I recently interviewed General Catalyst Co-Founder John Simon on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the co-founder of one of America's leading venture capital firms. John Simon co-founded General Catalyst Partners and is a Managing Director at Sigma Prime Ventures. John is also the co-founder of the nonprofit GreenLight Fund. John, thank you for joining us.

John: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Adam: Great to have you on. You grew up in Boston. You're a big Boston sports fan. You worked in venture capital before starting your own company, you took that company public? You did all of that before co-founding General Catalyst. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons most significantly shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

John: Well, I would say not too dissimilar to most people, I was probably shaped by my parents and what I saw them do. My dad was a physician, and I saw him constantly caring for people. He headed the radiology department at a local hospital and was always carrying a pager with him and really cared about patient care and giving to the community and my mom did as well. But they were also interested in business and creativity, even though neither of them had been in business and encouraged me to maybe pursue business and make the world a better place through that. So I guess I dragged that in a little bit. And while I was in college, at Harvard College, I worked for a startup biotech company during my junior and senior year and cut the magic of startup companies and taking technology from the laboratory and making it work in society and really building a company around it. Right after graduate school, it was a logical thing for me to get a job, an entry-level job, at Charles River Ventures was the first full-time job that I had, learning the venture business. But that was really a prelude to starting my own company someday. And the partners knew it and I knew it. And so they gave me lots of mentorship, lots of exposure, with the idea that I could see companies being founded, I could see what founders were successful and where they went wrong, where they went right and really learn about how to create a meal by watching chefs create their own, to use an analogy. And after about four or five years in the venture business, at age 27, I decided, okay, I'm probably not ready, but I'm gonna go try. And I licensed some technology from Harvard Medical School and tried to create a company around it. And I thought, after three or four years, I would bring in a CEO that knew what he or she was doing. They would run and build the company once we started get to commercial, but I got lucky. We hired a bunch of great people who I also learned from and built a great team. And before I knew it, it was 10 years of being Chairman and CEO of the company, which was called UroMed, the last six years as a public company. We made our initial investors about 100x their money and eventually sold the business. Now that technology and everything is part of Johnson and Johnson, a relatively obscure part of Johnson and Johnson, but at any rate, learned a lot from that whole experience of creating and building a company growing into about 400 people and becoming a public company and building something to be proud of. It was lessons doing that led me to then say, all right, let me now help the next generation of entrepreneurs by investing in, backing them, and helping them build companies building, hopefully much better companies. And that's what I did. We co-founded General Catalyst. And that's what I've been doing now, the last 30 years of my career is basically investing and helping people build companies.

Adam: I'm going to want to talk to you a lot more about your entrepreneurial journey, your career as a venture capitalist. But before I do, I want to ask you, what advice do you have for anyone listening interested in breaking into the venture capital industry?

John: Well, it's a little bit of a hard thing. In my day, that was such a small industry. When I got my first job in the venture business, it was a summer job in the summer of 1985. And then the full time job was starting the summer of 1986. And at the time, very small industry. Maybe billions of dollars raised per year by the whole industry, a couple hundred firms that mattered. And in those days, it was just trying to convince people to bring you on. I sent out something like 50 letters to venture capitalists trying to get an entry-level position as an associate, willing to work for free, if necessary. And there were only two folks that responded and I was lucky enough to get two offers, and then take the job opportunity with Charles River Ventures. So I always tell people, ‘Hey, if I only applied to 48 firms, I may not have gotten an offer to do anything.’ So the first thing is, if you really want to do it, it's a full-on effort. And being willing to hear lots of ‘we're not hiring, you don't fit our profile’ or whatever. And trying to figure out how to get your foot in the door. Maybe it's offering to work for free part-time, nights and weekends. It's something like that. But it's hard to get into the venture business right now if you don't have venture experience on the one hand. If you've built a company in a space that is eventually going to be very hot and you've been part of the management team, and you've done a great job and investors are perceiving ‘Well, this is a place where a lot more successful investments are going to be made,’ you might be able to enter in or if you were a valued CEO in somebody's portfolio, these are the entry points to venture firms these days. So it's how to either have one of those experiences, or how to figure out how to shoehorn yourself into a role and manufacture something for yourself and prove it. It's not an easy business to get into, despite the fact that it's way, way, way larger than it was when I entered in 1985 - 1986. By contrast, the whole private equity field, it's a much easier field to get into because there are so many firms hiring at so many levels. And there's so much interviewing going on. That's a much easier firm to enter, as an investor, a would-be investor, a private equity firm than a venture capital firm.

