How Golf Genius Reached $60M Revenue with 11,000 Clubs in 62 Countries (Interview with CEO Mike Zisman)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

0:00Hey, folks, my guest today is Mike Zisman. He's the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, launched back in 2009. He is a serial entrepreneur. Mike, I don't want to age you here, but first company back in 1979, formal faculty at MIT, over 40 years of experience building software companies. Mike, ready to take us to the top?

Mike Zisman, CEO

0:17I am. Great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me.

Nathan Latka

0:21you bet. Tell us more about what you're selling at golf genius. Then we'll go back and get your backstory.

What Golf Genius Sells and Who Buys It

Mike Zisman, CEO

0:26Sure. So Golf Genius is the leading provider of tournament software to golf clubs, private clubs, public courses, tours, associations. ⁓ We provide sort of the very high end software for, you know, creating tournaments, doing registration, payment processing, live leader boards, broadcast feeds where we're working with, you know, like PGA or USGA tournaments. So it's a very deep product for providing. ⁓ the capabilities that golf professionals need. Typically our end user is a PGA golf professional in a private club or a public facility.

1:05And is the group at the private facility, is that the owner of the facility or it's a player at the facility? Probably the owner, right?

1:12No, so you think about a club I belong to, Marion Golf Club, right? It's a member-owned club. We have a golf staff, typically a head golf professional, assistant golf professionals. Our user is that director of golf or assistant golf professional. But we're really B2B to see Nathan in a sense that all the live scoring is done by the players at that club using our ⁓ live scoring app. So we provide, think about it, provide software

1:40Interesting.

B2B to B2C Model Explained

Nathan Latka

1:42for the ⁓ pro to set up the tournaments, they say, hey, let's go. Then the players themselves are typically using our mobile app to actually do the scoring. So the beauty is when the last guy walks off the course, click a button to resolve ties. We know what all the results of the tournament are and it may have been many different tournaments all going on at the same time.

2:07So just to put that all in a sentence, you're selling to the director of golf when they have a tournament, they're emailing all the players saying, down to the mobile app before we start. Yep.

2:14Correct, exactly. Most of them already have. mean, millions of people at this point have our mobile app. So typically they don't have to, but say at a charity tournament, you're absolutely right. There's people show up to play at a charity tournament. They'll literally get something that says, download this app. We don't make them register. They're going to have a six character ID and they enter that ID and you know, they're scoring.

Pricing and the 11,000 Club Customer Base

Nathan Latka

2:36Very cool. Help me understand how you've thought about pricing, then we'll get the backstory here. What's the average director of golf paying you for the software?

2:42So our list price, which we stick very close to at a private club today is about $4,200 per year for essentially unlimited use of the product for up to two 18-hole golf facilities. So if you're a Pinehurst with seven different courses, that's all custom price. But it's actually, as I like to say, every business is price times quantity, P times Q, you learn in economics one, we're relatively low P, high Q, high quantity. We're in 11,000 courses. So we're pretty simple plus we do lots of other things, but it's certainly the most inexpensive software that club will have because they also need software to you know Do their point of sale to manage their t-sheet to do their website to do? ⁓ Member billing and things like that So we're we're one component in in that software stack that a clubber of course is running It's a very high-end like the US the United States Golf Association. You know, we're doing all of their tournaments. We do all the handicapping in the United States. So the USJ is responsible for handicapping. One of the things that makes golf unique, Nathan, I if you're a golfer not, but golf has handicapping. So what it means is that a really poor player and a great player can go out and have a very fun round of golf. Let's say that that really good player has to give me 15 strokes. So he has to beat me by more than 15 strokes to win. So we have, we can come down literally the last putt on the 18th hole. Compare that to something like tennis. If you have a really good tennis player and a really poor tennis player, no one's having fun. So what makes golf unique is this handicapping, which is very precise, and we do all of that in the US and 20 other countries.

Mike Zisman, CEO

4:1911,000 courses across how many clubs?

4:23It's 11,000 customers, so 11,000 clubs in 62 countries.

4:29Okay, got it. So 11,000 clubs, 62 countries, but one of those clubs might have on average three 18 hole golf facilities.

