In this episode, Anderson talks with Ryan Resch, Principal of Operations at Shore Capital Partners. Ryan spent over a decade in basketball, from student manager at Baylor to Chief of Staff with the Phoenix Suns, before joining Shore nine months ago. He shares how first-principle problem-solving became the common thread across every career he has built, why the shift from the zero-sum world of professional sports to private equity changes how teams operate, and how that same builder mindset now drives Shore's internal AI enablement efforts. Ryan also discusses why AI is a platform-level shift, not just an operational initiative, and what it takes to build something transformational from the ground up.

Key Takeaways:

• First-principle problem-solving makes skills transferable across industries. Break any challenge into its parts, and the path forward becomes clear.
• AI is not a tool. It is a platform-level shift, and the organizations building AI capability now are building a durable advantage.
• Talent wins games. Coordination wins championships. The real challenge is aligning people, roles, and resources toward a shared mission.
• Focus is a discipline, not a default. In an unbounded environment, saying no to good ideas is what protects your ability to execute on the right ones.

Chapters:

1. 00:00 - Introduction
2. 02:09 - From Baylor to the NBA
3. 06:22 - What Brought Ryan to Shore
4. 10:47 - Building AI Enablement at Shore
5. 18:01 - Operating Systems, Scouting, and Focus
6. 25:17 - What's Ahead

Listen to our podcasts at:

https://www.shorecp.university/podcasts

You’ll also find other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes, alongside our Microcap Moments and Everyday Heroes series—highlighting the people and stories that make the microcap space unique.

Other ways to connect:

Blog: https://www.shorecp.university/blog

Shore University: https://www.shorecp.university/

Shore Capital Partners: https://www.shorecp.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shore-university

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, or a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the “Terms of Use” page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.

Welcome to Bigger.

Stronger.

Faster.

the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion-dollar resources to the lower middle market space.

In this episode, I talk with Ryan Resch, Principal of Operations at Shore Capital Partners.

Those who know Shore know we love a sports metaphor, and Ryan Resch is the human embodiment of the Shore Capital sports metaphor.

Ryan came to Shore after more than a decade in basketball, starting as a political science major, folding towels and cleaning gyms at Baylor University, where he eventually built their analytics department during the height of the Moneyball revolution.

That work ultimately opened a door for an internship opportunity in the National Basketball Association with the Phoenix Suns in their analytics department.

In a few short years, Ryan became Vice President of Basketball Operations and then Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy, helping orchestrate one of the best runs in team history.

In his continued quest to build and to solve what he calls first principle problems, Ryan then made the jump to Shore Capital Partners.

At the heart of his work at Shore is orchestrating the transformation AI is having in all corners of our work and the work of our portfolio companies.

The connection Ryan draws between his work and the world of sports and his transformative efforts at Shore Capital is more than a metaphor.

It's a genuine transformation

To get us started, will you just give us your name and tell us what you do here at Shore?

Yeah, my name's Ryan Resch.

I am the Principal of Operations here at Shore Capital, where I sit within the Office of the CEO, primarily focused on our internal AI enablement efforts right now.

More generally, I kind of move throughout whatever operational initiatives are in the pipeline at the moment, helping take Justin and Jeff's vision and make it a reality.

And this isn't your world.

Correct.

Has, has only been recently your world.

Yes.

For nine months

now.

For, for nine months now-

Yes

… Anderson Williams: This has been your world.

Prior to that, it was sports.

Yes.

Will you talk a little bit about-

Yeah

… Anderson Williams: Your early career prior to coming to Shore?

Yeah, no problem.

My career prior to Shore was in basketball.

I started out as an equipment manager for Baylor men's basketball.

I sent Scott Drew a cold email the summer of 2012 after my sophomore year.

I was a campus tour guide.

And I told him how much I respected his program and what he was building, and he's an incredible person, and he responded that same day and said, "Come be a student manager."

And I had absolutely no idea what that meant.

