Brenton Sullivan - Co-founder & CEO of FieldLevel

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast where we discover cutting edge technology and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together we're going to uncover what technology San Diegans are creating with our own blend of local lifestyle. Thanks to our sponsors, Cox Business, longtime supporters of the San Diego startup community, and also partners in Quick Pitch San Diego, a pitch competition giving out over $75,000 worth of cash prizes to local startup entrepreneurs. On October 29, Connect San Diego Venture Group, Tech Coast Angels and Cox Business will present the next year's pitch competition. Join us and we'll see you there. And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am here at Field Level headquarters here in sunny Solano beach with co founder and CEO Brenton Sullivan. Thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Really excited to hear the story of the company, hear the story of you coming to San Diego. I think we're excited to get to know that part. Why don't you tell us quickly what Field Level is?

Yeah. Field Level is a collaborative athletic recruiting tool that helps athletes find the right colleges and college coaches find the best athletes for their rosters. And really our mission, the reason why we exist, is to unlock the highest level of athletic achievement for both athletes and coaches.

Oh, cool. I like this a lot. I come from kind of an HR tech space and this kind of has that kind of marketplace connection. Skillset amplification. I'm excited to dive into this.

Nice.

But why don't we get to know you a little bit? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the Bay Area, Berkeley, and spent my childhood in the East Bay and ultimately went to high school at a boarding school, which is sort of rare for the west coast, but I went to a small boarding school called Thatcher. It's in the Ojai Valley, which is just inland from Ventura, near Santa Barbara area. And that was where I was playing high school athletics before I ended up going to college at USC and spent a lot of time in la.

Okay, what kind of sports were you playing?

Passion was basketball, but I also played football and baseball and a little bit of soccer and so sort of jumped around. All different sports, but big passion for basketball.

Yeah, I love her. So that was in high school. Did you continue playing anything in college?

Yeah, I actually went to USC and ended up walking onto the baseball team there. I was a catcher. Spent a lot of time as a bullpen catcher there, and that was really where a lot of the ideas got Sparked for this business and what it is today.

So did you actually start the business while you were at usc?

You know, I wrote a business plan. I was in the entrepreneurial program. And part of the exercise there is to actually write a business plan. And what usc, at least their entrepreneurial program does, which is really great, is they bring in just a ton of entrepreneurs to tell their stories. And a couple of those speakers sort of stuck out to me where they were talking about, look, if you're gonna go start a business and you really need to be passionate about it, but it also needs. You need to have some reference point to the problem you're trying to solve. It always helps when there's sort of a personal pain that you're solving. And I really thought about that a lot because I was thinking, well, what's really painful for me right now? And I was at usc. I was on the baseball team, and it was a fabulous experience, but it wasn't the right fit for me. I wasn't playing, and it's great to go practice, and I had a ball at the practices and helping pitchers develop pitches or give feedback to them, and that was great, but at the same time, it just wasn't the right fit. And I started thinking about what went wrong during my recruitment. I was a passionate basketball player and had a couple opportunities to go play basketball, but really was not able to navigate that process effectively.

Interesting. So was this the first idea that came to mind when they said, create a business, or do you have a bunch of other ideas? First?

There were a number of ideas that I had. I was thinking about helping people with. Get their deposits back because everyone was getting dinged from hanging up posters, and there are all sorts of, like, little ideas. But when I heard that speaker and started thinking about my recruitment as being a pain point, that's when it really sparked for me. And I just started running with that.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And really the. The genesis of it was I started thinking, okay, I really wanted to go play. So I had the desire. There are coaches that are out there looking for athletes, and so there is a marketplace here. It's just. It's losing some efficiency. And had a lot of conversations with my high school coaches about this during sort of my research phase and learned that my high school coaches were actually interested in helping, just did not know how and felt like it was an intimidating process for them as well. Are they supposed to just reach out to colleges and let them know that, hey, I have an athlete that's. That's a good Fit. And that really sparked this concept of building a network that would have allowed a high school coach to advocate for their athlete and support their athlete throughout the recruitment process. And that's really the differentiator that has created the field level network today. The athletes, coaches are highly involved and very powerful in this process, as they should be. They're the people that know the athlete the best.

