David Anderson - From NFL Slot Receiver to Sports Data Revolutionary - [Glue Guys, EP.43]

Early in my career, I'd spend hours alone in the film room thinking I was being productive. But the truth was, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just going through the motions. That's what finance leaders tell me. They're frustrated because they waste hours manually tracking expenses and reconciling statements when they should be focusing on driving their business forward. Be honest with me. How much of your time is spent on high value work? For many finance teams, it's less than 20%. But you can change that right now with Ramp. Ramp is a free corporate card that handles all the tedious financial operations automatically so your finance team can focus on what actually moves the needle. One CFO told me they cut their month end close from five days to one. It's no surprise over 25,000 businesses trust ramp, including Shopify, CBRE and Boys and Girls Club of America. Don't waste any more time going through the motions. Check out ramp@ramp.com GG and for glue guys listeners, Ramp is offering metal cards for the next 30 days. Just go to ramp.com gigi cards issued by Sutton bank member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply.

Well, I wrote an essay in business school, Teach as an entrepreneur class. One teacher asked me why I think I'd be a successful entrepreneur. And I said, I got fired from my dream job five times and I kept coming back. She was like, you didn't have to write anything after that. That was my first sentence. I'm going to make it happen. I'll figure it out type mentality is really all you is like what it comes down.

We have a very special guest on Glue Guys today, an old pal of mine from our days in Houston. I was a Houston Rocket, he was a Houston Texan. He played six years in the NFL as a slot receiver. My good friend David Anderson went on to become a founder. He's a pioneer in the data analytics space and sports and founded Breakaway Data. All right, so I think you'll enjoy this conversation with my good friend David Anderson. I want to know, first of all, I want to know before we get to athlete data and everything else, how crazy do you have to be to be a slot receiver in the NFL? I mean, aside from the kickers and punters, you're usually the smallest guy on the field. And, you know, Alex has talked a lot about the monsters that are defensive linemen, especially in the NFL. But you had to deal with some, some pretty, pretty nasty middle linebackers, some pretty nasty, you know, strong safeties. Talk about the, the, the mental sanity. It takes to be an NFL slot receiver, which you did for, for, for.

Six amazing years and also tell people how big you are.

In high school I was 6 foot 180. In college I was 5, 11, 190. And then when I got to the Pros I was 5 10.4, 197 pounds. You get slower and shorter as, as the measuring stick gets a little more accurate. I what? So I went Thousand Oaks High School, Colorado State, played receiver, played running back, played defense, played kick returner, played punt returner and then Colorado State obviously palm returner, kick return. Just more didn't play defense but receiver. So to answer your question Shane, like growing up I played a lot of tackle football in a lot of positions. So the physicality of the game didn't really scare me. And I think that's something kind of gone in today's high school athlete is they don't play offense, defense. Special things are almost like we all talk about specialization but you look at like high school teams even where I'm from, like, I'm like, you just play receiver now. I was like, no, you should play defense, you should play dn, you should play kick return, you should do it all. I think that helped out a lot in like not being scared to hit and be hit because ultimately that's what football is about. I mean Shane, you were a 6, 7, 7th grade tight end and probably didn't like getting hit too much. You're a big target there. But like the, we've all seen guys that look really good in underwear and seven on seven and you put them out there and it just doesn't, doesn't, you know, doesn't work for him. I prided myself on being a guy who did well in 7 on 7 but did better in pads and played a little bigger than I was. Wasn't scared to get my, you know, block, get my head in there, throw my body in there a little bit. I think yes. The thing that you didn't really realize playing professional is you got to find your role rather quickly. Otherwise you're going to find your way out of the league. I walk into a team when Andre Johnson's our ex. They just had Eric Molds they brought up from the Buffalo Bills and they just signed another guy named Kevin Walter was our Z. Owen Daniels, Pro bowl tight end, was drafted. So he's your, he's our why we had Aaron Foster was our running back. So we had a ton of weapons on offense with like six Pro Bowlers on our offense. So to find the ball wasn't easy. And this was when Kyle Shanahan then were kind of slowly coming up. Right? So Kyle. Kyle Shannon was my receivers coach. Mike McDaniel was my receivers coach. Matt LaFleur is my receivers coach. McVeigh was my tight ends coach when I end up going to the Redskins and missing Alex. But we. We had all those guys. And so, like, that was that influence of, like, okay, now let's. It was slot, but it was really kind of lever leverage. You're trying to mess with leverage. You're motioning guys in and out. You're trying to get them on, you know, motion them to get them off the ball so that they have to declare on defense and stuff like that. So it wasn't like slot run down the middle, like. Like Peyton used to send Brandon Stokely. Right. Murder ball. It was a little different where it was a lot more option routes and stuff like that. And so, like, I really enjoyed that offense. I. I thrived year three and year four when Kyle left. I struggled. But, yeah, you have to have a mentality and like, physics aren't in your favor. And I always tell people what was the difference when I played is, like, guys didn't slow their feet when they tackled me. They would run right through you. Right? I have my back to the quarterback or my back to them face to the ball a lot of times, and they're just. They're just running right through you. Or if they catch you on a passing, a crossing route, they're running right through you. You know, you see a guy like Gronk run at you, you're like stopping your feet and you're praying that he doesn't run you over. Like, they didn't think that when I was coming.

Dave, that's actually. Listen, one of the things you said in there was like, you know, I just got used to hitting and getting hit, and I think that mentally that's like a real thing. Right? You just talked about the way you were hit as a slot receiver. So how did you get that resilience, you know what I'm saying? Like, where was it that you just took it? And it's just pure reps of. Yeah, I. I did it and I didn't have to go to the hospital, so I was okay. Or do you think there's something more inherent about your personality that allowed you to take those. Be okay taking those kinds of hits?

I think it was a little bit of both, probably. Right. I was the youngest brother. My brothers are 10 and 20 years older than I am. Beat me up pretty good.

10 and 20 years older than you.

Yeah, my dad was like the phoenix dropping in every now and then.

The.

Yeah. So I got beat up my whole life. And then, you know, I. I didn't play football until high school, so I was a basketball player. And like. And then I was. I don't know what great way to describe this. Basically, like, I was kind of full grown my freshman year of high school. I was five. I'm 510.45, 10, 180. Yeah. But like, so the game wasn't that physical yet. And it was the first time I really played and I played running back and so like, that it was okay with me. Right. I wasn't. I didn't feel like overmatched or out, you know, just kind of beat up on the, on the field my first year. So I got comfortable with the game, got comfortable tackling, Tackling people. I had a pretty good freshman football coach. Like, classic Vietnam. Vietnam vet. Had like nine helmets and two shoulder pads. And like, that's all we're. That's all you got out there. We're gonna. Just gonna tackle and figure it out. But yeah, that was, that was how I got used to the game, Robbie.

It's.

It's.

I. I view it as like, very binary. And I'm only thinking about this because again, like, my son just started. David. Freshman football first. First, like, lifting and field work yesterday morning.

Big day. Big day.

So he's never played. He's never played tackle football ever.

Good for him.

He won't hit until training camp. But like, the first few times you get hit, Robbie, it's like. It is very binary. You either kind of like it, even when you get your, like, even when you get like someone gets you pretty good and you're like, got your face in the mud. Like, there's a part of you that kind of likes that contact and like, you know, physicality, or you hate it. I feel like it's like one or the other. And freshman football, usually for a lot of kids, it's their first time. It kind of weeds, you know, kids either there's something about it you. Like, even if you're the one getting tackled or you don't. The thing that's interesting is that you typically are always playing with your peers, though. Yeah. So freshman volleyball, you're playing freshman or jv, and then even varsity. Like, every guy's within one year of you. Right? So like, developmentally, everybody kind of, for the most part looks the same. And then you go to college and it's still somewhat similar, right? Like, guys are roughly, you know, except.

