MGMT Boston - W10, Q4 23 - SportsVisio // Angela Gatta, Enspira
SportsVisio // Angela Gatta, Enspira
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TLDR:
SportsVisio - AI video software to help you see your (hoop) game like never before. With just a smartphone trained on a court, this app can help players track all their stats from points to rebounds to assists to steals and more
Thanks to Jack P. for the intro to SportsVisio
Angela Gatta, Head of People @ Enspira - an aspiring HR professional since undergrad leading with empathy, championing a human-centric work environment, and taking calculated risks through each new chapter of her career
Thanks to Luciana L. for the intro to Angela
🔥 Upcoming December Event: MGMT Boston Consumer Breakfast - 12/13 @ 9am - co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed software operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a Consumer breakfast on Wed, 12/13 to engage with the MGMT Boston Operators Club, co-hosted by Kristen Craft @ Fidelity for Startups
We’ll be joined by Alicia Tulsee, Founder & CEO @ Moxie Apparel too (previously featured here)!
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front (more Operators Club Corner content coming in 2024!)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Procurement Sciences AI, HYCU, Givzey, LogRocket, Stockpress, Mandrel, Nasuni
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Danielle Pedra // Delegate, Natalie Cantave // Estateably, Luciana Marzilli Lord // Repsly, Andrew Dickson // SevenRooms, Lucy Driscoll // 10Beauty, Gina Guarracino // Mirakl, Alan McKinnon // Jellyfish
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q3 Startups & Operators Highlighted
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
SportsVisio
Founders: Sam Corbitt, Brian French, Michael Seibert & Jason Syversen
Founding: 2021
Mission: See your game like never before
Employees: 15 & 70% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $6M raised
Investors: Hyperplane, Geek Ventures, Sapphire Sport, Sovereign Capital and other strategic investors
Key Customers: High Schools, Universities, Cerebro Sports & many more to come!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $25M+
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
SportsVisio is building AI video software to help you see your (hoop) game like never before. With just a smartphone trained on a court, this app can help players track all their stats from points to rebounds to assists to steals and more.
Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?
Founded in 2021 by veteran New England entrepreneur Jason Syversen, SportsVisio is a follow up act. Jason grew up in Maine battling poverty before getting a full scholarship to University of Maine’s computer science program. It was his ticket.
After graduation, he worked in cybersecurity & defense tech for companies like Sanders (a Lockheed Martin company) before he was recruited to the Department of Defense’s DARPA agency. There, he managed a $100M portfolio of defense programs for a couple years.
After DARPA he co-founded Siege Technologies, a cybersecurity firm, bootstrapping the company and selling the business 9 years later to a private equity firm for an eight figure exit. Jason has what the people call “relevant startup experience”.
During his whirlwind of a career, life changed a lot. Jason & his wife were raising 6 kids at home and donated the majority of their post exit assets to a foundation they created. Then, he ran for NH State Senate in 2020. He lost to the incumbent by just 1,179 votes or 0.3% of the vote.
Jason was at a crossroads. He’d already accomplished so much in his career. Maybe it was time to become a full time investor & philanthropist through his foundation. Or, he could start another company to grow the impact he wanted to have on the world. Life (and sports) are games of inches and basketball players everywhere are the beneficiaries of that extremely slim margin of defeat.
Jason grew up playing basketball and coached his kids throughout their childhoods (his oldest is now 22) and saw an opportunity. There isn’t much technology on the court. And basketball turns out to be a venture scale market - $1.5B according to SportsVisio’s research. Youth sports are growing across the board with global leaders like soccer and emerging sports like lacrosse too.
At the consumer level, Jason hypothesized that a vertical SaaS / AI company would fit well. There’s a major opportunity to democratize access to technology and insights for smaller programs and players. Division One college programs are lighter on technology than you’d think too. Interns in basements across the nation are still combing through tape tallying points, rebounds & assists for their programs to make better decisions.
SportsVisio is building a technology and service to help disadvantaged schools & players get better insights out of their game. Jason put $500k of his own money in and teamed up with Boston based Hyperplane to raise the first round of funding for the startup in 2022.
They aspire to help players get recruited, have fun with what they’re doing, and even receive highlight clips to put on social media. The company’s mantra is to do what people do better, faster, and cheaper. They’re building a technology and service for a fraction of the price and time leveraging AI.
