JR SportBrief Interview With Chris Metinko

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Shop in store or visit ashley.com today. It's the JR sport re show here with you on CBS Sports Radio. So we have talked about so many of these injuries that have taken place in the world of sports.

Last night, it was the running backs, the chubs, the Saquon Barkley's last week. It was Aaron Rodgers, your NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's making a big to do about players not resting. Well, there's technology behind this. There's a lot of money that gets invested into this. So I had to bring on someone who knows all about tech and knows about the money that goes into sports science. And just in a general sense, his name is Chris Matinko.

He's joining us senior reporter from Crunchbase. Hey, Chris, thank you for taking the time to hop on, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

No doubt about it. Now, I know your expertise isn't so much into sports, but you keep up with the money and time and effort that people take to just try to improve performance or just in tech in general. Explain to everyone what you do. Yeah, so I work here at Crunchbase. We're obviously a database that kind of keeps track of venture capital spending and where money's going and kind of trends in the private markets, basically.

So yeah, I cover a lot of different aspects of technology, be it kind of enterprise or cybersecurity or even kind of Web3. But as a sports fan, sports tech is definitely something that interests me and, you know, just fitness and health, I think, like, like most people, right? We see so much, Chris, so much money get invested into purchasing the teams. OK, Steve Ballmer comes from Microsoft and he buys the Clippers for two and change to Bill and change a couple of years ago, the Washington commanders get sold for six billion dollars. These these owners buy the teams and then they pay out the players these giant contracts like that's an investment in and of itself. When you see all of these injuries in sports, what are owners investing in to just try to get a return on the investment on the field and on the court? Well, I'm not sure what the owners themselves are necessarily investing in, but I know what you know, what venture capitalists are investing in and in some cases, some owners and some players and some teams themselves, some teams have sort of their even their own kind of venture capital arms.

A lot of owners have family offices that invest into venture capital funds themselves. And, you know, I think one of the number one thing that we see in kind of the if you want to call it sports tech or health and fitness technologies is really just so much around data. I think it's it's mainly around kind of rest, recovery, sleep, performance.

You know, once upon a time, right, we all love baseball. Baseball is about stats. Now, like there are stats for pretty much everything that that is just about practice and exercise and things like that. And I think with the with this kind of proliferation of data, there's a lot of startups that have kind of emerged to try to give people a better understanding about why their performance is going up, why it's going down, why it's leveled off. And we have seen, you know, a lot of money in venture capital thrown toward these kinds of startups.

Chris Matinko is here with us, senior news reporter for CrunchBase. When you talk about the money that's being invested into, I guess, fitness and health and trying to keep track of the athletes, what type of money are we talking about? We're talking about this is a million dollars to see whether a guy is tired for something he wears on his neck or his wrist or what type of dollars are we talking here? So, you know, I just ran some numbers through our database and tried to concentrate solely on sports.

So so really things that that that would definitely fall under any kind of our favorite sports pro or amateur, maybe not so much of the pelotons of the world that you or I may have is just kind of a weakened warrior. But, you know, just to give you an idea, in 2020, more than five billion dollars was kind of spent on what I would kind of call sports tech in the private market alone. So that's just venture capital money going to these startups. And that was, I think, a little bit more than a thousand different funding deals, too. So, you know, not some of those deals could have definitely gone to more than one company.

But you're still you still see kind of, I think, the breadth and depth of that of the startup world in sports. In 2021, which if you follow kind of venture capital or the private markets, you know that that that was kind of an outlier. It was a year where money was cheap. People wanted to really spend it. So venture capitalists really went wild to their detriment in some cases. But they spent almost 12 billion dollars that year on kind of sports tech and investing in sports tech. And that was more than twelve thousand or I'm sorry, twelve hundred different funding deals. This year, it's a little lower, right?

We've kind of come back to earth. Interest rates are a little bit higher now. Venture capitalists aren't spending their money quite the same. But, you know, we there to date this year, there's already been about three billion dollars invested in those kinds of startups, a little bit more than 400 deals. So there's still an interest in. And again, like just to keep that in perspective, everything, you know, most sectors are down this year as far as venture capital investing and kind of the startup ecosystem goes.

