Fritz Lanman

Lanman is the first of five sons of Dr. Richard Lanman and Alanna Purcell Lanman, born on August 6, 1981. He grew up and attended high school in Los Altos, California where he played football, basketball, and golf. He toured Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France with the Main Street Singers in 1999. Lanman attended Yale University, graduating in 2003. Lanman speaks three languages: English, Spanish, and Italian.

Fritz Lanman began his career as a Product Manager at Microsoft. He subsequently rose to become Senior Director, Corporate Strategy, where he worked on several notable deals including Microsoft's $240 million Facebook investment. Lanman was quoted onstage at the Le Web conference in 2010 confirming Microsoft's attempt to acquire Facebook, and positing that Facebook (then valued less than $10 billion) would one day be worth as much as Microsoft (then worth $230 billion). As of 2017, Facebook is worth approximately $500 billion.

Lanman began angel investing in 2010, with his first investment being Square, Inc.. He and his investment partner Hank Vigil subsequently invested in the seed rounds of notable companies such as Pinterest, Wish, Flexe, EasyPost, InDinero, Cargomatic, Everlane and many other startups.

Leaving Microsoft to become an entrepreneur in 2012, Lanman served as founder and CEO of Livestar, a personalized recommendations app. Livestar was acquired by Pinterest in 2013.

He subsequently cofounded two companies, Verst (fka DWNLD and JNSQ) with his wife, Melissa Middleton Lanman and Alexandra Keating, and Doppler Labs with Noah Kraft. Verst went on to raise over $14 million from notable investors including William Morris Endeavor, Gordon Crawford, The Chernin Group and a Series A led by Greylock Partners. Doppler Labs went on to raise $50 million in its quest to build a "computer for the ears". Lanman led the Series A financing for ClassPass and became Executive Chairman. As of 2016, he was rumored to be running the company alongside founder Payal Kadakia and in an interview with Vanity Fair, Lanman confirmed that ClassPass intended to expand outside of studio fitness with a live video product and non-fitness product called "LifePass".In 2017, ClassPass announced Lanman as CEO, swapping roles with Kadakia who became Executive Chairman. Subsequent to Lanman becoming CEO, Temasek led a $70m Series C financing in the company in June 2017. . Both ClassPass and Doppler Labs were listed as "Next Billion Dollar Startups" by Forbes in 2016. In an interview on CNBC in May 2017, Lanman confirmed that ClassPass's intention was to eventually IPO, though he gave no definitive timetable.

In 2015, Fritz Lanman was named "One of the Most Powerful People in Wearables" by Wearables.com as Executive Chairman for Doppler Labs' "hearbuds" product, "Here". In 2017, Fritz Lanman was named one of Fast Company's "Most Creative People in Business".