Podcast Alert: Jeehae Lee – Sportsbox AI

Transcript

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Anne Ristau: [00:00:00] Today I am absolutely thrilled to be joined by ghe Lee, founder and CEO of Sports Box ai. Welcome, GHE. Thanks so much for having me, Anne. This is exciting. We are definitely gonna talk a lot about Bryson DeChambeau recent victory at the US Open and the role that Sports Box AI played in that win. But before we even get there, and, and before we get into your journey as a sports tech founder, I wanted to start with another journey that began in 1995.

You wrote on LinkedIn about two years ago about your journey to becoming an American citizen and you called it your American dream. I found it incredibly powerful. And if you didn’t mind, I was hoping you could, um, share your first paragraph from that post with all of us.

Jeehae Lee: Oh wow. Okay. Well, thank you for bringing that up.

That one is very obviously close to my heart and something I [00:01:00] reflect back on all the time, whenever there’s a. A little moment in my life or a high moment in my life, I really think about like what’s brought me there. My American dream started long before becoming an American citizen. It started in August of 1995 when I boarded a flight from Seoul and landed in LAX with my parents and two siblings.

I was 12 and my only English sentence was, hello, my name is Jeehae. My American dream started with timidly ordering what came out as the biggest hamburger I’d ever seen in my life at Bob’s Big Boy. Our first stop from LAX on a long road to assimilation to American culture.

Anne Ristau: I don’t know anyone who would probably want to repeat middle school, high school.

Sure. I mean, it’s hard enough and you know, thinking about where you started and what you went through, you learned English, it sounds like, both in school, but also from tv. [00:02:00]

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, absolutely. I came here not knowing a lot of sentences besides introducing myself. I think I knew how to say like. Pencil and notebook and yeah, going through adolescence, just learning how to speak a new language, uh, trying to fit into a new culture was all a lot.

But I think I took a little bit of an academic approach to it all. I observed things on tv. I observed my peers at school to see how people interacted, who the popular kids were and what they did to gain people’s interests and, you know, respect. And so I try to adopt a lot of those things as I learned a new language as well.

Anne Ristau: What did you watch?

Jeehae Lee: I watched, uh, Clarissa Explains it All was a favorite of mine, I thought back then. I thought she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my life, first of all. And I like that she was a little bit quirky. And then I also watched Saved by the Bell, a lot of Saved by the Bell and [00:03:00] Beverly Hills 9 0 2 1 oh.

I like all the, all the favorites back then.

Anne Ristau: And you also captained the boys golf team in high school.

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, that’s my favorite fun fact that I captained a boys varsity sports team in high school. And I never thought about it back. Back then it was just like, of course I play golf. Of course I’m the best person on the team.

Like, it wasn’t like a big deal. Um, but looking back, it, it is kind of comical, uh, when you put it that way.

Anne Ristau: I love it. So after high school, you went on to Yale where you both played on the golf team and studied economics. Uh, either one of those things is not an easy endeavor. Can you talk about how you balanced the two?

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, actually, you know, I played my freshman year and yeah, it was a lot. I mean, being a college athlete. In general is a lot because you’re trying to be the best at what you do on the field of play, whatever that is, and also try to get the best grades possible so you can get a job after college and [00:04:00] golf in particular.

I think it’s the. College sport with the greatest demand on your travel, like with the, the most robust travel schedule. So we were gone, you know, sometimes on Wednesday until Sunday for these games, and I’m like, wow. Like am I really getting the most outta my college experience? It, it was, it was a lot. I was taking exams on the road.

I remember taking my. Finals in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. ’cause we had the NCAA regionals to play in my freshman year. And so I actually quit the golf team after my freshman year to really get what I wanted to get outta my college experience and then came back to play on the team my senior spring.

So that’s, I mean, the short answer is I didn’t balance it, but I’m glad I did what I did. I think my senior spring when I came back to it, the difference for me was that for the first time in my life, golf wasn’t [00:05:00] just what I accepted as being part of my life. I chose to play golf like this is something I want in my life versus this is something that expected of me and I’m just going to try to do the best I can.

It’s a massive difference. I think that’s what really got me to think about golf in a different way where wow, like, this is enjoyable. I love this. I love trying to get better at it. Um, which is what led me to the decision to play golf professionally after college.

Anne Ristau: I think it’s certainly a huge challenge and tension for any student athlete, but you know, even professional athletes at the highest levels kind of struggle with what role it plays in their identity.