Yeah. Interesting. So how much did you actually get to start while you're an undergrad? I mean, you kind of wrote your business plan, but did you actually incorporate or anything like that? Or how far did you get?

Well, the business plan won an award, so it was the number one business plan that year. And so I was selected. It was, I think there were 20 that were selected to present to a list or to a panel of angel investors and venture capitalists. And so I did that, learned some really valuable experience. It was like sort of the pitch competition, ended up winning the award, and that was amazing. I got some really great visibility. But I actually took the advice of one of my mentors that said, look, if you're passionate about starting this business, you have some really great insight into the athlete and to the high school coach, because you were very close with your high school coaches, but what you really do not understand is the needs of the consumer on the other side. And that was when I made the decision to forego taking on any sort of investment or jumping into this, but to actually take a job at USC as the director of operations. So I spent a year there.

And you did it like saying, this is going to be research for my company.

Absolutely.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And we brought in a fourth rated top 10 recruiting class, learned a ton. I think a lot of what I wrote in the business plan was validated when a lot of the relationships that the coaches had on our staff, they were utilizing their connections and they were going to the trusted high school and club coaches and junior college coaches that they knew to whether it was to cross check an athlete. Hey, I saw an athlete. Have you seen this athlete before? What do you think? Or hey, we have this need. Do you have any athlete that you think matches that? Or do you know anyone that might. And they were really using their, their connections very well. And so when we started thinking about, okay, there's this network process, and I had met the other co founder, Corey Ducker, and I'd been talking to him a lot about technology when I was a senior at usc. And so when I graduated, I said, I'm gonna go work at usc. And he Said, well, if you ever start to get this thing going, let me know because I think we can help build out a team and let this happen. And Jeremy Ware, the other technical co founder, joined us as well when we launched it a year after I graduated.

Okay, and how'd you meet them? Were they both at USC too?

You know, I met Corey through, he was actually working at a company local down here called Pint and they were doing a lot of web development and such for institutions and sports teams and things like that. And so part of the entrepreneur program was it was a pound the pavement exercise. It was get out there and talk to someone in the industry. So I came down and met with Corey and he basically took me through the process of building a piece of technology and talked about, there was sort of this thought, do you, do you packages up and outsource it? Do you bring on sort of a skeleton crew? Do you really need technical co founders? And part of the advice that he gave me was, look, this is not, this is not something that's a simple app. This is a business concept that's going to need tons of iteration and you're really going to want to have a technical co founder or a strong set of technical co founders that can, that are thinking long term, that understand how to build this type of infrastructure, that understand that this is going to be an iterative process and it's not going to be the slam dunk, first version type network. And that was great advice. And so when, when it was time to launch this, he was willing to jump on and bring on another technical co founder to join.

That's great.

Yeah.

So you graduate. Can you give us time period?

2007. Okay, I graduated.

Awesome.

Spent a year as director of operations.

So 2008, right before the recession, Great time.

There you go.

Great time for leaving your job and starting a company.

There you go. Well, we had good time to go put our heads down at work.

Yeah, definitely. No, a lot of the startups, the big name startups of today are forged in the recession. 5 Uber, Airbnb. All right, so you've been. So you kind of started 10 years ago or so. What did it look like when you actually like took the leap, left the left your job and said, all right, what does field levels look like?

Well, it's interesting. I mean the business plan was really a sort of a guiding sort of vision document. The blueprint that was, look, how do we help athletes collaborate with their coaches better about around recruitment. And I felt like I had these coaches that were like, father Figures to me and really had a lot of great communication. But it was interesting that we never sort of that relationship never evolved into the recruiting and sort of thinking about my future though they wanted to help. And so we started saying, well, if the athletes can collaborate with their coaches and we give their coaches a lot of really great utility in working with multiple athletes, they have full time jobs. Oftentimes there's teachers as well, or club coaches or they're running a business. And so how do they work with a number of different athletes efficiently? And then also if you're able to wire them into this private coaches network, now they don't feel as intimidated when they're reaching out to a college because a college is on there to find athletes. So if they're on the network, you're not bugging them by saying I have a great athlete that I think is a good fit for your school. Because the network is private for coaches. The coach industry is unique to where people are really. Their reputation is everything. So if they're advocating for an athlete, if they're sending a college coach an athlete, they want to make sure they're telling the truth. That they're saying like this is what I really believe this athlete can do. And I think they're a good fit because I have some knowledge about your school. Not just I'm going to send my athlete everywhere because then it just turns into sort of spam.

