PodPlay Technologies: Use Your Phone to Put Down Your Phone
I had the pleasure of interviewing Ben Borton, Chief Strategy Officer of PingPod Inc and a Co-Founder of PodPlay Technologies. PingPod, founded in 2019, pioneered the autonomous operating model. Today it operates a network of 18 tech-enabled autonomous ping pong venues and 5 autonomous pool clubs (under the Sharks brand). PodPlay Technologies, founded in 2023, is a wholly owned subsidiary of PingPod, which licenses the tech stack that powers PingPod to venue operators across multiple experience verticals including ping pong, pool, pickleball, padel, and soccer.
What motivated you to launch your startup?
I joined PingPod because of the people, the product, the mission, and the opportunity to build a category-defining company. Check out this blog: Why I’m Joining PingPod for more background. We had a huge opportunity to take the tech stack that we had built to power PingPods and license it to like-minded sports venue operators. When PingPod Founder and CEO Max Kogler approached me about joining to help lead that effort, I jumped at the opportunity.
I’ve known Max for close to 20 years. I was the seed investor in a quantitative hedge fund he started and I ultimately joined that firm as a partner. Nowadays we call that our period of “turning math into money.” We were using math to solve some really hard problems in options markets, which was lucrative and intellectually satisfying, but ultimately left us both wanting more from a purpose standpoint. You could make a case that we were contributing to “price discovery” or “providing liquidity” but that doesn’t really feel like moving humanity forward. Ultimately we both had to go on a journey from roles as investors to operators to make the change we wanted to see in the world.
It was a long road for me to find my way from the hedge fund world to the tech world and ultimately to a startup like PodPlay that is using innovative technology to do something philosophically positive with great unit economics. I’ve come to appreciate over time just how rare that combination is. I was influenced in this regard by my first foray into the tech world, as an angel investor in NYC based fintech Learnvest Inc. Alexa von Tobel dropped out of HBS to found Learnvest in the middle of the Global Financial Crisis. The idea was to build a tech platform to make financial education and advice accessible. The initial target market was women. Promoting financial literacy and sound advice to women into a market where men had brought the global financial system to the brink of ruin was an easy mission to get behind. The mission acted as a magnet for investors, partners, and employees. Learnvest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual. It was a great outcome — my key learning was that tech + mission + positive economics was a very powerful configuration.
I saw the potential for that same configuration when Max pitched me on PingPod in 2019. I was the first outside investor, became an informal advisor to the founding team, and I jumped at the opportunity in 2022 when Max, David and Ernesto invited me to join to help drive growth and launch PodPlay as our technology subsidiary. Our mission has been a magnet for great people and partnerships. I like to say that we are “using technology to increase the quantum of fun in the world.” What could be more philosophically positive than that?
Mission alone isn’t enough though. There are plenty of companies with a great mission and bad economics, which will tend to turn out to be a value transfer rather than a durable business. Driving sustainable unit economics is only possible if you are profitably delivering a ton of value to customers. PodPlay’s technology goes beyond simply making sports venues more efficient to opening up new revenue streams with video replays, and shifting economics by allowing clubs to pursue a labor light business model.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
Doing something truly different, something that makes a tangible positive change in human behavior. In the early days it is extraordinarily hard being a category of one. When the market comes around to your vision — which is happening today with PodPlay — it is amazingly gratifying. We have made progress with the autonomous experience operating model, but it is still very early days. I wake up every day excited to try to move the project forward.
We think modern society has a screen time problem and that the technology we are building at PodPlay can help solve it. We like to say the technology helps customers “use their phone to put down their phone.” Working on that problem is exciting. We seek to channel the powers of your smartphone towards real-life activities that are healthy, fun, and social. Ours is a technology that feeds your ability to focus and connect rather than disturbing it. Experiences like pickleball, padel and ping pong, that are active, require focus, and are unmediated by smartphones, are becoming an ever more important part of a healthy life.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
Focus. In a fast-growing startup there are always a hundred things you can be doing — partnerships to consider, demos to give, features to build, and the list goes on and on. We have an expansive long-term vision for what we want to build, but, in order to be successful, we have to hold that vision in our minds at the same time that we are laser-focused on executing. Every day we have to fight the inclination to say yes, often to great ideas and great opportunities that just don’t rise to the level of a priority. Some of the most important decisions we make are when to say no. We follow the lead of our CEO Max Kogler — his ability to prioritize is world class.
What are your future plans for your startup?
PodPlay is very focused on the fast-growing pickleball market. In their 2023 State of Pickleball: Participation & Infrastructure Report Pickleheads & SFIA estimate that there are 12,081 Pickleball facilities in the U.S. with an average of 4.3 courts per facility, for a total of 51,937 courts. Over 70% of these courts are temporary in nature. The report estimates that the U.S. will need to spend $900 million over the next 5–7 years to build 25,800 dedicated courts in order to reach 1 dedicated court per 500 participants.
We think this market will coalesce around a single default technology solution for managing clubs, and our bet is that the winner will combine hardware and software to produce the best user experience. Integrating software with hardware goes beyond the traditional role of vertical software (venue management) to impacting the consumer experience itself in the case of replay and the business model in the case of autonomous mode. Video replay, as implemented by PodPlay, is a vehicle for authenticity in a world that is progressively becoming more staged for Instagram. As we like to say, “sharing from life rather than living to share.”
Below are links to pieces we have published on hardware-enabled features:
Blog on Replay Feature: Changing the Game
Blog on Digital Scoreboards: Digital Scoreboards + DUPR
Blog on Autonomous Mode: What Consumers Want
And here is a Podcast I did with PodPlay client Performance Pickleball RVA in Richmond, VA. The PodPlay portion starts at the 13.30 mark if you are time constrained.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
If you have a worthy idea, just get started. I think a lot of first time founders worry they may not be ready, but I think that worry is often overblown. There are real advantages to getting started on the entrepreneurial path earlier. Whether successful or not, founding a company will accelerate your learning. In order to survive and thrive, a founder will have to dive into many more “jobs” than they would in a narrowly defined role at a big company. And most people have a greater capacity to take risks when they are younger, because they don’t have as many responsibilities and obligations as people who are a bit older and may have a spouse and children. If you have a personality that can cope with a certain amount of uncertainty, just get started. What you lack in wisdom as a young person you may make up for in having nothing to lose. And learning compounds over time. The earlier you get started, the longer your learning has to compound.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/borton/
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
