-stage software funds, private credit) and ignore the rest for now.* Draft a 3-year pacing plan: small, regular commitments > sporadic, oversized bets.2) Underwrite the Manager, Not the PDFAsk the questions GPs don’t expect:* Sourcing edge: Where do your best deals come from that others can’t access?* Decision evidence: Show me call notes and pre-investment memos from winners and losers.* Portfolio construction: Target # holdings, check sizes, reserves, follow-on policy; what breaks this?* Exit math: Walk me through 3 realized outcomes—how did cash actually return?* Data room reality check: What’s missing and why?3) Underwrite the Vehicle* Liquidity: Is there any structural liquidity (intervals, periodic tenders)? If not, assume zero.* Fees & waterfall: Where can value leak? Simple beats clever.* Reporting cadence & KPIs: What shows up quarterly, and can I reconcile marks to cash?4) Underwrite Yourself* Position sizing: Size so a zero doesn’t derail your plan.* Behavioral guardrails: Pre-commit rules for adding, holding, or pausing commitments.* Documentation discipline: Keep a one-pager per commitment: thesis, risks, “kill switches.”The Diligence Stack (A Simple, Repeatable Flow)* Screen90-second filter: strategy fit, team coherence, portfolio construction sanity.* CorroborateReference calls (LPs and portfolio founders), cross-check bios, verify realizations.* Stress the modelRebuild returns with conservative exit timelines, lower multiples, real dilution.* Mark-to-cashAsk: “How do these marks turn into distributions? What would slow or block that?”* Decision memoTwo pages, max: why buy, why pass, what would change your mind.Pro tip: If you can’t summarize the edge in two sentences, you don’t understand it yet.Illiquidity: Feature, Bug… or Both?* Feature: Can protect you from yourself; forces long-term compounding.* Bug: Blocks rebalancing when you need it most; amplifies regret.* Answer: Treat illiquidity like a mortgage—carry it only if the asset pays you for the inconvenience and you can service it during storms.Secondaries & Tokenization (Sans Fairy Dust)* Retail-sized secondaries often fail to clear because trade costs, verification, and buyer diligence don’t scale for small tickets.* Tokenization improves transfer mechanics but doesn’t conjure buyers or fix messy cap tables. Think “better pipes,” not “better water.”Your move: If liquidity really matters, prefer structures with planned windows (interval funds/tenders) or allocate to strategies with shorter duration (e.g., certain private credit).Concentrate vs. Diversify (The Grown-Up Version)* Early days: Diversify to learn—vintages, managers, and sub-strategies.* Later: Concentrate where you’ve demonstrated edge (domain knowledge, access, or analytic process).* Rule of thumb: Concentration without evidence is just hope with better branding.The Reporting That Actually HelpsAsk for:* Cohort analysis by vintage and check size.* Reserves & follow-on map (who gets more capital and why).* Attribution: selection vs. post-investment value-add.* Cash reconciliation: capital calls, fees, distributions, net IRR/TVPI explained in plain English.If a manager can’t produce this, assume they manage stories better than portfolios.A 30-Minute “First Pass” Checklist* Strategy fit with your plan* Team continuity and decision record* Portfolio construction math (targets, reserves, loss rate assumptions)* Realized case studies → cash paths* Reporting samples you can actually analyze* Liquidity expectations you can live with* Fee stack you can explain to a friend* Your position size ≠ your ego sizePrint it. Use it. Update it.Common Traps (And How to Step Around Them)* Shiny objects: Co-invests and SPVs with unclear risk controls—pass until your base is built.* Mark-driven FOMO: Quarterly marks don’t equal distributions; celebrate wires, not PDFs.* Process drift: Saying yes because you’ve “done so much work already.” Sunk costs don’t improve outcomes.* One-deal heroics: Diversify first; earn concentration.If You Remember One ThingAccess is widening, but outcomes still reward process over theater. Build a simple, repeatable system for evaluating managers, vehicles, and yourself. Then stick to it when markets get loud.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: <a target="_blank" href="https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL">https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL</a>🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: <a target="_blank" href="https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast">https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast</a>Chapters:00:01 Welcome & what Accredited Investor Insights does00:31 Leyla’s path: public to private markets02:18 The “real estate gateway” to alternatives04:24 Why accreditation limits exist05:36 The likely future: a knowledge-based accreditation test06:28 Alternatives inside retirement accounts (via target-date funds)08:59 Why $50k secondaries rarely clear10:17 Tokenizing LP interests: promise vs. verification14:54 Misconceptions to unlearn about private markets16:57 Illiquidity explained (vs. REITs)21:03 The retail LP diligence gap25:42 Concentration vs. diversification: earning the right to concentrateTranscriptBrian Bell (00:01:03): Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Layla Kunimoto on the mic. She’s a co-founder of Accredited Investor Insights, a platform helping LPs and high net worth investors navigate private markets with more clarity. Layla writes and speaks about how accredited investors can better understand