Titans: The Future of Sports Recovery with HyperIce Founder, Anthony Katz

Inside the Episode

“We look at these regimens and these processes, they’re all designed to address the fluid fascia system, which was not even talked about 20 years ago. It was all about, your bones and your muscles and things that are very structural, and so the movement has been the renaissance of how we look at the body in the first place. We have so much more clarity. So, you take the knowledge of understanding the body, the technology that can manipulate the physiology, then you take the data that we have that’s giving us feedback on what the person actually did, you add all of that up and that is what is the modern athlete” – HyperIce Founder, Anthony Katz, on the renaissance of sports recovery

An exciting week on the podcast as we launched the first episode in a special series called “Titans”, which explores the stories, innovations, and leadership behind the best companies in basketball and beyond (don’t worry, our regular podcast isn’t going anywhere)! Our first guest in this series is HyperIce founder, Anthony Katz, who’s built one of the world’s leading sports recovery companies. Katz was once a high school basketball coach and History teacher before creating HyperIce, and the story of the company is truly remarkable. 

HyperIce extends a variety of sports recovery products including the HyperVolt, Normatec, Venom, and more, and has become exclusive partners with the likes of the NBA, NFL, and MLB, making it one of the fastest growing and most dominate sports recovery companies in the world. This episode covers:

• The history of HyperIce’s growth and Kobe Bryant’s impact
• How Katz thinks about creating luck, partnerships, and authentic leadership
• The sports recovery renaissance and where it is headed

Chapters

0:00 Building Hyper Ice

9:54 Learning, Problem Solving, and Creating Luck

16:49 Design’s Influence in Product Development

20:55 Product Innovation and Company Values

24:33 Hyperice and Human Performance Impact

32:45 Revolutionizing Sports Recovery Technology

36:21 The Science of Preventing Non-Contact Injuries

45:10 Introducing Slapping Glass

Transcript

Anthony Katz: 0:00

We look at these regimens and these processes, they’re all designed to address the fluid fascia system, which was not even talked about 20 years ago. It was all about, like your bones and your muscles and things are very structural, and so the movement has been the renaissance of how we look at the body in the first place. We have so much more clarity. So, like you take the knowledge of understanding the body, the technology that can manipulate the physiology, then you take the data that we have, that’s giving us feedback on what the person actually did, you add all of that up and that is what is the modern athlete.

Dan: 0:38

Welcome to Titans. a special series here at Slapping Glass exploring the stories, key decisions and innovations of the best companies in basketball and beyond for pushing the game to new heights for coaches, players and fans. Today, we’re excited to welcome Anthony Katz, founder of one of the biggest and most innovative sports recovery companies in the world, Hyper Ice. From his roots as a high school history teacher and basketball coach to Hyper Ice’s early adoption by Kobe Bryant and other NBA players, today’s episode dives deep into how Katz built a product that now partners with the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball and beyond, along with his ideas on leadership, creativity and building a little luck along the way. Please enjoy our conversation with Anthony Katz. Like many great stories, this one begins with a chance meeting at a party Before Hyper Ice’s major partnerships, cutting edge technology and innovation and billion dollar valuations. In 2010, Anthony Katz was working as a high school history teacher and basketball coach in Southern California. As an avid pickup player himself, he had begun tinkering with a product that would better keep ice wraps compressed to an athlete’s body. During this phase, a bit of luck had favored Katz, as his high school friend and current UC Irvine associate head coach, Ryan Battarelli, was able to introduce him to Kobe Bryant during workouts, who both liked and helped give suggestions about bettering the product and the design. It’s here where we’ll begin, where, as Katz details at a going away party for a former player set to begin his pro career abroad, Katz is introduced to someone who may provide the valuable link between rough idea and full fledged manufacturing and world class design.

Anthony Katz: 2:37

I remember being at my apartment in 2010 and I was sitting there in the middle of the beach going, all right, i had this party. It’s a little far, i don’t want to go, but I really liked he’s looking at it and I was like, oh, he’s going to play in the Ukraine. I’m not going to see him for a while, and basketball is such a brotherhood you want to see your friend before he goes. I went over and at the time I was driving around with cut up prototypes that I had made of like basically like ice compression wrap, and I was using them. And I hadn’t made a couple prototypes, i had made one set for Kobe Bryant. That story you know, i’m sure we’ll touch on And I was just kind of like a guy with no business experience. I was a basketball coach and high school history teacher at the time And I remember going over there and his dad said hey, you know what I had this idea for, how I wanted to make the product better, kind of based on some of the feedback that Kobe Bryant had given me. And he said well, i know a guy that he just bought a manufacturing company and they said they can make anything. They’re like a very high level like aerospace manufacturer And I thought that was a little bit over my pay grade. But I was able to get a meeting And I kind of like kind of bird dog the guy down for a while got a meeting and I ended up presenting it. And you know, i walked into the meeting and presented my sort of like set of prototypes that I had made. And the thing that got them interested was when I told them about that, like I had made a set for Kobe Bryant. He liked them, but he told me that I have to change all this stuff. And they sort of have to believe me. I showed them the text messages with Ryan Barichelli, who I’m sure you guys know, and they were like, wow, like we’re interested if someone like that thinks that this could be a good idea. And they were interested And so I was able to work with them on developing the prototypes that eventually began, the prototypes for which we built the company First product line around. But it’s funny how, like you think that there’s always moments in your life where, like what if I just stayed home that night? You know, like who knows? There’s these series of events that happen that are all connected. We make decisions every single day And you just never know. Sometimes the smallest decision you make, like whether or not you’re going to leave the house, end up changing the course of your life.

