Episode 31: The Future of Futbol

Hey listeners, welcome to SphereCast, a podcast all about technology, technology advice, technology inspiration, and how real entrepreneurs have used technology to build their businesses from the ground up.

If you're wondering how technology can support your business goals, rest assured our guests have been there and done that.

This week, the SphereCast team interviews Álvaro Ybáñez, Chief Product Officer at Fly-Fut. Fly-Fut uses modern drone technology and loads of creativity to make every amateur football player, or soccer player, as some say, feel like an idol. Fly-Fut's main product offering features an aerial view of match highlights paired with professional narration and energizing music. Though football is its first love, Fly-Fut aspires to delve into other sports, such as basketball, tennis, volleyball, and more.

Ybáñez, who is both a veteran product expert and a football lover, truly believes that Fly-Fut is going to revolutionize the game. But while the rewards of startup innovation are high, Álvaro knows that getting a young company off the ground is no walk in the park. On the podcast, Ybáñez discusses some of Fly-Fut's biggest challenges, but also divulges the myriad ways he stays grounded as a senior executive at a fast-moving company. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Álvaro Ybáñez.

Hi everyone, Ksenia's here. Today our guest is Álvaro. We're thrilled to host you on SphereCast. How are you?

Hi Ksenia. Nice to meet you.

Let's start with an icebreaker. Could you share with our audience something interesting about yourself that most people do not know?

I was a professional DJ for a couple of years. I think it was over 12 in Madrid. I started DJing when I was 16 years old and I started with cassettes and Discman, and then I started buying vinyl records. You know, I started building from there and I went to the States, made some money, came back, bought a set of professional Technics players and a Pioneer mixer.

Everything was vinyl then, no digital. Things have changed a lot surely. I've DJed in many of the greatest clubs in Madrid and some in Spain. I even DJed in a bullring in front of 7,000 people. So I did quite well for such an endeavor, I guess.

Wow. I wasn't expecting that. Ksenia, were you?

No, not at all. I was going to say Luke mixes some tunes sometimes on YouTube, but I don't think you do it on this sort of scale.

Yeah, that was an experience. Unfortunately, I had to quit because I was in a big project working with Telefónica UK, and I had to go back and forth Madrid-London, London-Madrid. I was DJing at the time, so I came back in the weekends and I DJed, and it was very tiring.

After two months of the project, I got—I don't know if it's called like this—it's zoster herpes, which is kind of smallpox, but very concentrated, and probably the worst week of my life. I went to the doctor and he said, "You either do days or you do nights. You're not going to be able to do both." So I had to quit unfortunately. I now DJ sometimes for a friend's wedding or something like that, but very once in a blue moon, not that much.

That's quite a story. So yeah, thanks for sharing that. We could have never, you know, like—I'm sure you don't put this on your LinkedIn profile that you were a DJ, so.

No, I do not.

Okay. So apart from being a successful DJ, how did you get into football? Let's begin there. I mean, there must be some kind of—you're from Madrid, so I think it's easy to get into football, easy access, world's best football club is there. But what brought you to Madrid or this following? How did you get in? Like the interest, at what point in your life?

My interest for Real Madrid started very soon. I started going to the stadium when I was four. Actually, my granddad was friends with Alfredo Di Stéfano, which is a Madrid legend, and my family has had seats at the stadium since forever. So it's not something that you have a chance to decide by yourself, right? You're taken to the stadium, and it just builds from there.

Okay. You just got thrown into this. Okay, fair enough. And there's no way out now.

Thanks for sharing that. Okay, I mean people must be thinking by now, is this really a podcast for the technology-minded people or something like that? We talk about technology and tech products and services, et cetera, et cetera, and business. But we're talking something else here, but it's a great start. Ksenia, I'm going to hand this over to you for the next part.

All right. I'm going to ask some of the more business-oriented questions here. I like to keep our guests on their toes. I'd like to start with your most recent venture. In your own words, could you tell us what is Fly-Fut and why did you join this company?

Fly-Fut, in essence, is the future of football. What we do is we record games and training with drone. What we've found over many interviews and many talks with pro teams and amateur teams is that the drone shot is the best for both entertainment and performance. In essence, what we want to do is put a drone in every single football pitch in the world, and that's Fly-Fut in essence.

When I joined, I joined two years ago, two and a half years ago, in February 2019. I actually knew the CEO, Luis Javier Osorio, from way back. We actually played football together in the United States. We should have called it soccer, but we're going to keep things as they are.

