The Perfect Carbon Fiber Pickleball Paddle?

Introduction

0:00 

Welcome to Simply pickleball the podcast where we discuss all things pickleball.

0:05 

The fastest growing sport in America and around the world. We’re interviewing the founders, industry leaders, athletes

0:12 

lovers of the sport that are driving the spectacular growth. If you love pickleball as much as we do, listen in.

0:19 

Hi I’m Crystal Brown your host and I’m thrilled to have spent time with Josh Kim the founder of Spartus pickleball paddles.

0:25 

Have you ever wondered what your paddle is made of or how it’s constructed?  Well today you’re going to

0:31 

hear a little bit about Josh’s journey to becoming a Founder, how he grew to love pickleball, and learn a little bit

0:36 

more about how paddles are made. Okay now to the show. Thank you Josh I’m really

0:41 

excited to talk to you today about your company and appreciate you taking the time out of your day because I know

0:47 

being an entrepreneur is really you know time consuming. Unless you know of course it’s about pickleball and then you probably make a lot of time to play

0:53 

pickleball. So I met you at

1:01 

the Presidio.  To learn about how you got it started and about you and your background and maybe can you just tell

1:07 

me a little bit about you know what were you doing before you started at the paddle company and and then how you got

1:13 

started on on Spartus.  I want to preface by saying that

Josh’s Career Path

1:18

um to most people from the outside my career path looks like random dots but I promise you it will connect with my

1:23

babies yes okay so let me start way back because it’s relevant to Sparta’s uh

1:30

College I started biomedical engineering so it’s a mix of you know mechanical engineering you know um Material Science

1:36

and things like that so I had a touch of Education behind sort of some of the stuff I’m doing but the biggest piece of

1:42

Education I learned back then first semester in college and I promised all this ties back just bear with me first

1:48

submission that’s great yeah um I was one of those kids you know in high school I got a perfect SATs perfect everything in you know in college you

1:55

sort of you know you sort of experience Freedom like like Pure Freedom for the first time so oh yeah it was part of the

2:01

high school but not to the extent you know in high school in college so I wasn’t doing well on first first semester in uh college so my dad he was

2:09

an executive at one of the largest Korean mobile phone manufacturers they sent me to the factory for the summer

2:14

because he was like you know maybe you’ll get a taste of you know what you need to understand what education is

2:20

about why don’t you give it get a taste of blue color broke to see if that’s what you like so what about the crack of

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dawn to ride the bus to rural like remote area where the factory was and I was literally part of the factory line

2:30

wow using the phones and little did I know 15 years later that experience in

2:36

the factory line will give me a taste of understanding now that I’m working you know building my own products how you

2:42

know the supply chain works you know as an American you don’t know that it’s really hard for Americans to just assume

2:48

that there’s people behind like hand manufacturing everything yeah but there’s specialized machines when

2:53

there’s not at all all right yeah anyway so I thought that was really cool I was talking about Dad about this recently

2:59

but so I did that I absolutely by the way just totally agree that some of these early experiences that you don’t

3:05

know why when they’re gonna come back around for you absolutely so that’s really interesting and good for him for

3:12

giving you some real world experience yeah so after that that sort of turned my you know perspective around the

Law School

3:18

bowling College after that I went to law school um I did intellectual property law for three and a half years some of my

3:24

specialties were in biotech but also worked a lot with Material Science so again you know for that time

3:30

um as a lawyer I was you know very familiar with Rd practices because I’m only talking with inventors day in day

3:36

out wow yeah and then you know during that time I got really really lucky in

3:42

my second year I was on a high profile Supreme Court case and I was one of two lead authorities bringing Narcan into

3:48

the states and I realized I was a junior associate at the time again I was this is purely by Fortune I landed on these

3:55

cases I realized this is not the career path for me because you know 10 years on the line when you’re a partner you’re

4:00

still doing that kind of work you know it sounds interesting most people enjoy it but you know I want a more creative

4:06

spaces you know work on sort of things that interest me rather than sure um you know working for your partner

4:11

who’s working for a client it was you know I ever let pretty quickly you know it’s not what I want to enjoy for the rest of my life you know the pay was

