In The Thick of It

As the CEO of the company,

people need to feel your passion.

They need to feel your enthusiasm.

They also need to feel

when something isn't right.

And they also need to know that you got their back.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Today's episode is an extra fun one for me.

When you're a college student, you spend time with lots

of people, and you tend to wonder what they will

do as they go off into the world.

I've known today's guest, Erik Korem since

our days at Texas A&M.

I'm excited to share Erik's journey from coaching at multiple

elite Power Five schools to the NFL and eventually taking

on funding to launch his business, aim seven.

I'd like to welcome Erik Korem.

Dr. Erik Korem to the In the Thick of It podcast.

I've known you since we were both, what, 18?

So calling you doctor is a little bit foreign.

You don't have to call me doctor.

That's like an academic setting, only I'm not an MD.

Oh, man.

Well, thanks so much for making time.

Would you just maybe take a

minute and kind of introduce yourself? Yeah.

So, first of all, Scott, thank you

for having me on the show.

We have known each other since we were 18.

A lot has changed.

You grow up, you learn, you adapt.

You have a family, you have a business.

So there's a lot of things that have changed.

But, yeah, I grew up in Dallas, Texas.

I went to Texas A and M. That's where we met.

We were an aggie men's club.

I was a walk on football player, got really

interested in human performance, went on to have a

16 year career in the NFL, college football, and

started as a traditional strength and conditioning coach.

Then I introduced sports science

to American sports in 2011.

So if you've ever watched an NFL game and they

show a player running down the field, and they're like,

oh, so and so is running 20 miles an hour.

I pioneered that technology when I was a Florida state.

Really interesting time because this did

not exist in the US.

I went to Australia, brought this technology back.

These little devices were putting on

the players connected to GPS satellites

and accelerometers and all this stuff.

And we had millions of data points, and so

much so that I had to hire a former

NASA propulsion engineer to help us organize the data.

But it was just data, and

I think you'll find this interesting.

Coach Fisher comes to me after the first week.

Jimbo Fisher was the head coach at the time.

He's like, all right, Eric, how

are we going to use this?

I'm like, I don't know.

That did not go over very well.

We spent time and money, and we have a lot of

data, but we don't know what to do with it. Right?

And so, actually, I'll tell you the real story.

He said it was practice hard.

And I was like, I think so.

And he was like, basically shut the front door.

And so I was like, I'm going to shut my mouth.

And what we did was, for the first

time ever, we quantified the game of football.

What actually happens in a game,

what actually happens in practice.

We found two things, and this translates to business.

If you think about where this is going, if you want

to be elite, you have to reverse and engineer success.

So we didn't even know what the game was.

We found out, number one, we

had elite coaches and elite players.

We were killing ourselves.

We were practicing four to five games worth of volume

during the week, and we were just dead on Saturday.

Number two, there was multiple things.

The second biggest one is, although

all these different positions had unique

demands, like a receiver playing core.

Four special teams, they sprint like actual high

speed sprinting, 2000 yards in a game.

They may cover 6000 total yards.

A lineman would sprint less than 100 yards in a game.

And most of the time that was

going from the sideline to the field.

It's just a different job.

But they were trained all the same.

So anyways, we changed the way that we practiced.

We modified it, I should say.

We used a lot of coordination of

like, hey, this player is tired.

Let's keep his pitch count down, rep

count, all this kind of stuff.

Next season, we had an 88% reduction in injury.

Our team went from nine wins to

13 wins and won a championship.

NFL flew in after the season

like, all right, what's happening here?

And it led to opening a multibillion dollar market

for sports wearables and data in the US.

So real quick.

You were there for the

Florida State National championship.

I left right before it.

I was there for the ACC championship in Orange Bowl.

But Mark Stoops offered me a job at Kentucky.

So very weird.

I show up as the speed coordinator and

nutrition coordinator, and then after the first season,

the Director of Football operations resigns.

He retires? Really?

And this is like the GM, essentially.

I'm just turned 30.

Jimbo asked me to take over this role.

This is a massive role.

I'm managing and running a

300 million dollar football organization.

I was like, Look, I'll do it if you name

me director of Sports Science and Football operations, he's like,

yeah, you can call yourself whatever you want.

That title didn't exist.

And so it opened the door for

me to do some really cool things.

So I've always been pushing the limits on things.

But then that job at

Kentucky was an amazing opportunity.

So nobody had ever done what's called

high performance, where they run strength conditioning,

sports medicine, psychology, they manage it all.

And Mark was like, yes.

And he tripled my salary.

So I had to take it.

And Jimbo didn't blame me.

There was, like, an interview.

He's like, well, the SEC wins again.

They got deep pockets.

So I went there, got a PhD while I

was there, if working full time in the SEC

wasn't enough and I noticed something in sports that

no matter what sport, I'd also worked 14 years

in pro track and trained multiple Olympic gold medalists.

And whether you were an elite football player or track

athlete, they all kind of had the same commonality.

They could adapt to stress faster

than anybody else, physical and psychological.

And so I wanted to understand what drove adaptation.

And so my research was, how does sleep

impact our ability to adapt to stress?

And we did some amazing stuff.

There some really cool foundational research

that's now part of my company.

Aim Seven, went on to be in the NFL.

And then in 2019, I'll kind of tie a bow on this.

I got really curious about

the consumer wearable market.

You got all these people with these

devices, the Apple Watch and Fitbits.

Yeah, but do they actually know how to use the data?

The answer is no.

Right now, we're spending $265,000,000,000 a year

in the US on health and fitness

and 20 billion a year on wearables.

But chronic disease, diabetes,

obesity are skyrocketing.

And longevity, for the first time in a

very long time, is declining in the US.

When you say longevity, you mean people's lifespans?

Yeah, they're not living as long.

And health span there's health span,

like, how healthy are those years?

And then lifespan.

And lifespan is actually doing this going down.

And first world countries are

continuing to accelerate upwards.

And arguably, no matter what you believe about

health insurance or whatever, we still have an

excellent health care system compared to other countries

where you can have access to medical care.

So I'm like, this is interesting.

So, long story short, I'm an academic.

We started doing a bunch of pilots and testing, and

we asked people, what do you want from your wearable?

Like, what is it that you actually want?

The number one response we've got was more energy.

This thing could give me more energy. We're like cool.

So we sought out to be like, can

we predict somebody's energy level with an Apple

Watch and some other data sets?

And not only could we do that, we could predict

their energy and mood state multiple days in advance.

And we had those models validated by

some machine learning experts at NC State.

And that's what started Aim Seven and started that really dug

into it in late 2020, went full time, had a lot

of bumps in the road, a lot of ups and downs.

I'm sure we'll get into.

We are in the thick of it, but we

are now at an inflection point where it's working.

And we rolled this out in

mid February to paying customers.

We have a 94% conversion rate to paying customers.

Our daily active user rate is three

X better than the market average.

Our retention rates are 80% plus.

After 30 days, an elite world class app is 20%.

And so the data, after 30 days, the average

person now is experiencing a 31% reduction in stress.

They're doing 38% more workouts, and we have a very

active audience, a very active user base, and we've actually

found that our long term value is enterprise.

And we're rolling out a platform solution here this coming

month to fitness studios in three markets in Texas.

So there's some really cool stuff going on, but you were

there for some of the big bumps in the road.

We're like, this sucks.

This is not what I had in mind.

Now we've stabilized, and it's really cool to have people

go use it and be like, this is changing.

Like, we're getting these emails.

I'm a more present parent right now.

I'm more mindful.

My resting heart rate is down ten

beats a minute in the first month.

I'm actually managing and coping with stress.

My weight, I'm losing weight.

Like, just these amazing stories are flooding.

And you're like, okay, we got something good.

But it took two years to get there.

Well, anything tech related takes time.

Yeah, I definitely want to dig more into

the business side of things, but I actually

want to go backward for a minute.

You mentioned earlier you grew up in Dallas.

Talk to us a little bit about how you grew up.

What was your home like, what'd you do after school?

Did you go to public, private school?

What was life like for Eric as a kid?

Yeah, both my parents were entrepreneurs.

