All right, welcome back to the Buying Sandlot podcast. I am Kyle Scott, founder of Buying Sandlot. On today's episode we have Jon Stewart, the founder and CEO of sports tech company Fastbreak AI. So we recorded this episode in October prior to the announcement of Fastbreak's 40 million. That's 40 Series A investment round. For those who don't know, Fastbreak is only a couple of years old and got its start by offering an AI scheduling solution for pro leagues. But that was just the start. Fastbreak has rapidly brought its tech down market into youth sports and it's bolting on other solutions like registration, event management, ticketing, sponsorships and more. In a world where fragmentation rules and where many established players think consolidating many services across many sports will be hard or downright impossible, Fastbreak thinks it has the strength and tech to dominate the space. This isn't John's first rodeo. He sold his first company Map Anything route optimization software for sales reps and service providers to Salesforce for a reported $250 million. Needless to say, this is a great interview and a must watch or listen for virtually anyone in youth sports or sports tech. But before we get to it, I want to take a second and plug our Buying Sandlot Summit, a two day youth sports business conference which we'll hold in Philly next April 14th and 15th. The event is designed to bring together youth sports owners, operators and investors from across the country. This will be a high end event the likes of which this booming $70 billion industry has not seen. Stay tuned to Buying Sandlot for details. Be sure to head over to buyingsandlot.com to subscribe to our newsletter for free and we'll keep you updated on early bird tickets, sponsor and group ticket opportunities, all of which will be available soon. Onto the interview with John. All right John, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining.

Thank you for having me.

Kyle, why don't you give a little bit about your background and the founding a fast break before we get into it.

Sure. I'm a multi time entrepreneur. This is my third go round starting and being the CEO of a company. My prior company was in the Salesforce.com ecosystem. We were a field sales field service, route and schedule optimization company. Ultimately we sold that to Salesforce in 2019. Started this company in July 7th, 2022 was the idea behind it was to use the same principles we use the the area of math which is called optimization research. It's a combinatorial mathematics science and apply that to sports scheduling. So always been an entrepreneur through my career. And this is just the latest evolution of that.

Talk about why sports scheduling needed that sort of computational power in the first place. Because I know I've read The article probably 100 times about the old. I'll start here at the example a lot of people probably heard about the old husband and wife duo used to do the Major League baseball schedule by hand.

Interleague play really killed the ability of the Stevensons to do that. Before that every road trip combination could be sort of figured out. After that it could not be the series at least, but there, you know, we refer to things as like a solution space. You know, what's in this, how big the solution space is. There are more possible solutions than there are sort of grains of sand on a beach or atoms in the sun, right? Some ridiculous number that my co founder would be able to rattle off. These problems scale exponentially. It's really, really complicated because you have so many competing parameters and so many stakeholders. You think about professional sports leagues, there's stakeholders, there's the arenas, the teams, the players, the media rights partners and then just the core issues of balance and fairness as well that have to be accounted for. I mean the problem growth is in, the problem grows quite large, quite quickly. And so, you know, a lot of the science that we've developed, the machine learning, or AI as machine learning is now referred to, that's applied has to do with efficiently solving those problems or simplifying the definition of those problems so that they can be processed in an economical fashion.

Explain what on day one or early on a couple a few years ago, what Fastbreak was offering as a product and service and then maybe some of the, some of the. I know you're going into youth sports and we'll get to that. But like talk about how the product and service has evolved. Give people an overview of everything it does. Because I think I've talked to a few people in the space and they have a general idea, but I've never got like a good three sentence answer from someone who could tell me exactly what Fastbreak does. And I think there's more there to meet.

