Startup aims for goal of connecting Houston sports community

game on

Houston-based Sportlo is shooting for a one-stop-shop platform for sporting programs in Houston. Cade Martin/Getty Images

In virtually no time at all, Sportlo has built its reputation on the simplest of foundations: community.

Thilo Borgmann and Sebastian Henke founded the local hub for sports parents earlier this year as a tool for sports moms and dads to stay connected with local leagues, sports clubs, coaches, and other parents with children involved in youth sports in the greater Houston area.

"We make it easy for sports parents to keep up with what's happening in their local youth sports community," says Henke. "With our platform, they can discover tryouts, camps, and sports clubs. They can also join and create groups, find private coaches for their kids, and more."

Borgmann and Henke are both former NCAA Division 1 soccer players who starred while they were student athletes at Houston Baptist University, then went on to become well-known private coaches.

The sports-loving duo saw a dearth of useful information for sports parents on popular social media sites, so they created the platform to give users a central place to communicate with each other, join and create groups, discover tryouts and camps for their children and find private coaches across the city to help their young athletes reach their goals.

"We were both involved in sports for most of our lives and then got into private coaching," says Henke. "Overall, what we saw was that there is an entire ecosystem of youth sports and it was very much unorganized."

Henke says sports clubs weren't able to reach potential members and their parents. He says they envisioned a one-stop-shop approach to the sports ecosystem.

"So, Sportlo is focused on sports parents, but within the community, we try to connect persons with coaches, with clubs, with colleges and so on," Henke says. "That's the vision behind it, so people will have a place to have a community, to get advice and tips and then they will have access to certain services and information."

The plan for Sportlo has already evolved in its short life. Originally the platform was going to support just private coaching.

"After we got more feedback from parents and first users, we started to adapt the product and rebuilt the product," Henke says. "Based on the surveys we collected online, parents wanted us to find ways how to connect them with each other, so that's why we started building it as a new page and that's how we realized where it needed to go."

The biggest lesson in listening to their users was understanding that any initial vision to help a community must also be focused on or include what's intrinsically valuable to the users.

"Too often, people get focused on their own ideas and forget that feedback offers surprising moments," says Henke. "Users gave us a whole new path, which kept us from going in the direction where users wouldn't want the product to go."

Feedback from users is key, Henke says, and he recommends startup founders prioritize user experience and constructive criticism.

"All of the ideas that we had in our head, at some point we had to stop and reevaluate them and then focus on the most important thing first and then go from there," he says.

Still, the launch of Sportlo was not without its own unique challenges. Its March go-live date coincided in point of time with the spread of COVID-19, which ultimately turned into a worldwide pandemic.

"We haven't had to make any major changes," says Henke. "But groups on the platform have focused on that topic because there are no sports happening at the moment and they are eager to get them back. But other than that, it's not something we've had to focus on. But for parents, they've focused on related topics, like how to keep their kids busy at home doing exercises, things like that, or when discussing when their kids' clubs are starting back up and how to keep kids safe."

In addition to forming groups and sharing a variety of sports-related topics, parents can post pictures and videos of their child's latest tournament or game, get access to useful articles shared by fellow parents and find recommended sports products for themselves or their child.

"The main reason we added that social component was because we wanted to have a user timeline so when they log in, all the users can see something sports related," says Borgmann. "There's so much noise, with politics and posts that are only about the coronavirus and all that, so we wanted to focus on sports and have parents be able to show how their kid is doing, see other kids in action and support each other with a focus on sports without seeing all the other distractions that might be on other platforms."

For now, Sportlo is focused solely on keeping Houston informed, but it will look to expand to other cities and states when the time comes.

"We are focused right now only on Houston, because we know Houston and Texas and we've experienced different levels of sports in this area, so we want to stay local," says Henke. "Then, the next step is we intend to take it to other cities within Texas. And at some point, our vision is to have the entire youth ecosystem of the United States."

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UH lands $11.8M for first-of-its-kind early language development study

speech funding

Researchers at the University of Houston have secured an $11.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a first-of-its-kind study of early language development.

Led by Elena Grigorenko, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of Psychology, and research professor Jack Fletcher, the study will follow 3,600 children aged 18 to 24 months to uncover how language skills develop at this critical stage and why some children experience delays that can influence later growth.

The NIH funding will also support the development of the new national Clinical Research Center on Developmental Language Disorders at UH, which aims to bring experts from psychology, education, health and measurement sciences to study how children learn language.

