The Power of Communication: How GoRout Technology is Disrupting the Sports Industry

02:05

Dave Almy

Mike, I read the SBJ article about you and Goroute and I have to admit that I kind of fell in love with the first sentence of the article. Right. It's like Mike Rowley was just a limo driver with an idea. And I felt like that kind of set such a great tone for going into a bit of the origin story about you and Go Route. So can you provide a little bit of background and some insight into the. The aha moment that led to the creation of what would become Go Route. So give me a little bit of backstory, if you would.

02:41

Mike Rolih

Yeah. So that the limo driving thing actually happened. It was more of a need because we had just moved to Minnesota.

02:52

Dave Almy

Okay.

02:52

Mike Rolih

And I was, we lived in Chicago. I was in pro baseball. I was doing a couple different things for some organizations. We, we want to start having a family. My wife was like I want to be closer to mine. So we moved to Minnesota, and I'm a tinkerer. I like to build things and play with things, and I have all kinds of projects running all the time.

03:14

Dave Almy

Right, so you were a Lego kid. You were. You were always building stuff.

03:17

Mike Rolih

Yeah, I always. I mean, all kinds of random stuff, right? Like nets, you know, ropes and trees. Like, all kinds of different stuff. All. All my life. Well, we got. We finally were out of a condo and into our own home, and we moved to Minnesota. And I was great at doing something about 80% of the way there.

03:36

Dave Almy

And then later, there's a lawnmower is in the garage a little bit disassembled.

03:42

Mike Rolih

Yeah, she was just like, you need to just get out of the house and go do something. So we moved to Minnesota. Financially, were in a position where I could say, okay, we sold the condo. We could take a minute here, we take a break. Let's just figure out what we want to be for the next couple of years. And she was like, you need to go figure out what you're going to be, but you can't be here when you're doing that.

04:05

Dave Almy

So was the baseball career over at this time? Were you stepping back from baseball or were you still playing?

04:11

Mike Rolih

No, I was done playing, and everything was done and wrapped up and it was. I was done coaching, I was done scouting. Like, I was. I. I put baseball behind me. I was kind of out of. Out of the game altogether.

04:24

Dave Almy

Got it.

04:24

Mike Rolih

And so I was like, well, I need to figure out what I want to do. I like driving. Like, I have no issue driving for 5, 6 hours at a time. Like, I'm happy to do it. It's just a good time to just really go very inside of my own brain and think through things.

04:39

Dave Almy

Very meditative.

04:40

Mike Rolih

Yeah, it really is like. And there's nothing better than just knowing that it's a straight path from where you're going A to B, and you can just kind of zone out and just put the thing on cruise and go. And so I took this job driving limo because it was just an opportunity for me to do that. And.

04:57

Dave Almy

And we're talking about a, A, a long stretch black limousine or town Car here. This is not Uber. This is not.

05:05

Mike Rolih

Right.

05:05

Dave Almy

None of. None of those. This is the traditional limo driver process is what we're talking about here.

05:11

Mike Rolih

Yeah, I was actually. What I was doing, I was working for a limo service. And while I was just grabbing people from Mayo Clinic and taking them up to the Minneapolis airport, which is an hour and 20 minutes away.

05:19

Dave Almy

Okay. Yeah.

05:20

Mike Rolih

Coming back and forth, pick, bringing them back and forth. So it's just a Lincoln Town Car, very easy to drive.

05:27

Dave Almy

And you're on autopilot. You're going between Mayo and the airport.

05:30

Mike Rolih

Right. That was it. And the idea was, behind all of it was if I did come up with an idea, the chances that I would be able to engage with somebody that I was driving, strike up a conversation strategically, it was like, well, if they're taking a limo from A to B, at least they're going to be willing to be somebody maybe I'd want to have a conversation with. So I'm doing this, I'm doing it for maybe six months to a year, a couple times a week. And a buddy of mine gets a coaching job in, at a junior college here in town. Rctc. Go out and watch them practice.

06:11

Dave Almy

Just rolled a limo right up to the front door.

06:14

Mike Rolih

No, I took my own car for these. But I went out and watched him practice and the. He was a big. I want to throw the ball a bunch of times. Mike Leach spread me out. Throw the ball over. And they got to the part of practice where they were prepping and repping for the next opponent. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, preparation. And all of a sudden what was operating as a very fine tuned machine started to turn into chaos and breakdown and screaming and expletives. It was just, it went from being like, oh, this is actually really fun to watch to what the hell are they doing?

