Before we reached 100,000 professional records, we had to understand what made a single profile worth building.
What should it say about a coach? How could it capture the impact of someone whose work extended far beyond a job title or a season’s results? And how could we make that professional identity something they could carry throughout their career?
Working with OG1 founder Bruce Tollner gave those questions a depth that technology alone could never provide.
Bruce brought more than 30 years of experience representing NFL and collegiate athletes, alongside celebrated coaches such as Kyle Whittingham. He understood the relationships, pressures, and decisions that shape a career in sports. His perspective came from decades of advocacy and from growing up inside the profession itself. Bruce’s professional background.
As the son of legendary former USC head coach Ted Tollner, Bruce had firsthand exposure to the daily lives of coaches. He understood the demands on their time, the importance of their reputation, and the influence they could have on athletes and families. For us, that experience became an essential reference point as we helped turn the OG1 vision into a product.
The challenge was to make that understanding useful at scale.
A sports professional’s identity can be scattered across staff directories, biographies, announcements, interviews, and the memories of people they have worked with. Each captures part of a career. Bringing those pieces together creates an opportunity to show the person behind the position: their experience, philosophy, achievements, relationships, and contribution to their sport.
That became the purpose of the OG1 Profile.
Looking back, this was where our AI-readiness work began. We needed a clear understanding of what information mattered, how it should be organized, and what the person claiming the profile should be able to do with it.
Our early work also exposed a practical challenge: creating a profile takes effort. Even with a product people could see value in, completing it required time, attention, and a reason to prioritize it. Our retrospective brought profile completion and onboarding into focus, alongside the opportunity to serve a broader community of sports professionals.
That made the starting point important. We could do more of the groundwork, giving people something to claim, strengthen, and make their own.
As the work developed, we combined AI-assisted research with internet research, verified links, profile prompts, and defined sections to create richer individual profiles. Alongside that, we refined the product language, profile-production workflows, and the experience of accessing and sharing a professional identity. Bruce and the OG1 team brought real coaching situations, introductions, field testing, and feedback into that process.
The lesson was practical: AI became more useful when the work around it became clearer.
A defined profile structure gave research a destination. Consistent language helped the team understand what belonged in each section. Verified sources gave us something to check against. Founder insight helped us judge whether the result reflected what actually mattered to the people using it.
Those disciplines are easy to overlook when discussing AI. Yet they are central to making it useful inside a business. A tool can help produce information quickly. The team still needs to decide what deserves to become part of someone’s professional record.
Our broader work with OG1 reached more than 100,000 sports professional records and over 1,400 athletic departments represented in the platform. We built those records as starting points for people to claim and develop, creating a foundation for professional identity across sports and levels.
Reaching that scale also sharpened our sense of responsibility. A record needs context. An organization provides part of that context, but a person’s contribution deserves room of its own. The next step is helping each professional turn a starting record into a fuller account of their work.
That is why ownership matters so much to this story. A coach can add the philosophy that guides their decisions. A colleague or former athlete can contribute an endorsement. A sports professional can bring together experiences that would otherwise remain scattered across different roles and organizations.
From an AI-readiness perspective, this points toward a valuable future: information that is easier to find, understand, maintain, and use because it has a clear structure and meaningful human input. The quality of that foundation will shape what future tools can responsibly do with it.
Working with Bruce reinforced how much domain experience matters in building that foundation. His understanding of coaches helped connect the product to the lives it was intended to serve. Our role was to help translate that understanding into a repeatable experience, supported by research, design, technology, and ongoing feedback.
The milestone of 100,000 records matters because of what it makes possible for the individual.
Someone who has spent years developing athletes, supporting a program, or building a team can find a starting point for their own story. They can claim it, add depth, and carry it into their next chapter.
For us, that is the new reality OG1 is working toward: a professional identity that stays with the people who earned it.
Any sport. Any level.