Rounder to Founder: Cole South, from Nosebleed PLO to Jiu Jitsu Gear

In November 2005, a kid who went by "CTS" deposited $50 on PartyPoker.

Two years later he had over $2 million.

Ten years after that, he was selling baby shoes.

This is Cole South, and he's our first Rounder to Founder of the Week: a poker player who built a real business outside the game. No course to sell you. Just a guy who traded one grind for another and wrote down what he learned.

Cole at the WSOP. Photo: PokerNews, via colesouth.com.

The game

Cole was a Pot Limit Omaha monster in the era when online poker was the Wild West. Nosebleed stakes, heads-up wars, the swings you read about on the forums.

Then Black Friday came for his game. In his words:

"My bread and butter game of Pot Limit Omaha was completely dead after Black Friday."

He moved to Montreal and kept grinding. He calls 2013 to 2015 "some of my most profitable poker years." But the games got tougher, solvers showed up, and he was starting a family. Around 2016 he cashed out for good.

His reasons, from his own thread on quitting: burnout, "trading my time for money," the solver era, and online poker getting "logistically harder and less profitable."

The pivot

In January 2016 he and a longtime friend, fellow ex-pro David Podgurski, launched BirdRock Baby. Baby shoes. They started with somewhere around $5,000 to $10,000, and year one was almost all Amazon.

Then came Gold BJJ, jiu jitsu gear out of San Diego, which is where his focus lives now. (He earned his own black belt in 2024, so he's not faking the hobby.)

His site puts it plainly: the brands have done "tens of millions of dollars of sales," and they sold 3 of their 5 brands between 2019 and 2021.

No poker player I know would call that running bad.

The ledger he posted

Here's why I like this guy. He shows the numbers when they're ugly.

Last year, with tariffs flying, Gold BJJ made its first USA-made jiu jitsu set. Then he posted the scorecard:

Gold BJJ's first USA-made set. Photo: Gold BJJ, via @ColeSouth.

• Rash guard cost vs. China: +117.3%
• Shorts cost vs. China: +306.1%
• Retail price: up 100% vs. their imported gear, and margins still took a hit
• Artwork sent April 22, kit launched August 13: 113 days

His verdict: "it was a cool project, but a most likely one time adventure." And the line every founder will feel in their bones: "i took a lot of brain damage herding this project over the finish line."

That's a post-mortem. Most people would have posted the hero shot and kept the margins to themselves.

What poker taught him

Cole's thread on leaving poker is the best thing I've read on the subject. A few lines worth taping to your monitor:

"You're not building an asset in a poker career, if anything you're building a growing liability."

"until you have booked a solid win outside of poker, a degenerate level of focus is going to be your secret weapon."

"give yourself some runner-runner outs to end up big if you run hot."

And the one that stings a little:

"you need to find a new 'game' to attack with the ferocity you put toward becoming a poker pro."

Steal this

1. Write down why you're quitting. His advice, verbatim: "write your reasons down. put them on a sticky note, and stick it to your computer monitor." You'll need it on the first bad month.
2. Build something people use, not just a new edge. He calls trading, betting and arbitrage "money winning competitions." His push is toward "building a product or service that people get value from."
3. Cut your poker hours by four. "take the number of hours per week you play poker. divide that number by 4 … you'll almost certainly make half of your previous poker income in 25% of the time." Then spend the other 75% building.
4. Pick one idea. "then pick one (not two, not one and maybe a backup you'll switch to in a few weeks)."

If you're a poker player with a side project, that's the whole playbook. Cole ran it, and it paid.

Rounders to Founders isn't affiliated with Cole South, BirdRock Baby or Gold BJJ. Everything here comes from his public posts, his site and published interviews. Something wrong? Email art@rounderstofounders.com and we'll fix it within a day.

Who should be the next Rounder to Founder? Drop a name in the discussion. Bonus points if they'd hate being called a "content creator." And if you're a rounder building something yourself, post your build. Two minutes.

— Art