Garry Boddington, PlayWize - Founder Journey Series, Episode 14

From representing his country of South Africa at the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, to becoming a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits and influencing not just one, but multiple tech sectors such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, fintech, business intelligence. And taking that experience and bringing it back to his first love of sports. Today we're talking to Gary Boddington, who happens to be my co founder at Playwise. You're going to hear us talk about smart Athlete Manager Smith Sports Tech Group. That's just an indication of how fast tech moves. When we recorded this episode, that was the name of the company, that was the name of the platform we were building. Fast forward to today. We've rebranded it as Playwise Playwise IO and we just launched the platform for rugby this past week. And great things are coming down the pipeline.

Three, two, one.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Founder Journey. Really excited today. I've got one of my business partners, Gary Boddington, joining us from. Where are you? Sun Peaks right now, living the leisurely life of an entrepreneur. A little bit about Gary. Gary is a expat South African. He's a Canadian citizen now. He is also a former Olympian, something that you don't see often. Olympians come back into the workforce and diving head on into entrepreneurship. So Gary's going to be able to share some of that journey with us. I'm also proud to say he's a co founder and he is a CEO of Sports Technology Group co founder alongside myself. And we've been doing some great things in the sports entertainment world and we'll dive into that a little bit, into this conversation as well. But first, Gary, welcome to the show. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Thank you, Ray. It's great to be here and what a pleasure to shoot the breeze with you for a while. So, as I said earlier, I'm not sure how far back you want to go. I guess I'd be considered a mature entrepreneur, but seasoned, seasoned, seasoned entrepreneur. So I'll drive one back all the way to my roots back in South Africa. As you mentioned, I was formerly an Olympian, although people nowadays wouldn't believe that. But I kind of spent a number of years in competitive sports and at the end of that, I've come out of that and really looking for something to do on my own. I kind of felt at that stage that I had an inkling I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wasn't exactly sure what it was after the I was at the Atlanta Olympic Games. I took three months off and myself and my wife Traveled around America and we kind of just thought about what we should do next. And I went back to South Africa and actually I started off just doing. I did a presentation to corporate organizations around the similarities or the analogy of discipline in sport and principles in sport and how easily transferable that is into the work life in terms of managing teams. And I did that for a while. But the reality in the corporate training world, I enjoyed it, I loved it. I really enjoyed the presentation side of things. But it became quite repetitive for me and it wasn't something that was really challenging. Ultimately I wanted to do something like build a product or build an organization. And fortunately for me at the time, and this is, I guess the story of my, my career is I've managed to team up with some really smart people because I'm not going to, I don't classify myself in the smart technologist category. I'm more in the idiot user category that understands what pain points are and can kind of translate that into information that developers can code. And I've teamed up with two guys back in South Africa who became my partners in an early business. We built a, what was in those days as a kind of, we call it a celebrity portal for one of South Africa's top cricketers. He's a very well known guy internationally in cricket and that worked really well. But unfortunately he was traveling a lot at the time and he couldn't really get involved in updating the platform. So one of the things that really worked for us out of that was he was continually invited to go and do guest speaking, keynote addresses and that type of thing. So we spun out a website called Guest speaker which actually to this day is still going 20 years plus on. We're very proud of that. And it really aggregated about 400 more of South Africa's top sports celebrities and TV celebrities and radio celebrities and that type of thing. And we really just made the process of finding those celebrities easy. And we did the documentation and the matching and that very quickly and easily and efficiently and it was a really nice business.

And just again for our audience, that was 20 plus years ago, that was 2000s. And so connectivity and access to people was just starting to version online, let alone in South Africa where you guys were launching this.

Exactly.

It was very compelling stuff that you're putting together.

Yeah, it was, it was very early days and we were learning a lot. And to be quite frank, I mean, a lot of people on this that may be listening to this won't recall these days. But I only sent my first Email from the Olympic Village in 1996 in Atlanta. That was the first time I ever sent an email to anybody.

And just so the audience doesn't think that that's because you're old, that's just because that was the time when it just started, people were just starting to send emails and people were still using fax machines and photocopiers quite a bit back those days. Right?

