- Sean's unique journey from balancing sports and computer science at Tufts University to building a real-time marketplace for boat slips taught him the importance of customer feedback in product development.
- NoteMeal's focus on empowering sports dietitians rather than athletes themselves led to its successful integration with Teamworks, facilitating more efficient nutrition management for high-performance teams.
- Teamworks' go-to-market strategy expanded beyond sports into the US and international military spaces, leveraging shared expertise between the athletic and tactical performance sectors.
- Teamworks successfully expanded internationally by hiring local practitioners with domain expertise to lead regional sales, adapting their strategies to different cultural contexts.
- Sean emphasized the need for preventative healthcare, advocating for a holistic human performance approach similar to that used in elite sports to improve overall wellness and reduce the burden on the healthcare system.
In this podcast with Kyriakos the CEO of Terra, Sean Harrington shares his journey from balancing sports and computer science at Tufts University to founding NoteMeal. Sean discusses the idea behind NoteMeal, its focus on helping sports dietitians rather than athletes, and its eventual integration into Teamworks, leading to significant product evolution and market expansion, including into military applications.
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Joining the New England Patriots
Kyriakos: So Sean, it's pleasure to see you. I wanted to do this discussion for a while now. You're leading one of the most exciting teams out there with Teamworks. But let's just start with the prehistory. What have you been doing beforehand?
Sean: Yeah, first off, Kiriakos, it's great to be on here. But yeah, I was a Tufts University undergrad, played football and baseball and studied computer science. So I think I was this weird mix. I was probably the only guy in the engineering building that was wearing his football thigh pads to computer science lab just so I can make it out to practice on time. was balancing sports and engineering is kind of a metaphor for the next 10 years. I graduated in 2014 and tried starting a bunch of companies.
Actually worked on a unique product in the transportation space, trying to build a real-time marketplace for boat slips. Long story short, felt totally flat in my face there. Never made a dollar, but built a pretty cool product. So quickly, the lesson is, building a product in a vacuum and you don't talk to customers is not a recipe for success. So, you know, I dusted the knees off.
From that, got an opportunity to go work at Google and a joke that my tenure at Google lasted for about a day. The day after I took the job, my football coach at Tufts called me up and he said, the New England Patriots are looking for a scouting analyst. I go do the interview with the Patriots and the interview process was really interesting. They were showing me game film of guys playing football. And I was like the whole time in the back of my head, like, you know, I want to go write code. I want to build software. So I get to kind of the end of that and I said, “Bill, first of all, I appreciate all the time here. This has been great. I got to be up front with you. I don't want to be a scout. I don't want to work in personnel or scouting.” And he kind of looked at me and smirked and he said, that's okay. We don't want you to be a scout. I just wanted to make sure you knew football because we want to bring you in. We want you to build the software team here. So, I ripped the Google job up in a nice manner that the recruiter was not happy. I took the job of the Patriots, took a big pay cut, took a bit of an entrepreneurial journey to go start the team building software for Patriots.
I was there for about four years, from 2015 to 2019. And through that stretch, we were fortunate enough to play in three Super Bowls. And I was the guy in the back of the building. In my room with the lights off, writing code all day, we had a five person team and we were building applications for the personnel department really to objectively evaluate talent.
The Light Bulb Moment that Started Notemeal: Focusing on Sports Dietitians Instead of Athletes
Kyriakos: Super. Then after your journey with Patriots, I believe you started your own business. How did you get the idea for it?
Sean: Yeah, so that's a great question. While we were with the Patriots, we got really good at taking objective player data, like broad jumper, vertical jumper, horizontal jump, 40 yard dash, taking that data and building a logistic regression model to predict whether or not those players were going to make rosters and if they were going to play in games. And you can do a lot with that. You could sort guys based off of their athleticism.