You know, I'm out here in the San Francisco Bay Area and, you know, you can definitely see it and feel it here. It's just that money's a little bit tighter and VCs have kind of come back down to earth. So the fact that sports tech has fallen isn't isn't really that big of a shock. Most almost all industries really have.

Chris Matinko is here joining us from crunch bases. We talk about a lot of the money being invested into athletics as it relates to health, fitness and technology. We know sports from a consumer perspective. It's one of the last things that people have to watch live.

And so it carries great value. It generates billions of dollars in and of itself. When you think about some of these technologies that that that the athletes and the teams are investing in to try to be better. I know the New York Mets spending tons of money on their analytics department. Where do you find that there's there's more interest right now? Is it, hey, we need stats to know if Steph Curry is getting tired or is it we need a technology to make sure that we can maybe, you know, I saw something where you can learn how to shoot a basketball and the computer helps you.

Yes. Shot tracker. Is it more so on the stats and the numbers or is it more so on like performance?

How does that weigh out? You know, I think the big money right now goes to performance. I think you see companies like Whoop and Hyperice and, you know, Tonal. They're they're they're professional teams.

I believe that use Tonal, just like, you know, you or I do in a home gym. You see, I think more of that money going. Yeah. Bigger money going into those companies, really, because their markets are bigger.

Right. I mean, when you really start to try to analyze the trajectory of a basketball or the swing of your golf swing, that is not not to say that those are small markets. But I think that those markets, they have kind of a finite reality to them. Whereas, you know, you can sell you can sell a data.

You can sell devices or software or different kinds of platforms that analyze rest, recovery, performance, any of those kind of analytics to pretty much anybody. So, you know, like I know Whoop in Massachusetts, they've raised over four hundred million dollars. They're valued at least their last valuation. And I know their last valuation was a couple of years ago for for their funding run. But, you know, it was over three billion dollars. So, you know, you're talking about a really large company with investors like Rory McElroy, Eli Manning, just Larry Fitzgerald. So, you know, you can see where some of these athletes have put their money and what what they do with it. But to your point, too, that's not to say there are a lot of startups that we see every day that come out that are very kind of I want to use the word niche.

They would probably not like that. But but, you know, very specific to a singular sport. And again, like that's that just provides not to say that they can't be successful, but it provides kind of a more a smaller market, a more finite market. We think about it right. A lot of these larger companies that analyze sleep, for instance, is a perfect one.

Right. That that market's a huge market because not just does it apply to sports. It can apply to you or I just in our regular working job or fat. What about a factory worker? What about airlines? What about, you know, companies that really want to analyze how their employees are sleeping? If they're getting the proper sleep, maybe they can't.

You know, if you're a pilot, you can't fly. So those markets kind of can go beyond athletics. And so that's why you're seeing kind of some of, you know, really some of these larger, larger rounds. I just feel like I know total raised about one hundred thirty million dollars earlier this year.

There's Egypt, which is actually a German company which does kind of data analytics also for kind of performance. And you know what you're doing while you're kind of in health facilities, they raised a large amount of money, too. So, you know, it's that money is really going into more of more of the startups that do that kind of work.

Man, we need to we need to spread things out normal everyday use. I'm not going to shoot like Steph Curry, but yeah, everybody needs to sleep. And as Chris Patinko is joining us here, crunch base, the J.R. sport show CBS Sports Radio, we're talking about the business and the investment side that goes into sports from a performance standpoint. Ironically, Chris, I saw a story.

There is a Japanese pitcher, I believe, on the Blue Jays who recently had to exit a game due to cramps. And his reasoning was, I think I cramped up because instead of my normal 13 to 14 hours a night of sleep, I only got 11. And I was a little bit jealous of him. But I guess those are the type of things that that that we can track now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was just the prolific of data sets.

