Max Montrey: The Art of Simplifying Complex Data in Sports (Full Transcript)
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Full Transcript:
Ronen Ainbinder 0:54
Coming up on the Halftime Snacks is a former Microsoft engineer and product manager passionate about baseball, data, and the computer vision side of sports.
He then went on to drop his career at Microsoft to co-found a massive business called SportsTrace – where he is the CEO today. SportsTrace is a company that provides data and insights to athletes in a digestible format to improve the mechanics of their movements.
In the app, it all works through video.
He's based in Seattle, but the Halftime Snacks has no borders. So without further ado, ladies and Gentlemen, Max Montrey!
Max Montrey 1:32
Ronan, what's up? That's a big intro for me. Thank you. I appreciate it. Perhaps more than I deserve. And I just wanted to say I'm a huge fan of the show. I got to see Jacob's episode before I got to listen to that. And most recently, I think the most recent episode I listened to is Dan, who is now I think he's on the board at athletics, whom I've met over there. So that's an awesome job you're doing, man.
Ronen Ainbinder 1:57
Man, thank you so much for your kind words. And man, it's an absolute pleasure to host you on the halftime snacks. And I want to kick it off. I've developed this very unique routine of just throwing an icebreaker very recently in the afternoon snacks. So my icebreaker for you is, let's suppose that your company SportsTrace would have a professional baseball team. What brand Would you like to be the sponsor of this stadium for the SportsTrace team?
Max Montrey 2:28
Oh, wow, who gets to sponsor SportsTrace Stadium. Wow, if Halftime Snacks could do it, that would be amazing. If our friends from the state of the industry SportTechie, he could do it. As that starts tomorrow. That would be amazing as well. I've met the grandchildren and the children of Adi Dassler at the elite sports accelerator and their venture fund. So that would be nice, too. I mean, there's a lot of joint promotion that could be amazing. That would be
Ronen Ainbinder 3:02
Awesome. Man, that's great, and the Halftime Snacks would be very proud to sponsor the SportsTrace Stadium. Hopefully, one day in the future, we'll get to do that. So I want to switch over now to your story. And so first of all, man, the first thing that pops into anyone's mind when they scroll through your LinkedIn is that you work with Microsoft, one of the most relevant companies, companies in the world. So I want to ask you why or why wouldn't you recommend someone to join a company like Microsoft? What are your thoughts about that?
Max Montrey 3:35
That's a great place to work, a difficult decision to leave. I have a lot of good friends that I made there. And a lot of things that I learned, I would say why you would want to work there for sure. You would have tons of different opportunities and resources if I was there for the better part of a decade. Although I did work primarily in e-commerce, I also got the opportunity to work in information security. Also, I got the opportunity to work in Azure as well. Many different places to bounce around, lots of different things, and such amazing resources and events, I got to go there and participate in hackathons. They'd have every year for one week, that'd be during summer. And, fun fact, one hackathon one year, which is kind of cool.
Ronen Ainbinder 4:21
Now, as it's a fun fact. And is there any reason why someone wouldn't consider joining Microsoft?
Max Montrey 4:30
it's a big company, if, I guess if they don't like Microsoft technologies, that's a tough sell. Because you got to go in there and not use exclusively but definitely consider Microsoft technologies for the solutions you're providing. Um, that would be a big reason. So
Ronen Ainbinder 4:48
If I own an iPhone and iPad and a Mac, I shouldn't get close to Microsoft.