CI well, part of that is probably our market positioning. So just to be very clear, we have three lines of our business. We have a professional line of business and its products, an amateur line of business which is where youth falls and those products, and a brand business which is for consumer goods and brands to activate amongst our partners or customers. So there's three sort of three legs of school for us. So we do have this sort of halo effect that we use to go to market at the highest level. The idea was we built, you know, most scheduling in sports was as the Stevenson did it. It was consultants who have been doing it for years and did their best to make schedules. Honestly they weren't very good schedules because you're very limited. Human beings can't think in that many simultaneous dimensions with that many trade offs. The idea was to take what had been traditionally consulting projects and turn that into a software SaaS platform. That was the big sort of unlock to be able to scale a business here. Ultimately we first engaged with the MBA as a consulting project. We helped them figure out how to actually make the in season tournament work. That was 2022, you know, that was. Some of those things were the foundational principles that we used to apply to our solving engine through 2023. Actually built the product and started bringing it out to the market. Well, we actually started from the day we formed the company, but in 2023 we brought it to market. So our first customer that came on board, our first major league customer was June of 2023 with the NHL. And then from there it just sort of grew. And honestly the more complicated the problem, the better we excel and shine because of, you know, of capabilities, feature function, et cetera. We knew we always wanted to get down in the youth space. Having professional sports leagues is fantastic. We have north of 50 of them as our customers. These are the largest professional sports leagues in the world by far, you know, but it makes for, it's a relatively small market. By the time you get to the hundredth largest sports league, it's not a significant amount of revenue. So it's hard to build a scale of business if you're just working on professional sports. Yet we always were going to do this. So this wasn't a pivot. I could show you the investment decks from way back in 2023 when we first raised capital and it was roadmap. We were always going to make this directional, you know, enhance the direction of the company with attacking the youth sports marketplace. Now our big theory of the case is one unified platform, one unified data model that we're building around youth sports. Technology is extremely highly fragmented. Okay. As you know, you know all the players, every need has another solution for it and it's probably only a solution for one sport, right? So if you even think about scheduling, you know, the, the quote unquote leader in scheduling and none of them are really scheduling, not the way we think about it, but the leader in scheduling for volleyball is AES for 20, you know, torn Machine. The leader was, you know, they're the leader in baseball, etc. Same thing for registration, same thing for video streaming. Video streaming. You know, if it's high school sports, it's huddle. If it's hockey, it's live barn. If it's baseball, it's game changer, you know, it's Feed the Beast and Baller TV for basketball. Like you literally have to pick a segment for you to sort of know who is sort of the pole position at this moment in time. So our idea was look for the event operators, the people running these large scale youth tournaments or even some of the smaller scale unit tournaments. They're dealing with six or seven different pieces of software to run their system. My background's in enterprise software. My prior company was, you know, I sold the salesforce, so I'm used to that. Our idea was let's make the ERP or the operating environment for that event operator. So now we can give him a single solution for, you know, his E commerce, his payments, his registration, scheduling, scorekeeping, ticketing, travel and sponsorship. And by the way, from the scheduling standpoint, you know, we're the greatest sports scheduling software company on the planet. Just ask the NBA or the NFL or Major League Baseball, right? Like, you know, so we get to leverage that IP in that platform. So that's how we position, that's how we go to market.

So it's a pretty impressive growth trajectory in just a few years there. Talk about that a little. Like how do you, I just want to like double click on this, like how do you sort of so early on get them as clients and are you doing for some of those leagues like now the full schedule or is it still like projects like.

So we don't, you know, we don't do the schedule, so to speak. We provide a software platform and they create it themselves. So very clear. So we, we are a SaaS platform basically. And really what's neat about this problem, it's so complicated and so difficult to solve. We had a technology that could solve it and solve it really fast and therefore we win. Right? And it's one of those things where all you have to do is prove it. And this is such a challenging problem and a complicated problem. They're happy to let us prove it. And once we do, it's, you know, we, we get them.

As a customer, what are some of the unique challenges? I want to get into the differences between pro and youth and all the other services and youth. But what are Some of the unique challenges, particularly at the pro level, that was just really difficult for humans. That kind of square.

You have so many competing stakeholders or interests in a professional sports schedule. If we're just going to use the NBA as an example, they have. There is, of course, arena availability. That's one set of stakeholders. There's the teams where they have preferences themselves. The teams are set of stakeholders. There's the media rights holders. You know, if you're going to spend a couple billion dollars on meteorites from a league, you're going to get a few requests here and there. And so those stakeholders, and of course, viewership being the number one driver on that. There's the players themselves. Another good example, the cba. Right. Like per the cba, the players have restrictions on, you know, certain playing patterns, you know, that they've negotiated for player health and safety reasons, and those are fair. And then you couple all that with the end of the day that you still need a fair and balanced schedule so that every team has the opportunity to excel and succeed. That's a lot of different requirements that are constantly in tension with each other. And that right there is what drives the combinatorial nature of the problem or the way it exponentially grows the solution space. That right there is the biggest challenge on doing these problems. And ultimately, you have to produce a schedule that's playable, that's fair and balanced, that the teams are going to be equally unhappy with because no one's ever happy with their schedule. So equally unhappy with. And that is going to drive good ratings. Right. Because that's how these leagues drive the value of the meteorites deal. So, you know, we're a part of that.

Is it a matter of just putting in all of those, you know, sort of rules, for lack of a better term, and prioritizing, which takes presidents over another, and letting the machine do its thing? Or is it. Is it more?

Pretty much. That's exactly how our software works. It's a system where various stakeholders log in, put in their requests, the requirements. The league itself defines the constraints or the rules and preferences, and then they push a button and we produce answers. That's awesome.

What are some of the unique challenges, then? Let's get into the youth. What are some of the differences? You have different stakeholders with youth sports and tournaments. You have parents and players and facilities and things like that. What are the unique challenges? And again, I keep using the term rules. If there's a better term, let me know. That make youth. So different constraints.

