UWaterloo Alumni Podcasts
UWaterloo Alumni Podcasts
Revolutionizing baseball training feat. Joshua Pope (BASc ’19) and Rowan Ferrabee (BASc ’19)
Joshua Pope (BASc ’19) came to Waterloo with a big idea to change how people play and train for sports. With the right support at Waterloo, the right partner — Rowan Ferrabee (BASc ’19) — and plenty of grit and perseverance, that dream is now a reality.
The Trajeckt Arc is a pitching robot that replicates pro players and is being used by dozens of professional teams. Josh and Rowan came back to campus to chat about how they’re changing the game for professional baseball players.
Read more about their story in Waterloo Magazine.
Welcome to Uncharted, a University of Waterloo alumni podcast. I'm your host, jennifer Ferguson. On Uncharted, we feature awesome alumni who open up about their career journeys, the highs and lows, the twists and turns and anything they've learned along the way. On today's episode, we're welcoming Joshua Pope and Rowan Farabee.
Joshua Pope:Traject was a massive passion project and even getting like an hour of Rowan's time once a week during Capstone was like that was my favorite hour of that week. Rowan's like this is cool, but like I'm not going to drop all my courses and like drop my capstone for it. I got other commitments.
Jennifer Ferguson:Josh came to Waterloo with a dream, a big idea, and with the right support at Waterloo, the right partner, rowan and a lot of grit and perseverance, that dream is now a reality. Josh and Rowan came back to campus to chat with me about their pitching robot and how it's changing the game for professional baseball players. Josh Rowan, thank you for coming to campus and for being on the podcast.
Joshua Pope:Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here.
Jennifer Ferguson:What is it like when you step foot back on campus after not being here for a bit?
Joshua Pope:Nostalgic for sure, Some great memories. I was actually at Velocity just down the road and even the aroma of coffee entering your nose is like, brings back 100 memories. It was. It was cool feeling.
Rowan Ferrabee:Yeah, absolutely it's, it's. It's funny how quickly everything comes back. You step here and you immediately know where you are, and you immediately know where you're going, and it's just, it's, it's, it's amazing.
Jennifer Ferguson:The smiles on your face is telling me it's a good feeling. Okay, so let's talk about you. Let's talk about what exactly it is that you two do, and your company.
Joshua Pope:Yeah, so Rowan and I met in early 2014 as first year undergrad students and Rowan's an inventor and I kind of picked that up early on. Fast forward five years. We started a company called Traject Sports where we build baseball pitching robots and our machines or robots as we like to call them can replicate tracked pitches so we can actually take professional baseball pitcher data, upload it to our robot and create a training environment that simulates that for professional batters. And yeah, that's what we do. That's Traject in a nutshell. I don't know if that tracks, but that's what we do.
Jennifer Ferguson:How did you get started with that idea?
Joshua Pope:So Rowan and I, like the standard engineering students, went through our co-op programs and we tried a whole bunch of different things my background is biomedical engineering and Rowan's mechatronics and the idea came about actually even before I came to Waterloo as a high school student, where I had this kind of dream that one day you could leverage the data that baseball is tracking already and make a machine that could replicate those pitches, and so part of the reasons why I came to Waterloo and actually studied biomedical engineering was to solve that, and along the way there were some hiccups, but Rona and I took that vision and made it a reality.
Rowan Ferrabee:Yeah, I mean we met in first year. We've been friends since then but because of the co-op system we actually didn't see each other a lot in the middle of of university. And then, fourth year, we were back on stream together and so we took this uh fourth year course called sports engineering, where josh came to me with this idea and uh, it was with this professor, john mcphee, who had previously actually uh, denied josh from working on this project for another course because he didn't think it possible. And, josh, you needed to prove him wrong got the little chip on his shoulder and the two of us got the whiteboard markers out and whatnot and really dug into the problem of how do you precisely replicate human pitchers' pitch, so what are all the degrees of freedom and how would you mechanically recreate this? And so we worked it all out and presented it back to John and he responded with a lot of enthusiasm and was super supportive and carved us out some space in his lab and just told us to you know, get after it. Basically.
Jennifer Ferguson:Was there ever a backup plan? Because, josh, you came to university thinking about this idea already and then it started to happen while you were a student. Was there ever a moment of doubt where you said, oh, I better have a backup plan ready?