Adam: And I think it's fair to say that your advice for anyone interested in breaking into private equity is similar to anyone interested in breaking into venture capital, interested in breaking into anything, which is you got to put yourself out there. You can't be afraid of rejection. You can't be afraid of hearing ‘no.’ If you put yourself out there and ask, there are three possible outcomes: one outcome is no, one outcome is you never hear back, and the other outcome is yes. If you don't ask if you don't put yourself out there, the answer is automatically no. 

John: 100% 

Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? And what were the keys to ultimately getting it to a place where you were able to take it public?

John: Yeah, so the real way that I came up with that was, I was lucky enough to be an investor, with our venture firm, in a company called Origin Medsystems. Origin Medsystems was a West Coast company that was originally seed-funded and then funded by the Mayfield Firm. And it was a bunch of entrepreneurs that were Stanford-related who decided, hey, there's going to be a revolution in general surgery, and doctors, who are the ones that are innovating and coming up with the ideas, they're not the ones that are really going to commercialize these things because they're busy taking care of patients. And so there's a separation between who comes up with the innovative ideas, and another entity that's needed to commercialize it. So we'll set up this company called Origin Medsystems, and we will be the route to market for innovative doctors in general surgery who have brand new ideas for brand new tools that are going to change outcomes. And rather than going to some large company and licensing it with a large company who may put it on the shelf or do something or not do something about it, if they licensed our technology to us as a startup company, they know our lifeblood is we're going to bring these things to market. And so we can license these things, we can do the development, we can do the animal studies, and then we can bring these products to market to revolutionize general surgery. And so they created this entity that was going to be this platform to partner with innovative doctors. They attracted innovative doctors. They attracted innovative ideas. They sorted through them. They decided which ones they were going to license and commercialize. And then they built prototypes and built products. They started to bring these products to market. And they were such innovative products that had the chance to make such a difference in general surgery, that with some early success, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly, which was called Garden at the time, came in and bought the company for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and then brought these products to market. And I was able to watch this whole case study, if you will, from beginning to almost the end. The time that they were being acquired, which was the time that I then left to start my company. And when I saw what they had done and in what order I was inspired and said ‘Okay, I can do something similar, but I want to do it in the field of urology,’ because I think that's even more underserved and because if we can develop innovative products, given that there was only, I forget the number but it was maybe 10,000-20,000 urologists, we could actually build a sales force to commercialize our own products instead of having to sell the company because the distribution problem was so large, which it was with general surgeons. And so I set up this company, I called it UroMed, and we started to talk with all these physicians about unmet needs and licensing products. And lo and behold, we followed generally the same trajectory, except we were able to build a really good company, but not quite as good. And in the end, also having gone public, then got bought. So it was really seeing somebody do ABCDEF and learning from that, and thinking to myself, ‘Okay, let me try to do those same things in those same order, and checking myself at each stage to make sure that I was getting the job done. If not, I substitute somebody else for myself, because I knew, long-term, we could build a successful company.’ And that was what prepared me and inspired me to do it. And so I think the analog for anybody thinking about something they want to do is, try to get close to, or volunteer with or be part of, or, in some way, relate to something that's doing something very much like what you want to do. Because as you see that trajectory, and you learn from it, you might be emboldened to go do it yourself. And if you're too far away, it may look too daunting or too mysterious, or whatever. But if you get close to it, you might become convinced and inspired that, I'd go do something like that.

Adam: In your experience as an entrepreneur, and in your experience, as an investor. What are the most important elements to growing and scaling any business?

