ED CHAO – VP OF OPERATIONS AT CEREBRO SPORTS – EPISODE 714

Website – https://cerebrosports.com/

Email – ed@cerebrosports.com

Twitter – @edchao2 @cerebosports

Ed Chao is the VP of Operations at Cerebro Sports where they have the vastest collection of basketball box scores in the world, especially in the youth space. Cerebro organizes these box scores into basketball tools for basketball people while partnering with event operators around the country as well as vendors who stream youth basketball or do video breakdowns.

Ed earned his Bachelor’s Degree from Rice University in Houston and went on to earn a Masters in Public Health from Emory University, focusing on epidemiology. In 2010, Ed launched his first startup, MyVaxines, a web-based tool that provided information and services to assist families in forecasting and managing their immunization records. After moving back to Houston in 2014, Ed launched Houston Escape Room, the first escape room concept brought to Texas and that currently has two Houston locations. Ed, a self-proclaimed basketball junkie and long-time pickup game player, started Hoop Club Dallas, a digital solution to organizing pickup basketball games which he later sold. The program’s $10 games provided a “no drama” way to play and attracted players at all skill levels including NBA players like Trae Young.

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Make sure you have your notebook ready as you listen to this episode with Ed Chao, VP of Operations at Cerebro Sports.

What We Discuss with Ed Chao

• Falling in love with pickup basketball and intramurals in college
• Why Michael Jordan was his favorite player growing up
• “Entrepreneurship kind of runs in my blood.”
• The concept behind his pickup basketball company, Hoop Club
• Trying to eliminate the drama from pickup basketball
• How working with rec centers helped Hoop Club to grow
• “If I can make you feel like you belong in the basketball court, then I can make you feel like you belong somewhere in this world.”
• Selling Hoop Club once Covid hit
• How he ended joining Cerebro after Hoop Club had been sold
• “The custodians of the grassroots basketball space”
• “We’ve built basketball tools for basketball people”
• Working with AAU events and operators to collect box score data
• Taking the eight components of a box score and putting that into one number
• The Five Metric Suite that Cerebro uses to measure players’ ability in different skill sets
• Working with John Beilien, one of Cerebro’s early investors
• Working with forward thinking event operators to capture stats
• The line that convinced Mark Cuban to invest in Cerebro
• Why Cerebro’s RAM score is a better metric than PER
• How college coaches are using Cerebro’s metrics to evaluate players in the transfer portal
• Finding a particular player type in the metrics
• Linking Cerebro’s data to the actual box score and game video
• “Start with the stats”
• Building a player’s recruiting literacy and giving them tools to aid in their recruitment
• Why he believes players and parents will eventually only want to play in Cerebro certified events
• “Play, Measure, Learn”
• Comparing leagues and events using Cerebro’s data

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THANKS, ED CHAO

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TRANSCRIPT FOR ED CHAO – VP OF OPERATIONS AT CEREBRO SPORTS – EPISODE 714

[00:00:00] MIke Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with my co-host Jason Sunkle, and we are pleased to welcome to the podcast Ed Chao from Cerebro Sports. Ed, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod

[00:00:12] Ed Chao: Hey guys, thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

[00:00:16] MIke Klinzing: We are excited Ed, to have you on and dive into all the various things that you’ve been able to do with the game of basketball.

We’re going to talk some pickup hoops, which is always one of my favorite topic. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell us about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball.

[00:00:31] Ed Chao: For sure, as a kid you know, playing in the driveway with my little brother. Never let him win one game ever, as far as I can remember and to this day, I’m 38. He’s 36. I still don’t think it’s happened. But I was the kid who memorized jersey numbers and family members would quiz me to test my knowledge. And that’s basically how I just started to, to fall in love with the players and the game and to know who was who.

And played in the backyard. Whoever came by, I would challenge them to a game of horse and that love of basketball, just stayed with me. And I never got a chance to play in high school. It was never good enough to play on, on the high school team or anything like that. I was more of a tennis, tennis kid.

But once I made it to college and found intramurals and pick up ball it was hard to get me out the gym.

[00:01:28] MIke Klinzing: All right. So two questions. Okay. Growing up, who’s your player? Who’s your basketball player growing up?

[00:01:34] Ed Chao: It was MJ. I was born in 84, so that was, I mean, the whole Bulls team that whole era.

Horace Grant for some reason was one of my favorites as well.

[00:01:46] MIke Klinzing: All right. Give me your Jordan greatest of all time speech.

[00:01:52] Ed Chao: Oh my God. Oh, I am not one to be able to really, I think, truly articulate his greatness. But from my little vantage point.

You know, just the killer instinct to step on people’s throats. Wasn’t something that I had in my life and was always just enthralling. And so, yeah, I can’t say that was something that I aspire to, but I definitely respected it, if that’s an okay way to put it. I don’t know.

[00:02:31] MIke Klinzing: No that makes a ton of sense. I love these conversations. I’ve been, ever since I was a kid, Jordan has always been it for me. I spent so much of my childhood slash young adulthood watching Michael Jordan and I think I was a North Carolina fan before pre Jordan, maybe because of the colors. I’m not sure why loved al wood.

But Jordan cemented that love of North Carolina basketball for me, and then continuing to watch him in the pros. And for me, I think you call the killer instinct. What I always love to say is I’ve never watched any other athlete where I felt like the result was just inevitable, that he was going to figure out a way to win.

And when he did, I was never surprised. It was more just a confirmation of the fact that I didn’t know how he was going to do it. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like, but you just knew that somehow some way he was going to get it done. And then in those rare instances, whether it was early in his career or later on when he would lose a game or maybe not come through in a big moment, you were so surprised.

And yet, He almost always, even if even in defeat, he, he was always the best player on the floor. And I’ve just never seen anybody with that combination of physical talent, mental toughness, and then just that feeling of inevitability, that killer ins instinct that you described. When people try to argue with LeBron as the greatest player of all time or somebody else from the past, you just, If, if you’re arguing that, I just don’t see, You didn’t see, you didn’t see Jordan live.

You didn’t watch an experience watching Michael Jordan. Because if you did, there was no way that you could ever say that. The peak of Michael Jordan comparatively to any other player. To me, it just doesn’t compare. Now LeBron’s going to put up unbelievable counting statistics and he’s probably going to have the best basketball career.

When you look at the longevity piece of it, what he’s been able to do, and he’s phenomenal, but nobody compares to Jordan.

[00:04:52] Ed Chao: Yeah. And at the time, as a kid growing up in Dallas, I can’t say that I had a, I mean, I was a hometown fan, but, outside of Jim Jackson, Jamal Mashburn and Jason Kidd, that, that era or that that team you know, it was just, I wish, I mean, it’s just Mike, it was just Mike every year.

[00:05:15] MIke Klinzing: Yeah. There wasn’t, there wasn’t a whole lot of, of Dallas Maverick’s basketball. That was exciting to watch. I guess you had the, I guess you had the Jason kid, Jimmy Jackson, Jamal Mashburn Love Triangle, that sort of broke, that broke, broke that destroyed that team back, back in the day. Jimmy Jackson’s, the guy was Ohio guy actually, I remember I went and saw, heard about him.

And his high school team, Toledo MaComber, was playing probably in a, a school that was maybe a half hour, 35 minutes from me and my dad and I went and saw him in 10th grade. And of course this is pre-internet, so yeah, we had no idea what he looked like or anything, so we just show up in the gym and he was a sophomore at the time and came running out for warmups and you’re like, Oh yeah, that’s Jimmy Jackson.

And looked probably exactly the same as he did the day he showed up for the Dallas Mavericks. Just was, had an NBA body in 10th grade and just was one of those that, like I’ve seen him and LeBron or the two high school players that had no business being on a high school floor, they were just built differently and it just incredible.

So yeah, I can, I can see where you, you might, you might spend your time rooting for Jordan as opposed to rooting for those Mavs teams.

[00:06:24] Ed Chao: Yeah. Yeah, a little bit.

[00:06:26] MIke Klinzing: All right. So my second question about what you said, tennis. Who’s your tennis player?

[00:06:30] Ed Chao: You know, I didn’t really love watching tennis growing up. But I guess if I had to pick one I’d have to pick Michael Chang.

Okay. You know, just to be able to see someone else who looked like me out there. And you know, he was, he was a little bit shorter and still was able to make a pretty good run at it. So rooted for him. But I would say my favorite player Patrick Rafter. Okay. serving Volley.

But I just didn’t want to go with like a Pete Sampras or Agassi.

[00:07:01] MIke Klinzing: I understand. So you’re a little younger than me because my guy when I was a kid was McEnroe. Totally different era. And it’s funny because my own personal personality, nothing at all, like John McEnroe, which is probably why, which is probably why, which is probably why I loved him.

And I can remember being. Eight, nine years old, those early Wimbledon’s where he’s going against Borg and just wanting to stay home and get up on Sunday morning and, and watch those, watch those tennis matches. It’s, it’s funny just how you’re, you’re viewing habits change and how you slowly but surely have to eliminate things as you get older and you get more responsibilities.

In tennis, I just don’t watch nearly as much as I used to. But when I was a kid, and again, even as an early adult, I would watch man, I’d watch a lot of tennis. It was one of those things that I loved watching. And Michael Chang, I just remember him just going side to side baseline, just being so, so good at playing defensive tennis.

And at that time, obviously his style was you had a lot more servant vol players back then. Mm-hmm. as opposed to guys that were, now most everybody’s playing off the baseline just because you can hit the ball so hard with the technology and the rackets and all that stuff. So it’s a different era.

