All things business from seed stage to public companies with Entrepreneurs, CEOs, VC, Corporate Development Gurus, M&A Advisors and more.

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Managing a Unicorn Fitness Tech Company during a Pandemic

Andreas Penna

Andreas Penna

Host Ninja

CEO of ClassPass & Prolific Angel Investor

Fritz Lanman is the CEO of ClassPass; the largest pre-IPO, health & fitness tech startup. He’s also a prolific Angel investor with investments in: Square, Pinterest, Wish, Flexport, Formlabs, etc… 100+ investments over the past decade!

Fritz started his career @ Microsoft after getting his Bachelor’s degree in history from Yale. He rose through the ranks to become one of the youngest Directors in Microsoft history! He was the “go to guy” for many things Corporate Strategy and M&A and led the $240M Facebook ($FB) investment in 2007 when $FB was only worth $15B; that’s ~45X as of today! After Microsoft, Fritz founded and was CEO of Livestar, a mobile-based recommendation engine on food and culture that sold to Pinterest in 2013. I consider Fritz to be a preeminent Business Ninja in all things from Startups to investing. We explore his kernels of knowledge and wisdom. He would give Master Splinter a run for his cheese- COWABUNGA!

PAST EPISODES

Eric Engineer

“During a pandemic, it’s still important to build personal rapport even if remotely using Zoom or another platform for raising capital or M&A”

Ninja Wisdom
Humans are humans.  It’s as important to build an emotional relationship as it is a logical one when conducting business.

New Episodes!

 

Business Ninjas

 

Wisdom and truths from the trenches with Andreas Penna

Recent Episodes

Episode 1 – Eric Engineer & VC

Eric Engineer is really an Engineer (Computer Science) by background. He’s worked in Product Management at Microsoft, then went to HBS graduating to pursue a VC role at Sevin Rosen Funds. He joined one of his portfolio companies, Invodo, where he went from VP of Product & Partnership to CEO, ultimately selling the company to Industrial Color in 2018. He’s now back in VC as a Partner at S3 Ventures, the largest VC focused on Texas, HQ’d in Austin. Given his career, he’s a masterful Business Ninja with truths from the trenches that we explore!

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