Nadia Susanto isn’t just looking to improve her golf game, but also those of all golfers. With NoFores, a startup Susanto co-founded alongside her undergraduate peers at Carnegie Mellon University, golfers can study courses before a tournament even begins by using virtual reality to visualize data points, including changing terrain and other natural variations, in a 3D environment as opposed to the current 2D presentation of such information. Susanto said the startup’s purpose is to make golfers feel like they have a home course advantage anywhere they play.
The moment I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur was when I was at a teen entrepreneurship camp held during the summer after I graduated middle school. We were tasked with not only learning from amazing speakers who came, but also putting it into practice with a pitch competition that would showcase what we learned throughout the week.
To my surprise at the end of the week, being the youngest one and with the youngest team — and might I say the underdogs — we won first place and the grand prize. From that moment I knew that my passion was in business and that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
As a Carnegie Mellon student, I was very fortunate to be an Innovation Scholar in their Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. The support system and mentorship offered allowed me to realize my passions and to take risks.
With that, I incorporated my first company, Bivi, which focused on educating and mentoring young, international students to find their niche and passions. A couple months after launching and generating some tutoring sessions, I suddenly had the idea for NoFores, a virtual reality application for competitive golfers to elevate the way they study courses before tournament play.
This novel concept of leveraging virtual reality for golf excited me on another level. I played in many junior golf tournaments and was blessed to continue my competitive golf career at Carnegie Mellon. As golfers, we constantly travel to the venue early to play practice rounds and use our 2D yardage books for strategic information.
I began to realize that [a 3D model] could potentially disrupt the current, traditional processes of studying courses, but that the hardest component of building this out is acquiring the data. Yardage books are extremely accurate because the companies who make them use surveying and mapping tools that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars so they can physically walk the course and gather the data points.
Knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to do this process myself, I cold-emailed a former PGA Tour caddy now-turned yardage book creator. Intrigued with the concept, we set up a phone call that resulted in him offering some course data for us to build a prototype with. Now we are in the stages of finalizing our proof of concept after many months of trial and error and cold-emailing professors and students to offer their knowledge.
NoFores couldn’t have gotten to this point without my team and support system. I’m very fortunate to have Michael Lim, who has stuck with me as CTO through Bivi’s development and now through NoFores. I’m even prouder to have my younger brother, Nicolas Susanto, join the team. I’m always impressed with his technical abilities as a 16-year-old knowing more about Unity and software than sometimes what Michael and I know. Of course to my parents as well — thank you for the constant support and for pushing and motivating me to be the best I can be.
NoFores will be disruptive to the golf industry, and I am so excited to continue this journey.
ABOUT NADIA SUSANTO
Title: Co-founder and CEO, NoFores
Age: 22
Year company founded: 2021
What is your dream job? “Being an executive for a professional sports team such as an NBA or NFL team, or of course being my own CEO of a successful company.”
