Darrick Johnson, the architect of a new sports-centered software platform, began his journey to creating this innovative tool in South Central Los Angeles, where technology was an early and familiar influence.
This positive view of the tech industry, fostered by his father’s career at major companies like IBM and Intel, preceded his own entry into the field. Now, his platform has equipped sports agents and professional teams with powerful, actionable insights.
Johnson studied business administration, marketing, and management in college, combining his passion for sports with a strong foundation in organizational strategy. After graduation, he played professional football in Canada for about nine months.
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However, Johnson recognized that his long-term aspirations extended beyond that. Therefore, when his football career concluded, he made a determined transition into the technology sector.
“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.
Johnson’s career started in entrepreneurship before moving to enterprise sales in tech. After Dell, he launched a sports agency, but its failure, despite 30 clients, led to eight months of homelessness, sleeping in his car during that period.
Determined to recover, Johnson took a minimum-wage job at Apple, which helped him secure an enterprise sales role at Cloudera.
He is currently a Director of Enterprise Sales in Cloud and AI at Microsoft, where he transitioned from selling infrastructure to focusing on the new Azure AI initiative.
“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 recounted.
Johnson created Sherpa, a sports management platform powered by Microsoft Azure AI, because he saw that tech companies weren’t meeting the specific needs of sports organizations. Using his knowledge of both technology and sports, he built Sherpa to act like a “Salesforce for sports teams and agents,” fixing major problems in current sports management systems.
Speaking to Insight Success Magazine, Johnson described his focus on the convergence of data, AI, and human potential as an unexpected journey. “To be honest, it wasn’t something I intentionally set out to pursue — it felt more like a divine detour than a carefully mapped-out plan,” he shared. Initially, like many in the tech sector, his goal was to capitalize on the lucrative cloud infrastructure market, but, as he put it, “‘You make plans, and God laughs.'”
Today, Sherpa is an all-in-one platform for college and pro athletes, agents, and teams. It simplifies managing contracts, assessing brand fit, and executing Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. Additionally, it provides live scouting data, player development insights, and strong ROI tracking, which measures returns against all expenses, including travel and family support, while also considering market influence.
“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.
The Sherpa leadership team includes Chief Revenue Officer Rashaad Reynolds, a former NFL player; Chief Technology Officer Lakevious Battle, a former collegiate athlete and Microsoft AI architect; and Chief Product Officer Julian Dowell.
Sherpa employs specialized AI agents to manage different aspects of sports. The deal agent determines the market value of offers, the marketing agent develops personalized campaigns, and the compliance agent ensures all contracts (NIL, professional) meet legal and regulatory standards and tracks important deadlines.
For scouting, two cooperative agents work together to identify and evaluate potential prospects. Sherpa also provides Sherpa Edge, an AI tool for video analysis that enables tagging, gameplay examination, and immediate data retrieval, all integrated within the main Sherpa platform.
“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.
A financial agent completes the system by handling budgets, contract details, expenditures, and financial analysis, which assists organizations in planning their future strategic steps.
“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 currently being used at several major universities. Johnson’s next goal is to bring it to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Johnson is actively looking for seed funding and hopes to secure it by April or May 2026. The company is currently talking with venture capital firms.
A mobile application for Sherpa is also being developed.
