Former Athlete Darrick Johnson Started Out Making 100 Calls A Day In Tech Sales Before Launching This AI-Powered Sports Management Platform

Darrick Johnson and his team have launched a new software to put actionable insights at the fingertips of sports agents and teams.

Johnson is a South Central, LA, native who knew technology would always be in his playbook. His father worked at various tech companies, including IBM and Intel, so Johnson always maintained positive sentiments toward the sector. In college, his undergraduate studies centered on business administration, marketing, and management. He then had a short nine-month stint as a professional football player in Canada, but he always knew there was more in store for his career.

“I got back home from Canada and was sitting on the couch waiting around for phone calls. Phone wasn’t ringing. I was like, ‘You know what? I got a degree.’ So I literally looked up technology sales jobs and found an inside sales job … So I was making 100 calls a day for almost 18 months before I actually landed my first tech job at Dell,” Johnson told AFROTECH.

One year into his time at Dell, Johnson put his college degree and passion for sports to use by launching a sports agency that had 30 clients at the time. However, the venture fell flat, and he lost it all. He slept in a car for eight months and was eager to get back into the tech sector, which he did. A minimum wage job at Apple led him to connect with a lead at Cloudera, who later hired him as an enterprise sales representative.

Today, Johnson works at Microsoft as director of enterprise sales in cloud & AI, according to his LinkedIn. At the time of his onboarding, he was hired to sell infrastructure, but the team was complete, and it was suggested that he join an AI team they were starting as an Azure specialist.

“My first year, we ended up investing a ton of resources into the AI components of our platform. And then I think my second or third year here was when we initiated the partnership with OpenAI, and then obviously fast forward to today, AI is at the center of everything from Copilot to Teams and everything else that we have to offer,” Johnson said.

Sherpa

Johnson has worked with various Silicon Valley organizations on AI initiatives, and he observed that there weren’t many tech companies working with sports teams and agencies. He understood the pain points of agencies from his past as a former professional athlete, and now with experience in AI, he took a couple of years to build Sherpa, a Microsoft Azure AI-powered sports management software built around a long-held ambition to “create the Salesforce for sports teams and sports agents,” he told AFROTECH.

The all-in-one software, which serves all levels of players from collegiate to professional sports, enables agents and teams to manage contracts, assess brand fit, and execute name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. They can also access player development insights, up-to-date scouting information, and player ROI tracking that considers costs of flights, hotels, game visits, family dinners, etc., against a player’s projected returns from their contract and the added exposure they can generate for their university.

“So NIL space is blowing up … There is probably no time like the present to introduce a software that can essentially help agencies better manage their players and then also teams in the front office better manage their players and budgets,” Johnson said.

Sherpa deploys several specialized agents. One is a deal agent, which is helpful for sourcing deals, as it can run an analysis to determine whether a deal is at market value. The marketing agent can create tailored campaigns for players and brands. The compliance agent is built to assess NIL contracts and ensure they meet legal thresholds, required language, and other regulatory standards. It also reviews professional agreements for deadlines and criteria outlined in collective bargaining agreements.

There are also two agents working in unison to scout and recruit potential prospects. Taking it a step further, Sherpa has also launched AI video software — Sherpa Edge — to analyze plays, tag clips, and generate insights instantly, according to information shared with AFROTECH.

“Those insights sync straight into the Sherpa platform — so scouting, recruiting, NIL, contracts, and pro-level player evaluations update in real time. Edge handles heavy video processing on-site, the cloud handles long-term intelligence, and together they give college and pro organizations one unified system to make faster, smarter decisions,” Johnson explained.

Lastly, a financial agent manages in-house tasks such as contracts, spending, and budgeting, and runs analytics to guide the next strategic move.

Together, these tools help sports agents and teams work more efficiently and make more data-informed decisions.

“It’s kind of hard to tell a player what’s a good deal, what’s a bad deal when you don’t have the reference point of that,” Johnson shared. “So I think eventually we probably will get to a point where we have some type of platform for the athletes, but our goal for today is: ‘Let’s focus on enabling the people who have committed their livelihoods to sports and make them better.'”

Sherpa is already being deployed at several Power 5 schools, and Johnson hopes to expand its reach to HBCUs. Looking ahead, he is already in talks with a few major VC firms and plans to raise a seed round by April or May 2026. There are also plans to build a Sherpa app.

Sherpa’s vision has been aided by a team that includes Rashaad Reynolds (chief revenue officer), a former NFL player; Lakevious Battle (chief technology officer), a former collegiate athlete and Microsoft cloud & AI solution architect; and Julian Dowell (chief product officer).

“Sitting there with DJ, seeing how these features reflected his experience across all three roles,
that insight clicked into place,” Dowell said in a statement provided to AFROTECH.

“The platform demonstrated real coherence. It wasn’t just well designed, it was authentic. That conversation showed me Sherpa was built from genuine understanding, and that foundation really impressed me,” he continued.

The post Former Athlete Darrick Johnson Started Out Making 100 Calls A Day In Tech Sales Before Launching This AI-Powered Sports Management Platform appeared first on AfroTech.

The post Former Athlete Darrick Johnson Started Out Making 100 Calls A Day In Tech Sales Before Launching This AI-Powered Sports Management Platform appeared first on AfroTech.