For your boy Bradley in the ballpark.

Yeah.

Walking around.

Bradley Van Pel.

Just holding up cheerleaders, like, walking around.

But when you go. When you. When you finally get to the NFL, if you do, like, that's where you, like, you'll be playing with a guy that's 12 years older than you, right? Like, walk into the league and like, I remember seeing Bryant Young, and I'm like, I got no business being in the same locker room, right? Like, I'm staring across at Ray Lewis and Brian Erlacher, and I have no business being on the field.

Dude, we got. I got drafted with Mario Williams, who was like, yeah, he's a client freak. And I was like, you're not even good at football yet. Because I remember, like, we do. They used to do these rookie symposiums. They sense threw them away because this is a bad idea to put 300 millionaires in the same room at one time. But they. They. I think it was. Chris Carter was like, your rookie year should be the worst year of your NFL career. If it's not, you're doing something wrong. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. Like, you're brand new. Like, if this is your best year of your career, you're struggling. And I remember looking at Mario, I was like, oh, this is going to be his worst year with that body. I was like, dude, I would love. I would love to have that thing.

And they've developed also, to his point of, like, not slowing down, they've developed this killer instinct. Like, when they, like, they are like, sharks and, like, when they see the ball, especially, like, a chance to hit a slot receiver or like, they hit a qb, like, you're. They are going to unload everything they have and try and, like, you know, like, they're. They're trying to take you out. Like, essentially. Do you know, I'm saying they're trying to, like, separate you in the ball. Like, it is it. There's, like, a focus they have and a strength and speed that just. It's.

It's. Everything's, you know, so, like, on. On our teams, I wouldn't ever name a name, but we knew, like, when the game was on the line, there were some guys that would run away from the ball.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Everyone knew it. You need to say it, but there are guys who just didn't want the smoke. Were there guys in the locker room that you knew that didn't like to get hit? Oh, yeah.

Even in the NFL?

In the NFL, yes.

Huh.

For sure.

I would, I don't know, I might be overestimating at least a third, maybe half of the guys don't really, really, really love football. There are guys that really, really, really love football and they're like 10 to 15 of them. Like they might not even be the best on team, but they really, really love it. They love it. They're out there. They love it. They love everything about it. Then there's like 30 of the team who's like really good at football. They love it enough, they're passionate about it. But there are plenty of guys who are just really good at the game who like casually walk in, casually get out. They do enough, they might even be a pro bowler. But like if you ask them like football is like, they're like, oh, I would have much rather play basketball growing up or something like that. Like there's plenty of those guys, so. And those guys, yeah, there's tons of guys that like, yeah, just want to avoid the ball in the fourth quarter, don't want to get hit. I mean there's some famous receivers that want to get he, like Marvin Harrison. Some of these guys, like they're, they'll just duck out of bounds or early. But like if you're that good, you're allowed to.

You find out pretty quick though, Shane, like who wants the ball to go back to that same point, like especially on offense, right? Like who are the guys that like want to see who wants the ball on third and two, right? Like, you know, and a lot of times you're like calling these plays and designing them and to your point, like David probably got caught a lot of these because you're the little option route guy, right? Third and two, we're moving the chains, we motion you to a stack. You win your isolation and just like, you know, but you find that out real quick in practice. Everything's simulated, right? Like you simulate all this stuff all year round, right? You're going against your defense and who's going to step up on third and who's going to win on third and five, like really win, you know, who's got like that sense of urgency.

I actually, I was thinking about this for basketball because like football, the one thing what now started talking about and Shane, you're mentioning about the physicality is like, it's humility, the, it's humiliating like all the time, right? Like everyone gets got, right. Like you're going to get ran over no matter how big you are. How the best player on the field, you're going to get flipped on your head, you're going to get knocked out. Knocked around basketball. I feel like some guys just don't ever get dunked on. Like, there's like, you don't get humiliated. You might get crossed over. But like, is, or. Or are we wrong? And it just happens in practice. We don't see it. Like everyone's getting dunked on.

No, it's, it's like you guys, if you never get dunked on, guess what? You didn't play many minutes. Yeah, right?

Yeah.

So I got dunked down probably like three times in my NBA career that I, that I can remember. Like, that's pretty good. Thirteen years, three times. All right. Like, Russell West, Westbrook got me. I was, you know, I was playing helpside defense. I turned my head for a second and this young Russ, when he was super athletic, came down the lane and caught me. I kind of jumped out of the way, you know, but even my teammates like jumped up and like, oh, Shane got dunked on. And I said, you got to be on the floor to be dunked up.

Is there? Because I do feel like I see this with defenders sometimes, like making business decisions because they don't want to get, you know, be on the poster.

Yeah.

Is there, Is there?

Like, they're like, oh, at least you.

Went up for it, man. Yeah, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, look, you think about the old time shop lockers, the all time greats, the Mutombos, the Alonzo mornings, like, those guys, they got dunked on so hard. But like, that was just part of the job. Like, yeah, you get dunked on but you're blocking so many shots and like, it's an occupational hazard. But these guys today, they are so afraid to be on Instagram. They are, they are so afraid to be on a, on a reel, you know, where everyone's clowning them, getting dunked on. There are a lot of decision, business decisions being made on the floor in real, in real time.

The thing about it is like, that this is not specific to sports at all. Right? That's the thing. That's like true. One thing, like, truly in my career, I've worked for 22 years and the. One of the best compliments I've ever received was after Amazon bought Whole Foods and like, we like had our board meeting six months later and we were still like standing and one of the board members was like, yo, like, you guys like took a knockout punch from Amazon and we're like, still here. Like, let's take a Minute and like, before we go deep on, like, oh, this is all wrong. This is all wrong. Like, six months ago, we didn't even know if we were gonna have this board meeting. And to this day, I'm, like, very proud of that. Of like, you guys took a knockout punch from them. And so it's the same point of like, you know, do you. Can you take a hit? Do you want to keep playing? Do you want to avoid the failure, or do you actually want to go? Like, I actually think I really like Dave. The language you even have of like, it's humiliating to get hit. The reason is. But then you just went and did it again, right? And it's like, well, actually, you know what? Like, you know what happened after I got humiliated? It wasn't that bad. I just, like, did it again. And I think that, like, that, to me is such a good lesson of, like, the slot receiver.

By the way, you're. You're a long way from the sidelines when you're in the slot. So it's like, there's not a lot. And they're coming from everywhere, man.

It's like, yeah, there's. You're. You're running. It's like, close your eyes, drive down the freeway. That's what it's like playing receiver.

I do think, though, one of the things I'll tell you, like, look at, man, like, so Shane and Alex will not understand this, okay? But like, one of the excuses that people who are normal sized give to themselves for not playing professional sports is like, look, I just wasn't, you know, I wasn't big enough. I wasn't blessed with the size that you need to get it. And I think you end up just totally dispelling this thing. I'm like, 5 10, 190. Like, hold on, you know, Like, I know a lot of guys who are 5 10, and, you know, they're not 190 in the same shape that you are, but you know what I'm saying? Like, the point is it's a cool existence because it's sort of like, dude, you don't have to be huge to go and play and to get, you know, real reps in the NFL. Like, it's a very inspiring thing, you know, that kind of dispels some of the excuses that us regular sized folks have for not playing professional sports.

You play six years, the NFL, okay? Slot receiver extraordinaire. We become good buddies in Houston, by the way. Like, I had never really hung out with football players before. It was the first time I'D ever hung around with, especially NFL athletes. This is how I got to know you, Dave. And there was a pool party at Matt Schaub's house. At Shaw's house.

Yes.

And I will never forget, like, there was a pickup game in the driveway and it was like the most physical pickup game.