My mom, Sandy Coram, is the owner of the Festive

Kitchen, which it's so funny, I can't talk to almost

anybody that grew up in Dallas that didn't, like, grow,

especially if you're in the Park Cities or Highland Park.

Didn't grow up on her food.

But she started that business out of a

400 square foot kitchen over a racket club.

She was baking brownies for a

hamburger shop called Chuck's Hamburgers.

And she was a registered nurse with no formal training.

And now she has a very

large catering and food manufacturing company.

She's in Central Market. She's everywhere.

She's got four or five locations

in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

But I grew up on the weekends.

During the school year, I was working catering events.

On Saturday, my mom put me to work.

In the summer, I was working.

Did you wear, like, a bow tie and jacket?

For a lot of times.

She stuck me in the back.

She didn't give me the glamorous jobs.

She always made me like I was

the person that helped load everything up.

I would be in the back

washing dishes, breaking stuff down.

Most of the waiters were older, and she

would do a lot of high profile events.

Like, eventually she got to the point

where she's doing, like, Troy Aikman's wedding,

Emmett Smith, these were her regular clients.

And so an 1618 year old kid

is not going to be out there.

It's going to be somebody that

presents a little bit better.

Okay, so your dad was an entrepreneur, too?

Yeah, he was an author, investigative journalist.

I would say one of the core

values that was never really verbally articulated,

but in our family was hard work.

One thing my parents always talked to me

about was, like, the parable of the talents.

Like, if God gives you a talent, you're

supposed to use it to your maximum capability.

And laziness was not acceptable.

And it instilled in me a really hard core work ethic.

I was an overweight kid.

Got picked on a lot, bullied a whole lot growing up.

And that kind of created this obsession

inside of me to make myself better.

And I remember I would mow lawns and save up money to

buy books on how to train my body, how to get faster.

I would pay for speed camps.

I mean, this is like before.

This stuff was easily accessible.

How old are you at this point?

1213?

Yeah, about that age.

I remember going to the Bob Ward speed camp in SMU.

Actually, Trinity Christian Academy

hosted a speed camp.

I was a big kid, but I'm just like

I'm reading all these books at the time.

I'd go to Barnes and Noble by like sports speed.

That was Dr. Bob Ward's book.

He was one of the first

real performance coaches in the NFL.

Then Nebraska Corn Huskers started putting out stuff.

Husker power.

And so I was just fascinated

with how to improve my body.

So fitness has been a part

of your life since the beginning?

It has, but I didn't have great genetics.

I had to work really hard

to just make marginal improvements.

And I tore my PEC in high school.

That set me back.

I had a lot of is that like a weight room injury?

Man, it was bizarre. It was.

But my brother, who doesn't look anything morphologically like

me, he's a very slight built he's a filmmaker.

Six weeks before his wedding, he's

warming up on bench press.

Boom, blows, the same exact.

So it was a genetic something around the attachment

point or whatever, and he wasn't bench pressing a

ton of you know, it was always like, I

was having to fight uphill battle.

And then I go to A M at a

time when they were just loaded with talent.

But I chose that.

I could have gone and played one AA football, and I

had an offer to go to University of California, San Diego.

One AA.

Great program.

My mom was like, no way.

And then A-M-A guy named Coach Ray Dor, who

actually died of ALS, he called and said, hey,

would you want to come and walk on here?

And I'm like, Heck, yeah.

And so I didn't know a ton about A and M.

I grew up in the area where Nebraska football

and Notre Dame were on TV every Saturday and

I just didn't really follow A and M.

Well, 1998, they won the Big Twelve Championship

and I was like I had saw them

in the Cotton Bowl the previous year.

I was like, man, this is pretty sweet.

And my dad took me down.

They were like, this is awesome.

So I still had to try out, made the

team, and that was four hard but wonderful years.

Made some amazing friendships, and really got

to test myself physically, mentally, every day.

Because, Scott, I don't know if you ever know this,

but we have a big spring game every year.

We're in a white game, and by no means

do I think I'm a really great athlete, okay?

But going into my junior year,

starting right guard gets hurt.

They bump me up and they're like,

all right, Eric, you're going to start.

And guess who's in front of me?

Ty Warren, 9th overall pick in the NFL draft.

I graded out, like 85%, which is super high.

I go in to meet with the offensive line coach.

He's like, Eric, I cannot believe it.

Like, you had a phenomenal game

by all stretches of the imagination.

That would have been a winning grade in

the Big Twelve, like a major game.

He's like, but you're not going to play next year.

I'm like, wait a second.

It's like I just went out against one of the

best players in college football, and it was just like,

they didn't have a vision for me to do anything,

and that was kind of the deal.

Well, then, ironically, I ended up working with

that offensive line coach at another university, and

I love him to death, but hopefully you

gave him a lot of crap about that.

I never brought it.

Then, you know, Coach Slocum gets fired, they

bring in Francioni and Francioni, they move me

to defensive line, and they're like, hey, you

actually can do some things.

And I remember the D line coach, Dan Eggan,

saying, if you would have played here all four

years, you really could have done something.

And I was like, wow.

And so I got a little bit of playing time, but

it was more like a validation of my thought, look, you

have to realize this person is here and I am here,

and you have to have a very realistic view on reality.

But I wanted to be in the fight, you know

what I'm saying, and see some reward for my effort.

But if I hadn't gone through that, I never would

have ended up on the career path I'm on now.

Was playing in the NFL part of your dream or

something that you thought about at I never I knew

I was never going to play in the NFL.

There are some people that are very

disillusioned, and that was one of the,

like, working with college athletes.

These guys like, I want to go to the league.

I'm like, you're not going to the like,

even teammates like, I'm going to the league.

I'm like, no, you're like, they just weren't aware.

Like, there is a difference.

And I was at that level.

And quite frankly, some of those guys you look at

and you're like, man, they don't look like NFL players,

but cognitively, they're at an entirely another level.

At that level, things happen so fast, spaces collapses.

The first game I was ever on the sidelines for, it

literally looked like a train wreck because a guy would catch

the ball and it was like a vacuum space would close

so quick, and the hits were so violent.

And the guys that succeed can

anticipate faster than anybody else.

They are moving, especially linebackers.

Some of the times you watch these old videos

of Ray Lewis as he's in his 10th year,

11th year, he's not fast anymore, but he is

getting to the ball because he is anticipating.

And I think that skill carries over to business.

It's instinct. It's instinct.

It's repetition.

It's training.

They're watching film.

They are preparing.

Guys would say would see an alignment.

They would see a movement.

They're like, this is what's happening.

Even though there's somebody else across the

line from them, that is their job,

is to make their day really tough.

And the opponent is trying to window dress everything.

They are understanding what's happened

based off of pattern recognition.

And I think the same thing happens in business

and investing and all that kind of stuff.

I listened to a podcast, and it's going to kill

me because I can't remember who was being interviewed.

But the guy talked about pattern recognition like that

was his strength, was pattern recognition, and that's what

helped him build and blow up his business.

Charlie Munger is somebody to study for that.

And who was he again?

So charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

Berkshire Hathaway.

So if you don't know Charlie Munger is

he's probably one of the greatest thinkers of

our day, one of the most prolific investors.

But he they are ruthless about their like, we

do not we are more patient than everybody else,

and we are less stupid than everybody else.

They really think deeply about things.

Like, a lot of people, when

they acquire companies, are looking for

value, bargain value for mediocre companies.

And they're like, no, we're

looking for value, for quality.

And they have stuck with that thesis over

time, and they have made a fortune because

of it, and they've made mistakes.

But if you want to grow as A,

I highly, highly recommend you read the works

of Charlie Munger, learn about his heuristics.

From Munger has come like a whole

group of people, like Annie Duke.

There's a lot of people that study

these decision making models, these mental models.

So the view of the world and what's

happening is at another level, before we get

too deep into business, you've got kids. Yeah.

You played college sports at a big

D One program, and your wife also?

Yeah, she was an All American at Mississippi State, so

she was like a bazillion times better than me.

So you guys both got to play

post high school at a high level.

Big Twelve at the time for you SEC for her.

Does that play into how you parent your kids

and how you look at sports with them?