Yeah, sure. For youth, it's different for sure. A lot of times. If we take a look at tournament scheduling, there's some very common ones that are cross sport, right? So and there's some ones that are specific to certain sports. So the most common one you see at for youth tournaments is that shared coaches. So two different age groups can't play at the same time because they share the same coaches, the 14 year coach and the 16 year coach. More importantly, even if they are a chair coach or even if they aren't, a lot of times these tournaments take place over multiple facilities. So you have to actually have to consider the facility gap and travel time between those facilities to be able to make that work. And then again you have some teams, hey, I'm flying in from California, I'm not going to get there to one in the morning, please don't give us the 6am game or I have to catch a flight back, please don't give me a game after 4pm on Sunday. And then a lot of times it's pool play into bracket play. So you have to be really careful about strength of ranking. So one of the things that we eventually going to do is we're actually building a ranking system which I know a lot of people have tried, but we're data scientists, we're working on, you know, I'm okay to say this but we're literally working on the international ranking system for Taekwondo right now. We're going to apply some of that down at the youth level. We'll have to figure out how to capture data outside our system. But that itself is making sure the matchups are proper. Because it's not any fun for a superstar team to get a team. That's not, let's just say is common. And it's not fun for either, either team. It's not fun for the kids getting blown out. It's not fun for the kids that are dominating because if they're going to these tournaments, they want a competitive, they want competitive play. So these are all a bunch of factors that we have to consider. There's court restriction and field restriction by age group. Sometimes the fields or course or ice are different. So you have that consideration, you know, offset start times. And then of course if it's outdoor sport, you, you have to do all this while the facility open because they may or may not have lights so you can see. I mean even though it's a youth problem, there's all of a sudden, wow, there's a lot of that can even that even goes into that. And unfortunately most of these folks have Nothing. They've had tools that let them manually sort of put games on a grid, but nothing that actually does it for them that will simultaneously take advantage of all this and then rest pattern disparity like it's no good. If you're doing a tournament where team A plays a game and then immediately has it back to back at the same time. No one wants more than two hours between games because they don't want to have their first game at 8 in the morning and their last game at 5pm and sit in a smelly gym all day.

It seems like as the constraints increase, the number of possible outcomes is just exponentially envisioning the chart in my head. And it's going hockey sticking very quickly there.

And the greater the number of teams, the more complexity there is. And so that's really where we get to leverage a tool basically subsidized by multi year contracts with professional leagues built by 6, 7 PhDs on my professional staff. That engine, we get to bring that down to market and we basically more or less give that away as a function of doing the rest of the things that we do for the tournament operator like the registration and their electronic ticketing and their travel business.

Okay, so you're using that scheduling fees very much as the door into, into owning larger parts of the stack. Talk to me about the competitive balance one. That one's really interesting because it's. So I've had a few conversations in the last couple of weeks of folks out there trying to quantify more on the individual athlete side, but a little bit on the team side. How much do you have data from pre tournament?

Right.

Obviously you guys can collect the data from the tournaments as they're happening and be able to kind of stack one team against another. But what does that look like if a team's coming in from California and they're not in any of your systems anywhere, how do you square that?

So they're not in any system anywhere. The tournament operator can actually give them a rating. The first thing they do is they ask the team and the teams, which is fine. But truthfully, they lie either direction. They pretend they're not as good or they're, you know, or they're not as bad. Right. We usually suggest that, look, it's in the day and age of the Internet, you can sort of find out information on somebody. But typically, you know, silver, gold, you know, silver gold, Bronze or Tier 1, 2 and 3, or a number of stars, whatever system you want to use, they can put them into a bucket and the good News is though, you'll figure out real quick whether or not they deserve that ranking after one tournament. As long as they're playing people that are ranked. So that can sort itself out fairly quickly. It's hard to do this based off and it's funny because at U Sports a single player can actually shift something that much. It's really hard to do that off without having the player data. Now over time we should have a database of players where we can actually start doing some of that. It's a matter of data. But we certainly have the data scientists to build that for at the individual player level as well. Right.

You basically need detect to do because there's so much turnover and change in youth sports. It's not, you know, even in pro sports there is, but you know, if the Lakers are good for three years, like it's a, it's a, I mean it's volatile. Then the really good, the ringer 14 year old leaving the team and they go from good to bad in a hurry.

They'll, they'll do that in the middle of a tournament. Like in grassroots basketball, there's. You'll have one player literally change his jersey at halftime and play for the other team. That's happened.

My son's soccer team, there's seven by the way. And his travel team played a kid from a team from Philly last week. We're out in the suburbs here and the best player and then we went played the unions, Philadelphia Unions team. The following week, the same kid was on the team. We're like, how's that possible? So yeah, that totally makes sense. Talk about Fastbreak Connect, right? That's the sponsor and activation platform. How does that fit into everything? You guys just talk about it in general and then we'll kind of go to hell. All the pieces fit together.

