Portland entrepreneur Scott Bouska is taking his dozen years at Nike and his previous stint as an NFL agent and bringing it all to bear on his new startup, an app designed to help football fans better understand the game and make better decisions on everything from fantasy sports moves to sports betting.
Called Field Vision, the app uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict outcomes, said Bouska, who is CEO. He teamed with co-founder and chief data scientist Cameron Taylor to build the models needed. Taylor’s career includes data science and machine learning roles at Netflix and Instacart.
“Football is such a perfect game to apply modern principles of machine learning and AI. It’s all variables that interact and play off each other in really dynamic ways,” said Bouska. “When one thing happens it should tell you the cause and effect.”
Think of it as Moneyball 2.0. Whereas baseball has individual events with every pitch and hit, in football it’s more dynamic, Bouska said.
“If the defense is in one formation then the offense changes the play. Then the defense adjusts. If it’s all interactive variables, it’s more conducive to AI,” he said.
The proprietary models are built using historical data as well as context input from a football expert.
Bouska left Nike in December. He opted to jump into entrepreneurship as a way to get back to the business of sports. In his 12 years at Nike he moved up the ranks but as he did so, he was further removed from the reason he joined.
“I saw (Nike) as a sports business, not a ruthlessly efficient footwear and apparel retailer,” he said. Bouska is part of a growing number of former Nike executives who have launched their own ventures and are doing so in Portland.
As he was exploring the potential for AI in sports he landed on applying it to the game of football. He also found Taylor, who had written his Ph.D. thesis on predictive modeling in football.
Field Vision is a team of seven. They developed the app over a roughly seven-month period before it launched Sept. 3, ahead of the start of the NFL season. The app has a free two-week trial and then a $9.99 a month, or $49.99 annual subscriptions.
The app is positioned to give fans more accurate game and player-specific analysis and predictions than more traditional research. The company is also positioning these insights for people participating in the growing sports betting market. There is no betting through the app.
Last year, Americans wagered $119.84 billion on sports betting, according to research from Field Vision. That’s an increase of 27.5% over the previous year.
So far, the startup has one angel investor but has been self-funded by Bouska for the most part. He wants to see how the app performs this season and will evaluate whether to seek investment next year.
Bouska sees a path for the app in other sports as well, but he expects to get deeper into football before branching out. This means creating a business-to-business product that can be used by people who make a living off football such as media and teams, said Bouska.
