From the Founder’s Perspective: ShotTracker
Athletes and Assets Sits Down with ShotTracker CEO Davyeon Ross
We sat down with Davyeon Ross, former college basketball player and co-founder and CEO of ShotTracker, the court-side tracking system of AI driven video, stats, and analytic tools that is now pushing toward coverage across most of D1 and pro and women’s sports.
His career advice for young athletes was blunt: go where you can play. Reps build understanding, on and off the court. He credits a childhood in Trinidad and Tobago where his parents put him in everything, from music to sports, which turned out to matter as much as anything technical.
Ross pointed to his connections to Magic Johnson and former NBA commissioner David Stern, investors in the company. He spoke on their value beyond capital; Stern as a mentor and Magic as entrepreneurial inspiration. They both showed him how to “see around corners”; spotting what others missed, including the early read that venture money was flowing toward software far faster than hardware.
He returned again and again to a set of “Stern-isms”: "Failure is an orphan, success has a thousand fathers.” And his favorite description of Stern’s mentorship: "pure caring wrapped in vinegar."
Ross calls himself an ownership guy by nature. He's watched people do great things for companies without ever getting a share of the upside, and his takeaway is to control your own destiny even when that path isn't glamorous. That takes a specific kind of person, he says, one willing to put ego aside in what he called a "minute rice society" where everyone wants the payoff now. His shorthand for it: "know thyself."
What Ross felt was most important to him as a co-founder and CEO of the company was his framing on betting on people: you can always improve the numbers, but grit to work through the hard stretches is the part you can't coach. He described the CEO as the coach or the captain. Not necessarily the best player, but the one setting the standard. He closed on a line worth keeping: "if you're a tomato, you'll never be salsa". His point was about staying adaptable and expanding what you build.
ShotTracker, he noted, builds beyond tracking shots with a wide variety of products across scouting solutions and data driven fan & revenue tools as well.
Source: https://backstage.athletesandassets.com/p/shottracker-chat-mcafee-jams-with-jj-dybantsa-owns-ip
