Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu is the one Dunk Talk guest who has never thrown one down on a regulation rim, and that is exactly the point of his episode. He is the CEO of BlitzMetrics, and before that he was a search engine engineer at Yahoo in its early days, sitting on logs of roughly 200 million searches a day. He went on to run AmericanAirlines.com, spending in the range of twenty million dollars a month on it, and he co-founded Local Service Spotlight with Dunk Talk host Dylan Haugen.

He came to dunking sideways. A few years ago he collapsed, and a doctor told him he needed to change his life or he was going to die. The treadmill was far too boring to keep him coming back. Trampoline basketball was not. He started putting in two and three hour stretches at Sky Zone and courts like it, and has lost more than fifty pounds doing it. Along the way he picked up the vocabulary, learning what an Eastbay is and what it means to go behind the back or off the backboard. He watched Dylan’s clips, found the guy with the blue hair, Jordan Kilganon, and started wondering which of those dunks would translate to a trampoline court. A lot of them did.

He and Dylan met through an Instagram conversation about trampoline basketball, and then in person in Las Vegas, where Dylan was in town for a Dunkademics session with Donovan Hawkins and a group of other dunkers. Dennis came by to watch, they went to dinner afterward, and the night finished on a trampoline court. That was also the first time he walked a room of dunkers through what he actually does for a living. Dylan was the one who went home and implemented it.

Episode 59 is what came out of that. His argument is that dunkers are among the most talented and least findable athletes online: everything lives on Instagram, everything is organic, and the views evaporate inside a day. “If you’re not seen,” as he puts it, “it’s like you’re the beautiful girl in the dark room.” The fix he offers is structural rather than motivational. Short form is the trailer and long form is the movie, and each one sells the other. Google and Meta are the two systems everything else plugs into, which is why YouTube ranks the way it does. And a single podcast or a single contest is not one piece of content, it is fifty or a hundred moments, which is why he pushes dunkers toward written articles: an article can link to the people you were with, the dunk you landed, and the camp you attended. A video cannot.

He closed on Google Knowledge Panels, which he thinks every dunker should have. BlitzMetrics built a free Knowledge Graph Explorer that shows how many entities share your name and what confidence score Google has attached to each one; Dylan’s sat around 145 at the time of recording. The payoff is not vanity. Dennis regularly gets inbound clients who tell him ChatGPT sent them, and he makes the point that an event organizer deciding who to fly in for a contest will eventually ask an AI the same question. On that same trip through Utah he helped Hyrum Fechser and Bingham Perry build personal brand sites, and one of them helped Hyrum land a job.

Everything Dennis lays out in this episode is what Dylan went and built. More of his work lives at dennisyu.com.