🧭 At the Center has been live for 7 (!) months, and the response from many of you has exceeded what I expected when I sent the first essay, with several of you reaching out personally to tell me it has become your favorite read on the business of sports, media, and entertainment.

For those seven months I have published every other Friday at 8:15am PT, and the essays have run 4,000 words at minimum, with most at 6,000+.

They are 15 - 25 minute reads by design, longer and more intricate than most of what else is in your inbox, and each one takes hours to write.

Those hours are worth it, because the essays are where I work out what I actually believe about the patterns shaping sports, culture, and capital. But that time commitment means I can only do those so often and reasonably sustain.

At the same time, I genuinely believe investors, operators, and executives from across this industry would benefit from hearing my perspective more often because my day-to-day is relevant to them.

I’m grateful to be surrounded by world-class capital partners, deal flow, and value-add operators, and I truly believe my gift is teaching through contextualization.

This asset class is rapidly institutionalizing, and I find great joy in being your jungle guide.

Therefore, 🧭 At the Center is officially going weekly.

Every Friday morning, I will be in your inbox.

→ Every other week will be a long-form essay.

→ Every week in between will be a short-form quick read: Patterns.

Patterns is a shorter breakdown of the one pattern I cannot stop thinking about that week, written to help you orient yourself amid the headlines, the news cycle, and the flood of LinkedIn sports business commentary.

Each edition will also link that week's Clubhouse episode and close with a hint, in the form of a single picture, at what the next essay will be about.

I will keep these brief and, as much as possible, evergreen.

Patterns is not meant to react to the news but to name the trends and themes.

I will never disclose anything genuinely proprietary, but most of what I write here will be informed by my day-to-day work diligencing real investment and M&A opportunities, studying the larger trends moving through the industry, and having candid conversations with the people leading it.

Class is in session, let’s begin. 📝 📝 📝

"If you know, you know" was THE slogan of the mid-2010s.

If you stumbled onto something moderately niche or exclusive, the hospitable move (in theory) would have been to open the door and invite others in on the fun.

Instead, the culturally fluent move was to post it on socials with a #IYKYK, which told everyone watching that whatever you were doing had some gate built into it, that you were on the inside of it, and that they were not.

The phrase took off because it was an efficient signal that something was scarce and legible, but only to whoever was already on the inside.

Then, as happens with every signal that works, the masses adopted it.

People began slapping IYKYK on everything under the sun in order to manufacture FOMO, and the cultural cachet of the phrase plummeted accordingly.

The irony is that the phrase died because the phrase itself got captured: the signal became performative and copyable, and anything copyable is, by definition, no longer scarce.

The people who actually held the status, the ones who were in the know before everyone else was, did what insiders always do, which is rotate into a new signal, ideally one harder to copy, and that new signal quietly became the next IYKYK.

This pattern is back, and this time the signal is absence.

The cost of producing content and the cost of distributing it have both fallen to effectively zero, which means everyone launches their product with content now, VC firms included.

A16Z built new media into a moat, and it works.

But consider “quiet luxury,” and ask yourself whether you would rather walk around in the hit-you-over-the-head logos of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Prada or in the unmarked cashmere of Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli.

When anyone can be loud, silence becomes the scarce good, and “the return of IYKYK” has come in two directions.

(1) Informational exclusivity.

Where visibility is withheld on purpose.

Put A16Z next to Dragoneer, Thrive Capital, Benchmark, or the Investment Group of Santa Barbara, top-decile firms managing billions of dollars with little online presence beyond a landing page, and the gate becomes obvious: you cannot even find them.

The aura and allure are radiating. They are “the stuff of legends.”

(2) Participatory exclusivity.

Where you are fully known, searchable, and marketable, yet gated by what it costs to take part.

Everyone in endurance sports knows the Moab 240, but knowing about Moab is not the same as knowing Moab, because 240 miles of desert and mountain set a physical watermark almost no one clears.

Allen & Co. runs the same mechanism in a different key with its annual Sun Valley retreat, where nobody can explain how you get invited, the public sees only the arrivals photos, and the caliber of the guest list tells you everything.

But #IYKYK can implode: see Soho House.

The company built its entire model on a velvet-rope mythology, then scaled membership into the six figures and took itself public. Immediately, the exclusivity plummeted to zero, membership meant nothing, and a 2025 take-private is what it took to save them.

Once you are legible to everyone, you are scarce to no one.

Interestingly, however, F1 became far more valuable after becoming legible to the masses (see: Drive to Survive), and within F1, Ferrari is one of the most poignant case studies on how to create participatory exclusivity.

My takeaway?

The product is legible, but the access is kept illegible.

400+ million people are fans of Ferrari, but only about 180,000 actually own one, and 81% of new cars go to clients who are already on the inside.

After a decade in which TikTok made everything public, the assets that can credibly say "if you know, you know" are about to carry a premium the rest of the market cannot manufacture.

Reply to this email and tell me which brands, teams, leagues, live events, or other companies are crushing the #IYKYK game.

🎙️ Weekly All-In style sports business riffs with Brent Peus and Dominyck Bullard.

Celeb appearances by “the legends” from The 4th Quarter, go give my guys Sid Balaga and Suraj Peramanu some love.

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