Hugo Scott-Gall: Today, I’m delighted to have with me Will Lopes, CEO of Catapult Sports, whose visionary leadership has transformed the company into a global leader in sports technology. With a background as chief revenue officer at Audible and a track record of driving innovation, Will has steered Catapult through major change, transforming the company from a hardware-focused business to a global SaaS powerhouse, now serving over 3,600 professional sports teams worldwide. Catapult’s innovations are changing how teams and athletes perform, recover and compete. Will, welcome to the show.
Will Lopes: Thank you for having me. I appreciate you taking the time.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Can you, just to kick us off, just tell us what are your product services? Why are they so good? Why are they hard to compete with? What is it you do that’s hard to replicate?
Will Lopes: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you haven’t heard our story, Catapult’s been around for a little bit, but the product has evolved tremendously. And the way I like to describe as who we are today is that we are a sports analytics platform. So, think of us as the Salesforce for sport. We have a series of solutions, but they primarily fall into two big verticals in sport. And so, in the first vertical, it’s all around the performance and health of athletes. In that vertical, we have our pioneering product that we invented and brought to market which is a wearable device that athletes will wear during training session and during games.
And we are helping teams primarily prevent injury, get their athletes at peak condition and really managing the workload. So, one of the big challenges in sports is you could overwork an athlete or underwork an athlete. And both of those will lead to poor performance and worse case, injury. So, that product has been in the market now for probably a little over a decade. Many generations of it have been launched. And we support anything from an NFL team in the U.S. to an EPL team in the U.K. to an AFL team down in Australia. The second vertical for us, which is an expanding vertical in our platform, is really around tactics and coaching. And we have a video analytics product that customers will use to basically find the really important moments in a game and use that to change their tactics, help design the next week’s play, help change the tactics in how they go about it.
So, we bring these two things together which actually creates a really unique point of view for teams. So, think of it as you may want to substitute a player in football, but you don’t really know exactly when to substitute. And you can go back and look and review on your video. When was that player at peak conditioning? And when did they start to decay below it? So, the combination of the two creates some really unique aspect to it. Our platform continues to expand.
We’ve now moved our products into the gym. So, we are able to also capture what athletes are doing in the gym and get a real full picture, not just what they do on field but off field. We’ve added a scouting product that helps improve that tactical in coaching aspect to it. So, we really are becoming a much more diverse platform of products, really with the focus that we help teams ultimately make smarter decisions and faster decisions.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Great. Well, look. I’ve got about 15 questions. On the back of what you said already. But what I’m really interested in; I’m interested in pretty much everything you said there. So, there’s the hardware. You’ve got the wearable device and that generates data. And then you need to have very good analytics. And I would have thought, you need to have a very good understanding of different sports. You can watch athletes’ performance, but as they go into the red zone, once they are overtraining or over exerted, that’s different depending maybe on their position on the sports field and by different sports. So, you must have to have for your analytics some pretty smart people but some pretty sports-knowledgeable people as well. Is that right?
Will Lopes: I would venture to say we are probably are the largest employer of sport scientists across the globe at this stage. And I think you touched on something that is a major differentiator for us. It’s that ultimately, what we’re doing when we’re measuring athletes on the field is we’re really trying to calculate how hard they’re working for a specific event. And how hard that work has an impact in their overall capacity health, etc. And I think you touched on something is a core differentiator for us.
We don’t measure athletes as n-of-ones. They’re very unique. And so, we look at it from a sport perspective. We look it from a position perspective. And they’re all very different. Ice hockey is a good example. What creates load on a goalie is incredibly different than what it would create in a forward. You go to football and the same thing. What matters to a goalkeeper is not what’s going to matter to a midfielder.
And so, we use our sports scientists to really hone down those algorithms to understand. What is it in a micro sense that we can understand the difference of workload between these players and positions? And we have started to actually even get more sophisticated than that most recently where we’re now looking at sport, position, body type and in some cases, where they are in their aging as well, because all of those things will matter.
