Welcome. I am Mike Hendrix from smbGOLF. My guest today is Colin Read from Whoosh and this is the Tech Caddie podcast. Colin, welcome to the show. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate you having me on here. Listened to a couple of your episodes most recently. Love what you're doing and happy to be part of the show here. Well, we're really glad to have you. Definitely made some news here recently. We'll get to that.

But you and I don't know each other. and I, I always try to do my homework for these things. I, my understanding is pretty good, golfer. I think you played at Arizona state, and, and grew up playing golf and a bunch of sports, but walk us through a little bit of your early exposure to golf. And, and then I know you kind of had a different career for a while, but let's talk golf in the beginning at least. Yeah. So I'm a lifelong golfer, correction. There is actually played at a Claremont McKenna.

D3 school out in Southern California, but you know, I'm a lifelong golfer. I picked up the game at eight years old here in the Bay Area playing out of Mill Valley Golf Course, little local nine hole track, fell in love with it. My family moved to Arizona and was a member in Arizona Country Club, you know, growing up. And that really shaped a big part of, I'd say, not just who I am as a golfer, but who I am today. I think growing up in the company of adults was a really important thing for me to do. And it taught me about who I am and those things.

But then also I grew up in a very nurturing, I'd say family environment in that private club scene where I had a lot of great pros and mentors and family in that club that really helped and supported me. So that was fantastic. Became a good golfer, played high school golf. I then was captain of my team, went to Claremont McKenna, was a two-time All-American and captain of that team as well. And I actually even tried growing pro for a minute afterwards, but my short game is terrible and that was short lived. So.

I still continue to play at very high amateur level, US AMs and those types of things. But by 2006, I realized golf probably was not the full -time career. The PGA Tour felt a little bit difficult and really started going into the business world. My first company was a company called ECOtality. We did charging stations for electric cars. We were really, really successful. We were able to build the largest charging network to date, got acquired by ABB.

After that went on to found a company beyond the founding team of a company called RESERVE which became Resy the fine dining retail management solution was a VC for a minute. And unfortunately, I love to build companies that just invest. And then my last company was acquired by Facebook. And, you know, we really at that point had the opportunity to say, what do we want to build next? And for me, I'm a dad of yeah, go ahead. At Claremont, did you get exposed to entrepreneurship or where?

How do you think that became part of your life? You know, my father was a lifelong entrepreneur. He's always kind of built and sold companies. So it's always been in my DNA to realize like, you know, I I see myself spending 30 years at one organization. And I'd say Claremont specifically was a really, really entrepreneurial piece. But I think my entrepreneurship comes from my dad, most importantly, right? And how he was able to craft  different types of careers.

Claremont though, if you look at the golf team, some of our past captains are Henry Kravis and Drucker and all those types of guys, right? And so you look at what they've built and I think when you get into a smaller art school that is really ambitious, ambition surrounds you and creativity surrounds you. And I think that starts to create the impetus for that next generation, that DS4 of that college. And we've had a lot of really good founders that came out, Justin Kahn from Cruz Automotive came from us. You know, we've had, LaunchDarkly CEO came from, from Claremont. We've had a lot of great entrepreneurs that came from the Claremont college as a whole. Let's, let's talk a little bit about Reserve because it, so in the golf world, they're clearly, clearly are some connections between some golf tech companies and companies like Olo or Tock or Toast And, and clearly that.

that world, that restaurant world, if you will, is a bigger market, right? There's an opportunity for bigger dollars there, maybe bigger average unit volume sales. And maybe you can actually speak to that a little bit, but talk to me a little bit about, and I understand the history of Reserve. Reserve, I think, gets acquired by Resy. I think Resy has some Gary Vaynerchuk money in it. And I think ultimately American Express acquires Resy, if I understand that correctly.

That's correct. Yeah. So I was on the founding team there of Reserve worked really closely with Garrett Camp founder of Uber, Greg Hong and Joe Marchese there. And we really built that up to solve the problem around fine dining, you know, experiences we really viewed fine dining is like the last form of live entertainment for a lot of folks. And as a result, you know, you're kind of putting on this hospitality show and it's about coordination of everything.

about coordination of the hors d 'oeuvres and when the chef touches the table and how they even put your plates down only on the right side over your right shoulder, right? That was a really coordinated environment. And we ended up getting, we merged with Resy, which as you mentioned, I then became a board observer there when I was at VC then we got acquired by American Express and the company is still doing great. But I think if you look at Resy and you look at, you know, Reserve and you look at the dining world, there's so much similarity as to what we see in golf.

And I hate to say this, but very much, you know, you look at dining and OpenTable's the dominant player. And as a result, you know, they're paying, restaurants have to pay for their customers that come in through their own website. They have hot deals, they're bartering tables. There's a lot of things going on there. Let me, let me, are they bartering tables? They actually are trading out the revenue from table two. They're going to take more. So it may, may cost.