4:35The vast majority of them have one. Most clubs have one golf course. Some have two. And then resorts like a Desert Mountain in Arizona or a Pinehurst may have six or seven or eight golf courses.

4:48I see, okay, but it's fair to say on average, your customer's gonna be paying you then about that 4,200 per year price point, because the majority have one course. Yeah, okay. Give me the backstory here. How do you go from MIT professor to golf guy?

Founder Backstory: MIT, SoftSwitch, Lotus, and IBM

Mike Zisman, CEO

4:54Almost all the time. Almost all the time. Yeah. ⁓ Well, I always loved software. think my happiest days were programming. They're still my happiest days, but I don't do it anymore. I love coding. It's magical for me. Like some people, I think when some people appreciate a great poem, I appreciate great code. So I've always loved programming, very technical. ⁓ As soon as I got to MIT, I realized I did not want to be an academic. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I was there for two years, moved back to Philadelphia where I was from. I went to graduate school, started the first company, SoftSwitch, which was in the communication software business. It was very low level communication software, sold to Fortune 500 companies. That was acquired by Lotus Development in 1994. And then lo and behold, 11 months later, IBM came along and acquired Lotus. So in 11 months, I went from a company of 450 people, my company, to Lotus, which was 6,000, to IBM, which was a quarter million. They were different. Trust me, they were different. Not good versus bad, because it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have a quarter million people trying to do something. And I stayed at IBM for a while. I worked with Lou Gershner, who was a just fantastic CEO. He turned around to IBM, absolutely. And then that kind of ran its course.

6:04the

From Buddy Golf Trips to Golf Genius

Nathan Latka

6:24and ⁓ left IBM in 07, you know, I really don't want to retire. I love what I do. And I was always the guy organizing the buddy golf trip. know, 12 guys go off some place to play golf. And, you know, I'd come back from the trip and I was the organizer. And, you know, you come up to me and say, you know, you had me play with John three times and you know I don't like John. And I didn't play with Sam at all. And I have a, my PhD is really in operations research and scheduling. I sort of love scheduling problems. So I that's an interesting problem. And so it all started with, let's build a scheduling system to get everyone in the right foursomes over five, six, seven rounds. ⁓ It was called, in fact, the original name of the company was Golf Trip Genius for Buddy Golf Trips. And then ⁓ that turned out to be a very small market, but still serviced it. It's a small market, very price sensitive market and moved from that to golf leagues, right? And so instead of... 12 guys playing six rounds of golf, you got 60 guys playing 20 rounds of golf, and then move from that to selling to clubs. But the real break for us, and every company, I often say, if an entrepreneur tells you luck wasn't part of his success, they don't know what they're talking about. ⁓ Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, but you need some luck. And in our case, it was building relationship with the USGA to replace their tournament management system with ours, which really put the company in a whole different trajectory.

7:48What year was that?

7:49That was 2016. So it started in 2009. As I like to say, we wandered in the desert, entrepreneurs wander in the desert till you, today we say product market fit, you do you have a product market fit? And we went from buddy trips to leagues, to servicing clubs, and then, you know, really, really enter a relationship with the USGA to do tournament management. And then they came back in 2019 and said, hey,

7:51Okay.

Revenue Milestones and Growth Story

Nathan Latka

8:15We also want you to build the new handicap system. There was a new worldwide standard for handicapping ⁓ and we want you to build that and operate it. So we did that. And in fact, we just entered the second five-year contract to do that. So we have a very close relationship with the USDA as well as the PGA of America. Most of the England golf, the Ireland golf, do all their tournaments and almost all the the PGA associations around the world. So it really isn't an international company today, very focused on golf. It's probably the largest pure play golf software company in the industry.

Mike Zisman, CEO

8:49Bye. ⁓ measured by revenue or something else. Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4,200 to back into a revenue range?

9:05⁓ no, that would get you to about two thirds of our revenue, but then we do all the handicapping. We also have other products. You know, we go to, we go to a golf pro. It's a classic suite. Like I grew up in the days of Microsoft office and what a smart suite. go to a pro at a club and say, look, you spend your time doing three things. You run tournaments, you run a golf shop. It's a physical golf shop or retail, and you do teaching and coaching. We have four software products that do all those things. We're very, very focused on coaching. And so we can sell an entire suite to that club more than just handicapping. So when you roll it all up, it's a good deal more than the 44 million. It's been, the company's been profitable since 2017. I'd like to say we have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised. Literally, 11 million. That's all. That's all.