Hugo Scott-Gall: So, I want to talk about the tactics in coaching. But before I get to that, I guess the value proposition, given the increase in prize money, total value of winning in the premier league, winning NFL, performance has never been more valuable. So, I am imagining a value proposition to your customers is very, very high. If you say, “Your star player is now in the red zone, running on fumes. They’re about to break down. Pull him or her out.” That’s incredibly valuable advice. So, do your customers reflect that back to you? “The cost goes way beyond actually what we pay you. It’s incredibly valuable and it’s hard for us to replicate ourselves.” Is that a fair assertion?
Will Lopes: Yeah, I think so. We like to think of ourselves as being part of the team. We never think of ourselves as servicing teams. Ultimately, we’re a part of them and we’re there to help them be successful. But I think from a value perspective, I’ll give you an example that we talk about here all the time. Sports is a really unique industry. If you think of athletes as an asset class in the industry, it’s probably the one area where an asset class gets to sit down and money gets spent on it, even if it’s not being used.
So, I’ll give you an example. In the EPL last year, about 300 million pounds of salary were paid to athletes who sat on the bench because they were injured. That’s a huge loss of value for teams. The correlation of having your best players on the field to winning at the championship is incredibly high. So, when we go into teams, we’re talking less about the technology and we’re talking really about the output of what we’re ultimately trying to get to them. You’re going to spend a lot of money to get your best players. In some cases, you’re going to spend a lot of money to train those players to become the best players. And our technology is not going to just help you keep them healthy and improve their conditioning. Ultimately, it’s an ROI aspect to you. It’s keeping your asset class working rather than sitting on a bench.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Tactics in coaching, again, back to my first question. Presuppose that whoever is writing the code knows what the right tactics or right coaching is. Coaching and tactics evolve and they’re always contextual. So, how do you write original code for what is good tactics, bad tactics in this situation and in this situation. Do you know what I mean? It’s very, very complex. But at the same time, I imagine it’s very ready for disruption. I’m a Brit. And I’m going to talk more about English Premier League and about other sports. But it wasn’t the most sophisticated industry for quite a long period of time. That will be a fair way to describe it. So, how do you know what’s good and what’s bad?
Will Lopes: There’s a balance between allowing customization and also ensuring that you’re showing benchmarks of what works and what doesn’t. And we probably have now reviewed hundreds of thousands of videos over the years and are able to then tag all of those in ways of, “What are the outcomes, ultimately, of what happens on the field?” And understanding that allows you to find profiles or patterns that you could say, “This is most successful. This is less successful,” and so on. But you also want to give your customers the ability to say, “Well, how do I customize the way I think about my tactics?” I may have a particular style and then how do I go back and look at this style against perhaps a different team uses an equivalent style against a different opponent?
And we see that happening all the time. So, I find that for us, the challenge is having people who understand the sport internally. So, typically, we’ll hire people who have worked in the industry and pair them up with really smart engineers. The engineers are really working on, “How do I take this data and find the right patterns so I could present some predictive outcomes for you?” And in some cases, “How do I prescribe maybe some potential ideas?” And I think then, you’ve got to give the customization back to the customer to say, “How do I make some changes here?” I’ll give you an example, perhaps not in the EPL, but I think it really resonates with people when I describe it. Let’s use Formula 1 as a good example.
So, in Formula 1 on a given race weekend, we will capture about 1,000 different telemetry points from a car per millisecond. We will combine that typically with 150 to 200 video feeds coming from the racetrack. We’ll combine that with external data points like windspeed and temperature, track temperature, etc. And we will start to make about two million to three million predictions of the outcome of the race on it. We hand that back to our customers then to customize your strategy. And in racing, in motorsport, probably the core strategy they are trying to get right is when to pit a car and replace their tires. And they’re basically doing what-if scenarios in front of our screens just to try to figure it out.
If I bring Louis Hamilton in on lap 28 versus lap 31, given everything that’s happening, windspeed, race conditions, everybody else is going around the track, what does that mean for me? And in many ways, that’s what we were trying to do for potentially every sport. How do we capture most data from the athletes? How do we include that with what’s happening from a video perspective? Add third-party external data as well and then give the option back to our customers to understand that either pregame, post-match, in-match, how do you use these what-if scenarios to make your best decision and ideally, your fastest decision as well?