Is that in your minds, hey, we want

to see our kids be D One athletes?

No, I want my kids to be excellent at whatever they do.

So my oldest son, he's very creative.

He's an engineering type, he's an artist.

I just want him to find fulfillment in that and to

maximize his skill set and to be supported in whatever way

he can, because your children are just very different.

You know, this my middle son,

he hit the genetic lottery.

He's like two years old doing backflips and just

my wife and I knew that he was physically

gifted when we were one of the we've been

all seven, eight states during our marriage.

But one day he jumps off of a bed

and lands on the ground and sticks it.

I think he's like barely two, and we're like and we

go to the older son do that, he just collapses.

And I look at my wife, I'm like, uhoh and a year

later, he's doing backflips and all this kind of stuff, and he's

really into sports, but we don't have to tell him.

He is practicing all the time.

Like, he'll watch Machado or he'll watch somebody make

a play, and he'll literally go outside and mimic

it over and over and over and over.

It's just like how he's wired with the other ones.

They're, like, trying to create and build, I think, our

purview on what x he gets another level of coaching

from my wife, stuff that most seven, eight year olds

are never but he gets Nuanced coaching, and she also

holds him to a really high standard.

But at the same time, we love him up.

We want him to have fun.

We want him to just go out there and

play and enjoy and know that most likely he

won't be a college baseball player athlete.

That is the statistical likelihood that he won't.

We don't want him to burn out.

We don't him to regret these.

That's what most parents are doing

is they're crushing their kids.

Research demonstrates that if you do want

them to be elite, they should do

multiple sports and have frequent breaks.

Aaron Judge was a three sport athlete in high school.

Every year at the NFL, you watch Draft.

I guarantee you Scott Go do a Google search, and

they will go through ESPN does it almost every year,

and they list out all the multi sport athletes if

you specialize early, that is a recipe for disaster.

So our son do jiu jitsu baseball, or

the older son does jiu jitsu, and then

like, whatever else, that's this family sport.

He's been doing seven years.

The middle son jiu jitsu baseball, football.

We have them go out and play golf.

We go do just games and activities as a family, but

we're not trying to raise our kids to be androids.

Well, I'm glad to hear that because I think

way too many parents are focused on college scholarship,

and my kid's going to sign a seven figure

deal after they graduate from college, and that's just

not reality for it's a fraction of a percent.

Mom and dad, if you're listening, please don't do that.

It's the wrong move.

As an aside, here at Venn, we have two former

college athletes and they are some of our top performers.

I think that there's great they absolutely it's

the roll up your sleeves, whatever it takes.

That's not my job, does not exist in their world,

and I would love to hire more former college athletes.

You should get into a pipeline.

Is there something out there?

Is there like a oh, heck yeah. Okay.

You can go to the athletic departments and

they have people that are their job is

to help them with interviews and job placement.

And I think the one thing that if you're interested

in that, just know that there may be a learning

curve because literally their job, especially the higher level, has

been to be excellent at that thing.

And they go to school.

It's hard to do both.

My GPA.

Granted, I was not excellent.

One of my questions was going to be,

tell me about you as a student.

Were you a strong student?

Here we go.

Coming out of A and M,

I was exercise science, exercise phys.

I had a two eight.

The only reason I got into grad school at

Arkansas was I got a really good GRE score.

And then it was like everything changed.

I learned how to do very productive, deep work, and I was

in love with what I was doing and I was obsessed.

I was going to ask, was there a difference

in a curriculum that you were just more drawn

to, more interested in the graduate work?

Well, a and m it was hard.

First of all, it was really hard.

I was not mature.

There's a lot of things in

college where I was very immature.

Now that I look back and I think everybody is,

but there were some areas that I could have stepped

it up for sure went to grad mean.

It was like a shock to the system.

I'm living in somebody's basement in Arkansas,

going to the University of Arkansas.

I'm single.

I'm like, now's the time for me to

step it up to the next level.

If I want to be elite, if I want

to really make a difference, the training at A. M.

Was so good, though.

I had a 4.0, I think, after

two or three semesters in grad school.

And my head of the department was like, listen,

Eric, we're glad we made the bet on you,

because it's working, but this is boring, isn't it?

I was like, very they're like, why don't you go

do this physiology program in the animal science department?

And it's like, six or eight it

was like eight week chunks of, like,

neurofizz, endocrine fizz, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And honestly, I almost made a

switch to go into medical school.

I was like, you know what?

I just love the science.

So I took the MCAT, got a really good score.

I ended up teaching for Kaplan, and I was about

to go do that, and I started thinking about, what

kind of relationship do I want to have with somebody?

And I was doing rounds in the

hospital, and I couldn't stand it.

One of our good friends, our common David Nolan, was

I was coming down to the Houston Medical Center.

I started doing some rotations with different people.

I was like, I hate coming in and going out.

And that's when I decided that this wasn't for me.

But I think I finished my master's in PhD

with, like, a three nine or something like that.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, I mean, but I was really interested in it.

I was self directed, and I had grown up a little bit.

Yeah.

I'm by no means very smart. Whatever.

Now, did you take a break between undergrad and

graduate school, or did you go straight to Arkansas?

Went right into it, literally.

I had to do an internship to graduate.

I talked to our head strain conditioning coach, Mike

Clark, who is a legend in the field.

He went on to be in the NFL forever.

He's now the Detroit Lions with Dan Campbell and all those

guys, which is so cool to see all these Aggies.

I talked to Aaron Glenn, I don't

know, a couple of months ago. It's just wild.

Like, just how it all kind of came full circle.

But anyways, he's like, here's a list of colleges

where I know somebody to get you this internship.

First one was a Arkansas.

Picked up the phone.

Hi, coach Decker.

My name is Eric Coram.

I'm looking for an internship to graduate. Mike Clark.

Oh, Mike Clark. Yeah.

When do you want to start?

That was it. That was it. I moved up there.

I knew nobody.

Somebody from Campus Crusade was like, somebody's

renting a room in their basement.

And I just got in my car and moved to Arkansas, man.

So there's something really important with that, right know,

there's the saying, it's not what you know, it's

who you and yeah, as much as I hate

to admit, like, there's so much truth in that.

And the other thing that I think is

so important to take from that is it's.

Critical that people don't burn bridges.

Like relationships, even if they're not close, you cross

paths at some point with people again and again.

And the way that you treat people is so important.

I couldn't amend that even more.

And people you meet in college, if I could go

back and do it again, I probably would have been

a little more present in certain parts of my life.

But I was doing a lot of things,

and I grew up in a different way.

But, yeah, I agree with you.

I had an investor call yesterday, had a couple

really awesome ones, and then one where I was

just, like, getting just snarky big timed, and every

part of me was like, forget this guy.

But I was just kind and you never know.

You just don't know.

I literally went on a walk when it

was over with because I felt so belittled,

and I was like, don't burn a bridge.

Don't be a jerk.

Send him what he asked for, knowing it's not

going to go anywhere, but be the bigger person.

And you're right.

You don't want to burn in football.

When I was in that world forever, everybody

knows everybody, and it's a very small world,

and people are out to get each other.

But you treat people the right way, they're going

to pick up a phone and make a call.

You do the best you can, for sure.

So while you were at Arkansas, you're working

with the team, you're getting your masters.

You had decided that the medical route was definitely

not the right route for you at that point.

Was that the, hey, my trajectory is going

to be working with college and pro teams. Yeah.

So I was already working

with them through that internship.

And then I got a graduate assistantship working as

a strength conditioning coach, and they paid for grad

school while I was doing that, I don't know,

few months into it, first four or five.

So I'm learning on the go.

I also have an SEC softball

and soccer team and tennis team.

I'm responsible for training, so I'm

kind of learning on the go. Right.

A coach walks in with these track athletes and was

like, hey, do you want to train so and so

it was Veronica Campbell brown veronica is an eight time

Olympic medalist, three time Olympic gold medalist.

It was the golden era of sprints at Arkansas.

Tyson Gay, wallace Spearman, Veronica Campbell.

All these people were there.

Omar Brown so Veronica, I ended up

becoming a big part of her performance

team and traveled the world with her.