And I said, "Okay." And I was an equipment manager, so I started folding towels, doing laundry, cleaning the gym on Sunday mornings, which I still often think about how peaceful that was and like to reminisce about those early days.

But, so-

Were you studying analytics at the time?

I mean, you were still in college.

I, yeah.

You were a sophomore in college.

I was studying political science.

So military TA-

So none of this makes any sense, does it?

No, it doesn't at all.

It's all just like we threw some things on the board and this is what worked out.

I was studying political science, and political science has two different schools: a more philosophical, theoretical school, and then a more data-heavy econometric school.

And so I actually grew up on the theoretical side studying constitutional law, executive branch theory, those types of things.

And my junior year in college, took my first stats course focused on campaigns and elections, and that's when I fell in love with data science and what was possible with data.

And I actually left Baylor Head Manager of the basketball team my senior year.

I graduate, and I'm like, "Okay, that was really fun. What a fun hobby that was." And I go get a PhD in political science, but I quit that after a year.

And I realized that I don't really wanna study problems, I wanna solve problems.

Hmm.

And I called up Scott Drew again, and he was there for me again, and he said, "Can you come start my data science program?" And this was right around the time Moneyball was really taking off.

Yeah.

So I like to say I benefited from the Brad Pitt movie.

Yeah.

And I said yes and I went back, and we did it.

We built it all, and they still use a lot of what we did back in 2015, '16 at that time.

And really cool to look back on what we were doing scraping play-by-plays to build lineup box scores because lineup box scores did not exist in college basketball at that time.

And if we had had artificial intelligence then, how much faster we could have done all this.

But no, I'm very fortunate.

And is that sort of how you transitioned to the Suns?

I mean, were you basically- Yeah … had you now found your kinda niche and then the Suns role- Yes … made more sense by that point?

I think that's the way to frame it.

When I went back to college basketball, I kind of told myself there's really only one path out of this, which is to either stay in college basketball or to move up to the NBA level within the data science team of an NBA team.

And I got a summer internship the summer of 2016 with the analytics department doing basic draft and free a- Agency analysis and did that annoying thing where, uh, you stay on as a remote intern, they keep your database access live, and you just keep pushing work, pushing work, pushing work.

They brought me on full time the summer of 2017, and I was very fortunate to start at the same time that James Jones started, who was the former president and GM of the Suns.

And he started as the Vice President of Basketball Operations, which is the role that I would eventually end up in.

And when he became General Manager in 2018, I believe it was, he pulled me out of analytics, made me his Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy, and we kinda were critical to building the Suns throughout the last nine years.

So Shore likes to talk a lot about hiring athletes.

Yeah.

Uh, from poli sci to- Yes … analytics to strategy and so forth.

What is the common thread for you when you look at that?

That seems like three or four different careers in a relatively short amount of time.

Yeah.

What is the common thread there for you and how you're wired and how you think as an athlete, so to speak?

I think for me it comes down to first principle problem-solving more than anything, which is just a core inherent belief that all challenges that we face, all problems that we come up against can be distilled down into their component parts.

Let's chunk them down, and then we're gonna solve for those component parts.

Whether that's trying to figure out how to put the ball in the basket at a greater rate or how to build a team with the supply of available players that are in the market at that time, or how to improve the ability to project the revenue that's coming next month or two months down the line, or how to see whether the KPIs that we're tracking actually relate and correlate to financial performance.

All of these things do share a common first principles through line.

And if you kind of take that problem-solving approach, then skill set does become fairly transferable.

Yeah.

But how did you make the professional shift from the Suns into private equity, into Shore?

It probably seems more sudden on paper than it was in reality.

When Matt and Justin Ishbia, uh, acquired the Suns in February of '23, I met Justin literally mid-Kevin Durant negotiation.

We were in James' office with Brooklyn on the phone, and Justin walks in, introduces himself.

An incredible way to start off a-

That's a moment.

I know.