Hugo Scott-Gall: To stop this being a zero-sum game, customization is crucial. You can see in the English Premier League, clubs like Bryce and Bournemouth and Brentford have established real competitive advantage through scouting, through their ability to assess talent. It’s not just acquiring talent but also selling as well. Do you think there is ongoing competitive advantage for teams who use your products around player health, fitness, around tactics coaching and then even into scouting? Or does it all just flatten out because everyone’s got all the data the need and have all the analytics they need?
Will Lopes: No, I always think there’s an advantage. So, the way I think of technology overall, and I’ve been in this tech space; maybe not in the sports space specifically, but I’ve been in the tech space for quite a long time now. What technology does in many ways is it democratizes access. And so, what I think you start to get is that smaller teams today are able to have, as you’re pointing out, Brentford is a great example of that. They start to actually have better recruiting systems than they could have had 15, 20 years ago because technology is giving them access to pieces of information that they couldn’t have before. And a lot of what we do is help enable that, ultimately.
But you always are going to have somebody who’s smarter and faster, perhaps more deep-pocketed that will be able to use technology in different ways. And you could look at other industries to compare this. So, if you think of the world of media, it’s probably a really good example. Twenty years ago, how you went market with advertising was very different than you go today. So, today, any small company will have a digital advertising environment. But you are still differentiated if you’re P&G versus a startup. Sometimes that’s on budget. Sometimes that’s on how deep the expertise inside house looks like. But technology plays a significant role in how smart you are about what you want to do.
Depending on your size, depending on your strategy, your outcome that you’re chasing is going to be slightly different. And so, to your point, when you think of Brentford versus a Chelsea as a really good example, one may be chasing, “Hey, how do I actually, this season, pick up more capital by building great athletes and trading or selling those athletes throughout the year?” Where Chelsea may be focused on, “My most important output this year is to win the champion’s league.” And they will use technology with a different focus throughout the season. So, I still think technology will create a differentiator. It creates speed. It creates smarts. I think our technology is the backbone in many cases of both of those decisions.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Do you think there’s still further to go on understanding exactly what’s happening? So, there’s the data capture mechanism. But then you have to understand what that data means. And so, early on, I think in soccer but I think in other sports, too, I remember talking to someone about rugby saying, “We can’t yet teach our analytics what’s good, what’s bad. What does each movement mean?” So, there’s still a lot of uncaptured data…not data, but insight to be gleaned. Even though the industry has come a long way, there’s still just an awful lot that doesn’t fully reflect the decision making, how humans are operating. Is there a lot of still hidden information?
Will Lopes: Technology in sports is still very nascent. It’s still very early days. And if you look at how the pyramid of disruption that technology creates in an industry, you have three stacks or three steps in it. The first step is that there’s a digitization sort of period. I know there’s these activities that occur and I just want to capture the data. And that typically leads to overwhelming amount of data. And then to your second phase which is really around optimizing a component, where now creating some predictability. I’m creating some prescriptability on it. And I’m trying to really understand, “What does this mean?” In the world of sport, we are just beginning to transition from the digitization space to the optimization space. Meaning, we’re just starting to create these insights on, “What do I do with all of this?”
I’ll give you a great example. One of the things we discovered about two years ago is that the most important aspect of success for a wide receiver in American football actually wasn’t acceleration. It was how quickly they could decelerate. And actually, how you train for deceleration versus how you train for acceleration are very different. And that’s an insight that didn’t exist in market in a long time. And so, finding those and now that I have all this data, what do I actually understand about it is different. And then the next phase, once you get past this optimization phase, is really transformation. And I think we’re still pretty far from a transformation.
When I say transformation in the tech space, it’s the technology then starts to drive meaningful business model changes. So, what does that look like in the world of sports? Today, the correlation of success for most teams is still probably based on, “How much did I spend on the roster I have? And how much did I spend on the coaching staff that I have?” It’s not yet a technology-driven correlation. I think at some point it will be. Technology will play a much more significant role in correlating how successful I am.
And that correlation may be, “Do I have enough data? Do I have enough insights? Am I doing it early enough? Am I looking at a wide enough angle in terms of am I finding the kids who at 15 have a certain level of talent that is going to be different at 24?” How do you look at and use technology for that? I think it’s going to be probably where the transformation happens. But to your question, it’s still very early days. And I think we’re still in the digitization phase, which makes me incredibly excited to be where I am at this space and excited for where Catapult is.