John: Well, I think the first thing is customer pain, understanding what the world needs, the thing you want to build, really understanding what the problem is you're trying to solve, and your unique take on it, and why if you build this, it's going to be a really strong company, as opposed to something that was great but then some big company is just going to rip off the idea and squash it. So, first of all, thinking about what the customer pain is, and what your product or service is going to look like. And then how over time, that gets stronger and stronger and better and better. And you can carve out for yourself a place in the world that's sustainable and important. So that's the first thing. I think that's really important, and how you can have long-term competitive advantage, and hopefully a profitable business model. The second thing, then, is thinking about your strengths and weaknesses. And what you really need is a starting team or an early team, to make sure that you have the right team around you. Because people don't do things, teams do. There's the saying if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together or travel together. You really have to think about how to build a team and motivate that team that together you're going to do something great. So those are the two, I think, most important things that I would recommend to somebody when they're thinking about creating something. Then you have to think a little bit as a third-order problem, which is okay, in order to do this, how much money are you going to need? And when, and what's the long-term payoff for investors going to be, if you need outside investors? And then making sure you build a plan that achieves those results, so that you can actually raise the money, go do what you're planning to do.

Adam: I want to dive into the second tip that you shared around the power of building the right team. What advice do you have for anyone listening on how to build a winning team, how to build a winning culture, (to use the word) motivate as a leader, once you have good people in place, once you have the right team in place, how to most effectively motivate your people?

John: I think I mean, there's a few things but one is you really if you're going to lead, you have to be an authentic leader. There's many different leadership styles. But you have to be yourself. And you have to understand what you're strong in, what you're weak in. And, for one thing, make sure that your team covers your weaknesses but accents your strengths and then make sure that you're communicating effectively. You're communicating a vision that everybody on the team shares that vision, shares that passion. You obviously have to incent people the right way so that if the team wins, everybody wins and they don't feel it's all about you or your economics or whatever. So you've got to really cut people in the right ownership levels. And there's lots of communication required every step of the way. Not only where you're at and what the next steps are, but what the long term vision is. So Tom Stemberg, a really phenomenal leader who created and built Staples, he has said, ‘To be a leader of a great company, you have to have one foot on the ground and one foot in the clouds.’ And I think that's a valid way of characterizing it. And so you always have to be communicating where you are, what the next steps are. But the big idea and the big vision and the big opportunity is to fire people up around it. And you certainly have to deliver on what you promise; you can't over-promise and under-deliver. That's a recipe for people leading a team.

Adam: You shared a lot of the key elements of effective leadership: authenticity, something you didn't say directly, but implicit in everything you said, self-awareness. If you don't know who you are, as a person, as a leader, none of these things exist. You spoke about the importance of surrounding yourself with people who can accentuate your strengths, and cover your weaknesses. In order to do that, you have to know who you are, you have to know what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are.

John: I totally agree. I mean, just the interesting thing is, I like to use some trivial or funny analogies or sometimes to explain stuff. But sometimes they say, when you see a dog with a person in the elevator like the dog resembles the owner sometimes or whatever. A lot of times, when you look at companies, and you look at founders and CEOs and leaders, and you can see that companies resemble the leaders. The strengths and weaknesses said about Bill Gates and some of his traits, in the culture he created at Microsoft and people tearing down each other's ideas and competing against each other and all that the cutthroat nature of the early days of Microsoft. Again, those are strengths and weaknesses that are replicated from a leader to an organization. And so you have to realize that is what it could look like. But a better way is to think about what your weaknesses are. And make sure that that rather than the company, or organization, looking and feeling like the founder, or the CEO, looking and feeling like the founding team, the leadership team, because that's generally going to be a much better way to look assuming that you've covered your weaknesses, and accentuate your strengths with a real great team around you.

Adam: And something that you're sharing leads to another interesting topic, which is this balance between shooting for the stars, having a big vision, I'm going to act on this great vision, I'm going to lead a team toward this big vision, and focusing on potential downsides. Focusing on what could go wrong? How do I mitigate my risk? How do you, on the one hand, hit home runs, but on the other hand, how do you cut down on strikeouts?

