Quin Sandler: Optimizing Human Performance (Full Transcript)

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Ronen Ainbinder 1:18

This episode features a serial entrepreneur who has founded companies in online learning, coaching, and digital branding.

Our guest today is a very special one. He has over 12 years of experience in the wearables technology industry. Today, he's the CEO and co-founder of Plantiga – a startup looking to optimize human performance, resilience, and recovery by monitoring and analyzing biomechanics.

How does it work?

Their platform uses an advanced sensor that measures how a person moves to maximize their health and performance. I can easily say this guest is a complete guru on performance training, as he has helped hundreds of teams, trainers, and athletes - in sport and life. Ladies and gentlemen, Quin Sandler!

Quin Sandler 1:45

Thanks, buddy. It's a pleasure being here. Thanks for having me on.

Ronen Ainbinder 1:49

Man. It's a pleasure to host you. How are you?

Quin Sandler 1:51

I'm doing very, very well. How are you doing?

Ronen Ainbinder 1:54

I'm doing all right, man. I want to ask you, as an icebreaker, what's the first destination you'll travel to once COVID is over? For real?

Quin Sandler 2:03

That's a very fair question. I'll tell you right now, Joshua Tree, outside of LA, might be one of my favorite places in the entire world. I want to go to Joshua Tree as soon as that border opens. I want to get down there; Joshua our outside of Paul; it seems unbelievable.

Ronen Ainbinder 2:20

What's in there?

Quin Sandler 2:22

Nothing. No, it's in the desert. There's a big national park called Joshua Tree National Park; you can do amazing rock climbing, hiking; I think I just like the vibe of that area. It's beautiful. That's where I would go.

Ronen Ainbinder 2:35

Nice, man, that's awesome. I've never heard of that place. But I'm not now going to add it to my bucket list.

Quin Sandler 2:40

Take a look.

Ronen Ainbinder 2:43

So glad that we're going to speak about so many things that you've been into entrepreneurship Plantiga their product and Human Performance man. But how about we kick it off with you as a serial entrepreneur who has found a different company. Interestingly enough, I went over your LinkedIn profile, and I saw that you had no; you were never an employee; you were always a founder. So I was interested in seeing that. And I thought, Man, this guy must have some skills that are the skills needed to succeed as a serial entrepreneur. So I want to ask you, if you think there are specific skills for serial entrepreneurs that they would help them in there, in their ways in their ventures to succeed? And why would you say those are important skills?

Quin Sandler 3:39

So that's a good question. Yeah, I've been self-employed since high school. So I haven't worked for a whole lot of folks. So what are the two skills? I think the biggest one I know is that I have never seen the flip side. I've always wanted to control my outcome. I never wanted to work for somebody and spend all this effort and time lining somebody else's pocket. So no matter what I did, I always thought no, no, I want to control that. Whether I was picking up websites and developing websites at first, but just always wanting to be entrepreneurial, and having kind of a sense of like, equals a strong word, not being arrogant, just feeling like I never wanted to go and work for someone because I thought they were kind of idiots. I just wanted to do it myself and either succeed with myself or fail. So I don't know, maybe there's a healthy level of independence. But I think that's good to cultivate, and not necessarily waiting on any job or any employer to give you a raise or like you shouldn't. It depends on an entrepreneur, but you shouldn't rely on anybody to advance your career. You have to go out there and do it yourself. So that kind of take initiative approach.

I think that is a critical skill set that doesn't come. So naturally, one has to develop. The other skill set is almost a blind tenacity, but you just have to keep going. I cannot stress how many times it feels like I have run into a wall. And it could have been any number of companies I've started like, and it is just hard. It is very, very hard. And I think there's too much of a rosy picture around startups and entrepreneurship; they just don't say how challenging it is. It's just hard. So you have to be tenacious, almost to the point of blind like you almost like I don't know if you don't assume you have to be like a sadomasochist. You have to like to enjoy the pain. Otherwise, you're not going to be successful. And maybe the third one is passion; you have to do stuff that you like to do because the world and people can smell it on you if you don't like it. If you pretend like you like what you're doing, that's not going to work.

Ronen Ainbinder 6:03

Yeah, I agree with your three points. The second one goes along the lines of resilience, which is quite related, as I read to what you guys do at Plantiga. So we'll touch on that later. But I want to ask you in terms of career development, like what is your take? Does this type of career development is for everyone? Let's say someone who is planning his college career just right now is about to finish. And he is thinking about what he wants to like, partake this out? Do you think that? Is this like serial entrepreneurship and going out and being self-employed all the time? Is this for everyone? Or do you think that there's something that you would have done differently? Or do you think that there are things that work and don't work?

