Necessity has become the grandmother of invention, replaced by an innovative force that’s mostly driven by the idea: “Wouldn’t this be cool?” Although, to be fair, Adeel Yang thought he “needed” a golf simulator in his San Francisco home not long after he’d been smitten by golf. But when he broached the idea to his wife, Yang got the spousal stiff arm.
On his way home one day, Yang drove by a street where upscale RVs were parked. He wondered if he could build a trailer, put a simulator in it and park it on that street. About four years and four iterations later, Dryvebox — a mobile simulator — has units presently in 31 locations and counting. What’s more, the company has been signed by TGL — the professional simulator league that is backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s TMRW Sports — as its mobile simulator partner.
Three of the six teams in TGL have a Dryvebox to use in the cities where the are based to promote their teams and to encourage fan engagement. A Dryvebox for fan use will be parked outside SoFi Center, TGL’s venue where two-hour weekly televised matches will be held beginning Jan. 7, 2025, on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Florida.
This is the continuation of an innovation journey for Yang, who is a medical doctor and refers to himself as a “serial entrepreneur.” While he was still in medical training in 2010, he developed an e-learning software to help med students study more effectively. It was expanded for use by all allied health professionals and Yang later sold that company.
“I had thought about going back into practicing medicine, but I think once you've been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, you just want to keep doing it again and again,” Yang says. In 2015, he created software to help hospitals provide instructions to patients so that they could show up on time ready to go for procedures.
Yang sold that company to Philips in 2019 and went to work for the company as part of the sale. He started playing golf shortly thereafter and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The wheels in his mind started turning.
“It was a complete passion project to start,” he says. “I built a prototype, after realizing that there was no trailer on the market that you could sort of retrofit a golf simulator into due to street legal, dimensional restrictions. That was how obsessed I was about figuring this out. I talked to probably a dozen fabricators and manufacturers and found the one that was willing to give my crazy idea a try.”
Yang filed three patents for his first prototype in early 2020 but there were still a number of problems. The sound was harsh, the impact screens caused problems and it didn’t seem as if the ceiling was high enough for people to be comfortable swinging a club. Yet, nearly everyone who tried it was excited.
“I had all these friends that were in business school at Stanford at the time, and they were like, ‘I heard you had this golf simulator and trailer. Can you bring it down?’ And I'd end up parking the trailer behind the dorms at Stanford. All these students would come down from their dorms to play in my crappy little box.”
The second prototype was completed in July 2020, in which the walls of the trailer were expanded in order to give users more comfort that they could actually swing a club inside without hitting the walls or the ceiling. The next major challenge was electric power. In the beginning, a generator was the power source but Yang wound up retrofitting salvaged Tesla batteries.
“I had to scour the internet to find self-taught electrical engineers that could help me jerry rig a contraption that will take these salvaged Tesla batteries and make them possible for our trailer,” Yang says. Now, Dryvebox uses lithium batteries with equipment that can remotely monitor the batteries.
Even after four iterations, Yang says the current version of Dryvebox is still not a totally finished product. He’s still looking at ways to expand the ceiling of the trailer. Even at that, Dryvebox is starting to fulfill its mission. When Dryvebox began as an actual business, the first three trailers — in Charleston, South Carolina, Houston and Phoenix — were co-owned by the buyer and the company. Now, it has evolved into a franchise model and since December 2023 when the company signed its first franchisee, Yang says, there are more than 20 franchises.
“We're trying to hopefully ride this wave of simulator golf,” Yang says. “And I think our goal is to have a Dryvebox within 15 minutes of every American, and hopefully the same as we expand internationally. So, we have big, ambitious goals. We've gotten to a point now where manufacturing is no longer the bottleneck. We have three manufacturers that all build to our specs, and we can actually scale that pretty rapidly.
“But I think we, like any other business, scaling too fast is also a problem sometimes. So, we're trying to balance that. I think we're realizing that as a young company, we've not even had a full year franchising experience. It may be prudent to build the foundation a little stronger before we try to take on 100 more franchises.”
It’s expected that all six TGL teams will have at least one Dryvebox and the league itself will have multiple units, all in an effort to promote the league and give fans the same experience. But that’s only one aspect of the Dryvebox model.
“Think big events like large golf tournaments, like Genesis Invitational or the U.S. Open, down to corporate events, conferences, trade shows, and then all the way down to small events like birthday parties, little team building sessions,” Yang says.
In fact, one of Dryvebox’s busiest days is Father's Day. “That's like our Black Friday,” Yang says. “Every trailer is spoken for.”
Since Yang’s wife wouldn’t let him build a simulator at home, which started the whole idea, wonder if a Dryvebox is now stationed near his house?
