Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports. If you’d like to be considered for this series, tell us about your mission.
World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We focus on training the mental side of basketball. It’s a part of basketball we think is undertrained.”
Company: VReps. “The goal of the company is to give virtual repetitions of your sport, primarily basketball right now. That’s the impetus behind it.”
Location: Seattle, Washington
Year founded: 2015
Website/App: https://vreps.us/; Google Play app; Apple Store app
Funding round to date: “We are Pre-Series A. It’s all Seed funding.”
Who are your investors? “We are all angel funding and have raised roughly $2.5 million.”
Are you looking for more investment? “If the right investors came, yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO and founder Shawn Cooper: “I was studying computer science at the University of Michigan and was a scout player for the women’s basketball team. I’m 6-foot, I was 190 pounds and athletic, so as a scout player I could play any of the five positions. For an upcoming opponent, we would be given the scout team playbook and we’d have four or five plays we’re supposed to simulate during practice. That means during a span of 48 hours I was supposed to memorize 20-25 plays because I’m learning all five positions and it’s just a paper playbook, that was the best way to learn. The idea behind the company was initially making NBA 2K for playbooks, that’s really where we started–a video game version of playbooks. We’ve since broadly expanded to preparing the mental side of basketball, so how do you play basketball? What’s the chess match that happens? When you go through a ball screen, what are the reads? Why are there different ways you defend a ball screen? That’s the idea that came out of it. My senior year, I dropped out for a year and a half and started the company. I did graduate, went back, but that was the start of it.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “I don’t have co-founders but have some really important leadership to the company in Mike Greenman and Matt Stewart-Ronnisch. They are both supremely talented in the worlds they occupy. Matt, our CTO, is a very talented engineer. Met him in college and he joined pretty quickly after we started, probably a year after we started. Mike Greeman is our Director of Basketball and joined us two years ago after it became clear we had potential to impact the NBA. I have no connection to the NBA, I don’t know enough about basketball to chase that market. We hired him and he has the connections and the expertise. He is a very talented basketball mind. He’s the one that trained Chet Holmgren before the draft and Jalen Williams. We had three first-round picks (Holmgren, Williams and Christian Braun), three second-round picks (E.J. Liddell, Kendall Brown and Jabari Walker) and one player picked up on a Summer League contract (Jermaine Samuels). Chet was our highest draft pick at No. 2.”
The 2022 No. 2 overall draft pick Chet Holmgren had signed an NIL deal with VReps while playing for Gonzaga.
How does your product/service work? “The product is technology at the NBA level. We recreate NBA games as they happen, any NBA game from the past five years, and we’re able to put players in virtual reality in the shoes of any player during that scenario. That’s the product and that’s available for any NBA team to purchase, and we’re working with a handful of NBA teams. The service is the player development training that Mike does utilizing that product. He actually trains players and trains them on how to prepare for the NBA using previous NBA scenarios as examples. So, before Chet got drafted we put him into the shoes of any player in the league. After he got drafted, we put him into Oklahoma City’s offense to prepare to play with the team. So before he ever steps on the court with Oklahoma City, he’ll have been in their offense for almost an hour in virtual reality.”
What problem is your company solving? “Basketball training is very focused on individual skills–shooting, ball handling, weight lifting, vertical, speed. There is an entire segment that is mostly ignored, which is the development of your mental understanding of how basketball works and why those things are that way and the strategy behind it. We’re filling the gap between how a player gets from a really good college player to an exceptional NBA talent. A lot of that growth is on the mental side and we are accelerating that mental growth, which is traditionally learned almost exclusively through game time.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “Our product costs $10,000 to NBA teams as an initial offering. There are more expensive layers. The service to the NBA players, there are two tiers. One is $20,000 per year and the other is $60,000 per year. For the product, our target customers are the NBA teams. For the service, it’s NBA players or players that are preparing to be in the NBA. It’s not just NBA players.”
How are you marketing your product? “It’s entirely word of mouth right now and direct connections with those teams or players.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “The technology we built has meaningful potential at nearly every level of basketball. It’s training the mental side of your brain in terms of the strategy aspect. Our growth will come, depending on what markets we want to grow into. Our growth from here, after we successfully enter the NBA market a little more, will be high-level international basketball and probably going into the college level in the U.S. We may also pursue other sports like the NFL. This technology has the same value in the NFL. We can do virtual reality training for NFL players. That’s another way we can grow. Depends on how much cash we get and from whom.”
Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports. If you’d like to be considered for this series, tell us about your mission.
* * * * *
World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We focus on training the mental side of basketball. It’s a part of basketball we think is undertrained.”
Company: VReps. “The goal of the company is to give virtual repetitions of your sport, primarily basketball right now. That’s the impetus behind it.”
Location: Seattle, Washington
Year founded: 2015
Website/App: https://vreps.us/; Google Play app; Apple Store app
Funding round to date: “We are Pre-Series A. It’s all Seed funding.”
Who are your investors? “We are all angel funding and have raised roughly $2.5 million.”
Are you looking for more investment? “If the right investors came, yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO and founder Shawn Cooper: “I was studying computer science at the University of Michigan and was a scout player for the women’s basketball team. I’m 6-foot, I was 190 pounds and athletic, so as a scout player I could play any of the five positions. For an upcoming opponent, we would be given the scout team playbook and we’d have four or five plays we’re supposed to simulate during practice. That means during a span of 48 hours I was supposed to memorize 20-25 plays because I’m learning all five positions and it’s just a paper playbook, that was the best way to learn. The idea behind the company was initially making NBA 2K for playbooks, that’s really where we started–a video game version of playbooks. We’ve since broadly expanded to preparing the mental side of basketball, so how do you play basketball? What’s the chess match that happens? When you go through a ball screen, what are the reads? Why are there different ways you defend a ball screen? That’s the idea that came out of it. My senior year, I dropped out for a year and a half and started the company. I did graduate, went back, but that was the start of it.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “I don’t have co-founders but have some really important leadership to the company in Mike Greenman and Matt Stewart-Ronnisch. They are both supremely talented in the worlds they occupy. Matt, our CTO, is a very talented engineer. Met him in college and he joined pretty quickly after we started, probably a year after we started. Mike Greeman is our Director of Basketball and joined us two years ago after it became clear we had potential to impact the NBA. I have no connection to the NBA, I don’t know enough about basketball to chase that market. We hired him and he has the connections and the expertise. He is a very talented basketball mind. He’s the one that trained Chet Holmgren before the draft and Jalen Williams. We had three first-round picks (Holmgren, Williams and Christian Braun), three second-round picks (E.J. Liddell, Kendall Brown and Jabari Walker) and one player picked up on a Summer League contract (Jermaine Samuels). Chet was our highest draft pick at No. 2.”The 2022 No. 2 overall draft pick Chet Holmgren had signed an NIL deal with VReps while playing for Gonzaga.
How does your product/service work? “The product is technology at the NBA level. We recreate NBA games as they happen, any NBA game from the past five years, and we’re able to put players in virtual reality in the shoes of any player during that scenario. That’s the product and that’s available for any NBA team to purchase, and we’re working with a handful of NBA teams. The service is the player development training that Mike does utilizing that product. He actually trains players and trains them on how to prepare for the NBA using previous NBA scenarios as examples. So, before Chet got drafted we put him into the shoes of any player in the league. After he got drafted, we put him into Oklahoma City’s offense to prepare to play with the team. So before he ever steps on the court with Oklahoma City, he’ll have been in their offense for almost an hour in virtual reality.”
What problem is your company solving? “Basketball training is very focused on individual skills–shooting, ball handling, weight lifting, vertical, speed. There is an entire segment that is mostly ignored, which is the development of your mental understanding of how basketball works and why those things are that way and the strategy behind it. We’re filling the gap between how a player gets from a really good college player to an exceptional NBA talent. A lot of that growth is on the mental side and we are accelerating that mental growth, which is traditionally learned almost exclusively through game time.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “Our product costs $10,000 to NBA teams as an initial offering. There are more expensive layers. The service to the NBA players, there are two tiers. One is $20,000 per year and the other is $60,000 per year. For the product, our target customers are the NBA teams. For the service, it’s NBA players or players that are preparing to be in the NBA. It’s not just NBA players.”