In 2005, I went five yes.

I went to the world championships, track and Field

Helsinki, Finland and that is where my view started

changing because I started to see how the rest

of the world was training their athletes.

And in the US.

We have a problem.

We have too many good athletes.

It's like if you're in Saudi arabia, and

you got all this oil underneath your feet.

Are you, like, looking for green energy?

No, you're just going to tap the floor, right?

In the US, we got the biggest genetic blend

and amazing population of athletes on the planet.

There's very few countries that can rival us.

Why is that a problem?

Well, because if somebody gets hurt, you

just throw in the next person.

We are not actively looking for ways to

maximize our talent and so, especially back then.

So I started traveling the world, and

I started hearing about this stuff, the

sport science and these institutes of sport.

And one of the coolest stories is Australia.

Massive landmass, small population.

I don't know if you've ever

been there, but it's enormous.

Beautiful country.

I believe it was 1978.

I believe that was the year in the Olympics, they

finished, like, 50 something in the world in medal count.

It was embarrassing.

And they were like, Enough's, enough.

We're going to do something about this.

We're tired of always losing.

So they instituted something called the

Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra.

That's where it started, which is their capital.

And they brought together physiologists coaches,

biomechanists, everything under one building.

And, like, we're going to do everything we can

to support these athletes and build them up.

And that's where some of these

massive technological innovations came from, like

the athlete tracking that I brought.

So anyways, they went from 50 something in medal count.

By the 2000 Olympic Games, they

were third in the world.

Great Britain did the same thing leading up to

the London Games, invested massive amounts of capital.

And if you think about this, like, Russia did this

early on during the Cold War because winning was political

warfare, china is doing the same thing right now.

They are investing an absurd amount

of money into their athletic programs,

and they're hiring American coaches.

They're bringing the best minds in the world

to China to help develop their athletes.

And then they have these very

sophisticated programs of finding youth athletes.

And they put it's some of it's very

sad how they're doing this, take them away

from their families and just training.

But I was like, okay, without the unsavoriness of

that, how can we bring this to the US?

And so that was my mission, is like, I

want to bring another level of sophistication to training

American athletes, but I figured out, like, we have

to do this through data, because my opinion versus,

well, this is how we've always done it.

I've been a coach for 25 years.

This is what we always done.

This is what we're going to do.

And I'm like, that is the dumbest answer to anything.

There was no sophistication and thought process.

It was just rinse and repeat.

As a matter of fact, if you look at all

the coaches that have come out from Nick Saban that

have been successful, there's very few as head coaches most

of them have been terrific failures because I've seen it.

One coach who was a head coach in

the SEC literally took Nick Saban's manual, changed

everything to the name of that school.

Comes in is like, this is the Nick Saban program.

This is what we're going to do.

And it didn't work for those people at that time.

So when you copy the model, you copy the errors.

Interesting.

Meanwhile, Nick Saban's iterating and moving forward,

they're stuck trying to repeat the same

thing at a different time, different place,

different athletes, different budget, different everything.

Nick is always changing and evolving and there's

certain principles that you can institute, same in

know you see it all the time.

Well, they try to take this and

put it, it just doesn't work.

And so I think that is what's kind of

helped set me up for this journey in business

is like, I saw this in athletics.

Like, okay, great, you did that over there.

That's awesome.

It's not going to work here.

And I've watched it and I've been part of turnarounds.

You've got to make it

situationally relevant real quick.

You would have played Alabama a few times

when you were in grad school at Arkansas.

What was it like being across the sideline from Saban?

Well, when I was at Mississippi State, I worked for

Sylvester Kroom, the first black head coach in the SEC.

One of the greatest men I've ever

been around in my entire life.

There's an ESPN documentary called Kroom.

You should watch it.

When you watch it, I'm in

the background in the locker room.

I'm standing next to Coach Kroom.

So he never got the job at Alabama.

Even though he was an all American.

They had an award named after him and

he played and coached under have not.

If he would have been a different skin color, he would

have been the head football coach at Alabama, bar none.

He would have been the head football coach.

He's a legend.

It's like a Dabo Sweeney wanted to

go to Alabama and there's an opening.

You'd probably get the job.

Croom was five X different.

As a matter of fact, woody McCorvey, who is Dabo's

receiver coach, was on our staff at Mississippi State.

So anyways, Kroom puts together an amazing staff.

Joe Judge, head football coach of the New York Giants.

Shane Beamer, head coach of

University of South Carolina.

Freddie Kitchen, former head coach of Browns.

Like, the roster is insane.

My friend who is player personnel director for

Nick Saban, jody Wright was my roommate.

My current friend is one of the

scouting directors of the New York Giants.

Like, it's crazy.

Everybody on the staff was like a who's who.

But we were all young and he

just found talent, brought it to this.

Mississippi State was a dump at that time.

There was no place to go to the

like, it was right after Jackie Cheryl.

He ends Shula's career by

beating alabama the next season.

Nick saban is the head coach at Alabama.

I'm getting chills right now.

We're in the locker room and he's like, kind

of choking up and crying a little bit.

He's like men today.

You're going to change I'm sorry.

This is so amazing.

You're going to change the way that people look

at this university by playing a football game.

And we went out and throttled Alabama and the

score wasn't we beat them, but it was like

we physically imposed our will on, you know, crewman.

Saban tried to hire him.

He was the SEC coach of the year.

The next year they fire him at Mississippi state. Yeah.

If that tells you anything about how things work.

What year would that have been?

2007 was the year that he was

SEC coach of the year 2008.

They fired him and they brought in Dan Mullen,

but I've been on the opposite sideline of him

and with the Texans, we practiced and played the

patriots I don't know how many times.

So you've had Saban and Belichick

in the mix in your life.

That sounds fun. Yeah.

They're both incredible know, they're very deep know, you

see Nick go off here and there, but he

really is most of the time very quiet.

As a matter of fact, they

keep everything calm over the headset.

There is no calamity, and everything is very strategic.

They do everything in a very specific way to put people

in a position where they can think and make decisions.

There's a lot to be said for that calm.

I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve.

And if you ask my team, does Scott get animated?

The answer would be an emphatic yes.

Mel's trying not to laugh over there in the corner.

And that's it's just if you're acting out of

your emotions all the time, that's your default mode.

That can be a problem.

But as the CEO of the company,

people need to feel your passion.

They need to feel your enthusiasm.

They also need to feel like, hey, when something isn't mean,

they also need to know that you got their back.

And so I would also say that can also be an asset.

Well, people definitely know when I'm excited and when I'm not,

so all right, so today you run a tech company.

Eric, are you a techie are you a technology person?

I like technology.

I can't write a lick of code.

I tried to learn Python. Yeah.

I would say technology is just an avenue to take an

idea to me and to bring it to scale quickly.

Nowadays with technology, you can proliferate something

quickly and you can have mass impact.

And so, yeah, I mean, when I was at

Florida State, the innovations I made were with technology.

I'm not a data scientist.

I think what I do is I look at the

macro level of how something could be used, and I'm

always trying to cut the baloney and get to, how

does somebody use this sophisticated thing in a way that's

going to move the needle for them? So.

Yeah, I'm a technologist.

And what year was it that you were at Florida

State and you brought the technology into the program?

2011. Okay.

This is pre Apple Watch.

I think that we had fitbit was probably

around jawbone was around for a little bit.

Jawbone and Fitbit were yeah, for sure.

And there were probably a couple of others at the time.

But this is pre Apple Watch, and I think

that this is the first time that the masses

are even remotely thinking about fitness technology.

Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, I mean, Fitbit was on the rise.

People were really interested

in tracking their movement.

It was a very unique concept.

They did lose a massive amount in market cap.

Their valuation went from about 10 billion to I believe

they exited for a little over two to Google.

And the reason for that is two things.

One, I heard their CEO say they never move past data.

People wanted to know what to do with

this, and they never answered that for them.

And then, number two, because the utility

was wearing off with like, great.

So I walked 8000 steps.

Apple shows up on the scene and says, we

can do that, and we can give you something

that's sleek, it's beautiful, and it has multi use.

So people are like, I'm pivoting.