Dan: 4:31

Absolutely. And then around that night, that moment in the serendipity of it for sure And I think in building anything you know about the serendipity of people and right time, right place, what was it about you personally at that time that you started to feel the confidence to take Hyperice to someone like Kobe or to be able to talk to engineers that can engineer? Like, where were you at that place personally to start to get there?

Anthony Katz: 4:57

Yeah, Well, it wasn’t even Hyperice. I didn’t have a name for it, I didn’t know it was going to be a business. I had made the ice wraps based on sort of like something I saw when I was in Australia And I came back, made these prototypes. I was wearing them at UCI. Brian saw them and said, Hey, I got to like show Kobe’s ice bags every day And the name actually came from like when I made them for him. I remember at the time who’s actually? summer of 09. I was playing in the hyperdunk 08, which is my favorite basketball shoe of all time, which I still think and I’ve gotten to know Eric Gavar, the designer And I said it’s the best basketball shoe of all time because it represented the biggest leap from anything that had come before it. So, like, when a shoe comes out, it’s like what’s the second best shoe at the time? And I felt that that was like guards wore it, bigs wore it, wings wore it. And I remember I loved the shoe so much and Kobe had kind of popularized it. Remember he did like the viral thing when he jumped over the acid Martin And I remember saying that like he wears hyperdunk, he wears hyperice And that was sort of where the name came from, And so the confidence was really more of it wasn’t really confidence. It’s like I had nothing to lose, number one, And I just really thought that the athletes that I saw were spending more time and more energy into like doing things off the court than just training and playing. And so at the time I didn’t really know the industry And I think it was just something that like was pretty common. It’s like sort of an entry level modality that everyone knows. So it wasn’t really like, oh, a conference training. It was more just, I think, some naivete that like, oh yeah, you’re just gonna go start a business, But there has to be some of that Like, there has to be some of that Like I’m just gonna try it. And then the more I got into it, the more I started to believe in it And it just became, you have this like singular focus of, hey, I’m gonna like see this all the way through. And so I don’t know if confidence is the word or maybe it was just sort of a belief of I’ve nothing to lose And I think I should really try this. And it was just sort of a feeling you get that if you did it, it’ll work.

Pat: 6:49

Here and you talk about these moments that add up and with Kobe Bryant or we talked this you just decided to go to this going away party. How do you sell a belief? You know, like you said, you just have prototypes in your cars. You don’t even know if you’re gonna start really doing it full time, If it’s just a passion project. As you start getting down this rabbit hole and it gets further and further, how do you start to really, like you said, you believe in it. This is what I’m gonna go after. But how do you sell it to Kobe Bryant? How do you sell it to the aerospace engineer?

Anthony Katz: 7:20

Yeah, you know, i think honestly. Well, first of all, i’ve gotten way better at selling a vision now than I did when I was that young and inexperienced. Now I’ve had to sell much bigger ideas, like purchasing Norma Tech, whether it’s acquisitions or whether it’s bringing on new investors. Now you’re pitching a much grander. You know the vision has to get bigger and bigger as you go back. Then I honestly think one of the things that helped me was that I didn’t have a business background, in that when you’re in coaching, it’s really like a relationship based profession And so it’s not really transactional. I mean, you know, when you get to the NBA, you know there’s contracting, but you know high school basketball coach, you know, and a teacher, your whole life is. You deal with players and their families and like students and everything’s very relationship based and relationship centered and it’s not transactional. So I think that one of the things that might have been refreshing when I was pitching people was it wasn’t really a pitch, it was more I believe in something, and I think they just saw that like Hey, this person is doing this for the right reason. There’s no catch. I wasn’t like a guy trying to make a fast book. I really saw it like Hey, i think this is going to be something that could be big And I think that maybe they saw some genuine, you know, belief there. And I think a lot of times it wasn’t a sales pitch. I never thought of it as selling. I always thought of it, as you know, sharing a vision and trying to get other people to see it. So I think there was a little bit of that. My background kind of bought me some of that. You know I wasn’t the used car salesman, you know, pitching some idea. I was someone who, like, really believed in what I was talking about And I think people see, you know, when you really believe in something and it’s genuine. I think people see that I learned relationships through coaching and teaching And that has served me well. I have a different lens that I see people through. That I think a lot of times I know people that maybe that’s all I’ve done is business, that sometimes there’s always the transaction that is always front of mind, and for me it’s never really been like that. I would not have it any other way. I would go back and do it again. I would be a history and policy major and a teacher and a coach. It was a great preparation for what I ended up doing at Entrepreneurship.

Pat: 9:15

What role did vulnerability play in this process? Like you said, you were a history teacher, you’re a coach in basketball and now you’re going to immerse yourself in this idea and building this product.

