# S01E17 · Transcript — Dan Connerty Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 17, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Dan Connerty, founder of [NTangible](https://ntangible.co). Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/dan-connerty-intangible). Only a short highlight clip of this episode is public so far — the full episode audio is pending release. This transcript reflects the entire recorded conversation, lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Dan's. ## Broke ball players and Bay Street **Gokul** Before Intangible, you played collegiately at Northwood and professionally at the Hamilton Cardinals. What was life actually like back then? **Dan** Living the dream of a broke baseball player on his mom's couch — that's what I was doing. I played collegiately down in Michigan, but I first started in Canada, at Concordia's John Molson. I put up good numbers, and my catcher at the time, JC Pacquin, who'd played for Team Canada and collegiately in Georgia, told me, "Dan, you have to go to the States. If you don't, you're going to live with that what-if forever." So I took it to heart and emailed every college in the US to see who had interest. Forty-five wanted me for a visit. I narrowed it down, went to Northwood University in mid-Michigan, and after that came back and closed for the Hamilton Cardinals in independent ball for a few years. **Gokul** What did that professional experience teach you about handling pressure? **Dan** Other than being tall — I'm six-six, and that goes a long way in baseball — I was never the strongest, the most skilled, or the best player on any team I played for. But I made it as far as I could before my body gave out. In my last year I tore both rib capsules on my spine, the twelfth rib underneath the cartilage. Don't do that — it feels like getting stabbed with a knife every time you turn left. I grew up believing you have to outwork everyone, instilled by my coaches and my dad, and I've taken that straight into business. I keep hearing from entrepreneurs that you need to be delusionally optimistic to succeed, even when everything says it won't work. I think that's the same delusional optimism it takes to believe you're going to play college ball, then pro ball. If you don't have it, you can't expect success to fall into your lap — and if you expect that, it won't. **Gokul** There's a difference between that delusional optimism and false hope, though. **Dan** Exactly. In our assessments, we see players who say all the right things but never put it into action, and others who say what they believe and actually do it. Kobe or Jordan walk the walk and talk the talk. But I'd bet there are a ton of other players who say "I'm going to score every shot" and never do. Is that false hope? An overconfident sense of self? Or a true understanding of who they are that just doesn't match their skills? I saw that gap firsthand with teammates — guys who threw the hardest or ran the fastest, but something just didn't click. One example stands out from my player-development coaching career rather than my playing days. Outside of playing, I ran Canada's first data-driven baseball training center — it was sold in 2019 when the lead trainer went to work for the Cleveland Indians. We had the first HitTrax and Rapsodo technology in the country, before even the Blue Jays, who used to send players to us for testing. One player we had was the second-highest-drafted pitcher ever out of Canada — seventeen years old, 240 pounds, six-foot-six, throwing 97. If you'd slotted him into the Blue Jays rotation at seventeen, he'd have fit right in. But cognitively he was weak. Every bad outing, it was "Coach, my arm hurts," or his dad saying we were ruining his draft stock. I wish at the time we'd had something that could put a number on it — here's what you need to improve. Because human nature is that we don't know what we don't know, and we're afraid of the unknown. If we can measure certain skills, we can build a player-development approach around them: test, retest, intervene. That's the gap Intangible has since closed. That player ended up throwing 30 professional innings across a five-year career. It just didn't work out, and we knew why. **Gokul** Resilience, or the ability to handle failure? **Dan** Both, and similar to clutch — clutch isn't one thing, it's a multitude of factors. Resilience is one. The ability to regulate your emotions in certain moments is another. There's also a physical component: players who can regulate their heart rate tend to make the sanest decisions, whether that's a sympathetic or parasympathetic response their body needs without them even thinking about it. If you have some control over that, you probably perform better in those moments. But resilience as a whole is a life skill, not just a sports skill — I'll take most of what I learned as an athlete into whatever I do next. That's why a lot of these skills transfer into the private sector or public safety, and why former athletes end up successful in banking, politics, or entrepreneurship. **Gokul** You went into private wealth management after playing — working with founders, business owners, and investors. What were the parallels and differences between elite athletes and elite operators? **Dan** I worked for Syrian Associates Private Wealth Management on Bay Street — Canada's Wall Street equivalent. We managed a book just shy of $250 million, and I worked with a fair number of the startups and younger founders coming through, partly because I graduated with an entrepreneurship degree and always wanted to be one myself. My main job was building financial plans, insurance planning, and