$15, $10, $15 per person. If you get a hot deal at some of these OpenTable venues. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Of course Hot Deal, is a big term in golf. So when you say that it gets a lot of people's attention. So, okay. so, so Reserve was for high end dining and for the people listening, stick with me here. We're going to get the golf, but I, it's an interesting little crossover here. There is this company, Tock

that clearly was about high-end dining. It's the team that owns Alinea in Chicago founded TOCK and then they sold TOCK to Squarespace. You guys ultimately got acquired, like you say, by American Express. And I would assume you would agree, American Express bought Resy because of the value of the transactions. Is that a fair assumption as to why they probably made that acquisition? American Express bought Resy.

due to the value to its cardholders and being able to provide exceptional experiences at some of the highest end premier dining facilities across the country and exclusive experiences for their cardholders, right? And it's very much an amenity as to why you should use American Express. So actually a different reason than what I suggested, like Fullsteam bought Club Prophet Systems because we think because of the transaction value in there, but you're saying AMEX wanted to provide,

And I get it. They have a higher end customer. They wanted to provide some better experiences for their, for their card holders. Anyway, going back to Tock, Tock had this concept when they, when they launched that people should prepay for their tables. They should prepay for their meals. There would be no, no shows. If you were using Tock properly and that kind of stuff, were you exposed to Tock? Did you ever look at that model? Did you ever have any opinions of, of, of how that would scale?

We did and first off kudos to Nick KoKonis He's built a fantastic company. I know he's also a great golfer. I think he's a member out in Tahoe and Martis Camp or a few facilities. They built a big business and I think it's a little bit different for everyone. Your neighborhood mom and pop restaurant doesn't probably need to charge you a separate before you come because cancellations happen and that's the experience in the hospitality you want to deliver.

When you go to a place like in Alenia or a venue in Cezanne, you go to these high-end restaurants, a table in those shows that could be $500,000 of revenue per cover. That's a really big deal. And Tock did a great job of solving that with their capabilities to pay upfront for that reservation. So I think there's a different fit for everyone. But I'd say more high level, what we tried to do at Resy was really focus on hospitality.

where we saw OpenTable, we come in a marketplace and a transaction, you know, and really customize, I'd say cater to the mid market, the lower end of that market, those really big restaurants and tourist places where we see a lot of OpenTable Resy kind of took the stance of, if you know, you know, if you want to go dine at Flower and Water in San Francisco or Carbone in New York or Scarpetta, where your best bet to go in. And the reason why is that we really emphasize the service.

We really emphasize workflows among staff, making sure that they knew their customers the right way, that that whole coordination of that meal is all in sync. And that was a big piece of what we did at Resy why we were very different from OpenTable. We also believed restaurants shouldn't pay for their own traffic that comes into their website, right? If you're a good restaurant, your name enough is going to be viable to get customers through the door. That's all you need to go. Focus on your own marketing.

right, put that money to work there. And I think now as you move into the golf space, we see that same piece. We're really focused on staff work. We're really focused on hospitality. We're really focused on improving the member and the guest experience. And to do that, you know, we think in COVID, golf pros became hospitality professionals. And now it's about that service and it's about spending time there. And our goal is to give them the tools by the best service and hopefully additional free time so they go back to being able to hit a golf ball now and then as well.

Yeah, understood. And I mean, listen, just to go back a little bit to OpenTable, OpenTable and GolfNow, both of those companies could see that the fragmented industry that they were in golf courses or restaurants, those individual units did not have the ability to market maybe as effectively as a larger brand would. And so there was an opportunity to just fill into that marketing void, collect all those restaurant goers or collect all of those golfers.

and then essentially distribute them to their customers. Right. I mean, that's, that's really what we're talking about. And so typically the first guy in that executes well there is going to stay for a long time and going to do well. But I, I certainly salute you and a whole bunch of other founders like you, you guys are building technology companies. You're not building marketplaces. You're not building, you know, distribution companies. You're building technology companies. And if the tech is great, and I'm a big fan of what you said about employee workflow.

If the employee experience is great using the tech, that's what really matters. And so I'm certainly a big fan of that. So let's talk about Whoosh a little bit. You've raised it in my opinion. This is just my opinion. I think you've raised a lot of money. So you're really good at raising money. So I congratulate you on that. But before we get into the money a little bit or the raises, why'd you do it? Typically everybody wants to solve a problem.

Typically people want to see a runway and an opportunity to build something. What, what was your vision? Like what, what problem did you think you would solve and, and how long do you think that runway is? You know, this kind of goes back to that genesis story of how I got into golf, right. And growing up at Arizona Country Club you know, I am fortunate enough to have had been a founder several times and had a couple of successful exits. now my full -time job is I'm a Dad and I have two young boys they're now 11 and 8 years old. And a big piece for me and being successful in my career was giving my kids the opportunities the same that I had. And that is to grow up in a company of adults to be in that club setting to do those types of things. So a big piece of what I want to do is make sure that they're a member at a club. When I joined that club, you know, I was first given a mobile app and then I was like, man, this thing feels like it's 25 years old. I remember clicking on a button.