Incredible way to start off a partnership, huh?

And we got the deal done, too- Yeah … which I'm proud to report.

And Justin was just so generous, and he was so generous with his time and with his knowledge and his wisdom, and I mean that sincerely, where that first summer, July of 2023, he invites me to the Executive Leadership Academy that Shore hosts, Shore's Super Bowl every year.

And I came, and I attended it for those 48 hours, and I was just blown away.

I was blown away by the culture and the environment of learning and problem-solving and just the sheer commitment to being the best in the space and building the best companies possible and winning at everything that we do.

And I left there, I met people who are now coworkers, and they were all so generous with their knowledge.

And they gave me a lot of the Shore materials after that event about management, about operations, about strategic thinking, about resource allocation, about strategy setting.

And those materials kind of formed the backbone for how I led and managed operations and health and performance those final two years at the Suns.

Mm. And seeing the impact of bringing that thought process and those materials to the Phoenix Suns, you know, $4 billion valuation, best team in the NBA by record, coming off of a finals appearance and franchise record-setting win count.

To bring these things in, I thought to myself, "Wow, if I ever have the opportunity to go experience that on a day-to-day and go embed myself with the organization that, you know, provided this knowledge, how much more could I learn?"

And so on paper, it does seem pretty dramatic, but I think in reality- Yeah … there was kind of a slow shift toward it.

Well, it's interesting to hear you even say, like, for a couple of years you had access to Shore- Yeah, yeah … and some of the ways that we do stuff, and you were able to even put some of that into practice- Yeah

with the Suns, and presumably it worked.

And so even in that, you're like, "Okay, there's, there maybe something here." Exactly.

You know?

No, that's exactly it.

Yeah.

And it goes back to the first principles, right?

Yeah.

Which is our job was to build a championship team that could put the ball in the basket more than the opponent.

We have 60-some odd portfolio companies at this point, all with different core jobs.

Yeah.

But these things do translate.

Yeah.

The ability to manage, the ability to operate, the ability to set a vision and a strategy, all of these things do translate from one industry to the next.

Yeah.

So I, you know, listening to this, I imagine I'm not the only one.

I'm thinking, "Okay, here's a young professional who's moved up through the ranks in a r- relatively short period of time with the Phoenix Suns from an intern to assistant GM working in the NBA. 2021, the Suns were in the finals." That sounds kinda like a dream job.

This sounds really exciting.

That seems like something people would dream to be in the position to do.

Talk to me about what you were looking for when you made the move, just personally, because I do think that most people would think, "Well, this is where I'm supposed to be. This is fantastic."

I think at my core I'm a builder.

I love to create, and I was very, very lucky that when James takes over the Suns, it's a 19-win team, it's the absolute worst team in the NBA, historically bad actually, depending on how you looked at the numbers, and we kind of had a blank slate.

And we spent the next, whatever it was, six, seven years building that 19-win team into what then became one of the greatest runs in franchise history.

Like you mentioned, the finals appearance, 64-win franchise record.

From 2020 to 2024, we did have the best record in the NBA, winning 65.7% of our games.

And, you know, as with all things, it's cyclical, and this is just the nature of sports more generally, is you're going to have these rebuild, peak periods, contending periods, and then there is gonna be a downturn, just given the nature of how athletes develop, how teams develop, just the nature of the game.

And when I stepped back from where we were after nine seasons and I realized, okay, I was able to build all the way from the bottom with this incredible group of people, and now the Suns are starting to trend down, you know, I had a full run.

I had a full run at the cycle.

I didn't lose my passion for it, but I did find myself just itching for a new challenge and for a new game to play and a new problem to solve.

And I think that that's really kinda where that kinda itch and that energy came from, to want to take everything that I had learned, take that builder mindset and apply it to something new.

So you came to Shore.

Talk about what you're building here.

I spent the first few months just getting the lay of the land, being inside and just understanding how Shore operates, who we are on a day-to-day basis.