Anthony Katz: 9:26

That’s a really easy answer to this question. I was getting into an industry that I really didn’t know anything about, and when I was showing the products, and once I had the prototype, i was going to meet with the head trainer of Insert to Team, whether it was a college or a pro team or whoever was I knew I was going to talk to someone, and that’s a tough crowd. By the way, like it’s funny, on Wednesday I’m speaking at the NFL trainers meeting in Phoenix. That’s like my industry now, and that we’ve helped shape. But back when I started, i was like whoa, i’m an outsider. I did not. I don’t have a degree in kinesiology or biology or whatever, and so what I did, though and I go back to, like my education. You know, when you learn how to learn, then the only thing limiting how much you could learn is your curiosity, and so I was just really really saying, hey, i have to be really prepared. So I just started saying I’m going to learn people, i’m going to learn from research. I really dove into. It wasn’t just like I’m sitting there on Wikipedia, it wasn’t really that. It was a little bit. You know, if you need data, that’s always available, but it was really. I would meet people and I’d never try to like send something. I wasn’t. I was new in the industry And if I ever found a trainer, sports scientist, therapist that was willing to like talk to me about, hey, what is some of the new research, what is some of the new things that you’re doing? And I learned from people and really kind of advanced. That is a huge part of my growth in someone. But the vulnerability was in the beginning. I remember like one of my first champions like wow, this guy’s going to start asking me about the science behind. You know cryotherapy and stuff. I know a lot of that. But I quickly learned and I was a fast learner And I think that, again, going back to my education, you go to college the most important thing you do is learn how to learn. I was a fast learner. Curiosity is like the engine for your intelligence ultimately, and so I found that is to be like my favorite way to learn And I put really good people around me and part of being an entrepreneur is being like a talent scout. You find people that you can learn from in every way. So I’ve learned that across every area of business. But that was a huge one was that I was going to start a company that had products in an industry that I didn’t have an education background in. So I had to make up for that And I think some of that I really need to like make up for four years of that, go to college for it And, like now, i feel it’s one of my strengths.

Dan: 11:32

And on the subject of curiosity, i think one of the things is you know problem solving and for you as an entrepreneur, i’m sure, problem solving all the way through the starting of everything And I guess one thing I’d love to ask you about is how you went about and how you thought about solving the air pocket buildup problem in hyperized really early on, and I know that that was something that you had heard from other people or us reading our history of it is you’re trying to solve that problem And for you, not having any experience in the science of it and all that, i guess how you thought about trying to solve that, because that was a big issue from what we could tell early on and getting the product from good to great.

Anthony Katz: 12:09

That’s like the school technology feature. When I made the first hybrid, i was trying to make a portable ice compression wrap or design right, so ice is the agent. Right, so that’s your cooling agent. There’s a receptacle and then there’s a compression element. And I was really focusing on the compression element because we live in Southern California, there was wetsuit factories, i was cutting different patterns and I was really trying to get it to where, like, okay, you can walk with it, whatever angle you’re at, it’s still compressing. And because I was so focused on that, it was compressing the ice that was in the bag. We all know like, as basketball players back in the day, you put ice in a plastic bag, you wrap it And then when you put the wrap around, it creates this like air bubble and that creates a barrier, so you can’t compress the ice. So then what do you do? You poke a hole in it and then that’s why ice bag leak. So what I did? I was so focused on that And I remember the first time meeting Cody Ryan, he was like Hey, you did a really good job in getting this really tight. I can walk around and everything goes, but after a while it starts to slide down. And why it does? that is because there’s a thermal exchange. You apply ice to the body, the conduction of thermal energy, the cold goes in, pulls the heat out of your body, that melts the ice And when that melts ice, it creates air. And so now the compression wrap has this barrier here where it can’t compress the ice anymore. So he just set back an issue. Being a complete amateur inventor, i’m like Oh, if there was just a button right there you can press, it would suck all the air out. And that was sort of you know, it was a solve. I always feel that athlete feedback has been like the core of like how we develop product, very similar to filled night and Bill Bowerman to that was a huge thing with Nike has got athletes interaction. And here I have, you know, one of the greatest of all time, who was super into icing, who just happened to be like the ice guy, and he also said your ice bag is round, but it’d be better if it was square, because if you look at the knee instead of just going over the knee, all the 10 and stuff are on the outside. So we had to figure out how to mold a dip, mold a, you know medical grade square ice bag, which is super complicated And that took a lot of time. So that became a good first lesson. In product development is really like listening to the athlete, because they’re the ones that are going to be using it every day, and so, as a huge part of my philosophy as product developers, steve Jobs had always started with a consumer And in my case that is the athlete right. So I always start with the athlete and work backwards to the technology. It’s a great first lesson And to have that interaction was obviously another total luck thing And you know my relationship with Ryan at the time again luck.

Pat: 14:25

I lived 10 minutes away from him, i was friends with Ryan, all these things, all the plants kind of lined up, and I super lucky that it all happened that way, speaking of luck, as you look back on what you’ve done, what you’ve been able to do, like situations you’ve put yourself in, relationships you’ve made, like what helps create luck.

Anthony Katz: 14:41

I think it goes back to what I was saying about being a relationship-centered person and not being a transactional person, because, like Ryan knew, i wanted to be COVID because I was genuinely trying to make something. I was looking to build something. But if I knew how to create good luck, that would be amazing. I think that I don’t know how to do it. The only thing I know how to do is to be like a genuinely sincere person in the work you’re doing. You know, to this day I have most of the same friends I had before, but I have a ton of new friends. That’s another part of my job that I really enjoy Everything around the country, around the world, and meeting people in all these different industries, everything from product developers to engineers, to not just athletes, but all the people that touch that community. It sounds very cliche, but you put good out there and you hope that good comes to you. And also maybe like finding other people that create good opportunities as well. People always talk about oh, you’re a good networker. I’m like. I never think of it as networking. I’m just pursuing what I’m trying to pursue And in the process you meet people, and some of my best friends in the industry are not even the top head, big trainers or PTs. It’s like sometimes it’s like the assistant trainers because I just like them. You know there’s guys around Tremblok, so not always judging someone based on their status And although I have been really fortunate to meet some really great people that are the best in the world at what they do, When I go to the NFL trainers meeting, i’m going to speak about like the very first time I went to the 49ers locker room, which is my favorite team growing up, and you know Manio Rivera was the assistant trainer and now he’s the head trainer. It’s like you just meet people with good intentions. I don’t know if it creates the luck, but that’s all you can do.

