Who is Building Pickleball?

Brian Lim didn’t set out to become a storyteller. He just wanted to understand how people build things. Brands, lives, identities. And whether he could do it too.

A former MMA fighter, a self-taught pastry cook, and now the founder of Building Pickleball, Brian has quietly become one of the sport’s most thoughtful chroniclers. His work is raw, sometimes improvised, but rooted in a desire to learn, with a firm belief that stories well told can move a community forward. 

This is the story of a storyteller: someone who built his own way into a sport still figuring out what it wants to be.

A tough childhood

Brian was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, the youngest of three boys. But before his story could begin in any real sense, it nearly ended.

When he was a baby, his mother had laid him down for a nap, gently placing his head between two pillows. At some point, he rolled over. 

By the time she returned—thirty minutes, maybe an hour—his face had turned entirely blue. Frantically, the fire department was called. He survived. 

He doesn’t remember it, of course, but the story hung around in moments of reflection. “I was born here for a reason,” he says now. “I stayed here for a reason.”

That idea of surviving something early, of being watched over, became foundational. His family, tight-knit in the unique way immigrant families often are, carried that protective instinct. “They always looked out for me,” he says. As he grew older, and later became a fighter—literally, a professional MMA fighter—he connected that near-death experience to something elemental in himself. “Ever since I was a baby, I just fought through things.”

Family to Korean immigrants

And there was much to fight through. His childhood, as he puts it, wasn’t one he looks back on fondly. His early years were shaped less by affection than by noise: shouting behind closed doors, the hum of financial anxiety, the uneasy silence that follows incessant arguments.

His parents, Korean immigrants, had married for a green card—something he learned only years later, though in retrospect, it explained much of the turbulence at home. 

His father, a janitor at a Marriott, eventually clawed his way into entrepreneurship, building a small business for 30 years. But ambition came at a cost. “It was incredibly stressful,” Lim recalls. “They were low-income, always working, always fighting.” The house was filled with tension that seemed to hang in the air.

Amid the dysfunction, there were pockets of warmth. His father, despite everything, was a believer—in dreams, in possibility, and especially in his son. 

He was rarely without his VCR camcorder, constantly filming Brian, convinced he was destined for something more. “You should be an actor,” he’d say. “You’re funny.” He pushed his children to move, to get outside, to stay active—not just in body, but in spirit. There was a certain vibrancy to those moments: walks to the park, family outings, bursts of laughter caught on grainy tape.

It wasn’t idyllic, and it wasn’t simple. But it was family. 

Brian and his brother shared a bunk bed. They shared a room longer than either would have liked, but in retrospect, the cramped quarters wove a kind of closeness that has lasted into adulthood. “We hated it growing up,” he laughs, “but low key, I think we really enjoyed it.”

Theirs was not an easy home. But it was a home. 

Parents divorce

Brian spent most of his early years in Northern Virginia. Great Falls first, then Vienna. 

The moves blur together now. He can’t recall exactly when they happened, only that they marked different chapters of a home life already beginning to fracture.

Around the time he was 12, his parents divorced. 

The separation had been unofficial for years, but when it became real with papers signed, it forced decisions that didn’t have easy answers. “We couldn’t figure out where we wanted to stay,” Brian says of the time he and his brother moved between households. 

There was mainly the question of custody. Eventually, he and his brother settled on living with their father. It made sense at the time. In practice, it didn’t. Brian doesn’t elaborate much, but there’s weight in what he leaves unsaid. 

Graduating College

At Radford University, where Brian earned a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition and Dietetics, the real education came outside the classroom. It arrived in the form of grainy UFC highlight reels and the sudden itch of possibility: maybe he could do that. Maybe he could fight.

He started Jiu Jitsu during his junior or senior year, after searching local gyms on a whim. MMA was beginning to creep into the mainstream. He found a serious school led by Tim Mannon, a black belt under the legendary Renzo Gracie. Within a year and a half, he earned his blue belt. Mannon gave him the green light: “Now you can have an MMA fight.”

So he did. Two, in fact. 

The first ended in thirty seconds—a clean choke. 

The second, a minute and a half. Same finish. 

Lim had the instincts, the discipline, the aggression. But then came senior year, and the looming obligations of post-grad life. He put the fights on hold to graduate. “I needed a stable job,” he says.