estate planning for exits. A lot of those skills transferred directly. The difference is what people consider a successful outcome — some want to exit, some want to transform the world, some want to be the next Elon Musk. None of those are wrong, but each has different expectations and different abilities required to get there. Most of my focus outside the financial side was the human aspect: walking people through emotional but logical decisions to identify what their actual goal is. It's a bit like talking to a therapist after a bad breakup — you probably already know the answer, but it helps to hear someone else say it back to you. ## The idea for NTangible **Gokul** You left that to build NTangible. What was the actual decision point? **Dan** The idea started in 2019, when I was still at the training facility. I got connected to Dr. Ed Levine, known as the godfather of industrial psychology — his name is on nearly every textbook in the field, and his claim to fame was job matching and job analysis. We started talking, and I told him we were about to hit a ceiling on what we could measure physically. This was 2019; even outside sports, the wearables world is fighting over marginal gains now — the difference between a 99.6 and a 98 percent sleep score is negligible. So we're hunting for what's left to measure. I told him cognitive had always been a black box nobody wanted to touch, partly because of the stigma — seeing a sports psychologist meant something must be wrong with you. That's less true now, in 2026, but it was real back then. I told him the main assessment being used at the time was the Wonderlic, and he laughed. He said, "Dan, the Wonderlic was built in the 1920s to select executive assistants for Wall Street. You're telling me that's the main tool used to select NFL quarterbacks?" Some coaches swear by it, others call it trash — there's no in-between, the same way people either love or hate the DISC in the private sector. That's where we started building the assessment. It was a side hustle at first, alongside my main job, leveraging my college networks to get initial data in the door. COVID delayed us about a year. But once we had our data and validation done, I hard-launched full time in January 2025, and since then this has become one of the fastest-growing sports tech companies in the country. ## The price of getting recruiting wrong **Gokul** You've put two numbers on LinkedIn: $150,000 per failed D1 transfer, $3.5 million per draft bust. How do people react to those numbers, and to the idea that you can prevent them? **Dan** Recruiting, drafting, and free agency is an ever-evolving science — there's no single right way, just best practices. Every MLB team has its own internal drafting algorithm, totally different from one another. Poorer organizations sometimes don't have one at all; they just go on gut feel and scouting — "he's got a hot girlfriend, he must be confident," the old-school stuff you used to hear. Inside sports, people know these numbers. Publicly, they don't. They just see "Michigan got another five-star recruit" without knowing he signed the largest NIL contract for $5.5 million last offseason and didn't work out. Some donors don't care, but at the athletic director level and the professional level, every dollar counts. So our product is shifting toward something like a protective layer on a decision — not an insurance policy, because we don't pay out if someone makes the wrong call. In sales calls I ask: if you knew a player you were signing scored poorly on our assessment, would you second-guess that decision? The answer is always yes. If you're signing a $3 million transfer and find out he has a below-average clutch score, you'd want to know there's someone else who'd score higher, maybe for less money — and who's more likely to perform in those high-leverage moments when you need them to. **Gokul** With NIL and the NCAA now paying college athletes, has that changed how your product lands with colleges? **Dan** It's transformed sports, though who knows if NIL survives the next couple of years — the current administration is looking to roll it back toward something closer to the old scholarship-only system, maybe with a small stipend. Either way, there's only so much money to go around, and the parity at these programs means a good recruiting cycle is a winning season and a bad one can cost a coach his job. I'll give you an example: we were talking with a mid-major basketball program in New York State that made March Madness last year for the first time in about seven years. Great coaching, great development. Guess how much of the roster transferred out afterward? Eighty-five percent. Three guys stayed. They got poached by bigger programs — power-five schools picking up cheap talent, and all the power to them, that's the system. But if you're that mid-major coach who just lost almost his whole roster, and you don't recruit well the following year, you're done. Athletic directors ask why you didn't make March Madness again, not why your entire roster left. My hope is our product allows for a truer identification of talent — the underserved player, the one who's a little out of shape but will make the play when you need it, if you understand that those plays correlate most with winning. ## Inside the Clutch Factor assessment **Gokul** What does the actual assessment put an athlete through? **Dan** It's based on the science of projectives — the Thematic Apperception Test is the biggest one, used in clinical settings for years, and the Rorschach inkblot test is its ugly stepchild. We give athletes pictures with no definitive outcome and no right or wrong answers, and