Solo parenting, VCU basketball, The NBA opens business to sovereign wealth funds, and the venture-tech media wars
Stretch Four Insights Volume 45
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This week I have hit four of my five workouts. I was a solo parent this week so I had to manage to get the workouts in at odd times. My Future trainer is flexible and provides me with real-time adjustments throughout the week when I have less time. As December gets started my goal is to hit 24 workouts after getting to 22 workouts in November. Join me on my journey and get a trainer locked in ahead of the new year.
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Happy Saturday,
Coming to you live from Miami….
Just kidding, I am coming at you all from San Francisco, relatively speaking I somewhat wish I was coming to you live from Miami where the tech enthused venture-backed founders, builders, and investors all seem to have made an annual early December destination where it currently sits at 80 degrees.
But I am happily coming to you from my home after my first work week of being a single parent as the wifey spent the week in Vegas at AWS re:Invent with 55,000 others.
This week, the first of December is filled with my musings on being a solo parent for the week and the fact that I need a whole book to deal with the balance of working, parenting, and being a husband.
Additionally this week I cover:
My thoughts on a college basketball empire that has been quietly built in Richmond, Virginia
My thoughts on the NBA opening up investments in teams from pension and sovereign wealth funds will continue to put pressure on their league to be less “woke”
The venture tech media wars loses a key player while another rises to the top and expands beyond just the technology news vertical
Let’s dive in.
Quote of the Week:
“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.” - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
I recently re-read The Art of War and stumbled on a Joe Rogan episode 1901 where he interviewed Pressfield. The book is a key resource for anyone but specifically creators, writers, and people who make things for a living.
Chart of the Week:
Tweet of the Week:
Sahil Bloom has become a Twitter influencer and this week he gave his parenting advice in a thread. It was timely to see his perspective and while I have my own that maybe I’ll share at a later time there were some insightful points he highlighted and an exceptionally long twitter thread linked above.
Solo parenting
I got a full dose of being a solo parent this week as my wife took her first work trip since we welcomed our son Cain to the world back in March. While I did have anxiety a bit I felt I faired well. Cain and I are ok, and Whitney got back on Friday to a fairly clean home. A timely book I picked up this week became even more interesting holding down the house for the week without my better half.
I heard about Work, Parent, Thrive by Yael Schonbrun after listening to an episode of Cal Newport’s podcast. This book is a research-driven read on how to combat being a parent while still operating at a high level professionally. Running a venture-backed technology startup, particularly in these times, requires mostly 12-16 hours work days. Raising a kid is a full-time job in-itself and this book dives deep into 12 key ways to ditch the guilt, manage the overwhelm, and grow the connection with your spouse and kids. I am excited about it and hope to finish it this month and report back here with my learnings. I feel that founders having kids is a very taboo topic where people are never really prepared for the sticker shock from all angles with having a kiddo.
The most difficult part of solo parenthood for me was a lack of sleep. My son has likely slept through an entire night twice. We were not fortunate enough to have one of those kids that just sleeps well right out of the gate. Also, as first-time parents we did not execute sleep training as candidly we should have played more offense and been more aggressive. This leads to our current dilemma which compounds when one of us is traveling, our son wakes up 1-2 times a night between 11pm to 5am randomly. This weighs heavily on the brain which was top of mind for me because I read Why We Sleep right before we welcomed Cain.
Virginia Commonwealth is college basketball powerhouse
College basketball is here and one of the benefits for me during basketball season, and sometimes the bane of my wife’s existence is there is pretty much a basketball game on from 4 pm to 11 pm pacific standard time. This week while perusing Twitter I chimed in on a tweet thread a fellow founder, Tommy Nichols was commenting on about VCU basketball. Tommy is a RVA guy who went to UVA but likely supports VCU. While I am a JMU alumni and was a four-year basketball reserve I will always whole-heartedly hate the VCU Rams. They were in our conference back then so we played them twice a year and sometimes in the conference tournament.
Despite the rivalry what is intriguing about VCU basketball is how they have managed to remain competitive for the past fifteen years. College basketball is a very cyclical sport, you build a team and sometimes you have a great year while other years you struggle. Players transfer all the time, especially now, and you are always having to recruit the next group of potential stars. The game has also changed even more in the past few years with college athletes being able to monetize their name image and likeness. Players can now negotiate upfront payments, enter the transfer portal and play with another school right away. among other things like schools investing more into facilities and the use of analytics. Despite all this VCU basketball has had staying power:
Since 2002, the team has won over 65% of their games. They have built a culture that has remained consistent across five coaching regimens, and the job has been pretty much a lottery ticket for each coach with all leaving for higher-paying jobs after racking up wins at VCU.