No one’s parents dream of seeing their child in a cage fight. But it wasn’t just family pressure. It was the quiet coercion of respectability. “You finish school, you get a job, you generate income,” he says. “It was just me taking too much into consideration what society will tell you you need to do.”

The super senior lap

“I don’t know how to take tests, and I don’t know how to interview.” 

He cites The Sopranos’ Christopher Moltisanti as a kind of spiritual stand-in—“It's like the fuckin' regularness of everyday life is too hard,” Moltisanti says. 

School felt like theater for a role he didn’t believe in. The posture, the performance, the falseness of it all…none of it made sense to him.

So after taking an extra year to graduate, he took a job at a restaurant. Lebanese Taverna, a casual chain in the D.C. area. He waited tables, settled into the rhythm of service work. One day, a veteran server asked him, “What are you doing here?” Brian replied that he’d just graduated college. “You have a degree?” the man said, stunned. “If I had a degree, I wouldn’t be here.”

It was meant as advice, and Brian took it.

Before fighting took over, Brian moved restlessly through roles—tech recruiter, personal trainer, sales rep. 

He eventually landed at Custom Ink, a T-shirt printing company. It was a step toward conventional adulthood with a desk job, salary, routine. But even then, something felt off. 

A nagging sense that he didn’t belong. He spent time sitting behind desks, made cold calls, then fled office life for the gym. Personal training offered a kind of freedom, a more physical rhythm to the day. 

Loss

The call came from France. It was his stepmother’s niece—crying. 

Brian listened as she told him what had happened: his father had fallen while hiking Mont Blanc, one of the highest peaks in Europe. The fall was more than 300 meters. There was no chance of survival.

He hung up and called his brother. “He didn’t know how to take it,” he says now. Shock has a way of folding time. “It was kind of what you’d expect. We just didn’t know how to process it.”

Their father had been in the process of reentering their lives. Not as the flawed, distant man of their childhood, but as someone older, softer, more intentional. In youth, they had resented his absence, his stress, his temper. But adulthood recontextualizes everything. 

“You don’t understand why they’re not around. Why they’re angry. Why they’re tired,” he says. “Then you get older and realize—it’s life. Bills. Work. Pressure. They were just trying to survive. It took him 30 years to build his business and start to finally enjoy life.”

Running

As the sons matured, so too did their relationship with their father. There were trips—one to his home in Maryland, where Brian remembers his dad urging him to go running. He never did. “It’s one of my biggest regrets,” he says. That simple act—running beside his father—became a symbol of all the things they never got to finish.

“We were getting better,” Lim says. “We were all starting to get better.” And then, without warning, the story ended without warning.

Reflection

“Death does weird things to people,” he says now. And yet, it also clarified things. Finding a direction in life felt optional, which then suddenly became urgent.

His father had asked him many times: What do you want to do with your life? Lim never had a satisfying answer. Once, half-joking, he said maybe he’d become a chef. “Do you even cook?” his father asked, incredulous. He didn’t. But it sounded fun. And maybe fun, back then, was enough.

After the accident, Brian was named executor of his father’s estate. He helped oversee a small store in D.C.—not running it day-to-day, but assisting its operations, trying to keep things afloat. Around the same time, fighting returned. This time with focus, with discipline. It gave him structure and something that felt close to purpose.

Fighting with a purpose

“I realized life could just be taken from you,” he says. “It sounds cliché, but it’s true.” He didn’t want to drift anymore. He wanted to build something his father could be proud of. From 2015 to 2018, Lim threw himself into MMA. He fought ten amateur bouts, won eight, held three titles, and became the top-ranked featherweight in Virginia.

In the final stretch of his MMA career, Brian trained under Greg Souders at Standard Jiu-Jitsu. After his father’s passing, it was Souders who helped shape not just his training, but his entire worldview—how he learned, how he led, how he thought. “Souders was a pivotal figure in my development after losing my dad.”

In 2018, he went pro. The venue was the Royal Farms Arena in Baltimore—a big stage, a shared card with his main training partner. He lost the fight by split decision. But in the locker room afterward, what he felt wasn’t regret. It was relief.