And the thing said, please do not click this button again. If you want to do this action, this is your workflow you have to use. And some folks know what I'm talking about. They forget that there's that UI buried in. Don't click here. And then we started looking at the staff interactions of how they were managing that tee sheet And we saw so much redundant data entry going on. And we immediately said, man, the member experience can be improved. The staff workflow experience can be improved. That's a really big thing.

And we now have something here. But I'd say one of the overarching pieces for me is being a father and being able to show to my children, you can do something you love. You can be successful and make money at it. Right. It just so happens I know how to build technology companies and raise money in those things. But I think, you know, focusing from restaurants to electrification to 5G internet, now golf, it's showing that we can all be corporate athletes in our lives. We can all be flexible and adjustable and reactive, and we can all still do things we love and be successful at. So I think that's a big piece for me. But from a business side, it's really saying, let's provide better member experiences, both digitally and in person, and let's have the staff be able to use the same tools to solve that. And the last piece I would mention here, Mike, is when we enter private country clubs,

It is perhaps the only industry remaining in the world that has so many different operational needs and workflows that's trying to buy software from one vendor. And they can never be the best at everything. So 2024, the cloud tier integrations work. Let's break down that stack. Let's have this industry work like others. Let's use best in class throughout the facility. I love the last part there, but I'm sure you have bumped up against this.

I think what you say is absolutely right that you shouldn't have to buy everything from one vendor, et cetera. However, the question would be, is the gate open? Will Jonas allow you to integrate with Clubessential allow you to integrate, you know, because you could make the point or you can make the case and maybe it's not in their interest to open up. We just did a podcast with the USGA and we talked a lot about, will the USGA's Deacon data platform be open?

Or will it be closed? So what's your experience been in trying to work with Northstar or Clubessential or Jonas or whomever? How receptive have they been? First off, you know, I just want to state, you know, I love what GolfNow has done. They've built a great company. Their model may not be for everyone, but it's for a lot of people and they've built a great company. And I'd say the legacy providers have all built amazing solutions and that's why they have the prominence.

I'd also love to give shout outs to Jonas. I think that they really recognize that they're a platform and that they really value that customer experience of building happy customers and recognizing they can't be everything to everyone. So I think they've taken the much more progressive 21st century approach to integrations in a platform. I think there's some other providers there that are trying to build some walled gardens and...

that's really, really, really hard because you're not going to be the best. And I think about places like Monterey Peninsula and some of these premier clubs, which they expect from their staff to deliver Michelin quality service, at least in a restaurant environment. There is not a single Michelin caliber restaurant in the world running a legacy club management dining room technology. Yeah. Right. We can still get the data back.

We can still make these systems the systems of record that host that data, but let's give your F&B manager the same tools that they're using anywhere else to deliver that service, right? And it still works in a club environment. So I'd say the industry is gonna change dramatically. I think there's gonna be folks that build these walled gardens and frankly, I'm not sure if they care about their customers and their customers' wants and needs.

And there's these other folks that really believe that, Hey, here's a platform. What's the best business sense for me is to make sure my customers are happy and that they'll stay with me. I don't, I'm not going to invest in my product after 20 years. I'm going to lose some customers unless I partner with the right folks. Right. Right. And I don't want to overstate it. Right. I mean, so you, you, you've been in golf business for several years now you raised.

six million bucks a couple of years ago, you just raised another 10 million. I mean, you're in it, right? You are, you're in it. Is it, am I overstating it or is it fair to say there's a lot of room for improvement in golf in terms of open APIs and more integrations or, cause I genuinely don't want to overstate it if you don't think it's a problem. Tons this has to be almost a mandate when customers ask their software providers,

who do you integrate with and what's your stance on integrations? That's important because one system, I mean, just look at a golf shop. I think Jason from Club Caddie, on this podcast gave us the stat, you know, 12 to 15 different pieces of software per facility just to run golf. If they don't communicate with each other, you're really creating a world of hurt from a data perspective, from a business intelligence, from a staff workflow perspective, right?

So this is about making our customers happy. It's building the products that they want and meeting the workflow needs for them, as well as their end customers, the members, the guests, the patrons. let's give a little, I'm going to to a shout out to Scott Peper. Scott is your CTO. am I, do I have that right? I, yep. And, and talk a little bit about Scott's background. And the reason I, I like to do this, Colin is we definitely have CTOs that like to watch this. And I do.

want to give them good content. Talk a little bit about Scott's background and what he's focused on today. You know, what he's building today and then maybe we can get into the public golf side of things. So Scott was co-founder of the company with me. We started this together and really decided to build this sector. But Scott has a, I guess, a very pedigree background when it comes to both golf and tech. He grew up a great golfer himself. He is, he hits the ball, I'd say pro deep right now. He's a good scratch handicaps still.

