Twitter Composite
You might recognize billionaire investor and awful shirt enthusiast, Chris Sacca, from his several guest appearances on ABC’s Shark Tank. Or you might be familiar with Sacca because you know he’s a former Google employee who made a fuckload of money from investing in Twitter and Uber. Either way, homeboy is rich and he didn’t get rich on accident.
As you can imagine, a lot of people want to pick his brain. But gaining Sacca as your investing mentor isn’t easy to do. Hell, it’s probably impossible unless your related by blood or you’re already a A-list celebrity or athlete. Even then, he doesn’t want to waste his time. And that is exactly what Kobe Bryant learned when he came to Sacca for guidance about investing in start-ups and dipping his toe into the Billionaire’s pond.
Sacca shared the story of what came of his interaction with Bryant on Bill Simmons’ podcast and, to his surprise, he learned that Kobe Bryant’s tenacious attitude towards being the best wasn’t only relegated to the court.
From Sacca:
So I said look, if you’re serious about this then prove it to me. I said, I’m going to send you a bunch of stuff that you should read, a bunch of TED Talks and other videos you should watch, and if you do your homework then I’ll talk to you about investing. It was funny because I didn’t think he was going to do it. I thought it was kind of a nice way to let him off easy.
So, sure enough, for the next few months my phone never stops buzzing in the middle of the night. It’s Kobe, reading this article, checking out this tweet, following this guy, diving into this Ted Talk, diving into the Y Combinator Demo Day stuff. And I’m getting these texts, literally two or three in the morning, and my wife is like, are you having an affair with Kobe Bryant? What is happening here?
It was just at all hours, and the guy was serious! He was bringing the same obsessive work ethic to learning about start-ups that he does to training, to rehab, to his thousand makes a day, to everything. I was fascinated by it. So I ended up becoming really enthralled by him because this is a very unique personality type that I only kind of see in some of our very best entrepreneurs.
Mamba’s gonna Mamba.
Oh, and give me a call some time, Sacca. I want in on your next investment. I have roughly 100,000 IOUs that I can invest, so you know I’m serious and shit.
[H/T BI]