Ben Borton

He's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person.

But that kind of early stage of my career when I was seeding startup hedge funds has had a real impact on kind of my future path.

We definitely took a large drawdown, and this was kind of a real learning experience for Max and myself.

I think you learn a lot about people when you go through adversity together.

Right.

The way we came through that, I think we treated our investors incredibly well.

We got on planes.

We went and kind of like talked to everybody about kind of what happened and everybody was very understanding.

And a lot of those investors kind of made future bets on us as well or kind of gave us another chance because we we behaved very well through kind of a period of adversity.

So that was kind of the biggest, biggest learning from that experience is like, how do people comport themselves in, you know, it's easy to kind of be a good person and kind of comport yourself well when everything's going well.

But you really learn things about people when you go through adversity together.

And I think Max and I were sort of, you know, we forged our bond kind of for life during that period of adversity.

And it's great to kind of be in the same boat together again.

Yeah, I think the key is you have kept start with PingPod.

So the predecessor business was PingPod, which is an operating business.

So PingPod is a network of autonomous table tennis clubs.

It was founded in 2019 by Max David Silverman and Ernesto Ebwin.

I was the first outside investor in that business.

And the problem they were trying to solve, you had basically at that point in New York City, you had kind of one large entertainment destination, had to play ping pong.

And then you had kind of basement dojo style clubs and there was really nothing in between.