So Google bought them for their data set.

And it's interesting.

The head of Fitbit for Google is on our advisory board.

He's a fellow M One er because he saw

that we're kind of that data intelligence layer.

We are the ones that

are making we're hardware agnostic.

We make it useful.

But, yeah, you saw this early rise in

the early to mid two thousand s.

And then Apple comes on the scene, and

Apple's like, whoa, now we got really cool

access to health data, to activity data.

We can measure your heart rate.

We can tell you if you have an arrhythmia.

Now it looks like continuous glucose monitoring

is on the horizon using optical sensors.

And a patent was just filed by Apple for a

ring, which would give them 24 hours HRV, which is

a measure of how your body's adapting to stress.

So they've got all these cool pieces of data

streams that are coming in from all these different

places that nobody's really focused on the recommendation layer.

And that's what we're focusing on.

You mentioned the ring, so real quick, I think

the last time we saw each other, we had

breakfast probably about this time last year.

And I'm pretty sure you had an aura

ring, an Apple Watch, and a whoop all

going, are you still rocking multiple?

I am.

I mean, if it was up to me, I wouldn't do that.

But I'm doing it so I can test your

small team and we're actually about to implement Aura

Garmin, whoop Samsung looks hopefully next month.

So we're testing all of these things right now, and you

have to make sure that the data is coming in in

a certain way that you can then use it.

And also, I'm really interested in their user

interface, how they're showing people the data.

Why is it that some of these

companies are billion dollar companies and they

really haven't moved from insight to actionable

recommendations and there's learnings there.

And so I wouldn't call Aura a competitor.

They're more of an enabler.

They could be in that competitive realm, I'd

say, whoop may consider themselves we're nobody to

them right now, but they're very insular ecosystem.

But most, they're just enablers, like Apple Watch.

They build these technologies so you

can build solutions with them. Right.

Well, I think you touched

on something that's really important.

And as the head of a company, you need to

drink your own champagne, as we say here at right.

So we say, Eat your dog food.

Champagne sounds way better than dog food. Yeah.

So knowing what your customers are experiencing from, hey, I'm

syncing Aim Seven to Aura for the first time.

What is that experience like for the customer?

You need to experience that for yourself and

sounds like you all are doing that.

Yeah, you got to have a really good product manager.

I was doing a lot of that myself.

And then as Aim Seven has expanded, I have

an excellent product manager who's actually a former professional

golfer, and he was actually coaching my dad.

And my dad's like, hey, this guy Charlie Super

Sharp, went to William Mary, which is funny.

That was like, my last job in sports.

That's a whole nother story.

But he's like, this guy wants to be a product manager.

He's like, you want to talk to him.

So he has no experience, but he's an excellent

coach, like, amazing coach, and he's super smart.

So he started doing all this stuff with AWS

and started kind of building those skill sets as

he was transitioning from professional golf to this.

And I was like, hey, here's a project.

And he killed it, and he gave him another one, and

he crushed it and another one, and he crushed it.

And he had this intuition about user experience and

teaching somebody through this medium, and his intuition is

really strong, and he can iterate really fast and

come up with designs and another athlete.

And I'll tell you something, budy.

The other day, we're going over, I'm like, hey,

listen, you have to get the minimal viable product

of the feature that we want to test before

we can go build the great, beautiful thing.

We got to get the people are

saying this, let's go test it out.

And there was this point of friction

because the UI is good people.

It's easy to navigate, but we have a vision

of where we want to go with this.

But right now it's just getting it out there

and getting people's hands and making an impact.

I could tell it was frustrating.

He's like, I just wanted to be

like this perfect thing as an athlete.

I got to have I'm like, bro some

of the best products in the world. Okay. I tested.

Look at chat GPT.

I'm using this right now.

Pulled it up on my screen.

I was like, they don't even have a search function.

I can't even expand the side part.

You know, wherever your prompts are, basic stuff

they're not doing, why the magic is in

the box over to the right.

And I was like, although those things drive me crazy, and

I have no idea why they haven't done that yet.

You can't get a hold of customer support.

They're worth, I don't know, 40, $50 billion.

And to them, that's probably the MVP. Yeah.

With that in particular, we're having a lot of conversations

around the office about Chat GBT, as you should.

But somebody had a great analogy

in the last week or so.

They said, this is like the Internet in 1992.

A lot of people you told them about it were

like, okay, what's that going to be good for?

And I don't think that people are looking at Chat

GPT saying, what's that going to be good for?

I think that people just don't know what to do with it.

Much like in 1992, we couldn't envision taking our

smartphone and unlocking our door or changing our thermostat

or talking to the delivery person on our ring

camera from halfway around the world.

I think that two years from now, five years

from now, we're going to see the revolution like

we did in the early days of the Internet.

I think people are speeding up the

applications because we're more tech forward now.

The average person doesn't understand yet.

But for companies that are forward

thinking, it's not just Chat GPT.

These are large language models as

you understand what's sitting underneath it.

And there are things I'll tell

you, Scott, I don't care.

I'll share this here.

When I first had my vision for Aim

Seven, mark Hadar is on our board.

He is the CEO, co founder of Dialectsa big company

in Dallas that just had a big exit to IBM,

one of the best dev houses in the world.

He owns a company called Venley.

And he and I were in this

group called the Presidential Leadership Scholars.

It was an amazing experience.

And through that, I told him I was doing name seven.

He's like, make a journey map. I'm like, what is that?

He's like, Go figure it out.

So I come back and I made

this journey map, and I have it.

I could show it to you.

I was like, the ultimate vision of what this is,

is you come to a computer screen with a blank

interface, and it's like, how can we help you?

On your health and wellness journey, and you just

tell it what you want it to do, and

it starts building this structure out for you.

And I showed this to

somebody recently, like, Holy crap. And he looked at it.

He was like, yeah, this is

great, but this doesn't exist.

Well, the potential for it does now.

And so those large language models can't

do what we're asking them to do.

Like, if you ask Chappie GPT to make

you, it'll give you the tenants of a

nutrition program, but there's no nuance.

Go get me an exercise.

It's whatever the Internet has.

And so it could get really hurt if you followed it.

But the ability to interact like this, if you

build on top of it and you train the

model with your IP, that can get really interesting.

So let's dive a little bit more into aim seven.

So you've taken all these learnings, you've seen

what the data can do, and now you

have this idea to take that further.

And maybe what was that moment that you

were like, boom, this is the idea?

I got to run with this? Yeah.

When we wanted to see if we could predict

somebody's energy level, and we used some unique machine

learning methodologies, and we beta tested, it was just,

like, had 20 people logging data.

And we ran these models, and we could predict their

energy and mood state, and we had very clearly defined

rules that led to outcomes, and we had it externally

validated, and we're like, Crap, this is real.

And then I showed it to Mark, and

Mark's like, Dude, this is really interesting.

Now, when you developed that, were you still coaching?

Had you actually filed and started the company yet,

or was this, like, just a little, hey, I'm

going to just it was an idea.

It had the worst name ever.

What was the first name? Optum.

I don't think that's wasn't I guess it was just Cheesy.

I don't think it's bad at all.

Yeah, a budy of mine, we were working on

it together, and that's when I was like, okay.

I brought it to Mark.

And Mark was like, you got something here.

You need to go build this thing.

And I'm like, oh, gosh.

And he wrote me a check.

I was like, I want to be on your board.

And he was the first person that believed in me.

I look back on what I didn't know

just two and a half years ago.

I didn't know anything.

Like, nothing.

And what I thought I knew, I didn't know.

I'd never built a product like that.

I'd never started gone from zero to one.

I'd gone from one to two. Right?

But I never really started with a blank slate.

And so I started reading books like Lean Startup Methodology

and just tried to do it the best I could.

I had some people that were trying to help me, but one

of the hard things was I didn't have a full time team,

and it was very lonely, and I didn't have elite talent.

Engineering talent was bad, and that

led to a lot of problems.

And real quick, just from

a timeline standpoint, it's 2023.

You said you started this two and a half

years ago, so we're middle of 2020 pandemic.

I'm testing it in 2020.

November of 2020, I moved back to

Houston, so I was in Virginia.