Dan: 16:06

He brought up Steve Jobs a minute ago and I know that Jobs, he’s historically meticulous about design and the feel and to the detail of the actual product itself. And I’ve heard and I’ve read about for you with Hyper Ice, especially early on, you wanted it to look cool, like it was body armor, something that an athlete wears, rather than just somebody having ice packs on, and so can you talk about your thoughts on design and how the product actually makes a player feel, also helping them feel better.

Anthony Katz: 16:38

I view Hyper Ice as a design driven brand And I think we’ve gotten way better as we’ve evolved it out, as I evolved And I evolved mostly because I’ve learned a lot from being around great designers. The modern Hyper Ice product line is mostly designed by a guy named Ellie Garone, who’s a designer at Apple, and I met Ellie on a flight. I was sitting next to him and I pulled out my eyebrow. We started talking And he is a design prodigy. He’s an amazingly talented immigrant from Peru who is in the Apple Design Studio. At the time he was designing drones for a company called Andrill. Here He was in between Apple and he’s designed UX for Lyft. He’s just a brilliant, brilliant designer And he really turned me on to this whole world of looking at design and it really caught my eyes. I really want a designer band. I had a taste for design early on, but that was something that I totally had an eye for but really needed to develop by being around better people In design, in product development in general. It’s sort of like playing tennis If you’re playing someone, that’s not very good, the game’s not that fun. When someone’s is good or better than you, it pulls your game up. Probably that’s a little bit like that too. I always use tennis as a theology, but when I was around Ellie, the way we would talk about design, he showed me about composition and curves and how products fit in your hand. Jobs was a design first CEO and I think that’s kind of what it means. Why he got forced out of Apple in the first place is that he had surrounded himself with a bunch of sales and marketing people remember John Scully was the MO Pepsi, i think when he brought him in. You know we live in a design driven world. Design driven companies lead the world. Think about Apple and Tesla and Dyson like those are design driven, design first companies. And so I felt that my industry was super outdated when I got into it. Sports medicine I used to call it and it was like these big medical devices, the products look ugly every time you went in and it was like There’s the laser and all the different products that were super outdated. And so I think I was very influenced by jobs and by Johnny I and by I did a rinse who was kind of the inspiration to Johnny I, and so I really got into design when we’ve redesigned the whole new product line and as we go forward designing. It’s something that I really just believe in, that Apple changed the way we interact with products, so not just the physical design in their form, but how we interact with them and how intuitive they are. I would say no one in the history of the world has ever said, go get the Apple product manual because you don’t need one, right? Apple is just completely intuitive of the human and so every product developer. Honestly, i think and I’ve worked with product owners from other companies and talk Apple has literally set the gold standard and that is what we’re all trying to do. We’re trying to create products that are designed well. I have a really intuitive user flow and all the words we use, all the terminology, it all comes from the vision of Steve Jobs and Design of Johnny. I did that whole team and all the people that work there. I always tell people what my goal for high price was to be was to be if Nike and Apple had a baby. It’s like the aspirational brand of Nike, the way they story, tell, the way they make you want to feel part of the brand, and Then Apple in their way that they have put technology in the hands of humans. That just makes it so intuitive and that enhances our lives. And when I was growing up, those brands were not the biggest brand, they were the counterculture brands. Actually, i mean there’s a new movie called air which is about like Nike getting Michael Jordan. Nike was the underdog. Then they kind of came up as that in my childhood and then became the super brand, but I had products here. So like we have our designers and our engineers and I’m sort of a go-between in those two and getting those two things to work together Even everything from me designing our logo with a company called stock from design lab, which is like the best brand identity house in the world, and thinking through that and how that whole process went down. Design is awesome And it’s definitely a huge part of how we see product development here.

Dan: 20:20

You mentioned jobs and how we could talk about him forever. I just wonder for you, as a founder of a company, what you find most interesting about Jobs and his leadership style with Apple that maybe you take with you or you think about with hyper ice.

Anthony Katz: 20:35

Wow. There’s so much I admire about him as a entrepreneur as the probably that I think the thing I most admire about him is that I think he was worth a million dollars at 20, 10 million dollars at 22 and a hundred million dollars at 24, and the money never mattered to him. It was all about creating great things and You could say all the time. I remember there’s an interview in 2010. He had cancer and he was pretty sick at the time and they said it was the moment when Apple surpassed Microsoft, it’s being total enterprise value. And they said, hey, this is sort of a big moment. And he said you know that it doesn’t really matter to me. He said the thing that matters is that we got to this point because we just got back to developing great product And that’s what Apple had gotten away from when he left. They’ve gotten into being transactional. The innovation totally was stagnant. So what I admire about him is that he always kept that belief, that he always said no matter how big we get, we should still act Like we’re small, because big companies have a hard time innovating. Sometimes they get complacent. You have monopolistic market shares and some products and it’s sort of stymies innovation, and so he always had that mentality of the core of what Apple does is we have to make great products, and so that’s kind of always what I try to instill here is that look, without the products, that’s what we are. You know, now everyone wants to have. You know, take these ideas ago, we need a subscription revenue in this. Now I’m like, hey, we should dodge, shy away and we should own what we are. We make really great products And that’s still a really important thing in the world.

