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Throughout high school, Jack Adler’s sister, Kate Adler, always shared her business ideas. Jack wasn’t initially interested in business.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jack was bored and needed a resume builder. So, he quickly turned to building a business alongside Kate. Throughout quarantine, Jack and Kate started the $3 Challenge together, donating $3 to organizations such as Feeding America and homeless shelters in need of support.

They’d build it up by asking people to post the challenge on social media, reaching out to for-profit and nonprofit organizations and doing additional outreach. Their efforts lasted through their sophomore year of college, sparking Jack’s interest in business.

His newfound passion for entrepreneurship — mixed with his love for sports and the passing of name, image and likeness legislation — led the Syracuse alum to start Out2Win, a platform that uses data intelligence to build partnerships between brands and athletes. After beginning as a student-marketing agency in 2021, Out2Win recently pivoted to a technology that ranks athletes based on how they stack up against one another as creators and influencers. After its recent evolution, the company has raised a seed round of nearly $1.5 million.

“This was literally the fusion of my passions into one thing,” Jack said. “It kind of felt like right place, right time to go take a shot at it.”

Jack Adler, sporting an Out2Win shirt, speaks at a Syracuse athletic facility. Adler first started Out2Win during his junior year at SU. Courtesy of Jack Adler

While Jack was creating Out2Win, Kate often gave him harsh feedback on his ideas. Using the knowledge she gained in her business classes at the University of Miami, she also helped him build the first version of the platform.

Kate would tell Jack how to make feedback surveys for his first clients and customers, stressing the importance of receiving adequate criticism of his ideas.

“(Jack) was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I really need feedback yet,’” Kate said. “And I was like, ‘No, Jack, you need feedback. It’s the most important thing.’”

The feedback helped Jack on his journey once NIL legislation passed.

Before July 2021, Jack thought it was ridiculous that student-athletes weren’t rewarded for the value they provide to their schools. Even with scholarships, he felt athletes didn’t get enough in return for what they brought to colleges.

That all changed when legislation was passed less than two months before Jack’s junior year at SU. With NIL, college athletes could finally be monetarily compensated, mainly by brands paying them for social media posts.

Within a few months of the advent of NIL, Out2Win began rising to prominence as a student-marketing agency, helping connect Syracuse athletes with brands.

“I was interested in the opportunity that existed in a new space to take it as it was coming in and take it by storm,” Jack said.

Despite Out2Win bringing together campaigns with brands and athletes in 2021, Jack realized the company needed to incorporate technology to evolve further. Out2Win’s key mission — building the best partnerships possible — remained constant, but it began using AI to streamline its operations in 2023.

“Just seeing where this world is heading, we knew that we had to evolve, that we had to integrate technology and AI,” Jack said. “Not only to build the company, but build it fast, the right way and efficiently.”

Since beginning to use AI to streamline its tasks as a tech-based platform, Out2Win has taken off, earning over $500,000 in revenue.

Before Out2Win’s emergence, Jack says brands often struggled to find the right partners because they lacked the data to understand whether an athlete was the right fit.

With AI, Out2Win has developed a database that brands can filter by specific criteria. Additionally, it provides further data to individually vet athletes based on their content-creation abilities and to understand the audiences they can expect to reach.

The company uses a score that ranks athletes based on their marketing capabilities, taking into account their performance in past brand partnerships and on social media. Athletes are rated on a 100-point scale and matched up based on their marketability. The system leads to more innovative partnerships and lesser-known athletes getting recognition.

“(Out2Win) has allowed (smaller sport athletes) to get the visibility they deserve, that they weren’t getting previously,” Jack said. “Because there are a lot out of athletes out there that have strong content creation abilities that deserve brand partnerships.”

SU Chief Digital Officer and Sidearm Sports Founder Jeff Rubin said, while basketball and football drive ticket sales and conversation, their athletes aren’t always the best choices to serve as brand ambassadors. He added that there could be a player within those sports who’s incredibly talented athletically, but nothing spectacular in front of the camera.

“Out2Win is coming in at a time when the value of an athlete is beyond on-field performance or on-court performance, but is also very much about their value off the court, which is their social value and their social influence,” Rubin said.

Rubin believes the Out2Win score is the most intriguing aspect of the platform, referring to it as the software’s “algorithm” and “intellectual property.” Rather than just looking at how many followers an athlete has on Instagram, Out2Win analyzes real engagement, brand affinity and quality.

“(The Out2Win score) is their secret sauce,” Rubin said.

Even with immense success, Out2Win still faces hurdles related to its future and how it can differentiate itself – especially given numerous competitors in the NIL space, such as On3.

David Meluni, a professor at Syracuse University’s Falk College of Sport, said it’s important that Jack distinguishes the platform from others trying to achieve a similar goal.

“I think his biggest thing is, how does he differentiate from any competitors that are out there trying to do this?” Meluni said.

Jack Adler stands alongside Whitman School of Management Executive Dean Mike Haynie. Adler worked alongside Haynie to help develop the creator economy curriculum. Courtesy of Jack Adler

On a similar note, Jack thinks the most challenging part of NIL is how often it changes.

Yet, Jack also views that inevitable change as a positive.

“It’s been just something that we have to constantly stay on our toes for, because rules are changing,” Jack said. “They’re ever-evolving, and we just have to be able to quickly pivot and move around them. So, it’s challenging, but it’s also part of what’s fun about the space.”

The challenges have also helped build the foundation for a promising future. By 2026, Jack anticipates Out2Win will expand into high school and professional sports, as well as other sectors of the creator economy.

“Our platform, our infrastructure, it can apply into other spaces around the influencer marketing ecosystem,” Jack said. “We’re laser focused on building the best platform in sports today, but we know that there’s potential to do more in other spaces.”

As Jack reflects on Out2Win’s future — and how it evolved from an idea in his Notes app to an intelligence platform within the athlete marketing space — he looks back on when he was a junior at SU. He gives significant credit to Syracuse, and the relationships he formed there when he was just beginning to create Out2Win.

Beyond SU’s education and ecosystem, Jack has stayed in close contact with many of his mentors during college. He remains in touch with Syracuse Director of Athletics John Wildhack and maintains connections with Rubin and Whitman School of Management Executive Dean Mike Haynie, who he worked with to launch the creator economy curriculum.

But above all, Jack gives credit to Kate — as Out2Win may not have been possible without her criticism and innovative business ideas during the pandemic.

“(Kate) is extremely entrepreneurial herself, and has been a great sidekick and thought partner as I’ve gone about building this,” Jack said.

Published on October 28, 2025 at 11:16 pm
Contact Spencer: sabrod@syr.edu | @spencerbrod20