Complete lockdown.

Like, complete lockdown.

You can't go anywhere.

I come back to Texas, people were like, you're

trying to start a company, get it off the

ground in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, and

you can't even leave your house.

And, oh, by the way, after the first few

months of the pandemic, all the tech companies saw

the need to build and improve things, to do

deliveries and offer more cloud services.

All the developers were hired by Google and Amazon and

Facebook and Apple, and you can't pry them away.

So you had a lot of tenacity to pursue this. Yeah.

Or stupidity.

I don't like, I didn't really know what I didn't know.

I didn't know what I didn't know.

It was a world I hadn't played in yet.

And I had a co founder. That's a whole nother story.

We're still really good friends.

It was just some market things anyways.

I didn't have those engineers, and it's like

trying to play football without a good quarterback.

It doesn't matter how good your team is.

You're not going anywhere.

And, man, there was a year and a

half there of intense frustration on my end.

And is this your full time job at that time?

Yeah, I'm not making anything.

I mean, I think I paid myself

40 grand for, like, 18 months.

Yeah, I was living off my savings.

I had a certain amount of money

I was just not going to touch. Right.

This is like, my fail safe money right here.

My wife believed in it.

And what it originally started as is

not what it is right now.

It's not even really close.

It is, but it's not.

I didn't know how to go out and pitch.

I didn't know how to create this story

arc that these investors wanted to see.

I had family and friends giving me money because they

believed that I was going to just figure this out.

And it didn't raise a ton of money.

And then did an MVP.

It was a text messaging service, and

it was like, we're sucking in data.

And I was literally daily texting people what to do.

Like you're reading the report.

And in the morning, Eric's sitting

down in hours every morning.

It was on a web based interface,

and people were getting really good results.

Real quick, what would your product

manager have said about that?

That's the right thing to do. Okay.

I mean, when it's an MVP, it's got to be non

scalable and you got to just see if the thing works.

And there's a guy who was founder of Anthos Capital.

His name is F Martin.

And his daughter Julia was helping me.

She was on our team.

She actually was helping full time, but

she didn't really have a technical background.

But she was a hustler, like just worked really hard.

And F had Mean, he helped bring

Microsoft, Apple and some microsystems public and

he was one of the MVP testers.

And he was like, Eric, if you can bottle this

up into an app, you've got lightning in a bottle.

I was like, okay, we've got something here.

Then it was, let's package this up into an app.

Well, I thought know, people said they wanted to

sleep better, they wanted to have more energy.

They wanted this, this, and this.

So I'm just going to give

them the recommendations to get there.

Well, that didn't work.

We found that there was like first of

all, the tech wasn't working right because I

had a back end engineer that wasn't good.

He had over engineered the solution to another level.

And I'll tell you that story, that story

a little bit later, but my assumption was

people said this is what they want.

But I found that there was this feature in

the app that kept hitting called Exercise recommendation.

Like, tell me how hard and how long I should go today.

And the people that did that started getting results and there

was no score, there was no none of this stuff.

And so I'm like, okay, these are the

things that are creating value for people.

If I want to get them to here,

I've got to create some immediate value.

And what we really kind of we did this alpha test.

We had about 200 and 5300 people in the app.

And I think you were at the early part of that.

And we had this attrition dropping off,

dropping off, dropping off, dropping off.

And then we started changing things. And guess what?

People started sticking and it just started going

up and up and up and up.

And I'm talking to these people, I

don't know, every week, hours every week.

And they're like, hey, if you would do this, if

you do this well, why are you sticking around?

Well, this thing is making an impact.

Well, this thing is okay, we're getting

the signal and the noise, right?

So in May of 2021, 2022, we stop on that and

we get ready to build this beta product and we reengineered

this thing and it is just flat out not working.

I go and get a front engineer who

came from I was recommended by the Buyers

Institute at Stanford, and he is a stud.

Crushing it on the front end.

He's built multiple top 100 apps in the App Store.

Back end is not working.

I raised a good amount of capital,

had some really big investors hop in.

They saw the.

Version that we were building at the time,

and they're like, this is actually really good

for the little dollars that you have had.

And we got an injection of capital.

And I had somebody come in and look at the back end.

They're like, this is the most beautifully

written code, but it doesn't work now.

The market's changing, right?

So like you said, these engineers

are starting to become available.

And I go NAB.

A guy who used to be at vinly.

He believes in this.

Takes a look at it, comes

on board, starts solving some problems.

Long story short, we had a pivotal moment.

Our front engineer, we had an injection of

capital, and we're like, we got to rebuild

the rules, logic, and where it's coming from.

He stepped up the plate and

did it himself in six weeks. Wow.

I didn't even know this was possible.

Latency is, like, zero.

It's moving lightning fast.

And we're like, holy cow.

We start getting this into people's hands, they're paying for it,

and now it's doing what we want it to do.

So what we do is here's the big thesis, right?

If you want to address the most common preventable

lifestyle diseases in America cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity

that are causing we're spending four and a half

trillion dollars a year on in the US.

Like, over half of these cases are preventable.

You have to change fundamental behaviors, okay?

And even bigger than that, our goal is, like,

stress is rampant, but stress is not the problem.

It's our inability to adapt to stress.

That is what causes mental

and physical health problems.

Acute stress is the gateway to growth.

If you want to get physically

fit, you need to go exercise.

That's a stressor on the body.

If you want to learn a new skill

so that your brain can change, you have

to go deliberately engage in learning.

Going back to the athlete stuff, the best

athletes in the world are highly adaptable.

So we're like, how can we improve

somebody's capacity to adapt to physical and

psychological stress so they can thrive?

So what we're teaching people is how

to build something called adaptive capacity.

And there are five pillars sleep,

exercise, mental fitness, nutrition, and living

in community or fostering healthy relationships.

So we're an inch deep or an inch wild a mile

deep on three of them exercise, sleep, and mental fitness.

So the aim seven app will tell you exactly

how hard, how long to exercise each day, and

actually the type of exercise that you should do.

That's a unique technology that we actually

built in 2015 when I was at

Kentucky that is delivering tremendous results.

It rapidly improves fitness.

If you follow the fluid recommendations, you

will see a significant increase in fitness,

and it dramatically reduces injuries and burnout.

Now, we've gotten to the point from the

mental fitness side is we can assess your

psychological state, and we will push you an

intervention based off of where you're at.

So if you're stressed, we'll send you

the precise breath work tool to use.

If your mood is down, we

send you a gratitude intervention.

People are all over that.

That's been a really surprising thing to me.

And then we give you sleep recommendations, but then

what we do is so you get these acute

things, but after a week, we do just like

we would do with an elite athlete.

We go through all your data and we're like, here's the

one area you need to focus on that's going to lead

to the biggest change in your physical and mental health.

And then we create a unique

small little goal around that.

And then we have these different levels.

Level one, two, three. We move people up.

So we've gamified it.

We've turned it into this

long term behavior change app.

And it's working.

It is working.

People are getting the results that they wanted.

But where we started off and where

we are now are two different places.

But then this is the unlock.

So that alone right there, a consumer application.

Let's say it's worth you could build it

to a 500 million dollar company, right?

What we found was that we're building algorithms and

models that we can license to other people.

So you've ever heard of, like, F 45?

So one of the guys that owns a bunch of these

studios was like, hey, Eric, we have a burnout problem.

Like, well, no crap.

Like, you take people off the street,

you throw them in orange theory, whatever.

Not bad workouts.

It's just like, if you're not prepared,

people are going to get burnout.

Or if you're always going as hard as you

can every day, that's a recipe for disaster.

So we built the feature and

tested it, and it was working.

We were regulating their training sessions every day

based off of how their body was adapting.

Well, then we found the real problem.

I'm like, what's your conversion rate like?

It's like, well, if we can get people to

three workouts to do three workouts in their seven

day free trial, we convert 80% of people.

I'm like, well, great.

What's your real problem?

I mean, what's your real conversion rate?

They're like, 20%.

Okay, so using knowledge that we have from the

app, we built a methodology where somebody signs up

for a class, they get a quick text message,

they fill out a quick survey.

