At the big tech headquarters for Facebook and Twitter and at venture firms across San Francisco and Sand Hill Road, sneakers are the new hot investment: royal blue and golden yellow, basketball colors. Silicon Valley loves their local Golden State Warriors, and after a forty-year wait, they’re joining the Bay Area in anticipation of a battle for the NBA Finals against LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers.
The feeling is mutual. Through an ownership group with strong ties to venture capital and a willingness to test new technology and try out partnerships with their techie neighbors, the Warriors have embraced the tech community in turn. Here’s how the Warriors have used a flair for technology and partner-building to woo Silicon Valley—and why tech loves the team and its ‘Splash Brothers’ in turn.
A techie ownership
The Warriors’ deep ties to tech start at the top. Its owner group is led by Joe Lacob, a long-time investor at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. While co-chairman Peter Guber hails from the entertainment industry, many of the organization’s executive board members are also VCs: John Walecka of Redpoint Ventures, Mark Stevens, who became a billionaire at Sequoia Capital, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a founder of The Social+Capital Partnership and an early Facebook executive. Others involved include Benchmark’s Bob Kagle, YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley and Zappos cofounder Nick Swinmurn.
“The tech community admires how Joe and Peter were able to turn around this franchise,” says Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman, the only holdover from the team’s previous ownership group, and a one-time supporter of Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s failed bid to buy the team. “They assembled a truly great group of people that genuinely enjoy the journey we are taking ‘together’.”
Among the key hires they made, Harman and others say, are general manager Bob Myers, named the NBA executive of the year, president Rick Welts and NBA legend Jerry West, a team advisor. The most controversial: letting go coach Mark Jackson, who’d guided the team to become a playoff regular, in lieu of first-time coach Steve Kerr, who turned down the New York Knicks and led the team to an NBA-best 67 wins.
“When they bought the team in 2010, a lot of people thought it was a crazy price,” says Geoff Yang, Walecka’s colleague at Redpoint and a fixture at games along with fellow investors like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. The $450 million price tag ownership paid will look cheap given the team’s media and real estate potential in addition to the wins. Yang has this to say when asked if the team’s exceeded expectations for its investors: “Hell yeah.”
Social friends
By proving quick to adopt new tech, the Warriors have made it easy for the community to rally behind them. The team unveiled its alternate slate-colored jerseys at Twitter headquarters in September; players’ Twitter handles appear on warm-up shirts and on the jumbotron when starting lineups are announced. Players also use Vine and a Twitter Mirror and have been known to direct message with Twitter execs after games.
“As a fan, I love this team,” says Adam Bain, Twitter’s president and a courtside fixture as a guest of Guber, the co-owner. “The message is one we deeply believe in the tech community: you are successful in life if you pass the ball—you win by amplifying others,” says Bain, who points to Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green as his favorite Twitter follows from the playoff roster.
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.@warriors influencers and @hbarnes reveal the new slate jersey on @twitter first from Twitter HQ #DubsConfidential pic.twitter.com/qi4bLAIAkP
— Twitter Sports (@TwitterSports) September 29, 2014
But Twitter isn’t the only beneficiary of Warriors’ tech savvy, says Twitter vice president Jeff Dejelo, a nine-year season ticket holder who brings the team’s drum line and junior dance squad to his annual sales team awards shows. League MVP Stephen Curry has experimented with social startups in past seasons, and the Warriors are known for being one of the most aggressive teams in sports when it comes to wearable technology and using data for performance. Popular player Barnes interned for a few days at Facebook, and longtime Warriors digital guru Kevin Cote moved to Facebook to handle strategic partnerships with sports franchises in May. “They are going out of the way to be part of our tech community, and that stands out,” Dejelo says.
The team now counts on social media coordinator Julie Phayer to reach the team’s millions of social fans across those platforms (800,000 Twitter followers and 3.3 million Facebook fans alone). The overall social strategy makes fans feel like they have more access to the players, who themselves maintain family-friendly images and most importantly, seem to actually like each other, says Redpoint entrepreneur-in-residence and mega-fan Jeremy Gordon. Even the team’s courtside reporter, Roslyn Gold-Onwude, is a former Stanford varsity basketball starter who spent time working at Tesla.
Underdog startups, underdog team?
Many fans of the Warriors, of course, don’t work in tech. But of those who do, loyalties can range from just a couple years to decades. Bain and Dejelo are both converts from Cleveland, who theoretically might have rooted for their hometown’s own championship drought to end. Others became Warriors fans in the last tech boom of the late 1990s, when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls ruled the league. “It sucked to be a Warriors fan for many years,” says Joe Beninato, a repeat entrepreneur and investor who gave up the Bulls for Warriors season tickets nearly 20 years ago.
What a beautiful morning! #DubNation pic.twitter.com/k4FDraJeZk
— Jeremy Gordon (@JeremySF) June 4, 2015
In past years, Beninato’s struggled to get coworkers excited for sporting events. (When we speak on the phone Wednesday night, I almost blurt out the score of the unfolding Blackhawks NHL finals game, not realizing Beninato’s got the game recorded at home.) After so many years of futility, the Warriors have developed an underdog story that has the Bay Area excited, Beninato says. “It’s almost like a charmed season, and in the playoffs, the volume goes to another level.”
Underdog is a word that many tech fans of the Warriors use to describe the team, Curry once considered undersized; the team one of the league’s lost franchises. "There's a fascinating narrative playing out, turning an under-performing franchise into a championship-caliber team" through trades and the draft, says Nextdoor cofounder Prakash Janakiraman, a ten-year season ticket holder.
But with Curry putting up video game-type stats (techies love fluky stats) and the team the heavy favorite to win the title, that underdog narrative may be rapidly running out. And while investors compare the team to a startup—management hired strong talent and changed up the model, and fans bought tickets early, putting faith in the team’s ability to grow—these are largely very successful business people, rooting for a well-funded and now-stacked franchise. “I think that for many people in Silicon Valley and in other cities, they just like supporting a winner,” says fan and Homebrew investor Satya Patel.
But for this playoff run at least, the combination of history-breaking and tech savvy means that this NBA Finals should turn out a who’s who of tech names. Billionaire and Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri’s been known to frequent the good seats; one regular calls Twitter cofounder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey “a man of the people” for sitting one or two rows back from courtside.
Still, even Silicon Valley’s most diehard supporters are quick to point out that the team’s fanbase is much more than just a venture pageant. Whereas the NFL and baseball have two franchises in the area, the Warriors are the only game in town. Some in tech hope, however quixotically, that the silhouette of the area’s Bay Bridge on Warriors jerseys can create some solidarity between techie and non-tech resident alike, even as the team gets ready to move to San Francisco, to a high-tech facility easier for startup founders and investors to stop by, but farther from the more working-class fans of the East Bay.
“The Golden State Warriors are the Bay Area’s team…not just tech,” says SV Angel founder Ron Conway, who says he gets to about eight games each year. “It’s all anyone is talking about. On the streets every day, the Warriors are a unifying force.”
