More Than Numbers
The difference in the value proposition of consumer and enterprise sports tech
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“The numbers start out as tools for thinking. They wind up replacing thought.”
This may be my favorite quote from Michael Lewis- the author of Moneyball, The Big Short, Flash Boys, Liar's Poker, The Blind Side, and more.
Lewis made his career profiling stories everyone else missed, with “the miss” regularly coming down to an overreliance on numbers:
He launched his writing career writing about Wall Street, where individuals regularly make huge bets based on a single measure of risk, like VAR.
He then detailed the 2008 Financial Collapse, highlighting an entire industries overreliance on credit ratings.
He’s even taken his approach to sports, profiling the few who realized there was a better way to measure performance in baseball, as well as the rise of football executives understanding the value in athletes who weren’t recording stats.
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We are in a golden age of data. But that does not mean we are in a golden age of data analysis.
“The numbers start out as tools for thinking. They wind up replacing thought.”
I’m a victim as much as anyone. If you asked me who should’ve won the NBA MVP, I would say Nikola Jokic- he lead the league in PER.
And what about baseball’s 2021 MVP? I would argue Shohei Ohtani, as he ranked atop the league’s WAR leaderboard.
While these arguments make me sound smart, there is one major problem: I have no idea what goes into either calculation.
All I know is 1) the industry relies on them, 2) they combine “all the stuff that matters”, and 3) I’ll feel superior using them in a debate.
In other words, I don’t know anything…because I let the numbers think for me.
Taking it to Tech
“The numbers start out as tools for thinking. They wind up replacing thought.”
While these flaws may be OK for bar room debates, I see a similar problem in lots of the tech being pitched to professional organizations.
The problem is not in the tech itself, but rather the mixed messages when selling the same product to consumer and enterprise customers.
Consumer Tech
Taking a step back, a lot of technical innovation can be boiled down to the combination of two things:
Lot of complicated stuff happening behind the scenes.
A simple way of showcasing the benefit from all that complicated stuff.
The best consumer tech companies master this- with the bigger value being in the simple fronted.
I have no idea how Spotify’s algorithms work, but they keep giving me great music to listen to.
I couldn’t tell you how Zillow gets its “Zestimates”, but it’s cool to see what different homes are worth.
And I like that Stubhub tells me which seats are the best deals, while admitting I have no idea what they value.
In each case, it is likely that there are very smart people working at each company ensuring the output is accurate.
But I’ve never verified that. I’m busy.
And it’s nice letting Spotify tell me what music to listen to, or allowing Stubhub to find me a great seat to this weekend’s game.
“The numbers start out as tools for thinking. They wind up replacing thought.”
In consumer tech, that’s kind of the point.
Whoop
Whoop is one of my favorite tech companies to write about. I previously talked about their push to make sports personal, and today I want to highlight something else they do incredibly well: make the complex simple.
While it’s users may not know it, Whoop is doing a ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes. Specifically, the Whoop strap is equipped with:
An optical heart rate sensor that uses photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure heart rate and heart rate variability.
A pulse oximeter to differentiate between oxygen-carrying and non-oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, enabling WHOOP to track blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) using a combination of one red and one infrared LED.
A skin conductance sensor for tracking sleep.
A skin temperature sensor to help detect 1) times of strenuous exercise 2) when someone may a fever or 3) different parts o the menstrual cycle.
A 3d accelerometer and gyroscope for workout detection, exercise tracking, and more.
All of this allows Whoop to collect data 100 times per second, every second, and feed that back into an algorithm to output the data its users see.
And, while all of this is great, I assume most readers are exactly where I was after writing this:
That is because 99% of the people that wear the Whoop band don’t care. They just want answers. They want to know if they are recovered from their previous workout. They want to know if they got enough sleep.
And Whoop answers those questions. And they make it easy as hell.
If you want to know if you are recovered, Whoop gives you a recovery score:
And if you want to measure your sleep, they’ll tell you that too:
Now, Whoop is more transparent than most about what is going on behind the scenes. But, for 99% of the population, simple scores work quite well.
“The numbers start out as tools for thinking. They wind up replacing thought.”
And that’s fine by us. We’re busy. We just want answers. And Whoop provides them.
Enterprise Sports Tech
If consumer tech that lives at the intersection of 1) complex calculations and 2) simple outputs that are good enough for 99% of the population, professional sports teams are a large part of the 1% it is not good enough for.
That is because these are the customers that have 1) the most at stake and 2) the greatest resources available.
You and me can absolutely base our workouts on our Whoop recovery score, even if we do not really understand how that number is calculated.
But the head trainer for an MLB team advising professional athletes? Probably not.
That is not to say pro teams shouldn’t use consumer products. Just that when they do, they will want to verify “all the complicated stuff happening behind the scenes”.
For example, organizations relying on a sleep score will likely also 1) track the underlying data, 2) understand how the output metric is generated, and 3) dive into any assumptions and possible errors.
If they do the work and validate the product, great. That is a perfect example of organizations leveraging tech to improve outcomes.
However, if they take the company at their word like the rest of us rightly do, that is a misallocation of the incredible resources that exist within the building.
Most pro teams know this. It is why tech companies- if they want to sell into large enterprises- need to understand the bar to climb is different than in the consumer space.
In the consumer world, the goal is to simplify the answer so the user can make the necessary changes without too much thinking- they have enough else on their plate.
In the enterprise world, life is different.
Teams are equipped with innovators, researchers, and builders.
In enterprise sports tech, the goal should not be single metrics that outsource thought. Rather, companies need to build tools that leverage the incredible knowledge base that exists within a team’s facilities.
The numbers start out as tools for thinking. They need to end up as instruments for innovation.