A Bay Area kid, a family business, and a game everyone plays
TJ Ross grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with sports woven into ordinary life. His grandfather played for the New York Rangers. His parents ran a small business, so from an early age he watched the highs and lows of building something up close - the good months and the lean ones, the payroll and the risk. That mix, the game and the grind, shows up in almost everything he has built since.
As a teenager he read Wired and Fast Company and pictured himself as a startup founder. He went to USC during the Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart years, studied business finance and entrepreneurship at the Marshall School, and started a t-shirt company on the side. He graduated in 2009, straight into the wreckage of the financial crisis.
So he did the practical thing. Ross took a job in technology investment banking in San Francisco, working at Raymond James and Houlihan Lokey, in part to pay down student debt. Over those years he advised on more than a billion dollars in transactions for high-growth technology companies. It was a good seat to learn how companies actually get built, bought, and sold - but it was never the destination.
Finding people who share your mission and values is everything.
The pull back toward building won. Ross founded and ran 43Layers, an online marketplace connecting designers and makers, which went through 500 Startups Batch 14. The company itself is not the headline. What mattered was who he met there: Joel Milton, a fellow founder who had run the cannabis CRM platform Baker Technologies. Years later, the two would become co-CEOs. Ross also spent time leading strategic partnerships at STRV, a design and engineering firm building mobile and web products, sharpening the instinct for how software gets shipped and adopted.
Jock MKT: a stock market for athletes that closed on its own terms
In 2020, Ross and Milton launched Jock MKT - a daily fantasy app that behaved like a stock exchange. Users bid on shares of players in an IPO-style process before a game, then traded those shares against each other as the action unfolded. It was genuinely clever, and investors agreed: Jock MKT raised roughly $10 million in venture funding.
And then it didn't work the way they hoped. Rather than let it drift, Ross wound Jock MKT down in an orderly fashion, transferring customer account balances over to the next venture. It is the part of a founder's record that rarely gets celebrated - the clean exit from an idea you loved - but it says as much about him as any raise. The lesson carried forward: instead of inventing a market from scratch, build for something people already want to do.
Build something people want.
That idea pointed straight at a ritual millions of people already perform every fall: the office football pool. The group chat. The commissioner chasing down the one person who never pays. The spreadsheet that breaks every September. Everyone knew the experience. Nobody had made the software good.
Buy what people already trust, then fix what's underneath
Founded in 2021, Splash Sports did not try to teach people a new habit. It went and acquired the brands they were already using - RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool - and merged them into a single, modern platform. On top of that base Ross and Milton built the full spread of peer-to-peer formats: Survivor, Pick'Em, Quick Picks, One & Done, and Tiers. The platform is peer-to-peer by design, built around groups of friends and the commissioners who organize them.
The scale followed. Splash Sports now counts more than 2 million players and 80,000 commissioners, has raised toward $39 million in total funding across a Series B, and carries a reported nine-figure valuation. Ross runs it as co-CEO alongside Milton - an arrangement that only works when, as he puts it, you find the people who share your mission and values.
Ross stays close to the product in the least glamorous way possible: he uses it himself, every week, and listens to the customers who complain. He keeps a thick skin about criticism, in part because he sees engagement and frustration as related. As he framed it in one interview, love and hate are two sides of the same coin - the opposite of caring is indifference.
The journey, and a standing offer to Steph Curry
Ask Ross about the exit and he redirects to the work. He talks about the journey as the point, not the payoff - a founder who measures success by whether he still enjoys building and stays true to his values. It is an easy thing to say and a hard thing to mean, but it lines up with the way he has actually operated: a clean wind-down here, a patient acquire-and-merge there, no chasing the shiny thing for its own sake.
He has a specific dream for the brand, too. Ross would love to sign Steph Curry as an ambassador for Splash Sports - and notably, the reasons he gives are not about celebrity reach. He points to Curry's respect for process, his role in unforgettable March Madness moments, and his obsession with golf. In other words, he wants an ambassador who loves the work itself. Which is a fair description of how Ross seems to see his own.
We're living it. If we keep enjoying the work and stay true to our values, the rest will take care of itself.
Five things that explain him
His grandfather played professional hockey for the New York Rangers.
He built and sold t-shirts as a college entrepreneur at USC.
The @jockmkt handles on his social accounts are holdovers from his sports stock-market startup.
He still plays on his own product every week to feel what players feel.
He read Wired and Fast Company as a teenager and wanted to be a founder before he knew what one did.
He took an investment banking job largely to clear student debt before returning to startups.