How are you marketing your product? “It’s entirely word of mouth right now and direct connections with those teams or players.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “The technology we built has meaningful potential at nearly every level of basketball. It’s training the mental side of your brain in terms of the strategy aspect. Our growth will come, depending on what markets we want to grow into. Our growth from here, after we successfully enter the NBA market a little more, will be high-level international basketball and probably going into the college level in the U.S. We may also pursue other sports like the NFL. This technology has the same value in the NFL. We can do virtual reality training for NFL players. That’s another way we can grow. Depends on how much cash we get and from whom.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/7UmfaN0Ejbo
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “Our nearest competitor would probably be Strivr. There’s also a company that does hockey simulations. Nobody, as far as we know, recreates historical games to relive that from the perspective.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “Our unfair advantage is our technology expertise. We have 10 engineers working at the company. Very few companies our size are that heavily invested in their technology. We also have a few proprietary partnerships that give us access to the data streams we rely on. The recreation of the NBA games, for example, is through our partner, Sportradar. As of now, we are the only company that has access to those data feeds for player development purposes.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? „We just trained the second overall draft pick. That was a huge accomplishment. We also trained a player that wasn’t on most draft boards through the draft process and ended up being drafted 12th.”
In what ways have you adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic? “NBA teams are very focused on in-person relationships, as are NBA players. Trying to create a business where we could work with NBA teams and NBA players remotely has been a challenge. I don’t think we’ve done it super successfully but we’ve managed to get through it and now we are growing on the other side of the pandemic, now that it’s mostly gone back to normal in how the NBA operates. We’re growing into the normal sales processes.”
Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “It’s a very slow market to adapt. For example, the idea of relying on analytics took almost a decade to catch on. Now, every team is heavily relying on analytics. The NBA moves very slowly and negotiating that very slow-moving market has been incredibly challenging. I’m not saying we haven’t been successful in it yet, because the company is still growing and trying to enter this market, but it’s an extremely challenging thing to overcome. ”
How has your company been affected by the current economic situation, and how are you dealing with it? „The current economy isn’t positive for startups and inflation has also made it more challenging, but I don’t think we’re doing anything special or noteworthy to mitigate those problems other than trying to reduce our spending as much as possible.“
What are the values that are core to your brand? “The values are engineering excellence and content excellence. We have a very talented basketball expert and a very talented engineering team and having a high-quality product that is impactful, it’s not just something to talk about, it actually does make players better. The impact we have is really a core tenant of the company itself.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “Success on a small scale is players that want to get better come to us as a way to mentally prepare and mentally enhance in any sport. Success at a big level is changing the culture around the importance placed on the mental side of basketball. If more people started to focus on the strategy behind their sport, that would be–on a broader scale–a lot more success from our perspective as a culture shift from just individual skill training to the broader picture of the strategy behind sports.”
What should investors or customers know about you—the person, your life experiences—that shows they can believe in you? “What gives me the best shot of making an impact in this market is my ability to build a very talented team. The team we have is exceptionally talented from an engineering and basketball perspective. I feel confident I can grow the engineering team as we need to, and also grow into deeper levels of basketball or build into new sports and build a team necessary to enter those markets.”
VReps allows players to create and watch plays through their app in 3D.
What made you start with basketball for VReps? “My true sports are lacrosse and ultimately frisbee. I was a very talented lacrosse player in high school but didn’t play in college because it’s really hard to do computer science and play a varsity level sport, so I decided to pursue a career. Now, I play at the highest level of ultimate frisbee. I play on a world-level team. Basketball is one of the easier sports to monetize and has one of the bigger markets and is a sport that has a very clear strategy to teach. Soccer is a little more fluid in the way strategy works. Basketball is a pretty ‘rock, paper, scissors’ type game where if they do this, you do this and they are going to do this and you do this. It’s not scripted in a football sense but more of a read-and-react sense, and it’s teaching that read-and-react decision making that is core to our business and what we can do. Basketball is the perfect petri dish for us to really prove our technology can grow in these sports.”
Do you have a favorite quote about leadership? “‘Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant’ from Charlie Munger. The best leaders are those that build world-class teams around them. As an entrepreneur, you usually have very limited resources, so you need to be able to identify your biggest weaknesses and hire talented people to fill those gaps first.”
Quelle:
Foto: Jalen Williams, the 12th overall pick by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the 2022 NBA Draft, tests out VReps.
https://www.sporttechie.com/vreps-virtual-reality-basketball-training-playbooks-video-games