Joshua Pope:Definitely. One of my co-ops was in management consulting at Oliver Wyman in New York. That was a formative experience. With the co-op you're able to experience what it's like to work for different companies. I worked in startups, at Velocity, at a company called Vitameter that was doing blood testing. I worked at other med techs like Bayless Medical. I worked at in the public sector doing research for Sunnybrook.
Joshua Pope:So I've tried, like you know, private sector work, startup work, public sector work and fortunately Oliver Wyman did give me the offer back so I did have consulting. In the back of my head is if everything else failed, we can always go the corporate route. Rowan actually had a full-time offer from Google, so the hard part was actually diving into a project that we had passion and not taking the standard route of, you know, being an employee. So that took a leap of faith and once we kind of aligned that that was what we were willing to try, there was many times during the journey where we just didn't feel like it would be possible, whether it was technical reasons, resourcing reasons, capital reasons. Hardware is hard and so there was definitely moments between 2019 and 2021 where there was uncertainty of the commercial viability of Traject.
Jennifer Ferguson:It worked out Somehow. You two persevered. You're resilient. Is it 27 professional teams now that are using the Traject Arc?
Joshua Pope:Yeah, so 24 in the MLB 25. And then we have four teams in Asia between the Japanese Professional League, NPB, and the Korean Professional League, KBO, and that number is growing. We might even be in the Taiwan Professional League this year as well.
Jennifer Ferguson:Wow, what was the first team that came on board?
Joshua Pope:The first team was Chicago Cubs in 2021. We had a functional prototype that the Cubs said, if we were able to demonstrate something working, that they would be willing to engage us in a multi-year lease of the robot. And through some magic, we got that system working and from then on, with the Cubs' belief and some of their product feedback, we've been making tweaks and slowly spreading to the rest of the league.
Jennifer Ferguson:When you say some magic, do you mean like up all night weeks on end living on coffee?
Joshua Pope:Yes, yeah
Jennifer Ferguson:Josh gave everyone a look when you said that.
Rowan Ferrabee:Well, no, I think it's funny because we've had plenty of all-nighters, for sure, but the day that we had to ship the machine out to the Cubs, the very first prototype, was another all-nighter for us, with help from people actually just like family and friends, like helping us get everything together for them.
Rowan Ferrabee:And it was a very wild time for us, because it's literally just the two of us at that point trying to deliver a a completely new category of training device to a professional team, a multi-billion dollar organization with really high expectations. And it's just the two of us and we're young too it felt a lot younger at the time and so we put that machine in a box, sent it to Arizona and then flew down behind it and we were there with the team tweaking it live, making it what they expected it to be with them. And there's a really, really intense time because, you know, these expectations are so high and we had so little resources, but we managed to make it into something that had the amount of value to them that you know we needed it to be worth.
Jennifer Ferguson:Wow, how did you get in with the Chicago Cubs, like, are you a big Cubs fan? How did that happen?
Rowan Ferrabee:That's a Josh magic.
Jennifer Ferguson:That's also magic.
Joshua Pope:There's magic everywhere. One of the things we were only allowed to do for that installation was lift a 1400 pound robot into a crate, and he had four hours to do so and no forklift. So I still don't quite know how he did it, but, uh, he made some contraption on the fly with the pieces of wood we had. So that was that was part of the magic unraveled there. But in terms of getting the chicago cubs contract, what we knew we needed to do as a company was one build a product that can simulate pitches. And I always told the engineering team, which was Rowan and a few co-ops at the time, if we build it and it works, we'll sell.
Joshua Pope:And so the strategy to go to market was to attend the winter meetings which happen annually in December GMs, team officials, directors of player development, all kind of aggregate there and talk baseball with vendors, and we were one of those new vendors. And so we got a very small booth right beside an established company and we said, hey, come to us, come to us. And you know, we had 10 conversations with directors of player development. We had 10 conversations with directors of player development, one of which was the Cubs and other teams that wanted to be early adopters in pitch replication and a lot of people said this is awesome guys. We've heard this pitch a few times at previous winter meetings.
Joshua Pope:Unfortunately, it's never amounted into a real product. We want to believe you, we want to see something. If you have something to show us, we'd be happy to take a look. And so, with the winter meetings, we had those contacts and relationships and as the engineering team and product teams progressed which, as I said, was one or two people as our work progressed, we were able to create videos of its capabilities and those videos gained some momentum. And that's kind of where Bobby Basham, who currently is the Director of Player Development, and those videos gained some momentum. And that's kind of where bobby basham, who was the and currently is the director of player development and innovation at the cubs um, was able to see something functional and took that leap of faith and bet on us wow, that must have been such an incredible moment.
