Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Mark J Bernstein. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this station, its management or Beasley Media Group. Entrepreneur, founder, author and financial advisor, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners turn their visions into reality. Through his innovative work and the Forward Focus Forums, Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. His forums Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join Marc and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights and a little fun. Now let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein: 0:41

Good morning America. How are you? I'm laughing because we're doing video today and I'm getting used to technology. I was running around the studio trying to get everything done at the last second, but with no further ado, I'm going to do what I don't usually do and introduce our guest first today, because it will also introduce the topic of the day. So Michael Eckstein is founder and CEO of Vector Sports Science and the Topaz Group and for over 40 plus years he's had leadership roles in IT strategic planning and technology. Business that's a big theme on our show, especially IT and technology has been big on this show Business development for businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies. He's had past positions that included CEO of the technology subsidiary of PA Blue Shield it's a big job the senior US software executive for the state of Israel, and many more. In 2013, he founded Kina Trax. Did I say that right?

Michael Eckstein: 1:47

KinaTrax.

Marc Bernstein: 1:47

KinaTrax, a markerless motion capture technology platform to capture and analyze Major League Baseball pitchers during in-game performance, and it's now in use in 33 Major League Baseball stadiums. So we're going to get to talk about that a little bit. So good morning, Michael.

Michael Eckstein: 2:06

Good morning, Marc. Thank you for having me.

Marc Bernstein: 2:08

My pleasure and the reason that I wanted to introduce Michael first is that the topic of the day is going to be sports and how it can impact people in their careers and leadership, which seems kind of self-evident, but we happened to be having this conversation in my office over the last day or two and it was perfect timing that Michael's here today. So, Michael, your thoughts on that? How did it influence you and how can it influence young people sports in terms of being a leader in business down the road?

Michael Eckstein: 2:41

Well, Marc, clearly, sports has the ability to basically focus your mind, focus your energy to, in fact, a goal. There are different types of sports, of course. There are team sports basketball, baseball, football, hockey, rugby, whatever and there are also individual sports. There are tennis, golf and, clearly, when you are involved in sports, when you are training in sports, when you are looking to improve your skills in sports, it takes focus, and every athlete will tell you that focus and understanding what the objective is to get better is key. That can be translated then into business understanding how to succeed through goals and objectives in the business world.

Marc Bernstein: 3:39

That's wonderful. I want to bring another dimension into this. Tell me specifically. First, how did that impact you? How did you see that affecting your future business career?

Michael Eckstein: 3:50

Well, I have my degrees. I have my undergraduate degree from Drexel as well as my MBA, and I first started in the corporate world and understood very quickly that there are chains of command, there are rules, there are guidelines, there are different types of expectations when you are on the job. The question is how did I break away? Well, there was a time in my career where I understood and I looked at different opportunities. And again, going back to the health care insurance drug discovery area, when I was at Pennsylvania Blue Shield, I saw that there were different opportunities. I thought there were areas that were not being addressed and at that point in time I broke away and I started my own consulting company. So, to your point, sports enabled me to have the discipline, to have the focus, to understand what was needed as I started up my own efforts.

Marc Bernstein: 4:59

Excellent. So another thing that I happen to know before we really dig into your story that influenced you also was the fact that you went to military school and then served in the military.

Michael Eckstein: 5:12

That's correct. Because of a family situation, my mom passed away at a very early age and I was enrolled in Bordentown Military Institute no longer in existence, but I was there for grades 8 through 12, a very impactful time in everybody's life and after those five years, spent four years in the Air Force. So for four years, you understand the responsibilities, the goals, objectives, the chains of command, what needs to happen, plan your work, work your plan. Being in the Air Force, you understand that not always things go well, so you actually have to be adaptive. There are weather issues, there are equipment issues.

Michael Eckstein: 6:06

So, looking at the Air Force, military school, my military experiences together with sports, I am incredibly fortunate enough to look at things in a very, very analytical way, in a very organized way. Put together logic as to at things in a very, very analytical way, in a very organized way. Put together logic as to how things need to proceed. And, of course, in business, how do you get product to the marketplace, what is your pricing model, how you take market share, and those are the things in my background that helped me in my entrepreneurial life.

Marc Bernstein: 6:46

So planning an organization. But I detect something else as well. You mentioned chain of command. So out of the military, I believe you went to big corporation jobs for a long time before you became an entrepreneur.