“I got further than I wanted, but not as far as I expected,” he says. And that gap was where the burnout settled in.

 The store was winding down. The legal complexities of the estate were untangling. The fights no longer felt like the answer. Everything was closing, collapsing inward, making room for something new.

So he packed up and moved to Austin. Not to escape, but to start again. A blank slate and a chance to ask what kind of life he wanted to build—and this time, to answer it.

The jump to Austin

He read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, something his father had once mentioned, and something in it stuck. 

The mythology of invention, the audacity of vision. That was the spark. He found a job at a tiny tech startup—one of two employees working out of the founder’s house. The product was a home maintenance app for tenants. “It was basic,” Lim says. “I was just turning information into social media graphics.” But it was a start.

Brian used a friend’s address to get a job at FloSports. “I hadn’t talked to him in a long time,” Lim says of the college friend who lent him the mailing address. “I just needed to put something down.”

FloSports hired him in a customer support role. It didn’t last. “Terrible place to work,” he says flatly. He was the first to quit, but not the last. Within weeks, others followed suit. The department started to empty out, one resignation at a time.

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Brian the baker

And that’s when he turned to baking.

It started casually. Loaves and pastries in a home kitchen, photos on Instagram, a DIY portfolio built out of flour and lighting. 

He landed jobs at three different bakeries: Sugar Mama’s, Milk and Cookies included. The hours were brutal and the pay was worse. But it gave him something else entirely: a sense of creative control. “I think I just liked it because it was creative,” he says. After years in customer service and tech support, baking offered the simple pleasure of making something with his hands.

The impulse, he admits, was not entirely random, recollecting the conversation about being a chef with his father. But after his father’s death, it came back. “Death t makes you want to follow the versions of yourself you once left behind.”

But even that path ran dry. The hospitality industry proved toxic in its own way—demanding, hierarchical, thankless. “I was tired of getting paid $14 an hour. Tired of being up at 4 a.m.” And there was something deeper: an allergy to authority. 

“If I don’t respect you, it’s hard for me to listen to you,” he says. And in kitchens, that’s not a trait that goes unnoticed.

Brian left baking the way he entered it: on instinct, with a quiet certainty that he had more to build and somewhere else to be.

Building a corporate portfolio

He moved on, briefly landing at an IT consulting firm doing contract work for the Department of Homeland Security. Then came a realization: being a generalist might get you in the door, but it wouldn’t keep you there. “You need to become an expert in something,” his boss told him. So he enrolled in a ten-week UX bootcamp. 

It was 2020. COVID hit. The job market vanished.

He hustled. He picked up roles at a string of startups—one of them founded by the former CEO of Art.com in equity crowdfunding. Nothing stuck for long. But then came Atlassian. “That was the big one,” Lim says. A contract role that felt like a breakthrough. A real company. A real salary. A sense of having “made it,” even if just temporarily.

Eventually, a bigger name came calling: Walmart Global Tech. It was the kind of job you put on your resume in bold font. 

But the win was short-lived. In 2023, while driving from Phoenix to Sedona on PTO, Brian got the call. A colleague broke the news: the Austin tech hub was shutting down. “You can move to Bentonville, Arkansas,” they said, “or take severance.”

He took the severance.

By then, he’d already uploaded a couple of audio-only interviews to a fledgling pickleball YouTube channel—content everyone told him would flop. He did it anyway. The videos weren’t polished, but he published them anyway.

And for the first time in a long while, the next step didn’t feel like an experiment, but a new beginning.

Entrepreneurship

The interviews on Building Pickleball were never just content. 

Turning on a mic and asking someone how they built their business was an answer to his curiosity. “I wanted to know how these entrepreneurs made it,” he says. “If they could do it—and they did it these ways—then maybe I could, too.”

Entrepreneurship was a challenge to become someone he hadn’t yet met. “I’ve never really been satisfied with who I am—physically, mentally. I’m always assuming there’s a better version of me out there.” 

The work of building something from scratch felt like a way to find that version. Unlike the corporate world, where one could hide behind bureaucracy, entrepreneurship left nowhere to retreat. “In entrepreneurship, you can’t miss. You can’t run away from obligations. If you do, it’s on you. You’re financially doomed.”

