Noah Isaacs and the trouble with keeping score

Before Noah Isaacs had employees to evaluate, he had baseball players to scout. He and his childhood friend John Meadows ran a small website called the California League Review. Its audience was modest. Its purpose was more practical: learn to look at a player and put a useful judgment on paper.

Veteran scouts showed Isaacs the discipline behind a scouting report. An impression had to become something another person could read, challenge and use. Who was this player? What could he do? Where would he fit? The report gave an organization a way to remember its judgment and find out later whether it had been right.

Isaacs carried that interest into baseball operations with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2010. Then came commercial property appraisal, a company of his own, and a considerable number of hiring decisions. Somewhere along the way, a useful piece of baseball education slipped out of the kit bag.

“When I started my company, I forgot that lesson.”

Noah Isaacs, on the scouting report

That admission gives his career its shape. Isaacs has built a business around improving other people’s working tools. His second career asks what happens when the builder needs better tools himself.

A building is a rather large spreadsheet

Isaacs studied statistics at McGill University, alongside Operations Management and Labor-Management Relations. Numbers offered a way into questions that interested him. Baseball was one. Buildings became another.

At BBG in New York, he worked on commercial property valuations totaling more than $2.5 billion. The job connected a property’s physical details to its financial possibilities: income, comparable sales, costs, market conditions. It required judgment. It also required reports long enough to make a printer reconsider its profession.

The software did not make that work easy. Isaacs and Meadows had experienced the limitations from inside the same appraisal firm. By 2015, they were ready to build a company around a different working process. Bowery Valuation would employ appraisers and develop the technology they used.

The distinction matters. A tool built around the people doing the work can be tested against an actual assignment. Does it save time? Does it preserve a useful detail? Does it help the appraiser make and explain a defensible valuation? Those are concrete questions, and a report delivered to a lender supplies a concrete answer.

Two friends, three founders

Meadows and Isaacs had known each other since summer camp in Berkeley. Baseball gave them a shared enthusiasm; California League Review gave them an early project. A friendship had already survived the experience of trying to make something together.

The Bowery partnership needed a third kind of expertise. Cesar Devers supplied its technical foundation as co-founder and CTO. The two former appraisers could describe the work they wanted the software to do. An engineer had to turn those wishes into a functioning system.

Isaacs later distilled working with a close friend into four requirements: trust, complementary skills, shared vision and values, and the experience of being in the foxhole together. It is an unsentimental list for a sentimental premise. Friendship makes trust possible. A company still needs people to agree about the work.

There was also an early financing puzzle. To serve major lenders, Bowery needed an experienced, MAI-level appraiser. To hire one, it needed capital. Investors preferred a company with customers; the company needed the hire before it could win those customers. Admission to the MetaProp accelerator helped the founders build connections and raise seed financing. The business launched in 2017.

Less typing, more judgment

The daily frustrations became design requirements. Public records could feed into a report without being typed again. Comparable properties could remain in a database rather than disappear into old assignments. Notes and photographs from an inspection could move directly into the software.

Bowery also automated formatting: tables, graphs and maps. Anyone who has spent an afternoon making a table behave will appreciate the ambition. A perfectly aligned column is satisfying. It seldom deserves an entire afternoon.

The company’s approach retained the appraiser’s role in judging a property while changing how information reached that judgment. Its product development had a readily available audience: the employees using it. The feedback was part of the business itself.

Isaacs could be quite particular about the information a valuation needed. He pointed out that commercial rents on Fifth Avenue might be two to five times those for comparable space on Sixth Avenue. A nearby address can conceal a substantial difference. Property income and the characteristics of an individual parcel deserve attention that a broad average cannot provide.

A growing company can still lose its bearings

Bowery’s financing rounds supplied the visible markers. A $12 million Series A followed in 2019. Goldman Sachs Asset Management led a $35 million Series B in 2021, with Capital One Ventures joining the investor group. A further $16.3 million extension arrived in July 2023.