Hugo Scott-Gall: I’m very inclined to agree with you. I think that the value of sport is going to increase ahead of GDP. It’s something that’s hard to replicate. It’s a physical experience. Since the Olympics started, people have always watched elite sports people doing their thing. So, I would assume that the value of sport grows. We’re going to see it next year. The Soccer World Cup is in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. That’ll be a huge event. And so, you’ll see it again.
You don’t have to really go looking for growth opportunities ‘cause it’s there. You just got to keep making better products. But how are you going to move into different sports? Are you going to move because you’ve got all this data? Are you going to start selling it to fans? Because fans, they love the data…well, some fans, not all fans. So, how do you think about your growth by types of sport, professional, nonprofessional, and then actually fans as well?
Will Lopes: Yeah. I think there’s two drivers behind our sales. And then I’ll tell you how we think about driving growth. I think one of them is what we just talked about before, which is technology disruption in itself will drive a lot of growth in our world. The adoption of technology in many ways is helping and growing. Two, I think exactly what you pointed out. The industry is expanding. Sports is becoming the last bastion of live entertainment. I’m always fond to say that, “It’s the only industry where your product can be pretty poor and you’re still going to have a lot of fans.” I was a long-time Jets fan here in the U.S. It’s a proof of that.
But for us, I think there’s two big drivers. How we play in the space, 1.) How do we take our tech and continue to expand? There’s about 20,000 professional teams across the globe, Hugo. I think 10 years ago, only maybe 7,000 or 8,000 of them would have been addressable because they had the budget and the sophistication for it. And I think now, we’re probably sitting around 10,000 to 11,000 have the budget and sophistication. And so, how do we make our technology more accessible is really important for us. And there’s still a lot of green-field. And I say that technology really focused on the wearables, performance aspect of it. How do I help a team who maybe doesn’t have an army of sports scientists sitting in its house?
For training athletes, how do I make them as sophisticated as a Brentford now or as a Chelsea? That is a really core aspect. And then 2.) How do we take, then, what we have created? We sit on five petabytes of data. If you took every written word ever created in humanity and multiply it by 1,000, you still don’t have five petabytes. That’s how much data we sit on. And so, how do you take that and really start to make it more useful in the workflow of a team so that you can really start to expand the share of wallet? Teams are spending a huge amount of money. And they are using technology. They’re just using it in very fragmented manners.
And ideally, what our job is this more cohesive view from your training, recruitment section, scouting, all the way to, “What does it look like on game day?” so that you’re having a singular point of view. Our focus is always, “How do we land new customers?” A big part of that is going to be simplifying and making sure that we continue to bring what we have into various markets, whether that’s new sports or new regions. And then, where we have current customers, how do we expand the share of wallet? It’s by constantly introducing new solutions that help them in their daily workflows.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Can we pivot a bit back to when you joined the company? You had to change a lot or you decided to change a lot. I think you unified eight tech stacks. You changed a lot of the executive leadership team. How hard was that? How clear were you in your vision? Do you look back and think, “I should have gone faster?” Or, “Wow, I did a lot. What was I thinking?”
Will Lopes: I’ve never met a single executive or a CEO in my life that when, in hindsight, they think they moved fast enough. We always feel like we moved too slow and, “Gosh, I wish I had done things even faster than I did.” But yeah, it’s been a pretty transformational change for us. I always find that my role here, it wasn’t so much about coming up with incredibly innovative points of view on the strategy and where we went as an organization. It was actually learning to say no. When organizations are small…and Catapult was actually a collection of many small organizations.
So, it wasn’t a singular small organization. It actually had done a few acquisitions. So, it was a bunch of little companies, really. And when organizations are small, they basically will say yes to a lot because they have to. They will say yes to customization and the software. They’ll acquire other things. They will bolt on things that they probably shouldn’t have. But when you’re trying to scale, it’s really around, “What are the things we’re going to stay focused on?” And you’re going to say no to a lot of things around it. And you’re going to say, “Look, some of those decisions are going to be hard, which is going to require people who have gone through the process of scaling.”
