Lanman invested in Square without understanding the payments industry
Fritz Lanman · 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 · Jul 20, 2018 · at 17:42
Fritz Lanman, CEO of ClassPass, discusses how he backed Jack Dorsey and Square as his first angel investment despite lacking deep domain expertise in payments.
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“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 stuff. And we had really interesting conversations about that, but ultimately I didn't know much about the space and I met Jack and decided how many chances in your career do you get to bet on somebody like that? And so, you know, I kind of made that bet without really understanding the payments industry”
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