private placements, commercial real estate, and venture funds. Pretty relevant for this podcast, cutting through the jargon to focus on what really matters. Thanks for coming on.Leyla Kunimoto (00:01:28): Thank you for having me, Brian.Brian Bell (00:01:29): So I’d love to get your backstory. What’s your origin story?Leyla Kunimoto (00:01:31): Yeah, so I have a background in finance. I have been investing since I was 19. I’ve been investing in public markets for a very long time. And then in 2020, about five years ago, I discovered private placement. I kind of stumbled into it, and it captured my attention. It was very interesting to see how differently things are presented to investors, how big of a gap there is between what investors know and the information they get. I dove head first and had a lot of conversations. I’ve had thousands of conversations with other LPs, hundreds with GP service providers. In early 2024, a friend of mine and I decided to take this information public and share what we had learned. The friend has since departed and gone on to other things, so I inherited Accredited Investor Insights. What we started doing was writing about our experience. What’s been interesting is to see this grow and capture a lot of different audiences. I thought the biggest audience would be limited partners, and it was for a while. And now our newsletter is read by fund managers, wealth advisors, RIAs, investors—anybody in the ecosystem.Brian Bell (00:02:55): That’s amazing. What was that aha moment where you’re like, private placements, let’s look into this?Leyla Kunimoto (00:03:01): My gateway drug was real estate. In 2020, real estate prices were high. A lot of things didn’t pencil, but I saw that economies of scale in private placement allowed GPs to go out and buy much bigger properties, syndicate them, raise investor capital, and bring that to retail investors. Instead of owning something 100%, an investor can own a small slice of a much bigger pie. The bigger pie has very different economics versus a smaller one. It was interesting, and I thought there was an opportunity to exploit that inefficiency. Of course, it’s less efficient than public markets. In public markets, you have thousands of eyes looking at financials—let’s say, publicly traded REITs. In private markets, you do not. The downside of private markets is the lack of information, and that’s what creates that imbalance.Brian Bell (00:04:12): There’s an information asymmetry in private markets, right? Which is why you have to be accredited or a qualified purchaser. You have to have a certain level of wherewithal to understand what you’re doing enough that you’re not going to lose your money, which is why I think those accredited investor laws were put in place almost a hundred years ago. People in the ’20s were going into their local Charles Schwab or whatever it was on the corner—which was like every block in New York, I guess—and you could buy stock on margin, and everybody just lost their shirt.Leyla Kunimoto (00:04:44): This is exactly it, and you hit the nail on the head. As much as I don’t like excessive regulation, I think those restrictions exist for a reason. These are bigger numbers and higher risks of losing your principal. I think it’s good to restrict access a little bit to people who maybe don’t have enough capital to be placing those larger, riskier bets.Brian Bell (00:05:13): You know what’s wild? Anybody can just walk into a casino and lose thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars—and we let that happen—but somehow we’re not letting people invest in asset classes that the rich get richer in, right? Which is usually private equity, venture capital, private real estate, and other forms of investment. So it would seem that we need a licensing system. I think Jason Calacanis has been calling for this for years now—why couldn’t you just go take a test? Like, you have to take a test to drive a car, so take a test to invest. A test to invest.Leyla Kunimoto (00:05:48): It’s coming. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next couple of years we do have a test the SEC comes up with.Brian Bell (00:05:56): And we technically do, right? The Series 65, I think you could take—it’s a four-hour test, which is pretty onerous. Imagine having to take a four-hour test to drive a car. It’s a little much for the average person. But some shorter “accredited investor test,” maybe 30 or 60 minutes, testing your knowledge on diversification and other basics, could make sense. How do you think about all that?Leyla Kunimoto (00:06:29): I think there’s a high probability that a test like that is coming. I also believe there’s another side to this: President Trump signed an executive order a couple of months ago that will allow access to private markets inside 401(k)s—private markets, crypto, alternative investments.Brian Bell (00:06:53): That’s huge.Leyla Kunimoto (00:06:53): Yeah, that’s big. Because now there’s been sort of a wall, right?Brian Bell (00:06:58): You have to flip it to a self-directed IRA, which is a pain. It’d be way better if I could just log into Fidelity and say, “This is what I want to invest in,” and Fidelity checks: “Hey, maybe don’t put 100% of your portfolio into this one real estate deal,” right? It doesn’t even take AI to get that—just don’t do that.Leyla Kunimoto (00:07:22): A little caveat: it’s not going to be that simple. In 401(k)s, the most likely scenario will be target-date funds where a small percentage—probably under 20%—gets allocated to private equity or private