but played competitively in a lot of med events. And that's a huge huge by the way, there's a bunch of CTOs in the space that that's their little gap is they don't quite understand the course experience. I can tell you how many times we took out technologists at golf GolfNow we would get them on the golf course just to get them playing a little bit because you, boy, you just learn so much more if you experience the game. So that is quite an advantage for you guys that he's a real golfer, but go on. Sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, and I actually would not understate that last statement. I think that's really important. We do off sites. We're a fully remote company. So we do off sites every year at our customers facilities just so our engineering team can see the customer, see the facility experience kind of it from the staff and members side. And that's really critical. But, you know, Scott smart as a Princeton graduate, I think after that he did a internship for the Met Golf Association, where I think he like built their website, a lot of their backend tools. And then after that, he really fell into tech. He worked.

for companies like Homepolish and Hightower VTS. These are big vertical staff companies in the commercial real estate space building world-class software for them. These are billion dollar companies. It just so happens that Scott's dad is a man named George Peper, which many people recognize, editor of Golf Magazine for many years, famous golf writer and historian. And so Scott just innately is around the game and has kind of an unfair advantage just with his.

background in golf, but I'd say from a tech standpoint, he's one of the best CTOs I have ever seen. I think proof is in the pudding of what we've built. We have built a ton of product over the past three and a half years. And we've been awarded best in class for the private sector for golf technology two years in a row. Our time duration bookings are events and clinics that's got best in breed. And now we're pushing into public with Square. And that's a lot to do for any company in three years. Again, look at our competition and what they've done.

And that's really a testament to Scott, you know? And so the Square integration, as I kind of see it, maybe read between the lines, that's your entry to public. Am I thinking right? Like you felt like, well, if I can knock down a really strong Square integration, then that gets me to a place where I can start having better conversations with public golf courses.

Yes, I think there's a couple of things. Again, our mantra is 2024 integrations are here, the cloud tier integrations work, right? We want every operator to use best in class software. When you look across what we'd say the public golf scene, we see a lot of really good tee sheets that built a homegrown point of sale that's very golf specific. When we start asking operators, what's your pain point? I think to a man, everyone used a curse word described like inventory week. It's the worst thing they can do. And you know, I think, you start to pull the thread of what are other pain points, maybe it's marketing, whether it's data, maybe it's those things. With Square, what we can truly say is we've built in, we have brought to this industry what we believe is the best in class point of sale across the world. That meets 100% of the needs of a golf facility or even athletic facility. And I think the big piece for us and the opportunity we see is the ability to finally give providers an integrated solution that meets all of their needs. So we bring Square in to do online retail, in-store retail, online payments, F&B, invoicing, everything under one roof. On the Whoosh side, we can handle golf, we can do lessons, we do clinics, we can do events, we can do simulators. We see 76% of our customers that buy a tee sheet buy something else golf related. And when we started to look at the public space,

there were very few, if any clubs that had that full breadth of an offering. So we think having a comprehensive offering is going to be a big one. Having a cloud-based, tablet-based, most modern solution there is a big one. And then with Square, we really believe we can unlock, for the first time in the sector, omnichannel data on customers and really give full spend throughout versus having 12 different softwares, four different processors, and trying to cobble that data together and make business decisions.

Well, then, so let's just kind of imagine this into the future. So Golf Course says, OK, we're going to bring on Square. We're going to drop EZLinks, and we're going to bring on Square, let's say. Who's going to speak golf to the golf operator from Square? Or do you all actually do the installation of Square so that all the terminology and the lingo is familiar to your customers?

We play a really big role. Like when we say we have an integration, that means that we have support channels, that we have technology integrations, that we can bring in account manager from both sides. I hate to say it, especially since we're in a public forum, but in a lot of ways, we almost kind of play that quarterback, almost integrator of record role in helping to coordinate everyone in and make sure that the data all comes out the right way. That makes sense. I mean, I kind of, I think that's, that's what I would do. It makes sense to me. Just on a side note, does Square have integrations to the to the range ball machines and whatnot, is that already in place? They do, they have it all and we're pushing them for even more, which is nice. I mean, the big piece about Square is that they give operators choice, right? If you're unhappy with your accounting solution, there's, I think, almost a dozen that they integrate with. If you're unhappy with inventory management, here's a dozen different solutions for that too. So I think what's nice about them and us is that we're both building this platform approach. I think it just so happens to fit.

perfectly within this segment. And I think it's something that this segment's been desperately needing is that on the channel data, better workflow tools and much more modern cloud-based solutions that work candidly. Right now, I, it seems to me, this is, this kind of comes from the marketing piece or the marketing side. You don't, you don't typically say out loud, Hey, we're a tee sheet. Right? I mean, I've kind of seen people ask the question and then it gets massaged a little bit.

