- Yale University
- Goldman Sachs
- Navy SEAL Officer and Instructor
- Harvard Business School
- Firefighter
- Personal Trainer
- Motivational Speaker
- Startup entrepreneur
Sounds like a pretty amazing career, right? Meet Phil Black. You’re looking at Phil’s bio. Did I mention that he accomplished everything above before the age of 40? I’ve gotten to know Phil pretty well over the last three month as he’s the founder and CEO of FitDeck, one of the 10 companies which recently graduated from the Nike+ Accelerator powered by Techstars. Fitdeck is a series of cards with easy-to-use body-weight exercises that you can do anywhere for a quick and efficient workout.
Phil Black talking about FitDeck at the Nike+ Demo Day
The idea for FitDeck is based upon a card game that Phil and his buddies on the Yale Basketball team would play called PUG (short for “push up game”). They’d use a deck of cards and do push ups until based upon the cards drawn until there was only one man standing. When he became a Navy SEAL, he taught the other SEALS the game and they’d play PUG all over the world – on aircraft carriers, battlefields and anywhere else they didn’t have the training equipment to remain in world-class physical shape.
When Phil left the Navy, he created FitDeck and would up selling over $4,000,000 worth of cards from his garage. He then applied to the Nike+ Accelerator with the notion of making Fitdeck digital and mobile – quick, easy to understand body-weight workouts on your smartphone.
As I mentioned earlier, Phil’s just graduated from the top digital fitness accelerator in the world and has a terrific business model to disrupt the mobile fitness industry. About the only thing that Phil lacks is a technical co-founder. He is looking for someone at a VP Engineering level willing to relocate to San Diego (Phil lives there with his wife and four sons – can you imagine how much testosterone is in that household?). He’s looking for a partner with great product vision, technical skills (mobile and web), architecture background and platform experience who has built a scalable mobile app. Coding in the beginning is important but ultimately he desires someone who would grow into the CTO role over time.
Phil talking to an investor at Nike+ Demo Day
If you’ve got the technical chops described above and are looking for to partner with an terrific founder with great vision to build an important company in the digital health sector, look no further. It won’t take you more than a few minutes with Phil to see what I mean. As you can imagine, I’m incredibly fortunate to meet and get to know a lot of remarkable people through my work at TechStars and Phil’s one of the most extraordinary I’ve come across. If you’d like to talk to him about this, you can reach him at phil at fitdeck dot com.
