ABOUT LEVELCHANGER
Takedown is built by two people who know wrestling and know software — and who have spent more than a decade building for this one sport.
It started in an airplane cockpit
Takedown started in the cockpit of a small airplane.
Jack Moses has been a general aviation pilot since 1996, rated for instrument and multi-engine flight. Flying N214KP by instruments used to mean managing a cockpit full of paper — charts, approach plates, logs, checklists. Then the iPad arrived, and all of it collapsed into one screen. The cockpit went paperless.
Around that time, Jack was also an assistant wrestling coach at Palo Alto High School — and the parallel struck him. Wrestling scoring was still kept by hand in a paper scorebook: the very same paper problem he’d just watched an iPad solve.
He brought the idea to Nina Friend — someone he knew socially, whose son wrestled, and who happened to be a Stanford-trained engineer. With a Master’s in Mathematics and years programming complex, mission-critical systems, she could build it. They shipped Takedown to its first customers in 2012.
More than a decade later, they’re still at it — building for one sport, and giving coaches their time back.
The founders
Jack Moses
Co-founder
Wrestled at Yale and coached at Palo Alto High School for 13 years. A Stanford MBA and Silicon Valley veteran — he co-founded a networking company acquired by Cisco — with an early background in data and statistics. He is the pilot whose paperless cockpit started all of this.
Nina Friend
Co-founder
A Stanford-trained engineer with a Master’s in Mathematics and years building complex, mission-critical systems. A wrestling mom whose son competed — she brought the engineering rigor that makes Takedown reliable enough to trust at the scorer’s table.
What we believe
Wrestling is all we do
Every update we ship goes into one sport. We’re not splitting attention across a dozen others.
Coaches should coach
Time spent on paperwork is time off the mat. The app exists to hand that time back.
It has to work at the table
Scoring runs live, often without a signal. It has to be right the first time, every time.
Built by wrestling people, for wrestling.