We stratify them into risk categories, and then we

pipe the coaches like, hey, Scott's, first day.

He's moderately high risk for this.

Here's exactly how hard he should go today.

These are the exercises that need

to change in his circuit.

And over five months, we improved

their conversion rate by 50%.

Consistently, it's about $125,000 of new revenue per

location, and there's 1700 of these worldwide.

So we got approved as an international vendor by F

45 and MINDBODY and the platform solutions rolling out.

So we've had multiple companies now reaching out

going, hey, we want some of that too.

So we have B to C, then we have B

to B with a long term vision on enterprise payers.

So if we can demonstrate with large enough data sets

that we can help take somebody that's not hitting the

government standards for exercise and they can hit those and

stay there, and they can maybe go from I'm only

sleeping 6 hours a night to 7 hours a night.

You do those two things, you

lower all cause mortality by 60%.

What happens to work productivity?

Your insurance premiums come down.

What company would not give this to their employees?

And so that's where our long term

vision frame seven is like payers.

Who wouldn't want to get a cut

off their insurance premium by trading? You've got?

You would go to the Blue Cross Blue

Shields of the World or UnitedHealthcare Kaiser.

That's the goal.

If we have a model of 5000 people, we

have a model for one standard deviation of the

US population that's strong enough, with great enough accuracy.

That's why we have I just brought in our new

CEO is the head of data and machine learning for

the largest performance company in the world, exos 4000 employees.

He just came in as our, he was the

VP, stood up all Digital Products, ML, Data Science.

He's just come in and starts Monday as our COO.

We just pulled off somebody that ran international partnerships

for Gym Pass because all of a sudden they're

looking at this like nobody's playing in this space.

So we're the recommendation layer.

And like I said before, 125,000,000 Americans have

a wearable and they're getting cheaper and they're

proliferating 60% of American households have these now.

So we're like, we're going to use the app as

a place where we will deliver tremendous value for folks.

And we'll build models.

We do not sell your data.

Your data is yours.

We intensely believe in data privacy, but we

will build models that we can then use.

Does that make sense?

And then we'll go sit behind I mean, there's

some companies, there are like $30 billion companies that

have reached out to us about like, hey, would

you help us with this problem?

And we're like, yes.

So real quick on the data and not selling it

is the idea that you anonymize and aggregate the data?

Oh yeah, you have to do that, right?

So there's in the system you're

like a long string of characters.

And that's another reason why I brought in Dr.

Gerald Jackson.

Our new COO is be.

We want to have the highest standards in that area.

So really try to get to GDPR here in the US and

make sure that we have all of our ducks in a row.

Because one of our core values is stewardship.

And we believe that if you're going to come into our

system that we should be a great steward of your data.

So we're not going to sell it.

I'm not doing that.

One of our core values

is responsible stewardship as well.

So that's cool.

Oh, there you go.

Financially and then with data.

So I want to go back to

kind of you starting the company.

You had all this knowledge about fitness.

You had this knowledge about how to use technology to

improve the fitness, but I think it's safe to say

you hadn't really worked in a business environment before.

Is that a fair statement?

I mean, outside of being in high school and yeah,

I'd never been in the corporate world as a profession.

No, I got to imagine that working

with professional sports teams, I mean, you're

not in the back office, right.

You're working with the team, you interface, but no.

Yeah.

So you're taking knowledge that you have about

one area, but you've got to figure out

how to turn that into a product.

And, oh, by the way, how do I run a business?

What was that like for you outside of the know?

It's not like we have millions in revenue

right now and all that kind of stuff.

So it's scaling slowly and at a pace. That's measurable.

Right.

And it's like, it's okay, I need a person for this.

I bring them in. I got a person for this.

And Gerald's coming in to run.

Like we've hit a point where it's like, I

need somebody for okay, so Gerald's got that.

I got a front end and a back.

I look at it like a sports team.

What players do I need on the field?

And we have all these terms in football.

There's certain positions, like quarterback.

You got to have a great quarterback. You're not winning.

There are other positions.

We have somebody like we call them glue guys.

Maybe they're not the most elite at their

skill, but maybe they have other things that

are going to gel the organization.

So, like, okay, I've got a great front end engineer.

I have a great back end engineer now. Check.

I have a good product manager.

He's up and coming.

Did he go build whatever famous consumer app?

No, but he has the aptitude.

He's a great team player, and he works his butt off.

Great. Check.

I need somebody for operations that

can sit across these three things.

I went out and recruited that guy, right.

Brought him into the organization.

So now I got a quarterback over here.

I got a good running back.

I got a good center.

My right guard is a glue guy, but he's getting better.

It's like a three year I'd look at it like that.

My job is morphing more into what I want

it to be, which is putting the players on

the field and letting them do their jobs and

making sure that we are very strategic.

There are things in football that carry over.

Do we have core values?

Do we have guiding principles.

The weekly sprints, that's football.

Every week you're playing a game.

As a matter of fact, I think I'm a

little bit harder on myself and the team than

other people would be, because I'm always thinking, like,

every week is like game day.

I've instituted some things like EOS to

help us with our one year vision.

Our three year when I learned,

OKRs, that was a big unlock.

We've gotten a lot better

at that, at grading ourselves.

So a lot of these things I feel like

I naturally had the capability for and were honed

by watching elite organizations and bad organizations.

Great teams were always in complete alignment.

I've had to let people go already.

At aim seven, I've learned to trust my gut.

As soon as I get that feeling it's

over with, we're going to cut it off.

I'm trying to be even more thoughtful in

the like, there's people that we've kind of,

like, started a dating relationship movie, and I'm

like, no, this isn't working out.

Do they exhibit our core values?

Do they act those out in their behaviors?

Are they a team player?

Do they see the vision?

Are they going to push this thing to the next level?

Do they care about their family?

We're dispersed, which is really hard.

We're asynchronous, and we're raising another

round of capital right now.

Soft Tech just let us off with a nice investment

to have a $40 million fund here in Houston.

So that's great.

Once we finish that round, I'm going to get the

whole team together here in Houston, and then we're going

to make sure it's quarterly that we're getting together.

And then maybe I need to make a

flight out to Irvine and meet with Jerrold,

like, every month or every six weeks.

But those things you've got to just navigate around.

We're in a new world.

As far as the opportunity to

acquire talent and being dispersed.

Did you have a mentor or mentors that kind

of walked alongside you and kind of guided you

and, maybe kind of tangential to that,

as you were starting the business, did you know what

questions to ask about running the business and starting?

Not really. I did.

Like anything else, I'm a

person that goes straight immersion.

I listened to every podcast, got every book.

I think I listened to thousands of hours of podcasts.

It's a great way to learn every time I was exercising.

When I hear music for certain podcasts, it brings

me back to a certain part of my journey.

20 BC was really helpful for me

to understand the venture capital landscape.

I would listen to product

podcasts, growth, podcasts, sales podcasts.

I would try to go look at people that

started small businesses, people that have scaled big.

I now have strategic mentors in different parts of

my life that have actually invested in the company.

Like one guy, Brent Smollick.

He's on the board of Marathon Oil.

He's run billion dollar companies.

He's an investor.

And when we sat down, he's like,

listen, Erik, I've never done a startup. It's different.

I've run billion dollar organizations,

but this is different.

However, he made a really good point to me.

We're talking about goals because

it was right around December.

I'm like, making the year.

He's like, Listen, if the goal is ten,

eight plus a story does not equal success.

I was like, you damn right.

I was like, Amen to that.

Because in football, you either have

a trophy or you don't.

You either have the ring.

There's no like, oh, well, we played.

No, you won or you lost.

And I've had to get very clear with

people, we either win or we lose.

We either help this person or

we don't help this person.

And when we make strategic goals, we use OKR, so

it's a stretch objective, but when I go back to

the board, I gave them a board, some stuff, and

they're like, no, go back, go back.

That's not realistic. Go back.

They've been helpful to me, but then they've also

a couple of times I've been chewed out, rightfully

so, because there's a fiduciary responsibility there.

Not that I was doing anything that was irresponsible.

It's just like, I didn't know what I didn't know.

And so making mistakes is okay, you have to

memorialize those and you have to learn from them.