And tennis has definitely evolved from where it was back in the late seventies, early eighties, when it was probably for me at least in my heyday of watching tennis for sure.

[00:08:27] Ed Chao: Got it. Yeah. Well, that’s cool that you had that background.

[00:08:30] MIke Klinzing: yeah, for sure. All right, so tell me a little bit about how your love for technology come into play?

And then obviously we can talk about how you mold your two loves together.

[00:08:40] Ed Chao: Yeah. You know, I think instead of love or technology, I would just say that entrepreneurship kind of runs in my blood. My dad is an entrepreneur and when he came to the States as an immigrant, put himself through school and eventually got his accounting degree and had his own business.

And I think as a kid, watching him be able to have the flexibility to be able to, to take me and my brother to tennis terms and just be involved in our lives was just something that I didn’t know. What type of business like I would want to get into, but I just knew that that lifestyle was something that I really appreciated out of my dad.

And so I think entrepreneurship, I’ve started and failed at a lot of different companies. But if we just jump kind of straight into maybe the last company that I started before joining Cerebro was this little organized pickup basketball company, I guess you could call it a company called Hoop Club here in Dallas, Texas.

And we basically partnered with Parks and rec departments. In the DFW metroplex, there was probably about five different cities and we had a few private gyms here in DFW that we partnered with as well, where we would take their leftover time slots. You know, this is kind of like in the shared economy where we would rent out the gym essentially from say like six to 8:00 PM on weekday nights when it’s slow generally for these rec centers.

And actually it wasn’t quite renting out as it was as a revenue split. And so they would give us these, these slots throughout the city and we would sell 15 tickets to each of these hoop club sessions. And you just sign up, you pay online something between like 10 to $13 and you were guaranteed a spot in the game.

And once you showed up at the gym we had a facilitator who would you know, kind of like, welcome everybody and, and do some introductions just to make you feel welcome if it’s your first time especially. And make the teams try to make ’em as balanced as we can just right off the bat.

And that the having 15 players is, was the magic number for us because, You never would have to wait more than one game. And  I think we all know if you go to LA Fitness or some open runs, good, good pickup, like there’s just a lot of drama that comes with playing pickup basketball.

Yeah. And so the idea of organized pickup basketball always seemed like oxymoron and always seemed like something that Was so elusive, no one could ever crack the code on, on how to do that. And so anyway, that’s how we kind of structured the sessions. And we just found that it really resonated with the young working professional kind of demographic, people who were just getting off work and just wanting to get a good run in sweat I mean, good competition for sure, but like, it’s just about getting some good runs in and not wanting to sit and meeting some people.

We had a lot of people who moved to Dallas or transient or coming for work and just wanted to meet some people hoop and that was basically it. We just try to provide a really, I don’t know, hospitable environment to make you feel welcome and it just kind of grew organically and just at some point it just felt like it was a little bit of a cult following that we had because we would just see have the same players going to play all over the city because they just loved the setup and the people that were a part of it.

So that’s my quick little overview of what Hoop club was and what we were doing.

[00:12:24] MIke Klinzing: All right. Let’s go back in time to the beginning. Where did the idea come from and what were some of the things that you thought heading into it would be the biggest challenges, and then how did those compare to what the actual challenges were?

So maybe the idea where to come from. Sure. And then what did you think it was going to be versus what it ended up being?

[00:12:45] Ed Chao: So my wife and I spent about two years in New York City in Manhattan. Let’s say, this is probably around 2010 and I’m sorry, probably a little bit after that, maybe like 2014. And when we were out there she was traveling for work, She was a consultant.

And I was just like, what do I do with myself in this new city? I’m from the south, never lived in the Northeast, and I came across this pickup basketball service called indoor hoops. And it’s their model. And they would rent out public school, like middle school gyms throughout the city and have this concept.

And I basically just went around New York City playing basketball every night in different parts of New York City, getting to know the city in that way. And so I thought that that concept was so brilliant, but I thought it might only work in the northeast, in New York City where it’s such a dense population.

And when we moved back to Texas with everything sprawled out, big box gyms, I just didn’t, didn’t know if there was a need for something like that here. And you never know until you try. And so decided to at least give it a shot. And there was a local church here that gave me one night a week.

And you know, the first session I think that we launched, I think had six people. So we played three on three and then the next week had 10 people. So we played five on five, no one sat. And then the next week we had 15. And then after that, like we had a wait list every time. And so it was just pretty organic, the word spread.

And we just started filling that session up and needing to find more spots to play. And yeah, that’s pretty much how it happened.

[00:14:39] MIke Klinzing: Were the facilities, how challenging was it to make deals with the facilities? Now, as you said, you’re trying to fill some of their time where they already know, presumably that their facilities are empty, or again, they’re not being utilized to their fullest capacity at the times when you’re signing up for ’em.

But how, what were, what were the conversations like with facility owners and the people who are managing those places?

[00:15:05] Ed Chao: Great question. And that was definitely, we had a really wide experience depending on if this is like a private facility, you know high school gym versus park parks and rec gym.

And for the most part you know, people, I would say it was 50/50. Usually like, Hey, no, that’s just, that’s not something that we’re interested in. When I tried to explain the concept, and I get questions about like, wait, so it’s different people every single week. I said, Yeah, we don’t know because it’s different from a league.

I can’t tell you it’s this, like some of these places for liability reasons and liability insurance need to know that. Like, hey, I need a list of all the players who are coming every single week. And I’m like I can get them to sign a waiver for you on site that day, but I can’t tell you who they are.

And that’s the same people every single time. And so that was a no deal. You know, that was basically a deal breaker for some of these private facilities. And so we definitely ran into a lot of hurdles, a lot of red tape. But it wasn’t really until we found working with the parks and rec department directly being such a huge ad like win-win situation.

To be honest, like, I didn’t know how these rec centers normally work with their partners and their vendors to set up classes. But the, it’s a really. I think a very fair model that they have in terms of revenue split like they take, they take a small cut of what you bring in to the facility, and if you’re a valued partner, like you can make a good chunk of what you bring in.

And so once we had that relationship set up, they pretty much, they couldn’t give us more than two or three times a week like each, any given facility, but they would guarantee us those slots because we would always fill ’em. And for them, their quota wasn’t necessarily the revenue that was being brought in, but being able to bring in a different demographic, like young working professionals, going to a public rec center here in Dallas doesn’t happen very often, but to be able to provide programming for young adults was something that a lot of these rec centers, once the supervisor was able to hear from the other supervisor that it was going well, then they would rec refer us and then we would get into their facility and it was word of mouth even across the facilities as much as it was across like the players.

So it was neat to be able to see. I don’t know, even the facilities rally around what we were doing and being excited and being sometimes even being asked to see if we would bring Hoop Club Right to them, which is definitely a tipping point for us to be able to have them, not just as a rental facility,

[00:17:47] MIke Klinzing: Almost to be a partner, right?

Where they’re encouraging and they’re a part, they’re feeling like they’re a part of it. To me, I’m sure that’s a valuable piece of that relationship.

[00:18:01] Ed Chao: Definitely. Definitely.

[00:18:04] MIke Klinzing: When I think about this, and I think about myself as somebody who’s played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, unfortunately not for a number of years as an old guy with a torn ACL that never fixed it, but that’s a whole nother story.

Anyway,  one of the things I guess I would look at and say, Well man, if I’m going to sign up for this thing, I want to make sure that the level of play is, if I’m a high level player, I want to make sure that the level of play is high. Or if I’m a player who is. Just an average player, I want to make sure that I’m not showing up to a game where I’m going to have a bunch of former division one players where I’m not going to be able to do anything out on the floor.

So how did you overcome that piece of it in terms of making sure that the level of player was similar or did you find that the clientele that was signing up that that didn’t matter as much as maybe? I think it did.

[00:18:56] Ed Chao: Yeah. To be honest, it was probably more the latter. And we wrestled with that for a long time.

You know, self, self rating is not something that Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s not good. That works so well. And we never had a big enough contingent of I think high level players that we were able to kind of even craft like sessions that were just for ex-college players and above.

And so we ended up just settling on, Hey, you know what, this is 80 we’re going to. Like 80% of, of who we think is like 20 like 80% of your revenue comes from like 20% of your customers. And so for us it was just like, okay, these are the people who keep coming back and they are your we’ve noticed, like they were the guys who, and some girls who played high school but never made it to college ball.

That was kind of our sweet spot. Guys who played varsity basketball maybe jv or even just some, some just casual rec play. But we didn’t have a lot of elite players coming in, though there were some that would come out and still have a really good time.

But it’s just kind of like what you’re saying, like attitude and sort of like at a certain age you’re not still trying to make it, You’re not trying to make it anymore. And if you’ve kind of like given up on that path and you’re playing for the love of the game, then there’s still a lot of people who would still come out  and hoop with us.

[00:20:23] MIke Klinzing: So how much were you playing during this time? How many nights a week were you playing?

[00:20:27] Ed Chao: I had, let’s see, my first kid, pretty much like a year and a half into Hoop Club, and so it slowed down dramatically and just,

[00:20:40] MIke Klinzing: That’s surprising. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I can’t relate at all.

[00:20:43] Ed Chao: Yeah, I’ve already retired too. And let’s see, probably by my mid thirties I was pretty much moving on to pickleball. But for me it was just the opportunity to build a community of people who just love coming out there and playing pickup. You know, I can’t always say that I felt like I belonged on the court. And whether it’s just what I look like or I just it was never, I, no one’s going to mistake me for an ex NBA player or a college coach or whatever. But I knew that those like people who love playing basketball always called that space, like a sanctuary and like a safe place and a haven.

