Why Did Sam Hinkie Quit Bain Capital?

David Senra, reading Bill Gurley's profile of Sam Hinkie, says Hinkie quit a lucrative job at Bain Capital to chase a dream of becoming a sports general manager. Hinkie read Moneyball in two days and could not stop thinking about it. When he told his parents, they thought he was crazy. In meetings he gave a one-minute spiel about using data to make better decisions in professional sports, and he could see people's eyes roll.

At Stanford's business school he took a sports management class for the first time. He emailed Paraag Marathe, a former Bain analyst already working with the 49ers, and over burritos asked 200 questions instead of 20. He also wrote emails and physical letters to NFL teams, offering to work unpaid in the front office. The pitch was that a team has a limited pile of chips and needs to turn them into wins. Over spring break, while classmates went to the beach, he flew Southwest on a road show and visited five or six teams. The Houston Texans invited him to intern. The internship lasted eight weeks, and the team asked him to keep flying from Palo Alto to Houston during his second year of business school.