Yeah, no, it's kind of like managing deal flow to a certain regard, right?

Absolutely.

It makes sense. Okay, so you take the leap, you start it, you start building the product.

Yes.

What does that first product look like?

The first product was really a data management system for the college coaches. And it's because we wanted them to be able to manage their list of recruits that they were targeting. And we also wanted them to manage a list of their contacts that they had. High school coaches, club coaches, junior college coaches. And so it was really a data management platform for them. Now at the same time we built the platform for. Let's think about the junior college coach for just a second. They have a dual role. They're recruiting high school athletes because they're at the college level, but they are also a two year college, which means that they're going to be passing athletes along. And so they were a really interesting group to go in and look at because they're one of the first junior college coaches that we spoke to. I think said it best. He said, I spent 75% of my time placing athletes and 25% of my time recruiting. It's because the placement of my athletes does the recruitment. And it was that model that we really wanted to get into. So the first product basically had a, hey, I'm tracking my recruits in my context. But it also had this other side of, hey, here are my available athletes that have the desire to make it to the next level. And I'm sending them out, as we call them promotions, I'm sending them out as recommendations to colleges to say, I think I have this great athlete. So it really did have this network feel. Interesting part about the story was that because we were dealing with college coaches, there was also rules associated with recruitment. And so part of the pain that we saw these coaches were dealing with when we started storing and helping them manage their data was that they also had to track the communication they had with athletes for compliance purposes. And the business took a little bit of a detour to build a compliance, enterprise level compliance system for college athletic departments to basically manage all their teams and all their recruiting efforts. And you know, that was a lesson for me, I think of being a first time entrepreneur or really losing sight of some of the vision of what we wanted to create and thinking that we could, well, we could create this compliance product over here that could maybe fund some of our activities to build the network. And you know, it's hard enough to build one business. We were basically embarking on building two.

Yeah. So pretty quickly you realized that wasn't a product feature that people would pay for.

Well, they were paying for it. It just wasn't something that we were passionate about. So we had contracts with athletic departments and what I think we started doing some serious soul searching. And I was, we were reading the book the Lean Startup by Eric Reese. So this is, this is a right. When it came out September 2011 and this book comes out and we started thinking about, wow, we've done a lot that has really not been sort of focused on the vision. We're building tools that we're not excited about innovating. And we made the tough decision to basically shut down that aspect of our business and reboot the business towards the network and get back on the original vision. And so we did that. So we launched in 2008, late 2008, we built basically a dual product all the way up to 2011. It was in 2011 that we shut down our sort of enterprise level compliance product and moved away from that business completely and focused solely on the network.

That's tough to do for sure. Especially when you see dollar bills.

It was tough. Yeah. Yeah, But I think there's also something liberating about coming to an understanding once you become sort of. There's sort of a self awareness, like, wait, if I'm not passionate about this, then what am I really doing? If we're not trying to learn and trying to iterate on something that's exciting, then really we're giving up on our vision. And so getting back on track was exciting and fun.

Yeah. So you're splitting location wise. You were still up in LA when you started it and you had co founders down here. A lot of traveling back and forth between the cities, I'm sure.

Yes.

When did you eventually make the jump down to San Diego?

So one of the things about our company is we do two retreats a year. So we'll do one in April, we'll do one in November every year. And what we do is we rent a house somewhere and we basically go spend time as an entire company. There's team building exercises, but a lot of it is just talking about the vision and making sure that we're focused on the right things. And sometimes we can make really sort of large, tough decisions at those meetings. And so we had one of those. One of those in 2016 and everyone came back to LA afterwards and there was this sort of depression for maybe three or four days afterwards. I started having conversations with people. It was like, wow, it was so nice when we were all together. And now we're sort of split again and once again we're sort of on Skype. This is for Slack and zoom and things, you know, like we're sort of having Skype conversations and it's really difficult to sort of ping people.