But if I wanted to get down to the bare bones of it, and let's say golf, and I totally respect that you have solutions for racquet and for dining, but if we just were thinking golf, is it okay if I say, Whoosh is a tee sheet? Or do you think that that's not correct? First off, I'd say we are a hospitality technology company. And what we offer in addition to a tee sheet is a golf operation system.

And I think we're a tee sheet. Let's talk golf operation system, because I think people would like to learn about that. So I think when you look at a tee sheet, you imagine that as a very simple booking flow where I make a reservation. It shows up on a tee sheet. I can push to the point of sale. And that's about it, right? Fundamentally, it's a reservation system. I think we built that reservation system. But then we took a considerate view of what are all the areas that we can streamline.

At my golf course, I'm a member of Marin Country Club. You know, one of the things things drives me nuts, I hate to say this Ken Doherty, if you're listening, but is every time I walk in the pro shop, I'm hearing radio communications from outside services that says Mr. Hendrix rider full 18, cart number 36, then gets marked on a piece of paper, then gets plugged into my tee sheet, right? And then I get billed from that, from the point of sale. And what we're trying to do is build that full operating system, very much like Resy did, and a lot of the other things. Here's how you run your facility.

Here's how you can have iPads out there. Here's how you can use our system at a place like WhisperRock at the entrance gate to recognize your members by their profile photos, their guests, check in to then message to the bag drop that they're on their way and then go throughout every touch point to be able to mark someone. They're practicing today. They're on the back of the range. No tee times requests. There's a lot that goes into just that tee sheet. But then let's just stop for a second and think about staff workflows.

It's the Golf Genius integration is make sure they don't have to do that manual data entry. It's about prepping for service. Again, we're in the hospitality industry. So what we do unique is at the end of the day, when you close out our tee sheet, we'll push charges into the system is we'll send a report to all the managers. Here's what happened today. Here's who played. Here's the notes on the course. Here's actually some notes that probably needs manager's approval. You know, Mike and Jason got into it on 14th and, you know, golf cart ended up in the 15th pond.

Like that does not need line staff, that's managers, right? Then what we'll do is we'll send out a separate email to the rest of the staff. Here's what's going on the golf course tomorrow. Here's important groups of note and information on booking notes. Here's an email thread for you to start prepare for service, right? So we're trying to say, you know, why are we not a tee sheet? We're going beyond just that. We're going into workflow management. We're going into better hospitality tools. We want to get predictive, right? I would love to see Mike Hendrix,

up at the bag drop and we know your favorite drinks is, you know, Tito's transfusion and that you love the left side of the range and everything else, right? Never call you Mr. Hendrix, right? Whatever that may be, we want to automate those tools and we want to bring those tools used for the best hospitality facilities that are not green grass and bring them to the grass. So that's not a tee sheet, operation system. Is it highly unlikely that you would ever build point of sale?

We'll never be the best of it. So yes. Okay. I think there's some solutions that we could do to kind of scratch an itch. But when it comes to point of sale, that's your lifeblood. And a public course is doing 70, 80 thousand transactions on that thing. That needs to be bulletproof. Yep. And I think for us to reasonably partners, as we saw that there's a lot of gaps to the market today, and we want to be the best and we're never going to build Square like that's just we'll never be able to compete with a Square or Toast or some of those solutions.

That's not our DNA. You know, it's interesting you mentioned Toast. I mean, my real business, if you will, my consulting business, and we manage a lot of data for a lot of companies, we see Toast installed, frankly, over 100 golf courses. Toast is already installed and being used. Theoretically, you could have an integration to Toast, right? Whoosh could integrate with Toast.

and, and, and then I believe there actually is now Toast retail because of the re the front of many restaurants is essentially a store. So Toast has a Toast retail that that's an integration. I would, I would suspect we would see Whoosh do before, I don't know, an integration maybe with a, with a, legacy older point of sale company. Yeah. I think the legacy solution will probably be pushed in there as you push into resorts and hotels.

I think Toast is one of the best providers out there. Obviously I have some bias with Square and I think they're kind of best in breed, but you know, being neutral here from a restaurant standpoint, you know, we see Toast, we see Square, we see Spot On as all being a really great point of sale solutions. And at the end of the day, we are building an open, integrated platform. And if our customer wants to work with Toast instead of Square, well, we'll shade them towards Square right now.

But the other day, it's about making the customer happy and understanding what's the best solution for their operations. So we have a lot of folks come in and say, we want you for this. What do you recommend on the back end? And we kind of will walk them through pros and cons of different systems because we're familiar with them. And we kind of play that consultative role, right? We really see ourselves in essentially the team. But yeah, we want to be open. We want to integrate with everyone. We're not planning to build point of sale anytime soon. We want the best in class solution for every operator. That's great.

