Jeff Steinberg ’87 is living his dream of working with two of his passions – statistics and baseball - and wouldn’t change a thing. Invited to speak as a part of GA’s Upper School Speaker Series, Steinberg addressed the students about his career and how his GA training to be “Independent in Thought,” a component of Germantown Academy’s updated mission statement, helped him along.  “From the atmosphere in Mrs. HH’s [Sue Hunsinger-Hoff 1760] classroom where there were no desks, just a big loft, to Mrs. Daulerio’s [Glenda Daulerio 1760] Middle School History class where I played an attorney for a heretic in ancient Europe, to the long list of Upper School teachers and coaches and their ways of teaching us to think for ourselves,” Steinberg recalled. “I can recall times when I repeatedly experienced the elements of becoming independent in thought.  It all provided the building blocks for where I am today.”

His first role at Goldman Sachs was the beginning of 20 years of his career in which he spent asking the question, “What makes businesses successful?” in his position as an equity investment analyst.  Since then, Jeff’s career has been focused on another question, “How do you use statistics to improve performance?”  Although he played lacrosse for the last two years at GA, Steinberg spent the majority of his time at GA playing baseball. Today, Jeff’s company, Edge.com, tracks detailed statistics for baseball players to look at what specific elements of a pitch, or a hit, go into improving one’s performance.

He has built his business by leveraging partnerships and promoting applications and tools that others have built.  As an example, he has partners in California who, based on their coaching needs with their little league teams, have built an application to track their little league players’ statistics, play-by-play.  That tool, coupled with Jeff’s internet applications provided by JD Next have built up his business to over 300 teams currently using his software.  In his marketing, Jeff focuses just on amateur markets – college level and below.  Edge.com is working with 25% of the nation’s Division-1 schools for baseball and 20% of the Division-1 schools for softball.

“The challenge used to be information acquisition,” Steinberg told the students. “Now it is managing information abundance.”  By focusing on creating tools to make sense of all the data and information, Jeff provides a needed tool to help coaches of all levels apply statistics to player improvement.  A clever, independent-minded approach indeed.