Yeah.

And so what I, Corey had been, you know, for a long time saying, you guys should just move down to San Diego. And so I started floating it across everyone that was in. We were at Culver City at the time. We had an office there. Just started saying, what if we were to relocate and combine, sort of merge these offices? And everyone was very open to it. I think that it was part of coming off a retreat like that, where everyone was together. There was some excitement there. So we just kind of went with that momentum. And we're now a little over two and a half years in down in San Diego. Loving it. It's the best decision we've made.

I didn't realize eight years. You were remote though. Like their teams were apart for that long. That's a long time.

It was a long time.

Yeah. So that must have changed growth. I'm guessing by having all. Everyone under one roof.

Yeah, we still have a, we still have an office up in Ventura as well. Okay. That's where one of the other co founders is. So we were actually splitting between three offices and yeah, a lot of driving. But at the same time there's nothing like that face to face interaction. So it was always worth it. And I think that there's the co founders, there's a really solid foundational sense of trust. And so all of us are holding each other accountable, making sure that we're staying focused and on task. But there's nothing like being in the same office and all working together.

Well, you easily, it feels like easily could have picked L. A. How'd you, how did San Diego win out between the three cities?

Well, San Diego, there's a level of talent here that is very unique. It's interesting to say, Louisiana is big and has a lot of talent as well. But there started to be larger companies moving down there and starting to gobble up talent. And I came from the Bay Area and still go back there a lot. And I know what the sort of vibe is up there of people jumping from companies to companies and sort of grabbing resources and moving. And what I wanted, what I saw in San Diego was that there is a very high level of talent, amazing quality of life. We preach a lot of sort of mental health, making sure that there is balance, making sure that people are getting outdoors and working out and having fun and surfing. And so we felt like it had just all those ingredients and was just a great place up and coming startup city. And so it was, it was very attractive and, and we thought about, you know, what would it look like if everyone from San Diego or move up to la? And it felt like there wasn't a, there wasn't a central hub within LA that we were going to be able to bring everyone in. But there was in San Diego, we were in Solana beach and it's a, it's an amazing place where people can be in north county up in Carlsbad and at the same time it can be downtown in North Park. And as long as people are driving at the right times, it's sort of central. And that was exciting.

That's awesome. Oh, we're stoked to have you. There's a good chunk of like sports tech kind of companies in San Diego which I think makes sense with the lifestyle. We also have kind of some of the action sports brands here. I mean, golf is kind of the thing, the golf brands in Carlsbad. Do you find Other tech companies in the sports realm here in San Diego that you collaborate with at all?

Yeah, I think collaborate with. Not quite yet, just because folv's been so focused on building our product. But there's some really amazing sports companies down here and speak to those CEOs or founders or people from those companies often to just get an understanding of what does the investment landscape look like, who are the great partners, who's innovating, who's up and coming. And I think it's a very. There's something about San Diego. There's some openness and inclusion that really is valuable.

Kind of give before you get on those mental.

Yeah, it's very unique and we do that a lot. I'm very happy to open and share and talk about where our company is and what we see with the landscape. And most other co founders are too.

Yeah, I could see that as well. You hear that from people who chose between LA and San Diego when they were moving elsewhere that could have ended up in either one because both fit the bill. But here there's a certain kind of. Yeah. Kind of a way of doing business.

Collaborative nature. Yeah, it's very nice. Yeah.

Yeah. Take us through a little bit of the company's growth, in a sense. So have you been self funded or have you raised outside capital?

We raised sort of private seed funding for that first business that ended up going in compliance.

Okay.

We sort of went through our seed funding doing that business and there was a profitable business there. It just wasn't something we were passionate about. Sat down and spoke to our investors and said this is the direction we'd like to go. And they were happy to re up and help us get back on track. And so it was all sort of private angel money until our first outside funding came in late 2016. And the Los Angeles Dodgers have a seed, a seed funding group called Lesion Park Ventures and they came in and led the round. Our first outside money. And also we brought in a number of other high net worth individuals that are sports team owners that all got together and now make up our investment group and our board.