Stats are not just about points. The goal is to allow athletes to tally rebounds, assists, turnovers, and blocks to catalog better insights and give team players more recognition. The initial product launched in April of 2023 and you can use it via an app on your phone. Just download and sign up for a free trial on an iPhone or Android.
Athletes or coaches can upload videos from Sony cameras or their smartphone, they don’t care how you record the video because the model is software centric. Their product does the work of transforming raw footage into recorded video, analytics & highlights. Jason adds that “people don’t fully understand what’s possible and how cheap it can be”. SportsVisio thinks they can support athletes for as little as $1 per player per game. This opens up opportunities to expand in many other ways.
Today, there are a couple dozen high schools & colleges (Oxford University in fact) using the product with players as far away as Idaho & Spain. The team is in discussions with a large gym franchise with thousands of players and close to signing on an NBA player to help out as an advisor. Other early highlights include working with Cerebro Sports, a sports recruiting platform backed by Mark Cuban, with a roadmap to help make their player database more robust using SportsVisio’s technology and provide more consistent quantitative analysis for players.
This year the company raised an additional $3M seed round with Sapphire Ventures, hoping to get the onboarding process fully automated by the end of Q1 2024. Next, they’ll be gearing up for their Series A by securing their IP and growing the research team. They hope to launch a second sport in 2024 and scale to 1000s of users and dozens of customers. Building a repeatable customer acquisition strategy is top of mind too.
In the future, they hope to explore a “player locker” concept where amateurs can digitally store their favorite plays, collect digital trophies, and track their metrics. All in an effort to expand the definition of success beyond “scoring points” to shift the balance of power to what matters as a team. SportsVisio has pledged to give 10% of its profits to charity and will continue to democratize access for players by scaling through a bottoms up approach.
Operators to Know:
Scott Byers, Principal Software Architect
Charlotte Corbitt, Principal Business Analyst
Mark Scott Lichty, Director of Growth
Miguel Gutierrez, Head of Vendor Operations
Michael Mathieu, Senior Mobile Engineer
Dan Oblinger, CTO
Jack Ryan Potvin, Product Management Lead
James Sullivan III, Senior Business Analyst
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the SportsVisio team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones to position the product for continued growth?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team and product offering?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about SportsVisio you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more athletes into the digital age. All players, coaches, parents, and fans applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Angela Gatta, Head of People @ Enspira
Angela Gatta has been an aspiring HR professional since her undergraduate studies, leading with empathy and championing a human-centric work environment. She has taken calculated risks and pushed herself to grow through each new chapter of her career. Angela is the Head of People at Enspira, a 2023 Inc. 5000 fastest growing honoree and HR consultancy firm helping businesses across all industries and sizes identify talent, people and culture solutions that meet their unique needs. A division of Enspira’s consulting business focuses solely on the needs of startups at all stages of evolution.
Angela grew up in the Boston area, knowing from an early age that she wanted to influence and impact people through her work. As the oldest of four children and daughter of an entrepreneur, leadership came early. Many dinner table conversations centered around how people can influence the successes and challenges of a growing business.
When Angela’s mom took a job at Boston College, becoming an Eagle became the first real goal in her life. Naturally, she accomplished it. Both of her sisters went to BC too. Angela even met her husband on freshman move-in day, and they’ve been together pretty much ever since.
As part of her Human Development major, she needed to take an HR Management class and an Organizational Behavior class. She learned that leadership, culture & policies can motivate and unite people, and influence successful results. After an internship in HR during her junior year, she was hooked.
Upon graduating from BC, Angela headed to New York City to work as an HR Administrator at Rothschild, a global financial services firm. This role further validated her interest in HR. But after two years, she missed Boston and made her way back up north to anchor her career and life here.
Once back in Boston, she accepted a temporary HR position with Biogen as an HR Project Manager, supporting the sale and closure of a major manufacturing facility. Next, she accepted a full-time HR Analyst position at Pembroke, a real estate advisor that acquires, develops, and manages properties and places across the globe. While she enjoyed her experiences working for larger companies that offered stability and well-established structure, she began thinking about the next phase of her career, wanting to really challenge herself.
As this itch began, a unique opportunity presented itself. A friend and former colleague of Angela’s, Kurt Landon, reached out and asked her to join him in starting an HR consulting business - now Enspira.
