Derek Belch: Getting Off the Sidelines

I came back to Stanford. I came back to be a football coach. I did an mba. I was kind of thinking, you know what? I did business. I liked it. I can see myself doing a lot of things, but if I don't see coaching by the time I'm 30, I'm going to regret it forever. So I came back. I was on the path to be a coach, just like you saw in that story. My master's thesis was this. And Coach Shaw sat me down in December of 2014, and. And he said, get out of here. Go start a company. You're about a year ahead of everybody else. You're not the typical coach. You just got your fourth degree. You're smart. Get out of here. So Coach Shaw is our only investor to date. He gave us about. I can't tell you exactly what he gave us, but by the time we put his money together, me putting in $5,000 of my own money, Jeremy putting in $5,000 of his own money, a couple others, we raised $50,000. And the goal was to just sell the one team last year. So on January 2nd of 2015, we opened for business, met with lawyers, tried to come up with a company name, did all of the bells and whistles of the paperwork, and the goal was, can we sell this to one team? It was me, full time. Some of you who have been Stanford fans for a long time may remember the name Trent Edwards. He was a quarterback here, played for the Buffalo Bills for several years. He was one of my best friends. He jumped on to kind of lend credibility to what we were doing from a quarterback player standpoint. Jeremy is part of our company more in a visionary role because he's a tenured professor here, so we kind of just can tap into his brain whenever we need to. And then we had a grad student that was kind of helping us out part time, building software, kind of helped us get this thing off the ground. So really it was like 2.7 people when you added up. And then by the time we needed a little more help. My best friend from childhood was at Wharton at the time. He worked for the FBI for many years. And he came on as our COO living in Philadelphia. So really we're like 3.4 people trying to actually get this thing off the ground, trying to sell to one team in 2015. And to me, the 50,000 was enough to travel around the country and not feel the panic of like, oh, my God, we're burning through cash. Which we were. But it's okay because we were working towards a goal. So five of the first six college students I met with in March signed up on the spot. And then two weeks later, the Dallas Cowboys signed up. So we went from not knowing what the hell we were doing trying to just sell to one team to over a half a million dollars in revenue, just like that. And since this is a public facing video, I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty of what each team pays, because teams might be able to watch this. By and large, it's the same. But I will tell you that between April 1 and September 1, we went from figuring out how to service six teams and not knowing what the heck we were doing to having six NFL teams and 10 colleges by the time the season started. Then in the fall, we did a virtual hockey goalie simulator for Madison Square Garden where when you actually get down to the stance, you're literally stopping pucks against real New York Rangers hockey players. Then we did a big project for Visa and the New England Patriots. So now we were starting to figure out different revenue streams of how to actually make money in addition to the training. When all was said and done, we did over $3 million in revenue last year. In our first year with no fund.