Asensei & The Future of Connected Coaching - Steven Webster

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and health scientists. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level Five Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, certified course creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to level5mentors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Meltone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. So we're live. Stephen Webster, welcome to the show, my friend.

Thank you, Doc. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm really excited to have you. And I probably say this a lot, but I get really excited when I get the opportunity to talk about fitness technology. But you know, there's a few pieces of tech out there that have got me really excited. And yours is one of them, just maybe because I come from a functional fitness background. I see all the applications and everything. You know, I see a couple steps down the road for what you could be doing. So the opportunity to expose more people to what you're up to at Ace Sensei and all the other tech that you have is really exciting to me. So as always, though, I I do like to start from a personal you know note. I think it's always great to have context of where things came from. Maybe just give us some insight into your backstory, Stephen, and how you got to where you are now with Ace Tensei and the story behind the development of it.

Sure, for sure. So I think, you know, as I often tell people, you know, it's like I've worked my whole life for this, you know, essentially kind of brings together two passions or really three passions of mine. One is just I love sport. I've always loved playing sport and coaching sport, and I'm sure we'll dive into that. The second is, you know, I've always loved technology. I was that kid and I've always worked in tech and you know, I grew up in Scotland, but now I live in the in in the Bay Area just at South San Francisco and the in the in the heart of uh tech. You know, I enjoy being an entrepreneur. I'm a recovering entrepreneur, repeat entrepreneur. And so uh, you know, here I am. I'm you know, I'm I'm in the Bay Area and I've started a company that's around kind of sport and sport coaching. You know, I like I said, I grew up in Scotland. I've always you know played a bunch of sports. I think you know one of the interesting differences I think from what I see now uh in the US, you know, having a son here is in the UK, we just don't when I say we don't take our sport as seriously, it's not like little league or like my son's five and he's in his organized soccer tournaments, you know. We just threw jumpers on the ground for goalposts and you know kicked the ball around the field until it was dark. You know, I grew up playing every sport imaginable. When I went to university in Edinburgh in Scotland, I ended up uh competing and then captaining and ultimately coaching University of Edinburgh karate club. I was already a black belt in Jiu Jitsu when I went to university, uh, and then I kind of picked up a couple of more black belts uh at university and in various forms of karate. And so that's where I kind of really kind of cut my teeth in coaching and kind of found the joy in coaching, uh coaching sport and and winning medal. And then at the same time, obviously, I was learning to be uh an engineer, software engineer, and an electronics engineer. And then I built a company in Edinburgh which is sold to Adobe as an Adobe Photoshop, and ultimately it was Adobe that moved me out here to the Bay Area. But yeah, I would say just you know, uh, and I'm sure we'll dive into this, but maybe five or six years ago, um, a problem I'd always wanted to solve, which is like how could you effectively coach, or rather, coach effectively using digital technology. I just began to see the pieces fall into place. I was seeing everything that was happening in wearable, I was seeing everything that was happening in computer vision and you know, motion capture. And obviously, you know, we all have supercomputers in our pockets now with our phones, and I just really felt for the first time, you know, I think we can solve this problem. I think we can actually make human movement something that a machine uh can understand and teach. Uh, and I put the team together to go after that problem. Here we are, that's authentic.

Yeah, I love it. I think entrepreneurship, or just the word entrepreneur, is thrown around very loosely now. And I think a lot of people don't take time to differentiate, well, what's the difference between self-employed, a business owner, and an entrepreneur? And in my my opinion, and you can feel free to agree or disagree, is that entrepreneurs set out to solve problems, unique in a new way. It's it's about innovation and seeing problems where maybe other people don't see them. And I think that's the core of what makes entrepreneurship as opposed to the other variations of you know self-employment that I was talking about. And you can also be an entrepreneur within an organization. I think people don't realize it either.