And Justin and the leadership here made a commitment to artificial intelligence early on.

I remember talking about this with Justin back in 2023 when we first met, 'cause GPT-3.5 had just come out, and we were rolling out like a ChatGPT Teams plan across basketball operations in the early days before Enterprise existed.

And when I arrived and I saw that we were building an AI team that was gonna go in and identify problems at the portfolio level and find solutions to fix those problems, it excited me, and I loved how kind of cutting edge and novel the idea was, you know, even a year ago.

And at the same time, the firm was starting to kick around the idea of, you know, how do we bring these tools internally?

How do we equip the firm with these cutting-edge frontier models, these tools that can now just do absolutely incredible things?

Over the last probably few months, it became very clear that this internal AI enablement effort is developing into like a true initiative and like a true function in a way, where, you know, that enablement word is super important because it's-- what it's effectively saying is our goal here is to equip our people with the most advanced technology and tools in a way where they know how to use them, so that they can take it out into their roles, solve their problems, build use cases, and then provide a forum where we can surface those use cases.

And if they scale across the portfolio and across the firm, we can adapt those, design, develop, and deploy the scaled version of those.

And so that's really what I'm focusing on now is building out that internal AI enablement as a true area of the firm and marrying that with what's going on at the portfolio level so that we can really approach artificial intelligence from two directions for value creation, problem identification at the portfolio, go and solve those, drive value upward, and then enablement at the firm level, equip people to use this technology and these tools to solve their problems and challenges, which creates value down to the portfolio companies that we're managing and operating.

When you think about that from the builder perspective, just curious your thoughts on laying the foundation for something like this that isn't just an operational initiative, it's really transformational- Mm-hmm … in almost every way.

Mm-hmm.

It's a platform level shift.

Yeah.

And, you know, we can call it a step change.

I like to call it a platform level shift.

And I say that because very, very rarely in your life are you afforded the opportunity to, you know, experience this kind of platform level shift.

The internet is probably the one that you can point to before that.

And when you talk about those big moments, it requires a builder mindset, I think, because you are coming in and you're starting from the bottom, and now you have to change minds, and you have to influence and persuade people to use these things and show them how it creates value for them in a very specific, tangible way, which is easy if it's one-on-one, but it's harder if it's across a 200-person firm, and then let alone you bring in the portcos to that as well.

And I think that you really, like, you know, again, returning to those shared threads, you have to kinda lean on three things.

The first being, like a relentless commitment to taking the vision of leadership and making it a reality.

And what I mean by that is, if the vision is to make your business or your company AI native, it's one thing to say that.

It's another to then go through the hard work of defining what AI native means, specifically for your company and business, and then what the tactical things that you have to take to then go execute that.

And part of my success in Phoenix, I think, was that it w- there was just this relentless commitment to, okay, our ownership has set the vision for what this team is gonna be, the players that we want, the style of play, how we're gonna acquire guys, how we're gonna treat our assets.

And then we have to go make a scouting system that supports that.

We have to go create a style of play with our coaching staff that supports that.

We have to create a facility environment with your chef team and your security team that supports that, what you're trying to build.

And it's really no different with AI, where it is you need to take a step back and define what is your AI strategy?

If you wanna be AI native, what exactly does that mean?

And then everything around that is about driving that action toward fulfilling it.

The second, again, goes back to that deep commitment to problem-solving, because when you are building from the ground up, you are going to run into a host of problems and challenges that are novel, and they're unique.

They're things that you've never seen before.

And, you know, a really good example of this at the NBA level is after we did trade for Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, we were out of draft picks, we were out of draft assets.

And so we had to take a step back and think to ourselves, "Okay, how do we generate more assets out of nothing?"

And you go, "All right, well what does this sound like?

This kinda sounds like the finance world." And you go, "Okay, how do we create financial products out of our remaining assets?" And with the help of some other teams, we managed to create this very unique structure of layering on- draft pick swaps to acquire outright draft picks.