Capital Efficiency, Debt, and Profitability

Nathan Latka

9:54How much have you raised? That's great. So as a capital allocator, you're just sitting on these profits now you have over 11 million cash sitting in your bank today. Do you just what do do with that? How do think about reinvesting it?

Mike Zisman, CEO

10:06That's a very good question. And I had that conversation with someone today. Like, what do we, it's actually 14 million cash. Like, what the hell are we doing sitting on 14 million cash? We can fund out, it can fund acquisitions. We've done 10 acquisitions. And right now, you know, my view as an entrepreneur at our stage is there's always, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with rule of 40, right? Revenue growth plus profit margin. But there's a strong bias towards growth. If you want to get really good multiples, you gotta be growing. I mean, people don't pay high multiples for companies that are just flat. They'll pay six or seven times cash flow, right? ⁓ And so, you know, we are very focused on growth and investing into it. So my view is, I've never believed in, ⁓ you know, ⁓ growth at all costs, losing money. It's very hard to make the transition from losing money to making money. ⁓ And you're, you know, the fuse is on, right? If you keep losing money. You know, eventually you've burned out and, you know, bad stuff can happen. So my strategy is earn 20 % and invest the rest. So we consistently earn about 20 % EBITDA margin, invest the rest. We're, you know, incredibly excited about what AI does for us. I mean, believe it or not, my PhD thesis in 1977 was an artificial intelligence thesis. In fact, if you go... Ask Gemini or Chet CPT compares thisman's augmented Petri Nets to agentic AI. It says, wow, they're very similar. And that was 50 years earlier. So, you I've been around AI literally since 1975. And so can see how we can use it. All of our engineers, you know, are fully equipped with Claude and cursor and lovable and all the other tools. Our marketing people are using it like crazy. It's just, you know, There's a lot of problems with agentic AI in terms of accuracy and things like that, but ⁓ it's an amazing tool. It's amazing tools. And I often say, I view prompting as just the next national level of programming language. And we went from machine language, I'm almost on you. put ones and zeros to assembler language, which had nothing to do with the application, load this register with that thing. From there, I'll call them third programming languages, procedural languages. which we've had for years. So Fortran was introduced in late 50s, right? And then we had all sorts of other, you know, procedural languages and programs like, you know, C++. So it's been a long time where we've had these ways of programming and, you know, fairly low level and prompting to me is just the next evolution of that, where you can just speak at a much higher level. it generates source code that then generates machine code. It's fantastic.

Team Size, Romania Engineering Hub, and AI Tools

Nathan Latka

12:58Well, you're clearly using that and getting the efficiency if you're printing 20 % EBITDA margins consistently. So congratulations. What's the team size today, full time?

Mike Zisman, CEO

13:03Yeah. We're just under 300 and going down, we've been flat for some time because, you we are seeing productivity gains. are not of the right now. We are not of the view. my God, our engineers are so productive. We can reduce headcount. My view is our engineers are so productive. We can just do a lot more. So right now our view is we're not looking and interestingly enough, surprising out of our 300 employees. Almost half of them are in development, which is extraordinary for a company of our size. Most of them are in a wholly owned subsidiary, Inclusion Romania. We started development in Romania. The day I started the company, 2009. So we get enormous labor savings and fantastic people. Many of those people have been with us for a long time. When I started working with the USGA, they said to me, you know, Mike, We can find people who know software and we can find people who know golf. We just can't find people who know golf software until you. So we have people who know golf software. I've been with us a long time and some of it's, you know, very, very intricate. You know, when I started to come, I focused on the scheduler. I mean, that scheduler runs thousands of times a day and can literally generate and score 50 million schedules a second, you know, running on 10 big processors and Amazon. Some people would call it AI, I call it mathematical programming, it's sort of my background. But we're still, there's just so much you can do with the AI tools today. And as I'm sure you're aware, the market has taken a real hit because people think that AI will put SaaS companies out of business. I think for the large part, that's just very naive. It will make SaaS companies radically more productive. And there'll be more competition, which is good. Because I like to say to people, competition accelerates innovation and reduces costs. Which of those two don't you like? So we relish competition. And that's what I do. As much as I have you.