Exactly, yeah. And then took a bit of a meandering turn then because we fortunately, as I said for me, my partners, one guy in particular had done some work with automating data from a SQL database into Microsoft Excel on the front end. So. And so we started automating the process on Guest speaker, which was our celebrity portal. And we realized it actually was quite a useful tool because a lot of people in those days, some will remember a product called Crystal Reports, which is actually a Vancouver based company and everybody used to use for their corporate reporting, they used to use Crystal Reports but ultimately used to go export to Excel so that they could start manipulating data in a spreadsheet. And we just realized that actually we could automate the process between a database and Excel, which is what we started doing on our own database. And then we realized that this was a universal pain point that we actually had kind of stumbled into. Fast forward a couple of years and we started to focus on accountants industry. And this is how you meander into it as an entrepreneur. None of us were accountants, but we recognized that we did recognize very early that accountants were addicted to Excel. So we thought as a target market, that's who we should go after. And we then subsequently sold. That was our first exit. We sold Guest Speaker. It wasn't a huge exit for us, but it was a first taste of an exit and kind of understanding the process. And the team that were running it for us bought it from us. And then yeah, basically we focused on accounting. And we were very fortunate. In South Africa, like Simply accounting or like QuickBooks, there was a product in South Africa called Pastel Accounting which had probably 150,000 companies running, were running that particular accounting product in South Africa. And so we automated this reporting tool of ours on top of that accounting package. By then it had become a product. It was called Alchemyx. We'd been through the processes of operationalizing. We built a team up to that stage was probably about 40 people or so. And fast forward that process. We got very lucky. That organization in South Africa was acquired by large international accounting company called Sage. Through that relationship, Sage globally picked up what we were doing for accountants and for their install base and we ended up then ripping across a number of the platforms in Sage. So it was ACPAC in those days, which is now Sage 300. There was simply accounting, there was Peachtree down in the us, there was Maz. There's a whole bunch of these European accounting platforms which we could then just copy and paste our solution to. It sounds easy. Now it wasn't as easy in those days, but we kind of copied the solution onto those and that's ultimately what brought me to Vancouver. So we were running, we had a footprint here in North America, we had a footprint in Australia and a footprint in Africa and we were trying to run it out of South Africa and it wasn't working because of time zones and other issues. So I came to Vancouver on a two year plan to set up the office, set up a team and, and kind of run the operation across North America to get the channel working. Did that. Arrived in Vancouver with my family of four and four suitcases on a two year plan and 10 years later. Now I've moved houses a few times and I live in Sun Peaks and I'm a Canadian citizen. So yeah. But yeah, basically from there we kind of fast forward 12 years. That took us 12 years to become an overnight success.

So is it safe to say that Alchemy became the fundamental pieces of the business intelligence arm of Sage?

It became Sage Intelligence, yes. So there were a number of players around the Sage stable. We kind of looked, we worked more in the smaller and mid sized organizations and the higher end of the ERP platforms within the Sage stable had had other tools as well. But yeah, yeah, it became Alchemyx was actually acquired by Sage and it was renamed to Sage Intelligence. I went on. So I kind of, my claim to fame is I've probably signed just about every agreement you can with Sage. I've signed an ISV agreement, an OEM agreement, an acquisition agreement and a master service provider agreement. So kind of went and end to end. Yeah. And so ultimately as part of our acquisition deal I was required to go in as part of the earn out, I was, I was required to go into Sage and I was a card carrying member of Sage for a couple of years. Yeah. And then, then, then I'm in Vancouver and I'd been back in this age world and you know, once you've been an entrepreneur, it's a drug, you can't get rid of it. I wanted to get back into doing something on my own. I had a few ideas in those days. So that product was very much a desktop product. And this is probably seven, eight, nine years ago now. And you could see the cloud coming, never mind blockchain and AI and all this other stuff that's available now, but you could see the cloud coming. So people were still, were pivoting off desktop technology into cloud, which is still going on to this day. But, and I just saw that coming and I wanted to get involved in it and I wanted to be a part of the cloud, kind of the early cloud activity. So I left Sage and fortunately for me, I walked into this new startup in Vancouver on West Hastings called Launch Academy and I met you and a couple of other guys and so, and that's been a great. I'm very fortunate and I'm very grateful that I met you guys when I did because I didn't have the network in Vancouver at all that you guys have introduced me to. So I'm very grateful for that. And, and then I just started getting involved in advisory and doing some board work, advisory work, mentoring work. We then co founded, I always, you know, for the years of doing what we had in Excel worksheets for, for organizations, automating Excel workbooks, we were doing your financial reporting, operational reporting, sales reporting. But the one common thing that stood out all the time was that small businesses don't actually understand cash flow. And I think that's a common issue. Everybody knows that small businesses get on with whatever they're doing. They're not accountants, they don't understand cash flow. They don't necessarily understand the difference between revenue and cash flow, which is something that I think is important for all entrepreneurs to get to understand as deeply as possible. So I co founded. You were involved in this process too. And I co founded with some really smart people here in Vancouver an artificial intelligence company that really looked at developing prescriptive analytics on cash flow for small businesses.