06:50

Dave Almy

I think everybody who's ever coached who's listening to this right now is getting a little cold sweat about finding that finely tuned practice plan starting to dissolve in front of their eyes.

07:01

Mike Rolih

And it happens every week.

07:03

Dave Almy

Yeah, yeah.

07:05

Mike Rolih

Because you're having players run plays that aren't things that you're teaching your coaching. Right. They're running the oppositions sets.

07:13

Dave Almy

Right. Right. You have to basically provide the competitors look for your team.

07:19

Mike Rolih

Yep. And so you're holding up a piece of paper with 11D, you know, 11 drawings on it and you're having a bunch of players 18 to 22 stand around who have the, you know, the attention span of a Twitter post. Right. 140 characters. And you're trying to explain to them what you need them to do. And then they turn around and they go back to the line of scrimmage and they try to run the play. And it's just the translation, it was just such.

07:43

Dave Almy

Yeah. Probably 40% effective.

07:45

Mike Rolih

ng things that we did back in: 1995

08:02

Dave Almy

How has this not moved anywhere?

08:04

Mike Rolih

Right? And. And there were really three options. Do it the way they were doing it. Give more coaches paper so they could talk to less kids. Like, section it out, you know, outside left, outside right in the box. Or they could spend time drawing these really intricate diagrams. And they didn't. They were a junior college. They didn't have staff on site all day. This is very DIY to do all that. And so I was like, well, there's gotta be something better. So I went to a bunch of different high schools in the area and watched them practice, too, and they all had a very similar problem. Kind of that same window of practice, you could. You could almost see it coming.

08:41

Dave Almy

Did you, at this point, when you were going around to the other schools and seeing the same problem being replicated over and over again, did you start to get excited? Did you start to think, hey, there's a problem here I can solve, or had it not come to you yet?

09:03

Mike Rolih

It hadn't come to me yet. I just knew that there was chaos there and that there was an organizational mechanism that needed to be applied.

09:10

Dave Almy

Okay.

09:11

Mike Rolih

That was. That's all I knew. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know how it was going to turn up.

09:16

Dave Almy

Okay, so how did you start to attack the problem then?

09:20

Mike Rolih

So it was funny. I was actually sitting at the Minneapolis airport in between two drives, and I was on my phone and I don't know if I was on Twitter or what I was on, but a Madden video game popped up and I turned my phone sideways and I was like. I wanted to look at. Like, it was like some YouTuber or somebody was doing something. I was like, oh, that's the idea. They have this information already drawn up. Why don't we just have them send it from the people who have it to the people who need it? Like, we've been making phone calls and radio calls and all kinds of things for hundreds of years now, or a hundred years. Let's. Why can't we just do this with a football play?

10:05

Mike Rolih

Like, it was just a very much like, well, you idiot, you should have seen that immediately.

10:11

Dave Almy

Yeah, but by that logic, there's millions of people who should have seen it beforehand so far.

10:17

Mike Rolih

It's so funny, because the first couple of years of us having started this, so many people came up to Us and said I had that same idea. Right. And I always equate it to the. Not. Not that we're in anywhere comparison, but the example is very much like the Steve Jobs iPhone. It was like, well, BlackBerry almost got there and Copilot almost got there, but Steve Jobs. Now we're going to do it this way. Okay.

10:42

Dave Almy

So for those. Real quick though, Mike, because I think it's valuable at this point for people who are unfamiliar with go route. Can you talk a little bit about what it is and how you solved that or are in the process of solving that practice chaos that's going on. How do you. What was the result?

11:08

Mike Rolih

Yeah, so what we ended up, what I ended up building was effectively the first wearable coach to player communication system.

11:16

Dave Almy

Okay. So. Right.

11:19

Mike Rolih

It was a wearable display.

11:21

Dave Almy

Okay.

11:21

Mike Rolih

Where instead of like traditional NFL, you talk to somebody in their ear and they hear it the play call, this was a display screen. This was an image that would show up on a device for each player and allow that player to see precisely what their responsibility was for that play.

11:40

Dave Almy

Yeah.

11:42

Mike Rolih

Without having to come back to a huddle. Without having to have a coach sit down and walk you through each individual step. It was just the way I equated. It was like it was literally Twitter for a football player. It was bite sized. Bit of information. I'm the X receiver. I don't have to look at the whole card. I just need to look at the X. Yeah.