credit. I think we’re still quite a ways away, though. But imagine this scenario: I have interest in a private real estate deal and need liquidity. Let’s say it’s a $50,000 minimum investment. You want to buy it. Right now, there’s no platform for us to transact that small an interest. There are platforms for million-dollar secondaries, but selling a $50K stake is cost-prohibitive.Brian Bell (00:08:38): You’re talking about a secondary for a private company.Leyla Kunimoto (00:08:41): Exactly.Brian Bell (00:08:44): Yeah, we’re doing secondaries now. They’re hot—especially for late-stage unicorns. But closing a secondary is non-trivial. It’s complex for a little 50K check.Leyla Kunimoto (00:09:04): For a 50K check, it’s really difficult. But I do think that’s going to get solved, probably on blockchain. Once that’s solved, small retail investors will gain trading ability—and that’s going to be huge. I’m very excited about that. If we have any visibility into what’s inside that LP interest, and I can buy a fractional stake in something like SpaceX or OpenAI for $10,000, that benefits both sides. Whoever solves that will make a lot of fees and open up the entire market.Brian Bell (00:10:19): Why do you think blockchain is necessary here? We already have systems with intermediaries like NYSE and NASDAQ that could facilitate this without blockchain. Why is it needed?Leyla Kunimoto (00:10:33): The only other option is listing on the public exchange, which is expensive and infeasible for small holders like employees with modest amounts of shares. Blockchain allows cost-efficient micro-transactions of private stakes.Brian Bell (00:11:04): Gotcha. But who verifies what goes onto the blockchain—that it’s authentic, signed off by the company, and not subject to a right of first refusal? Blockchain is just a distributed ledger. Why not just use centralized ones?Leyla Kunimoto (00:11:33): All good questions. I don’t have a good answer yet. We’ll see.Brian Bell (00:11:37): That’s always my question when investing in blockchain—why does it need to exist this way? Founders often say, “It’s more secure.” Great, but who verifies it? Garbage in, garbage out—whether on blockchain or a NASDAQ ledger, someone must police it. It’s like buying a house—you need escrow, title, insurance, verification. So I think until everything’s fully digitized, we’ll need that bridge verifying what goes on-chain.Leyla Kunimoto (00:12:36): Exactly. The source information must be bulletproof. Blockchain is the “how,” the pipes connecting houses. But the water—what flows through those pipes—must be verified as clean. So the key is trusting the source. If we trust it, we’ll transact all day long. But verifying every source might be costly.Brian Bell (00:13:30): Huge. So when you look back, as you’ve been in this now for years, what misconceptions did you have early on about private markets that you had to unlearn?Leyla Kunimoto (00:13:46): I thought that by knowing the universe, you could create a little bit of an unfair advantage over your competition just by having more knowledge. It’s not quite so simple. It is true that in public markets, it’s much harder to find those pockets where it’s imbalanced. But what’s also true in public markets is you can find times when sentiment is just bad. Okay, regional banks — I’ll give you a recent example. Last Friday, you couldn’t sell regional banks if you wanted to. Nobody wanted those things. But then it’s overblown, right? And the next day we have a correction. When you have a lot of information about a certain space, you have those opportunities in the public markets, whereas in private markets, you do not. Marks are marks. They get updated once a quarter if you’re lucky, or never until the deals are sold. You are what you owe. It is what it is. Another big thing I learned — private markets are illiquid. The appreciation for liquidity came to me after I had a certain amount of money allocated to private markets. There are certain deals I would love to exit right now. I would love to take a haircut and exit, but I can’t. I’m stuck until those deals exit.Brian Bell (00:15:15): Just give us an example. You don’t have to name the company name, but give us the mechanics of it.Leyla Kunimoto (00:15:19): Let’s say I’m invested in a fund that holds a bunch of assets — let’s say real estate, and the fund owns ten different apartment buildings. Knowing what I know today, would I have allocated to that fund? No. And let’s say the valuations are down 25%. I’d love to sell that. That information came out quickly after allocating to the fund. If I’d been in a publicly traded REIT holding similar assets, I could’ve pushed a button in my brokerage account and sold the shares, taken the haircut, and redeployed. With a private real estate fund, I don’t have that button. I have to wait until the fund sells those assets and liquidates the portfolio for me to get the money back.Brian Bell (00:16:09): So you’re an LP in a fund. A GP controls when you get liquidity. It’s hard to sell an LP interest in a fund because it’s virtually impossible. The GP would have to help do that, all the other LPs would get first right of refusal, and even if you’re able to sell, you’ll take a huge haircut. Let’s say the fund’s up 2x — you might get 1.25x back, if you can even find a buyer and the GP approves and all LPs pass. It’s a very interesting model. But what it does do — and this is why I think private markets outperform public ones and why endowments put 40% of their funds into PE and VC — is that it creates long-term