Max Kogler

The through-line

Everything Kogler says about PingPod comes back to one idea: table tennis in the United States is enormous as a recreational activity and stagnant as a sport, and nothing exists in the middle to carry people from one to the other [1][2][3]. His answer is not a better club but a different physical format, a network of small, unstaffed, app-controlled pods placed close to where people already live, designed so that a casual player and a serious one can both feel at home in the same room [1][2]. The founding conviction he describes is that the barrier is friction rather than interest: make booking easy, make the location a short walk rather than a destination, make the space look cool from the street, and a share of the people who wander in will keep going. He frames the whole business as getting people "to go on a journey from pingpong to Table Tennis" [2].

What has shifted is his own posture toward the model. He was the skeptic at the start, telling David Silberman the ground-floor Manhattan concept was "cool this is really cool but it's never going to work" because of rent, and he was initially unwilling to bring the Silberman group in at all [1][2]. Having failed to poke holes in the numbers, and having gone from personally guaranteeing a single lease to running 17 or 18 locations with landlords now approaching him, he talks about the format as proven and the constraint as reach rather than viability [1][2].

On bridging the gap between recreational and competitive play

Kogler treats the gap as the central unsolved problem in American table tennis, and he is deliberately relaxed about the vocabulary that usually polices it. Asked whether the activity should be called ping pong or table tennis, he says he does not care at all, and goes further: "calling it pingpong is a little bit more open it's a little bit less exclusive," which is exactly the objection he has to conventional clubs, which are "very exclusive to begin with" [2]. The name PingPod is a deliberate play on that openness [2]. The journey he describes is gradual and self-propelled. Someone comes for a social event, catches the bug, plays a friend who is slightly better, gets irritated, notices there are different house paddles, starts asking why one has sponge and one does not, and eventually buys equipment [2]. He is clear-eyed that only a sliver completes the trip, putting the share of ping pong players who end up buying a racket and gluing on sheets at roughly "0.4%" [1], which is precisely why he thinks the funnel above it has to be as wide and frictionless as possible.

The design brief follows from that. The first pod on the Lower East Side had to be "really really good for great players but also draws in and bridges that Gap" for people at no USATT level at all [1][2]. Small tournaments in the pods and community events, some casual and some purely social, are how the competitive end gets introduced to people who arrived for fun [1][2]. Coaching is part of the same reaching-out effort across both communities [3].

On the unmanned model and its economics

The insight that convinced him was financial. Silberman produced a spreadsheet with 25 tabs, ten-year modelling and rents already checked with landlords, and Kogler, who says spreadsheets used to be his thing, tried and failed to break it [1][2]. The unlock is labour: "by eliminating the labor component or the vast majority of it like it made this a really really feasible business proposition and break evens for less than 20% of occupancy," which he calls crazy, since the unit economics turn profitable long before a pod is full [1][2]. The pods are not literally people-free, since staff come in to restock fridges and clean, but there are no employees on site during play [1][2].

That same absence of staff was the hardest thing to sell in the beginning. Walking into a landlord in 2019 and saying "we're gonna create a table tennis club and there's going to be nobody working there," inside a building with condos upstairs, mostly produced head-shaking and questions about safety and precedent [1][2]. One landlord took the chance, and the three founders backed it with personal guarantees against failure and security concerns [1][2]. He describes the reversal since: with 17 or 18 locations, counting the Miami sites opening shortly, condos and universities now approach PingPod because an autonomous pod is an attractive amenity for a building and a block [1][2].

On placing pods in neighbourhoods rather than building a destination

The original plan was the opposite. He and Ernesto were looking at 15,000 and 20,000 square foot spaces for a substantial club, and Silberman's counter-pitch was a network of autonomous pods at ground level with windows, app-controlled entry, 24-hour opening, visible technology inside, and "all the marketing is going to be done by people walking by" [1][2]. Kogler's own articulation of the value is catchment: many locations mean the area each draws from is smaller, so nobody has to treat a session as an expedition. "You don't have to make it a destination it's in your neighborhood right that was the idea make it so easy you just walk downstairs" [1]. Ease extends to the booking flow as well [1]. The street-facing glass is doing double duty as advertising and as an argument that the sport is not stodgy [1][2].

On why the sport needed something cool

Kogler is blunt that the game has stood still: "there hasn't been any real innovation in table tennis for a hundred plus years" [1]. Balls got smaller and plastic, there are novelties around, but in his view no genuine difference-maker, and if the shape of a racket and the colour of rubber are the century's biggest innovations, the sport should take a step back and think [1]. He extends the complaint to the culture around competition, including the rule at tournaments against wearing a hat, which he argues with officials about because of his hair [1]. Against that, the pods are meant to produce a reaction of "wait whoa hey hang on a second this is kind of cool," through technology built to support play rather than decorate it [1].

