Dodgers Pitch Accelerator as Crucial to Evolution

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L.A. companies making pitch at demo day

Field Level Inc.

Headquarters: Pacific Palisades

Founded: 2008

CEO: Brenton Sullivan

Funding reported: $20,000

Clients include: USC, Penn State University, University of Michigan, and Alabama A&M University

What it does: A private social network for athlete recruiting that connects coaches and helps teams find athletes.

FocusMotion Inc.

Headquarters: Santa Monica

Founded: 2012

CEO: Cavan Canavan

Funding reported: $170,000

Clients include: Dodgers and Pebble smartwatch

What it does: Offers hardware and software that makes it easier to track and analyze movements, gestures and exercises with wearables.

Appetize

Headquarters: Santa Monica

Founded: 2011

CEO: Kevin Anderson

Funding reported: Undisclosed

Clients include: Dodgers, Sacramento Kings, Chick-fil-A, Live Nation

What it does: A point-of-sale, mobile-ordering and inventory management platform for live events.

DoorStat Inc.

Headquarters: Playa Vista

Founded: 2014

CEO: Cole Harper

Funding reported: $770,000

Clients include: Dodgers as well as other teams across Major League Baseball, National Football League and National Hockey League

What it does: Automatically collects and analyzes customer demographics and mood through video-based software.

Standing in front of a crowd of about 600 people, entrepreneur Cole Harper and his team had five minutes to pitch their business in front of potential investors.

The demo day experience is a common one for companies who’ve finished an accelerator program in Silicon Beach. But the event’s location – near home plate at Dodger Stadium – was anything but ordinary and made the event a bit more dramatic.

“Getting a chance to go in Dodger Stadium and present what our company does is something that I’ll remember the rest of my life,” said Harper.

While most accelerators in Los Angeles are heavily invested in the tech world, Harper’s L.A. crowd analytics firm DoorStat finished its three-month stint in a program launched last year by the Los Angeles Dodgers in partnership with R/GA Ventures, the accelerator arm of New York ad agency R/GA.

The Los Angeles Dodgers Accelerator had 10 companies graduate two weeks ago and now, Dodgers and R/GA are gearing up for phase two.

Stan Kasten, chief executive of the Dodgers, said its first class was a successful one and credits it to the strength of the Dodgers brand as well as its network of sponsors and investors.

“We were offering an exciting network of mentors (and) we had the lab of the most heavily attended sports venue in the world – Dodger Stadium,” said Kasten. “Those were things that are uncommon and set us apart.”

The move has proved to be worth the investment as the Dodgers worked with several of the firms, including DoorStat, to boost everything from customer satisfaction to player performance – at a time when the baseball team, once again, was eliminated from the postseason.

Kasten said one of the club’s goals when launching the accelerator was to find startups that could also help the bottom line.

“We thought if we could find good, smart new ideas that related to some part of our business it could be a win-win,” he said. “It would be good for them. It would be good for us from an investment standpoint and maybe lend itself to applications which help our current business, whether it is analytics for players on the field or customer service training.”

Field of dreams

The Dodgers announced in April that the franchise was seeking “emerging companies at the intersection of sports, technology, entertainment and media” for its accelerator.

The team said its call resulted in a total of 575 applicants from 37 countries.

The final 10 companies worked out of a shared space at R/GA’s office in Playa Vista for three months. The participants were given face-to-face access to mentors, potential investors and strategic partners to help build their value proposition and business model.

The Dodgers also invested $20,000 into each of the companies while taking anywhere from 6 percent to 9 percent equity, a stake that’s shared with R/GA.

Harper, DoorStat’s chief executive, said the experience was unlike traditional accelerator programs, which often have strict criteria for potential applicants such as asking for a specific amount of money raised, revenue figures and company size. And many prefer early stage companies as opposed to the Dodgers Accelerator, which took in later-stage businesses such as five-year-old Atlanta firm LeagueApps, a platform allowing local sports organizers to create and manage teams and events.

It was also structured differently, noted DoorStat’s Harper.

“A lot of times accelerators really just give you office space,” he said, “and it’s a really passive experience. With this it was very structured but not in a way that was inhibiting.”

Tucker Kain, the Dodgers’ chief financial officer, said it wasn’t trying to operate like a traditional accelerator.

“As an organization and industry this is pretty new,” he said. “We’re not aware of anything of this scale in the accelerator technology space so that was a real exciting opportunity for us to blaze a trail.”

It has already made an impact on the L.A tech scene.

Three of the companies are headquartered in Los Angeles including Santa Monica’s Appetize, a point-of-sale and mobile ordering platform for live events; FieldLevel Inc. in Pacific Palisades, a private social network for sports recruiting, connecting coaches and helping colleges find athletes; and FocusMotion, a downtown L.A. firm offering solutions to make it easier to track and analyze movement and gestures with wearables.

In addition, DoorStat moved its headquarters two weeks ago from Chicago to R/GA’s office in Playa Vista while it continues to find a permanent space in Los Angeles.

Harper said it was never part of the plan to uproot DoorStat from its network of contacts in Chicago.

“It only took two weeks to recognize the strength of the network (in L.A.),” he said. “It extended into the Lakers and all the teams in San Francisco – every group we met with was saying come to California.”

Kasten said the Dodgers and R/GA are already looking to extend the program another year but are unsure how it will be structured.

“It’s still the first year of this experimental program,” he said. “We’ve gone far enough in it to know that it has been a success. Do we do the same thing (next year) and buy 10 new companies? We don’t know. Do we throw ourselves into one or two companies? I don’t know.”

Graduate class

But Kasten does know that it will continue to work with its recent graduates.

Kain added that it is already partnering with a couple of the firms. For example, it is in the early stages of developing a pilot program with FocusMotion around tracking the physical therapy regimens of certain players and monitoring their performance.

It is also working with DoorStat to help increase fan engagement. The company’s technology analyzes video footage from around Dodger Stadium, as well as the venues of other customers, to gauge customer experience through facial expressions and body language. That way, the Dodgers can find out how long one of their fans has to wait in line for a Dodger Dog before they become irritated.

Using DoorStat’s platform, said Harper, is a much easier process than sifting through the roughly 10,000 fan surveys the Dodgers receive each year from its fan base of about 3.7 million.

“It gives us that extra layer,” Kain said. “If we can get a handle on who’s here, how they feel and what they’re doing when they’re here we think there’s a lot of value to drive an experience more pleasing, more engaging to our fans. And hopefully, provide that info to our sponsors that would then be interested in paying for that type of experience.”

Kasten acknowledged the Dodgers have ventured into unchartered territory with the accelerator, but the team is prepared to dig its heels in for the long term.

“The Dodgers need to be leaders in everything and this is the next place we need to get aggressive,” he said. “We’re trying to be leaders in the technology world and the analytics on the baseball side of our operations and we expect to be leaders in new technology in the 21st century.”

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