Why Your Kid's Coach Might Be Wrong About Heat | Melissa Fortenberry | The Owner Seat

As of August 1, every UIL school in Texas is required to monitor Wet Bulb Globe Temperature before every outdoor practice, contest, workout, and marching band rehearsal. Rapid cooling zones. Full-body ice immersion equipment on site. Every athletic director in the state is spending compliance dollars right now, and most of the operators listening to this show serve exactly the population affected. Here is the problem the mandate does not solve: WBGT measures the field, not the kid. Two athletes in the same practice, under the same reading, can be in completely different trouble depending on hydration, acclimation, and fitness that day. By the time a coach can see a symptom, the window has already started closing. This episode is about the founder who left a Chief Product Officer seat to measure the athlete instead of the weather, and whether the economics work when a school district is the buyer.Today on The Owner Seat Podcast, host Albert Ramos sits down with Melissa Fortenberry, Founder and CEO of HeatSense, and goes behind the build:-What core body temperature tells you that air temperature and visible symptoms cannot, how a chest or bicep sensor estimates it against the invasive gold standard, and where the error range and validation actually stand-Why a school district can be fully compliant with one WBGT device on a pole and still never buy a per-athlete wearable, who the real buyer is (athletic director, booster club, parent, or private club program), and how hardware cost, membership pricing, and gross margin hold up across an off-season-Whether per-athlete monitoring makes a program more protected or more exposed when an athlete still goes down, and how minors' biometric data gets handled under Texas biometric law, student-record obligations, and parent consentMelissa Fortenberry is the Founder and CEO of HeatSense, based in Austin, Texas. Melissa comes out of twenty years as a consumer internet and product executive, and that is why this conversation goes well beyond a typical founder interview. She spent nearly seven years at RVshare, the first and largest peer-to-peer RV rental marketplace serving more than 60,000 RV owners, joining as Vice President of Product and rising to Chief Product Officer. Before that, nine years at HomeAway, rising from product manager on VacationRentals.com to Vice President of Global Product Marketing across HomeAway, VRBO, and 25 global vacation rental sites, through the Expedia acquisition in December 2015. Earlier roles include Philips, where she managed an $8 million budget across the Norelco and Sonicare brands, Millward Brown Vermeer, and StarMedia. She holds a degree in finance and Spanish from Tulane and an MBA in marketing from UT Austin's McCombs School of Business. In June 2025 she left software to build hardware. HeatSense pairs a lightweight, non-invasive sensor worn on the chest or bicep with an athlete app and a live coach dashboard, tracking core body temperature and heart rate continuously so a coach or athletic trainer knows who needs a break before performance drops. The premise underneath it: regulations look at visible symptoms and guidelines look at the weather, but the measurement that actually matters is core body temperature, and in the pros it is still taken with a rectal thermometer. [OPTIONAL, pending Melissa's OK: In 2026, Alabama football became HeatSense's first team customer, as reported by the Tuscaloosa News.]If you're weighing a raise or a procurement-driven sale: you hear how a pre-revenue hardware founder answers the validation, liability, and buyer questions an investor asks before writing a check. If you're a franchisor, franchisee, or operator with athletes training in the heat: you get the honest version of what the mandate changes, what it does not, and what to do differently on Monday.Connect with Melissa: https://heatsense.comWork with Albert, Fractional CFO for Fitness and WellnessI'm Albert Ramos, Founder of STRATEGO Intel Consulting and host of The Owner Seat. 16+ years of P&L ownership at Life Time Inc. (NYSE: LTH), Gold's Gym, and 24 Hour Fitness. I help fitness, wellness, and longevity brands ($500K to $30M) build cash visibility, unit economics, pricing and utilization models, and capital planning so every decision is clean and defensible.Book a CFO Strategy Call: https://calendly.com/albertramosjr-strategointel/youtube-podcastSubscribe to The Owner Seat newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7288029005239267328Website: https://www.StrategoIntel.comConnect with Albert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertramosjr/More from The Owner SeatNew episodes every Monday and Friday at 8:00am CST.Full library: https://www.youtube.com/@theownerseatpodcastSTRATEGO Intel: https://www.StrategoIntel.com