we ask them who they are in the situation, what's happening, what they're thinking and feeling, and what happens next. The keywords, phrases, and semantics they use all run against a neurolinguistic scoring guide developed with our psychologists to produce a Clutch Factor Score. You never get the same pictures twice — that's a protective measure. It's also positional and sport-specific: goalkeepers get a different test than field players in soccer, and a kicker doesn't get a quarterback's test. If a kicker says he's going to be a great quarterback, that's not useful — I need his insight into being a kicker. It's a fine science, still emerging, but the goal is eliciting the most honest response possible. It's also, unlike most tests, genuinely fun to take — people always expect a standard multiple-choice test and get something that makes them think and react instead. **Gokul** You've mentioned players who say the right things but can't back it up on the field. How do you catch that in the test? **Dan** We've got multiple sections, each with its own scoring guide, partly so the test can't be gamed. We regularly run responses through ChatGPT or Claude to benchmark — if you tried to use AI to game this as an athlete, you would not like your score. Clutch and Claude and GPT are not the same thing. But because of the different sections, we can flag when a score might be a little hyperinflated, so coaches know to weigh it accordingly. We're also building something in partnership with our accelerator, Mars — the top accelerator in Canada — which helped us build a talent funnel from the University of Waterloo. One of our interns, who specializes in voice and computer vision, came into his interview and told me: I want to transition your test from written to verbal, and build a lie detector into it — based on voice parameters and tonality, scoring not just what someone says but a confidence rating on whether they actually believe it. That would give us a verbal, neurolinguistic, cognitive test that demos well and produces data that's completely outside what we can currently gather. Once we get there, it could take the product to the next level. ## EJ White and Devea Crawford **Gokul** Tell me about EJ White. **Dan** EJ White was a pitcher for the University of Indianapolis, which made the College World Series the year we tested them. He was a D3 walk-on — a little overweight, threw from a funny arm angle, didn't throw hard, overlooked by every D1 and D2 program in the area. He got no scholarship money but was given a shot on the team. That year, when we tested him, he finished third in all of NCAA Division III in saves. We don't have any knowledge of a player's physical skills when we score them — just a name and a number, and we backtrack from there. When Indianapolis's coaching staff had us test the whole roster, EJ came back as the number-one scoring reliever. The coach was choosing his closer that year and asked who we'd suggest. We said EJ White. He said, "EJ's a D3 guy — seems like a bulldog and a gamer, but I don't know if his stuff plays." Our scores said to give him a shot. He became the closer and helped them get to the College World Series. Physically overlooked, mentally so far above everybody else that he outperformed them. The highest-scoring softball player we've ever tested is a girl named Devea Crawford. She scored 30 points higher than the nearest professional AUSL softball player we've tested, and she was 14 years old. We backtracked and found out she's the starting center fielder for the 18U national championship team for Alliance, our big softball partner — she plays four years up. She'd already signed her first NIL deal with Adidas and had verbally pre-committed to one of the top power-five softball programs in the country. At 14. With our assessment, we can test as young as thirteen and identify traits where an athlete might not have physically peaked but already has the mental skill set to become a great development project or performer. It also tells us something about the range: players who test high early tend to stay high or improve further. It's very rare for someone who scores 500 out of 1,000 to jump to an 800, the elite range — but if you start higher, the propensity to climb into that range is much easier to realize. ## Is clutch genetic? **Gokul** Is clutch genetic — are you born with it, or can you develop it? **Dan** That was one of the biggest questions we wanted to answer when we started. When we talked to scouts and coaches about why a player didn't make it, we always got the same answer: "They couldn't cut it, they didn't have it." Nobody could define "it." From all the data we've gathered — we're now just shy of 7,000 assessments across nine sports — I can confidently say a large portion of your score, around 60 to 65 percent, is trait. The top-end portion is skill, meaning you can improve your score, but only to a certain extent. Take a girl like Devea: at 14, her skill set on this side is already there, so she's more likely to keep improving as her game gets more refined. Players who start lower have a harder path to that same ceiling. So yes — it does seem like there are mental genetic limits, similar to physical genetic limits. That's a fascinating finding, and it'll keep sharpening as we gather more data over the next couple of years. ## Selling the black box **Gokul** You've been working with coaches and athletic directors on something that sounds pretty abstract to most people. What comes up? **Dan** Outside of everybody crying poor, two things. First, the unknown — cognitive has always been the last cog on the wheel of physical development because you can't touch it or