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What Happened When Venture Capitalists Took Over the Golden State Warriors. Watch In A Valley Of Violence Megavideo. After he finished playing, Lacob wiped the perspiration from his hands with a towel.

Then he pulled out his championship ring and passed it around for examination. They’ve been asking to see it for two months,” he explained. The ring had an extravagant and revealing design. One diamond had been inlaid for each of the 2. Warriors won from 2.

Lacob and his investors bought the team, through last year’s N. B. A. finals. “How much does this thing weigh?” asked Tom Mc. Connell, the managing director from Vanguard Ventures, lifting his hand up and down as if trying to estimate its value.

Photo. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors shooting over Kyle O’Quinn of the Knicks as Joe Lacob, majority owner of the Warriors, looked on. Credit. Ian Allen for The New York Times Silicon Valley — the place itself, but also the society of smart, technologically savvy people who surround it — is full of basketball fans. Many of them made a lot of money in their 3. Now in their 5. 0s, they’re looking for something gratifying to do with it.

In 2. 00. 2, Wyc Grousbeck, a principal at Highland Capital Partners who spent two years at Stanford’s business school, bought the Boston Celtics along with a group of investors that included Lacob. In recent years, venture capitalists, private- equity investors and hedge- funders have been acquiring N. B. A. teams. The Detroit Pistons, Milwaukee Bucks, Philadelphia 7. Atlanta Hawks all belong to this new class of investor.

The Sacramento Kings and the Memphis Grizzlies are both owned by Silicon Valley engineers. If you include Lacob’s Warriors, that’s more than a quarter of the league. Lacob was not the first venture capitalist to buy a franchise, but he is the first to operate one according to what might be called Silicon Valley precepts: nimble management, open communication, integrating the wisdom of outside advisers and continuous re- evaluation of what companies do and how they do it. None of that typically happens in professional sports.

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Most franchise owners of previous generations became wealthy mastering businesses that did one specific thing, if only because that was the way that people used to become wealthy in America. They’ve run their teams, for better or worse, in the same autocratic, hidebound fashion that they ran those companies. As a manager, Lacob prefers to surround himself with expertise and exploit it. This season, Lacob’s sixth as majority owner, the Warriors are on pace to break the league record of 7.

He and his partners bought a team that already had Stephen Curry, Golden State’s best player and a transcendent talent who is having one of the most dominant seasons in league history. He would be hitting tongue- flick jump shots from 3. But Lacob won’t accept that what the Warriors have achieved is a product of anything but a master plan. The great, great venture capitalists who built company after company, that’s not an accident,” he said.

And none of this is an accident, either.”After the pickup game, Lacob pulled on a sweatshirt and went to breakfast at a cafeteria on the ground floor. He goes there so often that one of the smoothies on the menu, involving orange juice, vanilla yogurt, bananas and strawberries, has been named for him. He pointed this out, then ordered one.

When I asked him about the previous night’s game, he could hardly contain himself. He boasted that the Warriors are playing in a far more sophisticated fashion than the rest of the league. We’ve crushed them on the basketball court, and we’re going to for years because of the way we’ve built this team,” he said. But what really set the franchise apart, he said, was the way it operated as a business.

We’re light- years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we’re going to go about things,” he said. We’re going to be a handful for the rest of the N. B. A. to deal with for a long time.”When Lacob and his group of investors bought the Warriors in 2. Larry Ellison, one of the 1. It was more than anyone had ever spent on an N. B. A. franchise at the time. And this wasn’t the Lakers or the Celtics or even the Knicks.

This was the Warriors, a team that plays in Oakland and had last won a championship in 1. In 2. 01. 0, Lacob promised another within five years. And last June, the Warriors won the finals, defeating Le.

Bron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games. In the months since, they’ve attained the status of a cultural phenomenon. More than any team since the “Showtime” Lakers of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul- Jabbar, they’ve become famous not just for winning but also for how they win. You don’t need to know the nuances of the sport to appreciate Curry’s uncanny accuracy, or the fact that he routinely launches shots from longer distances than anyone ever has. You just need Internet access and a willingness to suspend disbelief. Curry has moved beyond “Sports.

Center” to mainstream pop culture; even his 3- year- old, Riley, has developed a following. When Curry went on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to be interviewed, a reaction shot of her in the audience elicited the biggest cheer of the night. What’s happening with the Warriors as a business isn’t something Kimmel is likely to mention, but it’s equally impressive.

The $4. 50 million that Lacob’s group paid to Chris Cohan, the former owner, seemed so laughably expensive because of the woeful state of the Warriors franchise. This wasn’t just a bad team, but a team that seemed permanently stuck in a state of irrelevance. The little engine that couldn’t” is how the investor Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos and a lifelong fan of the Warriors, describes it. During Cohan’s 1. Warriors had reached the N. B. A. playoffs only once. Sixteen of the league’s 3.

So on an odds basis,” Lacob notes, “you’re supposed to make it half the time. Something was very wrong.”Such ineptitude had eroded interest. There were only 7,0. The arena where the team played, in a vast parking lot beside a highway, was outdated. Its corridors were narrow, its catering facilities rudimentary.

It didn’t have rooms that could be leased for corporate meetings. While the league’s newest facilities have been built with palatial home clubhouses the size of health clubs, the Warriors’ was austere and cramped.

One look at it during a road trip was said to discourage players around the league from considering the team when they became free agents. Other potential buyers perceived the institutional decrepitude as a drawback. Lacob and his partner, the Hollywood entrepreneur Peter Guber, believed it represented an opportunity. That’s what Joe does,” says Chip Perry, the founder of Autotrader.

Kleiner Perkins investment that Lacob aided as a board member for 1. He saw potential in what we were doing with Autotrader, even when others were dismissive.

He’s one of those rare people who can look around the corner and see something interesting.” In the Warriors, Lacob saw a start- up disguised as an underperforming business, a sports franchise that had been run autocratically — and therefore ineptly — as the industry evolved around it. That $4. 50 million investment is now worth around $2 billion. In 2. 01. 9, the Warriors will move to a new, self- financed arena complex on the San Francisco waterfront that will include office buildings and commercial space. The move is estimated to add as much as $1 billion more to the club’s value.

And while there’s only one Curry, the way Lacob and Guber run the franchise is replicable — at least in theory. Among this emergent generation of investment tycoons, that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

I knew what Joe had done,” said Marc Lasry of Avenue Capital Group, a Moroccan- born billionaire who partnered with the private- equity investor Wesley Edens to buy the Milwaukee Bucks in 2.