Skateboarding, except for a few edge cases, has been largely resistant to the creep of a certain type of tech innovation common in other activities and industries. Understanding this isn’t the most difficult thing – this endless mapping of data points and NFT-ification hasn’t translated to much for the end user in most venues, and overall, these efforts usually come off as a desperate justification for the type of progress-for-the-sake-of-progress that skaters largely frown upon. After all, we’d go much faster and stick to our boards much better by riding motorized boards with diamond-infused griptape.

So what happens when technology actually has something useful to offer? Something as simple, and yet, as revolutionary as being able to watch all of your favorite pro’s clips without searching? Or seeing how many clips a recently discovered skater been in? Or just seeing who rides for which company?

Skatefolio, the brainchild of photographer and former skate Youtuber Josh Katz and his partners Zach Parent and Ethan Cartwright, offers these features and more. We sat down with co-founder Josh Katz to understand more about what he’s building and why.

It’s surprising that something like Skatefolio hasn't been established earlier, given that data is such a big deal in our current era.

Well, I do want to say I feel very sensitive to the idea that Skatefolio is about data. You've likely seen our SOTY campaign, and that was very numbers oriented. But honestly, I don't want Skatefolio to be about the numbers. I don't think that skateboarding needs that. I think it's kind of a gross way to talk about skating. Obviously, it's an art form and not a statistically analyzed act like shooting hoops. The numbers that we used for the SOTY stuff, that was more of an eye catcher and a nice perk that comes from what we’re doing.

What we're really trying to do is have people's footage Clip Mapped and give the ability to go to someone's profile and see all the footage that they're in instead of having to search for it or watching a video and have no idea who the person is because there are no titles. That's what we're trying to solve.

What does it mean to have somebody represented by a profile on Skatefolio? If a skater’s career on the upswing and they’ve had a really good year, it will look great, but there's a flipside to that, right?

Yeah, so I think you're hitting at one of the profound questions of skateboarding: how do we deal with age? Skateboarding really loves the next wave of talent. We want to celebrate all of the exciting, hardworking skaters and filmmakers who right now, aren't getting the credit they deserve because their contributions to skating are not as obvious. I think we were the first people who ever said something like, “Did you know Cyrus Bennett was in 12 projects last year?”

For the older skaters who are slowing down in their careers, we want to celebrate their legacy. and I never want to turn skating into a pissing match of who put out the most footage because that's not what skating is about. One incredible part every couple of years is sick, and some skaters will do that. There are also some freeloaders right now who are benefiting from this layer of mystery who aren't doing that much. With this site, you'll be able to realize that.

I think the benefit of this is that all the people that who are criminally under-recognized for their work will be celebrated. When someone gets old, watch their archive. It's not always about having the best year, and when someone's in their 40s and they put out a part every once in a while, that's awesome.

Skatefolio co-founder Josh Katz. Photo: Ted Schmitz

There's an upside to that too. What if they’re progressing in age, but still putting out mad footage? You get to see that and you get to assess that in a different way.

It's definitely a way to study people's careers in a way that wasn't possible before. We're starting this campaign soon to Clip Map someone's entire archive. We've already done it for Tom Knox, Jake Johnson, and Nick Michel. There are a number of other skaters that are in the works. We're going to start working with companies to encourage this by giving out free product to fans that want to help.

The benefit of doing that is getting to watch Ishod become Ishod, being able to watch Greg Hunt refine his filmmaking technique. Isn't that the sickest thing ever? I hope that the benefits of this far outweigh the transparency that some people might not want.

Is what you’re doing specific to YouTube?

Right now we are entirely fueled by YouTube, and I’ve actually been working with a number of filmmakers who have archives on Vimeo. You can just re-upload your stuff on YouTube unlisted and then post it on the site. We don't have any way to support Instagram, and our goal right now is we're all about skate videos. Not skate clips, but skate videos.

