Be forewarned, this is a long blog entry. If you want to know the short of it, we are Brandon and Spencer White, founders of Lateral Line, we make the very best technical year-round fishing clothing system for striped anglers on the planet, We Fish. It’s who we are…. If you want the longer version, read on.

I often get asked the question, “How did you get where you are?” or “How did you do it?” or “How did you and Spencer figure this stuff out?”. So with the advent of the launch of Lateral Line I thought I would take some time just put it out for everyone in the best words I could find. If you have questions or comments feel free to post them in this blog and I or Spencer or will try to answer. If you want to email feel free to do that as well. It’s Brandon@LateralLineCo.com or Spencer@LateralLineCo.com .

The “How did I get here” saying always reminds me of the classic (at least to my generation) Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime” and the movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills. When I hear that song or see the movie it always seems to evoke me taking some time and reflecting on my life and how I arrived where I am. While I believe you should live in the present, set goals and visualize your future more often then not, I also think it’s healthy to step back in this sort of exercise every once in a while and spend some time thinking about what you did, how you did it, what new people you met, what friends you spent time with, what you did right, and what you did wrong and how you can learn from all of it to apply it to your future. I also take the time to give thanks for all that I have, because I truly believe we have been blessed to have the people we have/had in our loves. Some people we are still friends with, some we have drifted apart for one reason or another; the one thing I realize is there each relationship happens(ed) for a reason. When reflecting on these things I always like to put some structure around the exercise and not get caught up classifying the experiences as good or bad, but rather look at them for what they were and try to see the lesson in each.

While we have been working on Lateral Line for little over two years now, this time period truly starts a new chapter for me, my brother Spencer, our families and all of the people we have been lucky enough to have the help and support in getting to this point in time, the launch of Lateral Line. With the start of this new chapter, I find myself taking a quick look back and seeing how I got here over the last thirty-six years and how Spencer I arrived at the juncture where we have the opportunity to work together. Clearly this exercise is a selfish one in that we think it helps us realize how truly lucky we are to have the opportunity to be where we areand pursue the Lateral Line vision, and I think it gives us strength to face the challenges we will have as we grow the company in realizing what we have done in this life so far, what challenges each of us have overcome, what things we have failed at and how we bounced back, and what we have accomplished, as well as take a look at how Spencer and I together navigated the clothing business and figured out how to design, make, and get our fishing clothes from the factories to our warehouse which arguably anyone in the apparel business will tell you is no small feat. While selfish and helpful to us, we hope sharing this with you might spark you take a quick look back on your life and bring a smile to your face when you think of all the places and things you have done. We also hope this will allow you some deeper insight into who Lateral Line is, what we represent, what we hope to accomplish, since after all Lateral Line is the people behind it. I also want to let you know how you too can be a part of the Lateral Line vision so we can make the ride together.

Well it’s been a wild; it’s been fun, crazy, sometimes stressful, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, personal journey and learning experience that brought me here to Lateral Line. I guess it all really started with my brother Spencer and I passion, probably more like obsession, with fishing. We grew up on a farm in northern Harford County Maryland where we started fishing the creek that ran through our farm for sunfish, fall fish and, when we could trick them, trout. I can remember us running out of fishing hooks, with the nearest store that had fishing tackle literally at least thirty minutes away by car we would modify safety pins to use as hooks. We would rig it up with some bait and drop it over the side of the bridge that ran through our farm in hopes of catching one of the trout that we used to watch swim in the creek and feed. Truthfully, we rarely if ever, caught the trout, but did get plenty of sunfish and fall fish that were tricked by the scent and taste of fresh worms. Looking back this was not only our first fishing lessons and experience, but also our first conservation lesson as we watched the water quality and flow for that matter, in our creek slowly decline. Knowing what I know now, the pollution was probably from all the cattle in the pastures, which lead to all those trout that we used to see disappearing. The water flow was a whole other issue which is analogous with what I now know the western trout streams face, water use for other things, like in our case, watering cattle which at the time was more important then managing the stream and the fish that were in it. IN fact I am not even sure if fish health in the creek was even known to be an issue or we knew how what we were doing would even affect it. Ignorance is never an excuse, but when you do not know what you do not know you are operating in a vacuum of not knowing; I believe that was the case for us and probably is for a lot of pollution that happens to this day.

