Neil Kane on Business Fundamentals: What a University of Notre Dame Mentor Taught Me About Building Something People Will Actually Pay For

The sports business – especially college sports – has undergone a lot of change in recent years. Old rules are being replaced with new rules and leaders are more accountable than ever to drive revenue. To do this, teams and brands increasingly look for ways to engage and retain fans. In this volatile environment, delivering value to customers to drive revenue is key.

Neil Kane is driven to help businesses do just that. I met Neil in July 2024 when HONOR partnered with the University of Notre Dame's ESTEEM Graduate Program (the Engineering, Science, and Technology Entrepreneurship Excellence master's program), where Neil served as Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of Curriculum and Capstone Advising. His focus was helping companies execute on their goals with the assistance of the Program’s graduate students. Neil’s specialty: Understanding what the companies offer and what they need to succeed, then advising and teaching his students so they could provide deliverables that help companies succeed.

Neil is especially adept at helping organizations deliver value to their customers. He utilizes four questions for all who are offering products and services, whether it be in sports, business, investment, or academia. For example, athletic departments are spinning up their own apps. Athletes are launching brands the day their NIL deal closes. Sports tech founders are walking into a conference room with a platform and a prayer. Everyone is building. Not enough people are checking whether there is a market underneath it and how to provide value to that market.

Neil has spent 25-plus years moving between Fortune 500 companies and startups: sales training and a President's Award at IBM, business development at Microsoft, where he helped negotiate a $25 million investment. He founded and ran a synthetic diamond company spun out of Argonne National Laboratory and led a profitable "brain games" company. He built Michigan State's entrepreneurship program into a Top 20 program, then did it again at Notre Dame, where ESTEEM now ranks in the nation's Top 12. He's testified twice before the U.S. House on technology commercialization and was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. As he puts it himself, he's "a serial entrepreneur who specializes in commercializing complex technologies that come out of academic research labs or federal laboratories." In November 2025, he added scout for Origin Ventures to that resume – more on that below.

Neil is passionate about helping leaders of every business – large or small, simple or complex – deliver something of value to their customers. He has found that young companies often struggle to answer four questions:

1.       What are you selling?

2.       Who are you selling to?

3.       How will customers know about your offering?

4.       How will you make money?

You’re dead in the water if you can’t answer these questions.

Neil calls these the “fundamentals.” He likens a business to a basketball team where coaches may inherit a talented team that isn't performing – players who don't trust each other, who force plays instead of running the offense. The fix is never a trick play. It's back to fundamentals: running the floor, boxing out, practicing free throws until the form is automatic again. You don't skip to the highlight reel. You get the basics right, or nothing else works.

Business is no different.

What exactly are you selling — not the mission statement, but the actual thing, the specific embodiment of it?

Who is buying it — what market, what type of buyer, is government involved?

How will they find out it exists — what's your actual path to their attention?

And how do you get paid — one-time sale, subscription, royalty, a cut of a transaction?

Many don’t realize they skip these four questions, and I understand why. If you've spent your career inside one building, surrounded by people who look and think like you, it's easy to assume everyone shares your exact problem, and that if your school has 25,000 students, you've got 25,000 customers. Neil sees this constantly with his own students: someone builds an app for other students just like them, assumes the need is universal, and assumes the university will simply buy it. What they haven't done is the unglamorous part: get out of the building, talk to actual buyers, learn the budget cycle, learn who signs off, learn that a university sales cycle runs on its own timeline, not yours. Assumptions aren't data.

Neil described a founder who pitched investors this past summer. He made a lot of  unsubstantiated claims about the market because he was convinced there was an unmet need. But he didn’t prove there was a market and revenue model big enough to justify a business first. Neil said this can happen to any business for any of its product offerings.

Whether there's a problem worth solving is the first question. Whether there's a business worth building around it is a second, entirely separate one. Is a regulation standing in your way? Can a competitor copy your solution in a weekend? If you can't defend your turf, you don't have a business, you have a feature someone else will ship.

That distinction matters even when the need is sympathetic. Neil points to pharma: patients with real conditions go untreated not because the science is impossible, but because the market is too small to justify the R&D. A foundation may step in to fund it anyway, but eventually, someone still needs a market large enough to sustain it.

Good intentions don't repeal unit economics.

This is exactly where Neil's mentoring earns its keep. He's clear that he's not evaluating whether your product is good — that's not his lane. He's testing whether the data underneath your business is good, and whether your model can actually work. He listens to the pitch, then asks the tough questions an investor will ask, so founders find out where they're exposed before a VC does.

That instinct is why Origin Ventures made him a scout this past November, a 25-year-old Chicago firm investing out of its $140 million Fund VI, with roughly $500 million under management and an early track record that includes GrubHub, Cameo, Tovala, and Tock. Fund VI is focused on the AI economy – that is infrastructure, AI-native software, and frontier tech – at seed and Series A, industry and geography agnostic.

If you're building something or want to improve existing product offerings, talk to Neil before you're in a room with a term sheet or building and shipping products with your Product Dev Team. That's the discipline success is built on: know exactly what you're offering, who will pay for it, and how value flows before you scale it. Get the fundamentals right, and everything else gets easier.

Neil Kane can be reached through LinkedIn at and you can find more insights on building your business at Neil’s blog.