Michael Eckstein: 6:59

That's correct. My first job was with a company called Oxerain, which was a joint venture between Atlantic Ridgefield and Halcon International. It was up in Princeton, new Jersey, and commuted from Philadelphia daily, from Princeton to Philly to Princeton and back, from Philly to Princeton and back and, yeah, from there all the way through and including 1996, 1998, so for a period of four years I actually had this large corporation environment that I was working in, that I was progressing in, that I was being a part of and learning how the decision-making process takes place, depending upon the corporation sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but, yes, had the experience in the large corporate world. That gave me a lot of insight when I started my own companies.

Marc Bernstein: 8:04

So it looks like a very logical progression here. Sports to military Military helped prepare you for the corporate world, and the corporate world helped prepare you for entrepreneurialism.

Michael Eckstein: 8:16

You know, Marc, I never thought of it that way, but wow, very insightful.

Marc Bernstein: 8:22

That's one of the cool things of doing the show and telling your story to somebody else. I know I learn things when I have to tell my own story. So let's talk about that a little bit, about your career path, anything you want to say up until when you got into Vector Sports Science, and then we'll talk a little bit about Topaz Group as well.

Michael Eckstein: 8:42

Sure, absolutely so. It was interesting because when I left Blue Cross, blue Shield and started my own company, I knew and understood different types of requirements and needs that life science and pharmaceutical companies had specifically in the area of clinical trials and went into the area of very specifically identifying clinical trials at our recruitment sites and working with those clinical trials sites and the pharmaceutical companies having to do with the legal documents when you recruited different types of subjects for clinical trials. My client base included Merck, pfizer, lilly, bristol-myers, squibb, and I was incredibly fortunate to have a very good portfolio of clients. Something that has stuck with me, Marc, for a long, long time, is that in the 1980s, 1970s, there was a coach for the Dallas Cowboys, tom Landry. Sure, and not a lot of people knew this, but Tom was in fact a ordained preacher, he was a minister. I didn't know that and I was listening to him give a presentation during a pharmaceutical or some kind of a life science convention and he has said something that has stuck with me for almost 40 years and what he said was and what he said was life is not an undefeated season. And that is very insightful because all of us everybody listening to this program knows that there are ups and downs in life.

Michael Eckstein: 10:46

So here I was, into the early 2000s I had a wonderful and very productive and very profitable consulting practice in the area of clinical trials and suddenly we had a very tragic and catastrophic event in our family. That was a medical event and it was very, very tragic. I won't go into the details but, being who I am, I was devastated, given the fact that I was in this industry medical, healthcare, pharmaceutical and I could not help correct, fix the problem, which unfortunately came out to be a tragic end. And what happened is that and I'll be the first one to admit this I kind of meandered and wallowed and really couldn't find my bearings for at least a year and a half two years, my bearings for at least a year and a half two years. Emotionally, I was very, very, you know, confused. I don't want to give the impression here that I was, you know, off the grid or whatever. I just had a lot of baggage going on with me at that point in time, looking for a new way, whatever, through a sequence of events and life is wonderful and the universe knows how to do things.

Michael Eckstein: 12:17

I was at lunch and my seatmate next to me at a presentation was a front office executive of the Philadelphia Phillies and we got to talking amazing, individual, close friend to this day, and he said you know something, what we'd like to do, Michael? You have a technology background and, Michael, what we would like to do is we would like to bring the social media platforms of Instagram, facebook and Twitter all together and when people come to Citizens Bank Park for a game, we would like that to be displayed on the Jumbotron or on an image or a platform. So I worked with the Phillies on that and it was very enjoyable. Being a hometown boy, love the Phillies, they're my team, okay.

Marc Bernstein: 13:12

But what happened? Go Phillies, love the Phillies.

Michael Eckstein: 13:13

They're my team. Go Phillies, go Phillies.

Marc Bernstein: 13:15

But this was about social media posting nothing to do with statistics. Absolutely nothing. Right got it. Absolutely nothing.

Michael Eckstein: 13:21

Got it. Okay. What happened? If you look at 2012, we have a two-time All-Star pitcher, roy Halladay, who went on to become a Hall of Fame inductee Doc Doc Halladay and he was basically having aaday start the season with a 4-6 or a 4-8 record, with an ERA over 8? I remember that well. The vibe was he was having lights-out bullpen sessions, but when he got on the mound, something happened and we don't know what it was. The manager at the time was Ruben Amaro, the pitching coach was Rick Duby Excellent baseball executives but what really was needed at that point in time was a way to see when he was pitching in game. How do you look at what's called the kinetic chain? His arm slot, his hip rotation, his knee lift, his stride length, his trunk tilt.