And like, I didn’t know what that felt like. And so I almost built this company for myself in a way that I wanted the mission. At one point we kind of laid it out was if I can make you feel like you belong in the basketball court, then I can make you feel like you belong somewhere in this world.

I think ethos the metric. Here’s another kind of like way that I looked at Hoop Club as a business was the metric that mattered to me during a session in terms of like, if you asked me if this was a good hoop club session or not, like this night, I would’ve said it’s based off of the number of high fives that were given between the players.

You know, the 15 players that showed up that night. And there was a few times that we would take a counter out there and we would just track that. I think it was a stat that man, the 2011 Dallas Mavericks, the team that won the championship had where that team had more like high fived each other, more than any other team in the NBA.

I don’t know if that I’ve just heard that. I’ve never actually seen a number.

[00:22:33] MIke Klinzing: I think it was like that too, that Steve Nash, right? Mm-hmm. was the guy that was the, gave the highest number of touches, whether that was high fives or slap on a butt or whatever it was. Yeah. That he was the guy in the league that most.

Touched his teammates at some, at some point during the seven seconds or less era.

[00:22:50] Ed Chao: Yeah, I remember that as well. And it is just that, that just stuck with me. You know, something about like chemistry or just being able to like tell your teammate like good or bad, like, I got you. That just sends that signal there’s so many different messages you can send with the high five.

And anyway, that’s just kind of how I looked at, running these Hoop Club sessions was more important to me to watch the dynamics between people and make sure that like you’re saying, even on a competitive level, I want you to be competing and playing hard.

But I also want to be building like this community where like, we’re all out here, we’re on the same team. Like I know we’re playing against each other, but like we’re all young working adults, like for the most part. And we’re out here trying to get better, trying to get a good exercise and building community.

So that was the ethos of Hoop Club.

[00:23:41] MIke Klinzing: There is nothing better than pickup basketball when it comes to that feeling that you just described of fitting in feeling like it’s a sanctuary, having a community. And I think back to when I was playing and the number of times that you show up at a park and whether you’re at a place where you are regularly or whether you go to a place that you’ve never been before.

Basketball is just, it’s a common language, and I think you said it really well when you talked about that you want to compete as hard as you can with people, and yet at the same time, you’re all still kind of part of this community. And obviously you can go to some places where there’s more animosity rather, rather than less depending on what park you go to and when you’re there.

But for the most part, most of the places where I played pickup basketball, I definitely felt that piece of community. And I’ve talked about this before, but one of the things that I look back most fondly on in my basketball career, and I was a high school basketball player and I played division one college basketball.

And I always say that some of my most fond memories of basketball weren’t during those organized times. But it’s the time that I spent playing pickup basketball on the playground. And back in the day when I was playing primarily, a lot of the pickup that I played was outdoors. I mean, certainly there was some indoor that we played.

I played a lot of time outdoors, and I remember the local park in my community was probably about a half mile bike ride from my house, maybe a little less than that. And from the time I was like 13 or 14 years old, I’d hop on my bike and ride down to the park and I would always try to be the first person to the park so that as the players started showing up, by the time they got to 10, I was one of those first 10.

And so I could always get into that first game and maybe I’d do something good and somebody would recognize me and then maybe I’d get a chance to play again later with some of the older guys and whatever. And there was, there was a guy that, at the time, we thought he was really old, but he was probably like 36, 37.

He had gray hair, and he was a good player, but he would always show up and he and I would be the two first guy, the two people there. So the youngest, the youngest kid, and then the oldest guy who typically played in these games. And he and I would, Be the first two there. And we’d oftentimes, we’d just sit on the bench and we’d talk and he’d share things about about the game or you know, kind of, I don’t know if acted as my mentor as, I didn’t think of it at that time.

And I’m not sure if you know if he did, but certainly like those conversations and just, I think about the adults that kind of put their arm around me and sort of help me to be a part of that and said, Hey, we’ll take this kid and we’ll, we’ll put him on our team. And just, there’s no way to ever replace that.

And I say all the time that my own kids who have grown up playing AAU basketball and playing travel basketball and playing with kids their own age and all these things that, like, there’s a lot of good stuff about that, but I feel like they got cheated out of some of the experiences that I got on the playground.

It’s just, it’s a different way of growing up and I wouldn’t trade that ability to have to play pickup basketball. My wife has often told me it’s funny that. Just thinking about what you were able to do here with Hoop Club. My wife has told me for years, she’s like, You gotta come up with something. Bring back the pickup.

Bring back the pickup, bring back the pickup. I’m like, I don’t know. I’m not sure how you, how you do that. And here you, you had, you had the blueprint all along, we should’ve met 10 years ago.

[00:27:17] Ed Chao: It’s not too late. You can still bring it back.

Yeah. If there’s a need in in Cleveland, Ohio, let me know. It’s not too bad to set it up.

[00:27:26] MIke Klinzing: That’s cool. I mean, it’s fun. I think it’s something that is super interesting. Now, we were talking before the podcast that you ended up selling the business. So talk a little bit about first of all, the decision to do that, and then just a little bit of maybe what the new group that purchased it, what their thoughts are and where they’re headed with it.

[00:27:44] Ed Chao: Sure. Absolutely. So this, it was during Covid that we pretty much had to freeze all operations for Hoop Club. And at the time this was a side hustle. It was just a passion of mine. And so it wasn’t something that I could keep going and there was an interested party that a friend who I had met who who’d been working on more of, more of a basketball league app.

And it always seemed like it would fit well having pickup as a lead gen to be able to feed and funnel players into a league. And so yeah, we just had some conversations and, and we came to an agreement and I stayed on with this company, it’s called Areena Sports, also local here in Dallas.

And stayed on to just help them transition a little bit and try to grow their basketball leagues. Where we were sharing a lot of facilities, there was a lot of overlap in our players, in our communities. So just tried to go over there and, and tried to bring them some of that continuity of Hoop Club into Arena.

So that was, that was the big transition, kind of like moment was because of Covid and certainly could have picked it up later, but just timing wise, it seemed to make sense. And coincided, I don’t want to say coincidentally, but one of my board members on Hoop Club. Had approached me about helping him with his company.

At the time it was called E Play which iswhere I am now. We’ve reformed the company into Cerebro. But my CEO now, Ryan Gerardo, was on my board of directors for Hoop Club. And when I had to freeze hoop club and decided to sell it, he said, Ed, like with your experience of running event operations and running business like this, and also my background in statistics, like I have my degree in epidemiology, like just disease statistics.

So being able to combine my skill set with my passion. He asked if I would be interested in helping him out with E play. And when I took a look at what they were trying to build over here at E Play the mission really just jumped out at me. It was about helping players advocate for themselves with stats and anyway, we can kind of unpack and kind of go over what Cerebro is.

But, but I’ll just say that was kind of like the hook that made me really intrigued and talking to my wife about it was like, okay, this is something that I’d like to be involved in.

[00:30:38] MIke Klinzing: Obviously anybody who is involved in basketball specifically, but sports in general understands and knows that a lot of the conversations today center around analytics and what.

Analytics can do on the coaching side, what can do on the player evaluation side? There’s just so many pieces to it and I think there’s just, there’s a ton of data that’s out there that we’re still trying to figure out, again, what can we do with it? How can we make the game better? Whether that’s from a coaching standpoint, from an evaluation standpoint.

So you guys get involved in this, you jump in and you start looking at it. Why don’t we start with, just give us an idea of what it is exactly that Cerebro does for people that are listening so we can kind of start to be able to educate them from a standpoint of sort of the baseline of what you guys do.

[00:31:35] Ed Chao: Yeah, and if you don’t mind, I just start with a little bit of a disclaimer because it’s hard not to, I know from what I’ve researched and looked into in terms of the Hoop Heads podcast audience, you have a lot of high school coaches. You have parents, you have people who live in this world of youth basketball, aau, grassroots, scholastic basketball, and I’m an outsider.

Very much so, as if you’ve kind of heard over the past half an hour in terms of my background, I’ve never played in grassroots basketball, never played at the college level. I’ve never coached. And so I think I just say that I feel very much an imposter , even though I’ve been working.

[00:32:15] MIke Klinzing: Don’t feel that way.  Because here, honestly, So here, I’ll give you the honest honesty. And I appreciate your honesty and your feelings there, because I think one of the things that, so as the host here, like I haven’t coached high school basketball since 2008, 2009. And so one of the things that as I’m going through and I think what you have to do is.

You have to kind of look at it and say, I’m humble enough to know that, I don’t understand a ton of things in terms of just how the game has evolved and changed and coaching and this and that. Just the way that the last time that I was coaching and watching film, I was using a vcr.

So it’s like you go back and now you see all the different things that we have and, and look, I thought I knew way more about the game when I was 23 than what I do now. And so I think that as you go through and, and you’re sharing what you guys are doing, which I’m curious because I’ve spent some time poking around the website and looking at the video and trying to figure it out.

And I think I have in my mind kind of what it is, but at the same time,

[00:33:30] Ed Chao: Do you want to go first? Do you want to go first? No. No. I want you to, I’ve to know what you think already.

[00:33:35] MIke Klinzing: Because if I start, Cause if I start talking, what’s going to happen is everybody’s going to be confused and you’re going to be like, Boy Mike, that was the worst sales pitch for Cerebro we’ve ever heard.