Yes.

I mean, it was bare. It was barely basketball, okay? It was like guys just throwing each other around and I'm like, oh my.

Gosh, he's got some animals.

And you reminded me of, like, do.

The same thing in the pool. Pick up.

Yes.

Pool is even better. Yeah.

Yes.

Like, people throw. It was like the most fun physical pool party I've ever been. Guys were just getting handsy and just like, throwing each other. And I'm like, good God. Like, this is. This is a different culture. And like this.

Hey, Shane, before Dave answers this, I just want to ask you a question. How old were you when you got traded to Houston?

I was 25, 26.

Were you already married?

I was married.

How.

What was Heidi's level of enthusiasm if you decided you wanted to start hanging out with NFL guys?

Easy, easy.

It feels a little bit like you might have been like, hey, Shane, let's take a beat. You're already in one profession.

Shop is already married. Second shot was already married. If you want to go to Andre Johnson's pool parties, that would have been a different. That would have been a different decision.

I think my wife actually liked me hanging out with NFL guys, you know, because, look, basketball players are prissy, okay? We are prima donnas, 100%. And so I think a part of Heidi said, you know what? I like you hanging out with real, real men.

All right?

Basketball players, by the way, pansy pool parties.

This is why I don't play pickup basketball anymore. Because the last, the last time I played, Patrick Willis headbutted me and I got my tooth went through my lip.

I don't know, Alex. I don't know if Doug McMillan's listening, but you've committed, you know, to the, the Walmart.

I played pickup last night, Shane.

You committed? We're playing end of July. Okay?

It's bully ball. But that was that. That's when. When David and I became friends. So we, we've known each other for a very long time. Our Houston days. And, and now you've transitioned from record setting receiver, Colorado State, six year NFL career, to a data revolutionary. Okay, so, so instead of picking up blitzes, you are picking up SQL spreadsheets.

SQL spreadsheets, back end databases, spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah.

People always ask me, like, how did you run data analytics for the Miami? He just, I don't know, like, kind of fell into it. So walk us through how you sort of got into the data world growing up.

I was a math kid. Did you know, math mods and AP calculus and stats and my dad was an engineer, civil engineer, built, you know, freeways, airports, wrote, you know, big businesses, big, you know, shopping centers and whatnot. And so very kind of engineer mentality to problems. And I always want to go to Stanford. Stanford is my number one school coming out. Tyrone Willingham. Tyrone Willingham leaves Stanford and goes to Notre Dame. And so with it, my scholarship. Alex Smith will know this name, but Ben Olson was my quarterback in high school. He was the number one recruit in the country.

Elite 11 my year.

Oh, yeah, elite 11, yeah, elite 11.

By the way, he went to BYU out of high school. So, like 40 minutes south of me.

I have a lot of. I have a lot of Alex Smith, Ben Olson, random stories in my life. And then so like, I wasn't highly recruited, but people were kind of like maybe trying to do like a two for one, which I didn't understand at the time. They're trying to get Ben and I to go to Stanford or Ben and I to go to Cal or something like that. And then Ben goes at byu and then some of my opportunities left. I could have gone to Princeton. Ironically, Monty McNair of the Houston Rockets and Sacramento Kings was a receiver at Oak Park High School. He took my slot at Princeton. And then I thought I was going to go to Northwestern, but Colorado State recruited me hard, signed up at Colorado State. I say that because my parents at the time were like, hey, like, are you going to go back to school? What are you going to do after, after this? So I graduated CSU at three and a half years, went played in the NFL and then I went to graduate school, got my MBA in data science. And while I was there, I met two AI research professors. This is way before it was cool and talked about by, you know, housewives was that we were using machine learning to. On what was called spatial temporal data, or as you and I would know, rock around like old school geometry data over 4 up to. Here's where the point is. And these guys, if this, if you think back to 2013, like, even cell phones were, you know, if we were watching the gps, it was like a street or two off, you know, it'd be like, turn left now. And like, so the. Wasn't that granular yet. These Guys were working with what had been adopted and adapted by a company called stats. They took an Israeli missile technology which tracks the, you know, the Golden Dome was tracking missiles and shooting them out of the sky. Stats, Inc. Takes this and points it at NBA players and that turns into spatial temporal data that our company was working with. And I was like, oh, this is cool. And it was like Moneyball on steroids. And I was like, in business school, I was good at math. I was like, oh, I understand this. I started coding, I started to understand kind of what it said. But what I realized is all these dorks understand the game from a numbers perspective. They understand the game from like computer science perspective, but they have never walked on a court or walked on a field. They don't know how to communicate to players or coaches or even front office that, well, like, I could be that bridge. And at the time, Brad Pitt was just a Moneyball. So like, couldn't have been, you know, a better time to kind of get into the business. And the Second Spectrum gets off the ground. I actually call Shane and I was like, hey, what do you think of this? And he's like, I'd do it. And so that was kind of how I kind of started. And then again, I've been in sports data, sports and analytics, sports tech ever since. You know, I found it really interesting to work in sports still. I enjoy all sports. I still play basketball. I play beer league softball. I played, you know, obviously played football. So it keeps me involved in kind of all sports. I don't have to worry about recruiting 19 year olds or I don't have to worry about my job going from Buffalo to Denver to California in a matter of four years. And I was, I had a kind of entrepreneurial spirit. So I went with Second Spectrum. We ended up growing that company from a coffee shop of six people to over 80. We sold that to Genius Sports, which was fun, and then started a new startup called Breakaway Data. But yeah, been. Shane and I have been the darlings of the Sloan Analytics Conference for quite.

A while now and, well, a long time. And like when Second Spectrum came out, Alex and Ravi, like, it was so revolutionary.

What did it do? What did Second Spectrum do?

So Second Spectrum was the first of its kind. So you got to understand the world of basketball statistics before Second Spectrum. Okay, okay. There was, you know, the way that people took stats and took advanced stats is literally someone in a, in a room somewhere, you know, with a, with a notepad and a paper writing down like every shot that was taken from every Spot on the floor. Okay. And, you know, before Second Spectrum came along, Synergy Sports was kind of like the, the, the leader in the clubhouse. And it was, it was better than anything else that had come along before. But there were so many errors. And they were the first company really to try to determine, you know, how often does Carmelo Anthony go left. Okay. You know, how often does Kobe Bryant go. Go to his right hand. Okay. And it was still. It was better than nothing, but it was, it was pretty imperfect. All of a sudden, Second Spectrum comes around, Second Spectrum comes in, and they install eight cameras, high speed cameras, you know, taking thousands of frames per second of, of every action on the court. And the level of data that was generated just from a single game was, like, mind blowing. And the insights and the data points that they got from one singular basketball game, I mean, just was what an entire season on Synergy used up before. And so all of a sudden there's amazing models which Daryl Morey and Sam Hinkey did better than anyone initially to, to model, like, okay, what actually happens on a basketball court. You know, for instance, creating models to know, like, okay, we know where everybody is on the basketball court. We know exactly how well a person should shoot from every single spot on the floor, you know, given the, the time, given the, the distance, the defender, any XY coordinate. And it was, it was really, really revolutionary. And so that was like my, that, that was everything for me. When I learned how to use Second Spectrum data, I'm like, I don't know how I lived without this. Right, Dave?