I think that you know, the few times I've gone back and like I've you know, I went from being an entrepreneur to like, oh my goodness, I work for Adobe now, like a huge company. Yeah, and I always swore that would be the biggest company I'd ever worked for, and then I went to work for Microsoft. Um and you know, I always kind of positioned myself and my team as uh the phrase, which I stole from someone else later while you look back from me as uh an entrepreneur, you know, an entrepreneur inside of a company. Um but you know, it's certainly you know, and listen, uh Adobe was probably the the highlight and favorite part of my career and some of my favorite people uh that I've ever worked with. And similarly at Microsoft, I met some incredibly uh smart people and lifelong friends. Um but there's some problems that strangely are so big they cannot be tackled inside of a company like Microsoft. And that seems a little counterintuitive, right? The sales proposition to me when they kind of like headhunted me to Microsoft was, you know, we've got billions of users around the planet, you know, essentially infinite amounts of cash, you know, huge amounts of RD, like you can do anything here. And that was tantalizing. But the reality is it wasn't true because when you're inside a company of that scale, you need so much organizational alignment. Like your charter needs to lather up someone else's charter. You need to deliver results within a quarter, and if you're really lucky, you get forgiveness for a year. But tackling something that's like a three, four-year, you know, I think there's a there there, and I just want to go and explore it, it's very hard to do and then commercialize unless it's like absolutely core to the the future existence of the of the company. And so, yeah, a lot of the a lot of the things I learned that made me feel as sensitive as possible, you know, intelligent assistant. I got to know the Cortana team really well for like voice assistance, and I became, you know, good friends and I'm now beer buddies with uh the inventors of Microsoft Connect. And so I kind of got a real peek behind okay, how does all this like you know skeleton tracking? And you know, I worked a little bit with the Xbox fitness team, and we know we were filming NFL football players to try and deliver fitness content. So I really got a peek behind the curtain, but ultimately it's like if I if I really want to do this, like I need to step out of the company. And to your point about entrepreneurs, the other phrase I like to use is the wantrepreneur, you know, the person who's more attached to the idea of being an entrepreneur than actually attached to the problem. You know, you frame it as a problem, and that's right, you you don't want to be attached to the solution, you want to be attached to the problem that you're trying to solve. Um sheer terror every time you wake up that someone else might care about the problem more than you, uh, because if they do, they'll go out and solve it faster. So uh yeah, that's uh the trace of entrepreneur.

Yeah, there you have it. Being an entrepreneur is part sheer terror waking up.

It's a great way to become immune to adrenaline, that's for sure. I agree.

That's really funny. I just laugh because I think uh entrepreneurs, you know, people who are really out there are very anxious by nature and you know kind of learn to deal with it. Um let's dive into the problem a little bit more, Stephen. What's the problem that you recognize that you're set out and how's that two-part question, I guess, is how has that problem changed as you've learned more?

I'm going to answer it in two parts because I think it was a problem that we saw, and then I think the problem has been exacerbated, and I'll explain why. So the problem I saw, and let me back up to my my time at uh coaching at Henry University. Uh I was really lucky. I built a great club. We had like a couple hundred students at the start of each academic year. I managed to put a staff of coaches together, so I would have like three or four assistant coaches at any one moment in time. And uh and we took that club to ten consecutive national championship wins. I well, I took it to ten, and then when I moved to California, the club won another eight, and uh, the eight that they won without me, most of the coaches had been my white belt at some moment in time. So, you know, it was a great playground for me to learn how to coach, to learn how to build teaching syllabuses and to learn how to teach other people. I taught, you know, we can get into this if you want, but I was very unorthodox in how I coach, and I taught people that unorthodoxy uh so that you could kind of continue the way the club was being coached. But as a you know, as a competitor, as a coach, I wanted to train with the best people in the world. Like I I would see these instructors that were teaching in Australia or teaching in America, or you know, I wanted to learn small circle jujitsu from Wally J or uh Escrima from Remy Prasash. And uh I was very lucky because I had the University of Edinburgh logo uh in my email signature, and I could reach out to these instructors, say, would you like to be invited to come to Scotland to teach at Edinburgh University? And we'll invite other external clubs in to train with you. So I had the capacity to bring the best instructors in the world to my dojo, put on seminars with them, and then follow them around for three or four days. And so, you know, I was able to train with all these instructors, which was just phenomenal access to technology. And at the time, I mean I'm aging myself here, but at the time, you know, mailing lists were really kicking off on the internet, news groups were kicking off on the internet, and so suddenly, you know, you could be like what feels like someone that trains in a niche sport like Ati or Jiu Jitsu, and suddenly you're connected to an international community and you've got access to these world-class coaches. So that was one side of the problem, and then I got to be the coach. Uh, and you know, as I would travel around teaching with some of these instructors and kind of being the assistant teacher, some of these clubs would then say, Hey Steven, could you come out and teach our club just yourself? And so, you know, I got to teach in Australia, I got to, yeah, I spent a lot of time teaching in uh Holland and Belgium and coming out to the US. And then I got to experience that problem of like people want to learn from me, but I can only kind of teach them maybe once or twice a year for a weekend. And in between that practice, when they're practicing what I showed them, they're practicing incorrectly. There's nobody there to correct them. There's nobody there to if they're if they've picked up what I taught, I can't move them further along the path. And if they're practicing what I did incorrectly, they're practicing it incorrectly for the next six months. And so I really wanted to go after this problem of how can you, you know, it's hard to learn physical exercise. I don't care whether it's something like karate or football uh or golf or weightlifting or TRX, it's really hard to learn it from a video, it's really hard to learn it from a book. Um, and even if you're showing it in person, it's hard to remember everything that you should be learning and go away and remember those lessons as and when you need them. So that's that's the problem I wanted to solve. It's like how can we actually provide that experience of personal training but provide it at digital scale? I talked about the problem exacerbating. The second thing that's happened is you know the growth of this, what we call the connected fitness category. So everything from Apple watches and Samsung watches and straw ones with and now we're seeing Peloton bikes and rolling machines with screens on them and strength training machines like tonal with screens on them. And so we now have millions of people watching millions of hours of fitness and exercise, instructional content on millions of screens, but nobody's watching them. Nobody's making sure they're practicing correctly or safely, nobody's adjusting the pace of teaching to match the pace of learning. So for me, you know, without coaching and without what we call connected coaching, connected fitness is still just a spectator sport. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense. And as you're speaking, I'm I'm reflecting on my experience because you know I came from a a background in CrossFit and uh yeah, I like to consider myself a decent competitor at one time. And uh it was very important to me, let's put it that way. As you know, my advancement in the sport was important to me. I mean, I was dedicated to it. And I hired a coach, uh James Fitzgerald, who worked with me remotely. He was the very first CrossFit games champion in CrossFit. And then, you know, from him I learned systems how to do online coaching, and then I started doing more remote coaching and kind of you know playing with different ways to be a coach, right? And I think what what this sees in my experience with this, especially because you know, CrossFit can be very technical from the gymnastics to the Olympic weightlifting components to all these little things where the the way you move is just as important as how many repetitions you get, if not more important. So, how do you, you know, with that? And I think what we're looking for is like the using technology to get the fullest expression of what it is to be a coach, right? Because right now we're limited in the way it's like, well, it's you know, we can watch a couple of videos and give a little feedback. We can, you know, just tweak the the program to, you know, fix any kind of regressions or progressions that we need. And you can go only as far, really, it's very limited in how far you can push that that heart. But this this this brings everything to a whole nother level in the expression of a coach. And that's that's why it's exciting to me. You know, this this could change everything, could have give you access to like if you let's I don't know, name another, you know, niche niche sport and you want to have access to the very best coaches, but they don't live near you.