Nathan Latka

15:09They're both good things. So give us the growth story. Mike, give us the growth story here for a second. So you get going in 2009. What was your first year where you broke a million of revenue?

15:23It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years to get to 50 million. And I look at it, it's SaaS. know, when you're selling SaaS subscriptions back then, it was like 2,500 a pop. You got to sell a lot of subscriptions. It took a while. I funded the company personally, but from 2009 to 2020, I find I funded the company with about $10 million. My own money mostly is debt. What I love about our company is. Most of the stock is owned by employees. Very widely distributed.

Cap Table and Employee Ownership Philosophy

Nathan Latka

15:56how much, if I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP or employee owned?

Mike Zisman, CEO

16:00It's not an ESOP, but it's profit units. Not counting, well, almost 80%, including me and the other executives. Yeah, because we raised so little money. We only raised 11 million bucks.

16:08Wow. Okay, that's including you though. You plus employees, 80%.

16:14That's including me, but if I take away the really senior people, it's still 60%. My biggest thrill, I tell people honest to God, I will measure the success of this company by how many of our employees make a significant amount of money when we sell or when we exit or do a recap. To me, I was successful in my first company. wasn't really focused on the money, so I was able to spread the equity out quite widely. And we have people who joined us in 2010.

16:19Wow, that's great.

Nathan Latka

16:44got what were significant slugs of stock because it was not worth very much. And we have incredible retention because of it. We probably have 6%, 7 % attrition, including in Romania for developers. I like the people. I say, well, it's either because they really like me or they own a lot of stock. I'm not sure which.

17:08They tend to go together, don't they?

17:10Maybe, maybe, but to me, I want to make sure, my philosophy at company is we're all in this together. We're all in this together. I like to say, I couldn't build a company with 300 Mike Sissmans at different skills. I couldn't build a company with 300 Alex's who runs development. What I love about an entrepreneurial company is bringing together a bunch of people with different skills to accomplish something none of them could accomplish on their own. That's what a company is about. Can you bring together a set of skills, marketing skills, sales skills, finance skills, development skills, support skills, to accomplish something together as a team that none of us accomplish on our own? To me, that's where the juice is in being an entrepreneur.

17:52So just to summarize that cap table, which I'm so impressed by again, we'll take 100%, subtract down about 20%, which investors own. Employees, including you, own 80%, but even when you take out Mike, you, plus other senior folks, all the other employees still own about 60%. So you and seniors own about 20%. Incredible.

18:07Absolutely. Yeah. Well, ⁓ that's probably not quite right. That's probably not quite right. ⁓ Let's say me and the other seniors own 30%, 40%. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. To me, it's what's very gratifying is that, you know, and so we're all, you know, as I like to say, we're all pulling on the same side of the rope. We all have the same motivations. ⁓

18:18Still, still, same concept. A lot of employee ownership, that's awesome. Yep. Okay. I love this.

18:37We're all in this together.

18:38I always joke, Mike, I say first time founders chase the equity raising valuation, second time founders keep equity and use debt. So you mentioned you self-funded 10 million with your own money, including debt. Can you tell me how much debt and how you structured it?

18:50Well, the original money I put in, I put in almost all as debt because I had been through the drill. I raise money, I give you options. I raise more money, you get the litter. give you more. It's like hamster. give you that. So said, look, I don't need to do that. I'm going to put the vast majority in as debt, literally interest-free debt. I didn't really care. Let me finish it. when the company became, so as a result of that, by the way, I had basis. and how they'll had all those losses over the years that helped me from a tax perspective. When the company became profitable, started paying down the debt to cover the taxes. And then when we did our first round of institutional financing in 2020, there was like a 1.25 million left and paid it. But we now have debt. In 2024, we acquired two companies that have been incredibly successful for us. And we funded that partly with 20 million of debt from Bridge Bank. And they've been an absolutely fantastic partner, absolutely fantastic.

19:55Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's great. So just to summarize again, you said it took you eight years to get a million, another eight to break 50 million. That will put you at 1 million ARR in 2017 and about 50 million is where you wrapped up 2025.

