hey friends,

this is my first time doing this. I don’t write much. in fact, this is probably my first time writing in YEARS. so strap in because there’s a lot to catch you up on.

i just turned 30. THIRTY! i also just graduated from my MBA at Berkeley Haas.

lots of life changes all at once this summer. and with that, a break to reflect and think.

naturally, many of you, my closest friends and family, have been asking me “what’s next?”

throughout most of my life, every next step has been very clear. i’ve been more than lucky to have been raised by the best family. provided a safe and loving childhood. got through high school without too many scrapes. made lifelong friends, who all still get along and even do annual ski trips together (i know, rare!).

i got into a great college with a scholarship. then somehow stumbled into a dream job at a big tech company in sf. moved from ohio to south carolina to san francisco. my partner, Mack, also happened to live there. everything was going according to plan.

i spent half a decade working at LinkedIn in sf. it was amazing. again, i was lucky to have met the best cohort of people i could’ve asked for in those foundational first years of my career. i consider many of them my closest friends.

but after having spent most of my 20’s at one company, i started to hear the voice in the back of my head…”are you wasting your prime career years?”

i was making a lot of money. more than i thought i would ever make. but blah blah the same old cliché that money doesn't make you happy. money is important! i had all my basic needs met. but ultimately, my time and energy were scarce resources i felt getting sucked away by the comfy big tech life.

i had to break out of the golden handcuffs. i still remember the pit in my stomach i felt turning in my laptop on my last day. that was it. there’s no turning back.

as any person in their late-20’s lost in their career would do, i ended up back in business school. once again, seemingly the perfect mix of luck, opportunity, and good vibes came my way.

i promise, the conflict in the story arc is coming!

i still think it was a mistake but i got into some of the top MBA programs in the world: HBS, MIT, and Berkeley. ultimately, i decided to jump just across the bay to Haas to figure out what was next for me.

i got a full-ride scholarship to basically spend 2 years f*cking around, traveling, tinkering, building, and making new friends. and I did that! many of you were a part of this journey. and many of you rightfully asked “are you even studying?”.

special shoutout to Mack, for supporting me on this crazy journey. i was driving back and forth from SF to Berkeley daily. leaving on multi-week trips, getting home at 11pm after a late night soccer game, and constantly dragging her to social events on a school night.

but ever since i wrote those applications, i had my sights set on a mission.

my hypothesis in b-school was to try out this whole entrepreneurship thing. i had never started a business before. my whole family is made up of entrepreneurs: restaurants, grocery stores, appliance stores. every scrappy immigrant stereotype hustle you can think of, they’ve done it.

i like to think that it’s in my DNA but again, I actually never even tried.

only one way to find out. at the end of the day, i can always go back to big tech right? how much can the outside world really change in 2 years... (lol)

on day one of school, i met my peruvian brother from another mother. Gonzalo and I immediately connected. we played all the same sports, both worked in tech, both built our personalities around the early 2000’s era of brazilian soccer culture - i felt like i knew him my whole life.

and for the next year we embarked on the journey of building our killer consumer app idea, GoPlai. we spent all our time in school doing this. it was the “strava for team sports”.

imagine if you could have a longitudinal record of all of your athletic feats on the soccer, basketball, volleyball field throughout your life. automated highlights, stat lines, and mixtape reels to share with scouts, or to just talk shit in the group chat.

it was the best journey. bouncing between customer discovery, product design, 100 business model pivots, learning how to claude code, winning pitch competitions in sf, and everything in between.

but great things don’t always work out. i know someday we’ll get back together to build something big.

and so now I’m done with the 2-year MBA journey.

and what’s next isn’t so clear.

for the first time in my life, I don’t have the next step planned out. I don’t have a high paying job lined up. I’m not moving to a new city. I don’t even know what I’m doing to get health insurance next month (sorry dad).

but i’ve been leaning into this feeling of uncertainty.

and i still want to build…

one thing that is repeated ad nauseam in the sf tech circles and perhaps in many of your lives now is that we have this super-intelligent digital being at our fingertips. type in a few lines to your tool of choice and, boom, you've got yourself a new app or website almost instantly.

but does that mean it's gotten any easier to build a successful project or startup?

i’ve built probably 20+ shitty apps that i bet no human will ever see. and i felt so cool doing it. typed a few words into claude code and all of a sudden a fully functioning app. yet, i’m no closer to the successful unicorn founder than i was pre-AI.

a lot of my friends are bored in their day jobs. and being a founder sounds super sexy. but they don’t know what to build and frankly it seems like the AI super-users are now generations ahead of them.

they’re saying we should all be able to deploy a fleet of agents to build a $100M ARR solo business on the side. what’s your excuse?

but what do you build?

like any good MBA - i had to break this down into 3’s.

Ok, Angel:

i spent the first chapter of my career stacking skills and accolades. you know the stuff that looks good on resumes. crushes sales quotas, can write sql and derive data driven insights, can work x-functionally with product and eng, can communicate to senior execs.

in reality, i think it was in search of validation. that i belonged at a top tech company. that i could hang with all the ex-ivy leaguers and work on frontier products. i mean i was just a kid from a non-target school that slipped through the cracks.

i jumped from sales, to data analytics, to bizops. i liked talking to people. hated being behind excel all day. i liked connecting with clients but i hated carrying a quota. sql disgusted me but i got so much energy in the storytelling. calibrating…

these last 2 years, i leaned more into the good feelings and the things that came naturally to me. i built community in every sub niche that i liked. sports, cycling, djing, soccer, saunas, vibe coding, and padel.

these were the things that made me feel human.

more importantly i realized what i was NOT best in class at.

a lot of my classmates were experts at building pitch decks. or were the go-to for reading P&Ls and making financial decisions. or even knowing what a leveraged buy-out is. i still don’t really know what that is.

even though i've always prided myself on my ability to get dropped into a new environment and learn quickly, i kept thinking: why are we still crunching numbers in excel? surely our claude overlords will be better and faster at that.