We wanted to go look at this performance data and look at what was being prescribed to athletes and talked a lot with strength and conditioning and what tools are reasonable workouts. Going to talk to our dietitian at the time, Ted Harper. And I asked Ted for a meal plan and he, you know, he calmly got out his notebook and a pencil and he started writing out some stuff on paper and I was like, “man, is that really how you're doing that?” He's like, “yeah”. And that was kind of the so-called light bulb moment where I was like, “man, we just won a Superbowl, and our dietitian who's one of the best, if not the best at his job, in his trade, in his industry, and also a great friend of mine who's giving me his honest take on the best way to build a meal plan is using a pencil and a piece of paper”. So I'm like, my God, you put the computer science hat on, the product hat on, and you're like, man, there's something to go solve here. So from that point forward, I set out and I just tried talking.
So I got on the phone, I called 50 dieticians across the collegiate, professional, and military in the US and I said, hey, what are your top three problems? And through those 50 calls, it's very evident that dieticians don't like building meal plans because they take way too long despite them being really effective. Two months into that process, I had enough conviction where I decided to leave the team. April of 2019 we founded NoteMeal with the focus of building a software platform to allow dietitians, sports dietitians specifically, to build meal plans and educational content for players.
Kyriakos: So why did you focus at the beginning on sports dietitians and not the players themselves? Because usually, the approach that everybody would be doing would be exactly the opposite.
Sean: Yeah. I think a lot of folks take that approach, especially in the elite athletic space, because they know that the value is created in athletics, the value is created by the athlete. They are the source of the entertainment and the performance. Everything else in that market is capturing the value created by the athlete.
So naturally it'd make the most sense to go, ‘hey, we're gonna go build a nutrition app for NFL athletes’, right? What I had seen in the context I had been operating on was, ‘hey, these athletes are actually surrounded with a team of performance specialist. And their job is to optimize the athlete’, right? It's the only market in the world where you've got 10 to 15, if not 20 full-time specialists working to get you to perform better. So instead of attacking the athlete, we said, let's go attack the practitioner, augment their ability to influence the athlete and let's focus on them as the persona and build software to make them more efficient.
Back to putting the product hat on, B2C software is like B2B software on hard mode, right? It's much harder. But B2B software, you can talk to fewer end users, you can get more signal. There are bigger contracts you can go get with the organizations and it's a different sales motion. And I think I got a little lucky picking that direction.
But looking back, it was most certainly the right one. But it's a really good question because I see a lot of folks go after the athlete when they're starting to build a company. Not knowing that there's not enough of a market in elite athletics to sell directly to the athlete. There's not enough market to build, especially not a venture business, right? You could do a lifestyle business selling to elite athletes, but the market's really small. And you're going to have to go down market eventually. So it's just an interesting observation.
Seamless Integration of NoteMeal to Teamworks Acquisition
Kyriakos: Super, super. And what would you say was the product journey all the way to the Teamworks acquisition? How did it change?
Sean: Yeah, it was funny because I'll never forget it. Actually, while I was in the Patriots working for the team, before NoteMeal, Teamworks actually came and they demo-ed us. I had a note in my notepad before I even had the NoteMeal idea about if I want to do something in the elite sports space, it'd probably make a ton of sense to do some integration with Teamworks because it feels like they've got the single point of truth for the roster and the roster has the users.
So part of this transition and part of the way we underwrote the deal was like, man, if we could get our NoteMill users, right, just tied in with Teamworks users, that would allow us to take the Teamworks, the schedule information, right, because Teamworks is hosting all these calendars of these high performers, right? And their days are stacked, man. These guys are so busy that sometimes they can't find time to eat. So we said, Hey, let's take the calendars from Teamworks. Let's take the meal plan functionality and nutrition. Let's stitch the users together and let's help those dieticians find time on the athletes calendar so they can give pointed recommendations of when they should actually eat. So we underwrote the whole deal from a product strategy perspective with that focus integration in mind. So that was the first thing we attacked and went to market with it pretty hard.
Kyriakos: Super. But now you join an operating system when it comes to sports. So one of the things I'm very interested to hear is how did the products evolve over time? What kind of products do you have at Teamworks? And historically, how did they evolve? And how does discovery work when you have so many products?