20:07Little more than that, yeah, more like $53 million.

20:09Little more, little more. And what do you think you'll break at the end of 2026?

20:12Our plan right now is little over 60.

20:15Okay. So that plus your profit margin, you still think you can hit the rule of 40.

20:22We will not hit the role of 40 this year. Our growth is to get bigger and bigger, it's harder and harder. If you look at SaaS companies, it's fascinating. It makes perfect sense. If you look at SaaS companies, as the companies have got larger, the growth rate's gone down. The average growth rate for a SaaS company, 50 million and above, is like 10%. It's big, it's harder. We're more than 10%, but you have to be mindful that You know, it's one thing, as I like to say, it's one thing to grow a $5 million company 50 % a year. It's a little harder to grow a $5 billion company 50 % a year, right? Or even a $50 million company. So we are, you know, we don't have the, you know, we're not growing at 30 and 40%, but we're growing at a very manageable rate, very close to rule of 40.

Acquisition Strategy: Desktop Rollups to B2C Apps

Nathan Latka

21:12Yeah, Mike, the last thing I want to touch on, because there's a lot of founders I talked to that think they can't even think about buying up other companies until they have, you know, a hundred million of revenue. But I see sort of three phases with your acquisition strategy in 2020, you were rolling up sort of legacy desktop tools to lock and supply courses and tournaments in 2021. You expanded into leagues to increase, think probably engagement and recurring usage. And then 2024, you got really aggressive with consumer and mobile GPS apps, coaching and data. Please correct me if your strategy was different than that, but if that is accurate, why that pattern?

Mike Zisman, CEO

21:44Well, so when we came into the market and really started selling to clubs in 2014, there were some existing desktop suppliers who provided a very simple product, but they had customers. As I said, when you do an acquisition, it's some combination of technology or product, talent, and customers. The best acquisitions are all three. Some of them, you're just buying customers. So our first goal was let's go get those customers. We had no interest whatsoever in their old desktop software, but we acquired a whole bunch of customers. And then after that was really an acquihire, a guy who wanted to be in the business. It was clear, like, just come join up with us. And then we acquired a few other firms. And then, you know, in 2023, we made the strategic decision. It was important to expand from B2B, selling to clubs, to B2C, selling directly to golfers. There's a lot more golfers than clubs. Right. And so, you know, we entered that market with two acquisitions that, um, you know, golf shot and swing you that have been put, be able to put them together. run them a separate brands, right? So it's a house of brand strategy, if you will. Uh, most of the companies who have acquired, we've kept their brands because they had brand equity. Uh, disappointment to me in 2025 was he didn't do any acquisitions. We looked at some, but we couldn't get together on price. I think things are probably getting a little more reasonable now. ⁓ I acquired my first company in 1984. I've been on both sides of the table many, many times and hope to do some acquisitions.

Nathan Latka

23:07Yep. Well, is why I want to dive deep on this. mean, you're glazing over it, but this is something I want younger entrepreneurs to learn. I mean, I'm looking at golf shot on my phone right now. You guys, I don't know that we'll be able to see this. We'll edit it into the post-production. This is not a small deal, okay? This is like 71,000 five-star reviews. I'm gonna guess it's probably four, five, six, eight million users when you bought it. How'd you negotiate the deal?

GolfShot Deal Structure and B2C Expansion

Mike Zisman, CEO

23:45⁓ There's a market, know, people like to think that I think what I have learned over the years that I think sometimes younger entrepreneurs don't realize is there's a market. The market is very different than it was six months ago, right? Typically for entrepreneurial companies like this, you're talking at multiples of revenue because often they're not profitable. it's multiple, you know, enterprise value over revenue. And, you know, back in 21, as you know, companies are trading at 10 times revenue, you know, which is, which implies extraordinary growth. At the end of the day, a company's worth the present value for its future cash flows. I mean, that's what I learned as a PhD at the Wharton School, right? At the end of the day, a company is worth the present value for its future cash flows. ⁓ So the markets come down, but I think it was a ⁓ market rate. We had been talking to them a few years early because we were very interested. So GolfShot, the product you just put up, they acquired a company called CoachNow. which was a very high brand equity in the coaching video analysis space. We wanted that company, talked to them and we couldn't get a deal together, came back. And they were a company that had been around a long time, a complex cap table. It was time for them to do something. And in that case, interestingly enough, what they said is, hey, look, we're not real thrilled with the pricing you're talking about, but if we could do it as an all stock deal with you and ride your stock up, we would do that. And I said, well, we're sitting on too much cash to do that, but we'll do part of it in stock. And so, but I said, we'll get part of it in stock, but I don't want, I don't want, I don't want your cap table. I don't want your cap table. You go form an LLC, you put your cap table behind the black curtain and you're one line entry on my cap table. It's the, you know, XYZ Holdings LLC. I don't, I don't want to know what's behind, I don't want to, I don't want to know what's behind the iron curtain.