12:05

Dave Almy

It's such an interesting thing too, the way that. How people learn also. Right. Because I'll speak personally. Right. If I go into a group of people and somebody walks me through something, there's a 10% success rate. I'm a visual guy and I think a lot of athletes are trained because so much of the sport is visual.

12:25

Mike Rolih

Right.

12:26

Dave Almy

Right there. There's a success rate that they have by applying their visual acuity. So like that ability to learn, not only just like a learning style, but that's the medium with which they're now accustomed.

12:37

Mike Rolih

Well, and you got to remember, most of the people that were, especially the kids today coming up, they've never lived their lives without a visual component for communication in their hands.

12:48

Dave Almy

Yeah, that's the expectation.

12:50

Mike Rolih

Right. So, yeah, their predominant learning modality is going to be a visual methodology because they live 100% of their lives in that method. You could see a whole group of teenagers sitting around each other, not saying a word, but they're all slacking each other, they're all snapping each other or sending text back and forth and so in my mind, if that's how they're already consuming information, why don't we just do it that way?

13:17

Dave Almy

Yeah. Rather than trying to channel them into a way that they're unaccustomed to learning, why don't we actually create a system that channels back towards the way that they expect to learn? But you're talking about a technology, you're talking about hardware. Right? You are, you're of assistant. You have a company and a product that is hardware related and you're starting up and there's a classic expression in the startup world is hardware is hard.

13:43

Mike Rolih

Yes.

13:44

Dave Almy

So. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Right. It's expensive, it's complex. And you're talking about something that's being inserted into football, which, you know, requires a certain amount of ruggedness to it. So as you think about the, you know, where you started with this process and where you are now, I'm interesting what you think you've learned about developing go route and what do you think other people who are thinking about hardware? Because like you said, everybody had the idea.

14:16

Mike Rolih

Right.

14:16

Dave Almy

But what are some of the things that you've learned about the development of the product that are.

14:21

Mike Rolih

Yeah, well, first thing I would tell anybody is just be a SaaS company.

14:26

Dave Almy

First, first recommendation is don't do it.

14:33

Mike Rolih

And I'm going to be very frank about this. We don't look at ourselves as a hardware company.

14:37

Dave Almy

Okay.

14:37

Mike Rolih

Hardware really is just a medium for us to display all the things that we do from a SaaS perspective.

14:43

Dave Almy

All the content. Yeah.

14:45

Mike Rolih

But it's a necessary evil because you can't take a computer out of the field. Right. So I mean, I guess you could. It'd just be a bad look. And so my methodology on the hardware side, and it started all the way back from that first time that I was like, oh, I got to build something, was I don't want to spend time building components, I want to spend time building software and networks and relate to in connectivity. I don't want to build the thing. And so we really spent a lot of our time figuring out how to simply de risk that aspect. Right. Because every investor that we've ever spoken with, their first objection has always been, well, you've got hardware. Hold on, let me walk you through what this actually means.

15:33

Mike Rolih

And so very early on in our existence, I spent a lot of my time focused on building relationships with people who were already making hardware and figuring out how to make it fit into our ecosystem. Right.

15:51

Dave Almy

So you're not building from Scratch. You're like, how can this existing product be retooled for my need?

15:57

Mike Rolih

Exactly, exactly.

15:59

Dave Almy

And that's more like a systems engineer challenge than anything else.

16:02

Mike Rolih

Yeah. Because you gotta really de risk. Right. Because you could spend 100% of all your capital building something that you get back in and you realize you left a button out.

16:11

Dave Almy

Oh, God, I think I just got a cold sweat.

16:14

Mike Rolih

Yeah. It's the scariest thing in the world. And so from my stand, it was like, okay, how can we keep talking with people who are already making stuff for other industries, other uses, and figuring out just simply how to repurpose?

16:27

Dave Almy

Right. Just retool it just that little bit, that tweak.

16:31

Mike Rolih

Right. And so what we got real good at was writing firmware building tools that would allow us to say, okay, this form factor really fits our methodology. It lives up to the things that we need to make, how we need it to perform. It's got all the components that we're looking for. We need you. Can you now load this firmware into it and let us test it? And after you run your test, it's like, hey, this works. Let's strike a wholesale agreement. Let's strike some type of sales opportunity where we're moving your stuff, but it's brand, whatever. And that leads you into a whole different series of opportunities. Right. So now we've got our own custom casings being made that wrap the devices.