Right? So look, for a long time brands have been wanting to figure out how to activate into youth sports, but they're really not set up or situated to be able to do it in any manner that returns any type of engagement roi. So what we do is we act as sort of a clearinghouse. We work with the brands, we understand what their targeting demographics are. Right. And we can. And what's great about esports is we can actually use it as a micro targeting mechanism. So if you want to rethink, for example, reach Latina females, I can put you in soccer tournaments in Phoenix, Arizona. If you want to reach, let's say for instance, true story, you have a $300 mouthpiece with biometrics in it. You know, a mouth guard, rather $300 mouth guard, because you want to measure impact and you want acceleration and it's health monitor. Well, it's fantastic. But you have to have a very specific demographic to be able to afford a $300 mouth guard. We typically will put something like that in a, you know, Mid Atlantic lacrosse tournament. So you can actually use the sport and the area to actually target who your ICP is. And that's the value that we can bring to the tournament, to the brands. And the other thing is, you know, what do you what is a youth tournament? It's an hour of excitement, two hours of boredom and an hour of excitement. So unlike any other time in their lives, the kids aren't glued to the phones. They're sitting there anyway. They're bored. They'll actually engage with the brand. So we can do fun engagements, we can get a lot of social. So we bring value to that brand and we can use our inventory of tournaments as a place to deliver this. That's on the benefit to the brands. They're getting real value for their investment and their money, their real engagement. They're getting real data. The value to the operator is, well, you know, these operators, I mean, these tournaments aren't as lucrative as someone might think they are. They're very expensive to operate. Most people have no idea. Go to a basketball tournament every game there, there's $150 in referees on the floor. Think about how many games are going on every. And they don't get paid by the hour, they get paid by the game. Same thing with that floor field. So they're super expensive. And so if you want to keep the price of participation low for the athletes, these operators have to subsidize their income in other places. And so if I'm showing up to that operator and we're bringing them sponsorship dollars and we're delivering that through our platforms, either whether electronic ticketing platform, on site engagement, our hotel offering uniform, whatever the case may be, they can keep the prices cheaper while still maintaining a margin that lets them operate. Remember, they're doing this for a living. This is how they feed their family. We provide another basically revenue source for them. And it's a win, win, win. And look, even if they want to do sponsorship by themselves, it doesn't work because on the day of the tournament, they don't have the time to be handing out 2,000 free bottles of some sport energy drink when it's been tried in the past without someone like ourselves doing a turnkey facilitation. Of it, it's been basically a failure for everybody. And no one was happy with it. By us being the traffic cop, managing delivery, managing expectations, handling the actual activation, delivering the data, this problem is solved.

You basically just described what's going on or what goes on in the media world. I've been in Media for 15 years and it's the same thing. There's this constant tension between do you charge people to access information and. And some larger papers and niche brands are able to command a premium. And then on the flip side, it's like, okay, or you can subsidize it with sponsorship. And it's. Sometimes those things are imbalanced. Right. We have a paid audience and we have sponsorship and we try to marry it as best as you can. And it sounds like the tournament space is very similar in lots of ways.

It is very similar in that regard. And actually I think there's a net benefit because look, again, you know, the organizer. The organizer actually wants to keep his price low because he'll get more participants in his tournament. And that's the. Their business model is registrants. Right, Right. You know, more people participate, more people to buy merchandise, more people to buy concessions. It's no different. He's providing a surface. And again, for the brand, it's relatively short money, so to speak, and they get a high value for it.

What do you see on a macro level with sponsorship in youth sports in and around tournaments? I mean, we've been chronicling it in the newsletter and it just feels like there is so much momentum in the space, like by the day it becomes the sponsorship piece, the nil opportunities, the brand dollars seems to take up a larger section in our newsletter, like on a month over month basis.

Yeah, for sure. I think there are certainly a lot of people chasing the athlete on the nil stuff. I'm not sure that's healthy for a variety of reasons. I mean, you're taking their activity, which they should be doing for enjoyment, development and potentially turning into a job. And I'm not sure that's fair to the kid who might be 12 or 13 or 14. So I'm not a big fan of that part of it. But I do understand that the economics have created a situation where that has to be the case. My ideal situation, you know, if the opportunity presented it. I would love to help an operator basically have his entire tournament funded by brands. And I don't care if we logoed everything up from the T shirts, the court to the. To every last thing that there was there but the kids all got to play for free. That would be amazing. Right? I don't think anybody would care. But I do think there's going to be an opportunity like that or two coming up where it's like, if you can drive enough brand sponsorship, you can engage with the athletes and provide an experience for them without them having to fund the dollars. Because I do feel like there's becoming this socioeconomic divide on who can afford to participate in these things and who can't.

Yeah. So much of the conversation around you, sports, really centers on the haves and the have nots and the widening gap there. And it's really interest. Interesting to frame it that way with sponsorship being a way to sort of. Sort of square that. Are you seeing.

