LESSONS IN: EXPORTING
Game on
Nova Scotia’s Travis McDonough digs deep in L.A, bats 1,000 in Dodger Stadium
By Quentin Casey

ON NOVEMBER 10, Travis McDonough walked onto a stage erected near home plate in Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium. In front of him was a crowd of 550, including investors, sports and fitness executives, and officials from some of North America’s biggest sports teams and leagues.

McDonough’s Halifax-based company, Kinduct Technologies Inc., was one of 10 sport technology companies selected for the first-ever L.A. Dodgers Accelerator. The four-month program started in August and gave its participating companies access to a slew of mentors and contacts, including venture capitalists, executives from companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Nike, and Facebook, and sports world figures including Magic Johnson (a Dodgers owner) and Lakers president Jeanie Buss.

McDonough spent four months in Los Angeles attempting to glean as much advice and information as possible from those sources. His time in the program concluded with the on-stage pitch at Dodger Stadium. In it, he explained that his company, created in 2010, has developed athlete management software that improves performance and prevents injury.

“We have created the world’s most advanced human performance software platform,” he told the stadium crowd. “Each and every organization that used our tool last year saw a statistically significant improvement in winning percentage and a drastic reduction in preventable injuries.”

More than 50 professional sports teams now use Kinduct’s technology, including more than half of the 30 NBA teams — though, surprisingly, not Canada’s lone NBA team, the Toronto Raptors. The company’s subscription list includes the reigning NBA champion Golden State Warriors, the New York Knicks, football’s New England Patriots, the NHL’s New York Rangers, and the Toronto Blue Jays. (McDonough also claims 25,000 fitness trainers use the software, and says the Canadian military has 30,000 licenses.)

Kinduct’s software processes data from athletic gadgets such as heart rate monitors, Fitbits, and many other health devices. The company’s software also relies on data from athlete journals and electronic health records.

The software analyzes data from those disparate sources to find correlations in an athlete’s performance. In other words, the software tracks various factors — nutrition, sleep, training intensity — to establish which ingredients are needed to ensure top performance.

In the NBA, Kinduct has shown that a player’s free throw percentage dips two days after a night of poor sleep. In hockey, a correlation was drawn between grip strength and the number of shots a player takes on goal; a stronger grip yielded more shots.

Kinduct works with NFL teams to determine how a particular player’s performance on the field is affected by factors such as sleep patterns and pre-game heart rate. If problems are detected, Kinduct’s software makes recommendations for altering the player’s workout routine, diet, sleep patterns, or playing time.

Later this year, Kinduct’s software will be used to process data generated by special sensor-embedded jerseys, to be worn by players during the home run derby at Major League Baseball’s all-star game.

“This is frontier territory,” Mc- Donough said at his office shortly before departing for Los Angeles. “We’re at the forefront of data and analytics.”

Reached six weeks after his pitch in California, McDonough says the Dodgers accelerator experience yielded new clients and changed his “go to market” strategy.

Among the 10 new client teams McDonough added while in California: the L.A. Galaxy soccer team, the Denver Nuggets, Atlanta Hawks, Minnesota Twins, and Phoenix Suns.

McDonough, a chiropractor and son of former federal New Democrat leader Alexa McDonough, says his company is in negotiations with all four of the big North American sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB). If successful, those negotiations would see Kinduct supply its technology league-wide in all four sports.

“In a perfect world we’d get all four, but if we got one it would still be a big win,” he said. “That’s certainly within reach with the current discussions we’re having.”

McDonough also wants to push into the mass consumer market. But his strategy for doing so changed based on the advice he received from mentors such as Jeanie Buss, Jonathan Mariner (MLB’s chief investment officer), and Dodgers chief financial officer Tucker Kain, among others.

McDonough originally intended to take Kinduct’s technology directly to consumers, alone. Instead, he’ll now work to access the distribution networks of large, established sports companies. For example, Under Armour.

“That was a big epiphany moment for us,” he said of the decision to pursue partnerships. “There are some big, big companies that we are closing in on deals with right now,” he added.

The 10 companies selected for the Dodgers accelerator — a first in sports — came from among nearly 600 applications. (McDonough says Kinduct, already a Dodgers client, was asked to participate.) The selected companies were deemed to have technology that could help the Dodgers — from athlete recruiting to advanced analytics for fantasy sports.

Kain, the Dodgers’ CFO, said his team’s players work with strength coaches, trainers, doctors, sleep experts, and nutritionists. “How do you bring all those together to really add to the athlete’s performance?” he said in an interview from Los Angeles. “Kinduct has created a platform to do that.”

Kain also called Kinduct’s software a “powerful tool” that could “really add value” to sports companies, such as Nike and Under Armour, that are pushing further into health, fitness, and wearable technology.

“We think they’re really in a position to change athletes,” Kain said, “and ultimately change how people manage their health and wellness in this digital age.”

The Dodgers ownership group, Guggenheim Baseball Management, took an equity stake in all 10 companies in the accelerator. McDonough expects Guggenheim to also put money into his company’s Series A round this year. He says three other players are likely to take part in the eight-figure round: Intel Capital, R/GA (a global ad agency that helped run the Dodgers accelerator), and John Risley, the founder of both Clearwater Seafoods and Ocean Nutrition Canada. Risley’s Clearwater Fine Foods holding company already has a 15 per cent stake in Kinduct, and Risley chairs the company’s board.

McDonough’s stay in L.A. resulted in new clients, potential funding, and an office in the city. He says the experience also convinced him that his 42-person company can compete internationally.

“I realized we belong here. We’re just as good if not better than a lot of these other companies,” he said. “We can do this.”