4:18

there you know that the procedures are all of that but you know those aren’t really that’s not doesn’t really line up with my value system so I went to

4:24

business school I went to Northwestern to get my business degree and uh my MBA that was a really good time I really

4:29

enjoyed Evanston Chicago I still miss the Chicago Summers to be honest well

4:35

they certainly have to be better than the San Francisco Summers and then I’ve worked a little I worked a year in

4:40

private Equity when I moved over here after um after my time in Chicago one of my

4:46

buddies who was a co-founder Square had a new startup at the time here and he asked me to be the CEO of his company it

4:53

was called Bali and we were really lucky to be able to sell that company 10 months after I joined Marketo she’s not

4:59

a public company bought us out yeah so part of the deal is we had to work with Marketa so we were I was at

5:06

Marketa for a little less than a year before I was recruited by another Square guy who had another early start

5:12

stationary was his coo for two years um scaled out his company from literally

5:17

zero to 12 million AR so annual recurring Revenue with over 100 000 paid

5:23

users from zero so that was my role at that company on basically 50 of the company reported into me my primary role

5:31

uh was to get to those big Milestones yeah and my you know those four or five years in you know fintech early stage

5:38

startups is like pretty grueling it was really taxing but even more so when I was then I was a lawyer you’re basically

5:43

I was working basically to midnight every single day it barely went out did no breaks yeah it’s it’s interesting

5:49

because I think that is the startup story for a lot of people they don’t see the grind and the hustle in the beginning they only see the success

5:56

later yeah the thing is like the my friends and I are not very media based folks so you don’t year I was you know

6:03

going after media stories all the time whereas like the ones that you see on techlunch all the time is people always like talking about their wins all the

6:09

time and cover you know the hard periods that you’re going through day in day out you know yes so we’re just I mean it was

6:16

fire on fire you know especially when you’re working with a lean team you’ve got to make it work totally it was super

6:23

fun it was super rewarding um and the experience there and as the Lord and in primary equity and in the factory line

6:29

all carried over to what I’m doing now so after I left grid I needed a break so I was you know on a sabbatical just

6:35

chilling one of my friends from business school she always asked me to play tennis with her and I grew up playing tennis a lot did you yeah I was going to

6:42

ask you if you’re a rocket sport person it was there was a time when I was way more fit than I am now

6:47

I wanna I’m trying to get back there uh it’s hard when you’re 35. I think tennis but she introduced me to you know

6:54

pickleball like she had started this pickleball group that I told you about yeah on Thursday nights so I was like

7:00

okay you know sure I have a lot of time and the first time I went I immediately

7:06

realized why it’s picking up steam it was so obvious to me like you I couldn’t tell just about looking at it because

7:12

coming from tennis you know you’re you know you expect like explosive Sports things like that I mean when you watch

7:18

it from a bar you’re like oh is that sort of like you know right or until you

7:23

get on the court yourself and then you realize well you know it does record there is a lot of competition you know

7:29

but the best part from my perspective was people who pick up a pickleball paddle for the first time you know feel

7:35

like they can get the ball over the net pretty quickly whereas in tennis you know once and monster lessons right

7:40

that’s a good point so like a a low barrier to entry to just get started yeah good point exactly and the social

7:47

aspect is the best part you’re never going to see people at the tennis courts behaving the way

7:53

I know so I mean you hear people like hooting and hollering and laughing and cheering each other on and the minute

8:00

there’s a good point it’s like you know everyone else knows around that it happened yeah I saw this really really

Is it okay to play with strangers

8:05

cool quote yesterday online and so basically the premise of the the first

8:11

poster was like you know is it okay to play with strangers and people I’m just starting and one of the common people

8:16

that commented the goal that was like when I first started I played only with strangers but now I play with friends oh

8:22

that’s so nice yeah that was my experience at in the Presidio too like aside from the friends that I already

8:27

had like I know a lot of the people there you know so do everyone there just by being there all the time I want this

8:33

that’s a really good point and I I think just to highlight and that you know I’ve traveled around playing pickleball in a

8:39

couple different cities and what I find is like there’s so many different ages and you might hang out with someone

