How Founders Are Building the Next Market Giants with Anthony Katz

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is InvestTalk from KPP Financial, helping investors make sense of the markets one day at a time. Here's your host, Justin Klein.

Justin Klein (0:19)

So we're here with the founder of Hyperice, Anthony Katz. And Anthony and I, we've known each other for about 18 years. And I've seen your company from the very beginning. But most people don't know what it is and where it's really come from and how you've pioneered the recovery category. So why don't you talk a little about the history of Hyperice and where you see the recovery industry today.

Yeah.

Anthony Katz (0:47)

So Hyperice is referred to as a sports recovery company.

You know, that term recovery used to imply things that athletes do post-workout, post-training, post-game, and it's sort of become a catch-all term as really anything generated around body care. So you see in the proliferation of this wellness category that in wellness, I don't think has much meaning anymore either because there's so much supplements could be wellness. I mean, what is wellness?

And so where we specifically kind of focus is, and I say this with pride, that we are a hardware company. And as much as the investment banking community frowns on that term, the hardware is still part of our life. We still as humans use devices and products every day. Some of the biggest and best companies in the world are still hardware companies. We really focus on hardware that is geared to change the physiology of the human body in a way that could help in an athlete's recovery, treatment of an injury. A big one is warm up and movement preparation for injury prevention, day-to-day body maintenance and overall wellness. So while the term is recovery, it really encompasses just like body care, anything to what we say our just do it is move better. We're trying to create products and habits that enable people of all ages and demographics to move better. If you really think about one of the definitions of aging, it's the loss of movement over time. And we're trying to kind of give people sort of a sip of the fountain of youth of like, if you can do all these things and create these habits using our products, it'll enable you to do the things you love to do longer. So, you know, there's two things, there's doing things longer, so there are longevity, but then there's also doing things better. And I think that part of losing our youth is that we used to be maybe good at something and we enjoyed it. And as you get older, you kind of lose the ability to move and you don't, you're not as good at something. That kind of causes people to maybe stop playing a sport or stop doing something. And, you know, there's a freedom in being able to do things that you love to do for as long as you can. So we're all about like trying to unlock that for people. So recovery is the term, but it really encompasses all those things I mentioned.

Justin Klein (3:17)

Yeah. And you talked a little bit about warm up in that. That's something that you've, you've pioneered with the Viper and the Venom, right? But you have a new product and you talked about move better as you just do it. So you have a new product with Nike, the Hyperboot. So why don't you talk a little bit about how that came about. And then what kind of reception you've seen from athletes so far.

Anthony Katz (3:45)

Yeah. So warm up kind of implies like, oh, this thing I have to do before I play. And some people look at it as this kind of chore. I kind of change it to like movement prep, which is that if we are going to put our body through a series of dynamic movements and sports are series of movements, right? We want to put the body in the optimal state to start moving. Well, why optimal? Because the optimal body, if you get the body in the optimal state, you reduce the risk of injury.

In the process of reducing the risk of injury, your body has less friction and we have improved tissue glide, which means that we're going to perform better, our body can move more efficiently.

I don't know what's the side effect and what's the primary effect. Are we warming up so we can perform better and the side effect is we're preventing injury or are we preventing injury and the side effect is increased performance? When we look at our products, we look at offering a suite, I look at it how Apple looks at it where you have your Mac is like your hub, you have your iPhones, you take everywhere with you, you have your AirPods which are situational, you might have an Apple TV or it's this ecosystem of hardware that all serves the purpose of communication, entertainment, all the things that we run our life off the Apple ecosystem. What I want to do is create a similar ecosystem for active people or the athlete which is like, I have my device where I warm up, I have my device that I do on my moving prep injury prevention that I recover with. If I have an injury, I could treat it. On my day-to-day body maintenance, I just do these things just like brushing our teeth and taking a shower. We wash the outside of our body, we should cleanse the inside of our body.