Reflecting on this initial conversation with Kurt, she admits to being very skeptical. As a self-proclaimed “type-A” and risk-averse individual, Angela has a natural bias towards order, predictability and stability. Considering an offer with fewer hours, lower pay, no benefits and no formalized business plan was scary, especially in a year when she was planning to get married, buy a home and start her family.
Those that knew Angela well thought she was crazy and questioned her judgment, except for her husband. He recognized the invaluable learning opportunity at her fingertips and really pushed her to embrace risk. With her husband’s encouragement and unconditional support, she left her full-time job and took the leap. It was time to go for a ride!
Looking back four years later, Angela shares that “the past four years have been absolutely transformative, both personally and professionally.” She’s watched Enspira grow as a business from the ground up, embracing every peak and valley along the way, all while challenging and strengthening her own HR skillset. “I deeply believe in myself, my peers and the amazing work we do for our clients.” She shares that the cornerstone of the culture at Enspira is creating “A+” HR solutions for their clients while believing in one another as HR professionals. Angela thinks you need both of those things to build a successful company.
During her time at Enspira, she’s gone through two major chapters. The first chapter involved focusing on client delivery. Angela has worked on and led countless client engagements, translating business strategy into a people strategy.
The second chapter is shaped by her now Head of People role. Angela returned from her second parental leave with a deeper sense of drive and commitment to her career. She ultimately decided to apply for Enspira’s first-ever Head of People position. Despite feeling as though she was an “underdog” candidate, Angela was beyond thrilled to be accepted for the position. She is currently operating in a dual role, where she spends about 50% of her time on client delivery, and the other 50% of her time on internal Enspira HR delivery. The duality of this role fuels her development, as she continues to leverage skills from her client work to support her internal HR work, and vice-versa.
Angela has had to shoulder a number of responsibilities as Head of People. One of the toughest was navigating the organization through a reduction in force. She learned that when you're working on something that’s personally difficult, like laying off people that you genuinely care about, the best thing you can do in those moments is to just do your job to the best of your ability. “Showing up as strong as you can in your role will only help the people impacted by your work.”
As Angela continues to grow her skills in the Head of People role, she believes that DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging) are critical to that success. Prioritizing DEIB and having a workforce that is representative of different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives leads to many positive business outcomes. Most importantly, it’s the right thing to do. DEIB should be a top priority and not an afterthought.
A Human-Centric Work Environment
A key standard Angela always strives to uphold is to operate with kindness and empathy. She believes that leading with kindness and empathy is key to building strong, trusting relationships at all levels of an organization. It is also key to creating a human-centric work environment. It’s not enough to only focus on business results. You must also focus on the people making the magic happen.
As Angela begins to sharpen her own leadership style, she is constantly thinking about the most impactful ways to create a human-centric work environment. Angela believes that it’s important to create a culture with policies and operating norms that enable people to “fill their cup” first and show up to work as their best, most authentic and fulfilled selves. It’s the right thing to do from a human perspective, and it will also positively impact business results.
Ways that Angela has shaped a human-centric work environment at Enspira include serving as Enspira’s first-ever Head of People, creating and enhancing the company’s parental leave policy, planning a company offsite, creating a mechanism for ongoing feedback and annual reflection conversations, creating company values and competencies, taking the important time to get to know employees personally and reminding them that it’s okay to take time off of work to care for themselves or a loved one.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Always Bet On Yourself - “Research shows that, when compared to men, women are less likely to advocate for themselves or apply for a job if they are concerned that they do not meet the qualifications. As the mother of a little girl, I am determined to challenge this throughout my career. A key learning from applying for the Head of People position is to always bet on yourself. Throw your hat in the ring and put yourself up for things that are challenging and push you outside of your comfort zone. You will never regret it.”
How > What - “How you operate is just as important, if not more important, than what you’re actually doing. If you achieve or overachieve your objectives, but you’re stepping on others along the way, people will remember this. It will impact your relationships and ultimately limit your overall success and capabilities.”
Pull People Up - “As you are accelerating in your own career, always look around your shoulder to see how you can elevate the people around and below you.”
Eventually, Angela would love to be a Chief People Officer - ideally at a growing company. She loves “building the plane while flying it”. The strong sense of camaraderie when you’re building something together is why she loves the startup environment.
If you want to learn more about Angela you can find her busy scaling Enspira, chasing her two young toddlers around, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Angela. We’re excited to see all the teams you help influence internally and externally on your journey in HR over the coming years!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt