Relentless curiosity – that’s how Anthony Katz turned a homemade ice pack for his sore knee into Hyperice, a $700 million company headquartered in Irvine’s Discovery Park.

Now he is collaborating with Nike on athletic warmup and recovery gear that Olympians are using at the Paris Summer Games.

“I always say, if Apple and Nike had a baby, you’d get Hyperice because we’re a technology company geared to athletes,” says Katz, whose products are endorsed by the NBA, the NFL and Major League Baseball.

Like Apple and Nike, Katz succeeded by reinventing his industry. How?

“Curiosity is the key,” he says. “That’s the engine of success.”

Meeting Kobe Bryant at UC Irvine

Katz grew up in Laguna Niguel playing basketball.

After college, he coached at Laguna Beach High and Capistrano Valley High while teaching history. In 2004, he began organizing summer pickup games that included players from USC, UCLA and even future NBA stars Klay Thompson and Brandon Jennings.

Eventually, his legs started to ache after games. He tried ice packs, but they were messy and didn’t fit well. So he set out to fix the problem.

He bought some neoprene from a local wetsuit maker and sewed on Velcro to hold a reusable ice bag in place. “It was like an art project,” he says.

In 2009, his invention caught the eye of a basketball buddy, Ryan Badrtalei, then a UC Irvine assistant coach who let Kobe Bryant into the gym to train – and also filled Bryant’s ice bags.

Badrtalei introduced Katz to the superstar.

Katz recalls: “I put the ice pack on Kobe and he goes, ‘This feels good. Let me use it, and I’ll give you some feedback.’ ”

A-list endorsers

Two weeks later, Bryant came back with several suggestions, adding: “If you can perfect it, I’ll wear that on the bench,” Katz says.

That’s when Katz told his wife: “I think I should maybe start a business.”

He quit his teaching job and found a warehouse to make his ice packs, with a novel twist: a push-button valve to vent air (created by melting ice) for a vacuum-tight fit. Soon he had LeBron James on board, too. Then Blake Griffin.

“Irvine is where business happens in Orange County. I think of it as Silicon Valley south.” -Hyperice founder Anthony Katz

For the next two years, Katz didn’t even try to sell his ice packs. He gave them away. Soon NBA and college players were asking for this ice pack they couldn’t find anywhere.

“If you wanted it, you had to call this guy up – me,” Katz says. “I’d drive up and get it to as many guys as I could. Then players would introduce me to other players.”

In 2012, he started selling them commercially. Within two years, Hyperice was doing $1.5 million in annual sales. In 2018, he introduced the Hypervolt massage gun, which made Hyperice a household name.

Today, the company is valued at more than $700 million – with a list of endorsers that stretches far beyond the NBA to include NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes, golfer Rory McIlroy and skier Lindsey Vonn.

‘Silicon Valley south’

Katz chose Irvine for his headquarters because of its talent pool, location and business climate.

“Irvine is where business happens in Orange County,” he says. “I think of it as Silicon Valley south.”

From here, his team of 100 employees collaborated with Nike to produce an athletic recovery boot that James has been testing for over a year.

“From the moment I tried the Nike x Hyperice boots,” James says, “I knew they were going to change the game for athletes’ warmup and recovery.”

Nike and Hyperice are collaborating on other products, too, says Katz, adding: “This is just the start.”