8:45

playing pickleball that you would never interact with otherwise and if you’re

8:50

alone or lonely you just go to the pickle part ball court or if you have a group of friends you can go to the pickleball court so I think it does

8:56

cross a lot of a range of people playing you’re so right comparing it to tennis very different sport yeah 100 of the big

9:03

Social Club yeah so while I was playing you know obviously you know as you advance the

9:09

skill I was playing with my friends paddle at the time she just meant me in it all the time I think it was uh I

9:15

think it was like the onyxy but one of the ones a lot of people started with I personally didn’t like the feel of it I wanted something where I could get

9:21

better fuel so I started looking into uh you know what panels were in the market that’s more you know UPS up market and

9:28

sort of more premium so then you’re you know that’s what engage was still like a very popular company crbm was like you

9:35

know up on the rise things like that and then I was when I was looking at this carbon paddles and some of the other

9:42

ones out there it was you know based on my experience you know in this you know in the factory line and

9:48

just my understanding of warranty this it seemed pretty clear to me that a lot of these battles was sort of being built

9:56

in the same places this is before the market become aware of this as a matter of fact one of my posts on

10:01

um edits I read it pickleball is the third most liked posts on that subreddit and I’ve talked about this in detail

10:07

there I was like hey you know what I started you know I confirmed that by sort of contacting a lot of these

10:12

backers until you know it was until I you know I felt very comfortable thinking that yeah these factors are

10:18

making this Factor makes carbons this Factory you know make cell quirks you know China made ones et cetera et cetera

10:24

and I thought you know based on the price margins like the margins that they’re making is way too high my

10:29

primary line of thinking there was tennis rackets right now in this day cost around 250 dollars if you want to

10:35

get one it will soon as like premium rackets right same two Wilson and blades

10:41

for 12 years now I restarted pickleball paddles also are 250 right 33

10:48

like for example if you buy like the cell curve you know projects and I was like well you can’t replace you know you

10:54

had to replace the whole paddle when it’s working right right you can’t there’s no restringing it yeah so from like an economic standpoint it just

11:01

didn’t it didn’t fit within like the structures that you know I had in my head especially when I was working in

11:06

private Equity I also saw a very fragmented Market with it you know right now there’s a thousand different manufacturers but back then there’s

11:13

maybe a hundred and normally when you see these like fragmented markets and a lot of private Equity people will tell

11:18

you is a roll-up opportunity what that means is you know someone comes in and starts to you know you know just Little

11:24

M A’s basically right that’s not what I was thinking but I was thinking there’s an opportunity you know so Wayne just

11:31

explain that a little bit more so you mean you know basically one bigger brand will end up kind of buying up some of

11:37

the smaller Brands and then consolidate there’s that or usually there’s a third party that comes in to do that which I

11:43

see you Middle Market private Equity firms um yeah basically their focus is sort of

11:50

get one of the line items down and then increase the profits that way and then they could boost the entire value of the whole portfolio gotcha so going back to

11:58

so what will you just to be clear what you think what you were seeing in the beginning was a bunch of rackets that or

12:06

sorry paddles I keep saying that because people keep asking me about Rockets I was looking at at Search terms and

12:15

actually a lot of people do search for pickleball Rockets but it is a paddle so with with the paddles they were

12:21

basically being manufactured in the same way just different branding that’s what you’re saying yeah and the problem I had

Missing Marketing

12:28

personally I think this is where like my loyal or lawyer side comes in is like there was a little bit in my view of

12:34

like missed marketing going on because companies were like oh you know this is brand new stuff it’s like the logo is

12:41

new and that’s right you know so you know so part of the goal was not only

12:47

bringing a you know really good value to the market but also design it in a way that I thought actually looks good that

12:54

that was a sort of secondary objective of mine I just personally thought a lot of the battles didn’t have good design

13:00

like aesthetic elements but the primary focus to bring value to the market like I want to make sure that

13:06

the consumers get you know the most valuable their dollar and I didn’t see that at the time and right now you’re

13:11

starting to see that movement needle moving that direction far far faster because the company is like mindvatic

13:17

Pro rhombus Legacy the much higher performance pedals than you know it’s carbon which is you know one you know 50