thinking. The problem with public markets is you can always generate liquidity, which drives short-termism. That’s why companies don’t want to go public — regulations, quarterly calls, constant pressure. With long-term funds, like venture capital, pre-seed and seed, when I talk to LPs, they ask, “When do I get liquidity?” and I tell them — a very, very long time. Seven, ten years. It takes a really long time.Leyla Kunimoto (00:17:41): It’s an important thing. A lot of LPs hear that but don’t quite process it. A lot can happen in seven years — recessions, margin calls, liquidity squeezes. When LPs allocate money to a private fund, especially venture capital or private equity, there are no expected distributions for years. That J-curve takes a long time. It’s critical to understand: there is no button to push, no secondary sale. You are stuck. There are benefits — it forces your hand.Brian Bell (00:18:42): What are some of the other gaps that you’ve identified and are covering with your writing and analysis?Leyla Kunimoto (00:18:48): Huge information asymmetry — and it’s insurmountable. And frankly, a lot of LPs I know are retail LPs, like me. I don’t work for an endowment. I don’t have a legal team checking my work. Many people in my boat allocate based on thesis alone — “I think AI is the next big thing, so I’ll go find funds investing in AI.” LPs don’t have the ability to do very deep diligence, and there’s nothing really to help solve that. I think that’s the biggest gap. It helps if you have background in what you’re investing in. If you’ve started companies or had successful exits, allocating to venture capital makes sense because you understand that space. Real estate investors allocate to real estate funds because they know it. The biggest mistakes I see are people allocating to areas they know nothing about — for example, a tech founder saying, “I’m going to diversify into real estate,” without knowing the domain. Those investors are often in for surprises. Education is the only cure.Brian Bell (00:20:38): How do you think about that as you write? Your audience is LPs, GPs, and everyone in between. But say someone made their money in startups and now wants to allocate to real estate. Would you advise — and of course, this podcast is not investment advice — would you say maybe avoid individual deals and instead invest through a fund with a proven GP? How should LPs think about that?Leyla Kunimoto (00:21:07): None of this is investment advice, and I don’t advise LPs — that’s not my business model. But if I were allocating to something I knew little about, say biotech, I’d look for funds that are well-diversified within that industry. I’d focus on diversification and on the fund manager’s experience in that space. The biggest risk when you don’t know an industry is getting wiped out. One-off deals have a much higher probability of loss than a diversified portfolio. If you have ten deals, and seven go to zero but three return 10x, you’re fine. Concentrated bets should only be made with strong conviction — and that conviction only comes from knowledge.Brian Bell (00:22:33): Gotcha. Well, how would you reply to Warren Buffett, who said diversification is for suckers or losers?Leyla Kunimoto (00:22:40): Warren Buffett’s famous advice to his widow was to put all the money in the S&P 500 and do nothing. Diversification is for suckers because you can’t outperform the market if you’re the market. If you’re only allocated to the S&P 500, your returns are the S&P 500. But if you know a lot about Tesla, for instance, and you’re confident, then yes — concentrate there, because that’s the only way to beat the market. If you know nothing about something, you’re equally likely to get wiped out. So being diversified and earning 5–8% is better than concentrating and going to zero. Avoid zeros. It’s simple math.Brian Bell (00:23:40): This is what I tell my LPs. They’ll say, “I’ll just invest in my own startups.” I ask: How many deals? How many decks will you review? How many meetings will you take? To invest in 100 startups, you probably have to look at 10,000. You need that scale to be diversified. Real estate requires less, public equities even less. LPs don’t always appreciate that. If you don’t know the space — real estate, private equity, venture capital — as your full-time gig, you’re probably missing alpha. You’re better off hiring someone who does. But if you’re an expert — like in electric cars and the Tesla supply chain — then sure, overweight there. Just don’t put more than 20–30% of your assets into any one class. Definitely don’t concentrate in stuff you don’t know.Leyla Kunimoto (00:24:50): Not concentrating on stuff you know nothing about is probably the best way to avoid nasty surprises down the road.Brian Bell (00:24:58): So what do you think the next decade looks like in the LP ecosystem?Leyla Kunimoto (00:25:03): The next decade is exciting. LP access to private markets will expand. The number of publicly listed companies is going down — companies are staying private longer. That has pros and cons. The downside is opacity: we know almost nothing about private companies. You can allocate to a big-name PE fund, but all you’ll see in SEC filings is “Total revenues of our portfolio companies are X; total net profit is Y.” No KPIs, no growth rates, no margin expansion — nothing. That’s a huge disadvantage. Some GPs do a fantastic job of communicating performance to LPs, but they’re rare. When you see those detailed quarterly reports, it’s beautiful — “Here’s how our portfolio companies are