Going the Distance: Nick Fragnito's Journey from Ironman to Investing

A better way to push the limits

Nick Fragnito is a husband, father, athlete, and investor. He’s Founding Partner at Shorewind Capital, which invests in early-stage frontier tech companies. He founded two previous startups, worked in consulting for BCG, and was a senior associate for Mark Cuban. He earned an MBA from Emory University as well as a BS in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech. He has qualified for the Ironman World Championships and is a four-time USA Triathlon All-American.

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Episode overview:

• We really could’ve broken this episode into two parts.

  • In part one we talk about the ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ of competing in Ironman triathlons.

    • Specifically, how does it feel to be approaching the other side of his athletic peak in his mid-thirties? What does the discipline and rigor of a training block enable in Nick’s personal and professional life? What does it mean to bump up against the limits of what is possible and then keep going?

  • In part two we discuss Nick’s path to becoming an investor in Atlanta. He was first an entrepreneur, then worked in the family office of Mark Cuban before business school and a stint in consulting, then ultimately opened his own venture capital shop.

    • All the while he knew he wanted to become an investor, and he walked a path of intentional learning and delayed gratification.

• We also jammed on Nick’s investing focus on ‘Frontier Technology’ - making bets on tech developments that don’t exist yet but almost certainly will in our lifetimes (think ‘shades over the sun’ and ‘meat grown by light’).

• Please find the episode linked below:

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🧠 Big Question:

What does it look like to bet on frontier technologies from Atlanta?

Two part answer:

• First, defining frontier technology investing: betting on firms where the inherent risk and upside is more based on whether an unrealized technology can be successfully brought to market, and less on whether a certain company can out-compete others in a crowded marketplace.

  • Atlanta is long on B2B software success stories like Salesloft or Calendly, but has less of a track record in capitalizing game-changing technologies like, for example, Croft Motors, which is trying to create hydrogen vehicles at scale.

  • I asked Nick about timelines - is it notably longer to bet on the emerging technologies than a typical venture fund’s 10-year life?

    • Nick crunched the numbers and realized there’s a common misconception about timelines, and most frontier tech companies that went public actually did it faster from their founding date compared to software businesses.

    • And if anything, they’ve raised less money on average because software companies often have to pay robustly for customer acquisition, which can wind up being more expensive than tech R&D.

• As for making the investments from Atlanta, Nick acknowledges it’s a less typical route than being in the Bay area or the northeast, but says the investor network for Emory’s Goizueta Business School has been amazing about opening doors and supporting one another.

  • Also, as he reminded me on the show, Nick’s not here to do easy things. 💪🏼

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💡 Bold Idea:

When you’re feeling out of gas, you have more in the tank.

• Nick is competing in the Ironman World Championships this October. He qualified on his second race after learning some tough lessons about in-race nutrition during his first attempt.

• I asked if there’s a part of the race he knows is most psychologically challenging.

  • Nick says you never know quite what exactly will go wrong, but you know something will.

  • He does visualization exercises with his coach in the days leading up to a race, imagining every detail that could wrong, but also how he’s prepared for those eventualities and how it will feel when they go right.

• A common thread of what he’s learned through these series of intense physical and mental challenges is that when he feels depleted, he has more to give.

  • That belief that he can do more than his perceived limits extends into his personal and professional life. There’s a reservoir of capacity that he’s empowered to tap into because he’s successfully accessed it during his racing.

  • That’s available to all of us if we find it in our own domain, and it’s worth seeking opportunities to prove it to ourselves.

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🎯 Better Living

A revolution of quantified health will lead to personalized preventative care regimens

• Not surprisingly, Nick is optimistic about where technology is headed and what it will enable for us in terms of living longer, living better, and sustaining athletic performance (we talked about the exercises he plans to be doing in his 90s to pick up his grand kids).

• A market evolution he views as a certainty is that the reams of data we produce will actually help us take better care of ourselves.

  • Right now you can run (very expensive) diagnostic tests that get you hundreds of biomarkers, but not one has really codified that into an actionable program.

• It strikes me that if someone can suggest specific alterations to our individual sleep/exercise/diet/lifestyle factors that are going to lead to demonstrably positive impacts to our energy, quality of life, and risk profile for certain diseases, that’s a real promise of technology.

  • I don’t believe technologists are offering us a compelling enough view of the future. This promise of technology - to significantly improve our quality of life - is something we should be excited about and demand from innovators.

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Questions for reflection:

• Have you ever undertaken an endurance athletic challenge? What did you learn from the experience? If not, what challenge might you set for yourself in the coming year that pushes you out of your comfort zone?

• What emerging technology are you most excited about? How do you think it could impact your life or the world at large?

Once again, please find the episode linked here:

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