A Lakers fan invited Kobe Bryant to dinner to explain venture capital, then took him to Twitter where engineers challenged him to Pop-A-Shot. Kobe lost 80 to 82 against an engineer named Jimmy. The encounter led to a small fund with Kobe that invested early in Stripe.
I grew up as the most diehard Lakers fan. I had a friend who was advising Kobe, and Betsy said, hey, Matt, will you come down and have dinner and teach him a little bit about venture capital? Chris and I go down and have dinner with Kobe. You can kind of tell some people they want to know the details. By the end, he was just like, this was awesome, thank you so much. Will you send me stuff that I can read? So I put together like a free blog post that I ever loved, thinking that he would like never read it. 2 AM, I get a text. I read that post. He was like in it. And so we take him up to San Francisco and we do like the tour of Twitter. There's Pop-A-Shot Basketball and Kobe looks in and he's like, I gotta do it. All the engineers, holy shit, Jimmy's about to play Kobe. And like Kobe goes, he's gonna bang, bang, bang, hits like 80. Jimmy goes, he hits like 82. And the room like erupts and it's like the greatest moment in this guy's life. And I just remember the look on Kobe's face where he was like legitimately pissed. For a brief moment, we had like a side fund that we were putting together with Kobe and we'd made like 2 investments. One of them ended up being Stripe out of that fund.