13:24

explorers that’s sometimes so tell me about that construction so how did you figure out what the construction was

13:31

that was going to work best and you know because a lot of consumers maybe after they’re a beginner beginner they might

13:36

just buy sort of a paddle or borrow friends like you did and but after that

13:42

there’s they they have this question it’s like which paddle should I buy and you know how did you figure out the

13:47

construction for Spartus that that you felt was going to perform the best for sure um I’ll start with the first model

The Gladius

13:54

and then the the black one with the ballista that you’re uh Brooklyn used because that was a very different uh

13:59

process so the Gladius is something like a lot of other companies did it’s you

14:05

can just put I selected something because I wasn’t very familiar at the time with all the different you know

14:10

techs out there so I wouldn’t say very risky and the whole goal for that was to bring value to the market so the only

14:16

adjustment I really did is sort of lower the spinning weight a little bit by pushing the center of mass a little bit

14:22

down um that was just personal preference I thought there’s a lot of players switching over from tennis like myself

14:28

who’s going to be more familiar with the lower string weight however so I’m going to be I’m open about this that you know

14:33

if you want like basically a carbon paddle for way less go with go with Gladius it’s the same thing and why why

14:39

carbon like does that you know I mean I use a carbon surface paddle myself and hopefully is yours but what

14:46

what you know what why is that important so what I was talking about carbon um

Carbon Fiber

14:52

previously was the company crbm but okay carbon fiber on the face is right now

14:57

the most popular premium you know material for the faces of like more

15:02

higher performance models and there’s a few reasons first is there’s regulations that the usap

15:09

um mandates that you have to fall within for your battle to be approved gotcha and one of them is the stiff stiffness

15:17

of the paddle so there’s something called deflection and the best way to think about this is if your paddle sort

15:23

of has a trampoline effect your paddle will fail so the stiffness of the pedal

15:30

matters and so far the industry has found that the car a certain type of carbon fiber which is called t700 has

15:36

you know a very good mix of uh sniff this stiffness and durability for example if you go to T800 it is too

15:43

brutal you know it might be a little bit stiffer but you’re going to find that it actually shatters at times

15:49

um interesting T700 has been consistently shown to uh have properties

15:55

where you’re going to have the stiffness that falls within your CPU regulations without the deflection and has a

16:01

durability to get you much one second is you can apply a grit to it into the

16:07

carbon fiber itself there’s also regulations around how much grit you can have but the carbon fiber and certain

16:14

other materials you can basically Max it out without failing gotcha that’s that’s why carbon fiber is really popular when

16:22

you compare it to like fiberglass most the time most people will say you get more fuel off the base um yeah I would

16:29

say like 98 99 of people yeah so both your paddles are with the carbon construction that’s right that’s right

16:37

although we use a preparatory layer on top of the ballista that we’ve been

16:42

testing for months that we found actually has better better grip properties

16:48

on its own and you know there’s a misconception in the market around

16:53

um exactly what raw carbon fiber means a lot of people in the market actually thinks that raw carbon fiber is just how

16:59

carbon fiber is naturally the grid is actually formed when you put like this Matrix on the curing or the carbon fiber

17:07

so it’s not the carbon fiber is still treated um and the particles come off as the

17:13

ball hits it so that’s why even with um you know any my my Gladius or any other

17:19

company is coming fiber pedals you’ll start to see it smooth out because that’s inevitable well so that was the

17:24

question I had so like you know how long how long can can someone use their paddle I mean do what’s our expectation

17:31

right you said you have your tennis racket for 12 years but I mean I see people moving through paddles right now

17:38

because there’s so many coming out that people want to try to they somehow think the paddle is going to really up their

17:43

game and maybe it does I’m not saying it does not impact your game I think it for sure can but I think there’s a lot of

17:49

other things that you need to do to get there I’m going to be the first to say that if you expect a pedal to make you go

How a paddle will change your game

17:55

 from a 3-5 player that’s not going to happen yeah not at all um there’s no there’s no equipment out

18:01

there that’s going to only change your game it’s going to change their feel yeah the way you feel about yourself

18:07

playing um is going to change how you know the ball feels for you yeah by the way it

