How a Hall of Fame Hockey Goalie Inspired my Software Company

I obsess over performance. No, not in the intermittent fasting, biohacking, Silicon Valley-esque blood transfusion way. My obsession with performance is about recognizing and aiming for excellence.

Excellence is why I’m building Tango, a software company spotlighting the discrete steps taken to achieve mastery. Why do I care so much about how results are achieved?

I suppose it all comes back to Dominik Hasek, a legendary hockey goalie for the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. As a proud Buffalo sports fan, I knew excellence when I watched the Dominator. Sure, his statistics were incredible: saving 92% of shots faced in his career, recording 13 shutouts in one season, and winning Gold in Nagano in 1998. But it was really how he did it that was so special. He turned conventional wisdom about goaltending technique on its head. Literally.

Players before him, referred to today as “stand-up” goalies, relied on proper angles to the puck and disciplined handling of the stick. Hasek usually lacked both. Instead of maximizing coverage of the net, he used his flexibility to cover the ice.

In one of MasterCard’s iconic “Priceless” advertisements, Hasek was described as “having a slinky for a spine: priceless.” He flopped, rolled, sprawled, and dove throughout what many consider the greatest goaltending career in NHL history.

The method to his madness endeared him to fans. You would guess my childhood bedroom walls were sponsored by the Hasek family. There was something so unconventionally awesome about how he stopped the puck. From then on, how something happened mattered to me as much as what happened.

Fast forward to 2019, I met two classmates with a similar obsession. Dan, Brian, and I became fast friends at Harvard Business School. Brian, a lifelong hacker, drew energy from finding the elegance in a simple solution. Dan, a mentor beyond measure, believed everyone had the power to be a better version of themselves. We brought these values together to form Tango.

At Tango, we celebrate how work gets done. Elevate the elegance in wading through complexity. Provide the roadmap to do it better next time. Recognize excellence. Armed with these principles, we dropped out of school and recruited an all-star team to join us.

Now, we’re building workflow intelligence software that helps organizations accelerate new hire ramp time, multiply top performers, and amplify best practices. No longer will team leaders and top performers spend endless hours codifying and documenting operational excellence.

We’ve studied the uncertainty organizations face in bringing people up to speed. As average job tenure shortens and as job complexity rises, the problem is top of mind for business leaders.

• How do we close the skills gap?
• What should new hires learn?
• Who should they learn it from?
• How fast should they learn it?
• How do we know it’s been learned?

For many teams, those questions remain unanswered. Tango addresses these questions head-on. Our workflow capture engine records the step-by-step activity of top performers to make processes easily reviewable and understood. And it’s only day one. Workflow intelligence can ultimately change everything about team productivity and help everyone become masters of their craft.

Much like the Dominator, we have an opportunity to showcase excellence — the how. Make high performance visible and show others the path to achieve it. And like a slinky, we’re full steam ahead with no signs of slowing down.

Let’s Tango!