During my freshman year at Stanford, every morning I’d carry an iPad and a tripod from our locker room down the fluorescent hallway to Arrillaga practice gym. Hands full, I’d kick a few basketballs along the way up to the gym. I was a bad shooter, but I desperately wanted to be great. So I’d set the iPad at halfcourt, open the orange app with the H, hit record, and get to work.
After the workout, I would sit there and watch every shot from my workout. Then I would watch them again. I wanted to understand the tiny details of progress and HomeCourt made that possible.
That summer, as a walk-on, taking summer classes was no option. I needed to make money, not spend it so I set out to find the coolest job I could imagine and working for HomeCourt was clearly that. I reached out to the team, went through a couple interviews and crossed my fingers. A few months later, I found myself driving with Lexie Hull to San Jose straight after our morning workouts. We would drive down 280, still sweaty, but excited to be making a few dollars (these were the pre-NIL days).
That summer of 2019, HomeCourt was only basketball. It was backed by a sharpshooter named JJ Reddick and by my childhood hero Steve Nash. Today, it doesn’t have much of anything to do with basketball.
In the seven years since then, the company has gone from being a shot tracking app, to a viral movement app that spread across Asia, to a hardware console designed to bring families together through play. And now, Nex (the creators of HomeCourt) are on the verge of doing the startup version of Steph’s “Night, night.”
I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but here is an intern’s perspective on what David Lee, Alex Wu, and the team have gotten right.
1. They’ve stayed true to their principles.
Even when HomeCourt and Active Arcade hit millions of users and topped the App store during the pandemic, David refused to put ads in the product. They would find another way to monetize the business. He believed deeply in making a product people loved – not making a quick buck.
2. They experimented relentlessly.
Unknowingly, my internship was one of those experiments. They brought in Lexie and me to test whether youth camps could become a real part of HomeCourt’s future. We had some success, but nothing that truly broke through. At the time I didn’t yet understand how elusive desperation is, or how clearly you can feel it when it’s real.
3. They pivoted with purpose.
In basketball, a pivot means keeping one foot firmly planted while you rotate around it with intention. In startups, a pivot is the same. You keep your core insight grounded (like Nex’s insight that AI and a simple camera can make movements trackable and interactive) and you turn everything else to find the people who are desperate for that insight.
This month alone Nex sold 100k units, more than the Nintendo Switch and became the number one video game console just ahead of the holidays. For a moment I had to sit with that. The company I first interned for, the little orange H I used to open at halfcourt. Growing up in Tucson, the most successful people I knew were lawyers and orthodontists. I didn’t know anything about startups. I didn’t even know I was working for one. I was simply working for an app that had captured my heart and made me better.
Now at Floodgate, I’ve learned how rare startup greatness is. How much of it comes from stubborn, principled belief and having the courage to swing big. The story is far from over, but right now the Nex team is on fire. And what matters even more is that they’ve done it their way.
Sam Beskind 