You know, coaching, it's it's really hard to build a business as as you know, it's hard to build a business as a coach because you have to think about how do I scale this business beyond my geography? Like how do how do I make sure I you know I'm not just like limiting the people I can teach to the people whose house I can you know, home I can drive to or who I can meet at a gym. And uh no, I mean you hit on so many important things for me there. You know, tracking isn't teaching, counting isn't coaching. To your point, you know, it's like I e even as we bring technology into fitness, I think you know, today the focus is on uh quantity, like can we count reps? Can we count sex? Can we count calories? Can we count what? Can we look at outputs? But I think you know, as a coach, you're you know, quantity is not the the thing that you're most interested in. It's quality. It's like you know, it's better to do um you know less reps uh well than it is to do uh many reps in incorrectly. And so that's that's the thing for us, uh is like you know, how do we how do we start to think about bringing quality to people's practice? If I can talk a little bit, you know, about what the product actually is, yeah, yeah. Um yeah, it's not leave people hanging. Yeah, um, you know, what the pro you know the first problem we have to solve, and and here's my view on coaching that the the three things we have to solve to be able to coach is we need to be able to see what a coach sees, we need to be able to say what a coach says, and we have to be able to teach what a coach teaches. And I you know that that would be a good structure for digging into this conversation. But the first one, seeing what a coach sees, if I was to come to you and say, like, hey, um, yeah, I've just learned to do deadlifts and I'm really struggling with them, I keep scraping the bar on my knee, what am I doing wrong? What's the first thing you would say to me? You say, Well, we'll do one for me. You know, just let me see you do a deadlift, let me watch it. Right. Okay. And so we have to be able to do that digitally. And so where we got to, you know, we looked at camera technology, and I think there's a place for camera technology, but for me, the more scalable and the more interesting technology was what if I can put sensors in your sports clothing? So what if I can basically capture your posture in your form at the biomechanical level? And when I say capture your posture, I don't mean like I think I can guess you're doing a deadlift. I mean I can see that your shins are vertical, that your knees are pointed out, that your hips are hinged here, that your chest is upright, that your shoulders are back. Like I want to see that level of detail. And so we developed a constellation of sensors that can be embedded at the time of manufacturing into just regular compression apparel. And so when you pull on a shirt or you pull on a pair of pants, compression pants or yoga pants that have a sensey technology inside them, hundreds of times a second, from 360 degrees, we're seeing your posture and your form. That allows us to kind of see what a coach sees. The next thing we need to do, I mean, coaching, you know, I often say it's kind of like reading a book through a straw. You know, you only get to see that next thing you know. You don't, you know, when you know when someone's like, hey, you know, I I'll go back to my sports, I'm not teaching bad deadlifts on a on a podcast yet. You know, if somebody was to say to me, like, hey, I'm just not getting a lot of power in a punch, here's what I don't do. I'm like, okay, reverse punch. I want you to make sure your feet are shoulder width apart, like one and a half times shoulder width here. I want your knee pointing here, your toes here, your hips this way. Make sure you stop your hips here and your shoulder. I'm not gonna dump like 400 instructions on you. I'm not gonna give you the whole book at once. I'm gonna give you a straw. I'm gonna say, the next thing I want you to focus on is you're over-rotating your hips at the end of the punch. Make sure you lock them when they're square, and then focus on driving your weight forward. So that's what we're gonna work on. Here's a drill I want you to do. Here's a cue that I'm gonna use. I want you to imagine I'm holding the holding your karate belt, and at the end of the punch, I'm pulling your belt forward, pulling your hips forward. There's the cue. Imagine you're being pulled by the belt. And so that's how you and I teach as coaches. That's how coaches teach, right? You look at the athlete, we make a decision about of all the things this person could learn right now, what's the one next thing I can teach them? And so that's what I mean by teaching how a coach teaches. You need to be able to take a skill and break it down into the parts. You need to be able to take the parts apart and put them back together again for the athlete. And saying what a coach says is you need to speak to the athlete in the vocabulary of a coach. How many technology products are there out there where, you know, I can look at my golf swing and I can get all these graphs and charts and radians per second, this and you know, my baseball swing, I can know my hip separation and the separation time between my elbow and my hip. Nobody learns like that. You know, it's our job as technologists to turn that into the vocabulary of a coach and you know, just just use the cues or use the corrections that a coach would use. And that's the other part that we've had to build. So listen, the the long and the short of it with Asensi is you pull on a pair of uh you pull on some compression gear, and we put the voice of a world-class coach in your ear, we just guide you, monitors you, and corrects you as you're practicing the sport of your choosing. And it's it's as simple as that.

