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Reboot Motion is pioneering biomechanics as a service. But what does that mean?
Do we make it easier to build models? To upgrade a roster? To coach?
While we can do all of these things, there is not a specific application that trumps the rest.
Instead, it is our goal to make it easier use biomechanics data to do whatever you want to do.
With that in mind, while we claim to be pioneers in “Biomechanics as a Service”, we are more likely followers in “Data as a Service”- with a niche in biomechanics.
Data as a Service
Auren Hoffman, CEO of Safegraph, was recently on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best Podcast, giving a deep dive on data.
There, and in his data-as-a-service bible, he details how best to run a data business…and Reboot Motion is clearly a data business.
Why Reboot Fits the Mold
Hoffman breaks data companies down with the below 2 X 2 matrix, believing that successful companies 1) pick one category and 2) put all their resources behind it.
Reboot is a data company- but more specifically we are a “truth + application” company.
And three Hoffman ideas make that clear:
“Data companies dominate by having the correct facts and having an easy way to deliver those facts.”
Reboot does not prescribe drills. We do not tell coaches how to coach, nor do we tell front offices what decisions to make. We simply give everyone the cleanest way to view how an athlete moves.
By focusing on 1) having the correct facts and 2) delivering them via our dashboard, our API, shared S3 buckets, and more, we continue to grow as the company that best delivers great data.“Data companies are about truth, prediction companies are about religion.”
Our goal is to show organizations exactly what happened in an athletic movement. Then, we want the people inside the organization to do what they’re great at: coaching, training, decision making, etc.
We’re about truth. The people we help- organizations, coaches, front offices- they’re about religion.
“Data companies focus more on selling the raw data while Application companies take the raw data and create some sort of work-flow around it.”
Reboot is about truth over religion, and we are about application over raw data. Nine times out of ten, our partners have raw data- either in terms of motion capture data or raw video.Other people- mostly markerless motion capture companies- are executing in the data/truth quadrant. We should be positioned as the bridge between raw data and actionable insights.
How Reboot Wins
Once we know we are 1) a truth business and 2) an application business, we need to use that to guide our focus. Again, Hoffman makes it clear:
“As companies rely more and more on data (and build their machine learning models on data), truth is going to be even more important.”
Although we are not providing the raw data, we will still be judged by the quality of the metrics we deliver.
It may sound obvious, but we will win by being right. If our partners trust our metrics, deliverables, quality assurance checks, and more, they will continue to make us a bigger part of their workflow.
“The more data can be joined, the more useful it is.”
In-game motion capture is not the only data exploding in pro sports. Outcome data is, weight room data is, and on and on and on. We need to ensure our deliverables can be brought into an organization’s workflow so it can be linked.
As Hoffman writes, “data is only as useful as the questions it can help answer”.
Why Reboot is Excited to be a Data Business
Being a data business is hard, but we believe it is a great place to be long-term because:
“More and more people are comfortable working with data.”
This is true in general- and even more so in sports. The macro trend of data driving decision making for teams, coaches, and athletes, paired with a more micro explosion of biomechanics gives us faith that this is an industry worth dominating.“Data become more valuable when they are temporal and change with time.”
Athletes evolve- they change training habits, adapt to long seasons, tweak their form, and more. As organizations capture movement data regularly, being the best at continuously turning that into action is an ideal place to sit.“In DaaS companies, Customer Acquisition Costs tend to decline over time.”
Reboot’s job is to transform and transfer data. In elite sports, no one else is doing this- and only this. The more we deliver on this promise, the more leagues, clubs, and other tech companies will want to work with us.We Help Others
Hoffman sums up the role data companies play in a way that perfectly fits Reboot Motion’s mission to help others help athletes move better.Working at a data company is like being an archivist at the Library of Congress. You know your job is important but you also know it is a supporting role that helps other people shine. Your job is to help and support innovators.
There are very few monuments to archivists. They don’t win Nobel Prizes. They don’t write the Constitution, they only preserve it. Being an archivist means being extremely humble. You are an unsung hero. Your job is to help the innovators innovate. You are not the race car driver, you are the pit crew (or maybe just the person who built the wrench).
Coaches are innovators. Biomechanists are innovators. R&D teams are filled with innovators.
And we support innovators.