And I think that was my job when I came here. I thought they had a great product. I thought they had a great strategy. I didn’t think they knew how to scale that. And my goal was going to be, “What are the things we should stay mission-critical focused on?” And how do I put people around me that had done this before and knew what it meant to transition a company to scale? ‘Cause it’s pretty frightening, particular for us. We went from a perpetual license model to a subscription model. And when you do that, you’re basically going backwards in revenue. All that cash you collected on day one, you’re now spreading it out in the next three years.
And you have to have some fortitude on it. And so, you need people in the organization who understand it, who knew the KPIs to look for. And in my job, I always feel it is either to build great teams around me and to make sure that I have clarity on the mission and what we’re trying to solve; but ultimately, also, that I’m chief customer advocate. I’m bringing the customer inside the organization at every conversation that we have.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Making all these changes, how did you avoid morale dipping or crashing? How did you set out a vision? You scaled up Audible when you were there, hugely. So, you clearly had confidence in yourself to do it, but you were in a new place. You don’t know many of the people. You were pretty confident it would always work. Did you doubt yourself? How did you sell the vision, change and keep morale up and get everyone looking forwards?
Will Lopes: The good news for me was that I get to operate in a world where people are excited to come to work every day. It’s not every industry. We don’t work in insurance. Sorry for all the insurance brokers out there. Probably not the most exciting of industries. I get to come in and tell people, “Everything we do has an impact on a product that’s watched by billions of people worldwide.” And I think reminding everyone here, that is the ultimate output for us. It’s that we are helping athletes do better in this amazing stage. We’re helping teams do better in these amazing stages. We’re helping fans get the best of what they love and watch. As long as I could help keep the organization focused on that long-term view, the rest of it, you just have to be honest with the organization.
The rest of it is just hard work. And some days you’re going to knock it out of the park and you’re going to really get it right. And some days you won’t. Not every day is a win. But you have to stay focused on that long-term win and be relentless with it. And I think the other aspect that was really important for us from a morale perspective was that if there is one thing…I grew up at Amazon and Audible and the like. It was that we always acted like owners of the business. We believed ultimately that we were there to make a difference. We were there to drive success in the organization. And that success ultimately also has a payday for us.
And so, one of the things I did immediately when I got here was to ensure that equity was an important component of our salaries. And so, we don’t pay the highest salary, but we make that up with some equity components to it. And I wanted everyone in here to believe that, “Hey, if we’re successful, this is the outcome and this what it means to you.” So, I think it was a combination of what a great industry and the impact you have in it. Here’s the mission. Let’s make sure that everybody’s clear on that mission. Then 2.) If we’re successful, you have a stake in the game. And you’re just as much of an owner in this as our shareholders are in the market today.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Can you tell me about what you’re like as a decision maker? Are you decisive, quick, don’t reflect on it, move on? Do you like to sleep on things? Do you have a small group of folks you bounce ideas off? Do you go for a walk in the woods? Do you just interpret your dreams? And how do you make decisions? And how has that changed over time?
Will Lopes: Not all decisions are the same. So, I think we tend to separate them internally. I tend to separate them internally in how I approach them. So, we’ve always broken things as one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions. And two-way door decisions, I always believe by the time they get to me, time is of the essence. When I say two-way door decisions, they are decisions that you make but if you get it wrong, you could rectify it. It’s changeable. And in those scenarios, you have your experience. You have your team.
And by the time it gets to me, my job is to actually be decisive and quick and make sure that I’m removing roadblocks rather than adding roadblocks. But one-way door decisions, you want to be very deliberate about. And so, the way we approach it and it is very Amazon-trained is that that I believe in narrative. I believe in data. And I want to have a clear-cut, three-page or six-pager written with me with very clear datasets. Well, do we understand the problem well enough of what we’re trying to solve? Have we understood the options that are in front of us? And what are the data that allows us to make those decisions? And as long as you exhausted those options, you’re going to have to pick one.
