
How one alum became a start-up founder

When Ken Krebs (MVS ‘14) was wrapping up graduate school in computer engineering at Boston University, he was required to complete a capstone project.
The program allowed students to propose their own ideas, an exercise that had always been easy for Krebs; he’d found he could draw on his undergraduate experience at the U-M School of Kinesiology or the work he’d done at an intraoperative neuromonitoring company after college to come up with fresh and relevant concepts compared to his peers.
For this project, Krebs’ inspiration came from a biomechanics lab he’d taken at SoK, taught by associate professor Deanna Gates. In one session, the class had tracked different kinematics, recording themselves as they jumped on tables and then analyzing the movements frame by frame.
“We had to plot all the points over this five- to 10-second movement, and it took a long time,” Krebs recalls. “I don’t know why, but that was on my mind. I wondered if any of the technologies had advanced since then, or if people were still doing it in that tedious way.”
When Krebs looked further into the field, he was surprised to see that there hadn’t been a lot of progress. To him, it seemed that technology should be able to conduct that type of movement analysis in real time by now.
Krebs turned the concept into his final project, delving into biomechanics journals to conduct research before developing and testing a prototype. The project went so well that he won the department’s poster presentation award that semester.
“And then I got a lot of good encouragement from my professors to take it as far as it could go,” Krebs says.
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Krebs is now the co-founder, along with fellow U-M Kinesiology alum Adrian Heneveld, of the start-up Yogger, which allows physical therapists and sport performance coaches to quickly gather movement data through smartphones, tablets, and webcams. Yogger has more than 1,000 customers in 40 different countries, ranging from Little League athletes to Olympians.
Though this career seems like the perfect fit for his skills and experience now, it took him a while to arrive at a place where the connections seemed obvious.
“I’ll say to people, ‘I was in kinesiology, and then I did computer engineering,’ and then I’ll talk about the company, and they’ll say, ‘Wow, that’s a great use of both your degrees,’” Krebs says. “But when I first went to U-M, I didn’t even know what I wanted to do.”
Krebs wasn’t enrolled in the School of Kinesiology when he first started at U-M; he hadn’t known such a discipline existed when he applied out of high school. He was a pre-health major his freshman year and transferred into SoK after meeting some Kines students who told him about their classes.
“The coursework was just more interesting than any of the other pre-health options,” Krebs says.
He ended up being part of SoK’s second class of intraoperative neuromonitoring, the world’s first accredited program to teach students how to monitor the nervous systems of patients undergoing surgeries that could result in neurological deficits if there were complications. He credits clinical associate professor Josh Mergos, the founder of SoK’s IONM program, for encouraging him and his peers to try something new.
“He was very good at pushing all of us to move and get out and explore the world,” Krebs says.
Krebs moved to Boston for an IONM job, thinking he’d be there for a short stint while he plotted his long-term career path. But it ended up being such a positive experience that he stayed there for almost six years.
“I would definitely recommend working in IONM,” he says. “Even if you don’t know what you want to do, it was better to do that while I figured it out than to do nothing at all. You’re exposed to everything in the hospital and all the careers you could have in the health field, and it’s also a very interesting and challenging field itself.”
One of the most challenging elements for Krebs was mastering the soft skills he’d need when walking into a new hospital or working with a surgical team he hadn’t met before, with whom he’d have to make decisions about patients’ well-being amid tense situations.
“Working in that field, you have to develop a thick skin and be pretty bold,” Krebs says. “You have to be comfortable stepping out of your comfort zone and approaching people and asking people for things and there are always new challenges that you have to figure it out. And with Yogger, I use that mentality every day now.”
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The flexibility of Krebs’ IONM job also allowed him to explore his passions outside of work, including computer programming, which eventually led him to the master’s program at BU. Since then, he and his Yogger team have spent time figuring out how their product will be used, what kind of value it provides, and how much potential clients are willing to pay for it.
“The degree in kinesiology gives you an understanding of stuff that would be difficult to learn the reverse way,” he says. “If someone has a business degree and they work for a sports tech company, it’s tough to get up to speed on the hard sciences if you don’t have that education.”
Krebs recently moved back to Ann Arbor to be closer to family, and the proximity means it’s even easier to connect with the Kines community. He just hired a few SoK students as interns, one of whom found Yogger from a job posting Krebs sent to an SoK alumni page.
“What’s great is the students have the same story as me,” Krebs says. “They’re in undergrad. There’s a lot out there to do. They aren’t really sure what they want to do. So it’s fun for me to be able to say, ‘Oh, I have a lot of work you could do, and it will help you get exposure to what it’s like to work in software and sports tech.’”
He recalls a moment during his time at U-M when he saw a poster in one of the Kinesiology buildings that read, “What can you do with your degree?”
“It was a good poster because you could see there’s a lot you could do,” Krebs says. “But I think now there’s a lot more you can do. And I’m motivated to show students that.”