Recent EEE Grad Evolves Sports Tech Startup Out2Win Through Million Dollar Investment and New Focus on Data-Driven Software
Jack Adler ’23, is a Whitman entrepreneurial success story. While earning his bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises (EEE), he was also building a business, Out2Win, to leverage the opportunities brought about by the NCAA’s introduction of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) opportunities for student-athletes. Just two years after graduating from Whitman, Adler’s business is going strong with $1.3 million from 15 individual investors backing the growth of Out2Win. His commitment and success were recognized with The Young Alumni Excellence in Entrepreneurship award at this year’s Whitman Panasci Business Competition.
Out2Win was an idea that came to him in 2021 as college athletics anticipated changes that would allow student-athletes to profit from NIL opportunities. Adler saw this as a chance to provide guidance in what was a new frontier for student-athletes, creating an agency “run by college students for college students” with the help of EEE faculty and mentors.
At the time, his aim was to help not only big-name athletes but athletes at all levels of notoriety in a variety of sports to connect with the right brand. In 2021, for example, Out2Win helped build a brand marketing campaign for a local hot sauce, partnering with players from the Syracuse University men’s and women’s lacrosse teams to create promotional content through TikTok and Instagram in exchange for NIL compensation.
In 2023, while completing his undergraduate degree, Adler received the Student Entrepreneur of the Year award for his innovative business idea during the Panasci Business Plan Competition and took first place in the annual Orange Tank pitch competition.
More recently, however, Adler has pivoted the business in a new direction as its full-time CEO. Today, it is focused on working with colleges, including Syracuse University, sports agencies and consumer brands to help display marketability data that allows for smarter athlete partnerships.
“The business I started in 2021 is very different from the business I am building today,” explains Adler. “I’ve had time to innovate and adapt to the evolving landscape and capitalize on new opportunities as the NIL space continues to develop. The experience I gained at Whitman helped me understand the importance of showing your passion through storytelling to attract investors, as well as how vital data-driven decision making can be, both of which have been central to Out2Win’s growth.”
Today Out2Win is focused on developing and launching software technology that helps brands, universities, agencies and student-athletes build smarter NIL partnerships. It does so by providing marketability data for businesses to use when figuring out which athletes best fit their criteria for a brand-aligned partner, providing data-backed insights to drive more of the right NIL deals to a roster and allowing athletic departments to walk through their NIL strengths with both prospective athletes and stakeholders. This data also helps benchmark NIL resources that can help student-athletes compare one school to another, which can impact both recruitment and retention. Adler is proud that his first client was his alma mater, Syracuse University, and Out2Win is now also working with University of South Carolina, Michigan State and San Diego State.
The recent $1.3 million in investments have allowed Adler to focus on Out2Win’s product and sales growth with a concentration on maintaining and evolving its software technology. He recently was able to hire two software engineers and a head of sales, giving him a total of seven full-time employees.
“We’ve built the leading intelligence platform in athlete marketing. We need to move fast in order to maintain our competitiveness as the space evolves. There is a lot of competition out there in the NIL space, but right now no one is doing specifically what Out2Win is doing, providing data intelligence to all stakeholders across the industry,” he says.
Adler participated in nearly every business competition at the University as a student, so he was thrilled for the opportunity to see things from the other side as he served as a judge for Panasci in both 2024 and 2025.
“It’s pretty eye-opening in terms of how the decisions are made in these types of competitions, which are created to simulate real-life business deals,” he says. “You want to make judges get goosebumps from the passion and storytelling you put around your business because often that is what makes them decide to believe in you.”
Adler knows there is still hard work ahead to ensure that Out2Win continues to innovate, attract additional investors and add more universities, brands and talent agencies interested in the company’s data-driven NIL resources.
“I look back at when I was a junior at Whitman dreaming about what this idea could be. And I’m so grateful to all of those who helped me reach this level of success so quickly, particularly those at Whitman’s Couri Hatchery student business incubator and, of course, the EEE faculty and staff who mentored me and gave me the determination to keep going,” he says. “We’re just getting started, and I’m excited to see what lies ahead for Out2Win.”