Dan: 22:02

This is maybe going back a little bit in time. You just mentioned going from you know high school teacher and coach and to now where you are leading this company. And I’ve heard you before talk about one of my favorite bands, arcade fire, and their song wake up, and how you used a line in that song to describe as you went from high school teacher Into this business world to kind of not get caught up, i guess, in some things, and I’d love to hear you maybe speak on that again If I could ask you about that song and what you meant there.

Anthony Katz: 22:30

I really like that song and spike Jones used it for the trailer to where the world things are and my kids like that song and You know it’s sort of about like growing up as you get older. I think the line is you know, now that I’m older, my heart colder. Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up. It’s like, you know, it’s like all the stuff you do you go through is like a kid and as you get older, but like now that I’m older, my heart colder, is sort of sad. But I think when I got into the industry I was around, you know, in education and coaching I was basically around people that were pretty positive, like all the other coaches, were all kind of in it for the same thing. We all love basketball. You go to four basketball coaches together. There’s no matter who they are. You could take some parts of the country, anything, you get four basketball Together like they have something in common that, like their friends, were competitive, but it’s all like a good spirit. So I went from that world where, like I had a lot of friends in coaching, you know, my players would come back and I kept good relationship with them. Ended up this day some of my guys are my players. I was friends and then business. What I quickly learned was that like wow, this is a really different mentality in the business world. People are just out for their own interests. The incentive structures in business They drive behaviors that you know it’s like. Well, like I thought that guy was kind of cool, we kind of talked and it seemed like we were kind of friends. Like he’s just completely acting self-serving. So I think you get a little bit jaded. I kind of needed that because I was probably a little too naive coming into the business world, that I was surprised when I first saw it because the only industry I had been in people weren’t like that, because there wasn’t really anything to gain. I don’t know, even know what a high school basketball coach would I made back then. It was just you know nothing. We wanted to win games. There wasn’t competitiveness when it came to like the financial side. So I feel like what I meant by that song was wow. As I got older I really parted a little bit. Now I try to not let that jade me. I still try to approach things the same, but I’m just more aware of the environment. You know the environment doesn’t adapt to the species, the species has to adapt to the environment. So I think that was an adaptation. I had a bank of being aware of my environment.

Pat: 24:25

And you mentioned that when you got into it, the incentive structure favored, let’s say, more transactional approaches in the business world. Now with hyper ice, and that you’re having the opportunity to hire people and To form maybe this goes into the core beliefs of hyper ice. What are you incentivizing within hyper ice with the people you hire and that you work with?

Anthony Katz: 24:45

at the core of what I feel HyperX is is that we have the opportunity to really make a lasting impact on the industry of human performance, and so when we started we were at like this kind of renaissance of technology and ideas that could Transform the way humans view their own ability, and I think you’ve seen that play out over the last 10 years. We had a guy graduated high school in 1995, just like me, when a Super Bowl 44 years old, it’s unthinkable like when I was growing up. I recently got to meet one of my childhood heroes, joe Montana You we were talking about like he barely could make it through, like you know, 13 season because back then they just didn’t have anything. Obviously they don’t protect quarterbacks back then, but you And now you’re seeing guys play longer, like the arc of a career looks different now. So guys like Steve Dash and Chris Paul he’s like second wins in their career, to put it into context, to show how far the industry’s come. I was 15 years old when the dream team in 92 went to Barcelona And if you go back and watch the film of that, larry Bird has to like lay on the ground. He can’t even sit on the bench because he’s back so bad And like magic moves pretty stiff, and you look and you’re like, oh, wow, yeah, they must have been like 40. They were like 32 years old. They weren’t that old. Like that’s how bad the understanding of the body and technology was, the quality of shoes and just like what they did. And to say that like oh, the game’s so much more physical Physicality still means it wasn’t a faster game back then. The guys weren’t bigger and stronger, like it’s still very physical, but we just have so much more knowledge and technology available. So the answer to the question is that, to be a part of this, like movement in technology and sports and how we can enhance human performance, i love when I see people do great things at an advanced age, like when Tiger came back and won the Masters, joe won a major like 50. And you see all these achievements in sports at this advanced age And I think that it’s becoming more common And we’re not the magic bullish for that. We’re a part of that. We’re a part of the recipe. You know, kelly Slater, who I’m good friend of, won the Pipe Masters at 50 years old And I remember interviewing him a week after that. He’s kind of reminiscing on it and talking about how the industry had changed since he first started surfing, because I never really thought I could. He’s still winning at 50, right, the next oldest guy on the tour is 20 years ago. But a lot of it it’s not just the technology, it’s the knowledge and how we see the body, and you know the fact that I just have any more at this time and I kind of came up at during that time. What I try to set is like the goal for high prices, like I used to say. Like you know, changing the game is sort of cliche, but we have a chance to like have an impact on this industry, on human performance, and I always say advanced the game right. Advanced players ability, advanced player longevity. Nike had this campaign a couple years ago, breaking two, and what it was is that the Canyon runners were getting closer to breaking a two hour marathon. So that was a huge milestone right, for human performance was like wow, someone’s going to run a marathon in two hours. So Nike started breaking two projects and that’s when they created the Zubax 4%. That shoe was the shoe that Kipcho K broke the record in. In our industry we call it a moonshot. It’s like a moonshot project. Hey, we think this can happen, so we’re doing a moonshot project that I’m really excited about. That, i think, is going to continue to advance the game. When Mahomes was in the AFC Championship game and he had a spring day in Colony, he had two weeks to get ready for the Super Bowl. What was the formula that he used to get back and get ready? I think that’s a big thing. He had a pretty serious ankle sprain and he was able to play a title game and the Super Bowl on that sprained ankle And I think that if that happened, even like five day years ago, that might not have been the case. I always say getting guys on the field, that’s a huge contribution to sport. We all are one of our team. Even our opponents play at full strength. When people come in here like that’s the vision I try to get them to see, is that you get to work for a company, that our product is actually doing something that helps us move forward.