I wanted to double down on what I’ve always been good at and what won’t be replaceable.

I’m adaptable. I can effortlessly cross cultural boundaries. I’m a community builder. i bring people together. i welcome risk. i’m dangerous enough at many different things. i’m not afraid to bet on myself. ok something there.

AI is everywhere. everything is becoming increasingly more digital and automated.

resist the urge to make more slop.

so what about in-person stuff? it’s the literal antithesis of AI and more importantly, it’s AI proof.

amongst my circles and even with a quick doom scroll on IG reels, the growing contempt for ai-generated content is palpable. i mean some of it is genuinely funny (mbappe dictator memes).

but i think us humans are increasingly craving authenticity. something different and crafted intentionally. not with just a few slot machine clicks in codex. i swear if i see another landing page with the same claude-coded orange color palette…

more than that, my prediction is that we’ll even place a premium on those authentic experiences. human to human. in real life.

the world cup final in NY was the most expensive live sporting event ever.

what are the things that will stay constant in a world where the entire ground beneath us is shifting? Not exhaustively:

but don’t just take it from me. these guys are saying it too. and they’re the ones with the deepest pockets in ensuring AI proliferates:

and what hits all those basic human needs more than sports?

this might seem super random but keep reading, we’re getting there.

first, a quick primer on padel. some of you have heard me go on and on about it. some of you might already be addicted 🙂

it’s a racket sport that is a cool combo of tennis and squash. it’s social, instantly addictive, and WAY more fun than pickleball. I’ve been playing it for 10 years and anytime i travel, it’s the first thing i look for.

if you’re still doubtful, just go to tiktok or youtube and search padel - you’ll see what I’m talking about.

it was invented in acapulco, mexico in 1969 by a guy named enrique corcuera who wanted a tennis court in his backyard but didn't have enough space. so he built a smaller one and walled it in so the ball wouldn't roll into his neighbor's yard.

it then quickly spread from mexico → spain → argentina, and now it's everywhere in the spanish-speaking world. in spain it's second only to soccer. and they’re the world champs at that.

the court is about a third the size of a tennis court, enclosed in glass. the walls are in play, so the ball ricochets and the rally just… keeps going. and it's always doubles which makes it so fun and hyper social.

it is the most fun you will ever have being bad at a sport. day one, you're having 20-shot rallies.

compare that to day one of tennis, which is you shanking balls into a fence for an hour and questioning your athletic identity.

"isn't that just pickleball?”

NO!

pickle-lovers please don’t hate me but i think we are past the peak.

you can build a pickleball court on basically any flat surface. a parking lot. a driveway. an existing tennis court and a roll of tape. it costs almost nothing.

and it has a kinda geriatric feel to it, doesn’t it?

padel is the exact opposite. you need a 20x10 meter glass box. if played indoors, you need 30+ ft ceilings.

a 4-court indoor club costs roughly $1.5M all-in to build. courts themselves run $50-75K each installed. the rest is turning an empty warehouse into a place you actually want to hang out in.

at maturity, clubs like this are doing $1.5-2M+ in revenue at 30-45% operating margins. for context, a boutique fitness studio costs $300-500 per square foot to build. padel is closer to $75. and there's no star instructor to poach. the product is the game.

in the bay area, court times go for $150-160/hour. not cheap by any means. but courts are full. it has seemingly struck a nerve. according to playtomic, padel has a 92% retention rate.

the unit economics are strong, retention is high, and people LOVE the sport. ultimately, the beauty isn’t it just opening up one club. rather, replicating this model across the US and tailoring it to each unique geo.

we are in the very first innings of the growth of the sport in the US and california is severely under-built.

global stats:

the opportunity in the US:

money is flowing in:

i hope you see the vision I’m trying to paint.

yeah third spaces are great and all but how do you actually build a sustainable business that will attract customers, investors, and outlast a fitness trend?

it’s not just padel courts. it’s a bet on creating intentional, differentiated, and human spaces for connection.

picture a space where you can play padel, sauna for recovery, shower, grab a cold brew, sit down to take your morning meetings, meet new people, join a friday night dj social event. partner with local food and art vendors. so many possibilities.

i’m building my first club here in the bay area.

i can’t shake this feeling and i’m finding myself waking up every day feeling like this is the right quest.

but it’s not going to be easy. for starters, what do i know about commercial real estate or city permitting or hospitality?

what i do know is everything is figure-outable.

and that eventually, all we’ll have left is what makes us feel most human.

society once Angel opens his padel club:

let me know below if you’re interested in becoming a founding member 🔥

i want to build this in public. partly to keep me accountable and partly to bring you all along the journey. this piece is the first of many in a series of written and video posts I’ll be sharing.

p.s. I’m looking for people who share this vision of the future to help me bring it to life!

if you’re interested in collaborating:
hit me up at [email protected] or just reply to this email.