Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman

How do you build a $53M ARR software company, stay profitable for eight straight years, and give 60% of the cap table to your employees — without ever taking a venture check? Mike Zisman is the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, the dominant tournament management and handicapping platform for golf clubs worldwide. He self-funded $10M of his own money as interest-free debt, did 10 acquisitions before hitting $60M in revenue, and today sits on $14M cash while printing 20% EBITDA margins with 300 employees across the US and Cluj, Romania. You'll learn: Why Mike structured his entire $10M founder investment as debt instead of equity — and how it created a tax shield that paid him back on the way out How the USGA handicapping contract in 2019 transformed Golf Genius from a niche club tool into the infrastructure layer of global golf How Golf Genius went from $0 to $1M ARR in 8 years, then from $1M to $53M in the next 8 — and what the USGA relationship had to do with the inflection point Why 50% of his 300-person team are engineers based in Cluj, Romania — and how that structural cost advantage funds 20% EBITDA while competitors burn cash The exact three-phase acquisition strategy: legacy desktop customer rollups, league expansion, then B2C mobile apps with 8M+ users How Mike negotiated the GolfShot acquisition — and why he forced their entire cap table behind a single LLC before closing Why employees own 60% of the cap table at $53M ARR and how that drives 6-7% annual attrition across the entire company including Romania What Mike would say if a PE firm offered $400M all cash today — and why he says he's more excited about what's next than he's been in years Why he thinks AI will make SaaS companies radically more productive, not obsolete — from a founder whose doctoral thesis in 1977 was already on artificial intelligence The rule of 40 reality at $53M ARR: why growth slows as companies scale and what Mike does to stay above the 10% industry average Connect: YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Golf Genius: golfgenius.com Founderpath: founderpath.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4,200 to back into a revenue range?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  That would get you to about two thirds of our revenue. It's a good deal more than the 44 million. It's been, company's been profitable since 2017. We have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised. 14 million cash. And like, what the hell are we doing sitting on 14 million in cash? I can fund acquisitions. We've done 10 acquisitions.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  What was your first year where you broke a million of revenue?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years to get to 50 million.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP per employee owned?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Almost 80%, including me and the other executives.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million all cash upfront to sell the business, do you sell?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Hey folks, my guest today is Mike Zisman. He's the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, launched back in 2009. He's a serial entrepreneur. Mike, I don't want to age you here, but first company back in 1979. Formal faculty at MIT, over 40 years of experience building software companies. Mike, you ready to take us to the top?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I am. Great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  You bet. Tell us more about what you're selling at Golf Genius, then we'll go back and get your backstory.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Sure. So Golf Genius is the leading provider of tournament software to golf clubs, private clubs, public courses, tours, associations. We provide sort of the very high end software for, you know, creating tournaments, doing registration, payment processing, live leaderboards, broadcast feeds, where we're working with, you know, like PGA or USGA tournaments. So it's a very deep product for providing the capabilities that golf professionals need. Typically, our end user is a PGA golf professional in a private club or a public facility.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  And is the group at the private facility, is that the owner of the facility? Or it's a player at the facility? Probably the owner, right?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  No. So you think about a club I belong to, Marion Golf Club, right? It's a member owned club. We have a golf staff, typically a head golf professional, assistant golf professionals. Our user is that director of golf or assistant golf professional. But we're really B2B to see Nathan in a sense that all the live scoring is done by the players at that club using our live scoring app. So we provide software for the pro to set up the tournaments. They say, hey, let's Then the players themselves are typically using our mobile app to actually do the scoring. So the beauty is when the last guy walks off the course, click a button to resolve ties. We know what all the results of the tournament are and it may have been, you know, many different tournaments all going on at the same time.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  So just to put that all in a sentence, you're selling to the director of golf. When they have a tournament, they're emailing all the players saying, download the mobile app before we start.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Correct, exactly. Most of them already have. And I mean, millions of people at this point have our mobile app. So typically they don't have to, but say the charity tournament, you're absolutely right. There's people show up to play the charity tournament. They'll literally get something that says, download this app. We don't make them register. They're going to have a six character ID and they enter that ID and you know, they're, they're scoring.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Very cool. Help me understand how you've thought about pricing, then we'll get the backstory here. What's the average director of golf paying you for the software?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  So our list price, which we stick very close to at a private club today is about $4,200 per year for essentially unlimited use of the product for up to two 18-hole golf facilities. So if you're a Pinehurst with seven different courses, that's all custom price. But it's actually, as I like to say, every business is price times quantity. P times Q, you learn in economics one. We're relatively low P, a high Q, high quantity. We're in 11,000 courses, so we're pretty, plus we do lots of other things. But it's certainly the most inexpensive software that club will have because they also need software to, you know, do their point of sale, to manage their T sheet, to do their website, to do member billing and things like that.