It was, in some ways, a continuation of a story his father had started. The immigrant who rose from janitor to business owner. Brian wondered if he could carry that arc forward. Not just out of tribute, but to understand it from the inside. “I was curious about how my dad did it. And if I could do it too.” 

Perhaps the draw of entrepreneurship was to help him learn more about his father.

There was also a practical edge. The corporate track had begun to fray. Layoffs, instability, and the churn of an economy still reeling from 2020 made him question the logic of betting on anyone else. “Why not bet on myself?” he says. “Why not find out what I’m capable of?”

The beginning of Building Pickleball

Like many creative projects, Building Pickleball began not with a grand strategy but with a series of DMs.

Lim started by reaching out to founders, creators, and personalities who had caught his attention. Some he admired. Others were just more accessible. 

Jonathan Clay of Kitch was one of the first to respond. Then came Volair’s Ryan Cohen, a familiar face from Austin pickleball courts, someone Brian knew before either of them entered the business side of the sport. 

From the start, he thought like a builder. He took photos with his guests, pulled quotes, clipped moments, repackaged and redistributed across platforms. It was content, but it was also a way of thinking: squeeze as much value as possible from a single, authentic interaction. And maybe more than anything, about showing up, asking a few good questions and seeing what might come of them.

A glimmer of traction

Every creative project begins under the weight of a question: Is this going to be a waste of my time? For Brian, the early days of Building Pickleball were defined as much by doubt as by drive. He was investing hours into interviews, editing clips, posting to an audience that, for the most part, wasn’t there yet.

Then came the Legacy episode.

Legacy was a new brand, gaining quiet momentum. Around the same time Lim posted his interview, Chris Olson—one of the most visible figures in pickleball—released a video on them. The timing was pure coincidence, but the algorithm didn’t care. It clicked. Lim’s video began to spread.

“I couldn’t sleep that night,” he says. Up until then, none of his content had broken a thousand views. By the next morning, the interview had cleared fourteen thousand. It would eventually top twenty-one.

It wasn’t viral in the traditional sense. But for someone building something niche, from scratch, it was proof that the audience he hoped was out there was out there. And that maybe he wasn’t wasting his time.

Building off the spike

After the video took off, Brian gave himself a deadline: one year. If nothing materialized by then, he’d pivot. But something had shifted. The views alone weren’t the whole story. He enjoyed the process. He liked learning. And, most of all, he saw room to get better. “There was so much I could improve,” he says. “The studio, the visuals, my interviews—it all had a long way to go.”

He began studying creators more closely. His brother sent him videos from Casey Neistat. Lim watched, absorbed, and began imagining a hybrid form—part interview, part vlog, something more cinematic than his early clips.

His interview with Paula hit modest but encouraging numbers. Carl Schmits followed. “Three thousand views doesn’t sound like much,” Lim says, “but I had fewer than a thousand subscribers at the time.” Then came the SixZero episode with Dale Young—24,000 views. 

It was the clearest sign yet: he had carved out a space no one else was occupying. “I didn’t feel rushed,” he says. “I was doing something unique, and people started recognizing me for it.”

That recognition opened doors. Companies like Vatic Pro took his calls. Pros like Rob Nunnery answered his DMs. Eventually, he got an invitation to the Joola event—his first time brushing shoulders with bigger names in the sport. “That was the first time I met Pickleball Will And Chris Olson,” Lim says. “I always tell Chris this story—seeing him on that couch, everyone standing around him. Even then, he had that aura.”

The moment felt symbolic: a newcomer stepping into a room full of people he had once watched from afar. It was also where he met Tom Nguyen, a longtime Joola staffer and one of the earliest voices to encourage Lim to start Building Pickleball. They’d actually met years earlier—at an MMA gym, of all places. “He remembered me,” Lim says. “I turned around at an MLP event, and he’s like, ‘Aren’t you Brian Lim?’ I was like—what the hell?”

Their paths had crossed before the channel existed. Now, Nguyen was encouraging him to push forward. The timing felt uncanny, but the message was simple: You’re already doing it. Don’t stop now.

Why pickleball?

“I’m pretty good at jumping into trends,” he says. “Like baking, MMA, I caught the wave at the right time.” During the height of the pandemic, when sourdough starters and artisan loaves briefly was all the rage, Lim was in the kitchen. “That was the Milk Bar era,” he says, referencing the rise of Christina Tosi and the broader cult of culinary creativity around David Chang. 