But I think you have to be deliberate in those scenarios on it. So, I always try to separate. If we’re making one-way door decisions, meaning once we go, it’s going to be very hard for us to modify it, then we have to be deliberate and data driven. But on two-way door decisions, you want to push that down to the organization as much as possible. But by the time it gets to me, I need to move quickly. If I got it wrong, I got it wrong and we’ll deal with it. But in general, it’s more about time than it is about the decision.
Hugo Scott-Gall: It would be somewhat ironic if you didn’t use data in your decisions. So, you’re obviously a fan of the Amazon Memo.
Will Lopes: I am. I am. I was at Audible for about 10 years before Amazon acquired us. I was almost another 10 years there with Amazon. When they first said, “Look, we have this narrative style. You write these six-page description of the customer problem. And you have a press release on how you’re solving it. And you have all these FAQs you write that are very difficult to answer. It’s very time consuming. And you think, “Oh, my God. This is so useless.” And then you see the end result which is that it aligns everybody very clearly what the problem is.
It allows us to avoid showmanship and have real discussions of what we’re trying to solve. And you then create this relic of what we were trying to create. And so, you could always go back to and make sure that the path of where you’re going isn’t too far away from the vision that you had. I’m a gigantic fan of it. I think it’s a fantastic system. And I got to see it firsthand. I was very fortunate. I got to see it firsthand with Jeff Bezos and his S team which I was there. I got to sit in a ton of those reviews. And I became a resound believer on it.
Hugo Scott-Gall: That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting. Can we round out just by talking AI? I don’t think artificial intelligence is going to disrupt watching the Packers play the Bears. But can AI transform how you operate the company and your product services? And does it really add something? You talk about the amount of data you have. You let loose AI or AI capability in five years’ time; surely, you’ll do a lot more. So, what does it overall mean? I don’t think it disrupts sports. I think it enhances them. But maybe you would disagree? But what does it mean for you, your company and types of companies like yours?
Will Lopes: Oh, I’ll start by agreeing with you right from the start. I don’t think it’s a negative for sport. I think it’s a positive for sport. And I think ultimately what it means is it probably equalizes the playing field a bit more. And I think if you’re a sports fan, that should be well received. No one wants to see the same two or three teams win every year. You want to see a strong competition. And I think anything that equalizes that is well received. The way we look at AI internally is that we think of our world as having three layers. I’ll use the analogy of oil. You have the oilfield, meaning the raw first-party data. You always need to capture that. And that’s going to be something that I think AI can’t necessarily do, particularly in the physical aspect of the attribute.
We have a lot of very large oilfield. Then AI primarily sits in this middle layer which is really around refinement. I have all of this stuff. How can I make more contextual sense of it? And I think that part of AI is going to play a role in not only helping discover better insights, but also translate those insights into a less sophisticated team. That’s where the democratization will occur. And then the top of that layer is really where do you consume it? Where are the petrol stations that I’m going to use refined oil? And I think in those scenarios, the technology we’ve built are very well designed for the sport and the region.
And I think whether you have all these contextual insights, you still need to know, “When do I use it and how do I use it for that sport?” And I think those endpoints, people who own those endpoints will be very successful ultimately on it. But I think for us, AI is an enabler. I don’t think it’s a disrupter as much as people think it is. We’ve been operating with AI for probably over seven years now. So, it’s been a long time. I think some of it is a little bit of a fad. But I think it’s supportive to ultimately helping us provide our customers faster information, better information so they can make smarter decisions.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Will, I think we’ll end it there. I had to ask about AI. But I really enjoyed our conversation. I’m a big sports fan, analytical person. If you look at industries that are growing by more than GDP but their sophistication levels lag a bit, I think some industries have got loads of smart people and they’re pretty mature. But maybe they’re not growing anymore. Some industries are growing superfast and maybe don’t quite have the deep sophistication around analytics. And I think sports fits right into that. So, it was great to hear your take on that, your views and how you make decisions and your love of memos.
Will Lopes: Yeah, I appreciate it. Hugo, thanks for taking the time and giving me the chance to share our story with you guys.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Thank you for listening to today’s episode of The Active Share. The Active Share is available on iTunes, Google Podcast, TuneIn and Spotify. And if you’d like, please leave us a review. To hear additional insights from William Blair Investment Management, visit us at im.williamblair.com and follow us on Instagram @williamblairim.
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