Oh, that's great. And and how does my first question is, you know, coming from the um the avatar of a fitness professional, personal trainer, gym owner, remote coach, how does this benefit me?

That's a great question. And let me back up a little bit. Like when I was a kid, I would run around, you know, I'd pull on my Brazil shirt and I played soccer, and I'd be like number 10 on the back. It's like I'm gonna be Pele. And I'm imagining I'm Pele when I'm playing soccer. I also, you know, but people who don't know like they're like Scotland, you play ice hockey. Uh but yeah, I can't you know, I come from a hockey family. Both my uncles played for Great Britain.

Oh nice.

Um, so I would get all these hand-me-down hockey shirts, right? And uh and I would put on my my oil shirt with 99 on the back, and I'm you know, in my backyard, you know, not enough ice. The ice in Scotland sucks, it's just wet. Um so you know, I have a bit of plywood on the ground and I'm flicking pucks into makeshift nets, but I'm imagining I'm Wayne Gretzky, right? It's like Gretzky's voice in my head. And so I don't want to I I don't want to replace that experience of like I'm I'm following in the footsteps of my idols. I don't I don't want to get rid of that experience with like, well, here you go, now you've got Surrey in your ear, coaching ear, or now you've got like an AI coach. So I think that you know one of the things we learned very early on in the formation of the company is we we have to help people understand we're scaling the coaches, we're not replacing them with AI. So, what does that mean? Uh, I mean, let me use a real example. We uh we we announced a partnership with British rowing, so rowing and indoor rowing in particular, and as a crossfitter, you'll appreciate uh time spent on the concept too. And so we saw indoor rowing as a great sport to start with the Senti. And we've announced a partnership with British rowing, and we just, you know, just only a few weeks ago, we were at the Olympic Training Center, we uh spent three or four days with some of the athletes who are training for Tokyo, and we were filming coaching content with them. So you'll be able to sit down on a Concept 2 rowing machine, and on the screen in front of you will be Team Great Britain athletes who are hoping uh to be rowing in Tokyo, and it'll be their voice and the voice of Team GB athletes or British rowing coaches in your ear as you're practicing. And so, for coaches, that's what we're trying to offer. We're trying to uh essentially create this technology platform that allows a coach to take their knowledge and expertise to capture it in such a way that a sensey can deliver it uh on their behalf. I'm doing exactly the same with uh TRX right now. So I'll talk about that at some point today. But we're really excited to be working with TRX and like the master trainer, Dr. Chris Frankel, the the chief science officer at TRX, we'll be putting his voice in your ear. So every time you're hanging on these TRX straps, being coached through a progression or coached through a regression or a uh a check down as as as uh Frankel calls it, uh, as you're being coached through uh TRX, it's that voice that's in your ear. So, you know, I I want anyone that's listening to this and they're a trainer or a coach, I want them excited about the idea of like, wait a minute, I can take all my knowledge and expertise and essentially are going to be able to put literally my voice in the ears of millions of people at digital scale. But it's not a YouTube video, it's actually it's gonna feel like I'm there. And and honestly, it's magical, you know, when you know when you hear this voice in your ear say, make sure your head is following your hand, you're like, oh my goodness, like my head wasn't following my hand, and you correct it, and then you hear that voice say, much better, good, well done. I mean, it's it's nuts, it's magical. And uh I'm still delighted by my own product every time I use it. Like, how does that work? Wait, I know how it works. Wait, I did that, yeah.