So after doing both, and whether it was at the same time or at different times, but you graduated, you have a job offer in finance and talk about your decision to play on the LPGA tour.

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, so this is back in 2006, so pre-financial [00:06:00] crisis where investment banking was still the right thing to do coming out of Yale.

And so a lot of my peers were doing that. So. The summer in between my junior, senior years, I was in Hong Kong at Lehman Brothers of all places doing corporate finance, and I was like, well, it seems like a good job, you know, make some money, apply my econ degree somewhat. And so I went through the recruiting process, got a job back in Hong Kong to join Macquarie Bank.

After graduating, and then of course, you know, senior spring I went back to play on the team, had some success, won the Ivys as a team, and experienced golf in that new light. And I was like, wait, finance will always be there. Or so I thought before the meltdown, right? Maybe I should try playing golf and give it my best and see how good I could be.

And so. I talked to a few people. Our coach at the time, [00:07:00] Chaddy, she had played a few years of professional golf herself after college, and she, you know, gave me some good advice and gave me some encouraging words for me to go and try it out.

Anne Ristau: How did your mom react?

Jeehae Lee: A lot of people around me were, oh, that’s, that’s nice.

What does that even mean? I, it ranged from that type of ex, you know, reaction to. Are you sure about this? Like, are you’re not that good at golf? And you know, to be fair, I had the most mediocre record as a junior golfer, college golfer. I’ve never even won anything, any small tournament in my entire life.

And I’ve never broken 70, you know, graduating from college, you never broke. 70. I think my scoring average was like 78, something like that. So my mom was very concerned, I mean, deeply concerned for my wellbeing and my [00:08:00] future. She’s like, one, you’re not that good at golf, so you are going to struggle second, even if you were really good, like how will you find a husband playing golf?

And so, I mean, I would’ve said all of the same things if I were my parents at the time. But I think in one particular conversation with her, I think it was in Florida when I was trying to qualify for the Epson tour and I had played an awful round and my mom was again, gravely concerned. And she was like, are you sure about this?

And I was like, mom, listen, like this is gonna be hard, but if you wanna be really successful or extraordinary at anything. It’s gonna be hard, so why not do something that you actually enjoy as you struggle? And she was like, okay, I’ll buckle all.

Anne Ristau: That’s a incredible mindset. And as somebody who also went into investment banking, worked at a hedge fund, worked in management consulting, because it, I think in [00:09:00] many ways was an expected path.

It’s very brave and very cool to see you pursue your passions even when it is hard, and to see where you are now. That’s just awesome. Did you have any technology in your training back in 2006? I have to ask.

Jeehae Lee: Yeah. I love looking back on the evolution of technology in golf. I mean, I started back in 1990 when there was nothing, right?

You just, I think the technology we had was, there was a bald dispenser that like. Put a ball in front of you on a tee at a driving range like auto T situation. That was like the big technology. But when I graduated, the technology was a video camera, like an actual camcorder that stood on a tripod and captured your swing during a lesson and you would record and then you would.

Be brought into a room, uh, where they would pop whatever the cassette [00:10:00] into a monitor where you can see the swing. And there was some software to draw some lines. And the advancement from there, I think it’s oh 8 0 9, was that you can record the, the, the coach can record whatever was going on on the screen, so your swing video with the lines with his voiceover on like his commentary and burn that into a cd.

That CD was the takeaway after the lesson that you paid whatever $200 for, so that was the technology back then.

Anne Ristau: I do remember when VHS and CDs were exciting new technologies, and I’d love for you to talk about your time at Topgolf because you were there when it grew incredibly rapidly and led a lot of new business ventures.

Jeehae Lee: I joined Topgolf in 2015, right after graduating from business school, and they were, I think at the time they had 14 venues globally and no other [00:11:00] businesses. They were a venue based business, and in my first year they acquired a gaming company called World Golf Tour and a technology company in Sweden called Protracer, which they rebranded to top tracers.

So they went through this extraordinary trans transformation into a sports technology, media, entertainment business. And by the time I left, they had I think, 70 venues worldwide. Which is crazy to think about. If you’ve been to a Topgolf, you know exactly how grand and like how big of a business each standalone venue is.

And to have added that many venues in the span of five years is pretty crazy.

Anne Ristau: Alright, so let’s, let’s go to Sports Box ai. Um, when did you start this company and can you give us the overview or the pitch for what it does?

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, so in 2020 I left Topgolf to pursue something more entrepreneurial by 2020.