feel it. We call it the black box issue in sports. If Intangible were a shiny piece of hardware, it'd be easier for people to grasp. Because it's data and insight, it's harder to see the value. Second, we've learned not to tell coaches how to coach. We want to be the best assistant they've ever had, not the voice saying "play this guy over that guy." You're a coach, you got to the collegiate level, you know what you're doing — this is a tool to confirm your gut feel or surface something that makes you want to reconsider a decision. It's a support system, not a mandate. **Gokul** Walk me through the development side — say I score 600 and want to get to 800. **Dan** That's a question I've genuinely struggled with as the founder, because the SAT doesn't do SAT prep — they test very well and leave training to administrators and practitioners. We test very well too. To say "do this for eight weeks and improve your score by 20 percent on average" would require multiple double-blind controlled studies, and because this is such a new science, that's probably twelve to eighteen months out before we can guarantee something like that. In the meantime we've built a support system: our sports psychologist, Howie Schwartz, was the former sports psychologist for the Montreal Expos and has worked with a number of Canadian Olympic Hall of Famers and gold medalists. We digitized him into an app called Howie — I don't love calling it a sports psychologist in your pocket, but effectively it's a support agent with full contextual knowledge of who you are cognitively, giving targeted suggestions to improve your skills in your sport. Support has a positive net benefit even without a concrete answer — like therapy, where just talking through things helps. In sports it's hard to open up; you can't always go to your coach with what's bothering you, because the answer might be that you stop playing. Working with a sports psychologist in person also costs money, and a lot of people feel judged opening up face to face — a study just came out showing people were 40 percent more likely to open up to a digital therapist than a human one, for that exact reason. And there's a parent dynamic too — growing up, I'd talk to my dad about certain things and my mom about others, because I knew the responses I'd get from each. I imagine athletes experience something similar. A personalized support system you can talk to for your own development is low-load, low-friction — the only real barrier is opening the app and talking to the agent. **Gokul** At the Alliance Fastpitch All-Star Game, every athlete took the Clutch Factor assessment, and Lauren Howard finished with a 790. How did the room react, and how does that shape how people view a player? **Dan** That's a different context — the All-Star Game is the top players, all already committed to colleges, so the scores don't affect their opportunities directly. I hope they use them in NIL conversations — I've told Lauren she should call her school and say she's outscoring everyone else, so she should be getting a bit more money. Alliance has been a great partner; they're the largest softball company in America, with about 50,000 girls running through their tournaments annually. On August 17th we're testing 20,000 girls above the age of thirteen across their whole user base — our largest cohort to date, which lets us benchmark youth softball nationally. Once you're the de facto benchmark, you become the bringer of truth, and you can build further on those insights. Every sport has an Alliance-style anchor organization — baseball has a couple, football has a few, basketball too. Our goal is to find those anchor companies and partner with them on the recruiting side, especially at the youth level, and build toward a point where your Clutch Factor Score is as synonymous as your GPA or SAT score. That's when this company has made it to mainstream adoption. **Gokul** Has the analytics movement in sports — the Moneyball era — made this easier or harder for you? **Dan** Depends on the sport. You'd think baseball would be a no-brainer for us, but baseball's front offices and development teams are the largest, so when you have that many people with their own opinions, bureaucracy plays a role. You might have buy-in from scouting and analytics, but player development asks what the hell this product even is. At the pro level, soccer has been a much easier entry point — we're working with a couple of MLS programs there. That's just my experience, but with Major League Baseball, we submitted a proposal to one American League team that went in front of a standing committee of thirty-two people before spring training, and all thirty-two needed to say yes. I heard back-channel that twenty-nine did, but the rest said no, and it got pushed to "maybe next year." That's the standard process for new technology in professional baseball. For both our MLS teams, I only had to talk to two people — the sporting director and usually the sports psychologist. Once I had buy-in from those two, it was game on. You'd think the most forward-thinking, analytical organizations would adopt fastest, but it's usually the ones that can decide quickly and implement easily who get the most value. **Gokul** Which sports or industries do you see as the next frontier? **Dan** Softball has been our biggest and fastest-growing to date. We've got an exciting soccer partnership coming with one of the world's largest GPS tracking companies, building a recruiting report for soccer players in North America, which should go live in December and become bigger for us. Pro logos are nice to have but don't make or break the business — this is a product that