17:15

Mike Rolih

So when I talk with people, we're always like, well, you got your football scout product, you gotta just be replacing them all the time. And I just went through this. In the last five years, we replaced.

17:28

Dave Almy

Four out of how many units? I mean, it's like, percentage, like 5, 30,000. Yeah. Okay. That's a pretty good rate of success.

17:37

Mike Rolih

Yeah. And so it's just once you find what you're looking for, understanding how to really get it to do what you need it to do.

17:46

Dave Almy

Yeah.

17:46

Mike Rolih

And you can't. You just keep looking?

17:49

Dave Almy

No, it's. It's interesting, right, because you're talking about, like, certainly building the software, ready the firmware. To your point that's its own challenge. It presents its unique challenge too, but sounds like equal part of the effort was just put into going and figuring out where is the existing technology that you can use.

18:06

Mike Rolih

Yeah.

18:06

Dave Almy

And just being really adept at going out and exploring the market.

18:09

Mike Rolih

Yeah. And just understanding how to source. Yeah, it was. That's really it. It was just really figuring out what made sense, and then how can we leverage it?

18:19

Dave Almy

I'm wondering if there was a unique moment or a particular challenge in the development of go route that you take unique pride in overcoming. Was there like a how the f exploitive are we going to solve this? And then getting to the other side of that and being like, man, we did that was pretty impressive.

18:39

Mike Rolih

There were so many.

18:42

Dave Almy

Which one do you want?

18:44

Mike Rolih

I'll tell you a really funny story. So when we first started this, it's really two stories. When we first started this, we started. Tried doing it on a local WI FI system. And we built this box, looks like an electrical box. And you open it up and there's a small little mini server, wires and everything. Well, the first time I took that through the airport, TSA scanned it into another room. They're like, what is this? And I had. I had a. I. And I knew I had a feeling that was going to happen, so I had a bunch of documentation to show them. Circuitry and all these different things. Like, this is really what it is.

19:28

Dave Almy

Yeah. Y. Go ahead and analyze it and carefully and gently, please.

19:33

Mike Rolih

I box. And in our first year,: 2016

20:16

Dave Almy

Oh, okay.

20:17

Mike Rolih

They wanted to practice on the inside of the stadium and they wanted to practice on their indoor on the backside of the other side of the stadium.

20:24

Dave Almy

Yeah. That's a tough ass for a WI fi.

20:26

Mike Rolih

Yes. And there just happened to be like 85 networks in the area.

20:30

Dave Almy

Oh, God.

20:31

Mike Rolih

So we show up to Arkansas State and this is. We didn't have like, Blake was just like, figure out. Figure out how to make it work.

20:39

Dave Almy

So he's the ultimate great customer. Right. He's saying, go ahead and use us as a more or less a template. Just want it to work.

20:47

Mike Rolih

Yeah. But were ultimately not the great product for him to do.

20:50

Dave Almy

Right.

20:50

Mike Rolih

Like, it wasn't a great situation. So I had one guy with me and then we had another guy that showed up. And I literally had these guys in like 100 foot booms going onto the scoreboards, like hooking up routers and. And like none of this was approved by the university to do or like. Like, were just out there doing it. Yeah.

21:12

Dave Almy

The campus IT department would have just had a heart attack.

21:16

Mike Rolih

Yeah. Like, it was not a great situation.

21:20

Dave Almy

Yeah.

21:20

Mike Rolih

And I remember after it was all done, we got it set up and I realized that it just was not going to work.

21:25

Dave Almy

Right. Because you could be doing this for every possible client. Because everybody's got their unique twist on this.

21:31

Mike Rolih

Right? Yeah. It was not scalable. And then just with the elemental conditions of local WI fi, just we're not going to allow it to do what we wanted to do. And I remember sitting, it was. If it was a hundred degrees that day, it was so hot. I remember sitting in Blake Anderson's office with my hands in my face, my face in my hands, and I'm like, blake, one, this isn't going to work. And two, I got to go figure out what I'm going to do next. Because I was like, I can't do that for everybody. Like, it's just not gonna work.

22:01

Dave Almy

Was a little panicky.

22:03

Mike Rolih

Oh, I was freaked out.

