We had the good fortune of connecting with Shyam Sivaramakrishnan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Shyam, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Thanks for having us featured on this panel. When we started our business, our thought process was all about working in a job which matched our principles. If you had asked me 10 years back whether I wanted to be running my own business, I might have casually thought that would be fun, but would have been equally OK working for another business. But, having worked in multi-nationals and a start-up over the last 10+ years, I have come to the conclusion that there are fundamental principles that each of these businesses adhere to, that has played a large part in the current pressure to perform for the people in these businesses.

At the multi-national I worked in, there was this innate culture to go after big projects and even support such projects with a lot of funding. However, such funding was not always helpful because it led to unrealistic expectations and very poor culture as teams got assembled fast. The startup I worked in did not have as much funds, and delivered outcomes much faster. But, I felt constantly stretched and being asked to do more with less since we were not profitable.

At a certain point, when I reflected on what was driving such behavior in both organizations, it occurred that oth businesses were or striving to be public companies and with that came a huge amount of quarterly expectations and disproportionate importance given to financial metrics as well as to people that believe in financials being the mantra of a business.

My brother and I wanted to start a business where employee growth, customer/employee well-being, technological impact and benevolence were given atleast equal priority. We are now 2.5 years old as a business and this philosophy continues to drive our business.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Sure, happy to talk more about our business. We are in the business of helping sports organizations monetize data and analytics. We do this in a variety of ways from creating cool graphics during sports matches to creating live statistics dashboards to improving player performance with advanced analytics. One of the things we observed is that all sports organizations today, whether a club or a professional team or a federation, need to engage their fans more. At the same time, each of them want to grow their players. When we dug into what was needed to help both these needs, it came down to faster and easier collection of data, quick ways to crunch the data and show results.

Our solution was to break the silo between performance analysis and broadcasting using cloud technologies. We have built technology to use data generated by performance analysts, to also power real-time broadcast graphics to engage fans. We made this happen by transforming laptop-only analysis solutions to cloud-hosted analysis solutions. Then, data created by performance analysts became immediately available for serving with graphics to video producers. A key innovation that cloud technologies also allow is making these processes remotely serviceable, which is important to keep costs low at scale.

We are now proud to say that BanyanBoard has a variety of firsts to its name in the world of sports analysis. These include the ability to ‘tag’ Youtube streams, sharing analysis results in real-time with video-linked statistics dashboards, self-designed data collection (tagging) templates that are used by multiple analysts and operators, being agnostic to video hardware etc.

In the world of sports broadcasting, BanyanBoard stands out as a turn-key graphics solution integrating fast-changing real-time data. A recent example was a custom-built premier-quality graphics dashboard used at the WSF Squash World Cup in June 2023, where shot types, success ratios and other metrics were shown live for the first time ever during a squash tournament.

The hardest part of this journey has been understanding customer pain points, so that we can offer a solution. We enjoy solving these problems and don’t view it is a hardship, even though it not easy. It is also hard to predict what can make a sustainable business unless we try something couple of times. These lessons are par for the course for any new business.

When it comes to what we want the world to know about our brand, we want folks to know that we will always try and exceed expectations. When we commit to a timeline, we take it very seriously. And, we like doing business with honest folks with the same values as us.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
This is a hard question 🙂 There are so many things to do. But, being a wildlife enthusiast, I would say don’t miss the elephant seals at San Simeon. I would also recommend camping at the Channel Islands. This is not a popular thing, but I have found the pelicans at Redondo beach mesmerizing to watch. If they were a tennis fan coming at the right time, might suggest a trip to Indian Wells for catching world class tennis. Looking further south, might also suggest a trip to La Jolla and pretty much dining at any decently rated restaurant there!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Thanks for even asking this question. We tend to focus too much on an entrepreneur’s current journey that we tend to forget there is an army of folks behind a person’s growth. In my case, I have been truly blessed to have incredible support from my spouse, parents, in-laws and extended family. Even our children exchange friendly banter on our next project and product feature!

I am also going to take this opportunity to say a huge thanks to all my teachers. As an adult, I now appreciate how amazingly talented many of them were and could have easily taken up an alternative career. In particular, several of my teachers that taught me in primary, middle and high school come to mind. They instead chose to spend their time educating us; they are huge role models. There are too many to name here!

One of my later-stage teachers that I want to single out is Prof.P.Sankaran, who is unfortunately no longer with us. He was practically blind with very little vision left in his eyes. But, he took a princely sum of $20 for an entire year of tuition and taught us some extremely complicated physics, purely out of his love for students. This was at a time when other institutions would charge 10X higher. His students would routinely be among the best in the country .

At a business level, I have had the good fortune of working with managers who would do anything for their teams. Lots of great folks here to name as well, but I am going to single out Mark Lusted who was my manager at GE. Mark was a former submarine commander and he bought the same loyalty to his troops in his corporate role also. He showed how a manager can remove the weight of an entire organization from an employee’s shoulders. I also want to give a shout out to my super kind Ph.D. advisor Prof.Raj Rajamani – really wish there were more such folks like him in the world. And, shout outs to John Westerheide, Dr.Arun Subramaniyan and Larsh Johnson, who truly believed in me and made me believe more in myself.

Website: www.banyanboard.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/banyanboard/?hl=en

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/banyanboard-sports-data-visualization-and-performance-analysis-96216724a/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BanyanBoard

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTXMZlMRHrzpRh6fyTmApIQ

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