We actually did that for a tournament. So there was a tournament in Maryland, Rising Stars, and we work with Adidas, and I would say half the teams at the tournament we got Adidas to pay the full registration fees for. So the kids didn't have to. Right. That was a win, win, win sponsorship. The. The tournament was sponsored by Adidas. That's a win for them with engagement. The kids got to participate and didn't have to play, and it didn't completely crush the margins of the operator. And believe me when I tell you, running a soccer tournament that is with a premium, the fields is super, super expensive.

Are you seeing brands, bigger brands? I know you guys are relatively new with Connect, but are you seeing that brands have a bigger appetite for this now than maybe they did a year ago or certainly five or ten years ago? Like, how is. How fast is that tide moving?

Well, at least the brands that we engage with, we can make a very good case. You think about the amount of money that a brand uses. For example, in digital, like, you have a podcast. You know, when this podcast comes on YouTube, what's going to happen? There's going to be an advertisement. Right. From your own personal experience, how fast do you click the skip button when you watch a video?

I pay for the premium on YouTube, so I don't have to say, all.

Right, you pay for the.

But yes, for that reason. Because I don't want to wait for this.

Immediately hit skip so you don't have to watch it. Think about all the digital advertising that goes on. Like, go look in your Outlook email box and tell me, how do you go into the junk mail or the promotions with all the. No, you don't. So the reason I'm bringing this up is this. When we go to a brand and we talk to them, they have so much invested in digital and you ask them why they're doing it and so. Well, it's engagement, it's brand recognition, et cetera. And my, my whole thing with them is, well, it's phony engagement because no one's really engaging with you online on that. They're just skipping. Bastard. We're digitally overwhelmed. Right. It's noise at this point, it's literally noise. We can give them a much better value because we can authentically engage with the brands on site, right. With, with the, the athletes and that will create a better impression and you can still get the reach. I will give you an example this. We did an engagement at a lacrosse tournament. We radar gunned, you know, so there's like a radar gun booth where the, all the kids and the 12 to 16 year olds and so of course they want to do this. How fast are they thr the ball with their stick, right? Like of course they're going to do that. And then of course they turn into a contest and who's got the, the fastest throw and you know where you read the, the speed is covered with the logo of the brand and so they're taking pictures of it and posting it up on Instagram. Well, what kind of reach are these micro influencers going to get them? And what do you think they're remembering from the engagement? Like that's real, it can't be clicked through. You're going to get sort of natural take from that. Now compare that to just doing another digital ad campaign or buying some more ad time on YouTube, TV or Google or I don't even know because I've never actually bought any of it, how that works. Right?

Yeah. No, I mean you don't sell me on it. I mean as someone who again skips over ads, but I mean it's the story of media in general now and again it's, it's sports, it's live sports, but for lots of brands, it's so expensive. There's a reason why it's haves and have nots in professional sports rights. A lot of brands just can't afford to be on an NFL broadcast as much as they want to be. And it's not targeted. So you need the giant brands, the Toyotas of the world that could spend tens of thousands, hundreds, millions of dollars to sponsor something, but you're not able to really. And still even then people are tuning it out. This is the thing, I think if you look at the inflation in sports rights and how it's like just propping up Live television, I think it's great. But over time people are, those ads are getting a lower ROI as more and more people just look away at their phone when, when ads are on. You've seen it with pro sports. They're thinking about ways to integrate the advertisement into the game where in between plays they cut away. They're still live, but the brand's there. The announcers are talking about. The brands saw something really cool in Philly this year. They wanted to show one of the closers entrance and it would normally take place during the commercial break. So they got a local law firm to sponsor not going to break so they could show the closer and his entrance and all the lights came down. It's like, okay, you know, that's only so many brands can do that. But meanwhile you have millions of kids and parents at fields for the entire weekend. And it seems like such a way where you got a captive audience where people generally don't want to be on their phones at those things. I mean they are, but they're, they're, their heads are up.

Yeah, they got a captive audience. And more importantly, think about this too. It's not just the athlete, it's mom and dad and more importantly mom who makes almost all the purchasing decisions with both the non discretionary, discretionary income in their household. Right. So I, you know, that's why we saw the opportunity. It helps us provide, lets us provide a value add to our event operators. We bring them sponsorship dollars is another reason for them to use our overall technology stack and on top of great software and an unbelievable scheduling capability and we can holistically bring a solution that helps them run a more profitable business. Well, if they're running a more profitable business, they can keep and contain the costs. Right. There's, you know, there's, I know, you know, people get itchy about this, but at the end of the day it is still a business and if they run it well, there is a positive impact. Not just, you know, for and from a cost inflation standpoint, but also an experience standpoint. It's a better experience for their customers, which are those kids talked about the.

Scheduling piece, talked about the brand sponsorship and connect piece, kind of glossed over there some of the operational products and services you guys offer. So why don't you explain a bit more about what you offer. This area of the space is a little bit more competitive, fragmented, lots of pieces people are using. Who do you guys see as your competitors? What is kind of the main one or two pieces that product and service that you Guys lead with.