It's interesting, you know, in a personal anecdote. Like, I'll walk into the uh the gym that I'm a member at now and I'll see people rowing inefficiently. All I want to do is go cue them, right? But these people don't know me. My wife's like, Don't, don't you dare go over there and correct them. And like one out of five times I will. But there's like, you know, little things like that. And oh, if I can add on to your thoughts too, I think, you know, please there's there's a certain percentage of people who are fearful of technology about what it's gonna do. It's gonna take my own job, all the all that, right? Right. But I see stuff like this and I look at it's an opportunity to a leverage what your your expertise on on a much bigger scale, right? And number two, it really helps elevate the role of the coach to someone who's more based on the human relationship and seeing the big picture and all those things. Because we can get really a big difference. We talked about this in other other interviews, the big difference between a trainer and a coach. A coach sees the big picture, right? A trainer's queuing you up on where's your elbow in space, right? Or how many reps you're counting. And if if most coaches want to get out of the trainer role eventually, and this helps with like the little nuances, you know, that you can actually be looking at the person as a bigger picture, as a client, as the athlete, you know, in a in a bigger perspective. And this kind of takes one component of it and allows it, like, you know, if you're sitting there as a coach and you're constantly queuing someone's rowing technique, you're you're also missing the bigger picture. How are they breathing, right? What's going on in their mind at this point in the race? How are they recognizing anaerobic versus aerobic? Like that's the stuff as a coach you want to be working on.

I love that distinction of trainer and coach. I've often said it, I've used a different analogy in the past, but I think I'm going to steal yours now. The analogy I've often used is like the team captain. When when I coached the University of Edinburgh Cracky Club, one of the things I would often try and do as a coach is is empower the captain, and I've got a male and a female captain for the male and female team, but I'm trying to empower the captains to be the leader of that team so that ultimately they could take training sessions when I wasn't there and I was intentionally not there. I would let them do like a team pool training on a Saturday morning. Where it was it was as much about the team bonding and building that kind of teamship and then I could show up as a coach. And I've always thought of a sense it's kind of playing that captain role. The captain kind of worked with me, but I was the one that was, you know, making decisions on teaching syllabus. To your point, I was the one that's like, hey, British championships are coming up in March and we need to start preparing now. And I want you guys thinking about blah, blah, blah. And you know, that was my job. And the captain was much more just like, we're gonna do 10 of these, make sure you're doing X, like we were taught in class last week. Let's go. And then so I love the trainer coach analogy. And then the other thing you mentioned, that's something we're really excited about with Assenti, is you talked a little about the broader picture. Okay. I I want to educate you, and and maybe it's just me, but I don't think it is just me. When I'm learning a sport or learning an activity, you know, I become a nerd about it. I want to know why why do we do it like that? You know, explain to me why this movement is done like this, or explain what do you mean by anaerobic and aerobic? You know, why are these things important and how do they factor into my training? And so there's that educational piece, and then there's also the inspirational piece. You know, I think for me, when I coached, uh coached at the university, I love to storytell. You can tell on the podcast. I you know, I don't pause for breath, but I love storytell. You know, I love to like, hey, I remember last year or five years ago at the British Championships, there was this guy and blah blah blah. And and you know, people are listening and then it's like, okay, now let's go. And that's something we're trying to do on the Assensi platform as well, is you know, not just make it mechanical rep counting, but you can download Assensi today and you can learn to roll with one of the top Olympians of all time from Team from Team New Zealand, Eric Murray. And that you know, it's just a joy to sit down and listen to Eric talk about the stuff that you didn't see, the work that happened in the dark, you know, when he did his time trials or when he broke world records, or it's like he's reading that biography as of his life to you, and that's the context within which you're training. It's impossible not to be inspired when you're sitting on that erg and you and you're questioning whether you can do a 15-minute role, but you've just heard him talk about how you kind of held that split time for two hours. You know, it really it really pushes you forward. And so, you know, I I want you to see kind of a sentient like that. It's not just about the like, you know, the form coaching and we're just teaching you technique and we're just gonna do that. Like we want to blow your mind and inspire you. Like I want you to feel like I felt as a kid, you know, with my number 10 on my back or my number 99 on my back, you know, imagining I was Pelle or Gretzky. You know, that's the experience we want to give everyone in their sport.

