"We’re all about making a coach’s life as easy as possible" - Interview with Vasu Kulkarni, CEO, Krossover.com

Vasu Kulkarni, CEO, Krossover.com

Krossover.com is a start-up based in New York City. It aims to disrupt the big budget sports analytics market by offering ever small team the same kind of analytics and film analysis that have traditionally been the prerogative of the big budget teams.

Read more about the project in this interview with its founder Vasu Kulkarni who has roots in Bangalore, India.

Q. How did the idea of Krossover.com come about?

A. During my time playing at the University of Pennsylvania, I got a first hand look at how much manual labour went into our coach’s preparation for game day. It seemed ridiculous to me that in the 21st century, coaches would still spend hours and hours cutting up film and looking for data. Being one of the few computer engineers to come through the basketball program at Penn, a light bulb went off that told me there had to be a better way.

After a couple of months of market research, it dawned on me that just building a solution for the 1% of teams that have most of the money was pointless. Not only was it a relatively small market, but it wouldn’t really change anything, since those teams already had the resources to do whatever was needed. In order to truly change an industry, and to make sports more data-driven, we had to start at the grassroots level and make coaches and players understand the value of data and analytics in sports. Only then would we truly see a new side to the game of basketball/other sports.

After talking to all these coaches at different levels, we decided that we wanted to build a web application that would allow a coach to upload a video and go to bed. By the time he woke up in the morning, he should have access to the same level of information than an NBA team would have. And that’s what we did.

Q. Did you ever imagine that your love of basketball would one day merge with your work?

A. I’m a dreamer and so I can’t say that I didn’t hope this would happen one day. I obviously didn’t know for sure, but I always hoped that I would be able to do something basketball-related. Ever since I was five years old, I have been absolutely enamoured by the game.

Imagine a 6-year-old child crying every time Jordan and the Bulls lost a game (good thing they didn’t lose very often!). My parents thought I was crazy, but there was just something about the game that captivated me, and since then, I have always been willing to do anything when it came to basketball. As I was graduating college, I realized that if I didn’t find something that blended my passion for technology and basketball, I would be pretty miserable as a 9-to-5 employee, so I’m lucky that the idea for Krossover hit me when it did.

Q. What would you say is the big difference between big budget sports analytics firms and Krossover? What makes your solution so affordable?

A. The industry is really broken up into two types of solutions.

- Video editing software where the coaching staff has to cut up the film

- Video/Analytics services where a third party does most of the work and the coaching staff just has to review the finished product

Obviously, Krossover falls into the second category, and we’re really one of two providers that provide a legitimate service. The other provider costs about 10 times the cost and resembles a massive spreadsheet of thousands of stats. At the end of the day, the point of a technology company is to give the end user an experience that is easy to use and assimilate.

From what we’ve seen, nobody has spent as much time as us building beautiful interfaces that coaches and athletes love to interact with. Nobody wants to be greeted with a 10-page spreadsheet after a game that they need to decipher. We’re all about making a coach’s life as easy as possible, while giving them everything they need to win more games.

As far as pricing goes, we made a decision early on that we wanted pretty much any team in the world to be able to afford us. This meant that our margins would be slim per team, and we would have to go after a volume business in order for it to make economic sense. We could have just as easily increased the price 10 times, and said forget about the lower level of the market, but we felt strongly about not doing that since we would be like every other company then.

Q. Does Krossover depend on a great TV feed to build the foundation of the analytics or is it able to cull data even from rudimentary TV coverage off just a handful of cameras?

A. Nope. 95% of our video footage comes from a mom with a $200 handy-cam shooting the game from the sidelines in just a single feed. As long as the footage is decent and the jersey numbers are visible to the human eye, we don’t need anything else.

Q. Do you get a lot skepticism from big budget college/pro teams about your solution based your price point? Have any big name teams or individuals signed on to Krossover at this time (if you are able to divulge names)?

Yes and no. The skepticism from big budget teams is less about cost, and more about the fact that they already have a handful of guys on staff whose job is to do what we do. That said, several coaches have realized that even if they have their own staff, it still makes more sense to pay us a fraction of what they are paying their assistants to let us do a better job and to have an online platform that allows their players to watch film on their own time.

We’ve worked with the University of Kentucky Wildcats, some NBA teams, and a lot of pro teams overseas in Europe and Asia. It’s only a matter of time before a lot of younger guys that have grown up in the internet age start getting head coaching jobs, and we hope to always be one of their first five phone calls after getting the gig.

Q. Is your offering currently only limited to basketball, lacrosse and football (Gridiron kind)? Are there any plans of other sports being added in the near term?

A. At the moment, yes. However, we always try to add one new sport every year, and so 2014 will likely bring volleyball or soccer to the table (or perhaps both if our team beats deadlines).

Q. Have you had any inquiries from developing countries, which may be more non-traditional markets for sports analytics, yet? The price point certainly seems more affordable for them when compared to the current market leaders.

We have been really shocked to see the interest from countries that I never knew even had any sort of organized basketball. We recently signed up a team from Vietnam, which completely blew my mind. Apart from that, we’ve had teams from England, Malaysia, Singapore, and Mexico, just to name a few.

I think we are in over 15 countries this year, and it was completely unplanned. Coaches have just been hearing about us from their buddies or on Twitter, and reaching out to us to take their program to the next level.