'Curiosity Is Really the Engine of Intelligence'

It was 9 p.m. in early August of 2009, and a basketball player sat inside the UC Irvine gym, his legs elevated after a workout.

A stranger he’d been told he should meet walked over with a contraption in hand.

“All right. Let’s see it,” the player told him.

The man then placed one of his sleekly-designed ice bags that he’d been working on for months around the athlete’s knee.

“Give me some time to wear it for a couple of days, and I’ll let you know what I think,” the player said.

Two weeks later, they met again, and the player had detailed feedback on what needed to improve.

The player was Kobe Bryant, and the man with the ice bag was Anthony Katz, who two years later, would found Hyperice.

His company is now the official recovery technology partner of the NBA and MLB and counts Patrick Mahomes, Jayson Tatum and Fernando Tatis, Jr. among its many users.

The Daily Coach caught up with Katz recently to discuss how his high school coaching background served him as an entrepreneur, navigating difficult business decisions and Bryant’s influence on his company.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Anthony, thanks a lot for doing this. I know you grew up in Laguna Beach. Tell us a little about your childhood.

I was really fortunate. I was a kid in the 80s, a teenager in the 90s. That was a time where kids just came home from school and went out and played sports every day. A lot of what I learned was from watching sports on TV and playing in the park. I played soccer, then Little League baseball and basketball. Not everything had to be organized or with a trainer then. A lot of what I learned was going and competing with my peers.

Having young kids now, I see there's so much stimulus available all the time with streaming platforms. Back then, there were 13-20 channels if you had cable and not much on. My dad would say I could sit there and watch a whole three-hour game when I was 6 or 7. When I look back, I have some pretty fond memories of developing a love for sports and competition.

You go to college and then become a high school basketball coach and history teacher. Did you think that was pretty much what you wanted to do for your career?

I never really thought of it as a plan. You make decisions at the time you feel are the best. My favorite subject was always history, so I majored in it and minored in political science. When I graduated, I still liked playing basketball and felt a connection to it.

I started coaching in my early 20s. I got thrown into it and thought I’d give it a shot, but fell in love with it. I always understood the game and had a feel for it, but the other part was connecting with young people and showing them that you cared and could bring them together.

I didn’t leave teaching because I was unhappy. I left because I had an idea I wanted to run with, and that turned into Hyperice.

Can you take us through the origins of Hyperice and how your meeting with Kobe Bryant came about?

I was at a point in my life where I’d come out of the dark ages of the fitness industry. In the late 90s, early 2000s, we’d lift hard, then play basketball on the days we didn’t lift. But the lifting wasn’t very functional. It was basically body building.

I was obsessed with it and would do it really hard four or five days a week. I was in shape, but my movement patterns weren’t as smooth. I was 30 and was wondering how pro athletes made it through 82 games. I’d see them icing their joints and would see Kobe doing it during a game. I thought maybe I should start doing that.

My wife was playing pro basketball in Australia, and I’d see all these rugby guys who, instead of using a plastic bag, would have a little thing they’d ice with. I came home and went to a wetsuit factory, made a knee wrap, used a medical ice bag for myself.

I was at UC Irvine playing pickup and my buddy Ryan Badrtalei, who’s a coach there now, asked me where I got it. Kobe would train there, and Ryan was his guy to let him in and work him out. He said, “I have to fill Kobe’s ice bags all the time. They always leak. He always complains about it. Can you make me two more?”

I thought I’d just give it to him and never hear anything about it, but he said he would see if I could give it to him personally.

How did you act upon his feedback from that initial meeting and how did it take off? 

I didn’t know how to develop a product or know anything about business, literally nothing.

He was giving me a lot of critique on the product and how air was getting trapped and the fit. A lot of what he was telling me, I really didn’t have the expertise to fix on my own. I had very limited resources to do this.

He said, “I like this idea of having something I don’t have to throw away all the time… But you’ve got to get it to where it works better than what I have. Because right now, my ace bandage and my plastic bag I have down to a science. But if you can make it better, I’ll wear it, and I’ll wear it on the bench.”

I made a shoulder one, but I didn’t know where to go or where to start. 2009 was still coming out of the recession, and not many people were taking meetings with someone with no website or business card. I was fortunate enough to get a meeting with a manufacturer who offered to help source the development for me. They came up with a design for the ice bag that had a button that could suck all the air out so that no ice would lay flat…

I got the early prototypes to (Kobe) and he was wearing them. I just hustled and got them on as many NBA players as I could. By the time they actually came out, it was the lockout season, so a lot of guys couldn’t get to the training room. They were pretty open to, “Hey, there’s this guy in Orange County. He doesn’t have a website, but he makes these cool knee icers.”

It created a bit of a groundswell. That’s how the company started. I named it Hyperice after the Hyperdunk because that was the shoe I was wearing at the time. I thought, “Kobe popularized the Hyperdunk. He’s going to popularize Hyperice.”

You’ve had pretty remarkable success over the last decade. What skills did you find from your coaching and teaching background translated into business?

When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re essentially a talent scout. There’s no solitary company. You’re constantly looking to get people on this team who can help us win. You need to get different personalities to work together.

You want people who are self-motivated, but there’s a line between that and being selfish. (You want) people who can grind, people who can overcome adversity.

I make basketball analogies all the time here. There are a lot of similarities I think in how people on a team interact. You have leaders and players, who have to respond to the leadership positively. If someone’s not being a leader, you have to call them out.

What I learned from coaching really prepared me for business and trying to get people to buy into something bigger than themselves. If work is really hard and you’re not bought into the end goal, you get people who aren’t bought in. if they’re bought into the vision, then they look at what’s hard as, “This is challenging, but I’m in on this. It’s just a tough time.”

If you’re not interested in getting to the North Star, it’s kind of hard to get people to really be bought in and go through the hard times.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve had to make with Hyperice and how did you navigate it?

I look back at some decisions we made and some have panned out, some haven’t. We’ve bought four companies including Normatec, which was a pretty big brand at the time. That decision wasn’'t tough because I wanted to do it for a long time, but we were still buying another company for a lot of money that was based across the country. You don’t know if the culture is going to fit or if it’s going to be disjointed. It was weird. We were the acquirer, but we had fewer people than they did.

You look at big companies, and acquisitions tend to be what catapult them to the next level or have the opposite effect. It worked, but it was a big risk because there was a lot of unknown.

We went from having 35 people to 85 or whatever it was. It was a big change, but the decision was mostly motivated on high level, “I think this is where the company needs to go,” and we made it work.

Your background isn’t in kinesiology or business. How do you think being an outsider by traditional standards may have benefitted you?

When you go to college and study history and poli sci, you learn how to learn. In this day and age, information is free. We’re living in an information-rich, wisdom-poor culture. The only thing that’s stopping you is your curiosity and your willingness to do it.

I felt that early on in my career, a lot of the traditional ways that we studied the body in the country weren’t really conducive to working with athletes… Things like studying fluid dynamics and the faster fluid matrix, things that are much more on the cutting edge, there weren’t as many people studying that. I thought if I studied this early, I could be ahead of some people.

The other thing is learning from people. I was doing cadaver dissections on raw bodies in 2018 because my mentor told me to do it. Now, I’ll go to workshops if I can. I’m learning all the time. Now, I view it as the strength of the brand that we have a really good grasp on kinesiology. Ten years ago, it was a weakness. Now, it’s a strength.

Curiosity is really the engine of intelligence. If you want to learn about something, that’s only limited by how curious you are and how badly you want it.

Q&A Resources

Hyperice Website