Open Application

A note from Tom, who started this

Pepper Pong wasn't born in a boardroom. It was hacked together in a garage out of scrap parts from other games and a weird collection of foam balls. It wasn't a product. It wasn't even called Pepper Pong. It was just The Game, and we played it everywhere.

We loved ping pong. Then ping pong got old. Too serious, too breakable, too loud, too bro. Coffin-sized table. Busted balls. Ten minutes of interest and ten years of dust.

So we kept the three things worth keeping, which were competition, camaraderie and connection, and threw out the rest. The foam did something we didn't plan for. Rallies stretched to 30, 40, 50 shots. Matches stayed close. Grandparents started beating grandkids. The guy who doesn't do games started demanding best of seven.

Then life threw me a harder match. In 2016 I got sober. Toughest rally of my life, and the most important one I'll ever win. It reminded me what I actually valued, which was real people and real laughter. By 2020, in a world starving for connection, I decided to bring The Game to the world. Not for profit. For purpose.

People ask whether I went on Shark Tank to raise money or to market the game. Neither. I went to talk about declining human connection. Pepper Pong just happens to be one joyful way to solve it.

That's the job here. Turn every table into center court, and every gathering into a tournament of unforgettable moments.

Tom Filippini, Founder

Where we are

Six years ago this was a foam ball bouncing around a garage, surviving on 100-plus design iterations and 20-plus factory prototypes. On 22 November 2024 it aired on Shark Tank, Todd Graves came on as a partner, and Tom repaid his entire investment inside the first business hour.

Since then we have sold more than 100,000 sets, people have played over a million games, and we sold out three times in three months. You can find us in Dick's Sporting Goods and Scheels, and we ship to all 50 states. Reviews sit at 4.9 stars and under 1% of sets ever come back, which for something most people buy as a gift is the number we are quietly proudest of.

Where we're going

Right now Pepper Pong is a product. The plan is to make it a sport.

That starts with the app, which ships this year. Set a phone on the table and it runs the bracket, keeps score, and turns the result into a ranking you can actually climb. It is probably the first app ever designed not to be sticky, on the grounds that every second you spend looking at it is a second you are not playing. The long joke we are engineering is a grandmother who plays every Sunday outranking someone who does this professionally.

Around that sits a creator program, a growing retail business, and Rally for Recovery, which has put more than 1,000 sets into recovery centers and community spaces across all 50 states. That one is not marketing. It is where the game came from.

How we work

We are small, so the roles are wide and nobody is going to hand you a brief. You get a number that is yours and enough room to go get it, which is the good news and the bad news in one sentence. We move quickly, we use AI heavily and without ceremony, and we would rather hear the thing that didn't work at the start of the meeting than at the end of the quarter.

The role

We are always interested in meeting people who would be an asset to Pepper Pong, even when we do not have a matching role posted. If you have looked at what we are building and can name what you would own here, we want to read it.

This is the right route if your skill set does not map neatly to one of our open roles, if the role you want does not exist yet, or if you would rather tell us what you would do than apply to a title.

Why this role matters right now

We are going from one product to a sport, and the org chart to do that does not exist yet. Some of the most useful people we could hire this year are in jobs we have not thought to write down.

What You'll Do

  • Tell us which part of the business you want to own and why that one
  • Show us work you have done that is closest to it, with the result attached
  • Name the first thing you would change about how we market, sell, or support the product
  • Tell us how you actually use AI in your work, with specifics rather than tool names
  • Point us to anything you have built, written, designed, or grown that we can look at
  • Let us know your availability and how you prefer to work
  • Keep it short; we would rather read one page you meant than five you padded

Must-Have Requirements

  • Evidence of doing the work, in whatever form that takes for your discipline
  • A clear point of view on where you would add value here specifically
  • The ability to write plainly about your own results, including what did not work
  • Genuine familiarity with our product and the customer who buys it
  • Comfort operating with autonomy in a small team where roles are wide
  • Directness; we read every application and we respond to the ones that say something
  • No requirement to match a posted title