So the other day we spoke with Dayton Country Club, who's a customer of yours. Very high marks with Whoosh And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I know earlier I did mention Clubessential. I probably made it sound like, well, if you use Clubessential, this isn't going to work. That's not the case. Dayton Country Club does use Clubessential. They do a download import at the end of the night. They download, I'm assuming it's a report from Whoosh and they import it into Clubessential.

so I don't want anybody to think that if you're using Clubessential, Whoosh isn't a good solution. If you ask the guys at Dayton country club, it actually is a good solution. We are compatible with in a private club space. We're compatible with just about every legacy CMS system out there. Now the question is on the members side, how great of an experience is it? You know, I think in Dayton, they're using the Whoosh app predominantly, right? We have other clubs that use the Jonas app with Whoosh or we'll use Whoosh with some of the Jonas features as well.

We would love to open up more integrations with the rest of that ecosystem. Cause again, it's about ease of use for the members and better tools for the staff. Right now let's get specific. Cause you just said using the Jonas app or using the Whoosh app. I just want to understand, do you mean specific to the member booking a tee time or is it something different when you say Jonas app, Whoosh app? Well, we have people that use a Jonas app.

for maybe dining and for mobile ordering and for viewing their statements. And then maybe just they use Whoosh to book the tee times or their lessons or their events through different modules, right? You have to view these apps these days as Lego blocks. And we personally are huge fans of Pacesetter We think that future proofs a lot of clubs. It creates a great look and feel. It's very customized. It can plug in a lot of places. That is where this is kind of moving towards, right? And so with Jonas, with Pacesetter, with...

you know, a lot of other folks, we can integrate directly in there both ways. We can make that feel very, very seamless. You know, there are some providers out there that are those closed walled gardens that we would like to continue to push. I'll keep sending more emails, customers keep requesting it. We'll see if and when that happens. But you know, our mantra again is listen to our customers. Well, okay. So that's a great segue, but just a quick word on Pacesetter, because I don't think a lot of people know about Pacesetter. I've always been pretty impressed with Pacesetter.

You want to give us a 30 second overview of what Pacetetter is? George Stavros over there is one of the best CEOs in the industry. What they've built is a customized solution that can basically ingest. That is the primary app for your club and they make it beautiful. They make it elegant. They make it luxurious. They make it really convenient. And what they can do with that app is take in the best elements from Clubessential and Northstar and Jonas and Whoosh and whoever else you use and put that into one.

and streamline the user experience. And that's amazing. The last kind of big thing I did at GolfNow was I started the private club division and I wanted George to be my app supplier. I wanted to white label his side. I just thought what he built was really, really good. It just felt great, especially in that private environment. So I've always been a big fan. Now, you just mentioned, hey, I'll keep sending the emails. I want to have better integrations.

One thought I have is, and this gets into the fundraising a little bit, did you do any of this latest round? And this is a 10.3 round, I think, isn't that right? Did you do any of this round strategically? And certainly I think Larry Fitzgerald and some people like that are strategic, but maybe in thinking about integrations, like maybe somebody from Battery comes in. And so then it gets easier to work with that larger ecosystem. Like any thought?

to that in your fundraising? 100%. As you can imagine, we kind of have open arms to the industry, right? And Jason Pearsal at Club Caddie said it best. The first time I met him, he said, Colin, you and I have 99% of things in common. We both are crazy enough to start a company in the golf space. So we probably have a lot. Why would I meet you with animosity? I mean, I should embrace you and show you the ropes. And he is one of the best in the business. I love Jason, that Club Caddie team.

absolutely phenomenal. but, you know, I think as you look at the industry, there are some people that are definitely being a bit more closed off than others. We want to break that down. So what's the best way than saying, why don't you invest in our company? Let's get our interests aligned. I think what you're looking at though, right now in the golf space, which makes that difficult is there is not to the best of my knowledge, a single private tee sheet golf managing company in the public space. That's private. They've.

all been bought by private equity or consolidation. Everything's been consolidated in the last seven years. And in the public, in the private space, you have, you know, your, your big kind of players that are now private equity backed, whether that's Constellation or Battery or those folks, that they don't take venture investments. They take the, not a small bite, the whole, the whole bite of the apple, right? And that, that was the problem for us. We want to...

play well with all and it would be very difficult to take some investments from one and then play well with others. So we had to stay as neutral as we could. We've gotten, I'd say the biggest piece of this raise that brings me pride, obviously a lot of celebrities. And there's some other couple of strategic that we did not announce big organizations that will probably come to fruition later, but it's actually our customers. I was shocked by how many of our customers raised their hand and said, Hey, I just got a call from an investor heard you're raising a round.

can we invest too? And that was probably the coolest thing I've ever experienced. What a state of endorsement, right? Yeah, we now have seven or eight of our customers, all, you know, whether that's the DOG or the owner of that, of that, of that facility that are now on our cap table, users can love the product. That's huge for us. And I think that's the piece that's most strategic. Let's continue to build for you. Let's continue to make you happy. Let's make you want to invest our next round.

It's a huge testament to where we've come. And I think that's more important than anything we've got is that customer interest. That's great. You know, you do have one kind of standout investor here. So your first round was six million by Craft. And of course, Craft for people that don't know is led by David Sacks. And then for people that don't know that David Sacks, well, David Sacks is one of the main guys in the All-In Podcast which is one of the most.