Yeah, let's take it take a little step back here. So I remember you came into the Launch office and you were introduced by Matt Smith, the co founder of Thinkific at the time. And now he's co founder of Later.com and you're like, hey, I want to get connected to entrepreneurs. And I remember saying, careful what you ask for. And I threw entrepreneurs at your left and right saying, okay, hey, talk to Gary. This is the guy that's exited. He's about data and analytics, which we love. And I remember throwing a number of companies at you. And then you joined our team at LX Ventures and that's when you and I really Started working together. And then we had this concept about the ghost cfo, somebody helping behind the scenes and helping these entrepreneurs figure their shit out and understand numbers and data and analytics. And that then morphed into Menteo. And you kind of. But you actually really brought the team together there. Like, yes, I was a bit of a co founder. We germinated the idea and got things off the ground. But you brought in Monique, you brought in Sean. Mark. Sean. And then. So Menteo then morphed into. Well, got acquired, and then you were free to start looking at other opportunities. And that's when we brought you on into btl Blockchain Technology Group. So tell us about you diving into Blockchain. How did that come about?

Yeah, that's. And again, I'm grateful to you and the people that I've met and Matt Smith and all of the Smith brothers and all the people that I've worked with in Vancouver. I've kind of just bounced around, met a lot of people. And it was actually Alex Ventures. You probably remember the meeting you were sitting in. I think my responsibility was to try and find FinTech investments for Alex and for Alex Ventures. And in one of the discussions one Monday morning, I think a guy said, gary, this bitcoin thing is out. So that's fintech, so that must be you. So go and find out what it's all about.

This is 2013, so put a timestamp on it, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I'm eternally grateful for that as well, because I really come from an age group where still, to this day, my contemporaries still think, you know, bitcoin is a drug runner's money only. It's like the early days over the Internet. Everybody said, that's for porn. That's for porn distribution only. You know, don't touch it.

Porn and gambling, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the same thing's happening with bitcoin and cryptocurrency. But so what I did is I just thought, okay, I've got no idea what that is. I've got to go and find out. So, like most people that got involved in the space in the early days, you just. I just. I would dive in and just read as much as I could. Fortunately, on West Hastings, there was a place called Decentral. Some people might remember it, but it was really early. It was early days, and a whole bunch of the early community got together there. And it was literally a basement dungeon on West Hastings. If it was a movie, there would have been cigar smoke and like a really. But a Great bunch of people and incredibly smart people. I mean very, very technical audience or group. So I was the old guy in the room asking the question like who's going to buy this? How do you sell this thing, how do you package this stuff?

But asking the right questions, right? They're fundamental business questions.

You'd hope so. But yeah, fundamental business questions. And the reality is I didn't understand the technology well enough and I still don't understand the deep dive technology. But I recognize now that at the time the technology was not sophisticated enough yet to be able to answer those how do you get to market type of questions. And even to this day a lot of this, you know, there's still a lot of. Anyway, if we get time we can go into that discussion.

And you also had like a front row seat to a very notable person, Vitaly, coming in and talking about Ethereum and what that concept was.