It's a very complex thing that we don't need to get into, but-

That does sound like finance.

Yeah.

It's, it's, we, we created a financial product- Yeah … out of it by doing that.

But that is the, an example of, like, a novel problem that you're gonna run up against, and, you know, the market doesn't care that you have these problems.

It cares that you can solve them and then keep going until you hit the next one.

And I think the last one is, like, an unrelenting desire to win, and I, I don't mean that in kind of the cliche sense.

I mean that in, you know, you just love to organize and coordinate people and teams and groups toward a shared objective, and then you reach that objective, and then you celebrate it.

Like, we celebrate everything, and that winning creates this unbelievable energy and this unbelievable momentum where the team all of a sudden believes they can do this thing that nobody's done before, like win a championship in Phoenix or completely change the way a company operates using this new technology that we have at our hands.

So when you're dealing with those large platform-level shifts, you really do have to approach it from, I think, those three angles.

Is there an example of a novel problem that you're sort of already wrestling with and facing as you think about implementing this work- Yeah … in this context?

Probably the most novel is just how unique the business model is from company to company to company.

So from an NBA perspective, you have one team and you have one objective, which is, we have three objectives.

We would always say it was win our division, win our conference, win our league.

On a business level, you're trying to manage around all of the different business models and the operating models of those businesses, which means that you have to constantly think to yourself, "What is unique in this case versus what is shared amongst the rest of the companies that you're dealing with?"

It's a very interesting challenge.

And, you know, what that looks like specifically is this Are We Winning framework that Justin introduced to the firm, I think it was a year and a half ago or something before I arrived.

And the premise is simple: What are we measuring today to know if we're gonna win tomorrow?

Again, a very sports-heavy metaphor- … at the same time.

I warned the listeners before.

Um, and it's, you're basically trying to create a scoreboard for a system that doesn't inherently have one, right?

And we can get into a whole conversation around lead and lag measures.

But when you think about, okay, we're setting, we're trying to identify KPIs, lead KPIs that will predict whether or not we're going to win in the future, easy if you're one-on-one with a company.

Hard if you're trying to set this framework and this model across 60-plus companies at the same time, because the KPIs that'll lead to success in healthcare look very different than food and beverage than industrials than business services.

And so that's been a very interesting kind of novel problem that I have not had to face before because we were so focused on one team.

Yeah.

You said something, two things together earlier that I wanted to come back to.

You mentioned having to think through with the Suns how you defined your scouting system- Mm-hmm … and your style of play.

Mm-hmm.

I'm curious how you translate those two to what you see within Shore and in the future- Yeah of Shore, because everything you're doing and developing around AI is, as we talked about, transformative.

It's gonna transform your role and my role in ways- Everyone … that we don't know.

Everyone.

And so just any thoughts on that combination?

I find it really compelling to think about the combination of scouting system and style of play for a Shore Capital Partners.

Yes.

I think if you even zoom out from those two, you're, what we're effectively talking about is building an operating system.

And I'm a computer nerd, obviously, given all the AI data stuff.

And when you load up your computer, Windows or Mac, you're loading up an operating system that tells the computer how it's gonna behave.

In the NBA, part of developing that operating system is what are the types of players that we want to acquire, and how do we wanna play?

And so what are we really talking about there?

We're talking about mission setting and strategy setting, right?

Which are kind of the base level core components of the operating system, which is how is my business going to behave on a day-to-day basis, and what are we trying to achieve out of that?

You have to develop a scouting system around this once you've defined these two things, because you gotta actually go out and get the players to do it, right?

And, you know, if I describe what that scouting environment looks like, imagine, so you have four different buckets you can pull players from, I should say.

The NBA, college basketball, G League, which is the minor league for the NBA, and international.

So four different levers that you can pull there.

Let's say there's roughly 1,000 players total between all of those four buckets.

Free agency starts on July 1.

