Flint Lane 🏓

Famous hobbies outside work: Mark Zuckerberg: Brazilian jiu-jitsu, MMA, surfing, hydrofoiling Bill Gates: Bridge, tennis, pickleball, reading Steve Jobs: Zen meditation, music, long walks, Japanese art and design Sergey Brin: trapeze, gymnastics, diving, burning man Jeff Bezos: Sailing, flying helicopters, ocean exploration Jensen Huang: Cooking, eating adventurously, was a nationally ranked table tennis player! Morris Chang: Bridge, classical music, Shakespeare Warren Buffett: Bridge, ukulele, reading Elon Musk: Video games, spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to influence elections Obsession with your company is great! But the idea that the best founders have no interests outside work is bullshit hustle-porn. Having hobbies isn’t the opposite of being obsessed with building something great.

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.

I can foresee a scenario where the major sports leagues themselves act as the streaming distributor, cutting out the middleman network entirely. Thus, instead of brokering deals with legacy networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox) and tech streamers (Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon), the NFL/NBA/MLB itself handles broadcast distribution. If the leagues sell off broadcast rights, by definition the networks believe they can make more money than the cost of the broadcast deal. Hence, the networks are a middleman. It is easier and more convenient at the moment for leagues to sell broadcast rights, but long term owning the entire vertical may prove more lucrative.

I’m starting a new VC firm called “five foot seven” We exclusively invest in founders that are 5’7”. Studies show 5’7” founders are more likely to start billion dollar companies. I’d count on this thesis to outperform.

I picked up tennis 🎾 during covid and I regret that I haven't been playing my whole life. Tennis is a high learning curve sport, but if you can get over the hump it's one of the best sports you can ever play: 1. Trains mental fortitude - you can only play well if you are able to be present and have a focused-relaxed state of mind. If you try too hard and brute force, or play too scared, you will make errors and lose. The only way to play well is to develop trust in yourself and swing fully relaxed and confidently. 2. Substitute for meditation - related, once you train yourself to get into the focused-relaxed state, you achieve levels of meditative pleasure that are very difficult to achieve in regular life. 3. Highest correlating sport with longevity - Tennis is intensely physical and challenges stability, flexibility, cardio, and strength. But unlike many sports, you can adjust the level of the game to the physical ability of the players. This means you can continue to play as you age well into your 60s and 70s. Studies show it can extend life 9.7 years (forbes.com/sites/stevensalzb…) 4. Equal parts chess, talent, and physical ability - There are infinite levels to the game of tennis. Because a tennis match is played over many many points, any slight difference between two players in ability/skill/tactics gets magnified over the course of a match, and it is pretty impossible to win by pure luck. However, there's also lots of ways to figure out how to win. If you are inferior to your opponent physically, you can adjust tactics to compensate for those weaknesses (eg. be aggressive and shorten point length if your cardio is worse). This feeling that there is always a way you can train yourself over the long run to win, even against someone who seems a lot better, makes the sport unique. Downsides are: expensive, hard to find players of similar ability, can be a little snooty depending on the club

The live experience in MLTT is wild. We need betting immediately!

Congrats John! At least I lost to the champion. @FlintLane you got next?

Here’s a random question, if Lauryn Hill put out an album of ONLY covers (though she can interpret those songs however she sees fit), what would you want on that album?

Did anyone ask for a wonky Roman history-related fintech blog post? I feel like someone asked for that? Anyway, perhaps not, but I wrote one anyway: lnkd.in/eGQBBe6b