John: When you think about a company over time, and you start maybe with a zero value, and then let's say you build the company that you want. And over a 10-year period, you create half a billion dollars of value, the value of a company obviously can be seen: the revenues and the earning power and the projected multiples, afford earnings, etc. But another way investors can look at it and it can say ‘Well, okay, what's the upside that you validated, and then what's the risk that you've removed?’ And anytime you validate an upside, you increase the value of your company. And anytime you mitigate a risk, you improve the value of your company. So as an example, if you're trying to bring a product to market, and there's potential competing products, but you were to achieve a really important patent position, you've not only validated an upside, but you may be reduced the risk of competition because bigger, stronger companies may not be able to access the important feature that you have, and something that's covered from an intellectual property standpoint. And so you've reduced your competitive risk. Those kinds of things can substantially increase the value of a company because people are always thinking about growing revenues, etc. but reducing risk is also important. And so as you travel through time with a startup company or a startup nonprofit, anytime you can validate an upside, you're improving your value proposition for the world. Anytime you can reduce or eliminate a downside, it's the same and you have to pay attention to both

Adam: As an investor, what are the key pitfalls that you look out for when you're looking at different companies? And then, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, what steps can be taken to avoid those?

John: Pitfalls can be different in different industries and in different market phases that you might watch out for. And sometimes I'll try to look and say, okay, if I'm going to invest in a CEO, what are her or his blind spots, because maybe that's then where I'll be most attuned to the risks or the potential problems. Because if I know an entrepreneur, she's going to see what those downsides are, and she's worried about them, then I worry less about that. So it can be industry-specific or timing-specific, what the things are that you worry about. But in general, if you think you're investing in the right technology, and the right company at the right time, really, it's all about the CEO and the team and building a really fantastic team that has all bases covered. If you're missing in engineering, or you're missing in the pace of software development, or you're missing in sales, these things can hurt you in various different ways. And the best companies figure out how to hit on all cylinders, across all elements of their business.

Adam: You've invested in so many different companies. You've advised so many different companies. You've seen up close and personal companies that have had great cultures, winning cultures, companies that have had less than successful cultures that have impaired the company's performance. In your experience, what differentiates a winning culture from a losing culture? And how can leaders build winning organizational cultures?

John: So I'll just pick an organization that I'm lucky enough to be an investor in right now. It's called Equip. And Equip is a company that does comprehensive best-in-class eating disorder treatment, that's instantly accessible with a whole care team over the Internet. And a care team that cares, not just for someone that has an eating disorder, but their family as well. And with peer mentors and family mentors, and just has an incredible track record of success, and is now being reimbursed by all insurers, and is growing leaps and bounds and attracting incredible people. It's grown from essentially zero people, since I've been involved, to, I think, now maybe close to 500 people that are working there. And it's got an amazing culture. And how did that happen? Well, first of all, you got an amazing founding team. Second of all, you have a great cause and a great mission, which is that treatment is generally so bad, and so difficult to access and so expensive, and so ineffective that people have to go impatient and then recurrence. It's just so they're solving a huge pain point. And the whole team has created something that's clearly a better mousetrap that people are flocking to, whether it's payers, insurers, providers that want to refer or patients that need care, or families that want their loved ones to have outcomes change. And it's just got this tremendous mission-driven culture, which is why the company has grown so explosively, literally on track to eventually be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue. And it's without a compelling mission and founding team and team, it would never be achieving the success that it's achieving. And so that's all I can do is point to examples like that, and say, these are the kinds of things that we should be creating in this world.

Adam: If you had to boil it down, are there a couple of commonalities that you can look to and say, every leader, every team, every company, should be doing this?

John: I don't want to answer yes to that question, because I just want to say there are many different kinds of companies to build in different kinds of ways. And there are many different styles. And I guess I want to say that if you’re yourself, and you build a great team around you, you'll figure it out. And not to try to conform to certain norms or rigid rules that you hold yourself to. And that's really what I want to say. But I can also see certain things like, as I mentioned, authenticity, a sense of mission, a sense that as a leader, the customer comes first and then the team comes second, and you, even if you might have a controlling stake, you come last because if everybody else is successful, you're going to be successful. That putting people first, that really good communication and transparency, in good times and bad, that these things are really, almost universal prerequisites for success. I want to say that. And I think that's probably true. On the other hand, I just want to allow for all kinds of individual styles to be dramatically successful.