The draft is right before that in June.

You have one year every year to build a team to win a championship.

Good luck.

Go.

Where do you start to build players?

We-- The league just, uh, approved exploring two expansion teams that are gonna start from ground zero.

Where do you start?

And your scouting system is so critical because you have to define who you are and what you're looking for and how you're going to play so that you can now focus.

All of this is designed to do one thing, which is create focus.

When I ran scouting, I would tell our scouts, like, "Your job is to effectively figure out why we should say no to acquiring this player." And if we can reach a no in a way that is convincing and rational and logical and correct, hopefully, then we can take them off the list, and we can go from a thousand to nine ninety-nine.

And then eventually, by the time we get to player acquisition season, which is February around the trade deadline, June for the draft, July for free agency, the three main periods of time in which you can make moves, you have that list down to ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty guys that you can now go target.

And so you gotta build a system to do that.

And if you generalize what it is that I just laid out from a business context, you can go as granular as saying, "That sounds an awful lot like lead generation and what we should go target with our sales and marketing efforts." If you view it from a talent perspective, you think, "Wow, talent evaluation of players is actually very similar to talent evaluation of employees and who we should hire and how we should build a team and how we should allocate resources."

And so all in all, I think what we're ultimately talking about is building the operating system.

The same way that your MacBook is gonna behave the same way every time, you're trying to do the same thing when you're building these teams or building these companies by defining these operating systems.

As I listen to you, I, I think of it as in three levels as well, is that same metaphor, that scouting and that talent story for us as Shore happens in our evaluation of potential partners.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, there's a scouting element- Absolutely … to that.

Absolutely.

And then the team that Shore builds to support those partners and then how that sort of rolls up into- Mm-hmm the kind of character or personality, so to speak, of the portfolio.

Mm-hmm.

It seems like those are obviously really interdependent- Mm-hmm … but they do seem like three different layers to be thinking about that.

Mm. Because it's the people and the process at different scales, but it is still style of play and, you know, scouting.

And I think you're right on that.

And it's easy to say that the core challenge is talent identification or talent evaluation, and that is hypercritical.

By no means am I saying it's not.

I actually think that the core challenge is the coordination problem that you're solving for, where talent is some component of that, where we are trying to coordinate the people, the roles, and the resources to achieve our mission.

And that is the CEO's job, that is the general manager's job, that is the owner's job.

And you can take that model and apply it on a company level or, like you mentioned, on a portfolio level or on a fund level or on a firm level or on a business operation or a basketball operation.

That mindset of talent, the talent identification challenge is actually a component of a coordination problem.

Because we can build the most talented team.

I can go acquire three, four all-stars and roll out the balls and say go.

But if there's no coordination of those all-stars' roles and the resource allocation of their minutes in the game or the shot distribution in the game, you're not gonna win.

So you can go get a bunch of A players, but if you're not coordinating them, you're gonna fail.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting 'cause just to extend that further, it's like you talked about the Kevin Durant trade.

Mm-hmm.

He's played for a lot of teams at this point.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And he's the same unbelievable player, no matter which team he's played for.

Arguably the greatest scorer of all time.

Yeah.

And so the variable, to your point, isn't just the talent.

Mm-hmm.

It's how the talent connects and coordinates with the system and so forth.

I mean, he is a prime- Yep … example of exactly- Yeah … what you just described.

And a really successful example of this is when we traded for Chris Paul.

So Suns have 19 wins.

The next year is the COVID-shortened season, where we can go to Orlando and play in the bubble, which is a crazy experience, and we go 8 and 0.

We're the darlings of the league, the upstart Suns.

We called ourselves the Startup Suns during those years- … which I'm very proud of.

And Chris Paul asks to come to us, and it takes about two months to get this deal done.

We end up acquiring Chris for one first-round pick and outgoing salary, which is an incredible value proposition to acquire Chris.

And Chris comes and, boy, is he just the absolute perfect match for where we were, for a couple of reasons.