Yeah, that's awesome. Hey, give us insights. What are the quality of a sensei? You have compression gear, there's an app, what what other pieces is there anything else involved?

That's it. I mean, that's it, yeah. Uh so you know, the the compression gear, and you know, right now we've uh manufactured own brand compression gear just to allow some early adopters and some early brands to uh uh pilot the technology. But our our go-to-market is I want you walking into the store buying your favorite brand of apparel and it's powered by Assenti. So if any of your listeners are companies that like make apparel for the Cospit community or you know, technical apparel companies, we want them to come to us and say, how can we put Assensi inside of our apparel? And how can we use some of our coaches or our brand ambassadors? You know, how can we make them coaches on the Assensi platform? How can we put their voice essentially in our apparel? And and you hit the nail on the head, it's essentially an app for your phone. You download an app, it pairs to your apparel over Bluetooth, and now that app is the thing that you're using to subscribe to coaching plans and coaching programs in the sport of your choosing and be guided and monitored in course through your practice.

Very cool. When did you start Assensei? When did this whole thing start?

It was about uh five years ago.

Okay.

So I I remember like telling my wife, it's like I've done it, I've quit Microsoft and said I'm pregnant. So yeah. So yeah. Um So you're motivated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got skin in the game.

That's uh Yeah, you're properly motivated.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Over over the past five years as an entrepreneur, what do you think has been one of the biggest personal challenges you you've faced in in building this thing?

You know, a good a good mentor of mine uh uh likes to say, never mistake a clear line of sight for a short distance. It's a phrase that our reviews a lot. And I think you know, from the day I started the company, for a few years before I started the company, I had this clear line of sight. You know, I was very confident that there was a need um and that if we could will this product into existence, there would be a desire for the product. And I was very clear that it would create a category and create an ecosystem that others wanted to be a part of apparel companies, equipment companies, governing bodies like British Rowing, equipment manufacturers like TRA. Um I think the challenge has been when you're creating a category, you really have to get the timing right. You really have to be asking yourself the question, not just can I get the product to market, but can I bring the market to the product? You're delivering something that people didn't know they wanted yet or didn't know could exist, and they have a million questions that they don't quite understand how it works or what it's going to be like to use it. So I think, you know, you know, frankly, you know, the challenges that creates for you as a company is you know, you want to get investors on board. Investors like to tell you that they that they're risk takers. Investors like to tell you that, you know, we saw Peloton first. Go and listen to the podcast on NPR with John Foley, the CEO of Peloton, and listen to how many people said no to him. I think I read recently he reckons he had 4,000 meetings before he got a check for Peloton and his first million dollars with like hundreds of checks and just small checks from people who were like, Well, I'll give you 10 grand or I'll give you 15 grand. Like because he really struggled to help people see the future that he saw clearly. He saw that future himself sitting on a flywheel bike in the flywheel studio and was like, hey, you could do this digitally and this is what it would look like. But for him to convince investors, for him to convince early customers when they crowdfunded to buy, you know, it's really hard. And so I I think all of our challenges tie back to that core idea. You know, you have to make sure that you're not raising too much money too early because the market won't be ready when you launch the product. For a complex product like Essentially, it's like we got to introduce this in PCs. If we just drop the whole thing in the middle of the market, people are gonna be like, you know, well, how how does this work? How do we participate? So how did we pick a sport that we would launch in that one sport and just like educate a small niche community of you know, people that want to indoor roll, which is what connected coaching is. And how do we then use that to kind of branch out to other sports? So yeah, all of the challenges are basically, I think, about timing. I mean, that's coaching, but timing is key.

Yeah, yeah, I guess you want to unroll it at the right rate, right? And and do it like I I think the rowing niche is perfect. It's it's dedicated people who are into it are into it. There's definitely enough technical issues to show value in in your tech. Um, but it's also not, you know, maybe if things don't go right the first time, it's not a huge market that's been blown.

No, I mean you so you've absolutely I mean you've perfectly explained how I explained to other people the qualities we were looking for in a launch market. Is you know, it needed to be small enough to lead but big enough to matter. Uh, it needed to have a community of people who were like fanatical uh about stuff. You know, you kind of want people like, how did that guy get 10 seconds faster in his 2K? He's training with a senti. Okay, what's that? I need a sensey. Um so you know, you kind of want that community. And the great thing about rowers as well is they have high cost participation in other sports. You know, most rowers they run, they bike, they weightlift, they do you know a lot of yoga or mobility training. They're just generally very active. So, you know, once you've got a customer in rowing, they pull you into other markets. You don't have to go and find other customers in other markets.

Yeah. Are you gonna get into skiing? Because that would benefit me greatly personally.