Dan: 28:18

Cass, i’d love to shift back and talk about what Pat and I think must have been a pretty big decision for you back when things were just starting to get rolling with Hyper Ice, and that’s after you decide to split the company in thirds and leave 33% of it for athletes to invest And I think you see now in business a lot of athlete investments in companies And for you, being kind of on the forefront of that, to structure it that way so that you could get athletes to buy into what you’re doing. Could you talk a little bit about that decision and that foresight to use athletes and to see athletes to help invest in the product and to believe in it?

Anthony Katz: 28:58

Yeah, it’s more common now. The whole celebrity or athlete-assisted venture is pretty common now. Back then there’s a lot of folklore around vitamin water and how they did it. Some of it was exaggerated. But in general, what I felt was, if we’re going to be making products for athletes, having them as shareholders would be a real advantage because they would invest, We would have access to them and then the spider web of their training staff, their trainers and PTs and all the people that are connected to We have a good testing ground for a product. This is before social media. Really, we structured it that way in 10, 11. And I think Instagram was just like a photo app back then. It was nothing as big as it is now And so it wasn’t really the social media aspect which came later. It was really more of. I think this would be a good cap table to have a lot of athletes on it, because they would be able to advise on product or, when we’re testing products, get good feedback from them or the product come out there the first to get it. It just felt like a good way And the numbers were sort of you mentioned are relatively close. I think it was about a quarter of the company, or maybe even a little bit more. At the time It was just sort of an idea that I had that I felt could really help as far as having a company that had authenticity not only in what we’re doing but give the ownership as well.

Pat: 30:09

Obviously Foresight was a big deal, but also I think maybe like the relationship between control versus collaboration, i thought was also kind of admirable in what you did there, your willingness to, of course, bring in your engineer but Eermark began for athletes And something that was. I mean, maybe you want to call it like your baby that you brought up, but also again, maybe it is a Foresight to know that you’re going to need help but seeding control on some degree.

Anthony Katz: 30:33

Yeah, definitely. I mean that’s one thing. If we go back and do it again, i probably wouldn’t have done it the same way, but it got me to a good place. But I think at the time I think I was very self-aware of how much help I was going to need because of how inexperienced I was. I was pretty young, i was like 31. And I was like I’m going into something that it’s going to help to have people around me And I felt that everyone that was going to get in that early should have some skin in the game and outside, and so I was probably pretty generous with some of that. But it got people bought in. I maybe wasn’t focused enough on the numbers and some of what that really meant, but I was more like, hey, i knew if I get these people onto the tent, if I get the bought and incentivized, that I increase my chances of success. Even to this day, i’m like if I could go back and do it again, i would have done so many things different, but it ended up landing in a good place. Just so I can guess that sometimes It’s a fun exercise, but at the same time, could it have worked if I didn’t do that Maybe, but those decisions were all based on at that time I felt that was what I needed to do. So look back on it now, knowing a lot, and if I was going to start another company, it’d be a lot different, but at the time I think that it was really out of my own experience that I felt I needed to put people around me that were more experienced than I wanted to collaborate with And I’m a huge collaborator. That was never an issue.

Dan: 31:43

Love to ask about the future innovation, the stuff that you’re working on And I know you’ve recently got some great partnerships, like with the NFL obviously with the NBA you’ve had that, but also just across the multiple leagues, And some of the stuff that Hyper-Ice is doing, the stuff you can talk about that is doing to kind of move not just basketball now but all the sports, all recovery, all performance forward from the tech side.