That's great. That kind of sophisticated capital. People who really understand. I mean it's at a high level. It's not high school sports, but still it's the sports ecosystem.

Yeah. And the backgrounds. I think the Dodgers group, which is a little bit more of that venture slant.

Yeah.

High net worth individuals are a little bit more thinking long term and ownership and dilution and it's a really nice balance. But everyone on our Board gets along and is very supportive. So it's been nice.

And you went through the Dodger accelerator program too?

We did actually, yeah. So that was how we met the Dodger group. Was that when they launched the first sort of athletics accelerator? I think they met. I'm blanking on the number, but I think it was upwards of like 400 companies they met with. And they started talking to everyone to figure out like, well, they had these different sectors. Whether it was fan engagement or stadium and infrastructure or some sort of parking or you know, whatever it was. They were looking for different things to sort of expand their horizons as an organization and then also figure out like, what does the sports tech landscape look like. One of the areas they wanted to get involved in with was sort of the recruiting scouting. And as they did their research and as we started meeting with them, they saw that our approach was, I guess I'd say, much more LinkedIn than something like an Indeed. Indeed is sometimes very transactional. Once you're done with indeed, you're sort of leaving that platform. But at LinkedIn you're carrying your contacts with you, you're carrying your connections with your history with you. And so I think that they saw that difference and saw something that was a little bit more at the base, at the foundation of the sports recruiting industry. And they sort of made a comment that, you know, recruiting is the lifeblood of sports and so we need to have that in our accelerator. And so we ended up joining. It was an interesting time because we were, we were actually making money at the time. It didn't sort of fit the normal accelerator maybe definition, but they called it a growth accelerator and said, you know, this could be a great opportunity and we went with it.

That's great. So if any. Are any major league teams using field levels yet, is the tool right for that?

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. See we have 17 or 18 MLB teams have a presence on the platform right now and that goes from anywhere, from an area scout that's looking to connect with high school club, junior college coaches in their particular area and make sure they're staying on the front end of any of the up and coming athletes so they can come on and look at any athlete that's been projected by their coach to potentially have some professional ambition or talent. And so that's always great for them to make sure they have their area locked down. But then it's all the way up to scouting directors that are using field levels as a great cross checking platform where they have their own homegrown internal secure system. Where they store all their scouting reports and all their athlete information. But they'll use field level to go on. Because field levels has. Part of the functionality behind field level is that the high school coaches or an athlete's coach is writing a private athletic assessment for them. Very much like how a student will go to their physics teacher and say, will you write me a recommendation in my college application? So we've applied that process to sports, and it's private. It can only be seen by the college coaches or pro scouts. And so when the pro scouts are coming in, they know the high school coaches can be honest and they'll use what they write as sort of some cross checking. And so they'll say like, well, this is what our scouts are seeing. Here's what their high school coach says. Here's what their club coach says. This is what they said three years ago, here's what they said six months ago. How has that changed? Does it match up with what they're seeing? And so we have pro teams that are using it for that as well.

That's really cool to kind of have that history on the player. Can the players see much of that or not really?

Well, they can't see the private, the private assessments. And much like teachers, like my teacher showed me what they wrote for my college applications. And a lot of the high school coaches do, they'll say, well, this is what I'm writing about you. And very rarely are you seeing a high school coach that's writing something that's disparaging. Most of the time they're just being honest. This is what I see. And this is what they need to work on. And you know, these are all amateur athletes, so all of them need to work on something. It's not like anyone's coming out as a top tier talent right off the bat, but so the athletes can also, you know, as they're building up their profiles though, they're building their history as well. So they're putting in links, they're putting in video, they're putting in any sort of media that that helps paint a broader picture of their talent. They're putting in there so it can be cataloged.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's really cool. Any cool success stories, we can point to that in the majors now that kind of work their way up through the field level system.