As I mentioned, [00:12:00] Topgolf had grown into this massive organization with layers and layers and I wanted to do something. That I can really build with my own bare hands, always dreamt of being an entrepreneur. So I left and met my co-founder, Sam Maner and Rich and Mike Kennewick, who were building up this technology that can turn video into 3D data.

And by that I mean you point and shoot just like you would record a video. Instead of just getting that video image, you’re also getting a full 3D object of that human body. You’ll see in our app, there’s a avatar, a robot that you can spin around 360 or look at it from top to bottom, and also measure how the different parts of the body are moving throughout the motion.

So. We built the product for golf initially that allowed a coach or a golfer to take a [00:13:00] video and measure exactly what the swing did to produce the shot that they just hit. It’s called Sports Box 3D Golf, and yeah, it’s been adopted by some of the best players in coaches in the world.

Anne Ristau: How long did it take to launch a viable POC, which it is if you’ve not seen the Sports Box AI bot.

It is really incredible to watch it, especially next to a video of a live person and you can tell who is swinging.

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, exactly. It still boggles my mind and people ask like, how did you do that? I’m like. It’s magic. Magic. Sometimes the best way to describe it is, I mean, it’s ai, but it’s also magic. It looks magical to me.

But to get from, you know, I, I started working with Sam in October of 2020, and he had spent, you know, most of 2020 kind of building up a backend. So by the time I joined, there was some semblance of like. A prototype. And then within [00:14:00] six months we had an application that could do what I described, which is take a video and turn it into an avatar and some motion data.

And we took that out to, I’ll always remember our first PG tour event to show it to some players and coaches out there. And it worked maybe 50% of the time. And, and this is gonna come back full circle, but one of the swings we captured was Bryson DeChambeau. And for golfers out there, you know how extreme his swing is in every way possible.

It’s extremely fast. His range of motion is extreme versus even the best players in the world. And so it literally broke our avatar. When we try to analyze his swing, it like disintegrated right in front of our eyes. So unfortunately we didn’t make a connection with Bryson back then, but um, that was kind of our first.

Go at it.

Anne Ristau: Wow. Well, timing is certainly everything and cool [00:15:00] to hear how that started. Before we get to Bryson, uh, have you raised outside funding and what was that process like?

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, we’ve raised about $9 million so far through, um, couple tranches of seed round on fundraising, and we’re getting ready for a Series A As a first time founder, I have no other kind of point of reference.

We’ve been very lucky in that we’ve got a very good mix of institutional investors that specialize in sports that have been incredibly supportive and influential in how we grow our business, as well as individuals and strategics like the TG of America and individuals like Sean Foley and David Ledbetter and Michelle West, who also have been incredibly valuable in having on our tap table.

Anne Ristau: That’s an amazing set of insights to also have and to have their guidance. Who is your primary customer today?

Jeehae Lee: Our current customer base. Our twofold one is the [00:16:00] prosumer markets, which are composed of coaches. And there are a lot of actually fitness professionals, like golf focused trainers that are using our product to help their clients actually move better in a functional way and measure whether, whether they’re making progress.

And then our second target are obviously golfers that want to work on their game. And we categorize this group of golfers as, I mean. Jokingly golf nerds, but they’re the people for whom game improvement in golf versus enjoyment or social or like exercise, whatever these other objectives may be for playing a sport.

Game improvement is their number one objective and playing it. And so we have a lot of kind of these golf nerves that are figuring out how to use this data for their game.

Anne Ristau: I think Bryson might be the epitome of a golf nerd, I mean, renowned for his attention to the smallest [00:17:00] details, his engineering background.

Tell us how you got involved, um, with Bryson and became a part of his training.

Jeehae Lee: So, Bryson’s coached Dana Alquist. They’ve been working together for a little over a year. Dan has been using Sports Box for a few years now, pretty much from the very start of our viable product. For coaches, and he uses it in every lesson, whether he is teaching a Tour Pro or um, average amateur on the range.

He uses our product because he uses it as a communication tool. Um, and what I mean by that is, you know, prior to having Sports Box as a tool, coaches are trying to describe a movement to teach them, teach somebody and say like, oh. You look like you’re sliding too much or you’re not turning far enough. Or they might throw out a terminology like you’re reverse pivoting.

And none of those things are [00:18:00] precise enough and they’re all subjective, right? Like it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like what looks like too much slide to me, may not look like too much slide to another person. Right? And certainly may feel very different to the person you’re teaching. So he uses. Data to say, okay, you’re sliding two inches.