Yeah, it was my spiel about it. A great way to describe it is that, like, every sport is about creating or taking away space, right? And that, so what, when you have tracking data that is essentially measuring where everyone is moving. Think about if you're watching the game like a hawk, like 200, whatever yards or whatever feet above, and all you see is like dots moving around. And if you were to pause it at any given time, like Shane was talking about, and I paused the game, I would see, okay, here's Shane guarding Kobe and he's three, you know, three feet away. And now Kobe is doing a move, and now Kobe is four feet away. So this move that Kobe did created an extra foot of separation. And you can program a computer, understand that. So we were like, like Shane was saying, we would tell you how much more distance Steph Curry step back was getting you than James Harden's. We could tell you when you hedge this, like the level of granularity that you could dive into the game was. Was insane. And so you could essentially, you could almost ask it any question. And if we didn't have the answer, we could program it to understand it and to pull out the answer. It was cool. And then you could apply it to any sport. Now, the granularity of the data is what ultimately prohibits you from sport. Football is probably by far the hardest because it is. First of all, there's deception in the play. So, like, half the time you're doing something to deceive. And so you can, you can miscalculate that and say, like, it was bad when actually it was a good job of trying to trick someone. Also, like, everyone's action is not necessarily related to the other one, but it might be. And you don't know if it is or it isn't unless you are in the huddle. And so, like, that's, it's really hard to program football. Pretty much every other sport is good. But, like, we got really. We even got really good at football. And you see, Amazon now takes a bunch of stuff that we did on Amazon Thursday Night Footballs. But yeah, it's. That was, that was some fun times.

Getting all this data. We're starting to get all this data and you can, like, create these models, but part of this is, like, figuring out what matters. Like, what are the stats that matter, right? Like what. You know what I'm saying? Like, and that's the hard part. To your point, David, I think with football is like, nobody's cracked that code yet, right? Like, because trying to evaluate a left tackle and a receiver and a tight end and a quarterback, like, these are, they are such unique positions and they don't, you know, their, their tasks and jobs are not the same. What are the data points that matter for all of them and then even collectively. But in basketball, for both you guys, what. What are the main.

Like, you know, we still don't know the value of space, okay? So we know that the best offenses in the, in the NBA create space. Okay? You're watching the, the playoffs now in Indiana and Oklahoma. Like, you never see the floor bunched up, and as a result, like, the best players have more space to operate. Now it would be amazing to know that, like, every foot of space is worth, like, like 2, 200 basis points in terms of efficiency or, or making or missing the play.

Right?

We haven't figured that out yet. And we know great defenses, they do the opposite.

Yeah, take up space.

They take up space. And it's the same for football, right? And so, like, we so we, we know what is good for us. We don't know why it's good for us. Getting closer. We're not there yet, though.

No.

This is the reasoning for the premium in basketball for the, the. The long wing defender who can shoot a three.

Yes.

Because he can space the floor on offense.

Yep.

And then defense. He can, he can cover a bunch of ground. He's long.

I was looking for my book. Robbie will know this. Measure what matters.

Yeah.

Classic startup book.

Yeah.

So, Alex, I think the answer. Shane, what was it called? You called me a couple years into your Miami job and you were trying to do like, what is a Heat man? It's like these six pillars or something like that. What was that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, Alex, I think the. A great answer. And this is probably better in business than it is in sports. And sports are trying to figure it out. Like, the goal is like, is there a metric or a number? But the truth is, there really isn't. You start kind of at the top. What is your head coach, your general managers, and your team president's belief in a process, in a system and in numbers. And then like, if they don't like numbers and their gut feel people, and they're like Jerry Buss and they're out recruiting people and partying whatnot, like, there's no point in doing analytics. Like, it's just going to follow. It's just a waste of time and money. It's not really going to work. But when you have a system at the top where the people are like, okay, we're open to it, here's what we value in terms of the culture of our, you know, of our team. Here's the mentality of the team. Here's the way that, the style that we want to play offense and defense. Let's find what matters to us and what matters to our system and our process so that we could recruit better players and. Or find free agents. Right. That's kind of how you do it. Because if you're trying to plug. Think about it. If you're trying to plug Michael Vick into the wrong offense or you're trying to plug whatever it is, like, a lot of times it's just fit and what. The numbers that matter to what make Michael Vick good are not what matter. Numbers that made you good. So, like, that doesn't work. And that's, that's how you. You find that often in business, they're like, oh, it's. You know, everyone wants to talk about AI right now and they want to Talk about opex, you know, over, you know, OPEX to revenue. And they want to say, like, oh, I can get more per employee now. So that's kind of the number that everyone's looking at a couple years ago is EBITDA is like, everyone was doing M A. So as everyone was talking about EBITDA and stuff like that. So it's like, it's the same thing in sports and business. Like, these number and these kind of what you're measuring and looking at kind of go back and forth.

See, this is interesting though, because there's a few things. One, you know, Warren Buffett's obviously been like, fabulously successful and his style of investing, value investing, people are always asking, why doesn't everyone do this? And Buffett has an observation. It's very simple. He's like, if somebody starts to tell you about value investing and they're not interested within 15 minutes and asking you a bunch of questions, you're wasting your breath. They're not going to do it. You can tell within 15 minutes if they have any interest in learning more about this or not. And I actually think that's just like you said about like team management or leadership. Like, and so I think the first thing is like, does the person want to learn about this or not? Then the second thing is I actually think this is a huge deal. Shane, what you just said earlier about, like, well, we don't know exactly what the value is of 1 foot of space. That is actually like, it's like this tyranny of precision. It's like, I don't need to know exactly what the value is of 1 foot of space. I need to know that I need to take space or create space. Do you see what I'm saying? I actually don't have to have it be perfect in order to know that it is still accurate to know that it is good for me to create space. And I actually think that a lot of the times what ends up happening, you know, you talked about measure what matters. It's like, just because you can't measure, the flip of that is just because you can't measure it perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't matter. You see what I'm saying? And I think that that is sort of the thing that is the trick for analytics in anything, which is, yeah, let's measure everything we can and let's focus on the things that matter within that. And let's also recognize there are some things that we know matter that we don't yet know how to measure right you know, and some of the things you were talking about, are you a Heat player? Are you a Heat man? Some of that stuff is actually hard to like, figure out exactly how to measure it, but. But you kind of know it when you see it, you know, and that's okay. It's like, it's okay for there to be some intuition in there. I think this is where I'm actually very curious, Dave, for you is sort of like, how do you deal with that? Of like, people probably put you in a box of like they think that you are going to say everything comes back to the data and the numbers. And just even talking to you, that's not the way you are. You're not saying everything comes back to that.

No. I always start with, if you're players don't like each other and your players don't like your coach, you don't have a chance. Yeah, like, and maybe that's coming a football locker room because I've seen, you know, I've been a part of some really good teams and some bad teams where it's like, you know, like we all read in the media that like the locker room is turned or whatever. Like, yeah, that that does happen. Where your position coaches can't get through to your players. Maybe they listen to your head coach, but, you know, no one trusts the coordinator and stuff like that. Like at that point, analytics don't stand a chance.

Right.

Like, you know, no one's believing, no one's trying hard.

My uncle can't make chicken soup out of chicken shit.

It is certainly a great tool in a toolbox. I think that there's still tons of opportunity around data and analytics, especially how it's getting tied more and more to video. Video is still very much the lifeblood of certainly football, but basketball and all these other sports, like the eye in the sky don't lie is the phrases repeated daily on a football field. And so like. But I think if you can tie some interesting data points that matter to the individual athletes to those, I think they would find that interesting. I like, I charted my one on ones. Like, I always had a coach because one day my rookie year, I look over to the side and there's a guy writing stuff down. I'm like, what are you writing down? He's like, I'm charting everyone's one on one. So I was like, why? He's like, we want to see at the end of the week what your one on ones were. I was like, all right, well, I'm going to chart mine to make sure you're right. And he's like, okay. So I would chart my own one on ones and I would chart, did I get a good release, did I run a good route, did I get. Do a good top of the route and did I catch the ball? So like, I broke mine down into four categories. He just had win or loss. And so when I went back to check with Kyle, he's like, oh, you were like, you know, 7 for 11 this week. I was like, I was like, I was nine for 11. I won all my releases. I want all the top of the balls. I got two bad balls throwing me. And he's like, holy. And so, like, we would have these real conversations and Kyle loved it because he was like, he. He consumed information like that. So, like, at that point I realized what was important to me, numbers wise, was a little different than other people. How I can consume information was a little different. And like, I look at video and like, if it gave me something like that, like, you're talking about the value of data and where it's still opportunity. Like, if it gave me something like that, that would have been awesome. You know, I had to do it myself. You can't expect like, whatever computer. Just maybe in the future you just throw an AI at it and tell it chart these different things. But, like, that would be different for me than it was for, you know, a different receiver. What they were focused on, certainly tight ends and position and people like that. So, like, yeah, I just think, like, video is still the lifeblood playing for each other.