Max Montrey 4:52
The Times have changed significantly. You no longer are in fear of walking down the hallway and getting that snapped out of your hand. So there's that. Yeah, those days have passed. But no, I'm hard-pressed to think of a reason I've been to a lot of locations across the globe, which is always amazing. And like I said, the people there that I've met and befriended are top-notch,
Ronen Ainbinder 5:17
that's awesome. And I wonder that I feel like, if, if I remember correctly, you told me that you were started SportsTrace, while you were in Microsoft, you had this idea for a while. Then you've decided to drop out of Microsoft and join full time, develop your time to sport strays. I wasn't what we're the kind of like the indicators that SportsTrace was evolving. That was growing, that it was a thing, it was profitable. Or you could potentially see profits coming down the line that pushed you or help you confirm your biases and say, This is what I need to do. I need to drop one of the world's best companies if my grandparents would hear you say that they would kill you? Because in their mind, you have such a good job, you don't drop it. But so I guess that you have to have some good reasons to drop it. So I want to just know, what were the
Max Montrey 6:14
Yeah, absolutely true. So, first of all, definitely don't take that for granted. . My grandparents, rest their souls probably be the same exact thing, And trust me, I've had some people come up and ask that exact question. But that said, focused on SportsTrace, how it began was it had this idea with very specialized hardware, the Kinect cameras and wanted to try something out for sports. And it was just a hobby project. But Ronen, as with the formalization of the sports technology scene, for lack of a better term, with sport tech startups coming in and out different types of accelerators that focus on sports technology becoming more prevalent, some individuals were reaching out to me. And the reason they knew about SportsTrace is that, hey, if I had invented this thing, I was obliged to show it on my LinkedIn profile and resume. As we got more interest, what was the biggest indicator there was actual interest from customers. So I remember distinctly making a trip down to Texas. And that was before the pandemic last year. And we got to talk to teams, Rice University, and tech, University of Texas, still great friends, the program, love working with the folks over there in both cases. And what was neat about it was we left there thinking, cool, we saw some baseball, this will be all amazing. But when they talked to us and said, Hey, we're serious about using the technology you have, which was a key indicator for us. It was one of our entrance criteria and milestones, get a customer-first; this is the thing that you want to do. Now, do you have those original ideas, even from a year ago, changed significantly? Absolutely. Was it weird leaving Microsoft that I worked for the better part of a decade, like in the middle of a pandemic? Because I gave my notice, I think it was like a day later, they emptied out the offices there. Yeah, that was a little bit strange, But at the same time, I know this is a great opportunity for us. I know this is a great opportunity to be part of SportsTrace. And I think we're onto something here.
Ronen Ainbinder 8:24
That's awesome. Man, I think you seized the opportunity to become an intrapreneur. Develop something that you love you're passionate about; you can devote yourself 100 hours a week and don't mind because you feel like it's played to you. It feels like work to others. So,
Max Montrey 8:40
exactly. If you don't like what you're doing, go do something else. Absolutely.
Ronen Ainbinder 8:44
I love that. And why? Why do you think that we need the SportsTrace product? Why is it essential to sports? Why do you think computer vision technology helps athletes and trainers reach their full potential? Like, what's the rationale?
Max Montrey 8:59
Yeah, that computer vision is almost part symptom and part side project to the whole thing, if you think about it because computer vision is what's enabling this to go on right now to be able to do this in an efficient, effective, and far less expensive manner in terms of time and money than ever before. Why is SportsTrace important? Well, one, are we or are we not already looking at the video to establish how this person did? How did they perform? How was their form? How was their technique? What's the same? What's changed? What's different? We want to know all of those things. What if we could just do that automatically, and what if in doing so we could start to get some real measurements about how the body is moving, how it's performing those rotational distances and velocities, those linear distances and velocities, the general angles, how different things occur in different sequences. That's an all-important part of movement and sports; it's no different. So the time is right for this right now; there's an appetite for it, which is definitely a need for it. And I'm a firm believer that technology should make our lives better. It should, it should take away automated ways and the things that we shouldn't be doing. We're here to help enable athletes and coaches to achieve more, and in doing so, we want to take away a lot of the rote manual stuff they'd have to do and leave the expertise to them.
Ronen Ainbinder 10:32
I want to double-click on what you mentioned. In terms of timing, you think that timing is correct now for adoption, meaning that users or customers are ready to use the technology you're providing? And similarly, are we timing in the correct timing in terms of the software and the, let's say, programming available today, or the things that you can do in software today, are as efficient as the technology demands for it to be proper? And not very complicated?
