Fritz Lanman

CEO and Co-Founder, Playlist · 1 appearance on the record.

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Lanman served as CEO of ClassPass before becoming CEO and Co-Founder of its parent company, Playlist. Earlier in his career, he worked in corporate strategy at Microsoft, where he led its 2007 investment in Facebook, and invested early in companies including Square and Pinterest.

11statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 4.36/5average certainty → 2.27/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Fritz argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

252 words/min while actually speaking · 2.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Fritz Lanman: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 23 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 5,850 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Fritz Lanman is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10

pushed back at the host 2/10

setup questions received 65%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 5:16“How do you think about your own asset allocation today, and has that changed since those early, more enthusiastic days?” ▶ 17:00“I'd love to hear, given kind of your excitement around the Facebook deal, and really some of the Stellar Angel investments that you've made kind of in the space, how would you resp…” ▶ 27:26“Hearing that, do you think that actually capital efficiency and aggressive scaling are mutually exclusive, given the fact that one has to kind of peel back, stop scaling, get the b…”

What they said11 Episodes1

Everything Fritz Lanman said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure

Lanman holds his personal wealth entirely in cash and early-stage tech

“So, I'm basically all cash or Hyper speculative early stage technology equities.”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 5:35 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Opinion

Angel investors never solve startup problems or drive company success

“An angel, at least, has never solved, as far as I know, solved the business's problems or been responsible for a startup success. It's always about the operators figuring it out on their own with some guidance and some coaching and feedback”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 9:36 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Opinion

Startups should celebrate venture financings as lagging indicators of performance

“And this industry always says we shouldn't celebrate financings, and I say bullshit to that. The reason is that a financing is a lagging indicator of whatever you've done over the last six, 1218 months, and so it's a reflection that you did something good, tha…”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 10:24 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Disclosure

Steve Ballmer asked Lanman to bet his career on Facebook's $10B valuation

“I remember Steve Ballmer asked me if I'd bet my career on Facebook being worth ten billion, which is what my team and I had kind of come up with, and we didn't have much downside, so we were willing to take the bet”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 15:33 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Insight

Thesis-driven angel investing fails because modeling world opportunities is too hard

“I used to be a thesis driven angel investor where I would come in and I had a thesis about a given sector and I'd look for a company that fits that thesis and then I'd invest in it. But I very quickly learned that it's too hard to model the world and all of th…”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 17:24 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Disclosure

Lanman invested in Square without understanding the payments industry

“I mean, my first one was square and I had looked into payments a bit for Microsoft because, you know, we had so much cash in the balance sheet that one of the things we could have done was become a bank. And we could have gone after digital currencies and stuf…”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 17:42 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Disclosure

Doppler Labs attracted massive acquirer interest before ultimately shutting down

“Doppler labs, not working out a company, which we raised a lot of money. We developed really incredible IP and a product we were super proud of. You know, we thought that that thing was going to be one of the biggest companies in tech. And we had acquirer inte…”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 30:48 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Insight

QSBS tax exemptions drive supernormal IRRs unique to early-stage tech

“Beating taxes can lead to supernormal ROI or IRRs, and so that just feels like an advantage that I can get that makes it hard for me to win in other asset classes.”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 6:56 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Gates and Ballmer initially saw Linux as a bigger threat than Google

“We had done the early work that got Gates and Bomber focused on Google as a threat to the business, and at the time, back then, they were more focused on the enterprise side and on the threat that Linux kind of represented, and so we had gotten the company pre…”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 14:07 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Disclosure

Lanman invested in Pinterest after seeing his wife use it for weddings

“Pinterest is another example where I had never been using catalogs and stuff. I'd collected butterflies as a kid and done some of these things that I think work well in terms of this digital form of Pinterest, but really it was only until I went to my wife and…”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 18:05 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Assertion Not checkable as stated

ClassPass's business model works in any zip code with five fitness studios

“We found that it works in any zip code that has five studios in it.”

Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 27:01 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company,	Jul 20, 2018	24m

Fritz Lanman

The record, in short

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How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Appearances (1)

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