Luis and I have known each other for almost 20 years. I was closing my own shop and that was December 2018, and he called me via a friend in 2019 and he told me he needed a product guy to join his company. I joined because technology and football are two of my passions, so it was a no-brainer.

Amazing. So when you joined the company, did everything go as planned or what kind of challenges did you have, both business challenges and technology challenges that you faced?

First of all, the business side of things is not really to sell the product because football is a very passionate sport and people love seeing themselves. As soon as you bring that what we call the mystique, the new superstar experience to them, they feel like they're the new Cristiano Ronaldo regardless of how much they weigh, how good they play. They're having a professional broadcaster that is calling them by name and they just feel like stars. That was not a problem. Product-market fit was found super fast.

The business problems came from the legal standpoint. As I talked with Luke earlier, the amount of work that needs to go in to lift a drone is humongous. We had to spend like 18 months to get all the legal papers to make sure that we could fly drones in tens of places at the same time, because you have to call the airport, you have to call the police, you have to call so many stakeholders. Most of the time it's just a burden for them because they're trying to land a 747 and you're just trying to lift a drone that weighs 250 grams seven meters off the land, right? So the business problems came there.

From a technology standpoint, I came in just to make sure that we could scale. At first, things were not looking so good because the scripts for the highlights—the main product that we do is we select the most relevant plays from a football match and we edit them and we compile them into a single video, and we put a voiceover from a narrator that we have and that's our main product, right?

The thing with the technology was that the process of making the video was not fast enough, right? We had to have the script made in Excel, then the video was edited in Adobe Premiere, so it required someone with expertise and that was not scalable. So what we did was conceive a video editing software that allowed anyone to edit games, because everything was linked to a database and you just had to put Sphere as the score, as the main team, and you would pass to Luke, and Luke would shoot on goal, and then everything was automated by then with dictionaries depending on the type of play. We made that to make sure that we could scale, because at that point it wasn't scalable at all. So those were the main problems when I arrived.

Interesting, interesting. And how are these challenges coming along now, now that you have been with Fly-Fut for over two years?

Now, Luke, we are focused on a new version of the system. The first one was made in Electron, which is a web compiler, so it was a desktop app. Electron is the same technology that apps like Slack or Skype use, so it's pretty standard. But we're now doing a lift and shift strategy. We're taking everything to the cloud so everything can work without the app. The thing with the app was that you needed to have a very powerful machine to make it work, especially with an NVIDIA graphics card because it did some processing that was quite demanding.

So we're now putting everything into Google Cloud as part of our technology stack to make sure that they take care of the load. So far we expect to have this in production by the end of July, so with plenty of time to be ready for the next season.

I see. So yeah, busy month coming up, I guess, for you guys.

Yes, absolutely.

I'm wondering if we can take a deeper dive into your product architecture. Could you share with us, what was your thought process in selecting technology for Fly-Fut, what other solutions maybe you were considering, and which ones did you settle on?

The thing about choosing technologies for a startup is that you never know what to use properly until you have a very well-defined business case. For us, when I came in, pretty much everything was set into place. There was a CTO, there was some part of a tech team, but not really a product person, so most of it is not with us anymore.

Now that we've had time to really conceive what we need to use, everything is going to be in the cloud. We're going to be a cloud-first company. The apps in the beginning were made with a hybrid framework. They're both native now because responsiveness is super important for people, especially when they're using the app to watch video. We don't believe there's a hybrid framework that allows to navigate a video streaming or video content service properly, so we had to migrate everything.

We used Mongo at the start as a database because it allows for pretty much everything. But now that we understand that football is a very relational business—there are leagues and there are seasons and there are teams in those leagues that have players, that's pretty much—to make sure that there were no mistakes in sending data back and forth, we are turning it into a relational. We're using now PostgreSQL, and everything's on GCP. We considered AWS mainly, but for a business case, the video part in AWS seemed more expensive, and at scale that could be a problem. So that's why we decided to stay with GCP.

We also have artificial intelligence that detects goals, and that is something that we're going to host in GCP too.

So this is all, you know, I guess trial and error, and also a lot of reading, a lot of learning from—hopefully learn from other people's failures than your own, I guess. That's what you look for.

Absolutely, absolutely. Lots of podcasting.

During that time, could you share with us, did you learn something during your journey?

