SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman
03 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Mike Zisman self-fund his $10M investment in Golf Genius?
Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4,200 to back into a revenue range?
That would get you to about two-thirds of our revenue. It's a good deal more than the $44 million. The company's been profitable since 2017. We have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised. $14 million in cash. What the hell are we doing sitting on $14 million in cash? We can fund acquisitions. We've done 10 acquisitions.
What was your first year where you broke a million of revenue? It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years to get to 50 million.
If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP or employee owned? Almost 80%, including me and the other executives. If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million all cash up front to sell the business, do you sell? Hey folks, my guest today is Mike Zisman. He's the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, launched back in 2009. He is a serial entrepreneur.
Mike, I don't want to age you here, but first company back in 1979, formal faculty at MIT, over 40 years of experience building software companies. Mike, you ready to take us to the top? I am.
Great to be with you.
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Chapter 2: What role did the USGA contract play in Golf Genius's growth?
Thanks for inviting me.
You bet. Tell us more about what you're selling at Golf Genius. Then we'll go back and get your backstory.
Sure. So Golf Genius is the leading provider of tournament software to golf clubs, private clubs, public courses, tours, associations. We provide sort of the very high-end software for creating tournaments, doing registration, payment processing, live leaderboards, broadcast feeds where we're working with like PGA or USGA tournaments. So it's a very deep product for providing information
the capabilities that golf professionals need. Typically our end user is a PGA golf professional in a private club or a public facility.
And is the group at the private facility, is that the owner of the facility or it's a player at the facility? Probably the owner, right?
No. So you think about a club I belong to, Marion Golf Club, right? It's a member owned club. We have a golf staff, typically a head golf professional, assistant golf professionals. Our user is that director of golf or assistant golf professional. But we're really B2B to see Nathan in a sense that all the live scoring is done by the players at that club using our live scoring app.
So we provide software for the pro to set up the tournament. They say, hey, let's go. Then the players themselves are typically using our mobile app to actually do the scoring. So the beauty is when the last guy walks off the course, click a button to resolve ties.
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Chapter 3: How did Golf Genius achieve $1M ARR in 8 years and $53M in the next 8?
We know what all the results of the tournament are, and it may have been, you know, many different tournaments all going on at the same time.
So just to put that all in a sentence, you're selling to the director of golf when they have a tournament, they're emailing all the players saying download the mobile app before we start.
Correct. Exactly. Most of them already have. I mean, millions of people at this point have our mobile app. So typically they don't have to. But say at a charity tournament, you're absolutely right. There's people show up to play the charity tournament. They'll literally get something that says download this app. We don't make them register.
They're going to have a six character ID and they enter that ID and, you know, they're scoring.
Very cool. Help me understand how you've thought about pricing, then we'll get the backstory here. What's the average director of golf paying you for the software?
So our list price, which we stick very close to at a private club today, is about $4,200 per year for essentially unlimited use of the product for up to two 18-hole golf facilities. So if you're a Pinehurst with seven different courses, that's all custom price. But it's actually, as I like to say, every business is price times quantity. P times Q, you learn in economics one.
We're relatively low P, high Q, high quantity. We're in 11,000 courses. So we're pretty, plus we do lots of other things. But it's certainly the most inexpensive software that club will have because they also need software to do their point of sale, to manage their T-sheet, to do their website, to do member billing and things like that.
Give me the backstory here. How do you go from MIT professor to golf guy?
Well, I always loved software. I think my happiest days were programming. They're still my happiest days. I don't do it anymore. I love coding. It's magical for me. I think when some people appreciate a great poem, I appreciate great code. So I've always loved programming, very technical. As soon as I got to MIT, I realized I did not want to be an academic. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
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Chapter 4: Why does Golf Genius have a team of 50% engineers in Cluj, Romania?
I worked with Lou Gerstner, who was this fantastic CEO. He turned around IBM, absolutely. And then that kind of ran its course and left IBM in 07. You know, I really don't want to retire. I love what I do. I mean, I was always the guy organizing the buddy golf trip. You know, 12 guys go off someplace to play golf. We're still servicing. It's a small market, a very price sensitive market.
And move from that to golf leagues. And so instead of 12 guys playing six rounds of golf, you got, you know, 60 guys playing 20 rounds of golf and then move from that to selling to clubs. But the real break for us and every company, you know, I often say if an entrepreneur tells you luck wasn't part of his success, they don't know what they're talking about, you know.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, but you need some luck. And in our case, it was building a relationship with the USGA to replace their tournament management system with ours, which really put the company in a whole different trajectory.
What year was that?
That was 2016. So it started in 2009. As I like to say, we wandered in the desert. Entrepreneurs wander in the desert till you... Today, we say product market fit. Do you have a product market fit? And we went from buddy trips to leagues, to servicing clubs, and then really enter a relationship with the USGA to do tournament management.
And then they came back in 2019 and said, hey, we also want you to build the new handicap system. There was a new worldwide standard for handicapping, and we want you to build that and operate it. It's probably the largest pure play golf software company in the industry.
Measure by revenue or something else?
Revenue, measure by revenue.
Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4,200 to back into a revenue range?
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Chapter 5: What is the three-phase acquisition strategy of Golf Genius?
It took a while. I funded the company personally, but from 2009 to 2020, I funded the company with about $10 million. My own money. Mostly is debt. What I love about our company is most of the stock is owned by employees. Very widely.
How much? If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP or employee owned?
It's not an ESOP, but it's profit. Not counting, well, almost 80%, including me and the other executives. Yeah, because we raised so little money. We only raised 11 million bucks. Okay. That's including you though. You plus employees. That's including me. But if I take away the really senior people, it's still 60%.
My biggest thrill, I tell people, honest to God, I will measure the success of this company by how many of our employees make a significant amount of money when we sell or when we exit or do a recap. To me, I was successful in my first company. I wasn't really focused on the money. So I was able to spread the equity out quite widely. And we have people who joined us in 2010 and
got what were significant slugs of stock because it was not worth very much. And we have incredible retention because of it. We have over, we probably have 6%, 7% attrition, including in Romania for developers. I like the people. I say, well, it's either because they really like me or they own a lot of stock. I'm not sure which.
They tend to go together, don't they?
Maybe. But to me, I want to make sure my philosophy of company is we're all in this together. I like to say I couldn't build a company with 300 Mike Sisman. I have different skills. I couldn't build a company with 300 Alex's who runs development.
What I love about an entrepreneurial company is bringing together a bunch of people with different skills to accomplish something none of them could accomplish on their own. That's what a company is about.
Can you bring together a set of skills, marketing skills, sales skills, finance skills, development skills, support skills, to accomplish something together as a team that none of us accomplish on our own? To me, that's where the juice is in being an entrepreneur.
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