Jennifer Ferguson:Uh, I'm wondering was that the moment where you thought okay, like we're on to something? Or was was there another moment along the journey that was like the TSN turning point? Okay, like we're onto something, it's happening.
Joshua Pope:In that moment, I think, of the $100,000 or $150,000 we raised and we got from the Waterloo Jumpstart Bank, if I remember correctly, there was $3,000 in our account and we had to purchase a projector.
Joshua Pope:Part of this Cubs engagement was that we were going to create a visualization of the pitcher throwing time that up with our machine that could replicate it and that would be the batter cue You're kind of combining the visual cues with the actual replication and we used that $3,000 on a $2,999 projector and so it really was our final kind of shot down the field, a long pass down the field. And I think you're right in the sense that we knew that if we hit one commercial customer that wanted what we had, we would be able to reproduce it. We had the conviction, the belief in ourself that we could scale a team around it and I think, fortunately, as we landed the Cubs and had that experience, we also had our lead investor join and so we were able to pair both of those deals together, first customer and first series of financing, and that was a TSN turning point for sure. There have been others since, but that was the first TSN turning point.
Jennifer Ferguson:What is and I'll ask you both this because it might be different, so maybe we'll start with Rowan this time. What is something that you're most proud of with your career journey so far?
Rowan Ferrabee:Personally, I mean, I'm very, very proud of everything the company's done and it's such a team exercise and it's such like starting your own company for me is so meaningful because of how connected you are with everyone around you and how much of a team effort it feels like.
Rowan Ferrabee:So the success, you know, I always feel it as a team, but personally I think that I'm most proud of the amount of switching that I've had to go on in my role um, going from, you know, having to be doing whatever it takes and and that you know, early, scruffy, um, uh, startup founder, when it's just the two of us and we, you know we're hacking away in a garage and like firing baseballs out of out of a garage into the street, into into a net in the laneway and then, to, you know, getting to those new levels where you have more resources, and then managing other people and then managing people who are themselves managing people. It requires a lot, of, a lot of change in your day-to-day and and it might not be what's most natural to you and I think just adapting to that for me is what I'm most proud of having been able to do
Jennifer Ferguson:how about you, Josh?
Joshua Pope:As Rowan said.
Joshua Pope:I mean I don't want to reiterate too much, but the milestones Traject has hit in terms of having a product that replicates pitches, solves this physics-based problem that we were initially said or told was impossible with a mechanical system to seeing it in the world.
Joshua Pope:But then it's also like generating value for people.
Joshua Pope:People like on these teams not being able to like practice unless they have a trajectory like going to one team because they have a trajectory is pretty, I think, inspiring, just seeing the value that you know, the concept of replicating a trajectory or replicating a pitch for training can bring to people and how that can be core to how they think about training and how they conduct their training on a day-to-day basis.
Joshua Pope:And then, more personally, I think the perseverance that the founders had to show and our first employees and currently all of our employees were a team of 20 people were very, very um hard-working group and there feels like there's there's never a problem where we just throw in the bag, like if something's challenging, we actually like get stronger as a group and and build bottom up and I think that's like a, a culture that started when me and rowan were the sole employees of the company, but we found amazing people that have that same badge of honor on their chest, that are really willing to sometimes do whatever it takes. And seeing those people evolve I think has been really inspiring.
Jennifer Ferguson:Your journey. I mean, it's happened pretty quickly everything, although I know you've said you know you've had some hiccups along the way and it probably feels longer than it's been. But what's next? What's next for Traject?
Joshua Pope:So we're in year six. The first two years were research and development, productization, and we've had three commercial years, had three commercial years. What we've been able to achieve in those three commercial years is getting our product out into the wild and getting professional teams to really understand the value of replication. For me, it's taking that core IP, all of our innovation that we brought to the table, and figuring out a way to make it more accessible. So, whether that's bundling it into a smaller form factor or making it available to colleges or potentially even fans of the game, growing the reach of baseball, I think, is something that Traject is uniquely positioned to do.
Joshua Pope:Everyone loves gaming like Wii Tennis or Wii Golf or Wii Baseball and MLB. The Show at EA Sports does an amazing job at gamification, of virtual gamification, and I think there's an element here where the real experience being back in person post-COVID, you know, in a bar or in a hitting lane with your friends taking swings against your favorite pitchers in the world could be an experience that may be in store for future Traject users. So that keeps me coming out of bed every night and or every morning, rather, and inspired about kind of what we've built and where we're going.
