He's Got the Ticket

What others toss as trash, Jon Staenberg hoards as treasure. The Seattle venture capitalist has amassed more than 15,000 sports tickets—worth “maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars,” he says—since his childhood days as a Cornhuskers fan in Nebraska. “I couldn’t believe people were throwing these beautiful things away. And later, when I went into technology, I saw that tickets would eventually be obsolete,” explains Staenberg, an econ major who stayed at Stanford for a master’s in East Asian studies (’85) and an MBA (’88). His most precious sets: full tickets from every game where Barry Bonds has hit a homer, and stubs from 30 of the 104 Big Games. He’d like to establish a “stub museum,” but the 42-year-old bachelor has a more pressing goal: “I’m looking for someone to share my passion for stubs.”