In the News

Max Rusakov, co-founder of RevU, sits down with the Ball is Law team to walk through what actually goes wrong when a college athlete signs an NIL contract without reading it carefully. The conversation starts with the structural problem: most NIL deals are small enough that no one wants to pay a lawyer to review them, but they're complex enough that a teenager can't reasonably evaluate the risks alone. Max breaks down the most common red flags RevU sees across thousands of contracts — perpetual usage rights, broad morality clauses, exclusivity windows that block future deals, and termination clauses that let the brand walk while the athlete is still on the hook. He explains how RevU's clause-level risk scoring works, why the platform refuses to give legal advice (and routes to lawyers for high-stakes decisions), and what a healthy NIL infrastructure looks like when athletes, schools' compliance offices, and brand partners are all on the same page. The episode also covers what's coming next for NIL technology as the House settlement reshapes who can pay what to whom, and why having a neutral third-party contract layer matters more in a revenue-share era.

Hosts Erin Sarles and Thomas Roe interview Max Rusakov and Calum Kuhn, the co-founders behind RevU, an AI contract-intelligence platform built specifically for the NIL economy. The episode opens with a frank diagnosis: NIL didn't fail athletes because the dollars were too small — it failed them because nobody translated what they were signing. Calum walks through how RevU's analysis engine extracts compensation structures, deliverables, and risk-bearing clauses from contracts that arrive as PDFs, DocuSign envelopes, or scanned screenshots, and translates them into plain-English summaries the athlete and their family can actually act on. Max focuses on the human side — why most red flags get missed (athletes are excited, lawyers are expensive, and compliance offices are overwhelmed), the patterns RevU sees that consistently hurt athletes (perpetual likeness rights, morality clauses with vague triggers, payment milestones tied to subjective deliverables), and what athletic directors and parents should be asking before a signature happens. The hosts also push the founders on the limits of AI in legal contexts, and Calum is direct about where RevU stops short of legal advice and routes to humans.

In a 13-minute deep-dive with the Sports Business Leaders Podcast, Max Rusakov and Calum Kuhn unpack why so many NIL deals — most of which sit under the $2,000 mark — contain risks that athletes, agents, and even university compliance officers routinely miss. The founders explain RevU's four-part product surface: instant plain-English contract summaries, clause-level risk scoring against a CUAD-derived taxonomy, NCAA/FTC compliance checks, and deliverable tracking that integrates directly into the inboxes (Gmail, Outlook) and document editors (Google Docs, Word) where athletes and their reps already work. The conversation walks through what RevU learned between Version 1 and Version 2 — that athletes don't want a longer report, they want a shorter, sharper one — and how the team rebuilt the UX around the question 'what should I actually push back on?' rather than 'is this clause legally valid?' The episode also touches on the operational realities of working with compliance offices that are still building NIL infrastructure, and on the team's view of where NIL technology has to go as the House settlement and state-level legislation continue to reshape who can pay athletes, for what, and on what terms.

Greg Glynn, founder and CEO of Pliable Marketing, hosts Calum Kuhn and Max Rusakov for a wide-ranging conversation about the founding story behind RevU, the gap they saw between what athletes were promised in the early NIL era and what they actually got, and the product decisions that came out of seeing dozens of bad contracts in the field. The episode covers RevU's pricing philosophy (why the team kept the price low enough that a single-deal athlete can afford it), the marketing motion (partnerships with collectives, attorney groups, and athletic departments rather than direct-to-athlete acquisition), and how the team thinks about future features — group-deal templates, post-signing deliverable reminders, and tighter integration with compliance reporting flows. The conversation also touches on the macro context: the NCAA vs. House settlement's impact on revenue sharing, the rise of collective-led marketplaces, and what an honest NIL ecosystem would look like if every contract came with a plain-English summary, a redline window, and a deliverable tracker by default. Calum closes with the team's working principle: RevU has no stake in whether an athlete signs, only in whether they understand.

NIL Wire's Expert Interview series sat down with Charlie Raisin, Max Rusakov, and Calum Kuhn from RevU for a substantive Q&A on the specific clause patterns that put NIL athletes at risk and the operational realities of staying NCAA and state-level compliant. The piece walks through RevU's positioning as a neutral third party — explicitly not a marketplace, collective, or representation firm — that reviews NIL agreements against the relevant compliance frameworks and surfaces predatory clauses before signing. The team discusses how RevU's automated compliance submissions to athletic departments cut down on the friction that usually causes deals to either get rejected late in the process or quietly violate the school's policy. The interview also covers the team's view on the most common 'gotcha' clauses they see in the wild — overly broad image rights, perpetual usage, exclusivity windows that block future deals, vague morality triggers that brands can interpret arbitrarily, and termination provisions that protect the brand but not the athlete. Crucially, the team is clear about what RevU is not: it is not a substitute for a sports attorney on high-stakes contracts, and the platform is designed to route athletes to qualified counsel when the dollar size or complexity warrants it.