Ignite Startups: Building SportsVisio and the Future of AI Sports Tech with Jason Syversen | Ep211

Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

Jason Syversen is the founder & CEO of SportsVisio and a former DARPA program manager turned repeat entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He went from hacking Wi-Fi cameras for Special Forces demos to running nine-figure government R&D portfolios—then into startups and sports, with a mission to democratize analytics for everyday athletes.

With deep roots in cyber/defense and a chip-on-the-shoulder upbringing, Jason brings a builder’s pragmatism to AI: recruit elite researchers, solve occlusion-heavy, real-world computer-vision problems, and ship products that work in messy gyms—not just pristine arenas. He’s hardware-agnostic (your phone is the camera), plays the long game on technical moats, and believes unit economics beat hype every time.

In this episode, he talks about the moment a rec-league stat dispute sparked SportsVisio, why leagues (not lone parents) are the right customer, how they turned thousands of labeled games into a compounding advantage, and where this all leads—AI scoreboards, “robo-ref” assist, and near-real-time highlights.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

00:01 From DARPA to the Driveway

03:10 Growing Up with Grit

06:45 Hacking for the Pentagon

11:36 The Spark: A Rec-League Argument

13:34 Building an AI Sports Platform

15:34 The Timing Advantage

18:40 Go-to-Market That Works

20:38 Cameras, Courts, and Chaos

22:20 Scaling Beyond Basketball

24:00 The A-Team Behind the Tech

26:18 The Hardest Problem in Vision

31:26 Learning from Thousands of Games

34:40 The Future: AI Scoreboards and Robo-Refs

37:10 Speed, Cost, and Scale

40:05 Lessons from Building Deep Tech Startups

45:15 What’s Next for SportsVisio

47:40 Closing Reflections

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