Jennifer Ferguson:That's really cool to think about. Now I have a personal question for both of you. Do you play baseball?
Rowan Ferrabee:I never have. I come at. It's a baseball robotics company and I come from the robotics side. Uh, I spent a lot more time doing competition math and competition computer science in high school than I did playing any sports. Um and uh, to this day I've played a little bit of baseball here and there, but uh, my main growth is uh in that area is just becoming a bit more of a fan than I than I started. I knew nothing about the sport when, when Josh introduced me to uh, to the concept Love it.
Jennifer Ferguson:Now, you know a lot.
Rowan Ferrabee:Yeah, you'd be surprised.
Joshua Pope:Way more than your average, probably more than your expert too.
Jennifer Ferguson:Josh, did you play baseball?
Joshua Pope:I played some baseball growing up. I went to a sleepover summer camp and baseball is very much like a summer sport, so never really moved up the ranks.
Joshua Pope:But I think the angle that I bring to Traject is really caring deeply about competitive sports and really thinking to its full extent like how do people get better at any skill acquisition?
Joshua Pope:And for me, baseball is this amazing example where you have a duel between a pitcher and a batter and it's really this one-on-one environment and anytime any person tries to get better at anything, whether it's school or studying for exam, like usually.
Joshua Pope:If you spend more of the right focus time preparing for some sort of culminating event, you're going to improve. Obviously there's mentors and there's specific ways to get better at things. But for me and within Traject, it's how do we think about creating an environment that's going to look like the game, that feels like the game, that's very replicative of the game, so that you can get all your swings and misses out in practice? So when the World Series come, or a playoff game comes, or you're trying to go from single A to double A as a professional athlete, or double A to triple A or triple A to the big leagues. You have the tool that will show you what it looks like to be at the next level, really advancing by seeing what's ahead of you. And so I grew up playing a lot of hockey, tennis, some baseball, but never at the highly competitive level.
Jennifer Ferguson:Does anyone ever come to you and say but this is cheating.
Joshua Pope:We've had that there's some viral TikTok videos, I think, with like 7 million views or whatnot. That says, is this an unfair advantage? The way we like to position Traject is yes, you can replicate any track pitch which you can replicate pitchers, and you can replicate professional pitchers in any league, and it's a very cool experience. It's something you kind of have to feel to understand, but our tool can also be used to help pitchers, and so the way we think about that is you can actually upload your own pitch types to the machine and you can tweak it. You can change the orientation, you can change the velocity, you can change the spin axis and you can observe how that makes the movement more or less deceptive. And so oftentimes, when we go down and install a machine, we'll actually have pitchers be the first person lining up to see how they look from the batter's perspective.
Joshua Pope:A lot of these pitchers have been playing the sport for 20-25 years. They've never actually seen their movement from the batter's perspective, and now this is an opportunity for them to make adjustments based on what it feels like, what it looks like, and there's a whole bunch of other use cases, like catchers use our machine all the time If you're a AAA catcher. Before you get called up to the big leagues, you want to see some of the pitchers you're going to catch against and you can actually simulate what those pitch types will look like before you get called up. And that's happened anecdotally a few times with a bunch of our clubs.
Jennifer Ferguson:Have you met some cool people along the way? What's like, are you starstruck when you meet baseball players? Is there someone that, like you, shook their hand and you're like, yeah, that was like someone, that was really cool for me.
Rowan Ferrabee:We have to try very hard not to be. We've had some experiences actually where, you know we have meetings with some of these very famous individuals and you know we might have that meeting in a facility where there's some other people around and they come in people trying to get autographs and whatnot, you know, and so we have to be very unbiased about teams and players and whatnot. But yeah, there's been some really fun interactions with some of the most famous baseball players.
Jennifer Ferguson:That's cool. Okay, let's switch gears here before we finish and talk about Waterloo a little bit. It's been a few years since you were students here, but did you have a favorite place to eat? Favorite study spot? What do you miss?
Rowan Ferrabee:Oh my God, I miss so much of this place. Super formative spot. Favorite study hall has got to be DWE. My friends and I actually used to do all-nighter studying there all the time, and sometimes we'd actually Actually this one time we had slept in the study hall, like turning over the desks to to kind of make makeshift little beds for ourselves, and uh, you know madness, all over the chalkboards and uh, this tour group walks in it's like nine in the morning and wakes us all up with a bunch of 17 year olds like like prospective students and uh, and it was just the most hilarious view for them I'm sure of like these, these like uh, scruffy bearded uh, engineers, like poking their heads up in like sleeping bags and whatnot, um, but yeah, we had a lot of fun, uh, everywhere. We had uh a lot of fun in gear lab too and and whatnot, and uh, and just um, yeah, just filling ourselves with campus pizza and uh, and filling up our ramen and water fountains in the halls.