I compete with everybody, so I compete with nobody. Right. So we do. I mean, it's the same as when a team says we're very excited about our quarterback situation. We have three quarterbacks on the team. What are they actually saying? We don't have a quarterback. Right. If you've got three, you've got none. Right. And the way we see it is, look, we provide a platform for the event operator. Now that platform does their website, their, their registration, their E commerce, their registration and their payments. There are 10, 20 registration and payment companies. There's 20 e commerce companies for that piece. Okay, so who do we compete in all of that? Well, I guess we're competing all with all of them there. But since we also do the scheduling and the tournament operations. Well, there's seven companies that potentially do scheduling. None of them can do AI scheduling like we can, so that is a technical advantage. But there's no registration company that also does the scheduling. So I've got those pieces. Let's talk about ticketing. You go to the volleyball or basketball tournament, you got the tickets. I literally have a spreadsheet. There's 549 companies on there that offer electronic ticketing. Right. But they're separate platforms. None of them are tied into the schedule automatically. Right. Schedule or the registration, none of it is tied together. Same thing for travel. There's 19 sports travel companies. Our sports travel platform is actually built into the registration and the scheduling and the ticketing platform. So I can offer the operator a single data stack as opposed to him having to what we rattled off five logins he'd have to have versus one login. Right. There's power in reducing friction between data and there's power in the ability to what we can do across that platform. And that's really what we bring to the table. And then we lace our sponsorship into it. We use the ticket platform to deliver sponsorship. We use the schedule to deliver sponsorship. We use travel to deliver sponsorship.

Yeah, I mean, seems to be the holy grail in a lot of ways in youth sports is getting a critical mass of.

We go into next year with a thousand tournaments on our platform. All these tools didn't exist last year. So we only, we actually only started putting out these products in April and May was the first time we saw revenue on any of these products individually pieces. We go into 20, 26 with over a thousand tournaments all signed up to use it because there's such a need and demand on it. And truthfully, no one can compete with us only because what is Their answer for the other five things that operators need because no one is providing a complete platform.

Yeah, it's a finished question. I guess I was going to say, what's the marketing, the sales process like for that? Because again, like, again, the holy grail here is you get an operator who is able to own the full stack of tournament or event operations and it makes sense. Like everything you're saying makes 100% sense. The other challenge is like reaching all of these individual operators. Obviously, you know, we have a lot of them buying sandlot. We have to talk to you about advertising. But wow, how do you, but like, how do you guys think about like, all right, how do we go out and find these people? Is it really using the scheduling piece, which is probably the most unique part of this, as that loss leader, to get in there and say, hey, we can, we can layer on all this stuff for you and that's where we'll make our.

Hey, Kyle, see you're running a 300 team basketball team basketball tournament this weekend. You know, good news, we have this brand that would like to come activate there. What we're going to do is we're going to show up, we're going to set up, we're going to give your kids a great experience, we're going to hand out some prizes, we're going to run some contests and if you let us do that, we're going to give you X number of dollars. Can I come do activations at your tournament this weekend? What are you going to say to me? All right, what do you want to know by Monday, the following week, how much you made? No, no, no. How many? How many? How do I get this for my next tournament? Right, so you're these operators, they do multiple tournaments. They do one every weekend in some cases, or they do one a month, but they generally run between four and 20 events. So our whole thing with them is we, we try to lead with sponsorship because our message, it helps resonate, it helps drive home this message. The message it drives home is if you partner with us, we're going to have a positive margin impact on your business. And so we've established that trust because we started our relationship by bringing them sponsorship dollars. And it goes to. Let me show you how we can lower your operational costs and all these other pieces and oh, by the way, solve your scheduling problem and then create additional lines of revenue with either through Swoop Media, where we're doing revenue share on the pictures and the videos, or hotel travel, where we have what we call state of Save model. Now, state of play gets a bad rap. But the way we do it is we contractually make sure that the hotels that we work with, they keep the price 5 to $10 lower than the parents can find an expedia price line up to 10 days before the tournament. And so we're actually can save the money. But then you know, we do revenue share on the, on the hotel rebates and commissions. So again, it's all about helping them improve their operating margins, keeping their costs, their customers lower. And that's sort of the message. So we, we actually have sponsorship as a lead into the initial conversation that we have with a lot of these operators.

We go back to them and say, okay, you know, you saw what we can do. But you know, if we come back, you know, we want to work with you here, here and here.

Yeah, I mean it's, it's sort of a, this is the start of the relationship. Let me start this relationship. Instead of a sales pitch, which there's no issue with that, that's fine. But we don't have to start it that way. We have a massive amount of inventory that we have to place in our customers events with sponsorship and we'll use, we use it as a tool.

