Meet the Team Behind Tekkers

Tekkers didn't really start with a big plan to build a sports app. It started much more naturally, with three people who had experienced the same problem in different ways.

All three of us have lived in different countries, and sport has always been a big part of our lives. Over time, we realised that whether you're trying to organise games or simply find somewhere to play, the process is often much more complicated than it needs to be.

So, for this post, we wanted to introduce the people behind Tekkers and explain a little more about how we ended up building it together.

Ayanleh "Lee" Ide — Co-Founder & CEO

Lee grew up in London and has been playing football for pretty much his entire life. After moving to the Netherlands, he started organising football and basketball games during the COVID period, mainly through WhatsApp.

What started as a relatively small group gradually grew into a community of hundreds of people. That was great, but it also meant that organising everything became increasingly difficult. Keeping track of who was playing, filling empty spots, communicating with everyone and generally keeping the games organised took more and more time.

Lee tried different ways of making things easier, including using other apps, but never really found something that worked the way he wanted it to. Eventually, he started thinking about creating something himself.

The more he looked into it, the more he realised that his community probably wasn't the only one dealing with these problems. That was when the idea started developing into something bigger: instead of building a tool just for his own football community, why not build something that could work for different communities and different sports?

That's where Tekkers really began.

Today, Lee is our CEO and leads the overall direction of the company, from strategy and business development to partnerships and growing our network of sports communities. He's also usually the person you'll see representing Tekkers publicly. At the core of it all is something that has been there from the beginning: he loves sport and the way it brings people together.

Brent Kuis — Co-Founder & COO

Brent came across the same problem from the other side.

He has also played football for most of his life, but has spent the last few years living and studying in several different countries. Every move meant having to figure out the local sports scene again. There were almost always games happening somewhere, but actually finding them could be surprisingly difficult.

Often, the best communities were hidden inside WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages or networks that you simply had to know about. Once you found them, they were a great way to meet people and settle into a new city, but getting through that first barrier wasn't always easy.

That was actually how Brent and Lee met. While living and studying in Amsterdam, Brent found Lee's football community and started joining the weekly games. Over time they got to know each other, and when Lee eventually told him about the idea for Tekkers, Brent immediately recognised the problem he was trying to solve.

With an academic background across international business, marketing, corporate finance and financial management, Brent joined to focus on the business side of Tekkers. As COO, his role is fairly broad (as tends to be the case in a startup) covering operations, financial planning, marketing, expansion, partnerships and many of the day-to-day decisions involved in turning Tekkers into a sustainable business.

Having experienced how useful sport can be when moving somewhere new, one of the things Brent is most excited about is making those communities easier to find. The goal is that eventually, when you arrive in a new city, you don't have to know the right person or somehow stumble across the right WhatsApp group. You can simply see what's happening around you and join.

Omar Elfiki — Co-Founder & CTO

Omar is originally from Egypt and, like the rest of the team, has lived in different places around the world. One thing he has found along the way is that sport is one of the easiest ways to connect with people in a new place.

You can arrive somewhere without knowing many people and join a game with a group of strangers, and a couple of hours later you already have something in common. That idea of using sport to make communities more accessible is a big part of why Tekkers appealed to him.

Omar also brought something very important to the team: the technical experience needed to actually build what we were talking about.

With a background in computer science and software development, including experience with mobile development, Flutter and machine learning, Omar joined Tekkers as CTO and is now responsible for the development of the app.

Since joining a few months ago, his work has been a huge part of the progress we've made. Building Tekkers means constantly balancing what we want the app to become with what our players and organisers actually need today. Omar takes those ideas and feedback and turns them into features that people can use.

Building Tekkers together

At the end of the day, we also all share the same basic belief: sport is one of the best ways to bring people together.

That's ultimately what we want Tekkers to make easier. We want organisers to spend less time dealing with admin and group-chat chaos, while making it easier for players to discover the communities and games already happening around them.

We are also glad to have some amazing interns on our side. Our development intern Elina Klymova has been supporting Omar with the continued development of the app and has already contributed to the progress we've made on the product. On the marketing side, Davide Rubicondo has joined us to support our content and marketing operations, helping us share more of what we're doing and tell the stories of the communities we're working with.

Tekkers is still early, and we're learning a lot as we go. But seeing more players join, more organisers use the platform and new communities come on board has made us even more excited about what this could become.

See you on the pitch.

The Tekkers Team