A letter on opening day

On birthdays, beginnings, and the round at Friar’s Head that started this.

This is the first letter from The Journal. There will be one every quarter, on a Tuesday morning, for as long as Tee Time exists. They will be sent only to members and to the small number of people who, for whatever reason, have been paying attention.

Today, July 8th, is the morning Tee Time opens. At 7:14 AM Eastern, twelve minutes from when this letter is published, the first members in New York, Palm Beach, and San Francisco will be able to find each other through the app for the first time. The first caddie bookings will be made shortly after. The first foursomes will be confirmed by the end of the day.

July 8th is also my birthday. I am told this is the kind of detail one is not supposed to put in a founder letter. I am putting it in anyway, because it is true, and because the date wasn't chosen for marketing. It is what it is. The work happened to finish in time.

I want to tell you about a round at Friar's Head two summers ago.

The four of us hadn't all met before. Two of us had played together once, years earlier. The other two were a friend of a friend, and a man from a neighboring club who had asked through a mutual contact if he could join. The morning was foggy in that specific Long Island way where the fairways look like they end ten yards beyond where they actually do. I don't remember any of our scores. I remember every conversation.

By the 9th, I had learned that the friend of a friend had spent the previous fall in a small town in Hokkaido and had come home with a different relationship to silence. By the 14th, the man from the neighboring club had told us about his daughter's first season of college lacrosse, which she had finished in a wheelchair. By the 17th, I had told them about an idea I'd been chewing on for a year — a network underneath private golf, an app for members of clubs to find members of other clubs, a way to make the foursomes that actually happen happen again, on purpose, more often. They listened the way you listen to a thing that's not finished. Patient and a little curious.

By the 18th green, we'd agreed to play again before the end of the season.

We did not. I tried to set it up twice. The friend of a friend was traveling. The neighboring-club member was harder to reach than I'd realized. The third member, who I knew best, was caught up in his daughter's wedding planning. By October the moment had passed and we let it go. I have not played with any of those three again. I think of that round, still, probably once a month.

That round is the entire reason for Tee Time.

The thing that's broken is not that good rounds don't happen. They do, regularly, on the world's best courses, with members who are exactly the kind of people you'd want to play with. The thing that's broken is that they're hard to repeat. The infrastructure for finding the same three near-strangers again — six months later, at a different club, when one of you is traveling through — does not exist. You text a friend. They text a friend. By the time it works, the season has passed.

A network would solve this. A network has always been the obvious thing. The reason it hasn't been built is structural, not technical. Private clubs are deliberately closed systems. Every attempt to "open" them has been politely rejected, because the offer was always wrong: a third party trying to extract value from the members, or to sell access, or to publicize what private clubs exist to keep private.

Tee Time is built differently. We do not sell tee times. We do not take a cut from the clubs. We are not trying to make private golf less private. We are trying to make it possible for one member of one private club to find another member of another private club, on terms both of them trust, when they actually want to play.

What's launching today is the smallest possible version of that.

Three cities. About 500 founding members on day one. A walking-caddie network of roughly 60 loopers across the three markets, each one vetted by another caddie we already trust. A handful of partner clubs that have agreed to be quietly involved. A waitlist that will grow into the next cities — Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta — across the rest of the year.

If you are a founding member, your invitation is in your inbox by now. Your referral code is the one you share with the next member you'd want at your table. Three accepted referrals advance you to the lifetime founding cohort. The first 500 of these get the only perk that is not in any of our marketing: a small grill room access at our first three city activations, which will happen in late August.

If you are not yet a member, your invitation is forthcoming. We will get there.

I want to thank a few people. The first 14 members who agreed to join before there was anything to join. The three caddies from Bandon — you know who you are — who helped us build the looper standards. The two GMs at top-100 clubs who took the meeting that nobody else would. The investor who wrote the first check after reading a single email and a deck that, in retrospect, was not very good. The friend who, when I described the company over breakfast, said: "This is the most obviously right idea you've ever had." That sentence kept me going for a year.

There is more to say. There always is. The next Journal letter will appear at the end of September, at the close of our first quarter, and will tell the story of what actually happened in these three months — the numbers, the lessons, the second city wave.

For now, the work has caught up to the idea. Tee Time is open.

Find your foursome. Anywhere in the world.

— Garrett

Garrett is the founder of Tee Time.

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