More accurately the above was probably our second lesson in conservation. Our first was from our mother. Our parents got divorced when I was four years old and Spencer was just a few months old. Our father was a commercial and residential developer and when our mother and father split our father wanted to develop the farm we lived on. Most likely had this happened my Mom, Spencer and I might have been able to live a little easier then we did, but our mother has certain principles that go far beyond the lure of the mighty dollar. The one thing she to this day holds in high regard is the environment and our responsibility to taking care of it, a lesson she passed on to us. So, instead of developing the few hundred acres of our farm, she found a new neighbor whose property joined ours. The spirits work in mysterious ways and it so happened that this fine gentleman was a staunch conservationist whose grandfather just happened to be one of the founders of the now widely known Chesapeake Bay Foundation. My mother did not know him, but walked across a few fields, introduced herself, explained the situation that she did not want the land developed, but that we had to sell it because of the divorce and said she would sell it to him if he agreed to put the land into conservation trust, but only on that condition. He agreed, the deal was done. We luckily got to live on the farm for many more years. While this sounds more like something that is regularly done these days with the Land Trust and other organizations, we’d argue our mother was in the early conservation movement. Not to mention had the land been developed we really would have had a much easier financial life. Which might be a good segway into a quick aside on the background of our Mother and how we grew up. Our Mom was a stay at home Mom until getting divorced, in fact she dropped out of college to get married and start a family. After the divorce she did not have enough not to work and support Spencer and I, so she decided to being a photographer and writer. She took some photography lessons which led to becoming a partner in a photography studio which led to she and her partner publishing seven books, several on the Chesapeake Bay such as a “Decoy as Art” and a coffee table book called “The Chesapeake”, she also did a dog book called “Best Friends” and a few others. One thing which Spencer and I as well as my Mom can attest to, there is total truth to the old saying, “starving artist”. We had food on the table, but it was not it certainly was not easy. Our mother is a firm believer is getting the best education possible; she taught us it is something that no matter what happens it can never be taken away from you. So, somehow our mother made sure we went to the very best schools, we had to perform for no other reason that bad kids with poor grades do not get scholarships. I do not want to make this story a novel, so to skip some years and hit a highlight which will serve as a backdrop why Spencer and I are who we are; when I went to college and Spencer was in high school my Mom returned to college at the college of Notre Dame, got her college diploma, worked as a teacher at a private girls school for a few years and then after Spencer graduated from college, decided she wanted to get her Masters from Yale. So she applied, got in, deferred for year to save up some money to go and the next year went. She put herself through Yale and graduated at the top of her class and is now the Dean of students at a girls school in Baltimore. It’s a strange feeling to go visit your Mom living in a dorm room, but the lesson Spencer and I garnered from it was clear, if you want to do something and put your mind to it you can do it, period, end of story. It does not mean there will not be struggles or hurdles you have to get through; it just means you have to get through them. If you always follow the rules, traditions or the like the outcome will be what those things set up to elicit, do not let them define what is possible. What our Mom embarks on next in her 60’s we only can guess, but one thing is for sure, whatever she sets out to do you can trust she will do it and it will be an example and inspiration for Spencer and I.