So I’m going to let you go first and then I’m going to pepper you with questions after you get through the baseline explanation.

[00:33:51] Ed Chao: Well, offline, I’d love to still know the answer of what you thought before we talk, because to me, I want to learn, I want to know what someone think. From just visiting websites, from seeing our marketing or whatever it is and the perception that you have. So here’s one way that I like to describe Cerebro. I like to say that we’re the custodians of the grassroots basketball space. I know you just said like, it’s crazy how much information, how much data is out there for around basketball and people still trying to figure out how what to do with it, advanced analytics, et cetera.

But I think when I came into this world, like two and a half this grassroots basketball world, two and a half years ago, my first like realization was how chaotic how little there is.

[00:34:39] MIke Klinzing: Yeah, you’re right. you’re a hundred percent right at this level, at the grassroots level.

You’re talking about AAU basketball. Yeah. Or you’re talking about youth community travel basketball, which I mean, I don’t even know how many participants there are. Yeah, there’s, there’s next to nothing. Like you’re lucky if you get a score sheet. That has the player’s number. And how many points they’ve scored.

And if you get the score right, then who won the game? So serious. I understand.

[00:35:06] Ed Chao: So that was the shock that I had when I came into this world and, and as I peeled back the layers, like it only got worse. And, but like I started to understand why I started to get on the ground and to be with some of these event operators and to see why, but all of that to say, I call it, yeah, I call ourselves like the custodians because we’re cleaning up We’ll take the paper box scores that people are throwing into the trash and we’re going to consolidate those.

We’re going to clean ’em. Like, just make sure, like what, whatever we can do to make sure that the data’s accurate, we’re going to do that first and foremost. And then we’re going to put ’em into a, a big database and we put that, put it into this big database and then, and then we’ve built basketball tools for basketball people like.

Like in any other industry where you can filter and find recruits and look for job applicants and better fits in a very similar way. We’ve added filters to be able for you to look through an event in particular and look for you can sort by different fields or whatever you’re interested in, look at different teams and do that at the AAU level.

And as we collect more and more of these box scores, you start to be able to build like piece together player profiles and resumes, like what kids are doing over time and. We have to do it strategically because you can’t boil the whole ocean at once. And so we, we came up with sort of a, a, a few different ways to, to help us strategize, like what events do we go to, where do we go and get the data.

And we have a kind of a player led strategy and we have an event led strategy where there’s, there’s obviously your premier national events that happen around the country. You know, you got night you got the shoe circuits, you flying to the hoop in Ohio. You know, you have all these like just Les Schwab and Portsmouth and City of Palms and you know, the ones that have always been established.

So you have to get those if, if they have, you have those box where you gotta get those. And then in terms of player led you know, just it’s, you start at the top of the pyramid and you make sure that let’s just say ESPN top 100 rankings on class 2024. Let’s, let’s go make sure we have at least 50 games on every one of those players.

And when we get those players, we’re going to have their teammates. And when we have their teammates, we’re going to have their opponents. So then it starts to trickle down a little bit. You might get a little bit at the next tier and then the next tier. But that’s how we’ve sort of like at least guided ourselves, in terms of like where to go get data. So hopefully that gives you at least a picture of where we decided to start with going to get the data first. Recognizing that there’s just, there is just a lack of box score data at the AAU level. And I started to understand that’s because college coaches trust their eyes more than anything.

They’re still using the eye test and scouts, you know scouts and they’re, and then maybe they’re going to look at some film, they’re going to go and watch the kid in person and then send out their assistant coaches to different events and report back on Monday, Let’s talk about it and then let’s make a decision on who to offer.

But it was really telling for me when I was talking to a division one head coach and I asked him, like, on average for a recruit for a freshman recruit, like, how many box scores do you have to look at for that kid? And he. He said four and I, I couldn’t really, I was like four. No. Like there’s no way, like he’s, Yeah, he’s like, Yeah, and he actually spent a week forwarding me every single email he got from people, like kids international scouts and agents, like just trying to push their players to him.

Like it was just, it was mind boggling. Like just the, the mixed tapes and what people thought was important to show. But like, numbers were such a there just weren’t number, A lot of times there weren’t numbers where you couldn’t trust the numbers. There wasn’t context for the numbers.

And so yeah, this is just me continuing to try to learn and understand like what the pain points, what the problems are in this space before trying to honestly come up with a solution. But I’ve already, I kind of already started to tell you like kind of solution was where we went with the data collection and process.

But the other part, like the other half of the equation here, is that we needed a way to simplify the data, even though it was like box score data. We wanted a way to make it really, really fast and easy to digest big data. And so My team has been really, really amazing in educating me and showing me the ropes.

And one thing that one of our teammates did was to come up with our own composite score metric called the ram. You know, basically taking like your eight components of a box score and putting that into one number. You know, and I would not be doing it justice if I tried to explain how it all worked.

But with this one number, you can pretty much rank let’s just say every, every player in the NBA season last. And in addition to that one metric, we also have the C ramp, the comparative metric, which tells you how good a player it was relative to the average of the field. So then with that number, we were able to start to kind of like separate, kind of like percentile of a player.

And then we started handing out like medals gold, silver, bronze medals where in the NBA there would be like 2%, 2% of the NBA would get medals and then like 5% would get silvers and then 12% would get bronzes. And you start to see these tiers of players start to kind of like, you know organize themselves and.

When you, And the reason that we stuck with just box core stats and nothing more complicated than that. Even though in the NBA and you’re looking at, I don’t know, the PER or whatever advanced metrics are out there like that use like play by play. Data. You don’t have that at the AAU level.

Like you, you barely have box scores at times. So the only way to translate these numbers to the AAU level is to use like one common one common set of numbers. So that’s why we stuck with just the simple box score stats. And so with those two metrics, you have a way to very quickly just kind of like put, I mean, I hate to say it this way, like to assign a value to a player with one number, like how good they are, how much they’re worth.

But it’s a way to very quickly just organize that list. So we have those two numbers and then we have this separate set of five numbers that we call the five ms. And it’s the five metric suite. And this is, this is what tells you like the skill set that a player has. So we were able to take those eight box score metrics and organize ’em to kind of five skill skill sets. If you don’t mind, I’ll just tell you those five. Really Go for it. Yeah. Pure scoring prowess. Three point efficiency, four general skills around the rim like activity and then defensive statistical impact. So these five numbers, they all scale to 100.

And the reason we came up with these numbers, I’ll give you a quick backstory on this, was actually inspired by Coach John Beline, who’s one of our first investors. He was telling us how it would be great to be able to like search through a data set by the archetype of a player. So he gave us nine different archetypes like the modern big, or the point forward or the combo guard.

He gave us nine of those, we kind of came up with this five metric suite to be able to say, you know what, each of these nine archetypes, I can tell you is a com is a certain kind of minimum combination of these five skill sets. Like your point forward is going to, it’s going to be really strong in your four general skills, going to have a really good, strong defensive physical impact.

And maybe their scoring isn’t quite as high, but with those five skill sets, we’re now able to really, really quickly site read like if I could pull up your numbers back at Kent State, like it would be really cool if I could look at it.

[00:43:35] MIke Klinzing: It’s fun to go back and look at my statistics. Just like, it’s funny because they have, you can look at like whatever the, for college, that’s basketball reference.com or whatever, and somehow they have like some, there’s like some true shooting numbers that I’m always looking at ’em like, Is this, like, is this real?

I don’t even, I don’t even know what that means, but is it, is it, is it real? And then I’m looking at it going, Wow, that’s pretty good, . Like, I hear people talking about this true shooting. I’m like, Man, Mike was a pretty good player, I had a pretty good true shooting.

[00:44:05] Ed Chao: I saw that you broke a few records while you were there.

[00:44:07] MIke Klinzing: Yeah, so it’s funny, my longest running, Well, I still have one more, I still have one more record left. I still have steals, which I always say, I always say that in my career I had like 12 steals in my entire career, but I had eight of them in one game. And my quote, my quote in the newspaper after that game was they just kept passing me the ball.

They’re like, How’d you break the steals record? I’m like, I don’t know. The other team, they just kept passing to me. I don’t know what, I don’t know what to tell you. So, That’s the only one I still have.

[00:44:34] Ed Chao: That’s going to be tough to break eight. It is. Steals in one game.

[00:44:38] MIke Klinzing: Yeah, that’s a lot. Somebody got my 10 3’s Sincere Carry who’s actually a, a local kid from here. Not too far away from me. Yes. Got 10 hit 10 threes in the game. So I had nine for, I think I set that in 1991 and it lasted until 2021, so 30 years. That record stood, which is pretty good. Wow.

[00:45:00] Ed Chao: So you’re still paying attention to what’s happening with your alma mater?

[00:45:03] MIke Klinzing: I try to. I try to get back to at least one game a year if I can just to, and sometimes I’ll go to more, but I try to kind of stay in touch as much as I can,

[00:45:14] Ed Chao: Awesome. Yeah. Whenever we have time offline some time, we’d love to show you what the roster looks like in our platform.

But yeah, it’d be cool. Yeah did that do a good enough job?

[00:45:29] MIke Klinzing: It does.  Let me jump in with some questions. Okay. All right. So question one. Obviously, in order for you to be able to get any data, because look, I’ve been to a lot of AAU tournaments in my life and I’ve been to AAU tournaments now at all kinds of different levels.

