Mike Rolih was just a limo driver with an idea. One day, he picked up a passenger who changed his life.
An All-State quarterback from Chicago, Rolih was visiting a friend who coached junior college football in Rochester, Minn. — a town just south of the Twin Cities. He was shocked that in the age of iPhones with clear displays and effortless wireless communication, the coaches still called plays by holding up scout cards on the sidelines.
He thought he could fix that.
“And so I did what any limousine driver would do,” Rolih said. “I started pitching people in the car about my idea.”
One day, in Rolih’s backseat sat former Motorola and Kodak CEO George Fisher. When Rolih had a prototype, he called Fisher, who promptly hopped on his private jet and flew halfway across the country back to Rochester to make a $300,000 angel investment.
That’s how GoRout was born. Today, the company’s working on displaying plays inside the visors of football helmets — just like Iron Man.
Rolih is just one CEO hoping to bring a little of Silicon Valley to the lakes of Minnesota.
“It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week venture for me, and I require not exactly all of that from my employees, but I require that they care as much as I do,” Rolih said at SportTechie Twin Cities. “And if they’re not willing to work, they’re sure as hell not going to last in our culture.”
That culture needs hardware and software developers to innovate GoRout’s product line of wearable displays that wirelessly communicate with a coach’s electronic playbook.
“No one comes to Rochester to work for GoRout,” Rolih said. The Rochester-based Mayo Clinic employs more than 40,000 — the largest source of jobs in Minnesota.
“We struggle to find talent in Rochester, so we have to be very creative,” he said.
Rolih said his interaction with venture capitalists always took place in Silicon Valley and Chicago. He said the city of Madison, Wis. offered to pay him to transplant the company out of state, but he turned that down.
“We’re definitely looking for other places to plant our flag so we can grab the necessary talent to help us scale,” Rolih said.
But scaling requires capital — and Rolih tries to be selective about investing his time and energy into reward-based competitions.
He landed GoRout in the NFL’s “1st and Future” startup pitch contest hosted in Houston during Super Bowl weekend.
“We said our pitch probably 300, 400 times inside of an 18-hour window, and it gets ripped apart and built back up,” Rolih said. “Ten minutes before you’re supposed to have your final deck in, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, this thing sucks.’
“You don’t have any idea how fast four minutes goes when you’re standing in a room of 500 people and there’s somebody standing in front of you with a buzzer that will literally chime as soon as your time is up in front of all these people,” Rolih said.
After the nervousness cleared, GoRout found themselves one of three competition winners — returning to Minnesota with a $50,000 check.
Rolih says he’ll continue building his company brick by brick.
“I’m not a big believer in there’s just one thing that tips you over the edge.”
SportTechie Twin Cities
Rolih and other Minnesota-based sports technology startup leaders recently convened in Minneapolis for a panel discussion to share experiences and advice with a growing midwest sports tech community.
Seth Goodlaxson is the software development manager at Bleachr, a mobile platform built for teams to engage fans, particularly at sporting events. The startup spawned after the infamous Super Bowl XLVII blackout left fans to hurry up and wait:
“I’m not going to tell you what to do any day of your career at Bleachr. I’m going to tell you the problems that we have to solve and I want you to tell me what you think…I want you to come back in a day…whatever it takes for you to get your head around it — tell me how you’re going to solve it.”
Find a SportTechie meet-up near you!
Jon Marshalla is COO of NoSweat. The company makes disposable liners inside hats and helmets to absorb sweat:
“There’s a big tendency to want to do everything yourself…One thing you can’t overspend on is the professional services [like accountants and attorneys].”
Tyrre Burks is the CEO of Player’s Health, a web platform designed to allow coaches to document and track injuries. It’s currently targeted at the youth sports market:
“I need to understand that my first hypothesis on what I think a product or any idea is going to be in the marketplace is not the end-all-be-all. When it has to shift, I should embrace it as opposed to trying to stay on the same path. Most people, including investors, don’t like to head in a different direction… [the market] never reacts the way you thought.”