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Give me the backstory here. How do you go from MIT professor to golf guy?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Well, I always loved software. I think my happiest days were programming. They're still my happiest days, although I don't do it anymore. I love coding. I, it just, it's magical for me. I think when some people appreciate a great poem, I appreciate great code. So I've always loved programming, very technical. As soon as I got to MIT, I realized I did not want to be an academic. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I was there for two years, moved back to Philadelphia where I was from. I went to graduate school, started the first company, Softswatch, which was in the communication software business. It was very low level communication software, sold to, you know, Fortune 500 companies. That was acquired by Lotus Development in 1998. Ninety four and then low and behold, eleven months later, IBM came along and acquired Lotus.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  So in eleven months, I went from a company of four hundred and fifty people, my company, to Lotus, which was six thousand, to IBM, which was a quarter million. They were different. Trust me, they were different. Not that, not good versus bad, because it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have a quarter million people, you know, trying to do something. And I stayed at IBM for a while. I worked with Lou Gershner, who was a just fantastic CEO. Turned, he turned around IBM, absolutely. And then that kind of ran its course and left IBM in oh seven. You know, I really don't want to retire. I love what I do. And I was always the guy organizing the buddy golf trip. You know, twelve guys go off some place to play golf. We still service it. It's a small market, very price sensitive market. And move from that to golf leagues.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  And so instead of twelve guys playing six rounds of golf, you got, you know, sixty guys playing twenty rounds of golf. And then move from that to selling to clubs. But the real break for us and every company, now I often say, if an entrepreneur tells you luck wasn't part of his success, they don't know what they're talking about. You know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, but you need some luck. And in our case, it was building a relationship with the USGA to replace their tournament management system with ours, which really put the company in a whole different trajectory.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  What year was that?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  That was twenty sixteen. So started in two oh nine. As I like to say, we wandered in the desert. Entrepreneurs wander in the desert till you, today we say product market fit. You know, if you have a product market fit. And, and we went from buddy trips to leagues to servicing clubs. And then, you know, really enter a relationship with the USGA to do tournament management. And then they came back in twenty nineteen and said, hey, we also want you to build the new handicap system. There was a new worldwide standard for handicapping and we want you to build that and operate it. It's probably the largest pure play golf software company in the industry.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Measured by revenue or something else?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Revenue, measured by revenue, yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Can we take eleven thousand clubs times forty two hundred to back into a revenue range?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  No, that would get you to about two thirds of our revenue. But then we do all the handicapping. We also have other products. You know, we go to a golf pro. It's a classic suite. Like I grew up in the days of Microsoft Office, the smart suite. We go to a Pro at a club and say, look, you spend your time doing three things. You run tournaments, you run a golf shop, it's a physical golf shop, a retail, and you do teaching and coaching. We have four software products that do all those things. We're very, very focused on coaching. And so we can sell an entire suite to that club more than just handicapping. So when you roll it all up, it's a good deal more than the 44 million. It's been, company's been profitable since 2017. I'd like to say we, we have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  How much have you raised?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  11 million, that's all, that's all.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  So as a capital allocator, you're just sitting on these profits now. You have over 11 million cash sitting in your bank today. What do you do with that? How do you think about reinvesting it?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. And I had that conversation with someone today. It's actually 14 million cash. And I'm like, what the hell are we doing sitting on 14 million in cash? It can fund acquisitions, we've done 10 acquisitions. And right now, you know, my view as an entrepreneur at our stage is there's always, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with rule of 40, right? Revenue growth plus profit margin. But there's a strong bias towards growth. If you want to get really good multiples, you gotta be growing. I mean, people don't pay high multiples for companies that are just flat. They'll, they'll pay six or seven times cash flow, right? And so, you know, we are very focused on growth and investing into it. So my view is, I've never believed in, you know, growth at all costs, losing money. It's very hard to make the transition from losing money to making money.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  And you're, you know, the, the fuse is on, like, if you keep losing money, you know, eventually you're, you've burned out and, you know, bad stuff can happen. So my strategy is earn 20% and invest the rest. So we consistently earn about 20% EBITDA margin, invest the rest.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube. And I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. So you get going in 2009. What was your first year where you broke a million of revenue?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years. To get to 50 million. And I look at SaaS, you know, when you're selling SaaS subscriptions, back then it was like 2,500 a pop. You got to sell a lot of subscriptions. It took a while. I funded the company personally, but from 2009 to 2020, I find I funded the company with about $10 million, my own money, mostly as debt. What I love about our company is most of the stock is owned by employees, very widely.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  How much? If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP or employee owned?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It's not an ESOP, but it's profit, not counting, well, almost 80%, including me and the other executives. Yeah, because we raised so little money. We only raised 11 million bucks.