So I’ve been to some that are pretty good. Most recently, my son’s going to be a junior, and last year for the first time we traveled and went to some of the bigger tournaments and, but previously we played in lots of different local things. And I can honestly tell you that I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a box score that would have just the straight counting stats that you’re talking about in all of your metrics.

So the question that I have, or maybe it’s not even a question, but it’s just more of a statement. Obviously you have to pair with some of the. Biggest, best run, most functional events around the country so that the statistics that you’re getting, first of all, that you’re getting ’em at all. And then secondly, you have to be able to rely on them that they’re accurate in order for what you’re putting out there to be in any way actually reflective of what the players are doing.

So I know you talked about some of the different places that you paired up with, but maybe give them all a little promo, some of the events and that you mentioned flying to the hoop, which we just had, I just interviewed Horseman, just, I don’t know, a week or two ago. And so his episode will be coming out, probably it’ll already be out by the time yours comes out, but nonetheless, he’s running a great first class event here in Dayton, Ohio.

But just talk about how you, how you connected with those events, knowing what you needed in order to be able to put this together.

[00:47:10] Ed Chao: Yeah, absolutely. You know, just to clarify one thing you said I think you said being able to partner with the best event operators out there and I don’t want to take away anything from those who might think of themselves as the best. But actually the ones that I would say have been the best partners for us at Cerebro, I would say, I would use the word like forward thinking. Gotcha. Or those who are willing to kind of invest in the long run of their events.

I understand that for a lot of the event operators in the short term, they don’t get a return on investment in having stats at their event. They sell streaming, they sell tickets to the stream and they sell coaches packets to the coaches nd they make their revenue with the teams coming in.

So no one’s really been able to figure out how to generate revenue off of data, off of stats. And so until someone figures out how to crack that code, which I think we have, There’s still not going to be a lot of stats at these events unless they are your absolute premier forward thinking event operators who, like Eric Horstman just want to put on the best events possible or Glen Smith down here in Dallas who does Hoop Fest like they’re going to invest in having not just like live stats, but even like, they have the stats at halftime for the teams to be able to print out  and study in between games.

So yes, it’s always easy when we can work with event operators who already are getting great stats, but what we’re willing to come in and do for those event operators who are forward thinking and right now only stream video is, hey, you may not be able to have it make sense financially to invest in a live statistician.

But what we can do is we can help you coordinate with your video streaming company and then with one of our video breakdown partners. So we have like three different video breakdown companies that we could send if we have good quality video and what you were leading to earlier, a good score sheet or roster, then we can have one of our partners stat by video.

And it’s not immediate. And so you won’t have that at the end of your son’s game and tournament, but within 48 hours of that event being finished, if Cerebro was able  to get the rosters, and pictures of the score sheets and have access to the video to then turn around to our video partners, then we can get those box scores into our platform, usually within 48 hours.

So that’s kind of like how the sausage is made. When it comes to, if you can’t get it live, then this is kind of like your next best option. And I think it’s kind of a better late than. Type situation. And one thing that we’re doing with, let’s see just using Eric’s event, flying to the hoop they’ve had stats I think every single year, but their streaming partner is SUV tv founded by a great operator named Marcus Burnett. And Marcus is a partner of Cerebros. And we’ve been able to, to take a look at his vast library of a lot of elite events around the country that have never been actually statted. Like a lot of, LeBron James’ son, Bronny James’ sons games. They have film on these I think the battle series, but you know, they don’t have stats for these games.

So we’ve been able to go back with Marcus, collect the rosters, even if it’s tedious. Asking the coaches, Hey, like, who was this kid wearing, wearing this number at this game, like in like two years ago? You know, to be able to make sure that that kid gets credit for what he did on the court. And we’ll do that retrospectively.

And we’ll break down those box scores and basically have data in our platform that no one else in the world has. Which is if you don’t mind, kind of like a great transition to how we got Mark Cuban as an investor.

[00:51:18] MIke Klinzing: All right. Jump into that. Go right to it.

[00:51:22] Ed Chao: It’s basically one line, or one line that my CEO wrote to Mark Cuban via email right after the NBA draft this past year when we picked up Jayden Hardy and Ryan basically emailed Mark and said, Hey, congratulations on the pickup of Jayden Hardy.

I guarantee you we have data on Jayden Hardy that your front office doesn’t.

That was it, That was the email Mark responded back, Make me your best offer. And from there we just, we went through due diligence. But being able to tell an NBA team that we have data that they don’t, was pretty much as confident of a move that our team has ever been able to make thus far.

[00:52:08] MIke Klinzing: So what does that conversation look like? Obviously you can say that, and then the next question is, Well, what is it? So what, so what does that, I mean, obviously you’re going to explain what it is to them, but just what does that conversation look like? Where, as you talked about, 15 minutes ago, I would think that if you had an imposter syndrome, talking to Mike Klinzing on the Hoop Heads Podcast, that if you’re going in to talk to Mark Cuban and an NBA front office, that feeling, that imposter theory probably was a little bit stronger then. So just tell me a little bit about what that conversation looks like. Sounds like.

[00:52:42] Ed Chao: Sure it still was a little bit of imposter syndrome because the truth behind that statement is that it was one game. It was one game that when we were a really young company, even when we were, actually, it wasn’t even when we were Cerebro, but we were Eplay back then.

Ryan and our Chief Data Officer, John Cho, they went out to a small little showcase event, I think in Las Vegas. They were actually statting games ourselves then, like I told you that we were now we use like video partners and whatnot, right? Like we actually statted games ourselves. So that’s how we knew that no one else in the world would have this data set.

And Jayden Hardy happened to have played one game in this showcase. So that’s how we got the hook. And you know, I tell you now that like, I mean, I could tell the front offices now that we probably have a lot of data that on a lot of players that they’re interested in that they don’t have.

And that’s part of our pitch and why we’re trying to sell data licenses to these NBA teams. But that was the hook I think that we needed to be able to not just tell Mark, but tell ourselves like, we are doing something special here. And this data is not just valuable to an NBA team, but what does it mean to the kid who’s trying to show that he deserves to be a D two player and not a D three or he deserves to be a D one player and not a D two, or that he even deserves to play in college. Like just being able to have your own numbers to be able to advocate yourself. It just seems like it’s that for some reason it’s just, I mean, not for some reason, like, we understand that that’s never existed in this space and it’s why there is so much confusion and intimidation, I think, for parents and players on that journey of being recruited.

So that’s going to open up a whole other conversation for us. But let me pause there and just see if, like, if that makes sense for you. What we’re doing and why, like that statement to Mark is really the hook that allowed us to, to start having traction and credibility. With the audiences that we’re trying to work with.

[00:54:51] MIke Klinzing: Yeah, it makes sense. So I think my thought process as I first started to look at what you guys are doing and obviously trying to figure out, well, how do they get what they get from the box score and turn that into something that is going to accurately measure the total value, for lack of a better way of saying it, of a player.

So that’s the first thing that I think is popping into my head. And then I guess the next question that I would have if I was Mark Cuban or I was an MBA front office, is, okay, have you taken this data? And you talked about it a little bit, that if you apply it to NBA players, but in your experience when you went and you apply this to the NBA and you’re looking at the number.

That comes out, you’re looking at your ram that comes out of, of this. I’m assuming that what you’re seeing is that the players who are universally considered to be the top players in the league, that, that the ranking system of players corresponds pretty accurately with the number that you guys can produce from, from these, from these box scores.

So to me that’s where, if I’m looking at, if I’m looking at this like you could show me a number from some AAU tournament, right? And you could say, Hey, Billy Smith from California is the top player in. You know, in this AAU tournament, I’d be like, Okay, well fine, but what, what does that really show me? But if you show me that the first team all NBA guys, those are the top five guys.

When we take their previous seasons box scores and we put these metrics on it. Now that’s when I start to get intrigued. So I’m assuming that’s the data. Yes. You obviously don’t have to share, but I’m assuming that’s the data that you have that you shared with Mark Cuban and anybody else who’s coming to you with and interested in doing this.

[00:56:55] Ed Chao: I’ll be completely honest with you, Mike, like the NBA teams aren’t necessarily interested in our metrics. They want the raw data. They have their own analytic departments that are going to for sure model and forecast the features. But I can’t tell you that I’m so proud of the metrics that we do have in the ram.

You know, like you just mentioned, that if you go back into all the history of the NBA and you look at the different eras, like not only does you know, would I tell you that the names make sense in the order that they come in, like. The ramp translates even into different eras and playing styles of basketball that like that a Kevin Garnet would be a number one ranked player in one of his years.

And Michael Jordan definitely a number one. But Steph Curry like the way he plays and dominates like it, they dominate in different ways, but they still float to the very, very top. And so when we get a chance and we want to do a deeper dive on, on just how the ram shakes out, like these tiers, like, I would love to show you that and even go side by side with.

Let’s just say an nba, kind of like the gold standard at the moment, at least for the casual NBA fan, would probably be the PER, right? And if you take the top 20 players by PER last year, next to our top 20 by the ram, like I’d tell you, you’d like our list better because the PER inherently favors big men with high field goal percentages.

Like, it’ll put a Hassan White side and a Mitchell Robinson super high up on that list, and they’re going to make that list and you’re going to kind of scratch your head like, Wait, Hassan White side, Like that doesn’t make sense to me. . So I guess no knock on, on Hollinger over there, but just to say, we’re not saying this number’s perfect, but it’s more than serviceable.

And when you can apply it to the NBA set, but imagine applying it to all of division one. You apply it to all of division one, and then imagine this Mike, you have a button in the corner that says transfer eligible. The players that are in the transfer portal right now, you click that button, I show you the list of players in order of most valuable to least valuable, and that’s been a game changer for our collegiate coaching audience.