Anthony Katz: 32:07

A huge moment for us is when we bought NormaTech. Normatech was sort of the other company on the East Coast that was thinking about recovery early on. I would always see it. We’d always run into each other early on when I first started, and at the time it was a medical device company that made this big box that was sort of loud and clunky, but not a lot of athletes had their own early, early on, but it started in 2014-ish maybe It was in the team locker rooms and then players started getting them And I met their founder in 2015. And the first time I went to NormaTech was 2013, actually, and I was always curious about it. But it always seemed a little bit like we talked about Apple earlier. So the sportsman industry was kind of like IBM in a way, where it had these big, expensive devices that needed to be operated by a trainer or something like that And they were stationary, they couldn’t travel with. I wanted to make Apple, which was like how the products all fit in the backpack, you could take them anywhere, because athletes are all routine based. The athlete has to be able to do the same routine everywhere he goes. So NormaTech was kind of built out of the old model And then they modernized the device a little bit And around 2015, it started to get a little bit smaller. I met the founder. We ended up getting to know each other because we were on a private sector advisory panel with the Department of Defense in 2017. So we were going and advising the Defense Department on how to take what we were doing like pro-sports bringing it to the military, and so I got to know him a lot And I really loved the product And I felt that it was becoming the most ubiquitous recovery product And so we started collaborating a lot, like we did Nike stuff together, we did a bunch of stuff in the military together And it was like, ok, if we’re ever going to be like the company at the time, i was thinking could we emerge with them? But the cultures are pretty different. We were pretty far away there in Boston And then, based on the success of the HyperVolt and came out 2018, by the end of 2019, we had grown big enough to where we were able to acquire NormaTech, and people always talk about what was the biggest moment, like that was a big one for me because they were bigger than us for a while And I admired the product so much And I felt like if I could just get in there and get my hands on that and do the redesign. When we bought NormaTech, the entry level NormaTech was $1,300. And today it’s like $799. We sell more NormaTechs in one year than they did in their whole history of the company before that. What that means is that it’s on more people, so it’s having more of an impact And so we’re democratizing it more and more And that’s going to continue to happen. So later that year we bought a company called Recoveryx. It was this group of engineers in the Bay Area that had come up with the world’s first contrast therapy device. It was portable And that was a technology that I was always really interested in. That team has now become so like we have the NormaTech product team, the thermal product team I lead, sort of overseas Say like what the technology we’re working on is. I would say we call it like cross-qualification, so taking the technology from one and taking the technology from another and combining those into devices. I would say a big thing that you’re going to see happen is that technology, as we know, gets smaller, gets less expensive, more energy efficient. So you’re going to start to see these devices start to kind of like disappear into things we’re already doing or wearing. If you could imagine, you could take that, because when you acquire companies, you acquire like the brain of the product team And now you’re saying, ok, now I have this product team, this product team, what could we do together So that what we call like cross-qualification of technology and modalities is really leading to some big breakthroughs? And I think the next 18, 24 months people are going to see some stuff that you’re going to see like that acceleration curve of innovation really start to kick in. You know I’m playing around with some of these things. That’s why I still play basketball two days a week. And I played on a schedule is because I try to mimic some sort of relationship with the athletes. Pat knows like we play pretty hard. We play seven games a night and we track it. We end up running more than an NBA player and playing for a longer minutes. We don’t stop two days a week. Now I’m on a schedule like, ok, there’s recovery, there’s game day, there’s off days, and I’m constantly experimenting with different things in that rhythm so that when I talk to an athlete I can be like, hey, try it before you play, do the normal check for a half hour, this much time? because it’s like, hey, i’m going from my own experience. I’m not a professional athlete or something close. I have to make every effort as a product developer to understand the demands of the game so that I can better develop products. So that’s kind of why I’m so diligent about playing Number one, because I love it, i’ll always play. But it’s really helped me as a product developer because when we have a new prototype I’m like, ok, i’m going to wear it before I play, and I didn’t see how that worked And then I could speak to the athlete firsthand with the professional athlete.

Pat: 36:21

Obviously, the big thing is the availability. If we look at the NBA, there’s rest. talking to coaches, you know injuries. They’re still prevalent. They’re never going to go away, But are they decreasing, Are they not? Is the science supporting this rest, the injuries?

Anthony Katz: 36:34

So look, we have a lot more data now. There’s a company called Catapult. There’s another company, but I think Catapult is the dominant one. We’re in the back of the NBA jersey. There’s a chip right here. You know everything is tracking every single movement And then based on that, they can see what a guy’s load is on their body, based on how many steps they took, how they accelerated. There’s a lot more information. There’s a dashboard now that the training staff has about how hard guys are playing, how much wear and tear has been on the body. I know the Clippers, great training staff, travel with like force plates. They’ll test like quiet poly before a game and make sure that guys are loading and landing evenly. If you’re way off, if you’re like 70, 30, that means that, ok, you’re not going tonight. Like they make sure that they’re balanced. So the dashboard of information is way better. What we’re trying to do in professional sports is we’re trying to limit non-contact injuries. Contact injuries are going to happen. There’s not much we could do about that. But with the way we prevent non-contact injuries is by conditioning the soft tissue and fluid system so that there’s more tissue elasticity, the tissue is more resilient and the tissue is less sensitive And that’s where we come in. Our devices are all really targeted mostly towards soft tissue and fluid and conditioning the body so that the body does not have any non-contact injuries, like when you see someone just running and then all of a sudden just like go down and they like tear their ACL. That’s the injury where we’re trying to prevent. You know, look in football, you know guy goes to the middle helmet, helmet to the knee. All right, there’s not really much. There’s certain injuries are avoidable. Yes, there are less NBA tracks, games played, games missed. I mean, like load management is obviously helping. They’re making guys play less. There’s less back to back. Travel schedule is a little bit more friendly. I think that’s going to be a big thing in a new CBA when they discuss if back to back or ever going to be a thing anymore. But I do think that the work that’s been done recently, yes, not only is it non-contact injuries are down a little bit, but also if it’s time they miss from those injuries is way less. They’re getting back way faster. And so one of the things we try to do in the NBA is like we try to build the athlete this way Start their feet mobile ankle stable, knee mobile, hip stable, lower lumbar mobile shoulder, stable, neck, and so we do a lot of ankle and hip mobility stuff that will help prevent the injuries. And a lot of times, guys, when they tear their ACL, you go back and you do ankle mobility tests. You lose a lot of ankle mobility. So like there’s predictors, right. So we have dashboards of information, predictors on the mobility of ankle and hips to say, okay, this guy is in like the red zone where this is dangerous. Now teams would guys miss games And a lot of times it’ll be like they don’t hit certain metrics for certain mobility tests that are a predictor for injury. So I would say the combination of the dashboard information we have based on all the data science of tracking movement and load and then testing range of motion for archers, we’re the corrective right. We’re making the devices that actually change the body so we can get to that spot. And then the basic rhythm of things that guys are doing every day. You know, right now it’s the 39 degree cold plunge for three minutes. That’s all the rage in the ambient right now. Now it’s like this shock to the body. So there’s a lot of things that I’d say factor into that. If you look on the aggregate, games misses down, non-contact injuries are down, things like that. It’s definitely made it a back complete for sure.