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Okay, that's including you, though. You plus employees.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  That's including me, but if I take away the really senior people, it's still 60%. My biggest thrill, I tell people honestly, I will measure the success of this company by how many of our employees make a significant amount of money when we sell and when we exit or do a recap. To me, I was successful in my first company. I didn't, wasn't like focused on the money. So I was able to spread the equity out quite widely. And, you know, we have people, you know, who joined us in 2010 and got what were significant slugs of stock because it was, you know, not worth very much. And we have incredible retention because of it. We have over, we probably have 6, 7% attrition, including in Romania for developers. I like the people, I say, well, it's either because they really like me or they own a lot of stock. I'm not sure which.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  They tend to go together, don't they?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Maybe, but to me, I want to make sure, my philosophy at company is we're all in this together. I like to say, I couldn't build a company with 300 Mike systems. I have different skills. I couldn't build a company with 300 Alexes who runs development. What I love about an entrepreneurial company is bringing together a bunch of people with different skills to accomplish something none of them could accomplish on their own. That's what a company is about. Can you bring together a set of skills, marketing skills, sales skills, finance skills, development skills, support skills, to accomplish something together as a team that none of us accomplish on our own? To me, that's where the juice is in being an entrepreneur.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  So just to summarize that cap table, which I'm so impressed by, again, we'll take 100%, subtract down 20, about 20% which investors own. Employees, including you, own 80%, but even when you take out Mike, you, plus other senior folks, all the other employees still own about. About 60%. So you and seniors own about 20%.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's probably not quite right. Let's say me and the other seniors own 30%, 40%.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Still.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  It's a lot.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Same concept.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Lot of employee ownership. That's awesome.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, to me, it's what's very gratifying is that, you know, and so we're all, you know, as I like to say, we're all pulling on the same side of the rope. We all have the same motivations.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  I always joke, Mike, I say, so just to summarize again, you said it took you eight years to get a million, another eight to break 50 million. That will put you at 1 million ARR in 2017 and about 50 million is where you wrapped up 2025.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Little more than that. Yeah, more like 54, 53 million.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  And what do you think you'll break at the end of 2026?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Our, our plan right now is a little over 60.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so that plus your profit margin, you still think you can hit the rule of 40?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  We will not hit the rule of 40 this year. Our growth is, it's to get bigger and bigger, it's harder and harder. If you look at SaaS companies, it's fascinating. It's, it makes perfect sense. If you look at SaaS companies, as the companies have got larger, the growth rate's gone down.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  But I see sort of three phases with your acquisition strategy. In 2020, you were rolling up sort of legacy desktop tools to lock in supply courses and tournaments.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Desktop suppliers who provided a very simple product, but they had customers.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  And recurring usage. And then 2024, you got really aggressive with consumer and mobile, GPS apps, coaching and data. Please correct me if your strategy was different than that, but if that is accurate, why that pattern?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Well, so, you know, when we came into the market and really started selling to clubs in 2014, as I said, when you do an acquisition, it's some combination of technology or product, talent and customers. The best acquisitions are all three. Some of them is just buying customers. So our first goal was let's go get those customers. We had no interest whatsoever in their old desktop software, but we acquired a whole bunch of customers. And then after that was really an aqua hire, a guy who wanted to be in the business. It was clear, like, just come join up with us. And then we acquired a few other firms. And then, you know, in 2023, we made the strategic decision, it was important to expand from B to B, selling to clubs to B to C, selling directly to golfers. It's a lot more golfers than clubs, right?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  And so, you know, we entered that market with two acquisitions, you know, golf shot and swing you that have been able to put them together. We run them as separate brands, right? So it's a house of brands strategy. Well, most of the companies we acquired, we've kept their brands because they had brand equity. Disappointment to me in 2025 was they didn't do any acquisitions. We looked at some, but we couldn't get together on on price. I think things are probably getting, you know, a little more reasonable now. And kind of what I mean, I acquired my first company in 1984. So I've been on the both sides of the table many, many times and hope to do some.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  This is why I want to dive deep on this. I mean, we're you're glazing over it, but this is something I want younger entrepreneurs to learn. I'm like, this is why I love doing this show, right? Because if I ask my audience, just look at this website and guess revenue with all due respect. Like, it's not sexy web 2.0. It's none of that. And the reason is because you've got all these other go to market motions that are really sexy. Eight million user mobile apps for consumers and sort of other things. But 60 north of, you know, approaching 60 million bucks of revenue here is obviously an impressive story. How do you think about sort of your legacy, right? If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million all cash upfront to sell the business, do you sell?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Would you?