You know, two years ago, sorry, I’m kind of going backwards here from Mark, from the Mark Cuban story, but when we first kind of like took a product to market in April of 2020, right after March Madness. We were still like working in Google Sheets and we had these filters set up. We had all the division one men’s with our ram rating, and then we added this transfer eligible button.

And even though we don’t have access to the portal honestly, we would follow what would happen on verbal commits, right? So we would track which players had entered and which players have left that’s the only way we would know. So we would add that information on a daily basis.

And what I said, we, I specifically John Cho, and I’ll tell you more about him in a second, but you, you add that button and it just you just know who to. Look into it a little bit more and it saved so much time and that’s what we started to sell to college coaches, was access to this Google sheet for like $50 a month just to see if like we were building something that was useful, you know?

And sure. It was only for that kind of season of like when recruiting or scouting might be a little bit more you know, like hot. But we got a lot of really great feedback that this is not just that tool alone, but what we were building is going to be the future of recruiting.

Being able to do that at the AAU level and being able to do that across multiple data sets is something that was going to going to change everything so yeah, hopefully that gives you a little bit of a and the audience kind of like an understanding of Cerebros  little start and some of the traction we’ve been able to make since then.

You know, we’ve been able to build out an actual web application tool now where it’s, it’s self-contained and it’s really, really slick.  There’s a global search that you can search around the world for players and we’re adding like, data to it, so much data to it every single day.

So that’s what we’re up to at the moment.

[01:01:34] MIke Klinzing: Let me ask you this about the metrics. So I’m imagining that there’s obviously one number that you’re comparing across whatever, across players, across events. And if you’re talking about the transfer portal, you can compare everybody, you can get that one singular number.

But then I’m going to take it one step further that you also have the ability, Let’s say that I’m a division one coach and what I’m looking for is I need a big, who can block shots and rebound the ball. So now I can look at, okay, here’s a player who ranks here, but maybe their strongest metric is three point efficiency.

And that’s not what I’m looking for. But instead, I’m looking for somebody who has a high overall ranking, but I’m also looking for that sub ranking of the around the rim metrics. I’m guessing that that’s also a capability that. You have for sure a place that people can look at, Okay, what specific type of player am I looking for?

And then I can use those sub metrics to figure that out?

[01:02:43] Ed Chao: Exactly right. You can use our shortcuts to find archetypes if you want to. You can use the knobs to kind of dial it up, dial stuff up and down as you want to. And I’ll just even give you a case study from a, from an assistant coach who was, who was one of our early testers, and he basically gave us the scenario of like, I’m looking for I want, I want to see all the big men who are at least six, eight, who play less than 12 minutes.

And show them, show them to me in the order of like how many rebounds they, how many defensive offensive rebounds they grab, you know? And so we were able to do that within a few clicks and just kind of build that form, because I only learned that later from him.

Why are you looking for like people, the guys who play less than 12 minutes. So he was basically looking for productive players who weren’t getting a lot of playing time and were probably unhappy about their situation and might be willing to transfer so that he could though then talk to their high school coach and find out what their situation is. And that’s how I learned how recruiting, like how this stuff happens. But it just made all the sense in the world that yeah, that’s what you need to be paying attention to.

And, you know when something like that happens. So just the, this, it’s still crazy to me, the macro trends that, that have shifted the college basketball landscape within the past three, four years. You know, that transfer that covid giving players an extra year of eligibility as well as the transfer rule exception, being able to transfer without, without having to sit out a year.

It really just created chaos and free agency marketplace and chaos creates opportunity. And I think for us, it was actually perfect timing for our tool to come out and, and get tested because for the first time coaches were, Have this opportunity to look at more players than they ever could.

And unfortunately, the high school players that were incoming are the ones who probably suffer the most because of it. But for the coaches, they’re like, Wow, where do I even begin to start researching who I should be looking at? So the, the coaches that we were able to bring in early on and give us a try, I think we, we just have heard some amazing testimonials.

You know, even from a D two coach who just told us, like, because of your tool and, and being able to recruit off of the transfer portal, like, we’re like, Cerebro is the reason we made it to the tournament this year. And I don’t know, just at least from the coaches coaching perspective, like that brings a lot of validation.

But like I said, whenever you’re ready, being able to then transition to what this company is doing and why we’re doing what we’re doing for the players themselves, I think is really the heart of, of my team and of, of the company.

[01:05:38] MIke Klinzing: Okay. Let me ask you one more question about the coaches and then we’ll then we’ll skip to the player part of it.

So, from a coaching standpoint, obviously when you guys introduce this and it first comes out, nobody knows what it is. You have to educate people about it and let them know what’s going on and share some of the things that we’ve already talked about to help them to gain an understanding of what exactly it is that you guys are doing.

So who are the first coaches that you reach out to? I don’t, I don’t mean you have to name names, Sure. But just what are the relationships that you had or who did you go to to say, Hey, which coaches might be early adopters of this? Which ones would be open to it? Just what was the process for figuring out who do we go to in order to be able to put this in the hands of people who we think are going to be able to understand it and then want to utilize it?

And then once they realize, hey, this is a good tool. Now obviously it becomes, coaches are talking and it, it grows from there.

[01:06:33] Ed Chao: No such a fair question. It brings back such amazing memories and visceral moments. You know, it’s all, it’s all about relationships and you know who and I’ll start with Coach Bielein.

Coach Bielien, like I said, was if not our, I think our very first investor in Cerebro, like he believed as us really, really early. And so when we had our Google sheet tool, even in that state, he was willing to take us. He formed two separate focus groups for us, coaches for us to go talk to. There was probably like five or six in each of those Zoom calls of just his coaching tree.

Like just kind of spread throughout the country. And you, if it’s okay, I’m not going to name any names at the moment. But that’s where we got our earliest feedback and I still remember. I mean, I don’t, I’m trying to think why would, but we, there’s no reason not to. But maybe just, just to be on the safe side I won’t say names, but Yeah, that makes sense. There was one coach, and I think we were looking at a recruit look, Hoops, Omaha data set. And we were looking at the players in our, kind of like in that ranking with the ram. And I was like, Okay, here’s the best three point shooter based off of the three PE metrics that was in the tournament.

So we click on his name and then you can look at his player event profile. You scroll down to the, to towards the bottom, and then you have his game logs. And so you can see his numbers by each game. And then but then if you scroll to the right just a little bit, you have two links.

One is a link to the actual like box score, and then the second one is to the game film. And when he saw the game film. He said, Oh shit, like this is going to change recruiting. Like, this is like, you mean I can just click that button and I go watch the film on that kid? And we’re like, Yeah. He’s like, Oh my God.

So that moment was definitely a light bulb moment for us that we felt like we were onto something and that was still just, just the beginning of it. And, and just to give you an idea, like that that could be a baller TV link, that could be a synergy link. That’s where we, as Cerebro, we’re not trying to go and be the video breakdown company.

Like, we’ll link out to whoever has that film and, and if you have a, if you have a Synergy account and, and you, you can, you want to watch that kid every three point shot, he, he, he took, and you know, it’s all clipped up for you like, That then you, if you have that subscription, you just click it and you get to go watch that.

So if you, if we don’t and we just have like, I don’t know, a YouTube video link, then you can go and watch the full game film. And some coaches, they want that, right? They want to see everything and look for the red flags and the body language and how they react to misses, et cetera.

But it’s there, one of our sayings is start with the stats. Start with stats. Like, we know that eventually the next step is to go and watch some film and go watch these players in person. But like, instead of spending time watching a player that may not be producing as much as you think they are.

Like, if you at least start with the numbers, you start with a a like if you’re looking at a funnel like a wider base and, and a bigger population at the top, and then you filter out who you don’t need to look at you know, really quickly with our tools. And then once you figure out who you want to go spend time evaluating and, and researching then you can go and spend your time on that.

So we’re just trying to save these coaches time from that angle.

[01:10:23] MIke Klinzing: I think the eye test, it’s interesting obviously as the numbers have become more and more important and we’ve gotten better quality numbers, you still have a lot of coaches that, as you talked about several times, they want to see the player in person.

They want to see ’em with their own eyes, they want to evaluate them, and they should under that way, which exactly, which they, they definitely should. And yet I think sometimes, We know that as coaches, sometimes your perception of things is not necessarily always accurate, because sometimes you get stuck sort of in one way of thinking and you oftentimes maybe don’t recognize either.

It could be the growth in a player or the diminished skills of a player or the impact of a player. And I think that what’s interesting to me is the ability to be able to take these relatively simple numbers and turn them into something that is comparable to other players that you would be competing against.

Whether that’s you’re competing with them directly on the floor or in the direction that we’re going to go next where you’re a player and you’re competing with these other players for opportunity. Whether that’s opportunity coming out of the transfer portal, whether that’s opportunity. Coming out of high school and the ability to be recruited.

I think that’s where, again, you’re going to tell me here in a second that that’s where you see the value lie in getting players access to this data. So why don’t we jump off there next?

[01:12:03] Ed Chao: Before I do that, if you don’t mind, I just wanted to, I forgot you asked me like how we got to the coaches that we got to and so Coach Bielein was I think a spark for a lot of those coaches, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention and tell you a little bit about at least two of my teammates, Cerebro.