Michael Eckstein: 14:42

Took me about a year to devise the Kinetrack system and to create a technology platform that in a baseball stadium, you now have six or eight different cameras around the stadium that are all focused on the pitcher's mount. Why do you need six or eight cameras? Because you have something called occlusion. If you don't have a camera on the first base side, you're not going to see what's happening with the left-hander. You're trying to see the whole body in action. Exactly correct, exactly correct. So I went to spring training and I saw a number of different teams and I needed one team to in fact say come into our stadium, we'll be the individuals to help you do a proof of concept. And that team was the New York Mets and great individual there that helped us from baseball operations, adam Fisher, and we went into the New York Mets stadium on June, the 12th 2015.

Marc Bernstein: 16:05

And that's when it began.

Michael Eckstein: 16:07

That's when it began.

Marc Bernstein: 16:08

Excellent, excellent time to take a quick commercial break and we'll be back in one minute with Founders Forum.

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Marc Bernstein: 16:58

We're back on Founders Forum and we're with our guest, Michael Eckstein, and Michael just talked about kind of an amazing story as to how he got involved on a consulting level, kind of looking at the dynamics of pitchers in Major League Baseball. So you started your job with the New York Mets.

Michael Eckstein: 17:20

Yep, so here we are in Citi Field. Yep, so here we are in Citi Field. And over the past year I connected with this individual who was helping write the code and we had a proof of concept.

Marc Bernstein: 17:50

Get there eight o'clock in the morning and we start putting cameras and tripods and cabling and servers all over Citi Field. Baseball stadiums are a huge, huge structure. I should have had you set up our video this morning.

Michael Eckstein: 17:55

You're much better at that. So we are running all over, okay, and got there at 8 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the afternoon. We are finally ready to look at the synchronized videos of the pitcher, see what happens. The pitching coach said this is what I want to do and at the end of the day we were successful. So, being very, very ecstatic, okay.

Michael Eckstein: 18:19

Going to the different teams, I said I need the first team, number one team, to in fact be my first adopter. And I said to them we'll write in the contract that A, I will sell this technology to no other team in your division for three years. Number two I will give you some incredible first adopter pricing. Three, I will actually ask you to allow different teams to take a tour of your stadium and if I make a sale, I'll give you a percentage of that sale. Pretty good deal, yeah. So I'm talking to the teams and the teams that raised their hand. The first team was the Tampa Bay Rays. At that point in time, joe Madden was the coach and Andrew Friedman was from the from the Rays, who is now, you know, the brain running, the brain trust for the Dodgers, and he said yeah, we'll basically try it. So the Tampa Bay Rays was the first installation, followed quickly by the Dodgers.

Marc Bernstein: 19:32

Hang on a second. So Tampa Bay Rays, this was what year 2015. And when did Joe Maddon win the World Series with?

Michael Eckstein: 19:40

them. I'm getting to that, sir. Okay, all right. So what happened was Tampa Bay Rays 2015, followed quickly by contracts with the LA Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs, and lightning struck in 2016. Joe Maddon is now the manager and the coach of the Cubs, and the Cubs win the World Series. Okay, so clearly this is incredibly validated. Lots of good things happening, lots of energy, lots of vibes.

Marc Bernstein: 20:16

By the way, I imagine Joe Maddon had something to do with bringing you on to the Cubs.

Michael Eckstein: 20:19

I would think. I would think yes, absolutely. And at that point in time, theo epstein, uh, who came over from the red socks right, a very innovative um owner of the cubs. So again, um, it was the perfect confluence of a lot of very positive things happening um he's still in baseball?

Marc Bernstein: 20:40

yeah, he is still. Yeah, absolutely not general, not a president, no, I.

Michael Eckstein: 20:45

I don't know exactly what's going on.

Marc Bernstein: 20:49

He had a remarkable, pretty quick career.

Michael Eckstein: 20:52

He had a remarkable career, theo, very innovative. You know, the Red Sox broke the curse. He came over to the Cubs. The Cubs broke the curse.

Marc Bernstein: 21:03

You can't do much better than that in baseball. Exactly Pretty amazing.

Michael Eckstein: 21:06

So what happened was 2016, 2017, turned out there were a lot of things happening within technology and it was a time, at that point in time, that started to look at other applications for the technology. Yes, that started to look at other applications for the technology. Yes, I get a call from CBS Sports and the next thing I knew we are doing this for the Masters. I get a call from Microsoft because, at this point in time, the cloud service we're using is AWS, amazon. Microsoft said bring the cameras, bring the analytics, come down to Indian Wells and we're going to have a demo reel with Cocoa Gov. So we have a demo reel with Cocoa Gov.