The most important thing for any company—and not just startups—is to talk to customers. Every single week. Discover and research, regardless of the phase you're in. You have to talk to customers all the time. Not a single euro that goes into research or discovery is badly spent.

That is something that at first we did not do because we thought we were experts. Every single one in the company has played amateur or professionally, some of them. Some of them have played for Real Madrid youth teams, and some of them are registered coaches so they could be able to coach at a national level. We said, "Hey, we know everything and what we build for ourselves will work for every single person that likes football," and that is obviously not the case. So talk to customers as much as you can, as deep as you can.

Yeah, I think there's this saying that don't try to be your own customer. So when we think like that, I think we might be an isolated case if you're trying to solve that particular problem. But having said that, I think there's a lot of people I have seen—I don't know if this is the real story, but I've seen some interviews of highly successful people, and the way they are being shown on social media or television or any of the interviews, they always say, "Hey, I had this problem. I solved the problem that I had and here's my huge business." So I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there as well around this.

Absolutely, Luke. Absolutely. No, no, it's true. Not even for the same customer persona, like amateur players that are senior like us, there's always going to be some edge cases that you haven't even dreamed about regardless of how experienced you are in the field. We have a combined—I don't know, it's in the hundreds of years of football experience and it doesn't matter at all. It doesn't matter at all.

The needs are evolving all the time, so you can't read—yeah, yeah. You have to have the ears and eyes on the market and all the time, yeah.

And the thing is that you're not always competing against football companies. You're competing against every single company because, as Luke says, the needs are going to shift and they're going to shift. Let's say some delivery app brings something that might affect the general user experience of people, and people are going to expect that in every single app that they use. And that also you have to keep an ear to the ground not only in your space, but in technology in general.

That's a good point. I was thinking the same space, but yeah, other spaces as well because the UX, people want to relate their—like, I guess the people who use Apple phones, they just stay with them because they expect every app is behaving in a certain way and that's kind of very uniform across the board. But if you go to Android, I've seen similar applications having different buttons, different arrangements, and it does mess you up a little bit.

I can switch, but I can imagine my parents switching from an iPhone to an Android phone, it'll be impossible for them. Like, it'll take years for them to just, you know, get things right first time always.

Totally.

So Álvaro, you were with Fly-Fut during the pandemic last year. How has COVID-19 affected your business? How did you adjust to the current situation?

As most companies, COVID has affected us tremendously. Football was not played at all because it was not understood how interaction between humans on the outside playing a—it's not contact sport, but you're pretty close to each other in corners and everything, and football was forbidden. So our business was literally reduced to zero.

It affected us, obviously. We had to lay off some people and we used the time to regroup and work on tech and do internal audits of all our processes to make sure that we will come stronger whenever the pandemic was done. Now in Spain, vaccination is going at good speed and we expect to have most of the country, if not all, vaccinated by October, which is when the amateur leagues start.

So it's been tough, but it's been a good exercise of inner looking, inside looking of the company, and everybody making sure that they produce their best to make sure that the company stays afloat because you have to burn through cash to stay afloat with no income, and that's hard.

Indeed, indeed. So in that way, I guess it's been a tough time. But are you seeing things coming back to normal very soon? Are you working with any clubs? Is there any juicy information that you could share with us, maybe? You're from the world of football and it's a very important time right now in the market because there's a lot of changes happening and the Euro tournament is on right now. So what's going on? What are you doing? What's the next most exciting thing for you?

We're seeing things coming back to normal. As I said, we expect a normal season by '21-'22 season. That is pretty clear to us now. As I said before, we do the entertainment part and we do the professional part. We are working with, most of all, with Atlético de Madrid, which is a top-tier club in Europe, and we are recording the first women's team and we're doing the youth team and the second team. Not the first one, but maybe sometime.

We're working with Real Valladolid and we are working with Leganés, and we are in conversations with some other clubs which I can't mention. But yeah, the thing is when coaches see the drones, they love them. The shots that they have are unparalleled because you can have cameras and towers as high as you want, but the cameras can't move and they can't follow a player and they can't be a bird's-eye view, and that's going to be impossible to replicate really without a drone. So they're loving it.

The next big thing is expanding in a professional, in the professional side. You know, we expect around 2,600 games a month. For measure, Mediapro produces—Mediapro is the company that produces all La Liga and Champions League—and for measure, Mediapro does around 1,900 games a year, a season. And we're going to do 2,600 games a month. So that's some work.

Terabytes of data.

