What Happened When Venture Capitalists Took Over the Golden State Warriors
After racking up a historic N.B.A. season, the team’s owners
— most of them from Silicon Valley — think their
management style deserves some of the credit. Are they right?
By BRUCE SCHOENFELD
MARCH 30, 2016
It was still dark one morning early this year when Joe Lacob, the majority owner of the Golden State Warriors, drove his Mercedes station wagon through the Stanford University campus. He parked near the business school, then walked down a sidewalk through a drizzle to meet a group of Silicon Valley executives. The ex-C.E.O. of OpenTable, now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, was coming. So were a founder of the online-learning start-up Curious and a managing director of Vanguard Ventures. On another morning, they all might have met at a charity event or a TED Talk. But it was a Tuesday, and that meant basketball.
Lacob, who has worked in venture capital for three decades, has an open, expressive face and broad shoulders. He’s six feet tall but seems taller. The previous night, he watched his Warriors play a home game in Oakland, and now he looked tired. “The Tuesday mornings after we play Monday nights are the hardest,” he said. The basketball court, which is normally used by students and faculty members, has a tidy, corporate look: gleaming hardwood surrounded by plexiglass walls. In his Warriors T-shirt and shorts, Lacob pushed his hands against the glass and stretched his legs. “Honestly, this is my favorite time of the week,” he told me.
One by one, other players arrived. Most have known Lacob for years, since early in his career at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is when he helped start this pickup game. There was no reason for anyone to be deferential to him. But owning a basketball team has cachet, especially when that team has come to rank among the best in N.B.A. history. Nobody mentioned his own business affairs, but everyone was eager to talk about Lacob’s. “Joe, good to see Barnes back,” someone said, referring to Harrison Barnes, a Warriors player who had missed games with an injury.
Remainder of article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/what-happened-when-venture-capitalists-took-over-the-golden-state-warriors.html?&_r=1