So one, his name is John Cho, he’s our Chief Data officer. He worked for the Houston Rockets for 19 years and he worked his way up from assistant kind of like part-time video person to eventually being on the, the bench on the coaching staff for the Rockets and being Darrell Morey’s right hand guy to take the data and the analytics and take it to the coaches and take it to the players.

And so, I mean, I’ve never met anyone with the type of work ethic that John Cho has. It just gave me a glimpse of like what it takes to like, to make it in the in the mba. And John has had, I don’t know how many interns he’s had, go through his department, his video department at the Rockets, but it’s pretty safe to say that like his network of current assistant and general managers in the NBA is really, really vast.

And just folks that basically owe their first jobs to John and who are still, who are working in the NBA, in different capacities. Like John is beloved by all of these guys whenever we show up, I mean, not just whenever, but like this past year being at Summer League in Vegas and just being able to like hang around, John and walk through some of these casinos and the people that come up to him.

It was just, for me, it was just such a, I don’t know fan fanboy moments. I guess all of these players and legends like coming up to be like just Cho Cho Cho. So that’s John. And so through him we obviously were able to also have a pretty good start on a network of coaches to go and talk to.

And then and then another teammate of mine, his name is Rob James. He is in a lot of ways the architect of and the visionary for a lot of what we’re doing here. He used to work for Krossover and I didn’t know too much about it. I don’t know if you would know Mike. I think there’s, we, we had

[01:14:37] MIke Klinzing: Vasu Kulkarni, he was the, the ceo, the founder of, of Krossover on with us back in the early days of the pod.  So Yes. So familiar with it.

[01:14:47] Ed Chao: Yeah, for sure. So Rob worked support for Vasu for Krossover. And he I mean he just, he’s lived the grassroots basketball space. He’s from New York. And his knowledge and network is, is different from John’s, but like is also the grassroots basketball world.

And so he knows who to go to, where to go, all the underground things to do to be able to get into a gym or whatever. And he’s in a lot of ways, guided a lot of our strategy and data collection and just shown us the way to go. So between those two guys, I just wanted to at least give some of my teammates a little bit of a shout out.

I am, like I said, very much an outsider to this world. And that’s how we’ve started to gain some relationships in this space that is all based off of relationships and trust and it’s just how things move here. So anyway, I just wanted to add that part before we go into the players.

[01:15:55] MIke Klinzing: All right. So jump into the player piece of it. What do you see as being the value add for players and what direction do you see it going in terms of you being able to get this metric into the hands of players and then what players can subsequently do with that information.

[01:16:15] Ed Chao: Sure. I’ll be honest with you, this is a big part of what we’re trying to solve right now in terms of, I know it’s probably impossible to make stats cool to high school basketball players.

However, I think that what we’ve started to realize is when you get the buy-in from event operators and when you get the buy-in of the coach, of the high school coaches, when you start to get the buy-in, and then you’re going to get the buy-in of the parents and if you have that, the players are going to reap the raw awards of having their stats and learning what to do with them because of their supporting cast.

And so the current mission at hand for our team, and, and it’s not just current actually, this is the true mission of Cerebro, which is to raise recruiting literacy. Like this phrase is something that we’ve just started to just say a lot internally at our company, just recruiting literacy.

Like that’s, yes, we might be a data company. I think we’re a data company that’s masquerading as like a, hopefully like a leadership academy, that’s going to help these kids and their parents take the data to do what you were just saying earlier, like compare to the competition, to those who have some sort of baseline of some sort of ranking system to be able to say, Hey, like I was able to do this against that player who was supposed to be offered by Michigan State.

Like I just went toe to toe with him in this tournament. My C Ram was actually even a little bit higher than him. Like I can take that player event breakdown to a coach and start building myself a resume. So what we’re doing with each of these small tournaments or weekend tournaments and also scholastic seasons is each data set that we get in there, we’re going to be able to generate like an individual player event report.

And that’s something that your son played an tournament over the weekend, like you said, you don’t even know when the last time was that he had a piece of paper with his stats from, from the event. And what we want to do is we want to provide you that we’re going to sell it to you for $25, which we think is a really accessible and affordable and valuable like hopefully a very accessible price point.

And you can, you can stack those up, any event that you go to that’s Cerebro certified you’re going to be able to like purchase one at, So one, we want you to go play at Cerebro certified events with our partners and the ones who are forward thinking, the ones who are investing into stats.

There’s going to come a point in time when, if you’re not playing out of Cerebro. Tournament or if a tournament is not Cerebro certified, like why are you playing in that tournament? Like that’s a tipping point we believe as a company is going to come. So anyway, that being said for now we’ll go one offs with these events, and you can go and purchase these event reports for $25 a piece.

But eventually we want a subscription so that hey just for however much a month, like you’re, it doesn’t matter. You’re just going to have access to everything that you play in. And in addition to that, we’re going to provide you resources and tools and education curriculum to guide you on your recruiting process.

No matter if you’re just trying to make it, you find a way to play in college and keep your dream alive. Or if you’re being recruited by the blue blood programs. Like we can still provide value for those players who are evaluated between Duke and Kentucky and, Michigan because we can show you thir rosters with our metrics and tell you, this is how you would fit. Like this is who they’re going to lose next year. This is who they’re looking at. This is probably like where you would come in. You know, it’s, for us, it’s about fit. We want players to go to where they belong and are going to thrive in it’s in some ways a matchmaking surface for coaches and, and players.

And it might not be perfect, but hopefully if everyone’s using is speaking this language that Cerebro is building, then it’s at least better than what it is today. And we can start minimizing a lot of the I don’t know there, I know there’s a lot of negative things that we don’t have to go into that happen around recruiting and, and players not going to where they probably should and a lot of money involved in decision making processes, et cetera. But being able to at least have the data to, and the resources to in have a more informed process to, to going on this journey and supplying that to as many people that want to learn as possible.

Like, we really hope that high school coaches I’m going to be talking to a lot of high school coaches here in Dallas over the next few weeks after one of our local event operators are going to put on an event and we’re going to go take their kids’ data to them and say, Hey, if you’re helping this kid try to get recruited, like, do you have these numbers for them?

You know, this is how to look at it. This is how to help your kids who might not be looking at like, yes, your top two might be going to D one, but like, Hey, your third and fourth guys might be able to go play D two. Like let’s help ’em out. This is how you can help ’em and want to put those resources and tools into the coaches’ hands too.

Is this making sense?

[01:21:57] MIke Klinzing: It is.  Do you see the bigger challenge, as you guys look ahead down the road, is it a bigger challenge to educate the event operators, the high school players or the high school coaches? Like which of those three groups do you think is going to be easier to crack in terms of getting them to adopt and see the value in providing these kinds of stats?

[01:22:28] Ed Chao: That’s a great question and it’s something that I don’t think we’ve solved yet, and I don’t know if I could tell you which, which I think I could tell you which demographic is the hardest out of those three. If it’s talking about the event operators, the high school coaches and the players themselves.

I think the players themselves are the hardest to to show the value to. I mean, I think we’ve been on the ground at a number of events. And maybe it’s just the timing of the environment. Like that’s not the time to talk to the kids.

[01:22:59] MIke Klinzing: Do you think they have to get to the parents of those kids?

[01:23:01] Ed Chao: I think the parents get it really quickly and they see the value. I think it matters when and how we deliver it to them. And that’s why if we could speak to the parents directly, I think that would be an amazing way to be able to educate people about what Cerebro’s doing in our metric, et cetera.

What our current, I think, working theory is, is that if you get the event operator to buy in to get the data into the platform, and then not only that, but when we produce the data set in our platform for your event, You have like leaderboards based off of what you know, you can sort by whatever like stat you want to, if you want to do points or rebounds or assist, if you want to do that to those type of leaderboards, you can, you have the content right there.

If you want to use our metrics, you can make those and we’re even partnering with these event operators to create these leaderboard graphics for them so that they can tweet those out so that their audience, their coaches and parents and players will see those and see the exposure and the value of having those numbers for their events.

So this brings their events more value in exposure when it’s in Cerebro’s platform because we can also tell you college coaches are looking at your events or looking at your players. So the hope is that the parents who truly do drive a lot of the decision making in the grassroot basketball space, whether it’s for the kids or for the event operators, if you’re not making the parents happy, they’re just going to take their kid and go to a different team at a different circuit.

Like you do need to make your parents happy. So we’re trying to be, as we’ll kind of come into these event operators and work with them as much as possible. But I’d be lying if I told you, Mike, that they’re getting it. But at the same time we feel like we’re the rising tide that’s going to lift all boats, in this basketball space.

And those who don’t get with it sooner rather than later, like, don’t want to happen, but they’re going to be scrambling. They’re going to be scrambling later to like figure out how to get stats at their events and their parents are going to be. asking them like, Why are my kids stats not in Cerebro?

And they’re going to have to come back to us and say, Please, can you help us figure out a way to get our stats into your system? Can you figure out a way to help us get stats? And I mean, we’re definitely here to help anyone who wants to help themselves and run better events. Because at the end of the day, it is for the kids to be able to have something tangible to some sort of record of like, what they did on the court.

Like, I want to be able to tell every player, like, I think every coach wants to be able to tell their players, like every player matters. Like, you can, you can go out there and leave it all out on the court because someone, somewhere is going to have some way to like, record that and give you credit for it.

I think what we are bringing to this space.

[01:26:31] MIke Klinzing: I can totally see the value in it, Ed, when I start thinking about my own kid’s experience and just the ability, even if, let’s take it a step further, even if it’s not a recruiting tool for a kid, even if it’s not something that they’re going to utilize to further their basketball career, I know that in talking to kids that oftentimes you’ll have a game end and the kids will know exactly how many points they scored or how many rebounds they got, or how many assists they had, or maybe they’re fabricating it, but they try to keep track of that stuff.