One of the bets that we’re prepared to make is that skateboarding will become more international, and we want to help make that happen. We want to make skateboarding more diverse, and we also just want to help make skateboarders' attention spans increase. Something that I've heard in the past has been that the new generation doesn’t like watching full-length skate videos or that their attention spans is too short.

Attention spans are shorter across the board these days, no?

Absolutely. Videos are getting shorter and that's okay. But something I've realized is that I grew up in the Mind Field, Fully Flared generation. Those are the videos that I yell at the kids at the skatepark to watch, right? I realized that kids five or ten years younger than me don't necessarily have the same fixation with skate videos that my generation and the generations before mine did.

There's an incredible full-length every few days now, every day pretty much. Part of my theory is that younger kids haven't gotten into skate videos the same way my generation has because it's harder to get into these videos, especially with the lack of credit happening. A lot of videos don't have titles. You don't know who the skaters are.

We want to solve the bigger issues created by these factors. We hope that by creating an easier step into being a fan of skateboarding — for the first time, being able to watch all of a skater’s footage from this year — that kids will get to be bigger fans than before. Maybe this will be the stepping stone for them actually getting into full-lengths and finding their favorites.

Instagram wants you to watch weird influencer content and whatever Instagram K-hole they're sending you in. I want you to end up on Fritte Söderström's profile on Skatefolio watching all the Jante videos. That's the K-hole that you should be in.

It's an ambitious thing to say that you’ll change people's behavior. How do you get people to pivot from doing what they're doing now into using your platform?

We're trying to balance making a really exciting website with not being an annoying social media. We're a type of social media in that you can go into a world of skating and find the sickest skaters and filmmakers in any country and hit them up on Instagram because of us. We're not a social media in that we're not doing likes, we're not doing news. We're not doing any of the clout chasing that a lot of other platforms have because I don't think skateboarding needs that.

Our approach is, one, giving people the ability to have full credit for their work and looking at someone's anthology or filmography in completion. It's a place to study and appreciate skating. We're also really excited about curations.

There are a couple curations on the site that are made by me. If there's not a skater’s name attached to it, I made it. And I'm working really hard right now to remove myself from the website. This is super not about me — I'm just a guy that helps keep it going. I want you to be able to go see Pedro Delfino’s or TJ Rogers’ favorite skaters, or you can go watch Greg Hunt's favorite videos on here. I want everyone to make these great curations, and just raise the bar of what skateboarding fandom can be.

What's your elevator pitch for this?

If I were pitching to a skater, I would just tell them that for the first time ever, you can have a profile with all of your work in one place with a tool that lets you show off just your clips within those projects or watch the full projects, and the same for filmmakers. We're calling it an interactive skate video database, but I think that doesn't do full justice for what we're trying to do.

What are the guiding principles behind this thing?

No more lost footage. You're going to be able to watch all the Chris Athans footage. You can watch everything Jake Johnson's ever filmed in one sitting.

Zach Moore made that compilation of all Jake Johnson's footage, and it was so sick to see it all together.

Yeah, I've Clip Mapped his entire career and like the dude pops up in everything. He's got a clip everywhere. I want guys like that to be fully celebrated because people like him and Chris Athans and, you know, all the GX guys, they're just buried, man. They're really buried.

How much of that has to do with just people not using titles? Is this whole thing just a substitution for titles in skate videos? What if people started using titles again?

That'll probably happen, these things ebb and flow. But no, take the new Late Nite Stars video, which is literally unsearchable — [the title] is a character, right?

Yeah, the title's an ASCII symbol (◯).

Yeah, and it's one of the sickest videos I've seen in a long time. But even if the video has titles, if the title of the video isn't “Chris Athans street part,” it's lost. Oftentimes the SEO of these videos is bad, so you can't actually search by skaters. Even if you know someone's in a video, you don't know where they are within the video. So yeah, we're just trying to create a little more transparency there. And we also don't wanna be the guys that are like, “videos need to have titles.” No, let's support this art direction and let people do whatever they want. A lot of videos don't have credits at the end either, because they're trying to be shorter. And that's cool, but now, let's actually include the credits on Skatefolio. Let's just make sure people get recognition.