If.

If you don't. If you don't have any of those intangibles and all that stuff working for you. Data's. Yeah, data's not going to work.

So that brings up a very interesting conversation and kind of brings us to your day job. So you're charting something. All right. Kyle Shanahan's charting that who should own.

That data.

That was true. Like, who. Who should have the right to be able to use that data as they see fit? Which. Which brings us to.

I feel like he just set it up and you get to get to spike this one.

I wanted it back a little bit further.

Yammit.

You put it right by the rim a little bit. I believe that there should not be an asymmetry and information between players and management. That is the. The. The. That is my kind of stance, right in that traditionally in the last 10 years, like, you wouldn't go to a team and say, like, I had whatever, 92 catches for 1200 yards and they wouldn't be like, no, you had 86 catches for 1100 yards. Like there was no argument over what was information and what could be used. That has changed and it is because players have a bunch of information extracted them off practice, they have a bunch of information extract them off the game and they don't get it back. And so while you're 24 and you don't really think about this because you're just trying to maximize contract and have fun like you as you get older in your career, like, oh, maybe I should have made that extra 2 million when I was 24. Maybe I should have taken care, a little bit care of my body when I was 27 so I can play when I'm 35. And so like you realize like the value, this information is drastically different between the beginning or, you know, early in your career versus the end because you're, you have a little more experience and realize the value. But I, I think that you should have that information with you from the day you kind of grow up. Like, I even think when you go to combines and stuff where the Nike Combine High school, you should, you should have that information with you. It should live with you. It should be like a player passport that lives with you. There's no reason it shouldn't exist that way. You should take it from high school, college, college or pro. They have all the systems now. All the APIs exist. It's valuable for a player. You should be able to compare and contrast the way you feel throughout your career and take your numbers with you. So now does that mean that a team isn't allowed to have that their aggregated information compare their 2025 team versus their 2023 team? No, they're allowed to do, do that. But the player should have a. There should not, there should not be an asymmetry of information. Is my, my stance.

If you had all the data that Dave mentions throughout your career, right, for both of you guys and for you too, Dave, you know, what do you think if anything would have been different? If you take like the bull case, like let's say it worked really well, you were able to use it appropriately. You understood what you had. What do you think would have been different in your career if you had breakaway?

At the end of my career I understood the importance of like weight and body fat. Right.

Being lean.

Okay. And you know, but this is before a lot of the, the physio science and you know, I, I'd lift weights hard and in the summer I'd bulk up because you Know every coach said you gotta be strong. So like every summer I would get up to about 2:35, I'd feel good, but every time I got to training camp I'd lose everything and, and you know, play at 2:20. And so all that hard work went away. And so I worked on the wrong things. I worked on the wrong things. And if I would have known like what actually was important, core strength, mobility, you know, lean, lean muscle mass. And if I saw my own data compared to my peer group and I had that data set, I would have said, oh man, I'm wasting my time doing bench press. What the hell am I doing bench press for?

What about you, Alex?

I completely agree. I think you'd, your ability to fight aging and, or slow it down and combat it would be greatly increased. Like I've run 140 in my entire life.

Yeah, in the underwear Olympics and Al.

Davis was watching Indianapolis. Yeah, the underwear Olympics. I'm a quarterback. I had to get into a track start and run a 40. I did it one time in my life and never again. And you do that along with a bunch of other drills. And I, and I'm making fun of those drills because yeah, I do think they're kind of silly depending on your position. But there are a bunch of stats like the whole back half of my career and this just to give kind of color on this. The wearables became in vogue, right. And so I wore wearable technology every single day at practice for the whole back half of my career. You don't get any of that data. It's all for the team. So I would have loved to have known that over 16 years. And I definitely, I really wish I had this because it was obviously when I came back in 2020 after my leg, Washington would share us some of the data. Like post practice, like I would get my top end speed, I would get my acceleration numbers, I would get how much I was. It could tell you how much you're favoring your leg. Right. And for a quarterback who plays in an asymmetrical position, right, like I only throw right handed, right. I drop back one way. And you do get out of balance over time. Right. And so for me to be able to combat that, to train functionally. Right, again, to Shane's point, like what matters. Well, I need to be, I need to work on my mobility and I, if I had the numbers, I could have seen potentially that like, hey, I am slowing down. And again, the only thing I have is like, look on tape and tape's hard you're at practice, you're not like, necessarily going full speed, you know, like it was. It's hard to, to get a sense of that. But if you had the raw data, like every day, like, no, no, I am slowing down. I need to work way better at my short area quickness, right? Like, my velocity is slowing down on the ball, right? Like, I got to fight to keep my arms stronger. Like that stuff. You just don't, you don't get any of it. And the team is collecting a bunch, and I'm not even sure they really knew what to do with it, but they were collecting it and it wasn't shared.

They were using, they were using it against you in the contract negotiations.

Right? Now.

You know, in the investing business, a lot of the data that you have sort of exists in your head. And what I mean by that, you know, you, you, you, you decide what investments you want to sponsor. Cool. You kind of know how you felt about them. But then there's a whole bunch of other decisions that you give opinions on, which is like, other people's ideas that they're bringing in. And it's actually quite humbling when you think about it, because there might be something you didn't like that turns out to be great. There might be something that you did like that turns out to be bad. And you actually don't. You have to be very disciplined in order to keep that data. Like, do you write down what you think about every single investment? Do you rate, you know, 0 to 10 what you thought about this? Do you then go back and look at it to see are you good or are you bad on judgment?

Like, do you do it?

No, of course not.

Of course I don't do it.

I don't have the discipline to do it. I think that, you know, but the reason that you don't do it is, like, the reason you don't do it is also, it's like, there's laziness, but it's also that. And I'll tell you in a second what I think we do. Okay, it's aqua, but there's laziness and there's also like, fear of, like, oh, my God, what if I'm not as good at this as I think? Now, luckily, at the place I work, we do keep track of every vote. So we vote on everything, and then we keep track of every single one, you know, of how. What did we think of those things, you know, and it's very humbling again to, like, go back and look at the data, but I Think that's very interesting. I think the second thing I was just thinking about from what you guys said is sports are actually ahead of business in this regard. There's so much stuff that's not. That's not available for data in business. Think about the business I'm in right now, right? You know, we make decisions. We don't film our partner meeting. Think about how much data there is in the partner meeting, right? What does somebody say? What was their body language?

Ray Dalio.

Ray Dalio does.

I get it. But I'm saying that's.

What is that Reebok commercial where he was in the office tape.

Yeah. Right? Yeah.

You guys want. You guys want real feedback from your commercials? Bring in Mike Sherman, that guy.

That's what I'm saying, right? You look at it and like, dude, like, you tell me, like, in. In 10 years, if you're a business and AI is as good as we think it is, what are the chances that you're not, you know, finding every bit of proprietary data there is about your business and then taking that into account as you make decisions like sports are actually well ahead? All of a sudden, in practice, you have wearables. Like, what is the equivalent of that to me, you know, like that it really is. Like, sports is kind of giving us a hint of what's to come in the rest of the world.