Number one, we had a team of young guys.

We had a team of Devin Booker, Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, Deandre Ayton, Dario Saric, Cam Payne, like a true millennial cohort, younger millennial cohort of players who needed more of like a mentor role model.

You bring in Chris, this whole generation looked up to Chris.

Yeah, for sure.

And so they admired Chris as a player, and now they get to play with him, and he comes in as that commander, but he's such a special leader and a special person that he knows how to use his voice, and he knows how to say, "This is still Devin's team, but I have command of it as well." mm. And it's unbelievable lesson in leadership and management watching that.

Well, and even he in other places, in other contexts and other systems- Mm-hmm.

Did it in Oklahoma City … his voice was not particularly welcome.

Exactly.

The way it was there.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

You know what happened, unfortunately, with him and the Clippers this past season- Yeah, yeah where I am not there, so I can't speak to it in particular, but I can see on paper that they didn't have the generational alignment- Yeah … that we had.

And then the other part of this, too, is, like, back to style of play, where we needed a pick and roll ball handler so that Devin could get off the ball, so that Deandre could screen hard and roll, and somebody could orchestrate that.

And what we ended up creating, like this, you wanna talk about synergies, right?

When two pieces come together- Yeah … two businesses come together.

Yeah.

We ended up creating this machine of mid-range shooting, which is incredible to consider given the Moneyball era that we were in, but we had a hunch that we could exploit the drop coverage, which means the center was very low in pick and roll coverage, giving up that mid-range shot.

Well, we had the two best mid-range shooters in the game, and sure enough, it kinda worked out.

We took that shot all the way to the finals.

Yeah.

That's wild.

So as you've made this transition to Shore, what's been most surprising to you?

Sure.

Uh, and, and maybe I'd also say what stretched you the most as a builder?

I think probably the same answer to both, and I don't know if it's necessarily surprising as it is interestingly unique, is professional sports is the only professionally played zero-sum game in the world, meaning that for every winner there is a loser.

Tonight, when the Suns play, there will be one winner and one loser coming off the court.

For me to have a player, you can't have that player.

That is an inherently zero-sum dynamic.

Mm. And that creates a very unique environment where you're in a league where the aggregate results sum to zero.

Hyper stressful.

It's all public.

It's time bound, and that is such a unique little ecosystem that's created, whereas private equity is non-zero sum.

I can win and you can win.

We can actually partner together.

We can cooperate, which is the dominant strategy there, and then achieve more together than we could have separately.

And this is the first time in my life where I am living in that non-zero sum environment, and the day-to-day does feel different.

It does feel, while there is, like, a real strong sense of urgency and bias to action at Shore because of our culture, it's less of what it was at the Suns in the sense that there's not a game tonight that we have to win to secure our playoff seeding.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Yeah.

And so now I have the lived experience being in both of those worlds, and that to me has been very interesting and surprising to see just human behavior, I think- Yeah and the way that people behave on teams and in environments between those two settings.

It's interesting to think about that as compared to as you were describing it, which I've never thought about, of the relatively speaking, relative limited number of variables- Mm-hmm … that you were looking at in a specific- It was bounded.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To infinite- Exactly … variables.

Yeah.

How do you know where to focus?

And maybe you haven't figured that out yet- Yeah … maybe you have, but, like, coming in from that world, how do you know what to focus on?

I think, you know, to reframe that question, I would say start by focusing.

Like commit to focusing.

And focus is something that I think about a lot, and I adopt the Steve Jobs definition of it, which is focusing is saying no to things that you would otherwise wanna say yes to.

And easier in the NBA where it is bounded, where it is finite, where it's like, "Eh, we have a game tomorrow, we don't really have time to do this.

Let's not do it.

Let's move on." Whereas in this space, it does require more discipline to stay focused. To say, "Hey, that's a great idea, and we're not killing your idea.