Michael Eckstein: 22:04

During this time, I am no longer part of Kinetrax. I am no longer doing these sorts of things. Did you sell Kinetrax? Yeah, for that company that I started, okay, but instead there are an incredible amount of new companies that are coming onto the stage great engineers, great software developers and my primary skill there is the area of, again, business development, marketing, strategic planning.

Michael Eckstein: 22:30

So a huge thing happened that we can talk about in 2022. What happened in 2022 is that there was a change in the technology, and the change in the technology Marc is that prior, you had to spend $175,000, $180,000 for all of these cameras, for the servers, for the cabling, for the chipsets. What happened was the AI algorithms that you do the calculations with started to get baked into the silicon chips, and what this means now is you don't need $175,000 to get into and understand sports performance. You can now do this with an iPad because you now have this technology that is called inverse kinetics inverse kinematics that you have the ability to take a 2D image and now convert it to 3D XYZ coordinates. I know that sounds heavy and techie, but what that means is, with, in fact, an iPhone, with, in fact, an iPad, you now have the ability to do with a little league, a high school, a college. You have the ability to do this and have the same basic foundation of sports analytics and motion capture that you see in major league baseball stadiums.

Marc Bernstein: 24:06

By the way, you and I might find ourselves on the golf course soon. We met through a mutual golf friend right? Maybe we can try this out. Absolutely.

Michael Eckstein: 24:14

The answer is absolutely yes.

Marc Bernstein: 24:16

Pretty cool, okay cool, so keep going.

Michael Eckstein: 24:20

That is where the marketplace is today. You know, I look back and so many of the things.

Marc Bernstein: 24:27

So is that Topaz Group? Is that?

Michael Eckstein: 24:29

Yeah, and that actually does business under Vector Sports Science. Nobody could really relate to the Topaz Group being part of the sports industry. So I have a DBA which is called Vector Sports Science and working with different leagues and different teams and different athletes and bringing the technology together, it's a very exciting time right now.

Marc Bernstein: 24:57

So we don't have a lot of time. We have about three minutes left, but we and time goes fast on this, sure, it always does so a question for you. I mean, you're not a young man like I'm not a young man, no, no, right, but you still have a lot in front of you. It seems to me there's still a lot you want to do.

Michael Eckstein: 25:14

Well, you know I'll be realistic. I'm in the fourth quarter.

Marc Bernstein: 25:17

Okay, well, that's fair, Okay, challenge.

Michael Eckstein: 25:21

Right now, and in addition to doing the work I do and working with these teams and technology companies, I have to start thinking about a succession plan, and what I am doing is I am starting to work with and interview and collaborate with different companies, different organizations where I can consult, teach, advise and mentor and over the next I don't know year or two years, if you say to me Michael, you know what does the future look like. That's an important part of what I'm doing, Mark to, in fact, work with individuals, identify individuals that I can mentor and can continue the work that I am doing.

Marc Bernstein: 26:11

So really I was going to ask you about your future vision. It's really to figure out how to continue your work, but to get there you're mentoring, advising, consulting.

Michael Eckstein: 26:20

That's exactly correct and I find that incredibly fulfilling. I mean, people say to me Michael, you don't have to work. I mean you've been blessed, you've been very, very, you know, well compensated. To which I answer there are only so many fish you can catch and only so many golf balls you can hit. Right, exactly.

Marc Bernstein: 26:43

My sentiments exactly. I'm with you.

Michael Eckstein: 26:46

So nothing gives me more satisfaction than waking up in the morning and have Zoom calls conversations here in the United States, overseas, with young, energetic, incredibly bright people that are able and willing and have the passion for sports analytics that I have.

Marc Bernstein: 27:06

So we do have less than a minute. I have one last question for you what's the most important piece of advice you have for entrepreneurs that are launching new companies, of which we have many on the show?

Michael Eckstein: 27:17

Yep, very simple. Churchill said it Don't quit. Okay, there will be a number of people that are naysayers, you will have people yelling from the cheap seats, you will have individuals giving you their opinion. But get your facts right. Put together an excellent plan and put together a path forward that, in fact, can validate your vision and give you the satisfaction that you need.

Marc Bernstein: 27:45

Well said, Great story, Michael.

Announcer: 27:47

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