Don’t quit.

That’s what I keep telling myself. Late at night wandering through the meeting follow ups, while staring at the road on the freeway, and taking in the last 85 degree breath in April, calming myself to the sound of birds before they blur into construction noise.

Don’t quit, it’s a phrase I’m finding myself say more often these days, and I think it’s mostly because I know what happens when you do. You see my mom’s a music teacher, but I’m basically musically retarded. My sister can hear a song and sit down and play it, no sheets required. Me, I’m still trying to play Mary had a Little Lamb.

So I quit…. but every time I walk past a piano, I get a little sad. I wish I hadn’t. That guy at the airport who’s just sitting alone, playing for himself a concerto at the random Steinway they leave for strangers, I see it and think, that could be me.

But recently I’ve come to realize…. that pianos not for me. It’s not my problem. Leave me a young entrepreneur crying in a chair about not making his next payroll run, that’s me. Give me that. You just sold your company for life changing money and now they’re trying to steal it from you for their own corporate greed, let me tell you what happens next.

So is quitting giving up or recognizing where your time should be spent? I told my son when he didn’t want to go to baseball practice that Frommer’s don’t quit. I was angry at him for giving up before it even started, and I took it out on him because somewhere deep inside I thought quitting was just that, giving up on something you want to do. But maybe I was wrong.

Maybe Frommers do quit and should more often. Why waste your time doing something you know you weren’t meant to do. What you want and need are different, and so is what you should when you finally find that purpose.

So every day I wake up and try and ask myself “can I”. But I think I should also ask the next question; “should I?” I find I spend my time on things other people want me to do vs what I want to do, and maybe I should quit giving my time away to others and start putting my time into what matters.

So don’t quit because it’s easy. Don’t just give up because you gave it your all. Quit because it’s not what you were meant to do. They call that in business, a “pivot”, and some of the most recognizable companies you know, are what they are because the entrepreneur behind them realized that they shouldn’t quit, they should just spend their time where they were meant to be.

And that my friend, can make a world of difference.

→ Every Founder Must Know: UCLA's Kiki Rice just won a national title, got drafted into the WNBA, and picked up equity in a publicly traded nail-care brand. All in the same week.

→ The Operator: Adidas's former North American basketball GM just quit to run a 14-million-subscriber YouTuber's company.

→ Industry Move: Shaq walked into a store, stayed for hours, and walked out a shareholder. The pitch deck came later.

Kiki Rice just won UCLA its first national basketball title in school history, got selected in the 2026 WNBA Draft, and picked up an equity stake in a publicly traded nail-care company. All in the same week.

On April 13, MiniLuxe Holding Corp. (TSXV: MNLX) named Rice its inaugural brand ambassador. The press release framed the move as "signaling a shift toward partnerships with a shared mission." Most outlets covered it as an ambassador deal. The filings tell a different story. MiniLuxe paired cash with equity. Rice is a shareholder.

That's not a sponsored post. That's a founding-team hire with an athletic contract attached.

MiniLuxe is a publicly traded clean-nail-care company. Every ambassador deal they write has to clear public disclosure. They could have cut a check and been done. Instead, they decided the cheapest, best-aligned way to acquire a decade of Rice's brand equity was to put her on the cap table while she's still pre-rookie-season.

By the time she's in her second WNBA year, that grant is worth multiples. MiniLuxe gets the halo of a champion athlete who chose them before everyone else figured out they should have.

Rice already had a stable of traditional endorsement deals during her UCLA run. Bose. Dove. KitchenAid. Beats. Flat fees, shoot dates, rate cards, expiring contracts. Her first deal on the way into the pros is structured the opposite way.

Founders don't have the benefit of a disclosed securities filing to benchmark against. But the logic is identical. The people who win the best athletes and the best creators in 2026 aren't the ones paying the most. They're the ones writing equity into the deal at the inflection point, not after it.

Rice's inflection point was the week she stopped being a college star and started being a pro. MiniLuxe showed up with a cap table, not a rate card.

The next Kiki Rice is already on your radar. She's the college senior, the mid-tier creator, the pre-Series A operator, the regional athlete three headlines away from national. You know who it is. The question is whether you show up with shares or with a check.

That's exactly what OWM was built to help you do. We match founders with creators and athletes who already have conviction in the category, before the category figures out they're worth more.

Stop renting endorsements. Start building cap tables.

Performance Golf is a $100 million direct-to-consumer golf business founded and run by Brixton Albert. The company combines clubs, training aids, apps, coaching, and supplements into one connected stack, and works with some of the best-known instructors in the sport, including Hank Haney, Martin Chuck, Cameron McCormick, Erika Larkin, and Nick Bradley.

Albert ran Performance Golf as a side business until it hit $29 million in annual sales, then went full-time. Today the company has sold 800,000+ clubs, built a subscriber audience of more than one million golfers, and runs nearly 300 in-person VIP Golf Schools a year across the US and UK, all powered by the PG1 App that gives every golfer a personalized assessment and plan.

They are now looking for their next wave of athlete, creator, and coach partners to build products, masterclasses, and events with a team that already has the audience, the infrastructure, and the track record to make them winners.

A decade ago, Jesse Riedel (Jesser, 14M+ YouTube subscribers) would have signed with Adidas. This week, Adidas's former North American basketball GM signed with him.

The News:

On April 16, Jesser announced that Eric Wise, the former General Manager of Adidas Basketball North America, is joining JesserCo as President.

JesserCo is the newly formed holding company sitting above Bucketsquad (Jesser's creator collective) and his expanding basketball apparel and product lines. Wise ran Adidas's basketball business. Now he runs Jesser's.

The Operator Take:

A creator is no longer a marketing line item. A creator-owned brand is now the platform that top operators are leaving incumbent companies to go run. Wise didn't leave Adidas because Adidas was failing.

He left because a 14M-subscriber YouTuber is a better place to build a basketball brand in 2026 than the world's second-largest sports apparel company.

If you're a founder and you can't recruit that caliber of operator, it's worth asking who's winning them instead. Stop thinking of creators as distribution. Start thinking of them as competitors for the same operating talent you're trying to hire.

Shaquille O'Neal joined tm:rw this week as an investor, partner, and Global Ambassador.

The News:

On April 14, Shaq took an equity stake in tm:rw alongside a Global Ambassador role. Four days earlier, he and tm:rw founder Nathalie Bernce sat down with Romaine Bostick and Katie Greifeld on Bloomberg's "The Close" to explain how the deal came together.

Bernce didn't pitch him in a boardroom. Shaq walked into the tm:rw store, hung around for hours, met her on the floor, and decided he wanted a piece of the company before he left.

Bloomberg's on-screen framing captured his pitch in seven words: tm:rw is an immersive destination. His broader thesis across the whole hit was tighter than that: newness is everything. That's why he also integrated his own Dunkman brand into the partnership, not just a signature and a posed photo.

The Operator Take:

Shaq solved this math 15 years ago. The best athlete deals are the ones where the athlete has real product conviction and real ownership, because their bag depends on the outcome.

Everything else is a logo rental. Note what he did here: he didn't evaluate the pitch deck. He evaluated the store. Founders reading this, your deal doesn't close in a Zoom. It closes when the athlete shows up, stays too long, and starts asking who the founder is.

Build a product worth lingering in. Treat every athlete deal you write from this point forward like you're assembling a founding team, not a marketing campaign.

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