“This will be the first national study to estimate how common late talking is using a large, representative sample of Houston toddlers,” Grigorenko said in a news release. “By following these children as they grow, we hope to better understand the developmental pathways that can lead to conditions such as developmental language disorder and autism.”

UH’s team will partner with the pediatric clinic network at Texas Children’s Hospital, where children will be screened for early language development, allowing researchers to identify those who show signs of delayed speech. Next, researchers will follow the cohort through early childhood to examine how language abilities evolve and how early delays may lead to later challenges.

The Clinical Research Center on Developmental Language Disorders will be the 14th national research center established at UH, and will include researchers from multiple UH departments, as well as partners at Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Center for Learning Disorders.

“This level of investment from the National Institutes of Health reflects the significance of this work to address a complex challenge affecting children, families and communities,” Claudia Neuhauser, vice president for research at UH, said in a news release. “By bringing together experts from multiple disciplines and partnering with major health systems across the region, the project reflects our commitment to advancing discoveries that impact our community.”

Rice Alliance names Houston healthtech exec as first head of platform

new hire

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has named its first head of platform.

Houston entrepreneur Laura Neder stepped into the newly created role last month, according to an email from Rice Alliance. Neder will focus on building and growing Houston’s Venture Advantage Platform.

The emerging platform, which is being promoted by Rice Alliance and the Ion, aims to connect founders with the "people, capital and expertise they need to scale."

"I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it takes to make an innovation ecosystem more navigable, more connected, and more useful for founders," Neder said in a LinkedIn post. "I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that work at Rice Alliance, alongside a team with a long history of supporting entrepreneurship and innovation."

"Houston has the talent, institutions, and industry base to create real advantage for founders," she added. "I’m looking forward to listening, learning, and building stronger pathways across the ecosystem."

Neder most recently served as CEO of Houston-based Careset, where she helped bring the Medicare data startup to commercialization. Prior to that, Neder served as COO of Houston-based telemedicine startup 2nd.MD, which was acquired for $460 million by Accolade in 2021.

"Laura brings a rare combination of founder empathy, operational experience and ecosystem leadership," Rice Alliance shared.

Neder and Rice Alliance also shared that the organization is hiring developers to design the new Venture Advantage Platform. Learn more here.

Elon Musk's SpaceX files initial paperwork to sell shares to the public

Incoming IPO

Elon Musk's space exploration company has filed preliminary paperwork to sell shares to the public, according to two sources familiar with the filing, a blockbuster offering that would likely rank as the biggest ever and could make its founder the world's first trillionaire.

A SpaceX IPO promises to be one of the biggest Wall Street events of the year, with several investment banks lining up to help raise tens of billions to fund Musk's ambitions to set up a base on the moon, put datacenters the size of several football fields in orbit and possibly one day send a man to Mars.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the confidential registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SpaceX did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Exactly how much SpaceX plans to raise has not been disclosed but the figure is reportedly as much as $75 billion. At that level, the offering would easily eclipse the $29 billion that Saudi Aramco raised in its IPO in 2019.

The offering, coming possibly in June, could value all the shares of SpaceX at $1.5 trillion, nearly double what the company was valued in December when some minority owners sold their stakes, according to research firm Pitchbook, before an acquisition that increased its size.

Musk owns 42% of the SpaceX now, according to Pitchbook, though that figure will change with the IPO when new owners are issued shares. In any case, he is likely to pierce the trillion dollar mark because he is already close. Forbes magazine estimates Musk's net worth at roughly $823 billion.

In addition to making reusable rockets to hurl astronauts and hardware into orbit, SpaceX owns Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company. The company also recently brought under its roof two other Musk businesses, social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and artificial intelligence business, xAI, in a controversial transaction because both the seller and the buyer were controlled by him.

SpaceX has become the biggest commercial launch company in its industry, responsible for sending payloads into orbit for customers across the globe, but has also benefited from big taxpayer spending. That has raised conflicts of interest issues given that Musk was the biggest donor to President Donald Trump's campaign and is still a big backer.

In the past five years, SpaceX won $6 billion in contracts from NASA, the Defense Department and other U.S. government agencies, according to USAspending.gov.

Among current SpaceX owners is Donald Trump Jr, the president's oldest son. He owns a shares through 1789 Capital. That venture capital firm made him a partner shortly after his father won the presidency for a second time and has been buying up federal contractors seeking to win taxpayer money ever since.

The White House and Trump himself have repeatedly denied there are any conflicts of interest between his role as president and his family's businesses.

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