Exactly. I think that really for me there were a couple of people there that were very influential on me. Even though I didn't really recognize that a lot of it was in those days was proof of work, proof of stake. They're having these very technical arguments. I didn't really understand it, but there were some people in the room that I thought, okay, this is impressive. And that particular day I was in a room, Vitalik Buterin came to town. He was 17 or 18, whatever he was, he was waving his Ethereum white paper trying to get people to buy in, literally in the dungeon on West Hastings. And I listened to the guy talk and if you've heard him talk, you can understand that he operates at a way different level academically and every other way that I can possibly think. But I just got the sense that there's something. So this was Ethereum, nevermind Bitcoin. And I got the sense that something special was going on there. I mean I couldn't get a, couldn't get a handle on it. But you could see that this is, this was going to be transformational. So I hung around and then fortunately you introduced me to btl, which ultimately became Canada's first listed blockchain company. And a long story there, if we get time we can dive into all of that history. But that, yeah, that kind of evolved into two crazy projects. One of which was we did an interbank cross border settlement project with Visa and six European banks.

One of the world's first.

One of the world's first, yeah, that hit the front page of the, of the FT in London and suddenly our phones would just ring off the hook. After that. But it was really the pain point was trying to resolve. Why does it, what does it take you three days to transfer money globally bank to bank? And we addressed that pain point by literally taking three days down to split seconds with. With a new layer of technology. And then the other one which kind of feeds into where I am now is. Was also really an eye opener for me. We worked with. We created an energy trading platform for these energy giants that traded the commodity. There was natural gas. And the pain point was 90% of their trades were mismatched, which just sounds crazy, but again, it goes back to the spreadsheet thing. So the reason why the trades are mismatched is because they'll trade all over the world with counterparts and then to try and reconcile the trade, they lose track of spreadsheets or whatever it is. And we took that. Long story short, we took the pain point of 90% of their trades are mismatched to. We rendered the concept of reconciliation as obsolete. And when you think about that, yeah, sure. Particularly from an accounting and auditing world, people say how can you render reconciliation obsolete? But that's just the reality of what's going on. And that really was eye opening for me. And I realized that this is transformational technology. And yeah, so sorry, it's been not even a, not even a long story short or long story long. This is just a long story.

But that gets to us where you are today. And you saw that technology and this is why I bought onto it. Is that why we created sports tech? And you saw that technology, you saw the impact it had in the financial world. But you as a former athlete knew that there was a lot of corruption, a lot of challenges and issues and lack of transparency in the sports world and the entertainment world when it comes to agents and players and teams and leagues. And you knew that there's a better way to solve that and that was with the technology that you had firsthand knowledge building. And so tell us about sports tech and the status of the sports industry and where it is today.

Yeah, so that might be a long story as well. I'll try and keep that short. That's kind of. Yeah. I got to the point where I'll.

Renew whenever it gets too long.

Yeah, I'm at that stage in life where I really. What I want to do for. Do I want to have another swing of the fences as an entrepreneur again, as I said earlier, it's a drug. You can't, no matter how many times you've done it, you succeeded or failed. And. But I, But I just. And at the time I was talking to. You could see the, you could see this technology was transformational. And literally we were doing. We were in boardrooms or we were talking to people in healthcare and insurance and shipping and logistics and supply chain and all these different verticals. And the reality is. Well, two things struck me. One is none of them really blew my hair back anymore in terms of the subject matter with respect to those verticals. But also, you can't be a specialist in all of them. So I needed to get some focus in what do I actually want to be. So. And I got right back to where I started. So that is a long story, but it goes back to the beginning. I was an athlete. I love sports. I'm grateful for the career I've had in technology. I want to merge those two things. So lacking in imagination for, for the name of an organization. We call it Sports Technology Group. But yeah, the challenge, the creative geniuses.

That you and I are.

