JR Charles - CEO at ParOne / AVA Golf

JR Charles holds a remarkably uncommon dual role in the golf technology space: Chief Technology Officer and Chief Revenue Officer of ParOne. This combination of deep technical expertise and business acumen has defined his approach since founding the company in 2020 with a $300,000 raise and a seemingly "ostentatious" goal: reimagining the video experience for golf. Under his leadership, ParOne evolved from building a superior video player into a profitable enterprise that has fielded over ten acquisition offers - though JR notes those buyers were primarily after his engineering team's prowess. ParOne's client roster includes golf industry giants such as Golf.com and LIV Golf, for whom they've handled everything from live streaming European Tour events to solving complex media distribution challenges for worldwide audiences.

In 2025, JR launched a strategic engineering agency called Par1.dev (a name he humorously admits broke every branding rule), which set the stage for the company's most ambitious project yet: AVA.Golf. Recognizing that the post-COVID golf boom created surging demand for instruction but constrained supply (with only 30,000 PGA instructors serving millions of new golfers), JR pivoted ParOne toward solving game improvement through what he calls "golf intelligence." AVA Golf, named after his aspiring-golfer niece (and backronymed as "AI Video Advisor"), aggregates data from launch monitors and devices like Arccos and Garmin to deliver personalized video playlists from Top 100 instructors.

JR's philosophy is simple: most players drown in data they don't understand, so AVA Golf helps them "focus on the right things and not everything"—a sequential, root-cause approach to mastery. When he's not leading his global team of US-based engineers and London-based designers, JR can be found working alongside major brands and emerging startups alike, guided by the belief that with the right team, even ambitious features shouldn't take six months to build.