You have to be born on third to achieve anything these days 

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me.

You have to be born on third to achieve anything these days 

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/30/heir-ball-how-the-cost-of-youth-sports-is-changing-the-nba

The Farcaster formerly known as Kchamp. Books, beats, bodybuilding, bright ideas and beautiful things.

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How much has changed vs the past?

The Williams sisters were raised to play tennis starting at 4 by a former pro father. Messi needed growth hormones when he was 13 which were paid for by FC Barcelona when he joined their academy. Kobe was groomed from the time he was a toddler by his father who was a pro. Magnus Carlsen skipped school and started training w/ a coach at 9.

coder / founder / investor Founding partner @FirstStarVC 

Loves: AI/ML, data, Bitcoin, climate, techbio, coffee, and pie.

“In 2009, ten players in the league had fathers who’d played for N.B.A. teams; this past season, there were thirty-five.”

Moving from “being born on third helps but there are other ways in” to “you have to be born on third”

Those don’t feel apppreciably different to me.

It’d been true for a long time that if a kid doesn’t have elite genetics and isn’t training from when they’re little, they have zero chance of being a pro in a major sport.

Maybe it’s worse but it’s:
0.000001% vs 0.0000001%

How can you look at a 4x diff and say it’s no different? 

Idk 

I have bias 

I feel the vise squeezing and I am so well off 

Matter of time before I too am below the line

Well of course you don’t. You don’t feel the noose around your neck at all 

You are prone to seeing it as better 

I am prone to seeing it as worse

Even being able to afford paid ai plans to do these “new jobs” is beyond people these days 

I go out of my way sometimes just to use the free models just to make sure I know when I am talking my vibe code empowering talk the walk can actually be walked

I don't see it that way. older fields are more competitive than ever, but there's thousands of new fields that didn't exit 5 years ago that are so easy to break into. 

If you pick something interesting that just came out and focus on it for 1-2 years really hard, you end up as one of the world's foremost experts. tons of people who were nobodies from nowhere 5 years ago and rode a corner of AI or crypto or culture, and are killing it now.

To me There's a distinct tightening of opportunity across every single sector in the US relative to my parents’ generation and this is only getting worse