Yeah, absolutely.

Multiple terabytes of data, yeah. Okay, that's a good challenge.

So Ksenia, are we into the personal side now?

Yeah, let's get juicy here. I'm going to shift gears and let's ask you some personal questions. How do you manage your time on a daily basis? Could you describe your typical day for us?

Okay, so those are two questions. The first one, how do I manage my time? I plan my days ahead with time blocking. You can plan the day ahead and make sure you're producing the most work possible. That's a very proactive way to organize your day. Because if you keep responding to emails and let other people push you around, you don't get much done.

I do a daily review, a weekly review, monthly review. Those are more set with goals because those are more long-term, but all in all, I keep KPIs for my personal and professional life. Organizing days beforehand has been a life-changer for me.

My day is very strategic in nature because I'm now running two teams. I'm running—I'm the interim CTO as of today. We are looking for people to join the company, but right now I'm filling in that gap, so I have to run both the product and the technology team.

We just do a joint daily standup. The mornings are mainly for thinking and strategy and mainly innovation because I have to keep on top of things and making sure that we're going to be one step ahead of the competition. Right now there's no one doing what we're doing, like recording football with drones, but it's just a matter of time. So the head start needs to be as far away as possible from them to make sure that they're discouraged from joining the space.

Obviously some meetings that have to happen, obviously with other departments. And afternoons are mainly for writing and documents that I have to make, mostly strategic documents and maybe handoffs to my CEO or the board that need to have like a bird's-eye view of what's going on and what they can expect from us in the near future, mostly quarterly and based on OKRs, that's the measuring system that we use for tracking our goals. So that would be about it.

To build off on that, I didn't hear quite how do you relax during the day or at the end of the day? Do you drink some wine or do you DJ for yourself? How do you relax?

Well, I meditate in the morning, which allow me to work through day with the best mood possible. I try to train at least three days a week, and now that I'm training at home, I mean it's pretty easy. You can buy a pull-up bar or whatever, resistance bands, and you can train without going to the gym if anyone has a concern. So physical exercise and meditation. Cold showers too, I've been doing it for a couple years and they're great for mental health. Fasting.

I don't need to relax. I have a couple of habits that have made me not need to relax. But when I have to relax, I watch a movie with my girlfriend or I just read a book, reading or listen to a podcast, go for a walk, anything. I mean, go for thinking. But yeah, everything's time blocked.

Reading and alone time and me time always happen past 7:00 in the afternoon, and I think by that time your brain is not going to be able to produce quality work. That's been proven scientifically time and again. So those people that think that staying up until 2:00 in the morning, they're not going to produce their best work, and that's proven.

I agree. Luke and I, we both take our mental wellness very seriously. We both, I think, meditate, we do yoga, definitely read and relax, go for walks. I don't know, Luke, if you want to add to that.

Yeah, so meditation. We decided, me and my wife by the way, we have been meditating from 1st of Jan 2020 to now every day. We have a routine, so we follow that. We've not missed. Without fail, we will do it. We learned it the year before, then we repeated it twice a day for six months. That was the promise we made to the teacher. And after that, we kind of came down to once a day and we haven't left it since.

Awesome. How has it worked for you?

I think I find myself—the whole purpose of meditation is not to become peaceful or anything. I don't think there is anything like that. I think it's more to do with the fact that I'm able to organize my mind better. I'm able to focus on the things I need to. I don't distract myself with thoughts.

You know, there's always things on your mind that are not required, things that may happen in future, things that have happened in the past. And I think what I found is that with meditation, I'm able to manage these things very clearly and focus on the task that's in my hand right now. This has been a great kind of, you know, I think a lesson that I've learned. I still, you know, get this once in a while that I lose control, but I think coffee doesn't help. I think coffee is the enemy of my meditation and the routine.

Today, I get this extreme hunger drive in the afternoon that I want to eat everything, all the breads of the world, chips, crisps, and everything. So today, for the last couple of days, I tried not drinking any coffee in the morning, and I found that that I didn't have that hunger, the extreme hunger that I go through. I ate just enough that was needed, the enough nutrition, and that's it. So yeah, I think there's still a lot of learning that I'm going through right now, and yeah, it's a long way, but it really helps, I think.

I did a couple of coffee fasts and quit it for a month entirely. I think that helps reset the system. I would recommend taking magnesium if you don't want to feel the urge for eating. It helps with regulating and it also helps with sleep, which is a good side effect. It's not going to be bad, but it helps.