I want you to move only one inch, which becomes very clear and objective. So long story short, he uses it at every lesson, including Bryson. And so the relationship became like it formed through Dana, but when we launched our partner product with Foresight Sports, where Foresite Sports is a launch monitor that can track where the ball went and measure the bulk light.

Which I’m gonna call outcome. And what we measure is the process. Like what did the swing do to deliver the club in such a way that made the ball go in a certain direction? Put those things [00:19:00] together. You have the perfect data set, the perfect full picture for every golf sling. And so when we approached.

Bryon with this idea of capturing every one of his swings with that full, complete data set. He was very excited and, and he immediately had a lot of questions that he wanted to answer for his own gain using our data.

Anne Ristau: Wow. Well, I was sitting on my couch watching the post coverage of Pinehurst this year, and my ears picked up when I heard Bryon really give credit both to Dana and to Sports Box ai.

I felt like Will Ferrell in Elf. I was like, gee, hey, I know her. That was awesome. You got a ton of accolades in, of course, the golf press, but also were even covered in the New York Times. Can you talk about how that felt as a founder of a small tech startup?

Jeehae Lee: First of all, elf is my favorite movie of all time.

[00:20:00] Love it. Period. End of sentence. And yeah, that moment I, I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s totally unexpected. I was obviously glued to the TV throughout the entire week rooting for him. I mean, in the beginning of the week I was like, please just have one good day so that the information that I gave him isn’t the reason for him not playing well.

And then after his first day, I was like. Wow. Like maybe he can, maybe he can contend. He’s contending, this is so great. And then by the final day I was like, oh my God, he’s gonna win this thing. And obviously there’s so much that goes into winning a championship and I mean, he’s an incredible athlete, but to feel like we have played a part in a success, that alone gave us so much.

Joy and validation that what we were doing was in fact valuable to at least one person in the world. Right. And then the [00:21:00] cherry on top was his shoutouts. I mean, and the, the press conference immediately after in the golf trainer interview in the box, he just kept mentioning sports box. And you know, mind you, there was no.

He had nothing to gain from that. He, he, he wasn’t a shareholder, he wasn’t an investor, like there was no ambassador relationship to, for him to like, want, like, need to talk about it that way. But he truly felt like there was credit to be shared. So it was a pretty cool moment.

Anne Ristau: Talk a little bit about what you’re launching, the Sports Box studio and other new product and your go-to market priorities right now.

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, I mean, one of the hardest things that I, I constantly deal with is just prioritization. We’ve got a lot going on. And as a small startup, every opportunity looks like a good opportunity. But the few things that we’re super focused on [00:22:00] are our mobile products, finding product market fit with the golf nerds in the world.

And then we just launched a new product called Studio, which allows a indoor golf center or a individual homeowner with the golf simulator to install a camera that connects to Windows software. That can do what our mobile app can do, except a little more seamlessly, hands-free type of experience where you can just keep swinging and get the data that you’re looking for, just like a, a launch monitor experience.

Anne Ristau: I love thinking about strategy as not only what you will do, but certainly what you won’t do, which is a huge challenge for any scaling tech organization. Also, with the rise of ai, I think we’re seeing across companies that the value is often in the data itself. Can you talk about the future of sports box AI and what that means for it?

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, so we currently have the [00:23:00] largest database of. Golf sling data compiled in the history of the world, simply because the phone is something that everybody can access. And so we’ve scaled very quickly and so with the amount of data that that we have, we’re leveraging, we’re learning very interesting things about the golf sling and moving from assumptions and opinions and kind of eyeballed insights, if you will, to.

Data backed and data driven understanding of the cause and effect in the golf swing. So as a professional golfer and and golfer all my life, I used to struggle with the inevitable situation where you would hit great shots or you would have a period of great golf, and then all of a sudden it disappeared and you start hitting it awful.

You just have no clue. Like you have no idea why, and you start going down a rabbit hole and chasing different fields, and then [00:24:00] you’re lost and you just lost three months of your season searching. And you know, of course coaches are there to help you, but at the end of the day, as experienced as they are, as informed as their opinions are, nothing will be better than data backed decisions and data backed understanding of.

What makes you hit it, left, right, center, you know, high low. And so I think that’s the biggest breakthrough that we can contribute to in the game, is truly understanding the relationship between how you move and the outcome And beyond that, what I think is really exciting is that we’re experienced with, with Bryson is we’ve now been part of his team at the US Open and the open championship.

And collecting hundreds and hundreds of his swings with the foresight sports data. And we can now almost predict how he’s going to play that day based on [00:25:00] his range warmup sessions, because we know what his baseline is, what makes him hit it best, and if anything is outta range versus his normative range.