22:04

Dave Almy

You were.

22:05

Mike Rolih

I, I didn't know. I, I didn't know what to do.

22:07

Dave Almy

More than a little panicky. Yeah.

22:11

Mike Rolih

This whole thing is gonna end.

22:12

Dave Almy

This is the underlying technology for the whole thing here.

22:15

Mike Rolih

Right. Okay. And so it didn't work. And so I had to kind of go back to the drawing board. And the first real big milestone that we had to overcome was figuring out how to avoid these networking components, these networking issues. And that's when we just, we made the decision. Ultimately, through great relationships that we had with Verizon, we switched over to a 4G IoT type platform. And that's where a lot of this started to go from taking. It started to take off, is that were able to build now all of our systems to run on an IoT cloud based platform that was using cellular technology.

22:57

Dave Almy

So you stripped WI FI out of the equation all together. Yeah.

23:00

Mike Rolih

And it was a complete rewrite, rework of all of the components to do all the different things that we needed to do.

23:06

Dave Almy

That's such a hard decision though, too. Right. Because you've obviously invested time, energy and capital into building a WI FI based system. There's this inflection point where you have to go, do I keep dumping money, time and resource into fixing the existing system or do I go back to, like, to your point, back to the drawing parts? That's a, that's a hard moment.

23:28

Mike Rolih

It is. And it's not fun.

23:31

Dave Almy

No.

23:32

Mike Rolih

But it's also a necessary evil. You know, we always say in our organization that we're an organization of ideas. And the best idea always wins, doesn't matter who it comes from. And I don't take credit for many ideas in the organization because I think I've hired really great people to be around me and let them do their jobs. But that was the one time where I told engineering and it was me and two other guys that were sitting around writing the code all day. I said, guys, we're scrapping it all and restarting it over. And we're building it completely with the idea of being light and free flowing and focusing on an IoT type platform. And we're going to use cellular as the backbone.

24:14

Mike Rolih

But once we did that's where the scale started to happen, that's where we started to really grow, is because it was repeatable, it was scalable, and it was a structured backbone that we could rely on every single day to deliver a performance metric that we could at least categorize and say, we feel.

24:33

Dave Almy

Very good about this versus rolling into a school and saying, okay, how are we going to jury rig a communication system to be able to figure this out? We've got it baked in, right?

24:43

Mike Rolih

Yep. And it actually removed another massive barrier which was all the school IT departments because now we didn't have touch their infrastructure, so we didn't have to go through all the technology reviews and all the technology compliance stuff that institutions generally require you to go through.

24:57

Dave Almy

Right. Because you're basically a walled garden at that point. Right. I mean, you're your own standalone system.

25:02

Mike Rolih

Exactly. So it solved problems that we didn't realize were solving later down the line, as we started to go into Michigan or University of Alabama or, you know, some of the best high schools in the country where their technology departments are very much like, we want to have our hands on everything. We could actually literally tell them, you don't need to have your hands on anything.

25:23

Dave Almy

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So you've developed this product, you start to get success, you see how you can start to scale it, but you'd also run up against your market. Right. Because coaches could be a little set in their ways. Oh, yeah, right. I mean, not always the most like, oh, yeah, tell me what technology is going to help me out. Right. They have process, they have ways, they like to do things. So it's one thing to have the technology, it's a whole other thing to sell it in. So can you talk a little bit about that, how you started to work with coaches, the messages that you were finding useful that were breaking through to the kinds of people you wanted to reach with the product that you were putting together.

26:07

Mike Rolih

So the. Yes. In the sports technology world, the single biggest mistake most companies start out making is when they want to start to grow, they go and hire salespeople. What we did, what I wanted to do, the strategy I wanted to deploy was I wanted to go hire coaches. When we walk into a room, any football room in the country, our sales guys, Jeff Thorne, D3 national championship head coach Shane Hurd, FCS national champion coordinator Drew Robinson was at a DFO and assistant director of operations and a coach at four different division ones. I have quarterback coaches from division one programs on our sales staff.

26:53

Mike Rolih

When they walk into any football room in the country, they can get on the board, they can break down film, they can talk to people in a way that allows coaches to relax and understand that this isn't just selling you a technology. This is selling you a technology that we understand wraps around your process, doesn't require you to change your process. And we use a really big saying when we talk with coaches all the time, is that our technology actually bends to the will of the user. It doesn't require the user to bend to the will of technology. We're not locking you in. So if you hand draw your cards, you can hand draw them. If you use a certain drawing software, you can use that software and put everything into our system.