First of all, enjoyable podcasts that there are out there, but certainly successful as well. I wanted to ask you this, Colin. So David Sacks is essentially invested in golf, right? And then Jason Calcanis is invested in golf through Loop Golf. And literally today, as we're filming this, Loop just announced a million dollar round. Noteefy just announced a round not too long ago. I think they might've been, I don't think they disclosed the dollar figure, but there's a lot of,

big boy investing going on in golf right now. Talk about your fundraising journey and talk about was there latent demand to invest in golf and there just needed to be better storytellers? Explain that or talk through that with the listeners. Yeah, I mean golf right now is booming. Let's be really clear. Golf is booming. We are at the high water mark in terms of play, of participation amongst all age groups. It's a sector that needs to be to be

COVID people realize this thing has legs and longevity and it feels like this market will continue to ascend for the foreseeable future. And I think that's fantastic. But at the same time, we also recognize the market small. There's not a lot of unicorns that have come out in the golf space and there's a graveyard of people that have tried. Let me just interject on the small for a second. So if people wonder how come there's Google flights and there aren't Google tee times?

It's because of the size of the market. I mean, we had many conversations with Google who continually reassured us they weren't coming in. It wasn't big enough for Google to be interested. So go on about, but I totally respect what you're saying about it's not a big, big industry. I mean, if you just look at the market, we say a lot of stats, right? You know, there's more golf courses than Starbucks or McDonald's, but there's still only 15,000 golf courses publicly in North

and there's only 5,000 private facilities in North America, that's still a very small market. And you have some first mover or I like to say inertia has a lot of momentum and you still have a lot of that in that space, right? And so for us, we have to position ourselves beyond golf. To us, I look at MindBody as a tech company. And I say their wedge.

was yoga studios. And now they're the de facto who we think about when it comes to just broader activity management, whether it's a bike rental or an ATV tour. So to me, we saw how they entered with the yoga studios. And then for us, we said, great, we want to enter the golf and larger activity management space, the hospitality company. We're better to start from the golf side, which is booming right now. And we're better at these private clubs where we have some innovation in almost 25 years.

And that's really where we started. And I think the path we took is start off with golf and then expand into broader activity management lessons, clinics, events, fitness, swimming, spa, wellness, boat racing, shooting ranges, you name it, we can take that anywhere. And if we can build best in class for facilities like the Union League and Olympic club and Shinnecock and Friars, well, that's gonna flow down to the rest of the market. And I think we're doing the same thing as we now look in public is let's focus on some of the best.

premier golf courses across the country. Let's then expand into other things. Alt golf, simulators, training facilities are really top of mind for us. And I don't think they're being very well serviced. Then after that, we see a larger tail in hospitality. I like to state, you know, one of my use cases and first class problems is I took my family to Mauna Kea in Hawaii. No problem booking the hotel room for the week, right? Several months out, but I couldn't book golf online.

I had to call the shop or I had to book 14 days prior. I couldn't book my tennis court, my life jacket, for my kids, anything they actually advertised, I couldn't actually book. So fundamentally we see a problem when it comes to high end reservations that nexus of hospitality reservations and point of commerce, it's broken. And I hate to say it, MindBody now is almost a 30 year old company. It's there now a legacy solution. It's time for that next wave to come in, listen to customers and innovate.

Right. You know, when you talk, though, about Olympic Club and actually the one on your list of customers that really got my attention was Friars. Maybe the average unit volume there, the average sale there is healthy. I don't know. And I'm talking about in terms of Whoosh. But do investors push back and say, but are you going to get that at Joe's Joe's 18 hole deer creek down the road? Like talk about any concerns you might have with with

Is there enough? Are there enough dollars from each individual golf course to make the business viable? There is a man. It's a huge sector. You know, I think there's news out right now. Some of the legacy providers being for sale and some of the valuations that they're at, you know, and I think we will see some additional consolidation in the space, but we're looking at a multi-billion dollar industry golf in itself. You know, it's 108 billion in the United States. It's roughly a 250 billion dollar industry worldwide.

It's booming. It's not going anywhere. And for us, we see a world there for us to build a great business. But if we're trying to build a unicorn and that's our that's my goal, my goal. And I'd say any founder that answers this question otherwise of what to end goal, I'm going to try and build a unicorn until I realize I can't. Got it. I can't. We'll figure out the next piece. Yeah, that can't just be in golf, right? GolfNow was like that phenomenon that occurred. And I think now we're going to

trying to chip away at market share at some of those people in public or compliment and potentially work with them. But it's we have to expand beyond golf to be a successful viable company. And on that being said, I think there is still plenty of room for companies to grow and the industry is still expanding. And I would just say to founders out there, remember, GolfNow went bankrupt twice. It's hard, right? It takes a lot of different iterations, frankly, a lot of different go to market strategies before maybe you find that perfect fit.