Had it not been pickleball, he figures he would’ve found something else. Maybe running. Maybe another niche still waiting to be documented. “I probably would’ve created content for them,” he says. But pickleball stuck, and as the sport grew, so did the opportunities. 

One early marker came when he was signed by Vuori, the performance apparel brand. “That felt like validation,” he says. “Like maybe this is real.”

“Pickleball is my creative outlet. There’s so much decision-making—it’s what they call an open-skill sport. You’ve got an opponent in front of you, you’re adapting constantly, and that’s mentally taxing in a way I really enjoy.”

He pauses. “Running’s different. It’s a closed-skill sport. There’s no opponent. No decision-making. It’s just you and the road. Running lets me hit total physical exhaustion. I kind of thrive in that space. Just letting go, going all out, no noise.”

He shrugs. “Pickleball hits the mental and creative side. Running hits the physical. I think I need both.”

Originality is overrated

"There’s so much growth happening in pickleball, and that’s what makes it exciting is that you can pull ideas from other industries and just try them here,” Brian says. “There’s always this tension between coming up with original ideas and just adapting good ones. But honestly, originality is overrated. Copying—no, stealing—is totally fine. If it works in running or lifestyle or tech, why not try it in pickleball?”

He shrugs. “Coming up with original stuff is exhausting. I don’t even know how many truly original ideas I’ve had. And even trying to have them? That’s its own kind of burnout.”

Since the second Joola event—where he met Tyson McGuffin—Brian’s found new motivation. “That guy really inspired me. I actually have a sticky note on my desk that says, ‘When you get back, start pumping out content, get those views up.’ And at the bottom, it just says ‘McGuffin.’”

He smiles. “So, yeah, you just have to keep making stuff. You’re not going to run out of ideas, you just need better systems to come up with them.”

“When you have a strong idea,” he says, “and all you need to do is execute—that’s when the future starts to feel possible.” It wasn’t just momentum anymore. It was a moat. A position. A voice no one else had fully claimed.

On creators not reading comments

“I was listening to this podcast today—Seth Godin on The Rich Roll Podcast,” Brian says. “He was talking about how he stopped reading comments from anonymous trolls. And the point he made really stuck with me: when someone says ‘this wasn’t for me,’ what they’re actually saying is just that—their personal experience. It’s not actual feedback about the work itself.”

Brian’s seen it firsthand. “Look at the comments on any video—someone’s always like, ‘I hate this brand.’ Okay… but that doesn’t help me understand if the video worked. That’s not critique, that’s just baggage.”

Praise, he says, isn’t much better. “Excessive praise or excessive scrutiny—they’re probably both a little off. And if you start chasing either, you lose track of the thing you’re actually trying to make.”

Some videos, like his Selkirk breakdown or anything involving the ecological approach, tend to attract the most confusion. “And I try to be really clear. I don’t use a lot of idioms. I’m a pretty literal communicator. So when people still don’t get the core idea and then argue about it in the comments, it’s like—what am I doing here? I’m not going to change your mind. You’ve already decided. And now I’m just wasting my time.”

He pauses. “And I’m already pretty good at wasting time.”

Dreams

For all the clarity Brian Lim had found in his work, one question lingered louder than the rest: how do you make it sustainable?

“I think money has always been the concern,” he says. “Even with sponsorships, there’s no real stability. They can disappear overnight.” That tension remains unresolved. Entrepreneurship, he’s come to accept, means living inside that uncertainty.

But something shifted after a recent running event in Austin, hosted by Represent, a lifestyle brand founded by UK entrepreneur George Heaton. Lim watched as Heaton’s team moved through the space—athletes, content creators, production crews, all part of a single machine. “I always thought I just wanted to be like Casey Neistat,” Lim says. “Just me, a camera, maybe an editor.” But watching Represent’s crew lift together, eat together, run together, he saw a different model. A team. A shared mission. A company that was more than content.

It reframed his vision. What if Building Pickleball didn’t just grow in reach but in structure? What if the next step wasn’t just more videos, but people on payroll, events in multiple cities, a real business with real weight?