I think its time to get back to Spencer and I’s fishing and you’re probably ready for that after that short aside, so to pick up where we left off, from creeks we moved to our farm pond and ponds on other farms that were in reach by a bike ride. Once we found largemouth bass it was as if a whole new world opened up. Then once we realized that we could catch largemouth on plastic worms and did not have to use bait it was as if another world opened up. For me I loved watching that worm take off to the right or left as the largemouth picked it up and starting running away with its next meal, or so he thought, then it was a sharp hook set and the fight was on. My brother Spencer probably took largemouth fishing to the extreme as he would get up in the middle of the night if he saw the barometer dropping to catch the feeding frenzy that fish often exhibit before an oncoming front. It was a fun time and probably to the dismay of many of our teachers of the time, Spencer and I were able to recite the Bass Pro catalog then we could our history lessons. During the summers we would spend time with our Grandparents at their house on Leeds Creek off the Miles River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. This is where Spencer and I’s first taste of the salt came. Another new world that we only later explored and continue to do to the fullest. The annual outing with Captain Buddy Harrison was always something we looked forward to. We would usually stay at our cousin’s house with our Aunt and Uncle in Oxford. Our uncle would get us up at about 4am, pile us in his wagon and we would head over to Tilghman Island at o’dark thirty to get the homemade breakfast at Harrison’s and then jump in Captain Buddy’s boat. Back then in the 70’s ( I am laughing as I write this as it seems so long ago, yet I am not even all that old yet) the bluefish in the Chesapeake Bay were big and I can remember the mouth of the Choptank frothing with feeding bluefish. I was always amazed that the rubber hoses would actually catch those bluefish. Knowing that I know now, I think just about anything will catch them when they are in that state of mind.

As I moved into high-school and Spencer into Middle School (we are four years apart in age and three class years between us) came mobility, otherwise known as I got my driving license and Jeep CJ7 so we could besides chasing girls, get to other fishing locations. Now, finally there were no more long bike rides to friends farm ponds or local creeks. So about every day that was fishable after lacrosse or soccer practice we would head to someplace to fish. During the trout season we found ourselves wading the Gunpowder river in Gunpowder Falls State Park. Our favorite part of the river was off Pleasant View Road. We would wade with our friends have a blast catching fish until the sun went down and we could not see anymore. From there I went away to college, luckily being steered by Mom to Washington College on the Eastern Shore. Washington College is located in Chestertown, MD right on the Chester River and not far from the Chesapeake or many other tributaries. I hooked up with some friends and we moved into a place right on the water about 11 miles outside of Chestertown on Still Pond Creek. The Striped Bass moratorium had just lifted and the Striped Bass fishing was nothing less then spectacular. Spencer used to come down on weekends and we catch the living daylights out of big rockfish (what we call Striped Bass in the Chesapeake region). Spencer graduated high school and came to Washington College. We fished every morning and every afternoon, whether that was in Still Pond Creek, in the Chesapeake, or in local ponds around Chestertown. Spring breaks did not bring us to Daytona Beach for wild parties, well maybe we stopped there on the way home, but Spencer and I headed to Lake Okeechobee in Florida to hunt big largemouth bass with Big Bass Bob from Glenn Hunters Guide Service. A cheap room, a few rods and reels, a big tub of peanut butter, jelly and few loafs of bread and big bass make the week an adventure.