Rowan Ferrabee:you know like that kind of stuff was, was, uh, was, was the life
Jennifer Ferguson:do either of you have a favorite student memory, a time when you were a student that you look back on fondly?
Joshua Pope:I can try to tackle that one. I spent a lot of time in e5. Um, I was in the first class of biomedical engineering, so we're very close knit. Of 45 people um I think 37 or so graduated, just changing programs and whatnot, my fondest memory of a student was all the time I spent with a close friend, you know, cramming for exams late night in DP and just like doing whatever it takes to get through, type of thing. So that was fun, I mean.
Joshua Pope:Besides, obviously, starting trajectory was a massive passion project and even getting like an hour of rowan's time once a week during capstone was like that was my favorite hour of that week. Um, because we could advance this project that we were I was at the time so passionate about and I was like this is cool, but like I not going to like drop all my courses and like drop my capstone for it, I got other commitments. Um, so beyond, just like you know, getting through the grind of school, the time that Rowan and I spent, especially in 4B, just uh, just cooking up some some Python and learning from him, was pretty cool.
Rowan Ferrabee:Well, we had at that point, you know, I think of Waterloo as a real sandbox for us, right Like it's a little playground where you can experiment with what you love, who you are, what you're good at, that kind of stuff. And yeah, by 4B we were solidly spending a lot of time in John's lab and we actually just stayed here through the summer as well. But, yeah, being able to play around with these ideas physically, make them real and experiment and run tests and that kind of stuff was crazy fun.
Jennifer Ferguson:The good old days right. I'd like to finish with a little piece of advice that you can give to our young alumni students, those that have big dreams like you had. What's something that you could give them? A little piece of wisdom from your time.
Joshua Pope:I can kick it off, I think if I were able to talk to an earlier version of myself. It's persevere. There's so many great resources at Waterloo mentors between professors and velocity, at least on the entrepreneurial track. If that's something you want to do, there's incredible, incredible resources. Don't be afraid to ask a dumb question in the back of class or go up to a professor you admire and ask them about their research. People are really receptive and I think there's so much energy that can be channeled in such a positive way.
Joshua Pope:There's so many people here that want to make a difference to the world and I just encourage them to follow that, and there's nothing wrong with obviously not taking the entrepreneurial track. There are people who are extremely impactful, joining companies that are world leaders in different market segments and continue to do that too. But for the entrepreneurs that feel like taking that risk and stepping out of their comfort zone is tough, there's a lot of resources out there. There's funding, there's velocity, there's great professors, and I think Waterloo has an unparalleled environment for creating reality out of out of dreams.
Joshua Pope:So that's pretty cool.
Jennifer Ferguson:Thank you, Rowan?
Rowan Ferrabee:Yeah, I mean, it's very similar to that perseverance idea, um, and, and it's just like, I think, really all about putting yourself out there, trying, and that takes a lot of energy, and I think to that note, like doing things that give you energy, doing things that excite you, getting out there to do them. It's a real positive feedback loop. And also just surrounding yourself with other people who help you, you know, foster that energy. Who help you, you know, foster that energy. So, if you're excited about something, it doesn't have to be, like Josh said, entrepreneurship. What are you excited about and who is in your life really getting you more excited about that stuff? And what do you do? That really just positive feedback loop. You know, lift you up and, yeah, you just have to go out there, you just have to explore and you just have to explore and you'll end up, you know, being most successful doing what you love doing the most, because you'll have the energy to to achieve it. So, yeah, that's what I would say
Jennifer Ferguson:rowan josh
Jennifer Ferguson:you both so much for coming to campus today and, uh, all the best to you in the future. I hope one day I get to try try the Trajekt Arc
Rowan Ferrabee:Come by time.
Joshua Pope:Yeah, come by our offices. Thanks for having us. It was really awesome.
Jennifer Ferguson:UWaterloo alumni podcasts are produced and hosted by me, Jennifer Ferguson. Don't forget to follow, like and subscribe wherever you listen, and for more alumni content, go to uwaterloo. ca/alumni