Max Montrey 11:17
Yeah, let me see if I can answer this, Ronen, in a couple of different ways. So number one, in terms of like, the technology that's established now, how can it? How can it perform? Can it do it fast enough? Our ideas, pretty simple that these are things that can be processed stuff in the cloud. And we have all of the algorithms there that we need in terms of computer vision, Ai, ml, etc. So the groundwork is definitely there. But I think you asked an incredible question, Is the consumer demand there right now? I would argue that on one side, I've seen programs I've visited with coaches, I visited with entire teams that have reams and reams of video, all digitized just sitting there. And I happen to know for a fact, the way we started this was there's a lot of cold storage costs to just having video around whether you're YouTube or huddle, or it doesn't matter. Are you getting used out of that after the fact? We think the time to activate that is now to create some structured data out of unstructured data. And the appetite for it is absolutely there. But there's one sticking point I will say this, like the full coffee app, And I just messaged Tom on Twitter about this because he talked about communication. How are you effectively or efficiently communicating that information to the end-users? That's going to be the real indicator as to whether or not the consumers respond. And I think that's kind of true of everything. But I will say this, especially in athlete performance-related data. People need way, way more than just the raw data. And a great example, I love this thing I run all the time. I ran eight miles this morning because because
Ronen Ainbinder 13:08
The listeners only need to know what's that.
Max Montrey 13:11
Oh, that's Sorry. It's my smartwatch, And it tracks all my steps, my heart rate, the distance that I go, and that that is good; I can use that I can interpret that data, having run for a long time. But it was just this past summer that I've been using one of the apps, which shall remain nameless since 2013. It just started giving me some inspirational highlights and tips as to, hey, here's something that you could change. Now, those tips are kind of a disaster, because even when I tried to implement them, as I can never go fast enough, smooth enough, high enough, whatever the recommendation was, I kept, I felt like the goalposts kept getting moved to use a sports analogy, We want to do away with that. We want to have real things that you can work on that will show real progress.
Ronen Ainbinder 14:09
Let's Get Real and something, Max. When we first met in our intro call, I showed you my golf swing, a complete disaster. Now I want to know what do you guys recommend to me to practice for my golf swing?
Max Montrey 14:25
So we're gonna need a few more of those swings. I would say the swing itself wasn't so bad. It might have just been a result right there. But like I said, as I said before when I saw that video, that one might have just been the practice; that was just the warm upswing. I think it's interesting because what do we key in on? Yeah, there are specifics of movement. We could probably tell you if one swing is good or bad, but where we shine is established with the user consistency. How consistent are you doing something how consistent is this part of your movement here, and when we see inconsistencies there based on the coaches, the teams, the biomechanist, the different members of the scientific and educational academic community that we've discussed this with, what would they recommend you do in terms of drills and exercise and different kinds of products that would help? I will say the jury's still out on your swing because we have a sample size of one. So if we get a few more, we can absolutely answer that question.
Ronen Ainbinder 15:34
That's super interesting. Would you say then that talent is a matter of staying on a high-quality output consistently?
Max Montrey 15:42
I would absolutely say that. I mean, there you can, you can catch lightning in a bottle no matter what you do. Whether it's sports, whether it's developing software, whether it's having podcasts and creating content, but at the same time, the surest path to success is absolutely consistency, persistence and, and digging in and loving that grind.
Ronen Ainbinder 16:07
How do we make this product attractive for people that are not non-statistical junkies? Because from what I remember, in our intro call, you were talking about all these like mechanical statistics, and, and the movement and things that probably regular people would not understand. How do you make these people who are probably below cultural or the people with less knowledge in terms of stats? Love the product, the product?
Max Montrey 16:38
Yeah, I had a few conversations with some folks who are biomechanists. Recently, one, one soundbite from that was, al I heard a coach say to me that I need to have a degree or certification in biomechanics to now be a baseball coach, our mantra is, you don't write, you don't need to know the data as deeply. If you do you want to, that's great. But what we want to do is distill information from that data. Now, sure, it's there for the taking. We've had folks reach out to us, and all they are interested in is the data, Some of the great statistical minds out there. And as a matter of fact, we'll be exhibiting in the startup pool at the MIT Sloan sports analytics conference for that exact reason, because I like it. But you're absolutely right around, like how to how to individual users use this stuff? Well, that's where we take all of the steps between a, go do your thing, whether it's swing, a golf club, a tennis racquet, a baseball bat, throw a baseball, I mean, any one of the isolated sports scenarios that we cover, all the way to SportsTrace processes, everything in between, and you just get information back that says, here are some recommended things you can do for perceived inconsistency. Here's how you get better, faster, in short, and we feel like we've kind of cut a lot of that out in between. You can pursue it at your own leisure, but at the same time, is this where it says that?