And so just to be able to have that on hand so that whatever, a day later, two days later, after it goes through your entire process, to be able to have those statistics and have something tangible. To be able to look at, I mean, I can totally see where a kid would find value in that.

[01:27:34] Ed Chao: I think you are, you’re spot on.

And you know, the phrase that I said earlier, basketball tools for basketball people. That’s what my teammate PD likes to say. Like, I mean, it’s hard to, we don’t want to call ourselves a data company. That’s not fun, right? Like we’re, we’re basketball tools for basketball people and you a dad, a division one player, like I’m sure there’s a level of coaching that you might provide to your son.

And even if he has his own trainers and, and coaches like to be able to look at his development over time, like Yep. You know, from event to event. And just to be able to like either work with him directly or tell his trainer like, man, What’s going on here, Like three point shooting like is, it’s at whatever it is Like you, you can, you can speak to that a lot better than I can, but like, having the data to be able to essentially go through this like cycle, this cycle of play, measure, learn, play, measure, learn, play, measure, learn, play, measure, learn.

That’s what having data allows you to do. Even for your kid. And what every kid should be able to have. So that’s just one of the, like you’re saying, auxiliary like impacts of having data aside from just the recruit, like Yes, recruiting, literacy kind of like is our kind of flag that we’re kind of planting that this is where we’re going to change the game, but everything else around it, even like when it comes to coaching and scouting and player development are things that having data and metrics are going to allow you to do so. Anyway, I think you already I just, I love that it’s already making sense for you and that you’re thinking about the other ways that you can use data, because I couldn’t tell you, like, I think people are going to come up with ways to use Cerebro in ways that I still, I have no idea like what people are going to do with this.

But there is so much that’s going to be possible when you start thinking about like, just translating like players that are just the global movement of players, these like how international this game is. And you want to talk about like how, how good is the year leak? How good is like the NBL?

How good are, how good is the China basketball league? If you can start seeing players and their C Rams. And how good is an NCAA division one player go into the nba? And let’s see what the, what the fall off is in that first year and the second year for a division one let’s say a Trae Young going into the first year of Atlanta Hawks versus Luca Doncic coming in from Euro League.

Like, okay, they both dropped some both dropped a little bit in their c from their respective or previous leagues. But Luca’s Drop was much less than Treys. And then their second year, which a lot of NBA players make a huge jump going from their first year to second year.

Luca’s, I mean, both of them make significant jumps, but Luca gets back to pretty much where he was in the Euro League, like within, within two years in the nba. And Trae still, I mean, he kind of lands in this, maybe into the silver or  bronze area. So anyway, so then you have like, just a whole other application of having, you know cerebral.

Cerebro’s metrics, and we haven’t even talked about NIL or gambling dollars cetera. Like we don’t even need to. But because like I said, that really at the heart of it, like we think that this is just going to, we just want, for the kids, it’s going to it’s going to bring a lot of transparency into the recruiting process that hasn’t been there.

[01:31:09] MIke Klinzing: So could you compare the quality of events or the quality of leagues, for example? So like if you’re looking at the leagues in Europe where you’re saying, Okay, here’s a player who’s doing X in the Italian league, versus this guy’s doing X in the French A league. Absolutely. Now, which one of those two leagues?

Or take it back here to AAU tournament. So now I’m an event operator, right? And I’m saying that my event gets the best, whatever. We have the best teams from the. These five states in the Midwest or we’re the best tournament in California, I would think that at some point now there’d be a way to take and measure, okay, this player did this in this tournament, but then in this tournament they’re doing that.

And I would think over time again, you could build a data set where you could be able to, as an event operator, say, Hey, we’re the, we’re the number one rated event by Cerebro in California, or whatever it might be.

[01:32:05] Ed Chao: Yeah, I mean, I think something along those lines that we’re doing is to provide. Like league context data like be able to give you like the average like pace and you know, I mean different play styles for sure are going to come out in different leagues, but you start to be able to make some conclusions.

But you know, it definitely is still with a grain of salt. You have to I think look at the context and there’s specific events that allow you to see the intersection of different basketball worlds colliding at once that are really then great to then take back to look at different set and be able to say, Okay, hey, let’s look at FIBA Americas let’s look at these FIBA sets where you have different countries coming in and you can start to see you players from different leagues and how they’re stacking up against each other. And you can start to, you can also start to see movement. You know, if you’re looking at the NBL and you’re looking at, hey Jack Landale top three C ram, and all NBL comes over to the San Antonio Spurs, like, starts playing, Well where Lamelo Ball, you know number nine c a in nba in his year before he came over to the nba, Bryce Cotton down there.

And then you can look at Euro League and you have a whole bunch of ex NBA players and they’re all sitting at the top of Euro League, which is really cool to see. Like all these names that I recognize as a casual NBA fan, and I’m like, Man, I know, I know like 30 of those players, right? Or, or I’ll look at a 20 18, 20 17 Nike EYBL data set, and out of the top 25 C RAM players, like five of them go to Duke.

I’m like, Okay, That’s, that’s that, that, that makes sense. And you see everywhere else like that, those players end up in the nba like, There’s something to it, you know? So those, it starts to get really fun. Once, once you start getting comfortable speaking our language and it’s really good stuff.

[01:34:00] MIke Klinzing: It’s fascinating and I think about just what this data a can already tell you. And as you continue to build out your data sets with grassroots basketball, and obviously you already have it going pretty strong with division one basketball, but the ability to be able to evaluate players across different events and to be able to compare players from different teams and to be able to rank them and just take all that and put it in a metric where you’re getting that from a basic box score, where we know that what NBA teams are doing with the data that they have and the way they’re slicing and dicing it in different things.

But your ability to take that and simplify it and put it in one number and then have those numbers accurately reflect what people are seeing in terms of the eye test and consensus and what people are looking at in terms of players. To me it’s just the value of this to all the different constituencies that we’ve talked about just makes a ton, a ton of sense.

So we have blown past an hour and a half, which is, which is great, which is tremendous. What I want to do, I want to, I want to make sure, I want to make sure before we get out that you get a chance to share how people can find out more about Cerebro for all our coaches who are out there, who are listening, who may be interested, players, parents, anybody who’s out there, how do they find out more about it?

How do they reach out to you, get connected to you so that they can learn more about this. And then after you do that, whether you want to share social easy for me to say social media. Website, email, whatever you want. Go ahead and then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:35:50] Ed Chao: Sure. Well, I’ll just throw out my personal email.

It’s ed@cerebrosports.com. I’ll even throw out my phone number. Feel free to text me, call me. Because honestly, I’m just, I’m still learning so much and I think yeah, whoever has a question, if I can help in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out. My number’s 6 7 8 – 3 8 6 – 8 6 4 6. I’m not scared because I get enough spam, so don’t be afraid to call or text me.

And you can find what you can see a lot of what we’re up to on our Twitter. We have yeah, I think just cerebral sports is our handle. That’s probably where we’re most active in terms of social media. And I think the last thing that I just wanted to say before we wrap up is one big gap in our company right now and it’s girls data, but we’re coming for it and we’re adding it as fast as we can. We’re trying to get there. But we cannot wait to provide more data on the girls side of basketball. Like that is a huge mission of our team, even though we’re all dudes at the moment. We hope that changes very, very soon.

But yeah, we cannot wait to get more girls data into our platform.

[01:37:03] MIke Klinzing: Yeah, and I think as you make inroads with the boys, oftentimes a lot of the same operators and people that are running events on the boys’ side, a lot of ’em are running events on the girls’ side. You have some really well run events on the girls’ side where I’m sure that as you guys continue to build out what you’re doing with the boys, I’m sure the girls is only a matter of time.

This has been a lot of fun for me. Honestly. We talked for whatever, an hour and 45 minutes plus however much we talked before we even started recording. And it’s the conversation to me is fascinating. I think the analytics side of it and the statistics always to me are fun to look at and be able to see those numbers and then see how they correlate with things that you look at with your eyes and just where players rank and statistics and just how, to me, it’s all, it’s all fascinating stuff that as I’m having the conversation with you, my mind’s going a million different directions of, of ways that the data can be used and just what you guys have been able to build.

And to me it’s, I think it’s a no brainer in terms of boiling it down to something that can be as accurate and have the, the, just the data that you guys have the value in it is tremendous and I can’t thank you enough for. taking the time out of your schedule to, to jump on and to join us, and I’m really glad at all, just, I’m really glad Justin connected us and again, I’m looking forward to seeing where you guys take this thing in the future.

[01:38:29] Ed Chao: No, it was an honor for me, to be honest in research and getting ready just to listen to the previous podcast you had much on, and I’m going to be on the same podcast as Munch Williams, Are you kidding me? I listened to entire podcasts, Blown Away. We’re going to buy that book do a book club for our whole team at Cerebro.

[01:38:48] MIke Klinzing: It’s awesome. That book is, I just got it on the, what is today’s, the 28th, so I got it back on, I think the 23rd and read through it and yeah, I mean there’s a ton of power in what Munch put out there for sure.

[01:39:02] Ed Chao: yeah, no, Thank you for having me.

[01:39:03] MIke Klinzing: Absolutely. We are thrilled that we had an opportunity to have you on and get a chance to learn about what you’ve done in your career and what Cerebro Sports is doing and will continue to do.

And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.