Quin Sandler 7:00

I don't know if I would do anything differently because I feel like I'm very proud of where I've got to what I also feel like I've just started at the same time, I feel like I'm in like any one of nine, and I've just scratched the surface. Entrepreneurship is not for everybody; it isn't. And people need to do some self-awareness and some self-exploration, if someone might be just better off going to work in some job and likes that. And for them, it's very stressful and anxiety-building to try to do their own thing. And that is okay, like, not everybody is built to be an entrepreneur. So I feel like if I was a kid in college, or advising somebody there, they should just think long and hard on kind of what makes them happy, and what passions that they have, they don't need to go and start their own company, or whether it's like strength coach training, or like, like, like, they don't need to do that. Some people are very happy to go work at a gym and get corporate experience and train them.

You don't; you don't have to follow the route that I've taken her or, or other entrepreneurs. Now that said, I think entrepreneurship is a skill that should be taught like history or math. And even if you're not good at it, we should teach people, women, and men that they should try to go and like what you're doing right now with building content when they finish school. And like, that's exactly the type of thing that people should push themselves to go and do even if it doesn't come naturally. So I don't know if I would do anything differently. But I think for people, I don't think there's a right answer. I think some people can kind of pave their way. And they finish school, and they can start their own company. They could sport consultant things like lots of stuff, or they could go, and if that's not for them, they should go work with a company and just learn, it shouldn't matter where they come in. So if it's like an athlete management system or some type of wearable company, or even going to work as a sports scientist at some small team in some city, like don't worry about it, just go and learn. So it's just whatever route makes sense.

Ronen Ainbinder 9:12

One of the things that I would add to that answer is that you probably have to be very, very aware of what's going on with the world and what's going on with the industry that you want to be where you want to break in. Let me give you an example of why I mean this because it is an example of why the world is changing. Now the media, as we were just talking about before, or episode, the media is changing very fast. We know that there's the product, there's the distribution, and there's how there's both the quality of the content and also the quantity of the readers right there. CNN, which has an amazing distribution, maybe not the best content, questions their content. Yeah, yeah. And then there are different sources of valuable content, but that doesn't get access to so many eyeballs. So I'd say that it's important to understand what the trends in the world are meaning where the new reader is going to consume their content from or what kind of new companies are being developed or technologies, let's say blockchain, for instance, or what kind of things are being developed in the world that will make someone way or another impact? What do you want to do? So just following what you said, I guess that, first of all, first decide what is it that you want to do? Or where is it that you want to, like go and who you want to work with, but also understand the environment? Just make an analysis?

Quin Sandler 10:42

Yeah, to what I think, you're completely right; you need to take a look at what's going on in the world. And you want to be a part of, I guess, trends. To counter that, though, at the same time like, there's an exercise that my dad would always go through. Imagine that money was no option. Imagine you didn't have to work, okay, you just had money, you could pay for whatever you want. In that event, what would you do with your time? Outdo the exercise? Okay, well, if I didn't have to pay bills, I would probably go and teach Little League softball, or I'm just making this up, I'd go and be a musician, or I would go back to school, then the answer is to go and do that. Because sometimes, yeah, it doesn't matter about the trends, you should just follow your passion. And if you do that, you're never going to go wrong. It doesn't even matter if your passion is like being an apiary, what I mean? Like someone that tends to be, it doesn't matter what your passion is; you'll be happy. And for all, you might start making content about tending to bees, what I mean? Like, follow? That is what I would say.

Ronen Ainbinder 11:55

Yeah, man. Yeah, I think, I think that makes a lot of sense. And these are from my point of view, and I think that as long as you enjoy the process of whatever it is that you're doing, like, just stay there, that's the correct course.

Quin Sandler 12:14

Totally. So no matter what the money, it isn't; I know many people who make a lot of money and are not happy.

Ronen Ainbinder 12:23

Wow, that's a great quote. Walk us through a little bit of what plenty of guys produce is why, like, how it started, how it's developed. Now, how it's going, the meme of how it started, how it's got started, how it's going, Yeah, we don't have a visual on that. But just give us a very specific audio explanation of that meme, how it started, how it's going.