27:36

Mike Rolih

And that was one of the best decisions we ever made, was ensuring that when you go in and talk with a coach because you're 100% right. Like, I just got back yesterday from one of the biggest football coaches clinic in the country, AFCA. We're down in Charlotte this year, and 90% of the conversations that we had with our existing users were, well, we're doing it this way. Now, how do we do it this way with your system? Right, because they're never going to change their process. They're going to change the components they use around the process. And so we had to build a system that was very dynamic that got coaches to understand that it wasn't about us, it's always about you.

28:15

Mike Rolih

And when you have a coach, peer conversation between the sales rep and the actual person you're trying to sell, and they've both been coaches, there's a level of respect and a level of understanding there that immediately brings the guard down and just starts to talk about how does it solve your problem?

28:32

Dave Almy

I mean, it makes so much sense on the face of it, just from a credibility standpoint. Hey, man, we've been in the same. I speak your language I'm doing the same thing. I've seen how this job works. Like you said, they can just go up to the board and start diagramming play. But I'm also struck by there's not much of a delta between a coach and a salesman. Salesperson. Right. Because what is a coach doing all day long? They're selling culture, they're selling performance, they're selling recruiting. I mean, there's a bigger sales job in the world than recruiting. I don't know what is. So I want to. People, I think, sometimes have this negative interpretation of the phrase salesperson. But really a coach falls very close to what the objectives that you were looking for.

29:23

Dave Almy

They just came with an entirely baked in language to be able to support what you were trying to do. So I can only imagine that was successful and you're seeing the outcomes associated with that.

29:34

Mike Rolih

Yeah, but that's where it really matters, Right. Is that if you bring in somebody from the outside, their language doesn't match, so they immediately lose credibility. Right. It's. Well, you're just telling me what you want to tell me. And most times they'll focus on speeds and feeds or why this does this or this does that, versus the underlying problem of this is really what it's going to do for you.

30:00

Dave Almy

Yeah. Features, not outcomes. Yeah. I wonder. You talked about being client centric.

30:09

Mike Rolih

Yeah.

30:09

Dave Almy

Adapting to the needs of a client. I'm interested if have you ever been surprised by how clients, customers end up using the product that you didn't expect.

30:21

Mike Rolih

I actually think that's more the norm than the exception. So many times customers, coaches, teams call in and they're like, hey, have you guys ever done it this way? And they show us this whole nother way of doing something that we've never even thought about. Right. We. That happens all the time. And it's awesome when it happens because it does show how dynamic and really how diverse the thought processes are out there around this. Very similar. Same game. Right. Notre Dame and Ohio State are going to play this coming up week. Those coaching staffs approach what they're doing very differently from practice to structure, to everything that. Everything that goes into the secret sauce of their programs. But how they prepare, the way they look at things, the way they structure things, is so much different than the other one.

31:13

Mike Rolih

And we see that all the time. Where we've actually seen more of that, even in the football space, where we've seen more of that has been in our new releases with our diamond product.

31:22

Dave Almy

Okay.

31:24

Mike Rolih

How coaches are communicating defensive plays or how they're communicating a pitch call and then a back pick or how they're shifting their outfield around. Very, very interesting stuff that we never really intended the system to function as, but they've made it work for what they're trying to do. And then we're really learning back about, well, how can we make that even easier for you to do? And that's the cycle of this whole process that I absolutely will be in love with to the day I die is how do I continue to iterate, innovate and move the product forward because the users said it needs to do it this way, not us. That's the best part of my job.

32:04

Dave Almy

ur perspective on. Because in: 2023

32:16

Mike Rolih

Yeah.

32:17

Dave Almy

What's been the impact when that happened? What was the impact on go route and how have you seen tweaks, adjustments to the product to address what is now a very overt concern.

32:31

Mike Rolih

Yeah.

32:32

Dave Almy

That it hasn't been in the past, but now it's a very overt concern about that kind of. I'll call what it is call it cheating. So how does your product address that?

32:45

Mike Rolih

So a couple of things. One, the. We were already having discussions with every conference and the NCAA, along with the NAIA junior college, etc. About an in game solution back in February of 23, well before the Michigan stuff happened with the Michigan scenario, what all that did was it was really the catalyst that allowed the NCAA to say, yes, we've got to do something now.