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Well, you're growing from 50 to 60 million year over year. You're printing cash flow. I don't know your personal life situation. You have employees that have been on the cap table, potentially some of them for north of 10 years. I don't know if you've offered them liquidity in the past with the raises that you've done. If you haven't, it could be an opportunity to do that.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. So it's something you look, you have to think about. You have to do what's best for your shareholders, but, you know, and people like me who, you know, have been at this for a long time. But, you know, right now, you know, we're very, very excited about our prospects. I'm like, I told someone the other day, I'm more juiced up than I've been in years. I look at all this AI stuff. I'm a geek.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  It's great. I want to see more entrepreneurs build their company in a profitable way where they keep full control. I mean, you are the definition of that. Now, everyone is not as wealthy as you are when they launch their company, right? You already had success, but there's still some good lessons here. I want to round out that employee sort of liquidity offering for a second. If they joined in, you know, 2010, I'm making these numbers up. Okay, at a dollar exercise price and your most recent 409A, let's just make it up was 10 bucks. And let's say I've got 1,000 shares. There's some town in Romania that you're making very rich. Everyone's the real estate market's going up. All these people, these hundreds of these dozens of engineers, you're just making very rich, which is great.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  I'll tell you something, you'll find this hard to believe, Nathan. Includes Romania, there are 2,300 software companies.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  In all of Romania. Just in Romania.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  In the town of Cluj. Just think about Cluj as the Silicon Valley of Romania. So you have Bucharest in the south. Cluj is the kind of the university center. It's where many of the universities are. An enormous number of, you know, outsourcing firms and things like that. And, and so we're able to still maintain, you know, very high retention. One other thing I would say is at 300 people, we're still totally virtual. We have no offices. You know, I just think, you know, to me, it's, it's one big team. We're all in it together.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I'm predicting sometime in the next six months, I'm going to read a headline like Susquahanna or Main Sail has come in and, you know, bought a 30% sort of minority stake for whatever 200 million bucks and you're going to keep control. And then they're going to say, Michael, you've bought, Mike, you've bought 10 million, you've bought 10 companies today. I need you to buy 10 per year going forward because that's the private equity playbook and we'll see what you do.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  That is the playbook. And, you know, fortunately, when I sold my first company to Lotus, the venture capital firms that had financed off which invited me to become a limited partner in their firms. So I've been a limited partner in venture capital and private equity firms for like 25 years. And so I know the drill. I know the model. I've been on both sides of the table. And yes, I mean, the big PE firms want you to be a platform and an aggregate. And we are a platform. I mean, we have over 100 companies interface to our software through our APIs. And, you know, I just see really just keep doing what we're doing. What you have to focus on as an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is growth, profitable growth, right? And because if you want to get real multiples, someone has to believe the growth is here, right? Have to

• 16:41Speaker 01

  believe the growth is there. And so you really, in our case, we have four areas of growth. This is what I focus on. It's okay. What are we doing in each of these areas every day to drive growth? You know, one is our private club space. We're very dominant. One is public courses. One is international where although we're in 62 countries, it's hand to hand combat in each of these countries. They're all different and it's a struggle. And then we have some other, we can call them moonshot by any stretch, but really interesting things we're doing that we'll be introducing in the next year, but how, how are we growing? Where's the growth come from?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Well, Mike, if people want to follow your story after they're done listening to this interview, where can they find you online?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I'm Mike at golfgenius.com or I'm on LinkedIn.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Guys, there you have it. He had a lot of Success in the 90s at his first company, ultimately in 2009, you know, he was sick of his golf buddies complaining after work trips if they got stuck playing with the annoying guy and they wanted to play with the cool guy.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  No one liked playing with Nathan. No one liked playing with Nathan.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  No one liked playing with Nathan. They all wanted to play with Mike. So he said, you want me to do something about this? His first customers were his golf buddies back then. In 2014, he started selling to courses and a big contract in 2016, got going with the USGA. He's now handling the full handicapping algorithm, PGA of America, et cetera, profitable in a million bucks of revenue in 2017. By 2020, he'd obviously scaled, self-funded 10 million of his own money, did over 10 acquisitions. Last year in 2025, broke 50 million of revenue. Now today, we're recording here in March of 2026, 14 million cash in the bank, 20% EBITDA margins. 300 folks full-time, including a massive team in Cluj, Romania. 50% of the team are engineers. They're targeting over 60 million of ARR this year as they continue to scale. Again, 11,000 clubs across 62 countries, using them on average, he bills 4,200 per year, plus sells some other things on the side.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  And he gives back to his employees. They're all invested. Cap table today is roughly 50% of it goes to his employees, 20% are to investors, and the other 30% roughly to Mike and his senior folks. Mike, what a story.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  You did a better job summarizing the company than I could. You want to come work for us?

• 18:32Speaker 00

  I appreciate you. This was great. Thanks for taking us to the top.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Take care. Bye.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.