Ronen Ainbinder 18:19
Yeah, I think that the beauty in SportsTrace is I think there's this quote that I've read somewhere that says that you, the ability to simplify something complex is like that's like, that's so much value. Like for instance, let's say, I'm saying insane; when he developed the equals mc squared, he basically created this very simple equation that entailed a very complex topic. And so that's, that's all. Hence, I think that the art of SportsTrace lies in the idea that you can you guys can simplify something very complex along with all the like, biomechanics statistics, and all the things that are happening in between a video and a real insight on how how to improve your game. So I think I love that man. And ideally, in your mind of a former product manager for Microsoft, how does the product roadmap for SportsTrace look in your mind? Ideally, what is going to happen in the next year to five years? What does it look like?
Max Montrey 19:33
Yeah, sure. Well, first, I just wanted to say love being compared to inventing the theory of relativity. I'm not sure we're there yet, if only for simplicity's sake, but that's Thank you. Second, where What's our roadmap look like? Sure we've rolled out certain sports right now. And they work for us; they work at the level of isolation of scenarios. They work at the level of appetite and sports and how this can be useful right now. Baseball, softball, golf tennis, we have done some work inside of a couple of other sports, So we've done a couple things with track and field; we've done some stuff with soccer, believe it or not. And it was interesting. I'd seen some things recently, as recently as this past season; I think it was a Monday Night Football game; I saw Josh Allen, getting a biomechanical analysis. And they're drawing lines all over the video. And I said to myself, man, we could do that automatically. So we'd like to make a quick turn into some other sports. Again, we've built a very robust recommendation engine so that as long as we know the things that we're measuring and that we need to look for, we can distribute back out that related and efficient, and effective content that will help you train and get better faster, But beyond sports, I mean, we've got some other interest in the sports tech landscape generally from everywhere from fan engagement to sports, gambling, because they just love to use data for all kinds of things. But I'll tell you where we've gotten interested lately and how this plays into the five-year roadmap is, is in the healthcare space. So we've been working recently with some folks on the physio thought side, so some physical therapists on rehabilitation and movement, functional movement screening evaluation. And that's been good for us. So we see we see within the next two years, definitely having more sports, number one, number two, being able to move outside of that, even if it's only tangentially related through healthcare.
Ronen Ainbinder 21:43
That's fascinating. I can't wait to see what's gonna happen out of that collaboration between sports technology and healthcare. And I'm excited to see and be a fan of a company run by such a talented individual. So as for yourself, Max, it has been a pleasure, and joy is having a conversation with you. And since we're running out of time because a Halftime Snack can only last as long as halftime and be a snack, Gotta be a snack. Gotta leave the taste for more later. But my last question for you is one, what's one thing that you wish you knew when you were 20 years old?
Max Montrey 22:25
I say this to everybody I mentor, whether or not they are software engineers or more on the network's business side. It is a skill that you need to develop, just like anything else, whether you're trying to get faster, so you go out and run some sprints, or you're trying to get better at coding. So you like, just take a Pluralsight course, it doesn't matter. Go out there, ask questions. There are literally billions of people on this earth. Ask as many as you can, and like, you're gonna be able to talk to some folks like work on that scale.
Ronen Ainbinder 23:02
That's awesome. Max. Again, it has been an absolute pleasure to host you on the halftime snacks. Man, I love what you guys are doing. I love the product. I love technology. And I'm a big fan of the founders. So I will be cheering for you guys all the way to wherever you guys can get to hopefully more sports in the short term and more industries in the long term. Again, thank you so much for devoting a piece of your time to the listeners and me. It has been a complete pleasure, Max. Thank you, man.