18:13

might be a better fit for how you know natural your swing is at that point things like that yeah if you expect a

18:21

pedal to suddenly make the ball go at 100 miles an hour on every time

18:26

that’s a machine so you so you constructed so you started with your sort of first of first one and for a lot

18:32

of entrepreneurs what do they say if you if you’re not embarrassed to put out your first product then you waited too

18:39

long so in some ways it’s like you you know done is better than perfect you put something out really thoughtful and then

18:45

you learn from it and then you create the second one and that’s sort of where you are right now yeah well the first one I was very confident about here

Building an online reputation

18:51

because this is before a lot of the value companies started coming in of literally one of the first me and bombos

18:56

that’s awesome um so and we were really fortunate to be able to build up an online reputation

19:05

um I I tell people this right now like had I started today or even in June I don’t think I would have been able to

19:11

launch like properly at all I think I would have failed with the amount of saturation and how skeptical even like

19:18

Reddit or Discord communities are at this point um and the way that we built up the

19:23

reputation was uh purely to transparency I just you know I was very open about

19:28

even my cost structure um the user base on Discord on Reddit again one of my posts was the third most

19:35

liked Post in all of that suburb is history that’s awesome I didn’t intend it for that it’s just how I am well I

19:40

think people want transparency and they and they want to be educated they don’t want to understand yeah and I think it’s

Consumer Choice

19:46

purely the consumer’s Choice like you know you like what you hear you can buy it if you don’t like it sure go somewhere else it’s fine with things I I

19:53

also didn’t like how a lot of companies were sort of riding the pickleball wave at the in the beginning sort of sort of

20:00

saying some mistruce and I didn’t want to fall into that pattern totally yeah the second pedal the ballista this one

20:07

is cool because this is built from the ground up this is after um my team especially me got a better

20:13

understanding of all of the processes all of the materials um the final versions The Almost the

20:19

20th iteration wow six months we spent a ton of time

20:24

building all paddles um takes a long time because especially when you start quote-unquote thermal

20:30

forming if you’ve heard of that term no I don’t know yeah so that was kind of that’s the

20:36

called the Gen generation two pedals so when you think about Legacy Pro the crbm 1X the power Edition

20:43

um the battery Pro on the 60 Double Black Diamond those are the ones are dominated in the new market right now

20:50

um so basically the only difference between that and the Gen 1 panels is you take um

20:56

you take carbon fiber and you also put it around the entire paddle then you put it put into a custom mold and then you

21:03

heat press it for interesting 15 to 30 minutes um at a very high temperature so carbon

21:09

fiber has a negative um coefficient of thermoplasticity what that means is most materials will uh

21:15

become bigger when you heat it so carbon Chiropractic strings they’re very interesting ah interesting makes a

21:21

stiffer so when you see people in the court with the Legacy Pro you can notice that the bottom bounces off

21:27

right because it’s thermal form on the flip side um because of the manufacturing process units

21:33

um they end up becoming delaminated at a fairly High rate the elimination is when the base separates from the core

21:40

um and that’s illegal so there was problems with that oh interesting a lot of them have been able to solve a lot of

21:46

that we don’t have that issue because of the materials and the lamination issues they do anyway so we we also don’t

21:53

perform this although that’s not a highlight of the bullets so basically we were planning around I think the process

21:58

is basically anything you do in science right you come up with a hypothesis you have it Baseline understanding right

22:04

hypothesis and then you see if it comes out in reality and you make your adjustments and that was a process for

22:10

uh 18 times wow and so so you’re and this this Barack it’s not it’s not out

22:17

on the market yet you’re pre-selling right it’s for pre-sales but you know the demand was quite high on the for

Demand

22:22

like literally off the once we opened the gate so we already increased the production on day one or right right

22:28

because we didn’t think um we can fulfill all the orders from

22:33

the first bash I will come in so uh lucky lucky for us you know that’s the situation right now but

22:40

um we hope that you know the customers really really see the value and see the performance of this um yeah so far the

22:46

play testers have been posting online about the performance so people are starting to you know oh well I can tell you that my partner he as soon as he

22:54

played with it he was like I don’t want to play with anything else so he was ready it was ready so so where do

