Can't Not: Athletes × Creators × Tech Edition
A Daring Ventures Dinner
For some people, obsession is their default setting. We know because that's us. We can't NOT think about what we're building.
Sports, media, and tech are converging - and we see it as a perfect storm. Athletes, creators, and artists come pre-wired with exactly what we look for. They already know what it means to do something 10,000 times. The athlete reviewing tape at 3am when everyone else is asleep. The creator who can’t stop tweaking, posting, iterating until the story finally lands. The artist rewriting a single lyric until their friends can’t stand to hear it anymore. That's not learned behavior. That's how they're built.
Same pattern everywhere: The pharma rep who left to fix pharma software. The restaurant owner coding at 3am instead of managing. The memelord who quit posting to build SaaS (true story).
We call them monomanical founders.
Questions:
What's it like when your competitive obsession finds a new target?
Why trade being at the top for being back at zero?
How do you know when "I can't stop thinking about this" becomes "I must build this"?
Why we recognize them:
Joseph: Enterprise car wash → community college dropout → Columbia → Lazard → built WACC because the pipeline was still broken → couldn't not fix it
Maddi: Zero-star recruit → D1 athlete → no finance background → broke into VC anyway → couldn't not prove it possible
Daring Ventures: The fund for monomaniacal founders.
Can't Not: Our dinner series for the similarly afflicted. Where obsession becomes your competitive advantage.