What he's building now
Coaching, ripped out of the country club and dropped into your pocket.
Most great coaching is an accident of geography and money. The right zip code, the right academy, the right $300-an-hour instructor who happened to have an opening. Rocky Collis runs a company built on the suspicion that none of that should be necessary. Mustard, where he is co-founder and CEO, takes the thing that lived only inside a handful of legendary coaches' heads and puts it where every kid already looks a hundred times a day - the phone.
The pitch is deceptively plain. You point your camera at a kid throwing a baseball or swinging a golf club. Computer vision maps the body. AI compares the motion against the mechanics of the best on the planet, then hands back a personalized read and a plan to fix it. No wearables. No sensors taped to elbows. Mustard calls itself "sensorless," and Collis means that as a feature, not a limitation - the lower the barrier, the more kids get in.
The reason that matters is buried in a statistic that bothers Collis: most kids quit sports. They plateau, they stop improving, the coaching dries up, and they walk away. Mustard's entire reason for existing is to push that quitting point further out - to keep more people in the game, longer.
What if we could leverage computer vision and AI to give all kids access to the world's best coaching - the same that trained legends like Tom Brady and Nolan Ryan?
Rocky Collis, on the founding question behind MustardThat is not a hypothetical pairing. Mustard's co-founder is Dr. Tom House, the throwing coach behind Nolan Ryan and Tom Brady. The trick Collis and his team pulled off was reversing the usual order of operations. Instead of building technology and hunting for a use case, they started with what House actually does - what he looks for, what he values, the instincts he had spent decades refining - and then wrote that into software. Build the coach first. Make the code serve the coach. Then let it scale to a million kids at once.
The detour that became the point
From the mound to the courtroom and back.
Collis could throw. He pitched at Cornell and got drafted by the Seattle Mariners in 2006, spending time in the minor leagues - close enough to the dream to know exactly what world-class instruction feels like, and far enough to know how rare it is. The arm got him noticed. By his own account, baseball helped open doors all the way down the line, including admission to college and to law school.
Then he did the unathletic thing: he went to Georgetown Law, made Editor-in-Chief of The Georgetown Law Journal, and became a litigator at Boies, Schiller & Flexner. He counseled startups, investors, and the US Women's National Team Players Association. He even co-founded re-inc, a venture-backed lifestyle and wellness brand, alongside four members of the USWNT. On paper, a tidy legal career with a sports flavor.
The commute that wouldn't quit
While working as a lawyer in Los Angeles, Collis kept detouring to USC's baseball field a few mornings a week to sit in on Tom House's chalk talks. He says House's coaching actually made him better at his legal work. That fan's obsession - showing up early to listen to a coach he didn't work for - is what eventually turned House from idol into co-founder.
The other two founders kept it close to home: mental-performance coach Jason Goldsmith, and Rocky's brother Luke, a former professional quarterback. A throwing coach, a mind coach, a pitcher-turned-lawyer, and a quarterback. Mustard launched in January 2020.
A lesson learned the hard way
Nine runs, two innings, and the next start of his life.
Ask Collis where his belief in coaching comes from and he'll tell you about the worst day of his college career. With family and coaches watching, he gave up nine runs in two innings. A public, total collapse. Between that start and the next, he got real coaching - the deep, specific kind. His following outing was the best he ever pitched in college.
He has carried that arc into the company directly. The collapse, the coaching, the comeback - it is, more or less, the founder experience compressed into two weeks of a baseball season. Things go wrong loudly. Then someone who knows what they're doing helps you adjust. Then you're better than you were. He has compared being a founder to standing on the mound: the daily crises, the daily wins, the need to relax and stay in the moment, a habit he credits to Goldsmith's mental coaching.
Think bigger. Start from the endpoint: what do you want the world to look like when you're done? And then work backwards.
Make sure everybody's aligned on the mission. When you have alignment on mission, people give you more.
In technology, be ready to iterate again and again.
Seek out chances to change how the world works rather than being a cog in somebody else's wheel.
How he runs
Relentless, mission-first, and slightly obsessed with self-scoring.
Collis names "relentlessness" as the non-negotiable trait of a founder - the willingness to hear "no" again and again and keep going. He hires for it too, preferring people who spot problems and bring solutions over people who wait to be told what to do. At a startup, he argues, there is no room for cogs.
The self-improvement streak runs deep and a little eccentric. He keeps his annual resolutions on 3x5 index cards, parked on his desk and set as his screensaver so he can't ignore them. He has tracked things as granular as a "kindness score" for how he treats people day to day - a CEO who quantifies decency. And for all the talk of legends and AI, he admits the soundtrack of his commute is cheesy pop and country music.
How the company got its name
The founders were torn between two names. Golfer and investor Justin Rose, who is English, settled it: "swivel," he warned, was a vulgar insult back home, while "mustard" was British youth slang for cool. Mustard it was. The naming committee was, effectively, a major champion.
That investor cameo isn't a one-off. Mustard's cap table reads like an all-star locker room: Mark Cuban, Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott, Justin Rose, OneTeam Partners, and player associations from Major League Soccer and the US Women's National Team, with the 2022 seed round led by the Lake Nona Sports & Health Tech Fund. The athletes aren't just logos - they're proof of the thesis. The people who got world-class coaching are betting on the company trying to give it to everyone else.
Where it's going
Beyond the fastball.
Mustard started with throwing - pitchers and quarterbacks, the home turf of House and the Collis brothers. But the roadmap was always bigger than baseball. With its seed funding, the company set out to expand into golf, soccer, and football, building more live and recorded instructional content with elite coaches and athletes. In a marquee move, Mustard teamed up with Golf Digest to launch Mustard Golf, an AI-powered platform to help any golfer understand and improve their swing.
The throughline never moves. Take expertise that used to be scarce and locked away, and make it abundant and cheap to reach. Collis credits Georgetown Law for teaching him to analyze a problem from several angles at once - useful, it turns out, whether you're running operations or raising money. He credits a little "stupid luck" too, for happening to meet world-class computer vision engineers at the right moment. Relentlessness plus luck plus a clear endpoint. Work backwards from there.
For all the talk of algorithms, the heart of Mustard is stubbornly human: a kid, a phone, and the radical idea that the best coaching on Earth shouldn't depend on who your parents know or where you happen to live. Rocky Collis spent years being coached well, then being coached not at all, then sitting in the bleachers to soak up more. Mustard is what happens when someone decides to bottle that and hand it out for the price of a download.