We don't have the resources to do it right now, and we're committed to this part of our mission because we believe that'll be the highest leverage point to help us achieve it."

How do you get to that point?

I think this is where data can play a big part, where data science is really ultimately trying to filter out the signal from the noise.

We're trying to figure out what matters more versus what matters less.

Really good example of this that just from this morning, we're working with one of our portfolio companies on their are we winning KPIs, and they have a work order-based model.

And, you know, they missed budget despite beating their volume on work orders.

And this team had the foresight to say, "This could be a little bit of a canary in the coal mine. We probably need to be measuring our mix better than we are. How can we do that with the data that we have?" And we worked with them.

We worked very closely with them, and I have a lot of respect and appreciation for how they handled it.

And we were able to identify specifically within their pipeline, their work order pipeline, which tiers had a massive outsized effect on their revenue variance.

And we found there was one specific area that made up one and a half percent of their volume that had double digit impact on their revenue variance.

And so now the lesson there is we've now used data science to focus on this.

It can't tell you necessarily what to do about it next, but it can tell you your attention should be right here.

And if we wanna figure out what to do about it next, we just gotta ask different questions.

But us getting to that point is such an incredible unlock because now we can spend our time and our attention, our energy and our resources on that.

Well, I love that example because it also reinforces something that's very much core to Shore, is those founders and those partners that we partner with know the game they're playing better than we do.

Yes.

We bring the resources and- Right, right … people like you to the game, but they're the ones that when they bring that question to you, we help them figure it out, but they know in partnership with us how to get to that answer.

And Justin calls it what?

Bringing Fortune 500 resources to small businesses,

right?

Yeah.

I just think it, it's a great example of where the two approaches come together.

Yeah.

You didn't come in and say, "Now I'm suddenly the expert in your business." No.

You came in and said- I just know how the numbers work

"Okay, here's the problem we're trying to, to, to solve. Here's the numbers we have." Right, right.

And ask the right questions.

Yes.

Which is when our partnerships are most successful with our founders and our platforms, that's what it looks like.

I agree.

No, I think that's well said.

So when you think about your experience, past, present, future, what are you most excited about that's on the horizon that you're working on at Shore?

It is this AI stuff.

It is the platform level shift that we're undergoing with artificial intelligence, and it is watching again.

So I kind of had this experience with the Moneyball revolution in sports, where you see it just kind of seep into every nook and cranny of the industry, and we're watching it again.

But it's not just sports, it's the world.

And so it's every day, I'm really lucky that the group of people who have kind of formed this with me are so curious and they're so passionate to find out, oh, this new article just came out, or this update was just released, or, you know, this company said this or this security vulnerability is released 'cause that's a huge component of it as well, which is how are we doing this all securely?

And it's just this unbelievable onslaught of novel challenges like back to that.

And I'm really excited to watch this develop over time because I believe that time with these tools is an inherent advantage.

If you're not using these now, then you are at an extreme disadvantage to the person who's been using it like me since the fall of twenty twenty-two.

I mean, even machine learning back into the twenty tens, which was early AI that we were using.

I think that I'm most interested in watching just how this all unfolds over time, and I think that we have a very, very clear four track plan for how we're doing this internally.

AI security and governance.

So how do we do this securely and safely without sacrificing speed?

AI training, how do we make our people capable?

AI technology development, which is how do we improve our existing AI stack?

So ChatGPT Enterprise, Cloud Enterprise updates, how do we roll these out to people?

And then AI product development, which is what are the tools that we're building with AI to help the firm?

I think that we have a really clear like line of sight there, and if we just continue every single day working on it, then a year from now it'll be absolutely incredible.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger.

Stronger.

Faster.

episodes as well as our Microcap Moments and Everyday Heroes series at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts.

There, you will also find our newest video podcast series, Raw Talent.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with story and narration by Anderson Williams.

Story, recording, and editing by Austin Johnson.

Editing by Reel Audiobooks.

Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Ryan Resch.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC.

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