Ben Borton

So the software, the hardware, the whole package that we were putting together was the technology that powered PinkPod, right?

So first line of code is in 2019.

First outside customers we took in in the summer of 2023.

Um, that was when we formed Podplay as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Um, you know, we put the whole tech team in there and myself on the, on the business side, uh, tech team is led by a guy named Elliot Rifkin, who's one of, one of our co-founders.

He's an amazing guy comes from kind of a, a background in the fit tech world.

Uh, he spent the bulk of his career at a digital agency called RGA.

Um, his big projects there were the Equinox mobile booking app and the Nike plus running app.

So he's built really large scaled kind of global consumer facing apps.

And about 90% of our tech team has ties to those two projects.

So our hiring strategy has been to kind of go pick off all the best engineers, product managers and designers that Ilya worked with in the past and kind of reassembled them as a dream team.

So, yeah, in 2023, we launched PodPlay as a wholly owned subsidiary to license the whole tech stack that we built to power PinkPod to other like-minded operators.

And the real catalyst for that was Pickleball.

Pickleball was growing like crazy in the U.S., you know, fastest growing kind of company.

sport by a pretty wide margin.

And people had seen what we'd done in table tennis.

They loved the kind of the experience, the UX, the software, how we were combining software and hardware.

And they basically said, could you please do this in pickleball?

And so we obliged.

We had some great launch partners in that space, including City Pickle.