So something our team is doing now, which you may

like, scott, I don't know if you do this or

not, but I'm standing up a notion document and on

every Friday, everybody has to write down something that they've

learned and they're going to share it with the organization.

So we memorialize our learnings because

there's something called information operations.

It's a military term, but if information gets stuck

at any level, it's the death of an organization.

So you want to make sure those things are being shared.

And so, like, as my engineers are

learning something or Charlie's learning something or

Andrea is learning something about communications, how

can everybody else learn alongside them?

And so I want our organization

to learn faster, to be way.

Like we're teaching people how to be adaptable.

We got to be adaptable.

That includes me as the leader.

So, yeah, there's a lot of things I didn't know.

And thank God, people, as humbly as I can say

this, they just invested in the thought that Eric's going

to figure this out, and hopefully we do.

Every night when I go to bed almost every night,

I am thinking of the people that wrote checks.

It's a heavy burden, but it's a healthy

thing too, to keep you in check.

Yeah, like, I don't spend on stupid stuff.

They know that I took a hit personally, financially.

I mean, I'm still not making a lot of money.

Doesn't matter, right?

We're okay, we're living and our kids

are fine, you know what I'm saying?

But I told my wife before this year,

sometimes you have a gut feeling about something.

And I was like, we are

about to hit an inflection point.

It's coming and it's starting to do this.

And it's like, you're just like, oh, baby,

we just got to keep stay with it.

And then when the stories come in and then people

are like, hey, I talked to somebody this morning.

It's like, hey, we have an

organization of 2 million people.

We have a massive email list.

It's a veterans organization.

We think your product could really be helpful for them.

Would you like to, like, yes.

You know, those things start popping up because people have

used it and they're like, oh, I see the value.

This could really be helpful for our mental health.

Of course it could be.

Or the physical know, whatever.

So you just got to be prepared for it, though.

One thing Dennis Francioni always said, which I

will always remember, he said, prepare for your

opportunity, lest your opportunity embarrass you.

I thought it was brilliant and he said it in

his little Fran voice, but it stuck with me.

Like, I'm about to go on the road here.

We're about to do demo days

in Dallas, Austin and Houston.

There's going to be tons of investors there for this

soft tech venture studio I'm part of every day.

I'm doing my pitch, I'm doing visualization,

I'm training for when something goes wrong.

And I'm preparing for that opportunity to go up there

and crush it and to show people like, we got

a great team, we got a great product.

If you're going to put your

money somewhere, please put it here.

That's awesome, man. Thanks.

So two and a half years in what's

been the biggest surprise, how hard this is.

I mean, it is really hard.

It's harder than anything I've ever done because

when I was in football, it's like, you

start with a budget, there is nothing, zero.

And it cost a lot of money to build technology.

And if you don't have the

skill set, those people are expensive.

I think you kind of be a little bit

naive and you think, well, if I have this

thing, people are going to want it.

That's the worst way to go about it.

Find out what they want and then give them that thing.

And it's going to take a lot of iterations.

It's not just you're not going to turn on

this marketing funnel and it's going to work.

You got to do a lot of data analysis.

You got to be very introspective

on where your weaknesses is.

You got to continually do a SWOT analysis.

It's just hard.

It's just freaking hard.

But I see them.

I learned this blue ocean concept a couple of years

ago and I was like, that's the blue ocean.

We're swimming towards this recommendations world that

doesn't people are going to go there,

but nobody's swimming there right now.

That I know of, maybe.

I think there's one company that I can point

to that's like, they're going after the same thing.

So I think it's safe to say that the company you

are today is not the company you started out to be.

That's that adaptability.

On a personal note, when you came to the conclusion in

your own mind that this was what you wanted to do,

what was that first conversation like with your wife?

Hey, honey, here's what I want to do.

I was testing it all along, and

she's learned to deal with ambiguity.

She honestly was just like, if you believe

this is what we're supposed to do.

And I just prayed about it, and I felt

like it was what we were supposed to do.

And she jumped in both feet.

Doesn't mean it wasn't scary.

There was one point we had $9,000 left in the

Aim Seven bank account, and I thought it was over.

And then we had somebody come in, a

former NFL head coach, wrote a check for

$200,000, and then it just started going up.

And it's hard.

It's really hard.

Now we're generating revenue, but I'm like,

all right, we have these objectives.

We got to hit these points.

And you can't be just so objective oriented.

You have to be production oriented too.

It's great to have these objectives, but

if you aren't shipping, nothing's happening.

So we ship really fast, which is kind of cool.

If someone were starting a business today, what

one piece of advice would you give them?

Go get a co founder. Interesting.

I would say get a co founder.

It has been a very difficult road for me

because I didn't have a CTO to start.

If I would have had a CTO that was highly skilled

with the skill, I think we would be much further ahead.

Now I have all those pieces in place.

It just took a lot longer.

I would definitely have a co founder.

Unless it's a knowledge based company where you are

the expert and it's like a lifestyle business where

you can produce something, then that's totally different.

But if you want to build something

at scale, you need a co founder.

Well, for people who want to learn more about Aim

Seven, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah.

Aim seven.

Aim Seven.

Email me, Eric, at aim Seven, I

have a podcast, too, called The Blueprint.

It's kind of our marketing ideas.

Like, I want to go serve people that

are busy and time poor, so we deliver

cutting edge science, leadership, and life skills.

Need these, like, 1015 minutes shows.

So that's been a blast because I've

been able to this show grown.

We've grown significantly.

I think we're in the top 2% of all podcasts now.

I get to go out and curate some of the

best in the world and bring them on the show

and pick their brains and then try to bring that

to other folks and it's been a lot of fun.

So, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn and all that kind

of stuff, but if I can be of service

to you in any way, please reach out.

I would just say, Scott, it's really cool to see what

you've done as a husband, as a father, as a business

leader, like, all these things I didn't really know, you know,

you know, you in college, I didn't know your Aspiration and

your dreams and your vision for your life.

But it's really cool to see that you and

Ellyse are still how many years of marriage? 20?

19.

19.

That's real commitment.

And then when you kind of told me you were going

out, I was like, you're going to make it work.

And you have.

And it's really cool to be here to watch this journey.

And I don't know if I can ever help you in

any way, but if I can, I'm here to help.

Well, I appreciate that.

And man, watching what you've done,

I'm so stinking proud of you.

I think about the people that we were

20 years ago and what's happened since.

Man, you've done awesome. Well, thank you.

And I'm excited for you guys real quick.

You're also very active on Instagram, and

not only are you posting frequently, but

you've always got some really great tip.

And in fact, it was as you were really

building up your presence on Instagram that I reached

out and that's kind of how we reconnect.

I'm like, what are you doing?

So check them out on Instagram.

What's your handle out there?

It's at Erik Korem.

I've started doing author for Ink too.

So I do Erik Korem on everything.

Twitter, LinkedIn, I really, really appreciate that.

It's my way of just serving.

And I will say one thing.

One of the things I did early, which I think is helping

now, is I started to build an audience and I did that.

I didn't really offer anything.

It was just like knowledge and help the best I could.

And I would say if you're in business, if it's B

to B, go build stuff for free and serve people.

If it's B to C, go serve them and develop

that know, like and trust factor where they can come

to you as a trusted resource so that when you

have the thing, you can offer it to them.

And I don't think there's anything

manipulative about that, that's marketing.

But I think if you do it with a

genuine heart, like, man, lives have been impact.

It's crazy because of social media, like, people

will reach out and they'll share everything and

it's a really cool place to be.

So, yeah, at Erik Korem on all the different platforms.

That was my friend Erik Korem,

founder and CEO of Aim7.

To learn more about connecting your wearable data for

feeling and performing at your best, visit Aim7.com.

That's Aim, the number seven, dot com.

Also be sure to check out Erik's

podcast, The Blueprint, where he talks about

physical and mental health with industry experts.

One more plug for my friend.

He's definitely worth following on Instagram, where

you can get more insights on your

health in short, easy to digest posts.

His instagram handle is simply Erik Korem.

Note that it's Erik with a K.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of

It, email us at intro@founderstory.us.