Co-Founder at Hooper
Mike Wu
Building in sports. About me: https://www.mikehwu.com Prior: Stanford PhD, Sanas, Meta, Lattice Data
Questions & Answers
What inspired you to start your business?
Steven and I met in college where we found a community of friends playing pickup. After moving out to the bay, we built the first version of Hooper to see which one of us had a better jump shot. Turns out it was him but we hit on something that other people were excited about as well.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
During my PhD at Stanford, besides publishing i really wanted to deploy one of my methods into a real product. I got the chance to do this with Chris Piech and Chelsea Finn where we built a model to give students learning to code online real time feedback (before ChatGPT was a real thing). This model was deployed to "Code in Place", a large online course run at Stanford where we generated feedback for 16,000 students in a few minutes. Our work was featured in the New York Times.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
A lot of sports tech is about building hardware and custom software solutions for the biggest leagues. This is important but it means that the average player doesn't really get to experience any of that innovation. Hooper's tech is built to work on an average phone, and relies on AI to solve the hard challenges of tracking people and actions.
What's the story behind your company?
The goal of Hooper is make everyone feel like a pro. That means automatically generating highlights, stats, and the stories on the court. Imagine leaderboards for you and your friends across a season, mixtapes of the best (and worst) moments, and even generated commentary and debate about the game in the style of ESPN.