Well, baseball is interesting because it takes a long time to get to the majors. But what we have seen a lot of is, let's take Puerto Rico. Field levels are very. Has a strong international presence, a Lot of athletes out of Mexico, South America, Australia for different sports. And you know, in Puerto Rico there's a, there's a club team down there that has a number of athletes that have basically come through their program and have found junior college or four year college programs to move to. So it's oftentimes interesting to go in there and look at some of these teams that have sent, you know, 100 plus players from somewhere like Puerto Rico all throughout the country. In the last NBA draft, there were four players that were on field level that were selected in the draft. And it's great to go back and see some of the early, some of the early write ups where the coaches are saying, like, this is the best 15 year old I've ever seen. Already starting on varsity has the ability to really change this school and bring a lot more visibility to it. And it was fun. I called one of those coaches on draft day and said, wow, you know, even athletes probably going to go in the top 10 in the draft. How does, how has this changed your, your school? And the coach is saying like, it's amazing. Not only is it helping bring visibility to our school, but it's also helping every athlete that's at this school understand that just because we're at a smaller type program does not mean that we can't end up at the top level of the sport. So those are, those are fun.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, that's, that's, that's fun to say. I could see a lot of content out of that as well too.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, they talk about Derek Jeter's old scouting reports being auctioned off for a bunch of money. And it's great to see. Here are some players that they could have amazing careers and you'd be able to see what someone wrote about them when they were a freshman, when they were saying like, hey, we see some superstar talent here and that comes to fruition.

Yeah, that's really cool. So tell us about kind of going forward, like where's the company headed? What's growth like?

Well, the company was highly focused in baseball at first. I played baseball and that's the first network that was launched. But now we're replicating the same model in other sports. So we're in 11 sports now. We'll probably be in 15 within the next eight, 10 months. And what we're really doing, what I like about our positioning now is that we have a network that's thriving and there is some momentum. So it's almost like a flywheel as the college coaches are getting in there and working the system, the high school coaches are getting in there, adding more athletes and it's feeding on itself, which is exciting. And then we put a business model together that actually doesn't sort of erode the value of the network, it actually enhances it and sort of can work on the periphery. And so I think that forming this athletics network that's really the vision of the company, is that we are that dominant network in the athletics industry. And there are a lot of marketplaces and businesses that can be built off of a network. We've chosen the initial marketplace to be that amateur athletic talent matching with opportunity at the college or pro level. But there are also a lot of opportunities. Coaches are using our platform to find new jobs. There are a lot of athletic services that are looking to engage parents, athletes, coaches and help coaches. Whether it's to get them new technology or new year or something like that, There are a lot of different opportunities for us to start to evolve the platform. And whether it's finding new revenue streams or just new value that we're bringing to the platform and how it can grow.

Yeah, well, yeah, once you've kind of driven home that kind of that value and engagement, I mean, that's the whole point of the network. Right? I mean, engaged network continues to come back and drive. It's kind of that really great psychological problem.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it was a chicken or the egg in the beginning and I personally was driving to junior colleges all over California and Arizona to help them sort of understand that, hey, we know that you're going to be able to place your top tier players very easily. They get a bunch of visibility. That's awesome. But what are the players that are making maybe second tier that are looking for opportunities that are maybe outside of California and Arizona. And we help them sort of load those players in, get them visibility to schools all over the country and start to get them placed. And so we were able to seed the network that way by having first starting with sort of second tier talent. But very quickly the coaches realized that their talent as a evaluator and as a placement sort of entity was all tied up in the types of athletes they were placing. And so they were saying, okay, well I'm right now being looked at as sort of a placing second tier talent. And so quickly they started adding their top tier talent on. And then we started bringing on top tier colleges. And top tier colleges, though they're getting bombarded with athletes, they still have the same issues. They're Trying to sort of pick out the signal through the noise and figure out, like, who, what are the best athletes that are going to fulfill our program and bring our program to the next level. And oftentimes they're tapping in just the same way. They're tapping into their relationships, tapping into the people that they trust and trying to expand their recruiting reach.

That's great. That's a really cool growth story going from second tier to first tier.

Yep.

It's good to hear from marketplaces people always. The chicken or the egg is so tough.