33:16

Dave Almy

Yeah. Okay. Clearly this is now a problem that we're not whispering about anymore.

33:20

Mike Rolih

Exactly. Yep. Everybody knew it was a problem.

33:23

Dave Almy

Yeah.

33:23

Mike Rolih

But nobody took it to those extremes. Right. Like science dealing, just like in baseball is part of the game. It's been part of the game for however long they've been playing. Since Newt Rockne was around, since people.

33:33

Dave Almy

Learned how to bang a stick against a garbage can.

33:36

Mike Rolih

That's. You said that, not me.

33:40

Dave Almy

We're provocative here, Mike. We're provocative.

33:43

Mike Rolih

Anyway, we, you know, it was, were already having the conversation. The NCAA was already very much interested in this. Now we got to. You want to talk about another thing to overcome? We were preparing and we're prepared for the NCAA to approve in helmet audio and a wearable solution in February of 24 at the Rules committee. Well, they only ended up approving in helmet audio for only FBS teams alone. Everybody else was kind of left to still go back to doing it. The way they were doing it. But we had a lot of conferences and a lot of teams and a lot of leagues that were wanting a wearable solution. Mainly because. And I think you're already seeing it, you saw it this year. Is talking to your quarterback is great. There's so much value in doing that.

34:33

Mike Rolih

Talking to your mike linebacker is great. But if you watch a college sideline, you still have four guys wearing different colored jerseys signaling in. You still have poster boards, you still have the sailboat ships. The guys are hanging up the sails to try to prevent people from still videoing the signs.

34:51

Dave Almy

It's very 19th century stuff.

34:53

Mike Rolih

Yeah. And they didn't solve the problem. And so the NCAA not giving us approval in February of 24th may have been the single greatest advantage we've ever received, though it was a blessing in disguise because. Because it gave us an opportunity to really focus in on the user and making sure this thing is absolutely bulletproof. We were awarded a waiver by the NCAA to run an in game trial with the Liberty League in New York this fall. With the D3 League. They can only use them in conference.

35:30

Dave Almy

Former Liberty League athlete right here on the microphone with you. Where at Vassar College, baby.

35:35

Mike Rolih

Okay.

35:36

Dave Almy

This is back in the days when I think we used smoke signals to communicate between coaches and players, but. So continue please. I just got excited at hearing Liberty League.

35:46

Mike Rolih

So we, they approved it and so we rolled it out to the teams that were in the league. Each team got 10 devices, two tablets to send from. And the feedback we received was we need more.

36:01

Dave Almy

Okay.

36:02

Mike Rolih

And kind of the dream scenario feedback. And you know, again, the Michigan stuff was. Was just. It was just a. It was just the thing that made it necessary to do it was the NCAAs wanted to do it, but now they really realized that they have to do it.

36:20

Dave Almy

Great catalyst.

36:22

Mike Rolih

The alternatives that are coming out of it. Right. In helmet versus Wearables. It's going to be very interesting to how it all impacts the game moving forward.

36:32

Dave Almy

So you're at the intersection of two very, very dynamic industries. Right. Sports changing all the time. Particularly now, right where this period in sports business is nuts and technology isn't exactly known for sitting still and looking at its shoes. How hard, difficult, fun is it to watch the changes in those particular industries and living at the intersection of those. Making sure goroute is taking into account everything that's happening and adapting the system to be able to address them.

37:14

Mike Rolih

Yeah, that's. That's a very complex question and a more complex answer. Probably we spend an egregious amount of our time self reflecting at our company. We very rarely worry about the shifting landscape underneath our feet or what competitors may or may not be doing. And the reason is that as 92% of all the people in our company are athletes. They were college athletes, high school athletes, college coaches. In any organization where you're competitive like that, you prepare for what's you're going to see, but you internally always worry about what you can control.

38:03

Mike Rolih

And for us, we spend so much time asking ourselves what can we pull out of our products, what can we remove that might be a barrier to the user experience or an entry point for the user to become a part of us, that we actually spend very little time worried about what the markets are doing or what the competitors or what the landscape is or how it's changing. Now that's internally. I spend a lot of my time keeping an eye out for who I would consider to be movers and shakers in the industry. What are they focusing on?