Nathan Latka

25:36your 100 shareholders that own 0.001 % on your cap table.

Mike Zisman, CEO

25:39Exactly. Exactly. I don't want to know about it. You're just... And they saw the wisdom of that and they'll do very well. They'll get another turn on their ARR because the stock, when the stock goes, it was a really good deal. And I say to people all the time, if you're a seller, if you're selling your company, ⁓ don't take all stock because you're relying on that buyer to make good on you. But if you take all cash and the thing takes off, you're to feel like you missed the boat. So if you're willing to take some risks, take a combination of cash and stock. And I think that's how a lot of deals get done.

Nathan Latka

26:13If you looked at the total deal value paid for golf shot, like the dollar value, what percent of the dollar value did you do equity versus cash upfront?

Mike Zisman, CEO

26:20It was two-thirds stock, one-third cash.

26:23Okay, pretty cool. And how much did golf shot add to your revenue? The second you acquired it? What were you talking like 5 million or 10 million or something smaller? It was about 10. Okay. Okay. And my research says that they were bootstrapped. Was that true?

Nathan Latka

26:30And yeah. I think so. I really don't even know the history. were started actually, so they were started by two entrepreneurs in the Phoenix area. Ben Adams then came in and bought the company. He was the CEO and we bought it. And so he runs our whole B2C business. Ben, as I like to say, Ben, every time I talk, you get humble because you use acronyms I've never heard of. And I've been in the IT business longer than you've been alive. But there's the whole B2C world. Average return on ad spend, this, that, media mix. ⁓ Ben literally sold his first company to Excited Home in the 90s. you know, he's been in the B2C software business forever. It's an absolute thrill working with him because he knows the stuff so well.

Mike Zisman, CEO

27:19I'm like, this is why I love doing this show, right? Because if I asked my audience, just look at this website and guess revenue with all due respect, like it's not sexy web 2.0, it's none of that. And the reason is because you've got all these other go-to-market motions that are really sexy, 8 million user mobile apps for consumers and sort of other things, but 60 North is, know, approaching 60 million bucks of revenue here is obviously an impressive story. How do you think about sort of your legacy, right? If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million all cash upfront to sell the business. you sell?

27:52Would you?

27:54Well, you're growing from 50 to 60 million year over year. You're printing cashflow. I don't know your personal life situation. You have employees that have been on the cap table, potentially some of them for north of 10 years. I don't know if you've offered them liquidity in the past with the raises that you've done. If you haven't, it could be an opportunity to do that.

Employee Liquidity and Secondary Offerings

Nathan Latka

28:10Yeah, we do. So it's something, look, you have to think about, you have to do what's best for your shareholders. There is some number at which you say, okay, I don't know what that number is. What we have done in the past, and we're probably gonna do right now, is we offer ⁓ employee redemption. So we go to employees and say, we are open the window. ⁓ If you would like to redeem some of your shares at our 409A valuation, we'll redeem them. to get liquidity, because some of these people have been on the cap table for 15, 16, 17 years and say, I've had a chance to get a bite at the apple to redeem something. It's not a lot. Most people go like, you know, it's only going to get better from here. I always say, take something off the table. When you have a chance to take something off the table, I always recommend to people, just manage your risk a little bit. And so we've done that twice. We're probably going to do it again. We're considering a minority recap where we would bring in a substantial amount of money. ⁓ to provide liquidity for our investors. They're not very anxious, but ⁓ you know, and people like me who, you know, have been at this for a long time. But, you know, right now, you know, we're very, very excited about our prospects. I'm like, I told someone the other day, I'm more juiced up than I've been in years. I look at all this AI stuff. I'm a geek. I'm a certified geek. love... helping people build these things, giving them the ideas. You come back a day later and you go, oh my God, you did that last night? I mean, look at that.