After I graduated I thought I was going to be a lawyer and work for my Grandfather’s firm in Baltimore. My Grandfather said to me, “This profession is not going to work for you, you will be stuck in an office, you can not fish as much.” Looking back, great advice, but I still wanted to make money, so I took the LSAT’s. Well, fact of the matter is I am a National Honor Society student who can not take any standardized test worth a darn, so I did not do well and did not get into a law school I wanted to attend. So, I went and worked at the tree nursery (TDH Nurseries) in Monkton, MD where I worked during the summers in college. Not all was bad, the ponds on the nursery had spectacular largemouth bass fishing and outsiders were not allowed to fish there, so I had some great fishing. Meanwhile, Spencer was still in college and I would load my lab Lillie up in the car and go over to the shore every weekend and go striped bass fishing. Not knowing what I was going to do for my future, my Mom suggested that I just go back to school and get a Masters in something; she said you go back to school and something will become evident. So, where to go? Well, not a hard choice, go back to Washington College where Spencer and the fish were. So back I went to get a Masters in Psychology. Spencer had moved to a great place on the water on the lower Chester River which was great because we got to explore the whole area of the lower and middle Chester, the Eastern Neck Island area, mouth of the Chester and some of Eastern Bay (when the wind was calm and we could make it in our 16ft jon boat). Spencer graduated college and went on to do his post graduate work in Maine to study post and beam and historic restoration at a master carpenter school. I stayed to finish my Masters, keep fishing and hopefully figure out what I was going to do with my life besides fish. I have always been a tech/computer geek and since college had been fooling around with the internet. So one day I said, let’s see who has fishing reports out there, sure enough not much. So at first I decided to start a fishing magazine for fishing in Maryland, did the research and the $600 in my saving account was not going to cut it. So, as I was sitting in the Washington College library it hit me, I would start an online magazine. Now so common its almost funny, at the time “interactive media and online publications” was a novel idea in the brave new wild west world of the internet. (I am going to give the short version here, want the longer version, buy me some sushi and a beer and I will give it up). I taught myself some html, then found the smartest kid in the computer lab, convinced him to do side work for me for more then he got paid at the computer lab, got a job at a spinach farm to be able to take that money and pay him and the internet journey was on. Between this time I was lucky enough to meet my current fiancée, Ivette. After a few months we moved in together. Luckily she had an Apple LC 475 computer which got me out of the computer lab and into my first “office” (i.e. spare bedroom with a desk I built from spare wood and a terribly uncomfortable chair.) We launched Chesapeake Angler (of course known as ChesapeakeAngler.com) in 1996 with the really smart computer lab guy, myself and my boss from the spinach farm just happened to be a big angler and helped put up a little cash since I was paying credit cards with credit cards for things and the game was starting to catch up. I got in the car drove around to tackle shops and told them what I was doing, they looked at me a little funny, but luckily Joe Bruce from the former Joe Bruce’s Fly Shop bought in and said lets roll. I went to a MSSA seminar in Annapolis, MD and there was a fishing guide by the name of Richie Gaines from Richie Gaines Guide Service there giving a talk (I still to this day have the original notes from that talk), I went up to him after the talk, explained what I was doing, told him I would trade some advertising if he would help and for whatever reason he said yes. Quickly ChesapeakeAngler.com became well known with the kind help of other outdoor writers like John Page Williams who plugged us in his Chesapeake Almanac in Chesapeake Bay Magazine. I am a ferocious reader and one day I was reading Time magazine and in the beginning of the magazine they usually do short little briefs on interesting stories. There was a short little blurb on Jerry Yang and David Filo talking about this new idea they had on the internet called Yahoo and how they had raised some money. I read it, ran back to my partners house (the computer guru I met in the lab) and said, we need to raise money for this idea, it can be big. He looked at me and said, OK, make it happen. “Make it happen”, three simple works with so much behind them.