Sean: Yeah, man. It's a good question. We went through the acquisition three years ago, we had three products. We had Teamwork's hub. We had Influencer, now Teamwork's branding in NIL. And we had NoteMeal, now Teamwork's nutrition. So those are the three products. That was just about three years ago.
Today, we've got 16 products. We've gotten so good at building relationships and integrating products together. We're just gonna keep doing that. The way you have to approach this is like, it becomes an org chart problem. We basically got a squad for each product. You got 400 people in the company, how do you optimally staff 16 product squads. Where some products are doing eight figures of revenue and some products are only doing seven figures of revenue, it's making sure we have directly responsible individuals. And we've got such great people in the product work here. The context is really key to building software here. So yeah, the discovery process across those 16 products, a lot of those products have different end users, right? So, for instance, we're building a strength and conditioning product right now, and we've got a big community of S &C coaches that we've engaged over the last six months. We've got the beta rolled out with 10 of them, and there's a product manager, Dan Duffield, is doing a great job just working closely with that to get that product dialed in and doing that independent of the rest of the company. That's Duff's project to get product market fit. That product graduates, moves into the go-to-market engine, and then we get as many hands on there as possible and we spread the value. So that's essentially how we're approaching it. It's a decentralized product structure across each product, but everything's laddering up to the same. We're leveraging OKRs and we're leveraging kind of best practices on that front.
Expanding Horizons: Insights from Sports to Military in Go-To Market Strategies
Kyriakos: Yeah, so this brings me another two questions. The first is, what learnings did you get from the go-to market? Because I've seen over time that you expanded outside of sports as well, you went to the military. So what can we learn from that?
Sean: Yeah, it's a good question. I think on the go-to-market side and the different markets we work with, we've been talking a lot about sports, about collegiate and professional sports, not just in North America, but also in EMEA, in APAC. We're growing globally now, which brings its own set of new challenges on the focus side and the site reliability side. It's been really fun to attack. The one area we haven't talked a ton about yet is the US military space, and quite frankly, the international military space, right? And we've done a ton of work there because when you define a market, how do you define a market, right? I think Bill Allett says this best in his book, right? A market really can be defined by an employee leaving one job and taking the same job at another entity that exists in a different industry. And that's the reality between the elite athletic space and the U .S. military and tactical spaces. You see a ton of these practitioners who are running performance departments. In the NFL, they'll leave and they'll go take a job with special operations command as a head of human performance or as a dietitian and vice versa, right? And because that's happening, that is defining a market. So what happened to us is, when we started in collegiate and the NFL, we were naturally introduced to folks in the tactical space because folks have worked together.
Rob Skinner worked for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. He was leading lead dietician for combat sports there, and he goes takes a job within Socom, brings the product with because he saw the impact it had with his folks, his boxers, and he said, “hey, let's use this thing with some of the special operators”. So that's been really, really exciting and fun. And man, if you think the professional and the collegiate athletes are performing at a high level, the stuff that they're doing and the level of investment and care and impact that performance has in that space is just, it's totally unrivaled. You're talking about 35, 40 year olds who are operating at an age of 20. Every time I think about it or see it or work with these guys, it just blows me away.
And one of the things we're trying to solve here is, unfortunately, as you guys know, in the government space, the DOD space, it is harder to work there. There's a certain, there's a level of bureaucracy and the security is there for good reason, right? I think what we're hoping to see, and we've had some great conversations with some of our representatives on the Hill about this. We really need to see a global policy across the DoD for how units, how military units can acquire wearable technology and software. And you're starting to see this with the US government partnering with Palantir on the FedStar program. You're starting to see reps from the DoD come out and state publicly that they know that it's been really hard to develop software for the DoD. And they know that we are falling behind other countries when it comes to our ability to innovate because of that, right? So there is an imperative call to action to make that easier without sacrificing any of the security or due diligence. So it's really exciting to see that movement start to happen and to support it.