How difficult are the switching costs there? Or is it like, hey, like you.

You know, we're modern technology, we can switch someone in a weekend literally.

What do you see big picture in the next, let's call it one to two years time frame? What major trend just outside of fast break and product and service? Just kind of what you guys are seeing on the ground. What you're seeing on the ground. What do you see as some of the big picture trends in youth sports over the next year or two?

Big picture trends in youth sports over the next year or two.

And you could subcategory that around events because that's kind of the bread and butter.

That's our bread and butter. I mean all these events seem to keep getting bigger and bigger and getting more professionalized. Everything is more professionalized from the ticketing to the, the fact that these places are selling streaming rights. And you can, you know, you might like, you know, my, my mother, my kid's grandmother can log in and watch their games. I just think a general professionalization. I think some of that is because of the money. I mean, look, you've written all the articles, I read your newsletter. I mean, how many times do you bring up PE money coming into space? That is a global trend in esports, you know, so as a result, there's going to be a level of professionalism that comes along with that, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's. It's kind of why I pushed back a little bit on the previous comment. I mean, every, like, from what I've heard, you guys have great product or service and the sales strategy and the sales pitch is excellent. But one of the challenges I've heard just from so many people and especially among the PE folks and some of the investment bankers I've talked to or the VC folks even who are newer to the space and they're just coming, coming in with money and saying like, okay, we can get instant scale, we get venture level scale and this is going to be easy. And then I talk to the operators who've been in the space for 20 plus years in some cases, and some of them definitely like stuck in the old way of doing things. But almost to a man, I always hear it is so hard to consolidate because this sport has an edge case or this region has an edge case or this event. We need to address this and we just don't quite have that, that offering. And the bottom line I keep getting there is, yeah, fragmentation, like consolidation is great and it makes sense, but it's so hard without that ground game to address all of these edge cases at once. And that's why I was kind of pushing back. Like, this all sounds great, but like, how do you overcome that and be able to be standardized for volleyball in the Midwest and basketball in the Northeast and all the differences that lie there?

I think probably because we're not pe. The flaw in the model is the PE is coming in with money and they're buying up all the technology companies and partners or programs and they're slapping it together. And they say that makes a company that's not a solution. Slapping 35 products to the other does not make a platform. I mean, you've seen some of the consolidations that take place and there's some fine people in those companies. I'm not going to name Numby's, but you're smart enough to know about some of the collection of software companies that have come together recently. That doesn't make a solution if because you've done that. In fact, that creates a huge amount of technical debt that you now have to consolidate. So those PE companies can't get ahead of the cost curve because now they have, instead of a company with one product and a need, now they've got 10 products with 10 dev staffs, with 10 sets of legacy data issues with 10 sets of Go to market Motions, So it doesn't scale that way because of the fragmentation and the needs. Whereas our approach was, look, we're built from scratch and we designed this outcome from day one. Whether it was the way we designed our, you know, our software around the data scale or the way we, we, you know, we were very, very specific about attacking the one thing that we knew that we can do better than anyone else in the world, which is the scheduling and then starting to wrap the services around that. You know, we knew that, you know, we could glom onto that for the event operator and then if we just kept building the ecosystem of needs around that, you know, we could capture that business. But if you're PE and you're just trying to buy the parts, you're no different. You're just, now you own all the individual parts as opposed to having a platform or solution. So I don't think, and maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, I think we're the only true platform player out there and we certainly built every piece of it ourselves. We've done some acquisitions, but those acquisitions, we haven't kept a single piece of technology from any of our acquisitions. We bought, know how we bought customer lists, we bought distribution models, but we did not buy, you know, and that's the flaw in the PE model. They have to, they're not operators, they're simply buying the parts. You know, it's not a one plus one equals three model with what they're doing.

Yeah, it's bigger. For the sake of big. How do you think about like data portability, APIs and things like that? I mean, there's as, you know, so many, whether it's parents, coaches, obviously we talked about event operators and organizers, but you know, there's so many apps and programs and pieces of tech people need to use. And you guys are going to have data on teams, right? And that, that's, you know, to me, truly unique. Not the schedule piece unique, but having that, you know, competitive level data feels like it would work nicely in an API and a whole lot of places. Do you guys want to keep that or do you want to be open so you can integrate with. You're not going to have everybody, you know, integrate with others. How do you think about that?

I think that there's 16 sets of privacy laws the country. It started with the CCPA, the California Child Protection act, and now there's 15 other states who have emulated laws about that. And I think sharing data outside our data policy and protections and all the compliance that we've invested heavily into doing is a, is a risk that I'm not willing to take on.

Maybe, maybe not necessarily player and personal data, but like team rankings, things like that, event schedules, stuff that's less privacy based.