Yes.

Yeah. So you're based here in sunny Solano beach, which is awesome spot to be.

Yes.

You're a stone throw from the beach itself, but there's also some great food around. Tell us, do you have a favorite taco spot?

Yeah, I think we have an office favorite taco spot, which is Rudy's Taco Shop, which is right down the road from us here. And amazing breakfast burritos. Some of the best carne asada we've ever had.

I just had some last Sunday.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's a great one. And whenever we're coming down to the beach here or even, you know, I'd say multiple times a week, we're doing breakfast burrito runs or someone will sort of bounce into one of our slack channels like, I'm picking up breakfast burritos. Put in your order and yeah, it's amazing to have it so close.

What about coffee? You have a favorite coffee spot?

Coffee spot that I think we frequent the most is Swell, which is right over in Del Mar here. And a great place to have, you know, business meetings or to go over there. It's very chill atmosphere, amazing coffee. So we drink a lot of coffee here. We're big fans.

I was at Swell this morning with another sports entrepreneur, Derek Oyen. Nice shout out to Derrick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's down the street.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can see his office from our window here.

Yeah, super cool. What about beer, you local beer guy?

Yes. Ailsmith. 394.

Probably. Of course, baseball. Gotta be baseball.

Yeah. I mean, when there's a beer, a tribute beer to Tony Gwynn and.394, that was his batting average at his best year's batting average. And that year was actually the year they had the strike. And so it was a shortened season and there are a lot of people that sort of had an inkling that he was going to be able to hit that.400 batting average mark, but it was cut short. Apparently. His teammates that tell stories about it, said that he was just as locked in as he's ever been. So whenever I'm drinking beer, I like that one. I think all the proceeds go to the Tony Gwynn foundation too, which is. That's amazing.

That's pretty great. Definitely. That's awesome. Those are some pretty good grades. Are you on social media at all? A good place for people to follow you? Twitter, LinkedIn?

You know, I'm on LinkedIn, Brenton. Yeah, you can find me there.

And field levels, we'll make sure we're linked to any of your guys.

Social media, yeah, that'd be amazing. You know, one of the things we do for social media and the athletes really get a kick out of it and so do their coaches, is when an athlete commits, they'll log in on our platform. And what they're basically saying is that to all the coaches that are tracking my profile and tracking my progress, I've now made a decision. And one of the things that we do is we engage those athletes or the athletes that are following us on social media will reach out to us and ask us to put together what they call an edit. And what it basically is, is we take a photo of them and spice it up and throw the logo of the school that they're committing to. And so if you go to our social media at field level, I mean, Twitter, Instagram, it's flush with edits.

Oh, that's cool.

And so we give them. The kids. Kids are tagging, the athletes are tagging us. But at the same time, it's always great to see it. And the parents will send us like, this is fantastic. We printed this out. This is on refrigerator. The coaches love it. Thank you so much. Because that signing day feel, when an athlete is saying, I'm making a decision, oftentimes the only ones that are covered are those top tier D1 athletes. And it's an amazing accomplishment to go to college and play sports. I mean, if you ask someone, you know, hey, where'd you go in sports? They'll say, I'm a college athlete. First. They won't say, I'm a D1 college athlete. What they'll say is, I'm a college athlete. And that's a huge accomplishment. So we try to celebrate that, but we also try to make sure that we highlight the coaches that supported them to help get them there. Because the athletes doing a lot of work, of course, it's their dream and they're putting in the hours, but their support system of their coach and their parents, that's also something that we try to highlight. So whenever we're giving athletes these things, we're like make sure to thank your coach, tag your coach, thank them for the help and support. So you can check those out.

Yeah, yeah, we'll look for one.

We'll link to one.

That'll be really cool.

Awesome.

Well, Bren, thanks so much. This was great to get to know you.

Yeah.

We're excited to continue to help you guys grow and keep it up.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Awesome.

It's a great time. Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego Tech ecosystem. This has been a partnership with the San Diego Venture Group and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation's SD Life Changing Campaign. You can find Neal Bloom on Twitter eealbloom and on Linked SA.