Expansion meant more appraisers, more markets and a larger organization to coordinate. The 2021 financing supported plans to open additional offices across the United States. In 2023, Isaacs described investing further in data infrastructure and technology as the firm prepared for more appraisal activity.

The financing history is tidy enough to draw on a chart. The management history is less obliging. Isaacs now describes over-hiring before interest rates increased, raising more money than the business needed, and allowing that money to postpone the repair of underlying problems. He also says Bowery spent years without a sufficiently clear answer about which customer it served.

These are his retrospective judgments. They make the funding milestones more interesting, because they restore the decisions around them. Capital buys options. Choosing among those options remains somebody’s job.

The numbers graduate questions the numbers

In 2018, with 15 people and revenue growing, Isaacs felt the company needed more structure. The standard recommendation was Objectives and Key Results: OKRs. Bowery tried them at that size, tried again around 50 employees with a consultant, and tried again around 200 with a new COO.

He found the effort frustrating. Multiple objectives divided attention. Departments could pursue apparently sensible targets while competing over resources. Quantification could absorb time that belonged to the behaviors producing the result. The apparatus of coordination became another thing to coordinate.

His account contains an especially useful wrinkle: a statistics graduate recognizing the limits of his own preference for measurement. A number can describe an outcome. It does not automatically explain what to do next.

Isaacs is willing to use judgment when a clean metric is unavailable. Red, yellow and green can sometimes start a better conversation than a laboriously perfected indicator. The question becomes whether the team understands its priority and can make coherent decisions around it. A dashboard has no objection to displaying twenty-five things. A person has only so much attention.

One page, fewer escape routes

An employee had once told Isaacs he was not being strategic. The criticism landed awkwardly: he had studied business, taken strategy classes and raised money. Yet he struggled to define strategy clearly, let alone explain his company’s version.

He read Richard Rumelt and kept thinking about the distance between a theory and an action. His practical test became whether a decision reinforced the other decisions a business was making. Adding revenue was insufficient on its own. Buying a McDonald’s franchise, he joked, might improve a startup’s financial results without making sense for its strategy.

His strategic scorecard gives that thinking a compact form. One rallying cry names the central priority. A small set of defining objectives describes what must become true. An operating pulse tracks enduring business measures. He credits Patrick Lencioni’s work on shared objectives as an influence.

The appeal is partly physical. A page can be revisited in a meeting. A priority can be repeated without consulting a presentation. The format asks leaders to make choices before handing their teams a collection of targets.

The scouting report comes back

By September 2025, Isaacs had returned explicitly to the baseball lesson. His talent scorecard separates the mission of a role, its results and its behavioral requirements. A title alone provides too little information.

Consider the finance executive a company might need. Preparing for a public listing, reaching profitability and arranging a sale are different assignments. A candidate can have considerable ability and still be suited to a different assignment from the one on offer. The hiring team has to specify the job before judging the applicant.

That logic also changes the founder’s responsibility. An unsuccessful hire cannot always be explained by the person hired. Isaacs acknowledges that his own company lacked sufficient clarity about what it sought. The scout must examine the scouting.

His account allows room for behavior alongside results. Reliability and the ability to work within a company’s values belong in the assessment. A team needs people whose contributions fit together. Baseball has a word for those less easily tabulated qualities: makeup. The spreadsheet does not get the last vote.

A second career, with the errors left in

Isaacs left Bowery’s operating leadership at the end of 2024 to coach founders full time. He remains on its board. At Realize HQ, his work now centers on helping leaders clarify priorities, define roles and make decisions they have allowed to linger.

The clientele includes founders at early venture-backed companies. His public approach is direct: opinions, working sessions, a written plan and commitments checked at the next meeting. The experience he offers includes the mistakes he would prefer other people to avoid.

That is a fitting return for someone who began by learning to scout. A good report makes a judgment visible. A useful coach can do the same for a founder’s assumptions. Both require enough specificity that another person can disagree.

From the California League Review to Bowery to Realize, Isaacs’s work keeps circling a practical question: what does this team need in order to make a better decision? The answer has changed with the job. He has become more willing to include himself in the evaluation.