By the way, David and Shane, who. What is the legal. I'm sure some of this is gray. Who owns this stuff? And like, can a team tell you to wear a wearable and you have to wear it? Can you wear your own and collect your own?

So Shane and I's good friend Eric Winston was a president of the NFL PA. And he was drafted with me in 2006 on the Texans. And that's actually how I met Shane. I met Shane. To eric and the CBA. What? 2011 was the lockout year, right? And then we had another CBA about five or six years after that. We actually helped the NFLPA write, rewrite the cba. At that time, data was only three sentences in the cba. It was literally like, data can be tracked, blah, blah, blah. They didn't know what to do with it because it was 2011. Fast forward to 2015. We do this, like, huge study. We rewrite the entire cba. It's now like three, three or four pages within the CBA just talking about data ownership, what they can collect and whatnot. Now, the hard thing about a CBA is you have to not only predict what is going to be Tracked. Because if you don't communicate it correctly in a cba, like, they would say, oh, computer vision doesn't count. Oh, no, that's a sensor. That's not a. You said device. This is a sensor. Right. They end up arguing over all this stuff. I say all of that because two answers. One still a little gray area in terms of players who owns it. But the biggest issue is when they own it. So, like, my first thing we did at Breakaway Data is like, I had a bunch of former player. Well, my former teammates, like, ask for their. Ask for their data by the cba, right? So I didn't know what I was doing. I'm in a startup. I'm like, hey, I took the cba. Throw it in a word doc. Put a bunch of stuff in front of it, below it. Cite the cite. The CBA had them sign it. I signed it and it said, hey, third party asking for their data. Can we get it back? And we were like, well, we don't know what's going to happen. We'll see. And The San Francisco 49ers are like, oh, this looks legit. And then all of a sudden they're like, hit the brakes. And they send to league office. Then it goes around the league office and then it comes all the way back around and like a memo goes out to every NFL team. Like, apparently Dave Anderson and Breakaway Data is asking for everyone's data. Literally. I got the memo. I framed it. It's like, it's in our. It's in the office on the other side. I was like, I upset the NFL. But they're like, we'll give it to you at the end of the season. And then the end of the season happens. And they're like, okay, well, we meant at an end of the league season. So, like, they just keep moving. They kept moving the goal, goal post. And I don't want to say it was like the NFL's fault. It was kind of everyone's fault. And they had never happened before. And there's just a difference between CBA and legalese versus in practice. And I still think there's a lot to be figured out there. The problem is as soon as we figure out one device, one tech, another one comes along and something else is tracked, something else is. And they try to fight it again. We're getting to a steady, steady state here, though, where the NBA is by far the leader. They distribute all of their data to back to players. Medical records, training performance data, everything you can imagine. They actually, you. Every NBA player uses Our application for that. So it's pretty cool. The nwsl, European football, where data distribution matters. Like, think about if you're going from your club to your country. Like if I'm in Bape and I'm getting paid, I forget we're out. Madrid or wherever he is now and they're giving me $40 million and I go to France, who's giving me 20 grand to play in the World cup and I get hurt in the World Cup. Well, Real Madrid's gonna be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like who's paying us? Like, how hurt is he? Where is his information? And so like they don't. They have to use us to distribute that information back and forth. So like it's slightly different league to league is what I'm saying and how that information is distributed. There's GDPR laws that protect certain things. There's California data protection laws, there's CBAs. So like a long winded answer to said it's, it's a mess. It's different sport by sport. Some sports are forward thinking and are trying to get ahead of it. And some, like the NFL are traditionally reactive instead of proactive.

It does feel like, I mean, if you just go and like think about. Again, we try to think in our business like the right side of history versus the wrong side of history. You know, like, you know, the way you make money is to try and be on the right side of history because time is on your side.

Yeah.

Can you imagine how dumb you're going to look in a few years if you're arguing that players shouldn't own their own data on themselves? Think about the argument you're making. It's like this is them as a person. Right. Like it is how fast they move. They're not asking for the team's data, they're not asking for the other people's data. They're asking for their own. Like how their body moves.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's crazy. Like that is a crazy thing. And now you could make an argument that like, you know, I guess if you like come up with a new idea when you work somewhere else, it technically is owned by them. But like that's not what's happening here.

No.

Were talking about how you move, you know. Yeah. And so I think that this is one that feels early and inevitable, Dave, that you're going to be right on this thing. And later we're going to look back and we're going to be surprised that anybody argued against you.

Yeah, I find. Alex, one thing I find interesting for you is biomechanics, though. Like, how in your injury, how you had to change your throwing motion, your body from the ground up, in order to generate velocity. That if I was answering your question two times ago, like, what data would have been interesting. I would love to see how you threw the ball earlier in your career versus late.

Yeah, and I would love.

And.

And I wonder how far this is off. Right? Like, I've done biomechanics stuff where, you know, you get. You guys. It looks like the video put the dots all over your body and you go onto a force plate and, like, they can obviously take all this stuff in and break down your throwing motion. How far off are we from collecting data off a tape, though, right?

How.

How far off are we from. Hey, this. This receiver hit a max speed of 23 miles an hour, right, on this goalball in an actual game, not in the underwear Olympics, trying to run a 40, right? Hey, this is. This quarterbacks. These are his biomechanics. He threw the ball, you know, 50 miles an hour on this out route. That kind of stuff. Is that. Is that.

Yeah. So let me give you a couple examples. So. So when Shane mentioned there's eight cameras that surround a basketball gym.

Yeah.

Right. So the reason you need eight cameras is what's called inclusion. Right? Is at some point you have black players wearing black jerseys on the Brooklyn Nets who have this weird gray and black court.

Their court sucks. It's the worst court to watch basketball.

And there's four of them all running into each other. Yeah. And you're like, what? You're like, who is this? Right. And so, like, that happens every once in a while for the Brooklyn Nets game. That happens all. All the time in the NFL. Right. And so it's hard now if you think. How often. When can I do it off tv? Like one. You want to make sure everyone's in film at the same time. And so that doesn't always happen in basketball. You think sometimes the ball gets ahead of the. Or the camera gets ahead of the couple guys back here. So does it even matter? You got to throw them out. Like, do you just throw them out or do you guesstimate where they were? Or how does that stuff. Right. So that happens. Football does a pretty good job. You could back it up and do the all 22 and capture stuff sideline, end zone. But then what you think about is, like, all right, you can do that in the NFL. And then you got to take out some of the stuff that happens closer to the ball. With inclusion guys cutting each other, laying on top of each other. Who is that? Like you and I couldn't even tell from film. Like data wouldn't be able to tell. And then you got to think about like you want to do this downstream where there's actually a lot more opportunity. Like then it's wildly different. I mean think about, you know, mom and dad doing high school highlight tapes. You think about colleges. Colorado State, then you go to Montana State and then you go to. Yeah, of course Alabama's got good setup. But then like even Vanderbilt, it's like weird. You know, you go to Rice and there's a hundred thousand foot seat stadium with 22 people in there. Like it just, you know, I mean it doesn't like they're just wildly different on how, where, where these computer vision cameras have to capture this information. So like it can be done in sports. Soccer is by far the, the easiest to do. It's faux pas to wear green on a green field. So like they always have the colors right. The players are nicely spaced out. They're not running super fast all the time. They rarely run into each other. You know that that's a great sport to do it. Baseball is the ideal sport. First all stat stat collection. It's a one on one game. The, the parameters are known. Grandma's been charting it since 1917 with their book out there. And then, you know, football is just kind of what we described in the beginning is just like, it's such an interesting sport in that like there's a one on one matchup, but sometimes you're actually in a three on three matchup. Sometimes you're in a five on five matchup. If you're an offensive line, sometimes you're on a 11 on 11 play. Like you don't know unless you're in part, both the offense and defensive play calls. What you should be measuring.