Yeah, exactly. We hadn't had enough beer that day. The challenge is you can't just say, okay, well, we're going to just build. Well, now with Sports Technology Group, we got the solution. You've got to find out what the pain point is. What is the use case that we're trying to address. So we spend the better part of a year probably doing customer discovery around sports organizations. And those were multiple sports codes across multiple sports geography, multiple geographies, and looking right through the user Persona stack as well. So talking to executives, talking to agents, talking to scouts, talking to most predominantly athletes. And a common denominator came out. And there's common themes with regard to the industry. To your question, there's a lot of investment and a lot of thinking and strategizing going around fan engagement, which is for obvious reasons. You know, a lot of sports organizations right now, they're getting no parking revenue, they're getting no ticket sales revenue, no one's buying hot dogs and beers, they're getting no bums in seats. So how do you, how do you retain or engage fans now that Covid has literally changed the world? So there's, there's a lot of. And technology can help enormously there. But there's, there was also a lot of stadium optimization, which is related 5G and how do you optimize the stadium experience? And there's a lot of effort going into wearables, but a common denominator kept coming up that athletes are very poorly managed. And long story short, that's kind of where we decided to focus on addressing that issue. And we have built a platform now called Smart Athlete Manager, which really seeks to address that is, create the efficiencies, much like we did. If you the analogy probably going back a step to the blockchain project that we did with the energy giants. If you think about that ecosystem where they were, there were energy giants in an ecosystem sport. Every organizer, every industry, every sector has its ecosystem. So in the sports world, there's athletes, there's agents, there's clubs, there's scouts, there's parents, there's anti doping, there's all these people, but it's just awash with total inefficiency of. It's. It's just a. It's an absolute shit show of, yeah, WhatsApp messages, fax, in some cases, fax machines. Yeah, Excel workbooks, emails. It's just crazy.

In some cases, it's a level of bureaucracy, it's a lot of red tape, but it's redundancies. But there's also some nefarious activities and there's deception and transparency issues. And one of the things I always talk about when I'm pitching STG is that there's good and bad actors, but there's also a young demographic, a young workforce that gets renewed into the sports ecosystem every year because they're constantly recruiting younger players, and a lot of them are coming from third world countries and their education level is not as high, but they're great athletes. And they can be easily manipulated. And we've seen it hands down, numerous times where contracts are being manipulated without the kid knowing or even in front of them doing it without them actually really understanding what they're getting themselves into.

Exactly. And that's one of the things we want to address. But then how do you start to address that with technology? And when you start to see what's happening around, pick an acronym, whether it's blockchain with smart contracts or cryptocurrency and the associated tokens and wallets and AI, ML, VR, AR, all of these things. How do you now find the solutions to fix those things? Because those are pain points. They are real issues. Everybody in the industry understands that and knows that, but no one's actually been addressing it. Just, well, let's just keep doing the same things we're doing. And that's largely because, and I blame my own generation, it's my generation that are stifling innovation because the way we've done things is so ingrained. If you use a fax machine or WhatsApp or an Excel workbook, or whatever and emails. It's just, well, it's not broken, it works. It's a system that works, but it's just enormously inefficient. And it's, it's my generation that need to, either they need to quite frankly get out the way or they need to get a younger mentor as not a mentee or mentor and ask the younger generation what's going on, what are you guys looking for? There's athletes all over the world that want to get involved and make a contribution. But if the generation that are the incumbents, that are the leaders and influences or leaders and decision makers in sports are not going to change the way they do in business, it's a problem. I always say to the executives that I talk to, if your boardroom, if you look around your boardroom table at your monthly quarterly AGMs, whatever it is, and the people around the table are not changing or the agenda items are not changing or there's no allocation of budget towards technology, you're going to have problems, you're going to get left behind. A great example is esports and we haven't even touched on this and you and I have spoken about this at length. But if you think about esports athletes now, both your professional at the high end, but even the kind of armchair athletes at home, this demographic are buying, they will buy a skin for a gun using Bitcoin on the Lightning network, for example. And if I say that to traditional sports executives, they've got no idea what I'm saying. But that generation that are doing that in esports, that is normal, that is irreversible, it's unstoppable. And so now how do you embrace that? Because if you are a traditional bank or traditional insurance company, you can't expect that athlete who has just bought, basically they buy a virtual asset with a virtual currency on a virtual network. You can't expect that person now to leave their house and walk into a branch to sign a piece of paper to open a bank account or to walk into your insurance office and sign a piece of paper to sign a, to pay a premium. It's just not going to happen. So the game's moved on. But we're in this kind of generational shift at the moment. And Covid, I think has accelerated, which.

Is, yeah, definitely it has.

About how bad it's been for everybody and humanity. It's had some crazy spin offs which are positive and we will benefit from in time.