So it's no matter what the industry it's difficult. When investors have said no to Whoosh, why do they say no? Is there a consistent reason that someone wouldn't invest? TAM Total addressable market size is probably the number one thing is investors want to do diligence. Unfortunately, there's not. NGF does a great job when it comes to market data as a whole, especially private club data.

There is a big gap in that. So investors who understand the space get it, right? They understand initiation fees. They understand this. They play in that world. But for a lot of folks that may not play golf, they don't understand the size, the stickiness of the market and the dynamics. And I think that was probably the biggest issue was the addressable market size. And I think for us, we had to play that story. And it's not just a story, it's our strategy of a hospitality company, activity management.

golf is just a start, wait till you see what comes next. Gotcha. That's part of what we do at smbGOLF. We help people understand the TAM and penetration of individual companies today and that kind of thing. So, so, so how, you know, just, just predictions, right? What's Whoosh look like in the public space when we get to the 2025 PGA show?

And then maybe a couple of years after that, like, what's the growth pattern? Does this thing hockey stick? What's your thoughts on how your company, you know, grows and evolves? You know, we're just starting on the public side, right? And we launched with some great clubs, I think most notably Grass Clippings, which is really innovating, kind of how we're thinking of nighttime golf, that part three concept in, in,

Tempe, I actually think they'll do over 80 ,000 rounds this year. It's crazy having a tee sheet that starts at seven and ends at 10 o 'clock at night. But I think for us, we're going to continue to expand. I think we're going to try and take the same viewpoint and strategy that we did in private. Let's target some premier facilities. Let's go after that. Let's create a name and let's build over this next year the best possible solution for operators.

Right. And what we've done in private is to continue to triple and triple year over year, year over year. Now we can start to do that in public. I think another big piece for us that we've alluded to is that expansion into alternate golf markets, training facilities, SIMS, what we lovingly call entertainment venues like Topgolf. They don't have software built for them today. And that's a big, big growing sector. And I think for us, a big growth area for us has seen what we could do in that sector for

sims and alt golf, but also even for racquet facilities and those types of things. So our goal by next year's PGA show, let's make sure we have, you know, a hundred public golf courses in our belt. Let's continue to triple our private club base. Let's also have some great proof points and show a lot of traction and building the right solution for those sims and off green grass facilities is a big piece for us. You know, a lot of people I talk to say right now, sim is their greatest growth vertical. Is that?

Kind of where Whoosh is too, that you see a lot of growth on the SIM side. By volume. Yes. Yeah. By volume. Absolutely. We get more inbound demands globally for simulator management than anything else. That being said, I think this market is early innings and about to drastically change the price of home simulators are coming down so much that some of the inbound we get of, Hey, my guy and.

Topeka and I just bought two Sims and I've got a warehouse. I'm gonna start a club Yeah, those days are gonna end really really quickly and that long tail of kind of those those onesie twosies and I think we're gonna start seeing more aggregation consolidation up in the top and And it's a maturity in that market. So I think that market's gonna change a lot But again, I think you look at places like South Korea you look at the Nordic countries where more golf gets played at Sims and green grass You know, that's

to me with our land and our economics and everything else that we have going on globally, that is where this trend is going to go. Got it. Yep. I don't, I don't disagree with that. I think that's, I think that's smart. So, if I'm a, if I'm a public golf course, owner operator, maybe I'm a general manager. is it as simple as going to Whoosh.io and there's a, I don't know, there's a demo request form or something like that. How does somebody get in touch with your team?

to potentially become a customer. That's right. Visit www .whoosh .io. You can log in there or send us an email at hello at Whoosh. I would flag we are very unique. We want you to try a solution for you buy it. So we'll actually build your tee sheet, your rules, you're right. You know, everything else will import rosters, we'll send you guys demo iPad to get it tested. Wow. And part of what we want to hear is, I wish the system did this.

because that's how we get that product feedback. It's almost like free development. You don't want to go to so we don't do X, Y, Z. Great, we'll build that. And that's how we start to listen to those customers and do that. But also, no one should make it three, four, five year commitment, but at least trying it first, right? So that's a really different approach. We'll put that in the show notes. We'll put a link to your site in the show notes. I can't thank you enough for coming on. I think this is...

really insightful. It's great to have people on that are really good at raising money because at the end of the day, that is incredibly important component to getting off the ground. There's a lot of people with an idea. There's some people that can build things. There's very few like you that can bring that together with funding and funding is incredibly important. So, you know, congrats to you and thanks for coming on the podcast.

I appreciate that Mike. You know, I'd say the final note as a CEO, I find my job really being three pillars. It's building culture, it's defining strategy, and it's keeping the lights on. And it's good to know with 10.3 million in the bank, the lights will be on for a long, long, long time. So appreciate you having me on the show. Really enjoyed this interaction today and continue to do what you do. I love listening to the show and appreciate how you're helping to build the game.

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