I find it fascinating drawing the correlation of building cultures, teams, and consistently winning and being competitive in general. The fact that they’ve been able to build this culture with a fairly high coaching turnover makes it even more evident that the schools is one of the most underrated college basketball programs in the country.
The NBA’s search for capital conflicts with its progressiveness.
The NBA made waves this week by opening up the floodgates for more potential team owners. The announcement which goes into affect will allow pension funds, sovereign wealth, and endowment funds to acquire ownership stakes in teams.
While the NBA is my favorite sports league I could do without the blatant hypocrisy they display with a lot of the major announcements they make. For one this is a league that recently suspended a guy for posting a link on their social media, while simultaneously growing their business controversially in China and remaining silent on any of the many issues taking place there.
The juxtaposition of the leagues search for money while trying to be politically correct on every social, political, and issue that has little to no impact on their core product is an ongoing issue — and this new announcement could lead to even more of that.
The chart above shows the massive amounts of money under management with the Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund and I can only imagine some of that capital will flow into NBA franchises ownership groups over the next few years.
Imagine the NBA extending ownership to Saudi-backed sovereign wealth funds while simultaneously being outspoken on progressive issues? As US-based venture capitalist clamor for access to these massive funds, they do it with a clear point — capitalistic returns. The NBA will have to evaluate this differently as the current owner diligence already seems to be lacking with guys like Donald Sterling and Robert Sarver being able to own teams for years only to get exposed in scandals and abruptly forced to sell their teams for profits as the average NBA team is worth $2.5 billion with more institutional capital coming in and an $80 billion media deal in the pipeline you may see that number grow exponentially in the next few years. It’s the best sports product on the market and I’m sure institutions will be looking to participate for very solid returns.
I am of the ilk that the NBA should do away with its obsession with woke culture and focus on the core product and business. The league is stacked with talent, but the glaring distractions seem to be the pandering they do politically to come off as this enlightened progressive sports establishment when at the end of the day it is a capitalistic empire that wants to seek out money anywhere its at and continue to grow value and expand with at minimum two new teams in Las Vegas, Seattle or potentially Mexico City on the horizon.
This NBA announcement correlates with venture capital as well as it pertains to attracting capital from all over the world:
“Rising oil prices mean the Middle East’s sovereign wealth funds have more than $3 trillion at their disposal, according to sovereign wealth fund tracker Global SWF. U.S. investors hope that money will help them maintain the pace of fundraising and the supersized funds they grew accustomed to during the bull market.” - Kate Clark’s Deal Maker Newsletter
Venture and Tech Media Wars
A16z has not only tried to build strongest brand in venture capital, but more recently the firm has been hellbent on building their own in-house media empire as well as well as investing in others. This week A16z shut down their media arm Future, not to be confused with our sponsor Future (please go sign-up), there has not been any new content posted since the summer but it was made official this week.
While A16z has spent likely millions trying to build their own media empire not to mention made investments new media companies like this app, Clubhouse, and most recently former Waze founder and CEO’s new startup. The firm has not been able to establish itself as a go-to media source for tech news, there teams do a great job with long form newsletter content by vertical, for instance their fintech newsletter does a great job of highlighting their investments and their research but Future never got off the ground and I am sure they had bigger visions as a media footprint.
While A16z has not been able to create their own media muscle, the All-In podcast has shot to the top of the charts and reach a critical mass even beyond the venture and tech media circuit. Two scratch billionaires, a near-scientist entrepreneur, and Jason Calacanis have become one of the most popular podcast teams on the internet. Their show beats out another group Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway doing half the amount of content and with no ads or media machines pushing it to the masses. The quirky and weird mix of geopolitics, health and wellness, life science, and the topics across the venture-backed startup ecosystem has made the show a must listen for anyone involved in tech and according to Calacanis the show is popular amongst college students as well.
What’s Next
This week with Whitney back in town I move back to my normal work schedule, I am in the office five days a week working on end of year planning for ModernTax.
This week I got invited to a holiday party put on my my friend Andrew. He and his team just announced a $67 million Series B so I expect the best.
As always, I would love your feedback especially if you are new please email me at matt@stretchfour.co
Have a great weekend.
Back to the trenches.
Best, Matt