SportTechie’s Athletes Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. SportTechie talked to pro football player-turned-investor Ryan Mundy about his transition from the field to the financial and entrepreneurship worlds, including his new company, SWZLE.
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Ryan Mundy played six seasons in the NFL with the Steelers, Giants, and Bears, snaring four interceptions and amassing more than 100 tackles with Chicago in 2014. Even before he missed the 2015 season with a hip injury, Mundy had enrolled in the University of Miami’s Executive MBA program. He finished that degree—his second master’s—in July 2016, the same month he decided to retire from the sport he had played since his youth. Mundy scoured the financial world for guidance about angel investing and venture capital, receiving the advice that he should review at least 200 deals before making any investments.
Mundy now leads his own VC firm, Techlete Ventures, advises numerous companies and nonprofits, including the NFLPA Trust, the blockchain-based Crown League, and the Alzheimer’s Association. He also sits on the Athlete Advisory Board of the NFLPA’s OneTeam Collective.
He operates his own startup, SWZLE, along with cofounder Philip Causgrove. SWZLE’s consumer product is a reusable stainless steel straw that nearly doubled its Kickstarter goal before shipping at the end of last year.
SWZLE
“My business partner with SWZLE came to me with the headline saying plastic straws were going to be banned in Seattle in July, but he had brought this to me in about [December 2017]. I had kind of dismissed it a little bit. I was gung-ho on blockchain and Bitcoin.
“But the idea stuck with me, and I started to see it in different articles and headlines, and I circled back around with them and said, ‘Let’s talk about this more and figure it out.’ We eventually pulled the trigger in July. My involvement is as co-founder and majority owner of the business, but I do a lot of the client-facing stuff, business development, sales, [and] was very instrumental in the product development. I don’t know if we necessarily have swim lanes as far as co-founders—we do pretty much everything and anything as it comes to us—but it’s been a good working relationship.
“The straws are made of stainless steel, and they achieve coloring through a process called electroplating, which is a non-dye technique that is food-safe. Our case is made from recycled PVC, so we were trying to be very conscious about our materials. That’s just the consumer side of the house, but we also have a B2B component where we sell paper straws commercially to different restaurants, hospitality groups, franchises, hospitals, entertainment venues. I’m trying to talk to NFL stadiums. We have a capacity of about 100 million paper straws a month.”
Launching His Own Post-Football Career
“I’ve had probably hundreds of coffee meetings. I think the most interesting one was the one that got me going into venture capital and angel investing. I met with a friend who told me I should think about investing into startups. [He said] ‘Kobe Bryant’s doing it. Steph Curry’s doing it. Kevin Durant’s doing it. You seem like a smart guy. You should do it.’
“That was the spark that I needed to get started. I started Googling stuff, researching, learning, and it snowballed from there. That was literally the catalyst of how I got involved with the venture ecosystem.
“That was around the time I just graduated. I was at this interesting mix of ‘Hey, I just got my MBA in early July. Hey, I’m retiring from the NFL in late July. What do I want to do?’ So it happened really quickly, but I was very aggressive in making sure I wasn’t sitting around not doing anything.”
The Crypto Gold Rush
“I was very active in crypto. I participated in pretty much every investment opportunity or mechanism that you can in crypto. I own hardware and mine coins. I’ve participated in ICOs. I’m an adviser for a few companies. I’ve actually invested in a few projects. Pretty much everything that you can do from a crypto perspective, I’ve done. I’ve traded my own coins. Yeah, I’ve done it all and seen it all. And I’m still here to tell it and to talk about it, which is a good thing.
“I still, long term, believe in crypto—not specifically crypto [currency] but blockchain technology overall and what it can do not only for sports but also on a macro level in business. I’m still excited in that despite what the price of Bitcoin may be today, tomorrow, or next month.”
Business Advice for Current Players
“Pound the pavement. Get out there, meet folks, and figure yourself out beyond sports. Really take some time to self-reflect and figure out your likes, your dislikes, who you are beyond your respective game. That is really the core, and a lot of folks come to grips with ‘Who is Ryan Mundy when he’s not playing football?’ You think you know, but you don’t really know until you have to go through that exercise. Because I can’t play football anymore. I can’t do that anymore. Who am I? What am I going to do with the next phase of my life?
“And then pounding the pavement is critically important for guys who are in the middle or towards the end of their career because that smooths the transition away. When you’re active, people will take your phone calls. They will reply to your emails. They’ll have a coffee with you. Just because you do what you do. But the onus is on you to bring something to that conversation so you’re not just sitting there, looking at each other funny.”
Applying Football Skills to Investing
“I think the biggest crossover is a healthy dose of self-confidence paired with a skewed paradigm towards risk. What I mean by that is, I played football for 24 years in total. Most people would consider football to be a very dangerous game—high-impact, fast-paced, you’re running into folks, and you’ve got to do it over and over and over again. It seems risky, and it seems like it hurts to a lot of people. But for pretty much the duration of my life, that was my normal.
“So, picking that up and putting it into a different context, I view risk a little bit differently than most. I think that’s been helpful and that’s an edge that athletes can tap into in really help accelerate their career.
“But, even beyond that, grit, determination, hard work, discipline, focus, the ability to work within teams are all attributes that athletes can tap into for the transition not only into entrepreneurship but also life after sports.”
The Potential Scope of Athlete Ventures
“I was a little bullish on naming Techlete ‘Techlete’ because I’m really interested in non-tech opportunities right now. Sometimes those get overlooked. We always think about ‘What’s the newest technology?’ and ‘What’s the latest app?’ or ‘What’s the newest widget that relies on some sort of technology?’ Where I think there’s a lot of interesting opportunities is in the non-tech space, whether that be [consumer packaged goods], food and beverage, some sort of apparel, or straws. Stuff like that is equally interesting to me as this high-flying technology such as Bitcoin, AR, VR, or what-have-you.
“I think sports investment, tech or non-tech, is a massive opportunity that a lot of folks are starting to wake up to today. As athletes—the Ryan Mundys of the world, the Kelvin Beachums of the world, the Russell Okungs of the world, etc.—we sit at a very unique intersection in that. Or we can be very integral in those types of opportunities because we have the unique experience of being a professional athlete and having that paradigm and understanding of the ins and outs and the stakeholders within sports. Now, when you layer on our investment activity and business, it’s a very unique value proposition that we can deliver to the marketplace and, I think, be differentiating players in what is a sleeping giant of an industry.”
The NFLPA reviewed this content before publication.
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