Well, I want to be a little bit mindful of time so I Want to get back to you and your journey. What are some of the obstacles that you've had to overcome?

I think there's so many obstacles that you have to overcome. I think in the early days when we got going as entrepreneurs, like the lean startup methodologies, and they weren't entrepreneurial courses at university, there weren't a lot of people doing entrepreneurial type of stuff. It's not that they weren't entrepreneurs, but there wasn't that sharing of knowledge that's gone on. So that, that was. We had to learn a lot of what we now know by making some.

Organically, on your own, really stupid mistakes.

And that's, you know, I think that's, that's one, that's something that you, you could possibly avoid nowadays by reaching out to people like, like Launch Academy, reaching out to people that have been this and been there and done that and can share knowledge. And I think that was just getting access to information and expertise and knowledge is, you know, reach out to a mentor. That's one of the best things I didn't do early enough, and I think people should do very, very early. Apart from that, then it's really some kind of domain getting domain experience as well. Just trying to understand your specific domain. Learning to focus. Every entrepreneur has a thousand ideas, and on each of those thousand ideas, the derivatives, and you can riff all day on those, but the reality is you're not going to succeed if you don't actually get some focus around where you're trying to go. I think one of the biggest obstacles, I think it was one of the, one of the questions we were talking about earlier was also just, you know, what are some of the downsides or the taboos of being an entrepreneur? And I think people need to acknowledge that it's a lonely existence, especially at the CEO level. It can be incredibly lonely because ultimately the buck stops with you. You're responsible for the strategic vision, you're responsible for the team, you're responsible for operationalizing the business, you're responsible for the product to make sure it works. And often it does get very, very lonely. And I think that's something where I probably didn't do enough of as well. It's just reach again, reach out to people. You're not alone in this journey and reach out to people.

But it's hard, it's hard to a. It's hard to acknowledge when you are in that kind of a position because you're so just deep into your company. And most often when you are in those trying times, there's challenges and problems and fires that you're constantly putting out and you don't spend enough time focusing on yourself as you do on the problems and everything around you. But then even when you do acknowledge that there is a stigmatism like you as a CEO can't be seen as somebody that's struggling or can't be seen as somebody that's failing because that's a sign of weakness and that's. Investors don't want to invest in something like that and people don't want to join a team where they're struggling and they have challenges. But that's the reality that's everybody's in that boat. And so how do you. What's your advice for somebody that is trying to or is being faced with challenges and issues and is afraid to go reach out?

Yeah, I think, and that's. If I look at my younger self, I think you certainly at this end of my career, I recognize that I, I was not humble enough as a young entrepreneur. I didn't have the humility to reach out to people to say can you help me here? It doesn't matter what the issue is, whether I'm feeling lonely and I need some help just to talk to people or I'm really struggling with putting these financial projections together because these numbers aren't working for me or whatever it might be. I spent quite a bit of time, as you know, with the BC Technology association and I spoke to hundreds of entrepreneurs at different stages of their development as well. And through my own experiences and through a lot of those discussions, to me I kind of got my own little model that everything boils down to three buckets. Funding, people and opportunities. And as an entrepreneur we all face these issues. And if there's a funding challenge, there's normally somebody that can handle that funding challenge better than you. Or if there's a people challenge, there are people that have handled it or can handle it better than you. Or if there's an opportunity, opportunities as in, you know, how do I get this thing off the ground if it's early days or how do I get massive distribution at scale globally? If you've grown, if you scale in, there's people that have been there and done that. And probably I should concede that in the earlier days I wasn't really open in minded enough to or humble enough to say there's people that know what's going on besides me and I'm not the smartest guy on the planet. I don't have the best idea on the planet even Though I did in those early days, I would have thought like that. But that's not the reality. And I guess there's an ego issue involved there as well.

And I would argue that a lot of our audience members probably don't realize that it doesn't matter. Age, like seasoned entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs face this all the time. Like I myself, I admit, like I'm stubborn or I don't reach out what I need to, and I put myself in situations that are avoidable and I probably have a greater, deeper network than most people, but I don't leverage it as much as I should either.

