Silicon Valley meets the court: Tech trio powering padel’s rise in Bay Area

From the tech world to the padel courts, three friends — Jessica Talbert, Katie Lampert and Neil Chainani — left their careers in tech and fintech to pursue a new dream: building a local sports community around one of the world’s fastest-growing games, padel. (Talbert and Chainani, now married, are expecting their first child.)

Think of padel as tennis meets squash. It’s played in doubles on a smaller, enclosed court where players can hit the ball off the glass walls for fast, continuous rallies. A massive hit in Europe and Latin America, the sport is now taking off in the United States.

With courts rare in the region, they launched Park Padel in November 2023 with public courts at San Francisco’s Embarcadero, followed by their flagship club in South San Francisco in November 2024. With