Adam: John, you've emphasized the importance of communication multiple times. And it's something that a lot of leaders understand. It's something a lot of entrepreneurs think about when they think about, ‘I need to communicate with someone like John Simon because I'm looking to raise money.’ But it's something that, no matter where you are, you should probably be thinking about more. What advice do you have for anyone listening on how to become a better communicator?

John: Well, the first thing is to try to understand the world from the point of view of the people around you that need to be communicated to. So sometimes I'll be an investor in something as an angel investor, and I'll have a CEO call me up and say, ‘Hey, I'm raising money and I need a little help building a plan and a presentation and thinking about what investors to target.’ I'll be like, ‘I haven't heard from you for a year, like I have no idea how the company's doing really.’ And so I'll try to be helpful, but I'm just not going to be as helpful. So understand, like in that case, myself, as an angel investor, I probably wanted to hear quarterly from the company like how it was doing and be able to track it. And also know where the CEO and team wanted customer introductions or potential employee referrals, or whatever. So to know what was going on, know how things were going and know, if I wanted to add value, or was able to add value where I could and when I could. So that CEO, if he or she wasn't seeing the world, from my point of view, they would never know that that was the communication I want. Or let's say somebody who is working on an assembly line in a company has manufacturing something, think about, well, what is it that they want to know about how the business is doing, who the products are serving, what's happening with their job and their growth potential in a company and their earnings potential and their healthcare in the other things that meant stuff to them, you’ve got to understand their point of view as somebody that wants to be communicated to what needs to be communicated. So first of all, putting yourself in other people's shoes, understanding what communication is needed. That's the first thing, which I think is really important. The second thing is thinking about a roll call, a continual cadence. So communication is something you can forget to do unless you schedule it. Not that there aren't plenty of informal ways that you should be communicating all the time walking around your company, whether physically or virtually. But you should be thinking, ‘Okay, we're going to have, every Monday, a leadership team stand-up meeting where we're all going to communicate key wins and challenges. And then we're going to have an all-hands meeting every two weeks on a Friday, so that all our shareholders and employees know what's going on. I'm going to produce a quarterly update. For investors, I'm going to do a Zoom call twice a year, Zoom call for all investors, including angels, or whatever.’ So putting yourself on a cadence is something that's like belts and suspenders to make sure that communication occurs. Because if you don't put stuff on a regular cadence, and it's haphazard, even when you're communicating, people won't feel communicated to. So I think those are the two most important things that I can say about communication.

Adam: Those are great tips. And it leads me to another important element to effective leadership, which is accessibility. Being there, being present, being available. There's no substitute for that.

John: In this day, and age, with so much electronic communication, I do think even Zoom is much better sometimes than text messaging or emailing, I know, sometimes in a company or venture firm I'm a part of or even seeing interaction amongst board members or board members and the CEO. You can see things happening on email, or text or Slack. And basically, a lot of times I'll just hop in and say, ‘Hey, actually talk by phone or by Zoom, or have an in-person meeting and I know that problem will get solved.’

Adam: On the topic of accessibility, something you decided to do almost 20 years ago, and it's made an incredible impact is start the GreenLight Fund, where you have helped social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders grow and scale their ventures. You've been accessible. You've created an organization that has made accessible all these great programs that weren't necessarily available at the kind of scale that they were before. What are the best lessons that you've learned from your experience leading the GreenLight Fund? From your experience applying the lessons you've learned from your career in business to the world of nonprofit?