Right. Okay. In that case, yes, we, I mean we do have a strategy for public feeds. I mean we're going to start creating our own publicly available ranking system. We'll put out on Swoop, our Swoop API or Swoop AI website when we start, which is going to be our consumer facing brand. The Fast Break AI is basically a commercial brand. Swoop AI is sort of a consumer brand. So we're going to feed that there. I mean we're not opposed to sharing that type of data obviously or licensing that type of data. But you do have to be super careful because this is the data that belongs to miners. It's not a little thing to share data you've collected on people from the ages of 13 and over or under age 13 to 18. And they're so restrictive now. There's so much liability in it. You gotta be really careful.

Yeah. What do you think about again, it's kind of maybe outside what you guys do, but I feel like you'd have an opinion on this one. If you don't answer, that's fine. But like a lot of the video streamers and video platforms, they have this inventory. They have the more or less the rights to these games and they're thinking about selling sponsorship on top of it, which they can and should. But I heard left out of a lot of those conversations is like, all right, how do we cut the team or the player in. In the video? You know, when you watch pro sports, those teams and leagues are obviously getting a chunk of the, they're getting paid for those rights. It's almost different in youth. In high school you're paying the provider to do X, Y or Z and then maybe they're able to monetize on top of you. Do you have any thoughts there? Because I know there's like some passback and some rev sharing, but it's not like it's not top of mind in lots of those.

It's not top of mind. There's no clean way to do it. I mean that's one of the reasons that that's not an area we're ever going to go chase down. Hardware is hard, all right. And that's the number one issue with the streaming platforms is you got to figure out the hardware issue. And then after that, yeah, there's the rights around what can you do with that image? Right. Have those athletes sign the waivers. Do you know that? Right. If the brand is now paying for it, are they signing up for the liability around whether or not that operator or that streamer has collected the proper release waivers for putting a minor on the Internet in a video? So like I, I don't know how they're going to solve that problem. It's one that makes my head hurt and I think I'm pretty good at sort of managing the chaos and limiting parts. So it'll be interesting to see how that one shakes out. My opinion on that particular part of youth sports and space is that I will stay away from it.

This is why I'm bullish on the compliance companies. We work with a couple of them as sponsors, but I feel like, okay, they're in a good business for the next little while here. What's on the last little bit here? What's on the roadmap for you guys? Short term, medium term, long term? And what's an ideal outcome for fast break 10 years from now, 5 years from now? How do you want people to view it?

Where do you think you're at five years from now, 10 years from now? Fast break AI is synonymous with the, with sports technology. If someone says sports tech company or sports AI company, it basically is no different than saying Fast Break AI. That's how we'll know we did my. I'll know I did my job is if that's the connection people make. Right. That would make me very happy. So that's, that's sort of the process. We're going to build a big, strong, durable company for our, you know, our investors, our employees and our customers and their customers ultimately. And I think that's good for the overall health of the ecosystem as well. What was the other part of the question? I'm sorry?

Yeah, I mean it was short term, medium term and long term. So I think you answered the long term aspect. What's like more near term? What are you guys looking to roll out? You mentioned maybe like the, the rankings, I think through swoop. Anything else?

The rankings for sure. Obviously there's some things that we're going to do around ticketing I think will be valuable for youth with regards to doing background checks with inside the ticket, that is facial recognition with again sex predator databases. So it's funny, all these schools have these controls. You go to the school and there's control to get into the school. They ID you, they keep you in that sort of that man cage until you get Cleared into your kids school and all that. And security of course it's a, it's a high school. Unless of course it's an athletic event in which case come right in and here's your. For $5, here's your ticket. Right. Well now there's, there's. The world's not necessarily a safe place all the time and now they're. One of the big things we're focusing on our ticketing platform is using that as a, you know, you know, faith with facial recognition, being able to compare that against offender databases to make sure that someone who should not be around children by buying a ticket are not around children.

Yeah, maybe that's one of the API examples I could have used before about, you know, kind of that piece. I mean we do work with children. Someone who's in the space or it's. And I'm sure you've seen them but you know, same idea and I know they're thinking about their, their API. I mean, you know, do you think there's a world where there's integration between different companies and products and services on that piece? So hey, it's like this gets flagged regardless of which tournament operator software you're using.

Yeah, for sure. Like look, and I'm not opposed to APIs. Look, my whole career was around it. It's not so much the APIs and what we make available and terms of sharing data, it's what data is shared and how is it shared. Right. And again, you follow the space, you know what's going on here, you know the compliance laws. Right. It's gotta be really, really careful with minors data. More so than even you or me. Right. As adults.

John, why don't you plug for the audience how they can find out more if they want to follow you. You're usually pretty active on LinkedIn.

I think I see your stuff definitely on LinkedIn. If you want to connect with me, by all means, anybody in the sports space, I will connect right back with you. The company. You can find us at www.fastbreak AI and on the consumer side, swoop AI. And we look forward to having you reach out and talk to you.

Awesome. John, thanks for joining.

Thank you for having me, Kyle.