23:00

you see you know like as a company um you know so what I didn’t understand before and I do understand now is really

23:07

trying to Target the value market and um you know or provide value so that you

23:12

can have mass adoption um and how do you see yourself growing as a company do you think that you’ll

23:18

come out with more and more rackets do you think that you’ll just keep perfecting the one sorry why do I see keep saying rackets panels a lot of

23:25

people say that it’s right I know I know but it’s it it’s I I’ve never played a rocket sport so it’s just so do you

23:31

think paddles uh you know it’s just sort of like what’s the arc what would be your

23:37

hope for what comes next uh we actually have two two more panels as we release uh pretty quickly after this one’s

Timing

23:43

already but um we just need to uh submit it for the usap testing and then in a

23:49

manner that makes sense for the business problem in terms of timing um in terms of

23:54

um and I can give you details on that because we’ve been fairly open about it on yeah well not I mean even Brands

24:01

where you know like if you look at a sell Kirk paddle some of them have very different grips some of them have different weights and

24:07

um you know curious how you chose your weight so it wouldn’t be surprising to me if you have a few different paddles i

24:13

i as a for for whatever reason I need a very light paddle and some people really do to avoid

24:19

um you know what’s now probably pickleball elbow but it used to be called tennis on though

24:25

yeah um Weight Wise um I can give a little insight on some of the stuff we did

Weight

24:30

there was one um point I think back in late January we actually did manufacture

24:36

and test a 7.15 ounce paddle way less yeah what’s typical what would be a

24:42

typical panel all right so 7.9 to 8.1 is the usual threshold um a lot of Pros

24:47

like to uh wait it out put more weight yeah the 8.4 range um obviously for you

24:53

know there’s sort of several reasons they do that they want to expand The Sweet Spot while increasing the power

25:00

um they I mean if you watch a lot of the pros they have much shorter swings than many players do yeah so yeah yeah you

25:06

get sort of a little bit less you know sometimes yeah so basically they you know they have their different each

25:13

player is a different reason for doing that um but the standard weight is between 7.9 and 8.1 ounce yeah yeah 1.15 I can

25:21

tell you um from a lot of the play testers it was it was too like it generated way too little power

25:27

um and the feel the energy absorption was way was not there so it was really

25:33

hard to feel the ball um from their perspective now people with tennis elbow are pickleball I’m sure would appreciate

25:39

that well there’s such a range of players so you know if in terms of like how you think about targeting like are

25:46

you going to be able to make everyone happy or do you try to put out the best paddle that would be for anyone to play

Performance Value

25:52

with well right now the two Dimensions that we focus on is performance and value so uh there’s hopefully maybe come

25:59

a time where we can you know um what’s it called have um some paddles sort of focus more on like you know the

26:05

pickleball elbow and things like that one of the guys I met with recently

26:11

um I randomly met the senior vice president for engage um three days ago and he was encouraged

26:17

I don’t know why so he was encouraging me to build like one of those extra um practice pedals where like the head

26:23

is like this big oh and yeah me too he kept trying to convince me that they’re super popular and I was

26:29

like okay I’m not sure where they’re popular yeah I’m gonna have to look at that I have to look that up but I mean

26:35

you were saying like for your next iterations of paddles you know how do you think about going from I mean you

26:42

haven’t even put out the ballista yet but everyone’s eagerly awaiting but you

26:47

know what comes next or what do you hope yeah so you know hopefully we got you know the Bliss out into the market you

26:53

know and it’s you know well adopted uh the next panel that we had the next two pedals we have are a thermal so a hot

27:00

molded version of our Gladius that was a natural one to build given you know

27:05

basically everyone’s moved on to gen two um and then the third one is we want to move the Gladius 2 like basically a

27:11

starter level panel so we’ve been working on the outside interesting to bring our calls down uh so we were able

27:18

to bring our calls down quite significantly recently so we can actually introduce a little bit more Tech into the Gladius and then set the

27:25

price down lower to make it even more of an entry so basically there’ll be no

27:31

reason to like try out like the honesty diet for example that’s awesome and so where where are you selling your product

27:36

right now right now it’s only on our website although there are um and then we have some wholesale deals some