It's funny, uh I can't remember if you and I talked about this before, but um the the I'm gonna quit decision was made on uh on Snowman's Mountain, Colorado. My wife grew up in Colorado, so she was basically born with skis on, and I was not. So I'm uh I'm I'm throwing myself down Snowman's Mountain, thinking about centers and coaching, and and honestly, I was like, maybe you know, I definitely I want to do this company. I I'm literally my own user right now. I'm kinda I I want to be a better skier and I would love to have somebody giving me real-time coaching right now. I actually debated skiing as being a great niche market to launch into. But uh the problem with skiing is it's very seasonal. So it's kind of a lumpy market, no pun intended, so it's kind of a lumpy market to to launch a product in. But yeah, I mean listen, I as I often say to people, uh, what sports is the center good for? Any sport where posture, form, technique, timing are important. And then everyone looked at me like, well, that's every sport, right? And I'm like, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So skiing, snowboarding, yeah, I would love to.

I mean, I watch countless YouTube videos on instruction. Like that's what I do, that's what I do in the evenings. And that's uh actually how my wife learned to ski was through YouTube. And imagine how fast this could have accelerated if I was there.

Well, I and yeah, and the challenge there is like, you know, I mean, it's great, you're watching videos, but this I mean, let's just unpack this because it's a really interesting conversation. First of all, you need to know what you're looking for. Like, what's the thing I should be doing next? What what should I be learning? And so most of us don't know the answers to that question. I I might know that my roundhouse kick sucks, but I don't know like how do I make that better? What should I be working on? But regardless, I'll go and watch videos on how to do a roundhouse kick or or or how to ski. And you're given like 20 or 30 instructions, and it's probably it's Tuesday evening, and you're not going to practice that until Saturday morning. So that disconnection between when the lesson was delivered and when the left lied, I mean it's just it's just all kinds of broken, right? So it's how do you take that knowledge in that video that's probably, you know, there's probably like you know, months worth of learning back into a C-minute video because the coach that recorded it is a knowledge bomb and dropped everything they know about that subject. And how do you atomize all that coaching and content and knowledge? Uh and just deliver it piece by piece uh in the right sequence to the athlete as they're practicing. That's exactly the problem we're trying to solve.

What do you think? What markets are you looking at right now that just make your mouth water? Where you're like, I can, I can, we can really make an impact here.

You know, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And so I think that the market we can impact, I I pull up and I look at this at an even more macroscopic level. So the market we can impact first is sport coaching. You know, I live in a world where why would you learn a sport not having a sensei, watching your unsupervised practice? You can still go and, you know, you can join a rowing club or a CrossFit box or train with a track coach. Like I still want you doing that, but if you're in any way keen about your sport, I know you're practicing when the coach isn't there. You're practicing in your garage, you're practicing out on the field by yourself, you're practicing in your backyard. And so I live in a world where whatever sport you're practicing, when you're doing that unsupervised practice, you want a sense of there. And then I start thinking about the markets adjacent to sport, physical therapy. Uh, right now, physical therapy is like you get injured and then you get mobility and strength training. But yeah, again, you know, pre-habilitation is just as important as rehabilitation. How do we make sure that we're doing the strength and the conditioning and the move the mobility work to not get injured and to be in the shape that we should be in for the sports that we practice? So now if you think about it, if you think about all of your practice in a particular sport, we're not just looking at your biomechanics to ask questions about how can I give you more uh technique training in that sport, but we're starting to notice the asymmetries, we're starting to notice the poor range of motion, or we're starting to notice the inner movement patterns that you keep repeating. And that's starting to inform the strength, conditioning, and mobility training you're doing. So now we're in prehabilitation as much as we are in in rehabilitation. I often talk about the the industrial athlete. There are many people who are essentially athletes at work. They're they're they're lifting, and again, the idea that that movement can be continuously monitored and you can be coached into correct movement, huge market opportunity. And then obviously we start thinking about tactical and you know, firefighters, and there's just so many places where I think if we can help people move correctly and move well and give them the guidance. I mean, I think it just really uh it unlocks human performance on an incredible scale. So I can go down to the individual sport and get how excited about the impact we could have on the world of fencing, or I can kind of pull up to you know a hundred thousand feet and look down uh and just think about you know, you've had this fancy movement coach watching your movement from the age of a kid to the age of an adult. And this is an an intelligent and you know digital assistant that understands you and how you move and is able to kind of uh you know coach you through good movement. And uh, you know, our friends over at TRX uh they have a great sign as you walk in the door. It says movement is a vital sign. And you know, being able to move well, you know, just really I mean it's exactly that, it's a vital sign, it's critical to our critical to our health and well-being.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, my my first thought goes to anything that, and this is a terrible term, you know, forgive me in advance for using it, but movement Nazis, you know, people who are so into the finite pieces of the movement for efficiency and perfection's sake, you know, this this is the tool they're dreaming of, right?

