WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
those guys, all the ones in the NBA …
He was our strength, had the coach's
back when times were tough, al-
though he might argue with me now
and then. He was one tough guy.
"Look at how many times we beat
Michigan State his junior and senior
year, who was he guarding [Green]
and what he did. It takes one tough
dude to do that."
Novak spent 2012-13 overseas
playing for a team in the Nether-
lands, earning all-league honors and
finishing third in the conference in
scoring. The success he earned was
enough for him to walk away from
the sport, a year proving to be long
enough away from the contacts he'd
made at U-M.
He spent his first few years in the
corporate sector doing consulting
in Chicago before joining Groupon
founder Brad Keywell's venture Up-
take, which provides industry so-
lutions in several areas of business,
from minimizing downtime to op-
timizing performance to enhancing
safety, among others, through the use
of data and analytics.
"I'm involved in everything from
product design and management to
some legal stuff to sales type things,"
Novak said. "I get to see a lot of dif-
ferent things work, which is great.
The Michigan education was im-
portant, but a lot of it was about the
people I met, too."
Such is the power of the Michigan
network. Someday he'll probably
hire a U-M student or two from the
program himself — and, oh, the sto-
ries he'll have to tell them. ❏
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