38:42

Mike Rolih

Not today, but when I have conversations with other CEOs or like minded individuals 12, 18, 24 months from now, what are you guys really focusing on and trying to just really get a sense from their perspective of where do they see the longer term growth in these spaces. Right now there's a ton of movement in the diamond space. There's been a lot of shifting around about analytics and pitch intent tracking and we're doing some really interesting things that we've never done before. And we've with our partnership with a company called Aware, we have analytics coming out that have never been produced and we're getting really excited to put those out there for customers. And so we're trying where we can to try to stay ahead of what might be coming or think about what would our users want that our users didn't know?

39:35

Mike Rolih

Internally I kind of use that as the Steve jobs iPad strategy. No one knew that they needed an iPad until Steve Jobs said here's an iPad and everybody figured out what to do with it. We're very much, I try to keep us very much in that same mindset of let's show the users what's possible and then let them tell us how they want to use it.

39:56

Dave Almy

Yeah, it kind of goes back to what you said earlier about man, there are all kinds of ways that people are using our technology that we had no idea. Right. The answers don't always live within the four walls of the company. The customers are always going to be able to come back and they're going to be your greatest innovators and we.

40:09

Mike Rolih

. We signed over: 1800

41:04

Mike Rolih

They're not going to tell you what to create, but once you've created it, they're going to tell you how to make it the best it possibly can be. And if you can do that, you're going to stay ahead in your individual niche and you're going to work faster than sitting there, like you said in the four walls, trying to think about what's next.

41:19

Dave Almy

It's a great source of inspiration to the people who are outside using the product in ways that you'd never, ever conceived. That that's right from the start of the launch of the product. I'm with Mike Rowley, he's CEO and founder of Goroute. Mike, I want to say thanks so much for the time that it's been a great and fascinating discussion. Before I let you go though, I am going to put you in the Lightning round. These are series. You seem relaxed about the Lightning round and I want to caution you that the Lightning round is anything but relaxing. Okay, Are you ready?

41:52

Mike Rolih

Let's do it.

41:53

Dave Almy

All right, let's do this thing. Lightning round with Mike Rowley. Best coaching advice you ever received as a player.

42:01

Mike Rolih

Be better, don't suck as much.

42:07

Dave Almy

You know, it's pretty fundamental to the coaching playing experience. All right, you are a self described deep dish pizza expert. What are your accreditations?

42:20

Mike Rolih

My doordash Bill.

42:21

Dave Almy

Yeah, okay, that's probably mine as well. But is there like. So, so is this like deep dish is just that much better than thin crust or, you know, where does the expertise focus on?

42:34

Mike Rolih

Growing up in Chicago. Right. That's just kind of our thing. That's what you do. Our pizza. And for the longest time. I, you know, I never really. I'm a big Lou Malinatis guy. So if there's an nil deal out there as an old athlete for Lou Malinatis, hey, guys, send it over my way.

42:51

Dave Almy

All right, so if you're listening, we know you just asked me for the contact information and help you out there. All right, best limo driver story.

42:59

Mike Rolih

We'll be driving George Fisher from this former CEO of Motorola. And that's how this all got started. We struck up a relationship. He came back into town a couple of times. I said, every time he comes in, I want to drive him. He was a minority owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks. We had a lot of different connections and ways to strike up communication and ultimately became a mentor to me and then ultimately wrote the first investment check to get this off the ground.

43:27

Dave Almy

That's a good limo driver story.

43:29

Mike Rolih

30 or 50 bucks. He gave me a lot of money to start a business, so that would be the best story.

43:34

Dave Almy

Yeah, I think going away, that's probably the best story. What is the name of your English bulldog? And does he look like Winston Churchill?

43:42

Mike Rolih

My English bulldog's name is Wrigley, after Wrigley. While he doesn't look like Winston Churchill, he does enjoy smoking cigars with me, like Winston Churchill would have.

43:54

Dave Almy

Okay, so he has Churchillian qualities is what you're saying. All right, all right, last one. I mean, honestly, how far away are we from AI Just doing all the play calling in football and baseball.

44:07

Mike Rolih

There are predictive models that are coming in the next 12 to 24 months that'll be available. It'll just be a matter of how fast do the rulemakers decide to allow things like this in.

44:24

Dave Almy

Mike Rowley, CEO and founder of Goroute. I really appreciate the time, man. Thanks so much for joining me.

44:30

Mike Rolih

Thank you so much. It was awesome.