27:44

Distributors um out there um and then there is a couple um

27:49

Dropship Partnerships we’ve been trying out like infinite pickleball but primarily I would say 99 of ourselves

27:56

are straight through our website so tell me about what you see the future of so for you like do you and

28:03

because this can turn you know a much bigger company you know selling all types of things you can

28:09

continue to do paddles maybe a pro starts playing with your paddle I mean what what what what would be the vision

28:14

for you what do you hope happens you know I actually asked this question quite frequently oh really yeah it’s

Scalability

28:21

hard to answer I mean I’ll start with the latter sub question because we do have other stuff in the works like

28:26

apparel is coming up I personally you know don’t want to I as individual want to touch that but we just have too much

28:32

requests coming in for that I have a bunch of samples of shirts we’ve actually been giving a lot of those for

28:38

free until we get to like you know a shirt that we think is more like you know putting out in their market for you

28:44

know yeah um and then a bag you know pickleball bags are coming up too

28:50

um but in terms of the you know overall question about you know scalability of the company things like that

28:56

um you know I really like you know small companies personally I think I sort of shared with you you know my career path

29:02

yeah sort of position myself you know in a smaller company setting you know by

29:07

will most of the time yeah when Marquetta acquired us I didn’t want to be there and we were at that point we

29:13

got acquired in at 100 people and by the time I decided I can’t be there anymore it was like almost 200. yeah there’s too

29:21

much you know bureaucracy keep creeping it you have to know what I mean it’s your life right you have to know where

29:27

you do best and what you really want to be doing and I and that makes a lot of sense um so we’ll see you know I’ll do what I

Name

29:34

can you know what I have to do to you know keep this company moving forward uh

29:40

to the extent that I can yeah you know with business you never know how I know you got to go where water’s flowing so

29:46

tell me how you came up with the name where did where is the name from oh that was actually way harder anyway

29:52

I had so many stupid ideas

29:59

Google doc of all the names that you know we were going through oh that’s so fun stupid oh there were many don’t lose

30:05

that that’s history yeah yeah there were a lot of examples um I got a lot of my friends

30:11

um you know a lot of the feedback that gave me was basically you know there’s a dumbest hunting I’ve ever heard not

30:17

smart a lot of this stuff you came up with in the beginning um but yeah it was just a process of

30:23

just uh spitting things out conceptualizing sort of what you want the brand uh to be

30:29

about um and then eventually um there was a point I landed on

30:38

um what was it bar for some reason I can’t remember how it came up and I felt like I was on the

30:45

right track I sent it to um actually one of the girls I sent it to was at the pickleball courts Presidio

30:50

when you were there yeah um and she was like oh that sounds a little too short and too you know quite

30:57

Irish you know whatever I was like okay whatever sat on that came up with some other stuff and eventually

31:03

um I was like sponsor it sounds like Sparta because I have a I have some Affinity towards like ancient Greek Roman culture yeah and then I was like I

31:10

could just cut the um spark to kiss yeah and then landed on Sparta I was like oh two syllables or

31:16

something interesting and I was thinking about it circulated that around it got less negative feedback than all of you

31:22

it is good though I mean when you think about it like you know it’s I mean it is a competitive sport it can be fun but

31:28

you know that does have that element of like you know Romans like Sparta you

31:33

know that’s great I think it’s a great name and very um it’s very memorable and I think I

31:39

think you’re branding’s great so I I well thank you for sharing you know the con teaching me a little bit more about

31:46

paddle construction and about your your past and your future I think it’s really I always find it really interesting to

31:52

hear sort of the dots that were connected into the business that you start um I that is for sure the only way you

31:59

get somewhere is by learning in every piece of your career so it’s really exciting and I’m excited to see when

32:06

this when the ballista comes out and your launch and you know keep us posted on what’s coming next for you and so

32:12

just super excited thank you so much for your time and and for sharing your story I really appreciate it yeah thanks for

32:18

having me I’ll see you on the course hey guys thanks for listening to Simply Pickleball we will be back very soon

32:24

with great interviews discussions and more all about pickleball don’t forget to subscribe to our channels on YouTube

32:30

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