Pat: 39:43

Do you feel the information, the science has really exploded, like what we’re learning about the athletes. So this is why we’re getting the load management guys sitting out and we’re hyperized coming in as that recovery process starts to catch up with the data that then the load manage will get less and less.

Anthony Katz: 40:00

I’ll articulate it a little bit differently. So, starting like 20 years ago, what I call there, was this new way of looking at the body. Western medicine always looked at the body very structurally Cadabra dissection, the books, models, the bodies of structure And then, guiding Tom Myers and Robert Schleippe, started saying hey, wait, the body is mostly made of this connected tissue called fascia and it holds muscles to muscles that shape some muscle and it has a big involvement in how we move. And so people started looking at fascia. That’s when you started seeing the massage get bigger and foam rolling and all that stuff. And then, 10 years later, people started saying, wait a minute, but that fascia is not just sitting in air, it’s in fluid, and the fluid is dynamic. It responds to air, it responds to temperature, it responds to movement, and so what’s the fluid dynamic? And so, the combination of those two things, we started looking at the body different as a system of what we call the fluid fashion matrix, which is about 65 to 70 percent of our mass. If you’re going to study how a body moves, we were always looking at mechanically, but what about the fluid fashion that surrounds that? that’s really driving our body, most of the things that we do and a lot of our technology. What it’s doing is it’s affecting those things. What it’s done is that we’ve been able to say there’s the knowledge and the science and the research was basically saying we never didn’t see it. It was as if we weren’t paying attention to its role in movement. Now the movement scientists are starting to say, well, we really have to address these systems of the fashion fluid matrix to make sure that we have a healthier athlete that is more prepared to play. That’s where movement preparation and activation became big. Like people call us a recovery brand, we are just as much a movement activation, prep, recovery, whatever term you want to use that that process has gotten way more extensive and way more scientific and way more regimented, so that it’s not just go out there and do a couple of stretches and you go play. That process is way longer. So the pre is where our products really live. Then you have the in-game and our products were used sometimes in-game. Then you have the recovery, which happens not only that night after, but then there’s the body maintenance. That’s like the day off would happen when you do, when you don’t have anything. So it’s cyclical. It’s not this like when you think like game, game. And then what do you do in here? It’s the recovery. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to remove friction from the body. We’re trying to get the fluid in our body to act like a lubricant and we’re acting like the soft tissue to have enough space where it has enough disco elasticity, if we can do that. So, if you think about this, if I’m going to go step on the court, what’s the optimal state my body should be in? My fluid should be warm and moving and thin, because we can actually change the viscosity of the fluid with technology. My soft tissue should be in good condition and resilient so that when I go move there’s less friction in my body. So my body burns less oxygen and less energy to move. Then, when I don’t have drag and I don’t have friction in the tissue, i have way less chance of pulling a muscle. So the frictionless body is the goal. If you have a frictionless body, you could play basketball at 100 years old, because if there’s no friction in the body, your body can just move. So what we’re trying to do is remove friction from the body in a warm-up process. So how do we do that? We have to flush all the byproduct out of the body, and that’s what a normal check is. It’s a giant pump that pushes the fluid into the center of the body where it gets flushed and replenished. So we look at these regimens and these processes. They’re all designed to address the fluid fascia system, which was not even talked about 20 years ago. It was all about your bones and your muscles and things are very structural. And so the movement has been the renaissance of how we look at the body in the first place. Because if you don’t understand the body, you’re developing products for what You have to know what you’re trying to do. The body is like a computer. You have to give it an input, what we call a modality or an application. That application of the body is going to trigger a physiological response. That response is going to make my body be more ready to play, or maybe I’m trying to fight inflammation or whatever it is. So that’s been the big renaissance is the knowledge. Everything factors in that. Hydration factors in that Leap, factors into that What we put in our body, so the whole recipe. We have so much more clarity. So, like you, take the knowledge of understanding the body, the technology that can manipulate the physiology. Then you take the data that we have. That’s giving us feedback on what the person actually did. You add all of that up and that is what is the modern athlete. The next generation will have more resources, not be flying blind like we were when we grew up. All of that is going to add up to longer careers, healthier players and you’re going to see a lot of longevity records get broken.

Dan: 44:14

So our last question is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?

Anthony Katz: 44:21

You know, i think it’s honestly been investing time in my relationships and friendships, because even in work, when you collaborate, there’s a bond that you get with people, so like whether it’s my product team or, you know, i shoot a lot of our content and motion stuff, so I have my creative team. Yeah, i just think that throughout my career it’s always been the people, and it’s one of the lessons I teach my kids. I really kind of teach them about like hey, have your friends come over, like developing that ability to have relationships, i think. So the best investment is putting your time where it matters and that’s to like the people, because, forget about that, it’s going to be some sort of financial reward behind it. It’s more that it’s just going to be more enriching to you. You know, going forward So to this day, like getting a talk shop with co-vast world coaches, it’s still the stuff I enjoy as much as anything I do in my work.

Speaker 3: 45:10

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slappingglasscom for more information on the free newsletter, Slapping Glass Plus and much more. Have a great week coaching and we’ll see you next time on Slapping Glass. Slapping Glass, That’s kind of funny. I like that, Let’s roll it Slapping Glass.