performing; here’s the quarter-over-quarter growth.” LPs should demand that transparency, even though it’s costly for GPs. It lets LPs see which GPs got lucky versus those with real skill in picking winners.The next decade will also bring more change: large asset managers — KKR, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs — are all rolling out retail-facing products. High-net-worth investors are getting bombarded with offers. The lower middle-market GPs need to be aware of that. As an LP, I now have options I didn’t have five years ago, and in five years, I’ll have even more — backed by billion-dollar marketing budgets and decades-long track records. Smaller or newer GPs need to adapt — message clearly, differentiate, and communicate what sets them apart from the generalist giants.Brian Bell (00:27:48): Gotcha. Well, where can folks find out more about you online and subscribe to your newsletter?Leyla Kunimoto (00:27:53): I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn as Layla Kunimoto. My newsletter is at accreditedinsight.com, and I’d love to have people subscribe. Thank you.Brian Bell (00:28:06): Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.Leyla Kunimoto (00:28:08): Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me. Get full access to Ignite Insights at <a href="https://insights.teamignite.ventures/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">insights.teamignite.ventures/subscribe</a>

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 GamesBefore 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 AnalyticsSportsVisio’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 EverythingJason 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 ParentsInstead 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 BrainSportsVisio’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 BeyondSportsVisio’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 visionImagine 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 MattersSportsVisio 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. 👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: <a target="_blank" href="https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL">https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL</a>🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: <a target="_blank" href="https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast">https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast</a>Chapters:00:01 From DARPA to the Driveway03:10 Growing Up with Grit06:45 Hacking for the Pentagon11:36 The Spark: A Rec-League Argument13:34 Building an AI Sports Platform15:34 The Timing Advantage18:40 Go-to-Market That Works20:38 Cameras, Courts, and Chaos22:20 Scaling Beyond Basketball24:00 The A-Team Behind the Tech26:18 The Hardest Problem in Vision31:26 Learning from Thousands of Games34:40 The Future: AI Scoreboards and Robo-Refs37:10 Speed, Cost, and Scale40:05 Lessons from Building Deep Tech Startups45:15 What’s Next for SportsVisio47:40 Closing ReflectionsTranscript(00:01:07) Brian BellHey 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 SyversenThanks for having me, Brian.(00:01:27) Brian BellSo we’d love to get your background. What’s your origin story?(00:01:30) Jason SyversenYeah, 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 SyversenWhat 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 BellI 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 BellI 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 SyversenTotally. 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 BellWell, 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 SyversenYeah. 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 BellThat’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 SyversenSadly, 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 SyversenYeah, 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 SyversenSo 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 BellYeah, 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 SyversenThat’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 BellIt 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 SyversenExactly. 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 SyversenYeah. 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 SyversenAnd 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 SyversenSo 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 SyversenYeah. 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 BellI’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 SyversenSo 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 SyversenI 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 BellI’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 SyversenYeah, 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 SyversenI 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 SyversenThat’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 SyversenAnd 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 SyversenYeah, 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 Syversenyou 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 SyversenFor 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 SyversenTotally. 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 Syversenbootstrapping, 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 SyversenYeah, I appreciate it, Brian, and I enjoyed the questions and hope to connect again in the future.(00:48:09) Brian BellLikewise. 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