You know, everyone has their sport, and you know, every time I pitch a sensei or explain the sensei to someone at a party, it's like, hey, could you do this for ballroom dancing? Could you do this for Zumba? Could you do this for, you know, hey, I'm a fan, you know, I mentioned fencing. It's like I'm a fancy, hey, yeah, I haven't really thought about fencing or kendo. You know, if it's like, yeah, kendo, I guess that would be fantastic. You're wearing all this gear anyway, so having censors in that gear makes sense. And you know, I I think pretty much every sport, if you identify yourself with that sport, if you're someone that, again, you know, you're at dinner or you're at a party and you get chant with somebody, if you're that kind of person who within the first hour they know that you're a martial artist or that you practice CrossFit or that you're a roar, if you identify uh with that sport, then you probably care for something like a sense because you know, to your point, it's like I want to make sure I'm doing it as best as I possibly can, you know, make me faster, make me stronger.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. So I always ask this question because sometimes it works out really well because maybe someone reaches out or whatever it is. But what what is what is it, Steven? What do you think is the biggest need within your business right now?

I mean, uh, you know, we just want to get to this future faster. So anyone, the the top of the conversation we talked about, you know, the traits of entrepreneurs, and I think you know, a good entrepreneur has a deep frustration for the pace of progress. Um and you look back and you've gone quickly, but you look forward and it's like, why is it so slow? So, you know, I he just explained my whole life. Right, right. So, you know, so I that's a question I you know, that's a question I always uh give back to people is like, how can you help me get to this future faster together? And so what do I think that means? Anyone on this show, anyone listening to this show that identifies as an athlete, that that that likes to train, even if you're not a roar, I promise you, I I wasn't a roar, too short. But I've really got into rowing, I've really got to appreciate the sport and the skill, and I, you know, again, I'm like a nerve out about technique and there's so much to learn. So, you know, I I just compel you, please download a Sensi. Go into the app store, search for Asensi, download the app. There's free trials, and you can start training with an Olympic rower today, and you don't even need our compression apparel to get started. We'll actually take all of the data from the rowing machine, all of the telemetry from the rowing machine, and we'll use that to make some inferences about your posture in your technique and your form. So we'll start coaching you without the compression apparel, and if you get into this, you can get compression apparel and we'll give you even more nuanced coaching on your technique and form. But the reason I really want people to start using a sensei for rowing is because I want you to then go, like, well, I need to reach out to a Sensei and speak to them about my sport. So that's the first thing I would just love people to use the app. The second is you know, equipment manufacturers, please don't worry that you're about to be disrupted by Silicon Valley and you know, you know, $200 TRX straps are going to be disrupted by a $3,000 tonal strength training machine. And I love tonal and I love TRX, but you know, I don't want to make fitness something uh that you have to be able to afford two $3,000 pieces of equipment for. If I can make you the machine, if I can put the sensors on you, you can use your ordinary kettlebell, your ordinary TRX straps, your ordinary barbell, and I can give you that movement quotient. So if you're an equipment manufacturer who's trying to, you know, every day seeing another company getting 20 million of funding out of Silicon Valley to put a screen on a piece of fitness equipment, let us help you, you know, let us help you bring your plain old kettlebell, just pieces of iron, let us help you put them uh into a digital ecosystem. And then similarly, if you have apparel companies or if you have governing bodies who you know like British Rowing, who know that they have a tremendous amount of uh you know knowledge, capital around how to coach and teach rowing and who want to grow awareness and participation and competence in the sport, you know, we'd love to help you. And if if you let us help you, you'll help us get to the future that we want to get to faster as well. So yeah, this is like I say it's a Martin, it's not a sprint, and it's something that's going to take a team. It's not gonna be we we'll not be the only company in this category. We just want to be the center of gravity that pulls the category together. So yeah, reach out. Um, my email address is not very hard to get. My first name and my last name um that's sensi.com. So just reach out to me.

Right on. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, when I work with my clients at level five mentors, it's I tell them the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is balancing urgency and patience. And uh because you just there is no bathroom. Yeah, I don't think there is. Well, yeah, it's it's what you strive for, right? Because you're it's never happening fast enough. But if you look back, you're like, oh, actually that happened pretty quickly. So yeah, Steven, I I uh I I think you'll get a good response from the listeners here. Um I think there's gonna be people who are gonna be really interested in in talking. And I'm just excited to have you on. So maybe we can get another update from me in like the six to 12 month mark and see how things are going.

I would love to. And if there's things that people like if people wanted to get into a particular sport or you know, if there's anything that you and I spoke about today, I mean we just touched on a million topics. So uh I'd love to hear what people want to want to hear about and you know, we'll drive the conversation on social media. And uh yeah, I'd love to come back and uh have another conversation with you and not years ago. But thanks for thanks for inviting us. We're really excited, and the more people are helping us get the word out, like I said, we'll get to the future faster together.