“I think the desire to scale is starting,” he says. “But it always comes back to money.” Debt, especially, feels like a line he can’t cross. “I was never raised to be in debt. It’s not appealing to me.”

And yet, the idea lingers. Of building not just a channel—but a company. A team. A community that runs together, works together, and believes in something bigger.

What doesn’t exist—yet

Could pickleball ever reach the scale of a Represent or a Supreme? Brian doesn’t blink. “Yeah,” he says. “I definitely think it’s possible. Either we just haven’t seen anyone do it yet, or someone needs to lay the groundwork now so it can happen in two to three years.”

The ecosystem is still too young, he argues, too focused on product and not enough on culture. “You hear the word ‘community’ a lot,” he says. “But no one’s built real brand culture yet.” 

There’s no Supreme of pickleball. No Yeezy, no Represent. Not even a BPN—the Austin-based fitness company he recently saw hosting a marathon retreat with elite athletes from the UK and Australia, all bonded by a lifestyle bigger than the product itself.

There’s no gravity pulling players and fans into a shared identity. “No one’s saying, ‘I want to be part of that team,’” Lim says. “But they could. If you create content around the right people, if you tell the right stories, you can evoke those emotions. That desire.”

Maybe pickleball doesn’t naturally lend itself to hype culture. Maybe it won’t follow the Kardashian blueprint, or the fitness influencer mold, or the garage-born streetwear empire. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t,” he says. “You just have to stop waiting for someone else to execute your idea to validate it.”

For Lim, that’s the thread running through his entire arc—from MMA to baking to media. “Whatever you want to see, you have to go be the one who makes it real.”

What does Building Pickleball mean?

“I think I just ripped it from How I Built This,” Lim admits, laughing. “I was listening to the podcast and figured, I’ll just do that—Building Pickleball.” There wasn’t a long brainstorming session. “I don’t remember having any other contenders. It just felt… fine. Like, if it didn’t work, I could always change it later.”

But over time, the name took on more weight. “Now that you bring it up, I’ve actually started to think more about it,” he says.

“And I guess for me, that name—Building Pickleball—it’s about documenting the sport, telling the stories that aren’t being told, or at least telling them in my way. But also, it’s about actually helping build something. Not just reporting on it.”

He comes back to a line he’s said a few times before: “How do we get someone who picks up a paddle once to pick it up again?” The number everyone throws around—44 million people have tried pickleball—doesn’t mean much if most of them never come back. “The key word is tried,” he says. “The real challenge is getting people to stick with it. To feel like they’re part of it.”

He shrugs. “It’s not world hunger,” he says. “But it’s a problem worth thinking about.”

Gratitude

“I actually woke up today just feeling… grateful,” Lim says, his voice slowing. “Like, this sounds cheesy, but I’ve got a roof over my head in Austin. I’ve got friends I really like. My family’s doing alright. I’m not making a ton, but it’s enough.” He had gone to sleep reading a book the night before. “It felt peaceful,” he says. “That hasn’t always been the case.”

For years, Brian’s life in pickleball was stationary. A few trips here and there—San Clemente, Pensacola—but little else. Then suddenly, the calendar exploded. Vegas. Idaho. Utah. China. “And now I’m going to Korea for the first time,” he says. “Then Hawaii. Japan. All by October. It’s insane.”

That sense of motion, of momentum, now shapes how he thinks about the future. “Right now,” he says, “my biggest goal is living up to expectations—especially with Vuori.” And then, there’s the marathon. “January 2026, Houston,” he says. “Boston qualifying time is under 2:55. That’s the physical goal.”

Brian’s father would be proud

“My dad would be proud—because I’ve finally found purpose,” Brian says, wiping away a few tears.

“For most of my life, I didn’t know what I wanted to become. I drifted through college, through jobs. I avoided certain paths because I thought they weren’t mine. But it’s funny—what I spent so long running from ended up being what brought me closer to him.”

He pauses, voice softening.

“I’m not trying to live in his shadow. That was never the goal. It was always about finding my own way. And honestly, I think that’s what he would’ve wanted. Not for me to follow in his footsteps, but to carve out my own. To chase something meaningful to me.”

Then he adds quietly, “If he were here now, I think he’d finally say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’”

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