Yeah. And it never goes away. I completely agree with you. I was having a conversation with someone the other day as well, because there's also another level where you've got to back yourself as well because you potentially are doing something that is slightly off piste for what people have been seen. And you've got to back yourself that your idea, it might be new and revolutionary and out there, you got to back yourself. That's going to work. I mean, right now I talk extensively to the sports and esports people and a lot of people, you know some of these ideas. No, I'm not sure if that's going to work or not. That's going to work. And you've got to think yourself.

Something you hear often, like, you got to go through a hundred no's before you get to that one yes and that one yes could be that make or break. And you never know and talk about recent conversations. So you sent me a slack message this morning about a company that essentially is doing something very similar to what we're doing with Sam Smart, our smart athlete manager. Most entrepreneurs will face this at some point in their career where, oh shit, somebody else has got a better idea or somebody's copied our idea or somebody's beat us to the market. Talk us through what went through your head when you saw that. And I obviously know the answer because you and I had this conversation. This, for us, it's not a bad thing. It's a benchmark. It's a way for us to have a comparable out there that we can reference. And there's differentiators that we see right away that we can take using our advantage. So this goes back to the get shit done attitude. And basically the mantra of launch and everything that I'm involved with is all about just, you got to move forward, you got to look at the positives and negatives and just get shit done. So walk us back through what went through your head. Before you sent me that Slack message this morning. And where are you at now with that?

Again, this is a great example of the journey. If I, 25, 30 years ago, whatever it was, if I'd been at this stage of development where we are now, and I'd seen this crowd come out and launch, I don't think panic is the right word, but I would have thought, okay, this is a problem for us. But with the benefit of experience.

And.

With the benefit of hindsight, I recognize that I was actually excited. I was. I was very glad to see that there's somebody that looked very much like what we are doing. Because to me, it's just validation of the market. And I think what comes with time is even if you think that your idea is brand new, it's going to be, well, beating. No one has done it before in the world. It's not a bad thing if someone else comes along in the same space and does it, because all it's doing is validating what you're doing. Because. And so for me, with the discussions we've been having now for two years, I think, okay, great, there. Somebody else has had exactly the same discussion. They get into the same outcomes, they're trying to produce the same things. And that's validation for me that we're in the right place. And then you start to think, well, how big is this universe anyway? I mean, these guys are focused on one of the US Major sports. There's another couple of hundred sports we can go to. So it's a mindset issue, which I think over time, again, I've matured into. And even if those guys win, you know, if they win the entire market, great. There's still another. There's lots of opportunity around for other players in the market. The other way around is also to look at it and say, well, the second mouse gets the cheese. I mean, there's all sorts of positive ways to look at it. Whereas I think. I think in the earlier days I probably would have been a little bit more concerned about, you know, somebody's coming into this turf and we really need to think. Think long and hard about whether we should be going into this space. And I just. My mind is. I guess I have a much more mature perspective now on how big the world is and how much space there is for more than one player in any particular vertical and any particular.

Yeah, especially if it's a change in that industry or something that requires education of the incumbents or the stakeholders, let that person take the arrows in the back and go through that heavy lifting, and you can just swoop in with a new solution or a different solution once that market's been educated. And the other side of it is ideas are a dime a dozen. Everybody thinks they've got the most unique idea in the world. No, you've talked to how many entrepreneurs? Hundreds, if not thousands over the years. And people have similar ideas. They're faced with similar challenges and problems around the world, and is really about execution. Who can take that idea and actually make something happen with it really matters.

And I also think over time, I've developed a much more collaborative approach to everybody, whether they're competitors, collaborate with a competitor or not. I think nowadays in this unit, this kind of an economy that is driven by this API universe where you can just push and pull data all over the place and do all sorts of crazy stuff, there's some clever guys doing a whole bunch of smart stuff which might just be slightly adjacent to what we're doing. And if you work together, both parties can actually benefit. And so I have a much more collaborative mindset now as I mature, but also as the technology matures and allows us to be much more collaborative, I think it's a better place to be, is just be open about it.

If.

If a competitor phoned me and said, we want to chat, fantastic, let's chat. I have no issue. Let's find ways that we can help each other. The rising tide lifts all ships to drop. A terrible cliche, but why not?

