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Krossover Is Building The ESPN For The 99% Of Athletes Who Will Never Actually Be On ESPN

This article is more than 10 years old.

Image by None via CrunchBase

Growing up in Bangalore, India, Vasu Kulkarni learned to play the game of basketball by watching VHS tapes of Michael Jordan that relatives from the US would send him. While being a lifetime basketball junkie, Vasu understood that his sports career would never be professional. Vasu decided to fuse his passion for sports and technology (he graduated with a Computer Engineering degree from UPenn) and build a company.

That company is Krossover, an online video indexing platform, that  provides sophisticated data analytics technology to sports teams around the world. You send them gamefilm and they break it down. Krossover evaluates performance factors such as possession time, game and player efficiency ratings, total team efficiency, game pace, and much more for over thousands of high school, club,  college sports teams and now even the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Krossover enables coaches to easily use video to improve the success of their athletic programs by eliminating the time and financial barriers in managing their filmed content. It is estimated that 95% of high school and college athletic programs now recording game video, and Krossover is accelerating the use of indexed, on-demand video content and advanced analytics by creating a database for uploading and socializing this content.

Krossover recently developed sIQ, a mobile app that tests athletes’ perceptual skill and evaluates the user’s sports intelligence. sIQ is used two ways: 1) Sports enthusiasts to test their own perceptual ability 2) Coaches to evaluate an athlete’s sports intelligence.

I had a chance to connect with Vasu and ask him a few questions about Krossover’s vision, the hardest part about starting a company, and if they receive any videos worthy of #SCTop10.

Alexander Taub: What's the vision for Krossover? Is there a possibility of going post-college? Pro-level?

Vasu Kulkarni: The vision for Krossover is to become an archive for any athlete who played any form of organized sports from middle school through college to find footage of his or her playing. They should be able to find video and stats of their entire career. Twenty years from now, we want these athletes to be able to show their kids the 40 point game that they had in high school, and be able to relive those memories. While our coaching tool has already helped thousands of programs actually get better, the content that is being created as we breakdown and analyze the games is what makes Krossover special. We will amass the largest fully indexed database of sports games anywhere, and make it all available to anyone who wants it.

Taub: What's been the hardest part about starting a company?

Kulkarni: Initially you think it’s the money - as a 22 year old with no track record and $10 in your bank account, it seems impossible to have a group of people working for you, and being able to make payroll. Eventually you realize that money is the easy part - someone is always willing to back a good idea, it’s getting the right people that matter. We often forget that a company is just a group of people, and the company lives and dies based on whether those people get the job done, or they don't. In today's market, when capital is becoming so easy to find, and the big tech companies are doing so well on the public markets, hiring quality talent, and retaining them, is the biggest challenge. So far, we've been lucky that the sports angle attracts a lot of very smart people who have a passion for sports and want to work in it.

Taub: Why video indexing and analytics? What do you hear from users? Was this always the initial business idea?

Kulkarni: While playing on the JV basketball team at the University of Pennsylvania, I got a firsthand look at what coaches actually did to prepare for game day. Seeing how much manual work was involved, my tech brain immediately started thinking of ways to make things easier. The original idea wasn't necessarily to break down video, but it was to figure out the best way to capture enough data on a game that we could actually give the coach valuable information and analytics, without them having to do as much work. We thought about a lot of different concepts, but in the end, this is the one that made the most sense for the largest group of users - essentially we couldn't build a hardware solution that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, because only the 30 pro teams could afford that. The one thing that coaches always said was "We wish we had more time," and that's what we essentially give them - more time.

Taub: You get a lot of video? Any crazy clips worthy of SCTop10?

Kulkarni: A ton! In just the past seven days, we've broken down over 1500 games, and the season hasn't started for more than half our customers yet. We see some absolutely incredible things, and we tweet them out all the time on our Twitter handle @krossovr. We're asking our coaches this season to tweet their top plays to #KrossoverTopPlays. We’ll be collecting them throughout the season and sharing the best each week on our blog and social networks.

Taub: Is there any data to back up that coaches who use Krossover perform better?

Kulkarni: Absolutely. Just a few months ago we went back and looked at all the teams that used us last year, we looked at their previous records, and their record after using Krossover, and we also looked at the factors that determined success in a high school basketball game. We put out a report on what it takes to win in high school - turns out limiting turnovers accounts for a massive portion of a team's success. Also, teams that use Krossover won on average, 10% more games than they did before they used us. The data don't lie!

Taub: What makes Krossover unique and what advice would you have for these young indexers looking to go into the business and distinguish themselves?

Kulkarni: The biggest thing I tell everyone at the company, and whenever I speak, is that passion never fails. You will have to look very very hard to find someone who is more passionate about basketball than I am. Not just because I play and I watch - a lot of people do that. But I truly believe that I live the game every day - it’s been a teacher of life for me, and that passion is infectious. It trickles down to everyone who works at Krossover, and we make it a point to find people who really care about sports. And when you get guys like that who would do this job for free just because it’s something they love, but now they're also getting paid, it makes the team really come together to do some incredible things. For all our sports analysts out there, I tell them to do this job not because they are getting paid, but in spite of it. Do it because you love basketball, or do it because one day you want to be a coach. Don't do it for the money.

Taub: Analytics seems to have hit the big-time from pro sports teams adding positions dedicated to analytics to the excitement surrounding Moneyball. What do you think makes the industry attractive to the younger generation?

Kulkarni: Analytics and "big data" is definitely the flavor of the week right now. There's no doubt that more information is powerful, but at the same time, there is such a thing as data overload, and more than anything else, you need to know what to actually do with raw data. It isn't exactly trivial to be able to go from hundreds of millions of data points about a team, to being able to extract the five keys metrics that will guarantee success. I think that a lot of youngsters are attracted to sports analytics because it gives guys like me who never had a chance of actually making a career out of playing sports, a chance to kind of be a part of the team and make a difference in something we really love.