Mike Zisman, CEO

29:40That's the beauty of a Romanian engineering team, right? You give this back at 6 PM, you wake up at 6 AM and it's done.

29:45Well, you know, we're adding social features to our products. know, typical, like a face, and I literally laid out, said, here's what we need to do. Here's, we need a feed where clubs can broadcast, we need chat, and that, that, that. Literally 48 hours later, a VP of engineering says, look, I use Lavaboo, I built this whole thing out. says the whole thing, I said, yeah, my God, and it's like, beautiful. I said, God, we could go compete with Facebook. Oh wait, they have two billion users. Okay, probably not going to do that, but it is a need. We have product managers, we have product managers who literally started their careers as assistant PGA professionals who on their own went out and got lovable. And they say, rather than explain to development what want to do, it's easier just to build the user experience and say, here, you know, we were using Figma for a long time. We still use it as a good product, but we literally

30:18We probably have more golf users though.

30:44I mean, you I have a guy who runs product management joined us 2010, 2011, and he's become a very, really good product manager, right? Which is a hard job to me. Product management is the hardest job in a company. It's the gearbox. It's the gearbox when you decide what to build and what not to build. And he's using Level to build sort of next generation UI, UX. It's incredible. It's fantastic to watch. People are so productive.

31:15I want to see more entrepreneurs build their company in a profitable way where they keep full control. mean, you are the definition of that. Now everyone is not as wealthy as you are when they launched their company, right? You already had success, but there's still some good lessons here. I want to round out that employee sort of liquidity offering for a second. If they joined in, you know, 2010, I'm making these numbers up. Okay. At a dollar exercise price and your most recent for all nine, eight, let's just make it up was 10 bucks. And let's say I've got a thousand shares. When you send that email out to everyone saying you're going to offer sort of a secondary, you say, Nathan, you could sell up to 10 % of your vested shares so that people don't sell all of them. And, do you say we're going to sell the first people that say, yes, up to a cap of 5 million from the company, or how do you structure it specifically?

Nathan Latka

31:56It's a question. So what we've done in the past, which is probably what we're doing, is to say, Nathan, you can sell up to 20 % of your shares as long as those are vested. Right? So let's say you had 500 best and 500 unvested, you could still sell 200 of your 500 invested. Right? And I say to people, look, I'm truly indifferent. It's a creative to the investors, right? You're skinning down the cap table. These guys are getting liquidity at our size. I mean, typically, a 409A is way below market.

32:31usually 60 % below preferred share.

Mike Zisman, CEO

32:33Yeah, in our case, because the company is the size it is, we really can't get away with that. Our 409A price is... much closer to market. It has to be at our size. So, you know, they're not selling at some distressed price, but it's still a creative to this year. It's a win-win for everybody.

32:45Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah. there's some there's some town in Romania that you're making very rich. Everyone's the real estate market's going up. All these people, these hundreds of these dozens of engineers, you're just making very rich, which is great.

Nathan Latka

33:04tell you something, you'll find this hard to believe Nathan, in Cluj, Romania, there are 2300 software companies. It's unbelievable. It's in Cluj, in the town of Cluj, just think about Cluj as the Silicon Valley of Romania. So you have Bucharest in the south, Cluj is the kind of the university center, it's where many of the universities are, an enormous number of, know, ⁓ outsourcing firms and things like that. And so we're able to still maintain, you know, very high retention. One other thing I would say is,

33:12in all of Romania, just in Romania. Wow.