can gain mass adoption at the youth level and trickle up from there. I use the Blue Jays as an example: if the Blue Jays used this product, great, but does that drive a hundred thousand players in Canada to take the test? No. Signing a deal with the Greater Toronto Hockey League does. That's the thought process — the more data we have, the better our correlations get, and the more we become the bringer of truth in each sport, at the youth level first. ## Five years out **Gokul** If NTangible works out the way you want — five years from now, say it's the standard for a seventeen-year-old getting recruited — how does that change life for an athlete, especially one who doesn't look the part? **Dan** It gives people a starting point for data they otherwise don't have. In sports, and in life generally, you don't know what you don't know, and you can't always trust the mirror test. If I don't step on a scale, I don't know my weight — if I look in the mirror and think I gained five pounds, that's purely subjective. Cognitive has been the subjective space nobody wanted to touch. Now we can measure it, and my hope is that in five years there are practices that can train it and retest it over time. The whole reason I started this was wanting kids to be stronger and more clutch on the cognitive side than I was, or than my teammates were. If we can build the most resilient, most clutch youth user base, we make everybody better — COVID accelerated mental health issues across the board, and I think a lot of Gen Z has lost some of the ability to deal with pressure that older generations built up. Even in a sports context, if we can show someone where they stand and give them tools to improve, with the understanding that clutch is a life skill they can carry outside of sports, we've given them something for the pressure situations life throws at them regardless of whether they ever go pro. **Gokul** Is resistance to measuring the mental side more scientific, cultural, or financial? **Dan** Some of it is human nature — in any assessment world, especially analytics and psychology, there will always be people who tell you your product is crap simply because it isn't theirs. I've seen that firsthand at the MIT Sloan Analytics competition — if it isn't yours, people default to discounting it. The only thing that cuts through that early on is validation: success stories and use cases. I can't tell you our assessments are predictive of pit crew performance broadly, because we're only working with one NASCAR team right now — but that team is RFK Racing, having their best season on record since 2012, with their pit crews ranked around third in all of NASCAR this year, up from eighteenth last year. We're playing a small role in that, but I can't yet preach it across every team in the sport — it's the success story and the input from the end user that shows the value. The other piece is the fear of the unknown — there's been such a stigma around anything mental or cognitive that getting past that hump has been a long learning cycle. When we first started, we had a test and a number, but I didn't fully know what it meant — I knew a higher score correlated with performing better, but I couldn't tell you the ranges or how meaning shifted from sport to sport. That's evolved a lot as we've told this story more. **Gokul** How would someone actually take the test? **Dan** It's fully digital. If you're part of an organization or team we're working with, you get a link by email. It takes around fifteen minutes on any device — phone, tablet, laptop — and your report generates automatically in about ten seconds. Your data goes to the coach or administration's dashboard, or if you're a player, to your own app, where you get access to Howie. The product is also very API-native, which has helped us in bigger conversations recently — some pro teams only want the score itself, nothing else, because they've already got scouting and sports psychology resources and just want a data point to plug into their own system. Other teams and colleges want everything, because they don't have those resources in-house and want to extract as much as possible from the product. That flexibility has been very appealing. **Gokul** Last question — most founders aren't really building for the money. What's the mission underneath NTangible for you? **Dan** I've always believed in giving back and moving things forward for the next generation. I still coach — I don't have a facility anymore, but I love working with younger kids, and hopefully some of what I teach them helps make their lives or their sports careers better. In doing that, you give back to the community that made you, and I feel the same way about this product, just at a much larger scale, because we're identifying something that's never really been measurable before. I don't think the current system is broken — it's just underserved. Once we can serve it, I hope there's a mass opportunity for improvement, because the earlier kids have this data, the more likely they are to work on it. If we can make that change now, hopefully it's a better foundation for generations of athletes to come. **Gokul** Sounds like you might help someone avoid a Jalen Brunson-style dip in their career. **Dan** He's a good example of someone where something happened, and he's not quite the same player he was before. There's probably a reason behind it, and probably some intervention that got him back to the next level. **Gokul** That's a great place to end it. Thank you for talking about your journey and NTangible. **Dan** Thank you. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/dan-connerty-intangible) · [[podcast|All episodes]]