Cool, in his usage, is not the same as party. The founding irritation was that spin, which he praises as a great place and where he started playing, carried "a lot of distractions there from the actual game," beers and mood lighting and not enough space, which grated as the group improved [1][2]. PingPod was conceived as a complement to it, "something that focuses on the game and the sport rather than the party," while staying "less like you know sweaty Dody you know more fun" [1][2].

On technology in service of the point you just played

The concrete expression of that is the replay button beside each table. Press it after a rally and the replay of the whole point, not just a shot, lands in the player's profile and is emailed afterwards, with real-time display on in-pod screens coming within weeks [1]. He describes its use as adjudication as much as memory, settling whether a ball clipped the edge or the net [1]. Digital scoreboards sit in the same category [1]. The stack behind the pods was there from the first hire: Christine Cha was the first software developer, working as designer and UX and UI as well [1][2][3].

The purpose he attaches to all of it is offline rather than online. He admits it sounds cheesy, but says the mission is to "bring people together through technology right but into real life," a corrective to what he sees getting lost in the virtual world [1]. Playing someone means focusing on what you have in common: "I don't know when I'm playing so and so whether they're voted for whoever they're voted for I don't care because we're playing table tennis" [1]. He credits Chief Strategy Officer Ben Borton with articulating this thinking in a series of blogs [1].

On content that meets ordinary players where they are

PingPod's digital output deliberately mixes registers. Alongside great points from sponsored players, the channels carry tutorials as basic as how to hold a racket, plus a large volume of user-generated material, much of it fed by the replay feature [1]. Kogler accepts the characterisation that a professional would find such tutorials mundane and treats that as the point, since they land exactly with the audience being targeted [1]. Coaches appearing relaxed and regular players shown having fun are part of the same positioning, keeping the brand away from the high-level training centre image that tells a beginner this place is not for them [1].

On the pandemic as accidental fit

Opening in February 2020 forced a closure of a few months, with reopening around June 2020 [1][2]. The format then turned out to suit the moment almost perfectly: no employees, a private sanitised space, a table that is nine feet long and therefore ideal for social distancing, and a way for people to meet at all [1][2]. Customers wrote personal emails, some to the effect of "thank you for saving my life I was extremely depressed sitting at home not being able to go out" [1][2]. Kogler is careful not to overclaim, noting the founders worried about what would happen once the pandemic ended and finding instead that plenty of people continued to stay home and needed somewhere to go. He will say only that they were as well positioned as they could be rather than that the business was pandemic proof [2].

On founders, persistence and partnership

He is insistent that PingPod is the work of many people and repeatedly gives credit rather than taking it, calling what has been built "the product of a lot of people's Blood Sweat and Tears" [1][2]. All three founders were self-described table tennis addicts, a group that started at spin and became a Facebook group of the same name [1][2]. He describes Ernesto, six-time Philippine national champion and a former US number one, as literally the best coach he has ever had in any sport, recounting how Ernesto diagnosed his game, including the no-spin serve to the middle to set up the backhand, without ever having watched him play directly [1][2]. His division of labour was explicit: he had the business side and the passion, Ernesto had genuine expertise in the sport [1][2]. The partnership with David Silberman happened only because Silberman would not give up, and Kogler concedes he agreed largely to end the pressure, having come to see him as eloquent, smart and strategic [1][2]. Silberman's cousin Chad stayed in his existing job at the time and joined the company roughly four years later, which Kogler treats as getting the band back together [1][2]. On the equipment side he describes an exclusive partnership with JOOLA supplying tables, rackets and the rest, which matters because it lets players move from house paddles to real equipment without leaving the ecosystem [1][2][3].

Takeaways

• The gap between recreational ping pong and competitive table tennis is the sport's key unsolved problem in the US, and Kogler's fix is a journey from casual play to equipment ownership rather than a recruitment drive [2][3].
• Removing staff is the economic unlock: unmanned pods break even at under 20% occupancy, which is what makes expensive ground-floor retail space viable [1][2].
• Many small neighbourhood locations beat one large club, because a smaller catchment area means nobody has to treat a session as a destination trip [1].
• Landlords in 2019 refused to believe an unstaffed club could work, so the founders personally guaranteed the first lease; today condos and universities approach PingPod as an amenity [1][2].
• Openness beats purism on naming: "calling it pingpong is a little bit more open it's a little bit less exclusive," in contrast to the exclusivity of conventional clubs [2].
• The sport has seen no meaningful innovation in over a century, so in-pod technology like the replay button and digital scoreboards is positioned as the difference-maker [1].
• Content should include tutorials a professional would call mundane, such as how to hold a racket, because that is what the target audience actually needs [1].
• The stated mission is to use technology to bring people together in real life, on the grounds that shared play sidelines the divisions amplified online [1].