I in kind of, you know, you hear all about A.I. now in the world, too. The information that that these platforms are able to give you and tell you why something is happening or why you can't do what you did yesterday is really just amazing. It's really democratize really just fitness and health, too. I mean, people have never been more into fitness and health now. And I think that's a big reason why.

Because you have all this data, you have all this knowledge. So, yeah, it can it applies to kind of the Steph Curry's of the world. And, you know, and just just anybody in general in the professional kind of sports world. But it also just applies to you or I. And and I think that's why investors just see a big market in it right now.

Final question for you, Chris, this is more of a personal question, your opinion. There are a lot of fans who don't I don't want to say appreciate, but there's there's less of a balance with data and numbers and investment when it comes to sports. It's not like me and you going outside and playing in the backyard years ago.

Those days are over. So much money, so much investment, so much tech. Do you find that there is probably more so an imbalance? We might be moving in the wrong direction, just too much cash, too much information. Sometimes it's sports.

You just got to go play. Yeah, I think I go both ways on that. I you know, I'm a baseball fan and I definitely like most. People get, you know, irritated or annoyed sometimes with the you know, this guy's throwing 100 pitches, got to take him out of the game. You know, some of the numbers don't necessarily make sense to me. And I wonder about the analytics behind it and what it really means.

Or we can't use this guy for, you know, three three consecutive games or whatever, you know, out of the bullpen. That kind of is weird. I do have a lot of appreciation, I think, for a lot of the teams. And I think the NBA teams do it even probably.

I think NBA teams are probably kind of the early adopters of some of this technology more so that really follow kind of an athlete's performance, their their health, their fitness, their you know, everything is measurable. And I do think that there is a there is definitely a place in the world for that. I mean, I think you're you're really going with some hard numbers that, you know, have dated back that, you know, they're just it's data. I mean, it's it is it's there and it's you can't argue with it.

It's undebatable. And I, I feel like some of that is I think I feel like a lot of that is really good for for these sports in and keeping players healthy. I haven't really analyzed. Do more players get hurt now? You know, I kind of probably think so. But that's probably because, you know, everybody's bigger, faster, stronger. So, you know, I think that's more of the reason then, you know, we're not doing as good of a job taking care of these athletes as we were back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, that kind of thing. Yeah. One thing we know for sure that the technology, whether we like it a lot, it's not going away and neither is the investment. Hey, Chris, I appreciate you sharing the information, the numbers, the stats.

Is there anything else that you want to add? No, I mean, I would just say, you know, if if if people are kind of interested in this kind of work or what money is going to, you know, it's it's funny. You can just look at maybe what some of your favorite athletes invest in with some of your favorite sports teams invest in. To me, I'm always amazed.

I'm not amazed anymore. But, you know, it's it's it's shocking how many of these teams. I know the Golden State Warriors out here, they have their own venture fund. The Green Bay Packers, not kind of an area that you think of as kind of a huge tech community. But they have their own venture capital fund, Title Town, I believe.

I believe it's called. But athletes like, you know, Pat Mahomes and Tom Brady, I mean, they've been investing for years. So, you know, if you're if you're interested in it, sometimes you can just follow what your favorite athlete is kind of investing in and and kind of see what the new that what the new new greatest technology kind of is.

It's a it's a wild world that we live in. So much information, so much to participate in. Hey, Chris, where can people follow you and your work and your articles and everything that you put out? Yeah, just it just at Crunchbase News.

Just look it up. If you want any money, any information on Crunchbase, kind of the data that we have Crunchbase dot com. You know, you can kind of search for, you know, just where investors are spending their money.

Look up. You can check out your favorite search for sports tech companies. Try to see what some of these companies have raised and what they do.

Any of that. So, yeah, just, you know, go to good crunch based news and, you know, please read. Hey, listen, it's a pleasure to have a professional on here to talk some money, to talk some investment. We all love sports, but we always got to remember there's certainly a business side behind that as well. Thank you so much to Chris Matinko from Crunchbase for joining us here. It's the J.R.

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