Midori Black speaks four languages, deadlifts 125 kilos, and spent six years building a US company from Buenos Aires, Colombia, and Mexico while waiting for her visa to come through. Now based in San Francisco, she is one of the co-founders of GoodRec – the app that lets you find and join a pickup sports game, anywhere, any time, and one of Inc. Magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing companies in America.

When Midori Black graduated from the University of Edinburgh, she lost her volleyball team. It sounds simple, but the problem turned out to be more universal than she expected. At university, someone else organises the fixtures, books the courts, and fills the teams. The moment you leave, all of that disappears, and finding your way back into the sport you love, in a new city, without a ready-made community, is harder than it should be.

That gap is what GoodRec is built to close. Co-founded with Lewis Black and Jeff Estes, the platform lets you open an app, pick your sport, find a game nearby, and show up. No league commitment, no upfront season fee, no waiting for enough friends to be free on the same evening. 

It is, in many ways, a company that could only have been built by someone who had spent years solving the same problem herself – in six different countries.

We talked to Midori in this GBx Founder Spotlight to get the ins and outs of the incredible journey she’s been on with GoodRec, from a garage in Manchester to operating in over 50 cities across the US and Canada. 

 

If I weren’t a founder, I would be…

‘Either a language teacher or building my own gym. I’m half French and half Japanese, I speak four languages, including Spanish, and I’ve always loved what happens when you speak to someone in their own language: they show you their real self. That’s what drew me to languages at school, and I think it’s also part of why I love coding. It’s just another language. You’re learning how to speak to something and decode it.

Building my own gym is something I’ve only discovered a few years ago. It would be a very boutique, community-focused gym – the kind where you know the coffee barista, the yoga teacher and the trainers. I had that in Latin America, and it was one of the best things about living there. I started strength training at 27, and I’m now deadlifting 125 kilos. It’s become a real passion. I would love to create a space around that for other people one day.’ 

 

The one piece of advice I keep coming back to is…

‘Looking after your body is not in conflict with building a company. It’s what makes building a company possible. There’s this 9-9-6 grind mentality that gets promoted a lot, the idea that you have to be on your laptop from the moment you wake up, and I used to do that, but not anymore. 

Now I never start my day without an hour’s walk before I even open my laptop. I work in 25-minute focused blocks with intentional breaks, and on the breaks, I get up and move. If I can’t walk, I use a walking pad and a standing desk. I do better work this way, and it’s proven that people who move their bodies throughout the day consistently outperform people who are glued to a screen for twelve hours straight. I really believe that.’ 

 

One thing about entrepreneurship that people often underestimate is…

‘How important culture is and how early you have to start building it.

When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to think the only things that matter are getting the product out and getting sales. Those things do matter, but a company is made of people, and those people are the ones who go and solve the hard problems, so if you don’t get the culture right at the very beginning, it’s incredibly hard to fix later. A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players, and that compounds in both directions. 

I love the story of President Kennedy visiting NASA and asking a janitor what they did there. The janitor said: “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” That’s how you should build your culture  – not a collection of roles and responsibilities, but a shared mission that every single person in the building feels part of. Even the people making the coffee.’

 

One tool I couldn’t live without is…

‘Claude Code, without question. I only started using it two months ago, and I was not technical before that. I’d run the whole company through operations, marketing, and sales. Now I’d call myself a developer. My main interface for work is the terminal.

I use Claude to connect to every tool in the company – Slack, Notion, our website, clevertap, push notifications, emails, etc. I build everything there and fire everything from there. It’s also become my personal assistant outside of work. I use it to manage my to-do list, plan my wedding, and curate event alerts so I only get notified about things I actually care about. It’s the best possible tool for someone who has a lot going on. Which, right now, is very much me.’ 

 

Where did the idea for GoodRec come from?

‘From a problem I had myself. I played volleyball at the University of Edinburgh, and when I graduated, that team disappeared. It took me six months to find another volleyball team in London! Six months, just to find people to play a sport I’d played my whole life. Volleyball isn’t huge in the UK, and the only real solution was a fixed weekly league, which meant a high upfront cost and a commitment to being there every single week. 

Lewis, my co-founder, had the same experience with football. Jeff, our third co-founder, had it with basketball. We all knew independently that if you could just open an app and find a game of your sport that day or evening, pay for just that session without any commitment, that would solve a real and universal problem.

Sport is also, genuinely, the best way to meet people in a new city. Every friend I made during six years living across Latin America came through sports. One of my bridesmaids is someone who came to a GoodRec game I organised in Buenos Aires. I didn’t know her before. She just showed up. That’s the real product, in a way – not just the game, but the community.’ 

 

What was the biggest challenge building GoodRec, and how did you get through it?

‘Not being in the US by far. I couldn’t physically get there for years, so I was building a US consumer product while living in Buenos Aires, then Colombia, then Mexico, waiting for my visa. Most people would assume you can’t launch a ground-up sports product without being on the ground. We just did it anyway.

Covid actually helped in a strange way. When everything moved remote, we launched in New York because outdoor sports were still permitted there, and it blew up. People had been inside for months and desperately wanted to play, so we got early traction we might not have had otherwise.

But not being close to the product is genuinely hard. A consumer app is built on constant iteration with real users, and there were things where I knew I would have moved faster if I’d been physically in the same city as our players. Now I’m here, and the difference is real. Being close to the product changes everything.’ 

 

When did you join GBx, and what have you found most valuable about it? 

‘I joined pretty soon after arriving in the US, actually. I’ve had a knack for finding the expats wherever I’ve lived; my first instinct is to find the community of people who are also navigating somewhere new. In San Francisco, I found GBx, and it’s different from a general expat group in one important way: everyone here is doing something exceptional. They’ve started companies, they’ve scaled things, they’ve made the same bets and taken the same risks. They get it in a way that not everyone does.

What I love most is the pay-it-forward culture. Someone is always going to help you because they know that it comes back around. GBx has that spirit. And there’s something about the people in this group specifically – everyone has fought hard to be here, to get the visa, to make it work in one of the most competitive cities in the world. That shows a level of intent and ambition that makes the room feel different.’ 

 

What advice would you give founders coming to the US to build?

‘It’s so much easier than you think, and it’s so much more worth it than you think.

I started GoodRec from my parents’ garage. You can set up a Stripe account, do your SAFEs, incorporate a company – all of it online, no lawyers required. Every resource you need is out there. Sam Altman’s YC talks on YouTube basically taught me how to start a startup. And now with AI, if you have a question about anything, you can just ask.

The US is also just more business-friendly. We tried to expand into some European cities and hit two-year waitlists just to get access to pitches. That would never happen in the US. When you have money and momentum, things move. The culture is genuinely supportive of new businesses getting off the ground.

And people here want to help you. I was surprised by that when I first arrived, how readily people make introductions, connect you to someone, push you forward just because they can. That’s the culture of San Francisco, and it’s the culture of GBx too. Come, be part of it, and lean into it.’ 

 

Midori Black is Co-Founder of GoodRec, the on-demand sports community app operating in over 50 cities across the US and Canada, and one of Inc. Magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing companies in America.