That's actually interesting though on why football is so fun to watch. The fact that it's actually difficult to break down into, you know, these components is actually part of the reason that it's enjoyable. You know, it's because there's so much going on on any given play. Like it's kind of an interesting thing.

My favorite Kyle Shanahan breakdown was watching old Troy Palomalo film or Ed Reed film and Kyle Shannon. We'd be watching it for like 10 minutes. We'd be sitting there and we're about to play the Steelers and be like, Dave, what coverage is this? And I was like, I don't know. And he goes, either do I. I've been watching it for 30 minutes. The single play for 30 minutes. Paloma is supposed to have backside cover, too, and he runs through an opposite side C gap to make the play. I'm not sure he has that ability. That's like, that's just like. That's completely going rogue. Like going from pass cover to flying down, making play. He's like, but he makes a play. So I guess he's just allowed to do this. I don't know how to coach this. And you're like, all right, but, yeah, that happens.

So you make a compelling argument for all the physiological things that we can measure. Okay, I think everyone gets that. How does the argument change when we're talking about metrics of the mind? It's been a taboo subject in sports league. You know, the ability to collect data on someone's ability to think under pressure. All right. Or to even diagnose anxiety or diagnose depression. Does the thesis change for Breakaway when dealing with metrics of the, of the mind and of the. Of the soul and not necessarily the, the physiological metrics.

I was told that when I retired, went to the Cleveland Clinic to do the NFL mind and body assessment, that the mind is like the ocean and that we know very, very, very little about it. Like, we studied it. We know a decent, you know, enough to kind of like guide us to a degree. But in terms of what we really know, how we think, how we process and anxiety and a lot of these things, it's still wildly unknown. I think also that means extracting that data is also very, very difficult. Like, how do you do it? When do you do it? What questions do you ask? I think people have tried to do like the, how you feeling today? Happy face, no face, kind of sad face type stuff. I've certainly. I think you bring up a good point in terms of like mental health. Right. When I, when I was growing up, like, I think it was. It was called mental toughness. It has changed since then and just called mental health. And mental toughness to me meant you're capable of dealing with the bad. That's going to inevitably happen. And, you know, and I think that conversation has changed. And so, but it's the same kind of thesis is like, what is what. How you deal with these pressures, how do you deal with these stress? How are you dealing with failure? I mean, some guys, I guess, how are you dealing with success? And how does that. How do you cope with that? Or the. In the change of your reality? I suppose, but the Data and information that come with that, I would say would 100% belong to the player. I would say that they would have to be extremely comfortable with how that information is being extracted. I would say it probably shouldn't even be looked at by someone other than a very. Their very own trusted professional like that. That type of information scares me. To have like a receiver coach to have that information. That would scare me. He'd be like, I told you he was soft throwing the ball in third and seven. Like, look at his deep pattern score. You know, like, you're like, I don't know what it is.

This is. I even think the same thing on some of the. They've talked about getting like, sleep scores, having players wear a wearable. Yeah, right. That the team could have. And I'm like, there's no way. Right. Like, your team could use this data against you. You know, like, you're.

What were you doing up at 4:00am? You know, what were you doing at.

4:00Am I was at Badoki getting wild, boy.

Getting.

Having a grand time. Time. No, I, you know, it's. It's interesting. Ravi, I asked you this question as, as an operator, investor. Like, people ask me about the transition from sports to business all the time, and I. And one of my canned answers is transparency. When you, when you're in a locker room, you are literally and figuratively naked. Like, I know everything about you and how much money you make. I know your responsibility on the field. I know, like, a lot of your personal issues, whatever, because I'm sitting next to you, we talk about you, I see everything about you. Literally, figuratively. I get it. In the workforce, it's completely different in that, like, you can't ask someone's age, you can't ask someone's. Like, you really got to be careful about background, especially if you're a CEO hiring people, you got to be careful about the type of background questions. You certainly don't talk about equity or pay distribution with anyone other than that person directly. Like, to me, that transparency always allowed me a lot of mental space to perform. And I knew where everyone was. I knew the situation. To me, in business, it feels. It feels restrictive in a lot of ways. Like to. To be put into a. Like, like you're boxing everyone and then they feel like just like a cog. I don't know how to break that. Break that feeling in some ways. Like how. I don't.

Oh, yeah. I. It feels tough, you know, David, so it's super interesting to hear you talk about it because you've done both at a very high level.

Right.

Like, this is. This is real perspective from both. So first thing I tell you is I agree with you, and I think that the reason for that is that sports teams are optimized to win whether or not they always do. Like, the. Every decision is made to try and help you win. Everything you just described is meant to minimize risk of getting sued. Like, the reason you can't ask those questions is not because it helps you win. You see what I'm saying? Like, and I'm not. I'm not. I'm actually being dead serious.

Like, oh, yeah, that was. We're laughing because.

Right, yeah, yeah. But, like, it has nothing to do with winning. So it's actually like, oh, there's all these other things that prevent you from doing the thing that might help you win. Okay, fine. Now the question is, well, what do you do in spite of that? What do you do given the fact that you have certain restrictions that you can't do? So what do some people do? Like, hug Leone, when he was interviewing me for Sequoia, he said, he's like, I had worked at kkr, then I had worked at Instacart, and I was working at Instacart, and then I was talking to Sequoia, and he was like. He's like, I don't think I'm allowed to ask you what you get paid at Instacart. And I was like, okay. He's like, but I think you're allowed to tell me. Which I thought was interesting. I thought it was like a great, you know, a great way of getting around the topic. And then he was like, I definitely think I can ask you about your KKR equity. He's like, and I'm certain you're allowed to tell me that. Like one of those. So that was kind of a fun, Funny.

Yeah.

But anyway, on your point, I do think that what you just said, which is like, you have all. You and me, we have to create environments where the team is optimized to win, which means, like, yeah, guys, we're not going to all know each other's equity, right? But, you know, we know that this person's getting paid more than this person. And we know that equity is a function of what you deliver. And so we are going to be real about that. We're going to talk about that. And, like, you know, you can get a lot more if you do A, B and C. We know that we're not going to perform at our best if we all have stuff that we're holding back from one another and I don't want you to know about your marriage, but I need to know if there's something going on that's going to prevent you from playing at the highest level for the sake of all of us. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, yeah. And, and this is where I go. It's back to like, it comes back to trust in this thing of, you know, what you said at the beginning of like, if your team doesn't like each other. Yeah. And if they're not going to listen to the head coach, you're not going to win. Yeah. I think that same thing exists in business, but there was more restrictions on your ability to like, get that to happen. But I do think that really good leaders are able to create an environment where the team kind of wants to work together and they want to listen to the leader. You know, on this stuff.

I try, I definitely try to create those environments all the time. Right. And I, I like pretty much anyone who has a, becomes a father or leads a business or whatever. You're very pretty much. At least I think cherry picking your favorite sayings and yes. Behaviors from coaches or women in your past that kind of influenced you. Like, I always, I always appreciated. Sonny Lubick was my coach at Colorado State, which, you know, he, I don't want to butcher the phrase, but like, pretty much he treated everyone equal but not the same. Guess what, Alex Smith, like, you might have gotten a little trouble for the class. It was your first time. You're also our starting quarterback. We're gonna let this go. But Dave, this is your seventh time getting in trouble. Like, you know, it's gonna be a little different and blah, blah. And like they would, you know, at the surface as a, as a player, you're like, whoa, whoa, they just both missed class. How come one's different than the other? And you're like, well, it's, that's tough. And like, I feel that, like there's those personality. You know, your head coach knows how to deal with those personalities in a locker room. They know how to make sure everyone's comfortable, that they know how to make sure everyone feels heard. Certainly want to make sure that everyone feels appreciated for their work, what they're putting in, that they get recognized. Like all that stuff I find really, really interesting about, about sports and business and that. Like, you know, at first I was like poo pooing on OKRs and like, okay, how do we do all this stuff? And this is annoying. But then you're like, oh, this is actually leads to transparency. Like, everyone is communicating what they're supposed to do. And now we know, like, are you hitting those numbers? Are you hitting those. Whatever they are, deadlines.