And we can kind of say, oh, he’s probably gonna pull it a little bit today, or he’s probably going to fade it a little bit today. So while that’s still very preliminary, I 100% believe that the power of the data is in the predictive analytics for the game. So I think if you just kind of noodle on that, you can think of all the different possibilities that can arise.

Anne Ristau: There’s certainly nature and nurture, but would you say you could fix anyone’s swing? Or maybe better to say, could you make any golfer the best version of themselves?

Jeehae Lee: What gets

me out of bed is everybody is capable of hitting it right? How do we get them there faster? How do we get them to do that more consistently is something that we’re uniquely [00:26:00] qualified to do.

So. I do believe that, one, everybody can become better golfers, and two, we can help them accelerate that process by using data. And three, I think, you know, we can help people play more consistent golf more often.

Anne Ristau: What’s been the hardest part about being a founder, CEO?

Jeehae Lee: It’s a good question for this week, because I’m having, I’m having a week, but there are a lot of ups and downs similar to being an athlete.

There are days when you’re like, wow, I’m, I’m the best golfer in the world, right? Like, I am gonna go win everything tomorrow. Tomorrow is my day, right? You have those days and then it, the game kind of beats you up and you, you are crying in your hotel room. You, you know, ordering it and room service by yourself.

Like you have those extreme ups and downs, and I think that’s. That’s very similar as an entrepreneur, you, you have [00:27:00] extreme highs and lows and sometimes it feels lonely ’cause you feel like you can’t really talk about your problems with anyone. ’cause you, you need to kind of present this strong, like, invincible, I can do anything.

You, you should invest in me, that kind of a facade. So I think that’s the hardest part.

Anne Ristau: I certainly do think that competing as an athlete, there’s no better training in grit and perseverance, which is critical in any type of business success, but certainly as a founder, entrepreneur. And last question about sports Fox ai, what, what do you see as the long term goal or future for your company?

Jeehae Lee: Yeah, I believe that we should be and will be part of every. Bay, hitting bay where there’s a swing being taken, whether that’s a indoor golf center or a top golf, or a home simulator where people are practicing. We should be built [00:28:00] into every one of those experiences because of the value that we can drive for golfers and coaches or anybody who utilizes that bay.

Anne Ristau: Love it. All right. We’re gonna wrap up with some rapid fire questions to get to know you a bit also as a person. Um, what is your favorite golf course to play?

Jeehae Lee: One is our home course in San Francisco, lake Merced. It’s, I can play that cor golf course every single day of my life and not get tired of it.

And then diapers point,

Anne Ristau: do you get to play a lot?

Jeehae Lee: I play. On average nine holes a week. That’s bad. And yeah, and it’s, uh, it’s nice to get out with my husband and my friends. A great way to spend time with the people that you, you love. But I struggle to play more than nine holes at a time.

Anne Ristau: Any predictions for Olympic gold

Jeehae Lee: for women?

I mean, Nellie’s had such an extraordinary [00:29:00] season. Hard to bet against her. But I’d love to see Lydia win. Lydia Co. Lydia of course got a silver medal at the last Olympics. So, you know, I think she’d do. And then for the men, I mean, Xander Schley coming off of a two major championship season. Hard to bet against him.

Anne Ristau: Favorite Topgolf venue?

Jeehae Lee: Vegas.

Anne Ristau: I love Vegas too. I’ve not been to Nashville, but those frozen Moscow meals are incredible. What shows are you currently watching? Do you still catch Saved by the Bell or have you moved on?

Jeehae Lee: Uh, I’ve moved on from Saved by the Bell. I actually haven’t turned on a show in a long time.

I’m deep into the Korean dramas, though I’ve rifled through so many of them on Netflix. I would say one I would recommend amongst the Korean shows is Crash Landing on You. Highly recommend.

Anne Ristau: I love that you make time for golf and for some television hard to do as a tech founder. Ghe, thank you so much [00:30:00] for joining us on the Navigating Sports Business podcast and giving us some insights into your fascinating world.

Jeehae Lee: Thank you so much, and this was a, a really fun conversation. Thank you for letting, letting me share a little bit about my journey.

Anne Ristau: If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us. My email is ANNE@NVGT.com, and you can also connect with us on my personal LinkedIn or the Navigate page.

Again, this is Anne Ow with Navigate. Joined by GHA Lee, CEO and founder of Sports Box ai. Thank you for joining us on Navigating Sports Business. Please stay well.