Quin Sandler 12:51

Of course, my pleasure. And I'll start with where the name is. So the name clan Tega comes from the word plantigrade. So plantigrade is a term; it's a term that means a mammal is walking with their souls flat on the ground. So humans are one of the few mammals that walk with a plan to grade low standing upright bears the same, so we shorten that to Plantiga is kind of where that name comes from. So, where it started, I found a plan to eat with my dad over ten years ago; my dad had a biomechanics and product design background. And we started as a side project when I was in my early 20s. We started by this concept if we could measure ground reaction force, or that equivalent data, which is how the forces and the foot interacts with the ground, if you could measure that within a shoe, the applications would be far-reaching, whether it was performance, rehabilitation, tracking disease, you name it, how you move is very much tied to your health and your performance. That was always the guiding light in what we call the democratization of data analytics. If you want to measure how you walk or run, you have to go into a human performance lab, camera systems motion capture force plates timing gates. Very few people have access to that. So we were always of the mind. Let's democratize that; let's take something that very few people have had access to and bring to a much larger population. So that's kind of where we started. My dad passed away four years ago a very aggressive prostate cancer, right, what? Our company was starting to pick up speed. So my father Norman lives on our patents and is very much a part of our company. We're building an AI, and the AI His name is Norman. So it's very much a personal family business for me and kind of where we've come from. Um, how we're doing today is we're doing fantastic. So we're a venture-backed startup based here in Vancouver. We have about 15 employees. We service about 60 different organizations across the NFL Major League Baseball, the NBA, NCAA, elite High School, so kind of a large group of professional and collegiate programs, and a lot of sports med clinics and performance centers and groups. They use our platform as a way of measuring, walking, running, jumping to some kind of baseline, assess performance, and then use it in that recovery process. So we're doing very well; we work with the US and the Canadian military, we have several exciting projects in the pipeline. And we just started giving our platform. We're opening it up to individual athletes. And that is being that's been a phenomenal uptake so far.

Ronen Ainbinder 15:47

Does it sound like it's a product designed to make athlete's life easier, in a way that is kind of like the mission?

Quin Sandler 16:00

Yeah, so the mission is around optimization. And if you think of performance, and maybe injury prevention or recovery of two sides of the same coin. So we're about optimizing and maximizing not just an athlete, I think, we're all athletes; athletes are more of a mindset. But we're about optimizing the ability and the output of a human being and doing that through the lens of analyzing how they move and giving personalized recommendations, depending on if they're coming back from an injury or moving through a performance training block. And you can imagine, the life of an athlete is very much like I'm performing. I'm performing again, an injury. I'm rehabbing or rehabbing. Okay, I'm getting back; I'm on the field and performing and performing. But, again, I'm a setback. And it's more like a stock ticker. It's up and down, and up and down. And Plantiga is there to help optimize the recovery, the performance, and that's where we come in with objective data and some kind of AI-driven insights around movement.

Ronen Ainbinder 17:12

Wow, that's fascinating. And I saw a lot of like keywords in the website and buzzwords that sounded very, very, I'd say, let's just put it high level, that not everyone may understand. One of the ones that I didn't understand was resilience. Resilience is just antifragility. It's just basically that you can break something down to build it up. Yep. So I want to know how you break down athletes to build them up? How is plenteous product developing? If you go just like in specific cases, maybe we'll understand it better; for sure, just walk us through one of the examples if you want.

Quin Sandler 17:57

So, a lot of what we do, because we have a sensor in each. In each shoe, we measure a big thing that we measure is right versus left asymmetries, which means you are compensating one leg over the other. So let's take a run test. Someone does a sprint test, and we measure the speed. But we measure the right versus left asymmetries. Now, most healthy human beings will be plus or minus 10%, whether it's force or ground contact time. So they might favor one side a little bit more than the other. But there's kind of a healthy band. Well, if you do a run test, and you favor one side, 18% more than the other side, you have 18% asymmetry on your left side, which's quite considerable. So that is us identifying a deficit where you are favoring one side more than the other. And then, with that information, you can put programming in place to train up that deficit. So no longer does that have 18%, you can train, do more exercises, stretch, work on that limb more. And when you do another sprint test, you might be more like 5% or 6%. So, our data allows anybody to see how they move that you can't see with your naked eye. And that's how we work at resilience. Because if someone has high asymmetries, what, if they keep having high asymmetries, they might hurt themselves, they might rupture their ACL or hurt their hamstring, or, like, we know that high asymmetries lead to a bunch of injuries. So being able to identify that and then train it and then retest it. That's a powerful thing.

Ronen Ainbinder 19:37

Yeah, it's kind of related. And you tell me if you agree with this, but its kind of related to sometimes doing less of what may injure you is so much better than doing more of those things that might improve your performance in a small margin. What I'm saying? It's just that just, it's; it's just addition by substitutes. So, is that one of the key ways that you think about optimal optimization of performance?

Quin Sandler 20:09

Yeah, it's complex. And it's unique to each person. But yes, sometimes it looks, somebody moves inefficiently. And you need them to change some things; they need to shorten up their stride because the length of their stride is creating unnecessary stress on their hips. So it kind of gets kind of very detailed the applied SPORT SCIENCE route. But sometimes it is a little bit more addition. And it's, they have a weaker limb, and they need to make their left side stronger because it's just weak compared to the right side. So yeah, I think, I think it is about fine-tuning. And sometimes it is about reducing and more optimizing movement patterns, thinking of like an F1 car, okay, if that car's not fully tuned up properly, it's probably going to have quite an off alignment. And then the car won't run that, well, you can kind of think of a human being in a very similar way, where especially in the athletes, they're like f1 cars, and they need to be tuned properly, they need to be aligned properly, if any of them are not, because it's such a high-speed sport. And let's say it's football or basketball, because it's such an intense sport, that if they have a pattern or a misalignment, that could affect them. So that's kind of where we come in.