It's just natural. We all have it, but we don't produce as much.

Some people have less, some people produce more. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I get it.

There's always something that's underlying reason, you know, for the hunger, and there's lack of some minerals or vitamins, and you just have to find out what it is and fill yourself with those things.

I fast a lot. If you're not into fasting—

I am. I am. We do three or four times a week. We finish eating around 5:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and then not eat until 11:00 or 10:00 next morning. In between, we'll just have, like a green tea or something in between a couple of times. That's what we do. But lately, it's been difficult. I've been struggling. Otherwise, I mean, I've done 22, 24 hours easy on fasting.

Yeah, of course. I did a three-day fast.

Three days?

Yeah. You're not going to have 2% body fat, so the body is going to have fuel to work. So it doesn't matter, right? That's true. You're going to have fat to work with.

It helps with cancer also, and there are many studies now that tell that if you fast for like a week, your complete cell count is 100% renovated.

Yeah, recycled. And yeah, what's that thing called? Autophagy, I think. That's the process that takes place, and the bad cells are being consumed by the good cells and body flushes out a lot of things that it doesn't need.

That starts after 13 or 14 hours of fasting.

I hear around 16-hour mark, so between 17 and 20 you go through that, and then benefits just increase, and there you go. I'm a big fan. I read a lot about this, I listen to a lot of stuff. Three days, tell me something. When you did this fast for three days, did you take any honey? Because people say you can have a spoonful of honey, but I think that's carbohydrates. Why would you do that?

No, I haven't heard that and I wouldn't, of course. No, no. Just black coffee and water, that's all.

Okay. And how was the sleep during this time?

Awesome. I'm a good sleeper.

Okay, good. I will try that and come back to you, Álvaro. I'm going to write to you on that one.

Okay, okay.

All right. So moving on here. Álvaro, how do you stay on top of the latest business and technology innovations? Are you subscribed to any sort of online magazine or podcasts that you could recommend for our audience?

Yes, absolutely. From magazines, MIT Technology Review is probably my go-to. Podcasts, I've listened to some of yours and they're great. Podcasts from a technology perspective, I don't know, Lex Fridman has incredible conversations.

I'm more of a product person, so I love the ones at Intercom, the ones from In Depth, the In Depth podcast, which is from First Round Review, The Farnam Street podcast from Shane Parrish is amazing. There are so many out there that, I don't know, but I just try to pick topics that I like, mostly focused on product and AI, which are the topics that interest me the most. Those that I said before are like the sources of information I try to consume. MIT Technology Review has incredible papers and articles on artificial intelligence.

I like MIT as well, and the others as well. So yeah, we have some common things there. Doing our podcast, which is just at its beginnings, so we are learning from all these leaders or people who are ahead of the game. So yeah, we're always listening and trying to make our program better.

It's been a pleasure. Let's carry on. I think we have one last thing left on this particular episode. So Ksenia, over to you again.

This is our tricky part of the podcast. So what continues to be your biggest challenge from a tech perspective, Álvaro? How do you wish the technology would evolve to make your product more efficient?

Technology never stops. And it's evolving faster. So, not knowing what is coming in the next 18 months is our biggest challenge. Because before you could anticipate, because you understood that technology evolution took some time. But now, you can't know what's going on and what will happen, and I think that's the biggest challenge. Because you can envision something, but you don't have a clear perspective of how it's going to be in the next, as you said, 12, 18 months.

Before you said maybe in five years we can do this, but maybe you can do it in—there's a problem with visualizing how technology will look in the short term. I would say that's like a more succinct way to say it.

Álvaro, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today. I think you've been very open and transparent, and shared lots of useful tips and advice for people who are looking to start their companies or maybe they have some technology challenges. Some well-established people in the industry, I think, can learn from your experience, and you were very kind to share those instances and stories, and especially the DJ story. I think that was fascinating. So thanks for sharing all those things with us. We really enjoyed having you and would love to have you again here.

Thank you. Thank you, Luke, so much for your time. Thanks for having me and it's been a blast.

Thank you for your time, and I hope I didn't target you too hard today. We wish you the best of luck, and Luke and I will keep following your success and stay in touch.

Thank you very much, Ksenia.

A special thanks to our podcast guest this week, and once again to our sponsor, Sphere Partners, for bringing this episode to life. If you enjoyed this episode, drop SphereCast a five-star review on iTunes and share this content with your network.

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