The luckiest and unluckiest part of sports is that there's a scoreboard. Right? Like, the fact that there isn't, that makes it much harder. I will tell you this, though. You just said two things that made me think. One, Shane told us that Coach K told him, I'm not going to treat all of you equally, but I'll treat all of you fairly, which is the same point that your coach at Colorado State made, which I thought was super interesting. And then the second thing is, dude, you talk about learning from coaches. I learned from you today because I'm going to take this back to my kids, which is, you know, it's binary whether or not you like taking a hit, right? But here's the thing I'm going to tell them. Here's the thing I'm going to tell them, if you don't like it, you better learn to like it. Because no matter whether it's football or not. Right. You better like learning to take a hit because they're going to come.

Yeah.

The question is what you're going to do to respond. It's not okay to not like taking a hit. You know what I'm saying? Because whether it's in football or somewhere else. So I'm going to take that. One of like, I like those things that kind of have a twist to them, which is like, well, you know, you might not like taking it. That's okay. Actually, it's not. You have to like taking hits, you know?

Yeah.

Well, I wrote an essay in business school. Teach as an entrepreneur class. One teacher asked me why I think I'd be a successful entrepreneur. And I said, I got fired from my June job five times. And I kept coming back. And she was like, you didn't have to write anything after that. That was my first sentence. And she's like, you know, she's like, that's all the resilience. The, like, I'm going to make it happen, I'll figure it out type mentality is really all you. Is like, what it comes down to. And like, you see that in business, like, Breakaway, we're sputtering. Oh, my God. We got, you know, it's like, how are we gonna figure out this next two months? Like, how are we gonna fund this? How are we gonna get this product out the door? Like, there's plenty of times you can quit running a business, but like, if you're like, whatever, Nothing. I. I got called my second year. My. I had an amazing training camp my second year, amazing training camp. And my roommate was so confident that I was going to make the team, he called and pretended to be the Turk. So he called me from a phone number that I didn't recognize, and he was like, I got you, blah, blah. Thanks. I hung up. Thirty seconds later, Turk calls me. I get cut. I wanted to kill him. And like, it, like, I was. I was devastated. I was like, well, I could not have done anything better. My second year, got cut, end up getting bring back like six days later. But, like, the dealing with that, the emotional roller coaster of like, okay, this is my dream job. I literally did everything that I could do, and I still make a team. Now I'm back. Now I'm done. Now I'm like. It was just like, if you can deal with that, you'll be all right. Can I ask you a question? What is. I thought about this. What is a glue guy?

A glue guy is. Is someone who creates an environment where others can be their best. That is the simplest definition of a glue guy. That not necessarily. It may not be about their talent. It may not be about their skill. It may not be about their impact. All right, so this is agnostic to talent, role position. But every glue guy and glue gal creates an environment where everyone can be their best self.

There's a commit. I think there's a commitment level that comes with being a glue Glue guy as well. That you are so committed that you will do anything and everything, like, within your power.

It's funny. I thought about this.

Help the team.

I've thought about this. Last night, I was like, I. I was definitely a glue guy, of course. And I was like, the difference is we aren't called gold guys. Gold guys are so good. They get away with whatever they want. They could be the prissy. There's a difference between a glue guy and a gold guy guy, right? Like, everyone has a. But the glue guy's job. So interviewing people. My dream interview would be able to play pickup basketball with these guys. I don't think there is any way, any better way to understand if someone is a glue guy or they're a gold guy or their blah, blah. Than playing a couple ups and downs of pickup basketball to me is like the most telling thing in humanity of like, can you figure. Can you figure it out? Do you know? Can you figure out your role? Or are you gonna Be the guy that's, you know, making it rain, airballing 19 shots in a row and thinking he's the score.

Well, that's why my, my definition, which I actually thought both of these guys definitions were amazing. But my first reaction was like, they are someone that finds a way to make their team better, you know, no matter what, right? Like what, whatever it is, and that they go. And our belief is that the teams are everywhere. You know, it's not just in sports, it's not just in business, it's in your family, it's in your community. And so that's the other thing that the people that we really admire are people that do it not just in like the obvious place, you know, that they find places to go and be that way. Anyway, like Alex's son was just in like the Woodside musical, right? The school musical for the eighth grade, because every student has to be in it, which is awesome. And this dude's doing set design, right? And you know, that's cool. But then there was a woman who actually Big Blue Guy listener, Courtney, who did the choreography, you know, for this thing. And like that is Glue Gal, you know, like for the eighth grade musical, doing choreography for Moana for a bunch of kids that maybe don't all want to be there, you know, I don't know. Makes the whole play better, makes the whole community better. Like, shout out to Courtney.

So our traditional asked question. So we're going to flip it around on you, David. You know, you have been a Glue Guy founder, slot receiver. But who are the Glue Guys, the Glue Gals in your life?

You know, probably starts with my mom and older brother where my parents got divorced when I was in eighth grade. My dad moves to the Philippines and Guam and kind of out, like I mentioned, my brothers are 10 and 20 years older. So my brother took on kind of like this uncle older brother role. Like sometimes I laugh and I was like, probably wasn't good that a 22 year old was giving a 12 year old advice, but like there's a good enough nuggets in there. And so my brother definitely was always that first Glue Guy being like, hey, here, here's the way things are going to work out now. Like he was at University of Arizona when my parents got divorced and he was kind of like guiding me and being like, this is what life is going to be like a little bit. My mom certainly was the first. So then it was my mom and myself basically from 8th grade, 9th all the way through high school. And so like she was Just so she let me be me, I would say was kind of the thing, right? Like, it was tough. She didn't want to play the role of, like the man of the house. She let me kind of like establish who I was. And she kept it, she kept it together as I was going from thing to thing. Life experience. Life experience. And then she also gave me the space to fail and space to explore. And like, right after high school, two, two weeks after high school, I left. I never came back. I went to Colorado State and I was gone. So I think those were the first two I would say on team wise, which is really interesting. I'll never forget. Kyle Kegley was a big, a big guy. Now, he wasn't a traditional. He wasn't really a glue guy. He was our gold guy. He was our scorer. But when he wanted to turn it on and when he, when he had to, like, do the things necessary to play defense, to guard the best player to do this, he was that. He was that guy. Wayne Myers was my first basketball coach. Fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade was certainly taught me the meaning of a couple axioms that I use in basketball, which was like, don't turn up, don't ever turn down an open shot. We all worked really hard for you to get an open shot. And if you're not willing to shoot the ball, go somewhere else or go set a screen. Like, don't stand wherever where everyone else would like to shoot the ball. If you're not willing to shoot, do something else. And I was, I always, like, take that mentality. Like, everyone worked really hard for me. I'm in the corner wide open, and now I'm going to pump, fake and drive into three people and throw the ball away like you're an idiot. That applies to life.

Well, David, we appreciate you coming on glue guys. You are glue guy. Congratulations on all your success with breakaway data. If you're a young athlete listening, check out the app. Have a chance to own your data. Something, you know, Alex and I wish we had coming up through the ranks. And it's only going to get more, more important as the, as the years roll on here. But we appreciate your insight, Dave. Best of luck to you, man. You're always a friend of luguys.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Dave. We appreciate it, David.

Thank you, man.

Absolutely.