Linebacker Dan Basambombo believes his career in pro football has equipped him to tackle just about anything, including a budding technology venture. The 28-year-old free agent, who spent much of last season on Calgary’s practice roster before ending the season in Ottawa on the Redblacks’ practice roster, has spent much of his life juggling school […]
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Linebacker Dan Basambombo believes his career in pro football has equipped him to tackle just about anything, including a budding technology venture.
The 28-year-old free agent, who spent much of last season on Calgary’s practice roster before ending the season in Ottawa on the Redblacks’ practice roster, has spent much of his life juggling school and sports. Now, he said he is transferring many of the lessons learned during his athletic career into being an entrepreneur.
About seven years ago, while attending the Université Laval in Quebec City, Basambombo and friend Martin Belporo noticed a lack of parking for many of the students. This planted the seed for Phista, a platform they developed that allows users to post an available parking space for rent, whether in a driveway or parking lot.
Basambombo describes it as the “Airbnb of parking” and similar to the property rental app, Phista generates revenue by charging a commission on each rental.
Basambombo could only work on his entrepreneurial project part-time after he was drafted by the Ottawa Redblacks before the 2020 CFL season. Although that season was ultimately cancelled due to the pandemic, Basambombo played for Ottawa through the 2021 and 2022 seasons, meaning Phista took a backseat.
“I was giving my heart and soul to make the team. The business was there, but I couldn’t put all the time that I should have or could have so it was more of a part-time thing,” Basambombo said.
Basambombo explained that the schedule of a CFL player is always changing, from long days during training camps to shorter days during the regular season. Despite not having a stable schedule, he said he wanted to fill his time off the field meaningfully.
“The reality is it’s about what you make of your 24 hours in a day. It’s a choice. Some guys (would) rather chill and others, like myself, get busy, jump on the computer and work on some projects,” he said.
Now, the business he and Belporo dreamed up in university is rolling out in Ottawa and Basambombo said he’s looking to increase traffic to his app by reaching out to the city’s business improvement areas as well as partnering with venues and festivals.
He’s also starting to work on a back-to-school campaign. With Carleton University announcing it would limit on-campus parking passes to students living within Ottawa, Basambombo said he sees an opportunity to help with a situation similar to the one that led him to start the platform in the first place.
“We’re focusing on this so students can have an ease of (parking-related) headaches because they already have enough to deal with … If anybody around Carleton has an extra parking space, they can put it on the platform to help out those students,” he said.
He said he hopes that with the backing of several incubators in Ontario and Quebec, including at Invest Ottawa, he will be able to grow the platform that he’s bootstrapped into being.
While a background in high-level sports prepared him for many aspects of building a startup, Basambombo said he’s run into some challenges, such as learning to work without the support of a team.
“Going from being more active and always running with other people to (being) by yourself on a computer, that’s self-discipline. You’re not always driven by your teammates. You have to be more of a lone wolf,” he said.
Luckily, Basambombo said his athletic career instilled in him an acute sense of discipline, no matter what the day brought.
“Being a student-athlete, it trains you to be able to do more than one thing at a high level … It brings a certain discipline that doesn't matter how you feel that day. A day off can cause so many (downfalls) in a career,” he said.
High-level sports also taught Basambombo the importance of staying humble.
“You’re putting your money and your time in but you’re not getting (anything) back until you show it to the public. That’s another challenge. You have to stay humble enough to go back to the board and touch up whatever needs to be touched up,” he said.
Building a startup is more of a marathon and less of a sprint, Basambombo said.
“From winning games to having a bad practice, in football we would say, ‘The only play that matters is the next play,’” he said. “You can only do better the next day, so that’s what I’m bringing to the business world.”
In fact, he said his love for business and football has always been equal.
“I have always been passionate about business development … and a big love for the business world because I knew that it was something that’s going to be around for a long time,” Basambombo told OBJ.
Looking at his future beyond the gridiron, Basambombo hopes to expand his platform to other traffic-dense cities like Toronto and Montreal.
“Business was always something I knew I was going to fall back on. One thing I loved about being a pro athlete was the platform that I had … It always added another line on my resume. It’s helped a lot with my introduction in most rooms,” he said.
