Jack Rasmussen couldn't read until he was 20, didn't play football until he was 23, and had zero background in footwear, yet somehow built the cleat technology now worn by 100 unpaid NFL players.
Tyler and Jake dig into the wild origin story: a viral video, a 4 million-view overnight blowup, and a 13-hour drive to chase down his first investor. They also get into the harder questions, like how a five-person company proves its tech actually works and why Nike hasn't swooped in to take it. It's a startup story that sounds too strange to be true, except it is.
⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 — Intro
00:44 — The Injury That Started It
03:08 — The Dream Team: A marketing guy and a housekeeper walk into biomechanics
04:06 — Flex 12 Degrees, Rotate 360: What a "smart stud" actually does
06:17 — Why the easy version got vetoed
07:27 — Learned to Punt on YouTube
09:00 — "These Are the Rasmussens"
12:58 — The Mount Everest of footwear
16:38 — Four Years in Limbo
20:11 — Four Million Views Overnight: Going viral with zero product to sell
21:14 — The 13-Hour Drive to "Phoenix": How Todd Heap became investor number one
23:14 — Selling Hundreds of Pairs From a Drawing: The presale before the product existed
24:06 — How you value a company with no revenue
27:45 — Losing money to get in the league
29:01 — The Madden Cover Mystery: Blurred-out cleats and Nike's billion-dollar deal
33:41 — Jake's Hard Question: Is this just the next balance bracelet?
35:08 — The Data They Can't Share Yet
39:15 — Why cleats might need a helmet-style safety rating
43:32 — Waiting for Nike to Wake Up: Sleeping with one eye open on a giant
46:46 — What the next 21 months look like for Caddix
54:25 — Outro