Ronen Ainbinder 21:32

Yeah, I love it. Because it is the nitty-gritty of movement, it's just going into the super, super small details that you can't even see with your eyes, that you can use through technology and optimize the different things that athletes do to improve those things. Now, going from the macro to the maker, I think that's, that's even more interesting, because you may say, Okay, yeah, but if you stretch your leg a little bit more, yeah, but why, why is it different stretch, going to create a better impact in this symmetry that you mentioned? Like why? Like, that's even like, think about why such a macro thing you may do before you run, or even during your run, influences this super, super smart, small detail during the run? It's Yeah, it's just like, it's just like working the formula backward, the algorithm of what you do backward, it's, I think it's super interesting.

Quin Sandler 22:34

Totally. And, like, on that point, it's even hard for us to prescribe Because it's very like somebody could have a high asymmetry. After all, they're feeling kind of down. After all, they're in the midst of a divorce, and they are with their wife all night, right? So that's, but we're just reporting, hey, you have a high asymmetry that maintains you have a high probability of getting injured. It's kind of like trying to predict the weather. It's like, it looks like it might rain on the weekend. That means it might not rain, but it looks like it might rain. So that's kind of where we are right now. And we try, we're very careful not to prescribe unless we have a lot of contacts, unless we know, how do they feel? And we're talking to them. And that's kind of what we do a bunch with our sports teams, is the context means everything to the data, because just looking at somebody's jumped data or their run data, that may not mean a loss.

Ronen Ainbinder 23:36

Yeah, no data just tells a very small portion of the story. I say that's why coaches know that their players better than anyone else. And that's why even today, we still have coaches and not just computers, replacing them because of coaches.

Quin Sandler 23:56

Coaches will always be there. Yeah, wait, a coach will never do all the data. Hopefully, it reduces some of the burdens of injury and helps optimize. Still, nothing will replace a human being, almost like we facilitate and support coaches. That's kind of where I think data comes in.

Ronen Ainbinder 24:15

In your mind, how do the future of human performance and all these things that we mentioned look like?

Quin Sandler 24:23

I think we're going to get to a place here in the next five to seven years, which will look so different from where we are now. I think Plantiga is playing just one part of it, but you could imagine performance in the future. They will measure what we measure, so the biomechanics of walking and running will measure blood glucose level, hydration, cognition, peripheral ability with my eyes, and my gut biome that we are taking stool samples and my gut bacteria and performance in the future. The future will be a holistic approach to looking at an athlete with very personalized programming and recommendations. It's not going to be your Mexico right now, soccer, right? Or like, it's not going to give everybody on the soccer team the same program, not at all. Every single person is different. And they're going to build personalized programming for each player. That is the future. I have no doubt. And I think we're going to get there kind of in the next few years for sure.

Ronen Ainbinder 25:33

I wonder if after that you're going to be opening a new startup or something?

Quin Sandler 25:38

You never know. Yeah. You never know. Or we'll just buy other ones. And we'll be that company that offers

Ronen Ainbinder 25:46

yeah, absolutely, man. That's super interesting. But since we're running out of time, Quin, it's been a great Halftime Snack to spend with you and listen to your insights and all your knowledge coming from, a very experienced entrepreneur, someone that has been through a lot, someone that has worked on that blend Tiggers product for a while, and that has a lot of insights around human performance. Man, I want to ask you a personal question related to what we talked about, but what is your definition of success?

Quin Sandler 26:22

Well, that's a good question. Um, success is a combination of just almost putting your head down at night and being happy. Because that, to me, is successful. And that might be you working at a bookstore, and you just love old school books, and you don't like the internet, and you love your job, you can go to bed happy, and I think that's successful, that's being successful. Successful is not money or companies or cars like it's none of those things. People are successful with no money, but if they're happy, and I know people like that, they might work construction, like friends of mine, they like to build homes, but they're the happiest people in the world. So I put a lot of respect on that. I'm happy with what I do. But happiness, I think, is not with what you get or what you acquire. Its success is happiness.

Ronen Ainbinder 27:23

That's very powerful. I want to thank you, Quin, so much for sharing that. And also for coming to today's halftime snack. It has been very much of a pleasure to host you and hear all your insights around human performance and plenty of guys and what you guys are doing. I can't wait to see what the future holds for you. But man, thank you once again, and I hope we can get to make another Halftime Snack somewhere in the future.