John: So a little bit first about the GreenLight Fund just so I can give you some context for my answer. So with the GreenLight Fund, which your listeners can go to www.GreenLightFund.org, and see what we do. We started this about 18-19 years ago, my co-founder Margaret Hall and I. When we created the GreenLight Fund, what we saw essentially was a problem in cities across the US where there were all these issues and metrics that impacted life outcomes for low-income children and families that weren't moving. I'll call them problems that cities had with outcomes, whether it was Detroit, or Boston, or Charlotte, or Kansas City, all these truly important metrics that weren't moving. And a recognition that there actually were solutions to many of them that were led by nonprofit leaders that operated at scale in an original city, and it spread to four or five cities. But because there's no market system, those solutions were never going to get to most of the cities that needed them. And so at GreenLight, we created this multi-city network of GreenLight Fund, which are now operating in 12, soon to be 15, cities with the upcoming editions of Denver, Miami and Dallas, cities number 13, 14 and 15. And every year in those cities, we're running an annual cycle: what does the city need and residents need that isn't in the city that isn't happening? And then bringing something, making it work, covering its startup expenses, to help it scale, and then over time, change that outcome. And by doing this over an 18-20 year period, now, we've created 50 elements of change across all our cities, reaching close to a million children and families a year. And it's been really, really successful. The pain that we recognized was that there were cities and children and families that were in need had all these unmet needs and unmoving metrics. And there were solutions, and solutions were never going to get there. And so we created this organization that is essentially a railroad track or an internet distribution system, if you want to look at analogies for nonprofit leaders that create something magical, that could be applicable in many cities, but otherwise wouldn't get there. And so the lessons that were applicable from the for-profit world to help me create GreenLight is, first of all, to see this market failure essentially, and to start to envision an organization that could address this market failure. And then to think about what would it look organizationally, which is we would have a central national team that would be helping facilitate but in every city. We would have a local executive director or a selection Advisory Council of citizens, and a two to three-person team that was basically running the cycle every year on behalf of the city: what does the city need, and then it would be a poll network. So we've raised north of $100 million to achieve magical things in all these cities. And this is just going to grow over the next 10 years and will triple in a lot of ways that footprint impact. But the lessons were: see something missing, envision it, build an organization that can go make that change. And then make sure it had the value proposition for funders, in this case, its donors. And the reason why donors donate to GreenLight nationally and in cities is because, in comparison to the money we spend, the magnitude and amount of change and amount of follow-on investment we create is like 100-to-1 social return. So address the pain point. Think about an organizational design, prove it out, build it, make sure it has the value proposition for investors, or in this case donors, and then scale the heck out of it to bring the scale solution set to what is that massive scale problem. Because the American Dream that we want doesn't really exist in terms of economic and social mobility that way that it should because the ladder to opportunity has all these missing rungs, these unmet needs, metrics that are really poor. And if we can build these rungs, we're going to change economic and social mobility across our country.

Adam: John, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

John: First of all, build your own definition of success. What is success to you? What does that look like? It doesn't have to look like what Elon Musk's vision of success looks like to him, or what Peter Thiel’s looks like to him, or what Marc Andreessen looks like to him or what Joe Biden's look like to him. You build your own definition of what is a successful life that I want to create for myself, with my faith, with my family, with my professional life, with my hobbies, with my other interests. What is that definition and really own that and work towards it steadily. One of the things that I do, and my wife makes fun of me, every New Year I make resolutions, set what I want to achieve over the course of the year And I think really hard about it. And I look at that probably every month, because in some cases, it's continuing to make progress against the stuff. So I'm a big believer in creating a vision, and then breaking that down into bite size goals, and really evaluating every year or think about the unit of time, and am I making progress towards that? And knowing that sometimes, you're going to go back a step or you're going to go sideways, two steps, or maybe you'll go back two steps. That's okay. It's not going to be unbroken. But then what's your plan for where you want to hit now? And really stepping back and thinking about it that way? I think those things are really important.

Adam: John, thank you for all the great advice. And thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

John: Adam, thanks for having me. And hopefully, your listeners have some take-home nuggets to add value to their lives. That's really what it's all about. And it's been an honor to be on with you. Thanks for having me.

Adam: An honor to have you on and no question that listeners will take more than a few nuggets from this conversation. Thanks again.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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