I had zero idea how to write a business plan, so one day Ivette and I jumped in the car, drove to Barnes and Noble Towson and I found the best looking “How to write a business plan” book I could afford. I came home and read it cover to cover. I combined all that information with the information I gathered from reading public company quarterly and annual reports (by this time I was still working at the spinach farm, but that was not enough money so I took up trading stocks to fund the company. I had always studied investing, so I just put it into action. Back then margin trading rules were much looser and I just rolled the dice and let it rip. Luckily a rising tide raises all boats and I rode the tide hard to pay the bills). I put a business plan together and just started calling people. I read an article in the WC alumni magazine that a guy I had known was getting into venture capital, I wrote to him, he answered and was interested. He introduced me to many people, one of just happened to be a recently retired Partner at Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm was the original investor in companies like Yahoo, Apple, Google, Cisco and just a few other little companies J Tom McMurray sent me an email one day and said he had met with my WC friend, had been using our site (now called WorldwideAngler.com as we expanded coverage beyond the Chesapeake) for a long time and wanted to meet with me at our office. Our office consisted of a Ivette and I spare bedroom in Easton, MD. I said, great come on over, do you want to go fishing too? He said sure. It was February, cold as all get out, but fishing at the power plant was hot, so said dress warm. She showed up at my door the next day. I said hello and brought him into our “office” upstairs in the converted spare bedroom. I said, “Welcome to WorldwideAngler.com headquarters.” He looked at me, and there was a long silence as he looked around the room (it’s only maybe 10×15 or something, actually the same room where I am sitting and writing this, although with more modern furniture and little better chair), he walked over to the white board and took a look at it carefully, and looked back at me and said, “Is this really is?” I said almost as an apology, “Yes this is it, however my partner has an office in his spare bedroom down the road that we can see as well if you want. But, if you were coming here looking for anything more, this is all we have to show. Sorry if you expected more.” He looked at me and said, “Relax, I just thought there was more, when I called you it sounded like a big operation.” I said, “Nope, this is it, sorry.” He said, “No worries Brandon, this is how we found Cisco, but their office was their living room floor. Let’s go to lunch.” We went to lunch at the Washington Street Pub in Easton, did the business plan on the back of the placemat. Tom put it in his pocket and we went fishing. I had asked Richie Gaines if he could take us just because I was going to have to talk business and did not want to have to run the boat and everything. Richie being the great guy he was said no problem. First cast Tom catches a fish. And that is the way the rest of the day went there. On the way back Tom said how much money do you have in the bank. I told him not much, we traded stocks to fund the company for us to live personally and did web consulting for company money. He said, “Well you need an office and we need to get started.” He pulled out a worn out checkbook from his pocket, wrote out a check for $50,000, handed it to me in the back of the truck where I was sitting and said, “Now, let’s get started”. Fast forward, we had many great people invest and take a chance on us. To this day I am thankful to have had them as investors as well in many cases as mentors. We grew WorldwideAngler.com up the dot wave, raised a few million, almost got bought for a lot of money…twice…but missed it as the market crashed in 2001. We had to shut down, but either being crazy, stubborn, both or somewhat insightful, I said the internet was never going away and bought some of the assets back and started TidalFish.com and ran it part-time for the simple reason that I just loved fishing and figured it would be a good business project on the side.

Spencer at this time is an apprentice doing historic restoration in Baltimore. After WorldwideAngler.com shut down, Tom approached me and said he would love to start a foundation focused on fisheries conservation and asked if I would help start it. I agreed and we started Marine Ventures Foundation which today is one of the leaders in fisheries conservation among private foundations. After ten months we were up and running and rolling, but I still had a passion to go work in the for-profit world in venture capital. One thing led to another and I went to work in Northern Virginia for venture capital firm as an Associate (Tom and I are still partners in Marine Ventures, Tom works fulltime on it and I work on it part-time in conjunction with running Lateral Line). From there I went to American Online (AOL), from there back into venture capital and decided to do my MBA in a global program at UNC, Chapel Hill while working full time (if you decide to work fulltime and go to school, proceed with caution, it’s brutal). Before graduating it became evident to me I did not want to live the crazy life I was living. Ivette and I had a house in Easton where she lived, we had one in Northern Virginia where I lived during the week. It was back and forth, little sleep, incredible traffic in northern Virginia and simply not the life I wanted. Life is to short not to be happy; you can always make more money, but as for “time” well, once it’s spent it’s gone forever. I left the venture capital firm, moved back to Easton and set out to figure out what I was going to do. One thing led to another and one day while fishing Spencer and I came up with Lateral Line. If you want to read that story, see the About Us section of the site.

So, here we are today embarking on the Lateral Line journey. We hope this extremely long blog entry lends a little insight into who we are and how we got here. There is more in the About Us section as well.

When does a hobby turn into a passion, a passion into an obsession, and an obsession into a business? We’re not sure; it seems to all blur together for us. We hope to share our obsession, passion and business with you through Lateral Line and hope that you join us in this fishing adventure.

Brandon & Spencer White
Founders, Lateral Line, Inc.
We fish. It’s who we are…

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