Four Growth Pillars and Future Outlook

Nathan Latka

33:34At 300 people, we're still totally virtual. We have no offices. And some people say that's nuts. say, look, first of all, it allows me to take money I would spend on office space and invest it in the employees. So for example, we do on our 401k, we have a superb benefits program, because I just think you have to treat people well. So in our 401k, ⁓ we do a guaranteed 3 % match and at the end of the year, another 3%. So typically, and we make clear, that other 3 % is based on how we do guys. I often define success is doing what you said you were gonna do. Success is doing what you said you were going to do. Sometimes you don't do it. It doesn't mean you failed. It just means you weren't successful. Right? And so we do a, you know, pretty much a 6 % match for people. As I like to say, I've learned a few lessons at my age. You got to start saving early. So we want to make it extremely painful for people not to save. Can I take someone, you know, just $50,000, if they're putting in 6%, that's $3,000. We put another $3,000. You're leaving $3,000 on the table. And by the way, you should do it as a Roth ⁓ 401k if you can possibly afford it. Do it as a Roth if you can afford to. you know, we have really, really good medical benefits. ⁓ You know, I just think, you know, to me, ⁓ it's one big team. We're all in it together.

Mike Zisman, CEO

34:47Yep. Yeah, well, I'm predicting sometime in the next six months, I'm going to read a headline like Susquehanna or main sale has come in and, know, bought a 30 % sort of minority stake for whatever 200 million bucks. And you're going to keep control. And then they're going to say, Michael, you've bought Mike, you've bought 10 million. You've bought 10 companies today. I need you to buy 10 per year going forward. Cause that's the private equity playbook and we'll see what you do.

35:23Yeah, that is the playbook. fortunately, when I sold my first company to Lotus, the venture capital firms that had financed SoftSwitch invited me to become a limited partner in their firms. So I've been a limited partner in venture capital and private equity firms for like 25 years. And so I know the drill. know the model. ⁓ I've been on both sides of the table. And yes, I mean, the big PE firms want you to be a platform and an aggregate. And we are a platform. I mean, we have over a hundred companies interface to our software through our APIs. And, you know, I just see really just keep doing what we're doing. What you have to focus on as an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is growth, profitable growth, right? And because if you want to get... real multiples. Someone has to believe the growth is there, right? Have to believe the growth is there. And so you really, in our case, we have four areas of growth. This is what I focus on is, okay, what are we doing in each of these areas every day to drive growth? know, one is our private club space. We're very dominant. One is public courses. One is international where, although we're in 62 countries, it's hand-to-hand combat in each of these countries. They're all different. And it's a struggle. And then we have some other, I wouldn't call it a moonshot by any stretch, but really interesting things we're doing that we'll be introducing in the next year. how we grow? Where's the growth come from?

Nathan Latka

37:00Mike, if people want to follow your story after they're done listening to this interview, where can they find you online?

Wrap-Up and Summary

Mike Zisman, CEO

37:06⁓ I'm Mike at GolfGenius.com or I'm on LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

37:12Guys, there you have it. He had a lot of success in the nineties at his first company. Ultimately in 2009, you know, he was sick of his golf buddies complaining after work trips. If they got stuck playing with the annoying guy and they wanted to play with the cool guy, no one like play. No one liked playing with Nathan. They all want to play with Mike. So he said, you want me to do something about this? His first customers were his golf buddies back then in 2014, he started selling to courses and a big contract in 2016 got going with the U S

37:21Yeah. No one liked playing with Nathan. No one liked playing with Nathan.

Mike Zisman, CEO

37:37GA, he's now handling the full handicapping algorithm, PGA of America, et cetera, profitable in a million bucks of revenue in 2017. By 2020, they'd obviously scaled, self-funded 10 million of his own money, did over 10 acquisitions. Last year in 2025, broke 50 million of revenue. Now today, he's recording here in March of 2026, 14 million cash in the bank, 20 % EBITDA margins, 300 folks full-time, including a massive team, includes Romania. 50 % of the team are engineers. They're targeting over 60 million of ARR this year as they continue. to scale, again, 11,000 clubs across 62 countries using them. On average, he bills $4,200 per year plus sells some other things on the side. And he gives back to his employees. They're all invested. CapTable today is roughly 50 % goes to his employees, 20 % are to investors, and the other 30%, roughly, is to Mike and his senior folks. Mike, what a story. Golfgenius.com.

Nathan Latka

38:26Hey, Jason, you did a better job summarizing the company than I could. You want to come work for us?

Mike Zisman, CEO

38:33I appreciate you. This was great. Thanks for taking us to the top.

Nathan Latka

38:35Pleasure. Take care. Bye.