Could this technology be used in a different space? Like in sports? It kind of reminds me of when the NBA made NFTs of different players’ highlights.

I haven't thought too much about how we'll do other sports. But I do think that there is another layer of curation that we can offer. Right now we have all of these incredible Instagram accounts that are making great nostalgic posts. When you have a fleet of people who are ripping content from the internet, you lose the credits. You forget who the other people were in the videos and you forget who the filmmakers were.

As long as it's up on YouTube, it's a fair game for what you're doing, right?

Yeah, and on that note, I just want to say, we're not trying to be a media platform. We don't want to compete with Thrasher and Free and Pocket and Vague and Solo. We want to support them, we want to just be another place where we help people explore their archives and find stuff that's older. Because skating doesn't need another platform, that's for damn sure.

Do you see a time where people come to Skatefolio first to watch things?

Yes, I do. As the Clip Mapper grows, I expect videos will get Clip Mapped pretty quickly. When a video comes out and you don't know who's who in it, you'll want to watch it on Skatefolio. The other thing is, if you work for a skate company or you're just like a curious skater, being able to watch a video being able to immediately click on their profile and see all their other footage — how sick is that?

Right now you might not know what their name is, and if you can find their name, you might not know what their Instagram is. If you can find their Instagram, you still might not be able to find their footage or their sponsors — it's a mess. For fandom, for the pipeline of sponsorship, for curiosity's sake, I think it'll be a much better watching experience.

We've still got to build some stuff out – we’ve just added full screen mode as well as Skater Titles, and in general, if you see a feature that's a little bit annoying, odds are we're aware of it because there's definitely still some stuff to work out.

What do you think it will be like in five, 10 years from now, if there’s a generation of kids who had access to this tool?

Another one of our big goals is, you know how you constantly hear that saying that goes something like “First you make it in Australia, and then you’ve got to come to the US and make it all over again”. We've seen that with Jack O’Grady and with Rob Pace and these guys, they could win Australian SOTY and you wouldn't have heard of them until they started putting out footage with an American company – that's ridiculous. Part of my goal, like I said before, is to skateboarding more international. I want to create more opportunities for African skateboarding, for Southeast Asian skateboarding, for Latin American skateboarding. There's so much incredible stuff. We've all sort of fallen into our own little geographic holes. What a disservice that's done to skateboarding.

There's still a hurdle if you're from anywhere outside of California.

Yeah, I mean, I can name a hundred guys like this, but the best example I can give you is Ryuhei Kitazume, the guy that had last part in LENZ III. How many people knew who he was this year? He's one of my favorite skateboarders right now— he's the best, he's the absolute best.

I bring him up to friends and people haven't heard of him. He's a superstar in Japan, and rightfully so. No one should have to come up twice.

What else should we know about Skatefolio?

We have company pages, which we're really excited about. Companies right now either have team pages on their websites that are just links right to people’s Instagrams or just don't have team pages. We want to have more sponsor transparency and we want to have these embeddable pages so companies can have the most engaging websites ever.

You're making it your responsibility to communicate who rides for which company?
Yes. I mean, like…did you know that Jiro Platt rides for Habitat? Because I didn't. He wasn’t on the Habitat team page until very recently. What a bummer, right? Like it's such a huge deal that he's riding for Habitat. That's one example, but a lot of websites don't have team pages, they link right to Instagram.

We're keeping people engaged on these companies for much longer, which, if you have a company trying to sell product, is probably better than sending people to Instagram. We're working with some companies now, some really sick companies who have never actually publicly said who their team is, and it will say on our site.

Ultimately, Skatefolio only works if we have buy-in from skaters, from filmmakers, and from the industry. We've really built this in the spirit of thinking hard about how we can help everyone and pushing skateboarding in a positive way. That's what we're trying to do.

Skatefolio is Here