Building a Global Sales Team and Navigating Cultural Differences"
Kyriakos: Super. I wanted to ask you two last questions. You mentioned about expansion into other continents as well. I wonder, how do you build the sales organization internally when you have the US teams and the military, then teams in Europe, for example. So what can founders and executives learn from you from this?
Sean: Yeah, it's great. It's good question, man. I think the short answer is, one thing we've done a great job of is finding folks in the go-to-market departments that have had experience as practitioners and oftentimes are former users of the software that we've rolled out.
You know, in doing so we bring the inherent context into the sales process. We also don't always hire, you know, like career sales professionals, right? We've taken a unique approach here and brought in practitioners and coached the right people to take on sales leadership roles with the context and the domain expertise. Not only in that sport or in that department, but also in that region.
We are 100 % global. We are remote first. We do have an office in Durham, Ireland, Colorado, and Australia. Number of different footprints. But again, because we're remote, when we talk about APAC expansion, Simon leads up our APAC territory as the general manager and he's boots on the ground in Australia because that's probably the right way to do. He understands that space better than me, or better than anybody that has grown up in the US and doesn't understand the culture. Gareth, who came over from the Congress acquisition, is currently leading the EMEA go-to-market team as the territory GM. When you look at it there are just cultural differences between the US and some of the UK, between the UK and France, between France and Ireland, right?
Having someone who's closer to those cultural differences is great. It's funny. Like we talk about the U .S. compared to somebody else, like the Australians. And in the U .S. we're much more aggressive with the sales motion and the buyers are much more used to the aggressive sales process and the constant consumerism and being hit with ads all day. If you try to run that play Australia, people are like, why are you jamming this thing down my throat, man? Like, why don't we have a beer first? Chat about it first. It's been fun. It's just more efficient to find people that understand the region, understand the domain and have them lead the go-to-market motion.
A Hundred Years in the Future of Human Performance
Kyriakos: I always ask guests this last question. If you were looking backwards from 100 years in the future, what would you say is really wrong in the space of sports?
Sean: Can I broaden that to what's wrong in the human performance space?
Kyriakos: Yeah, of course.
Sean: I think what's right in sports is that you have a team, right? A cross-functional, multidisciplinary team that is responsible for taking care of the athletes that are invested in their overall wellness, and are ultimately focused on getting them to perform at a high level. And that's what's right about sports. What's wrong about the general consumer population is that we don't have access to that.
I think my biggest personal gripe is that primary care is broken, the healthcare system is broken, and medical schools in the medical system, in the US and many other countries are incentivizing folks, medical doctors to take on specialty roles. Clearly there was a need for that, and the market solved it. So we've got these high-paid specialists, right? It is really hard to get up to find a primary care doctor. But when you get a primary care doctor, oftentimes, you're going to see a primary care doctor when it's already too late, when you're already subject to the downstream effects of not taking care of your metabolic health. And to stay metabolically healthy, you're basically doing all the things that these athletes are doing. It's just so simple, right? And there's not enough education, there's not enough significance or emphasis put on preventative medicine. All that is, is you sleep good, you're active, you don't eat too much, you eat within reason. You spend time with your friends. You spend time with your family. You don't stress yourself out too much. And if you do those things right, you're never going to see a specialist, right? You're going to take care your own health. So I would love to see the world start to, start to embody how athletes are treating human performance and just have that brought and trickled down into the general consumer population.
And maybe the answer there, like maybe the answer there is to leverage the athletes as role models to get consumers to wake up to the fact that by making these very simple decisions and choices earlier in their lives. That they can do things like Peter Atiyah talks about, right? Where you can pick up your grandkids when you're 80. Or you can avoid diabetes and pre-diabetic states when you're 65. And you're still able to cognitively process things when you're 90. It's not just the health span. It's not just the lifespan, it's the health span. I think the world would be a much happier place. We'd all be more efficient and spend way less money on the downstream effects of not taking care of our bodies if we were to adopt this holistic human performance mentality out the gate. So that's my opinion, we just got to figure out how to make that happen.