Well, Gary, you and I could probably riff on this for hours and just keep going, but I'm pretty sure listeners are getting tired here listening to us talk. I want to kind of wrap it up with anything that you want to do, last tidbits or things that you want to talk about.

No, I agree with you. I mean, this is a subject that we could go on for hours and it's a fascinating subject. And I love, I love the world of entrepreneurs, as frustrating as it can be.

But yeah, so that's actually a good segue. As a founder entrepreneur, what is one tool that you cannot live without? App, tool, service. Anything that I'd hate.

I don't know if this qualifies as an answer, but my phone, because it has all the apps and tools on it, so does that qualify a piece of hardware?

Well, it does, because especially when we look at older generations and even the younger generations, the appreciation of how the mobile phone has changed business, younger generations will obviously take it for granted because they've grown up with it. They don't know world without the phone, which can be an issue when you lose connectivity and systems go down or apps go down. But also the older generation of the realization. And this is what we're facing with Sam and our smart athlete manager is going into these older offices with these older executives and telling them there's a better way and there's technology that can truly revolutionize your industry.

As you mentioned earlier, we now live on the interior of bc, so not in a city anymore. But the reality is, you know, I can. I want to drive everything off my phone. Whether CRM or banking or accounting or sales pipelines or wherever, everything's on my phone, I can run everything I can. And our development team is between Cape Town in South Africa, Biarritz in France and India. We can run everything. I can run everything from the phone. So, yeah, it's crazy. Just the other day I subscribed for a service and they wanted to charge me 150 bucks for enrollment and then for. For kind of an admin process to do to send me invoices effectively. I said, do you know, you could. I could say that I'm 50, because you could automate that monthly online and that can be automatically reconciled. And it's, It's. I guess we work in technology and we worked in the back office of technology, so understand how these things work. It's just scary that people still.

Function.

The way they do.

Yeah. Awesome. And then. And last piece of advice for our audience, entrepreneurs young and old, how to function as an entrepreneur founder in today's world.

I don't think it's. I think there's elements of that. Obviously this depends on what part of the. Of the entrepreneur. There's elements of technology that are moving fast at the moment, so that's that. It's very hard to keep up, up to date with all this, all these moving parts. But the elements around being a human being, as an entrepreneur don't change. You just. You've got to. You got to be clear about. You got to be focused on your goal. You got to be clear about your goal. You've got to be disciplined about the work you got. You got. You got to get shit done in a very disciplined way around your goal. And you got to be focused, just stay focused on, on what it is you want to achieve. And then when people come along and try and tear strips off you because they don't believe it's going to work, you just back yourself. It can and will work.

That's awesome advice for our audience. You've given a lot to our listeners. And what can our listeners and our audience do for you?

I think where I am right now in the sports sector, another part that we haven't discussed, I guess, is I've always have the view that your network is your net worth. And we work very hard. As hard as we work on our technology, we also work on our network of people, of human beings. Because even if we had the very best platform for the sports sector today, it means nothing unless our network of human beings within decision making around sports organizations and federations actually will listen to our story and buy into us and recommend us. So our technology is looking really good. We've got a way to go. Still quite a bit of heavy lifting to go. But if there's anybody that's listening to this that is involved in sports, traditional sports or esports and is a decision maker, or in fact anybody, anybody that wants to talk about sports and technology and is somehow related, whether it's blockchain, AI, VR, AR, I just, I love building the network of people. So please reach out to me or let's have a conversation under different circumstances. I say let's have a coffee, but let's have a virtual coffee.

And what's the best way for them to reach out to you? LinkedIn.

Yeah, LinkedIn. My profile is on LinkedIn or otherwise. My email address is Gary Boddingtonportstech IO that's sportstech IO.

Gary, thanks for taking the time out of your day to join us. Always great connecting you and I talk on a regular basis, but I hope.

Somebody'S going to flip the table on you here and interview you because we should be asking you the questions.

That's a whole other series on its own. The Therapy Couch. Awesome. Gary, enjoy your day. Thanks for taking time today.

Thank you.

Bye.

Ciao.

Launch Ventures is for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode of Founder Journeys, please like share, follow and check out our link in bio for all the other good stuff.