The Most Investment-Savvy Team in NBA History? Eight Years Ago, Half the Warriors’ Locker Room Was Made Up of “Investors”

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Author: Zen, PANews

In the more than 70-year history of the NBA, the most dominant player is undoubtedly Michael Jordan. When it comes to the greatest teams, however, people often give different answers: the six-title Bulls dynasty led by Jordan, the Lakers’ three-peat led by the OK duo of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and the “Death Lineup” Warriors led by Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant. Each is a reasonable choice.

In the world of venture capital, though, there is no suspense over which NBA team was the greatest. The 2017-18 Golden State Warriors already had an extraordinarily impressive résumé on the basketball court. But revisiting the team’s roster eight years later reveals something even more unusual: this was also the most investment-savvy locker room in NBA history.

Of the 17 players on the regular-season roster that year, nearly 10 had investment experience. The best-known examples include Durant, who bet on more than 100 companies including Robinhood and Coinbase, and Andre Iguodala, who made hundreds of millions of dollars from a single investment in Zoom.

Even Omri Casspi, the “Israeli Jordan,” who averaged only 5.7 points per game and did not make it to the playoffs, has just completed a $250 million fundraise for the third fund of his venture capital firm, Swish Ventures, making him the head of a VC firm managing more than $800 million in assets.

If we turn back the clock to 2017, they were merely teammates in the same locker room. Eight or nine years later, however, that locker room looks like it had brought together a group of Silicon Valley investors ahead of its time. The first to turn investing into a “second career” may have been Andre Iguodala.

Iguodala, the “Investment Mentor” in the Warriors’ Locker Room

In the Warriors’ locker room, if the players were asked to vote on who came closest to the role of an “investment mentor,” Andre Iguodala would be the overwhelming choice.

Before the Warriors dynasty truly took shape, Iguodala had already begun studying investing. He once recalled that he first bought Zynga stock through E-Trade. After earning a decent return in a short period, he began pondering a more fundamental question: If it is possible to make money by buying a company’s stock after it goes public, why not invest before it goes public—or even when it has just been founded?

It was through this process that Iguodala first came into real contact with early-stage investing. Later, Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, became one of his most important investment mentors. Jordan not only introduced him to entrepreneurs and investors, but also helped him develop a framework closer to that of a professional investor: rather than invest in everything, look for companies he truly understood and could help through his personal resources.

By around 2018, Iguodala had invested in more than 40 companies through investment vehicles including F9 Strategies. These included Zoom, PagerDuty, Allbirds, Casper, Carta, Lime, and Jumia, and he joined Jumia’s board of directors. Over the following years, those investments gradually entered their monetization phase. In 2019, as Zoom, PagerDuty, and Jumia went public one after another, Iguodala entered his “IPO harvest season.”

Zoom was Iguodala’s most representative investment. His relationship with Zoom founder Eric Yuan was established largely through basketball. Yuan was a Warriors fan, and the two connected after discussing basketball and entrepreneurship at an event. Iguodala ultimately became an investor in Zoom before its IPO.

In 2019, Zoom listed on Nasdaq and quickly became one of the year’s strongest-performing technology IPOs. Iguodala’s exact return has never been publicly disclosed, but judging from the growth in Zoom’s valuation and market capitalization, it was undoubtedly one of the most successful early-stage investments of his career. Iguodala later openly lamented that he should have “invested more.”

What truly made Iguodala stand out on that Warriors team, however, was not just the scope of his investment portfolio. As his network in investment circles expanded, he began proactively introducing the VCs and entrepreneurs he knew to other athletes. He also organized investment opportunities so that players around him could participate together.

In 2017, he and business partner Rudy Cline-Thomas founded the Players Technology Summit, bringing athletes, VCs, and technology company executives into the same venue. Eventually, “helping professional athletes enter technology investing” even developed into a relatively mature business model.

After retiring, Iguodala did not remain at the individual angel-investment stage. Instead, he moved fully into the professional venture capital industry. Today, he is a member of the investment team at Mosaic General Partnership.

From first buying Zynga on E-Trade, to investing in Zoom, to bringing teammates into Silicon Valley’s investment network, Iguodala completed more than a transition from athlete to investor. In a sense, he was also the first person in that Warriors locker room to start “passing the ball”—except this time, he was passing along investment opportunities.

Durant Turned Joining the Warriors into a “Silicon Valley Education”

For Kevin Durant, the most glorious stretch of his career was undoubtedly the three years he spent with the Golden State Warriors. In 2016, Durant joined the Warriors, forming the nearly unstoppable “Death Lineup” with Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. Over the next three years, he won the only two NBA championships of his career and captured Finals MVP honors in consecutive seasons.

Off the court, a less noticeable change was also taking place: Durant was truly entering the world of venture capital. The latest event to draw renewed attention to Durant’s investment portfolio came after Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Multiple media outlets reported that, as one of Hugging Face’s early investors, Durant may have earned as much as $60 million in returns from the transaction.

On that “Death Lineup” Warriors team, Durant was also one of the first players to systematize investing as a professional athlete. As early as 2016, he and his longtime business partner Rich Kleiman founded Thirty Five Ventures, now known as 35V. Strictly speaking, his investment career did not begin only after he joined the Warriors. The two had already begun building their business and investment platform near the end of Durant’s time with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

But the three years he spent in the Bay Area fundamentally changed the trajectory of Durant’s investment career. During his time with the Warriors from 2016 to 2019, Durant and Kleiman began immersing themselves in Silicon Valley’s startup and venture capital circles. They frequently met entrepreneurs, investment firms, and technology companies, quickly building their own network. Companies that later became household names, including Postmates, Acorns, Whoop, Overtime, Robinhood, and Coinbase, gradually appeared on his investment list.

When ESPN interviewed Durant in 2018, his portfolio had already expanded to approximately 30 companies, with typical early-stage investments ranging from $250,000 to $1 million per deal. These included Coinbase, Acorns, Rubrik, LimeBike, and Postmates. At the same time, the people around him discussing investments had become some of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley’s VC community, including Ron Conway and Ben Horowitz.

It was also during this period that Durant first truly understood how venture capital operates. He later recalled that his previous understanding of VC was simple: find a good company, invest in it, and wait for it to take off. But after entering the Bay Area, he discovered that a venture capital firm might receive hundreds of deals every day, while only a small number would proceed to the next stage of research. Investors must constantly screen opportunities, study companies, communicate with CEOs, engineers, and teams, and then decide which companies are worth backing.

This gradually led Durant to realize that venture capital is not about finding a single “stroke of genius,” but rather a long-term, continuous process of filtering, learning, and making bets. He later brought this mindset into his own investing. Instead of trying from the outset to find the next world-changing supercompany, it is better to continually seek projects one can understand and is willing to back, then let time and the portfolio amplify the returns generated by a small number of winners.

Eight years later, this approach has produced abundant results. 35V, Durant’s investment firm, has a portfolio of more than 100 startups spanning fintech, AI, healthcare, media, and other sectors. Beyond startups, he has also expanded into professional sports, holding stakes in teams including the Philadelphia Union and Gotham FC.

Although Durant parted ways with the Warriors after only three seasons, those three years were likely among the most influential of his career, both in basketball and investing. He won two championships and two Finals MVP awards there, and it was also where he completed his transformation from an “NBA star who invests” into a systematic technology investor.

Casspi, Who Averaged 5.7 Points per Game, Eventually Managed an $800 Million Fund

Compared with Durant, who arrived in the Bay Area already prepared to become an investor, Omri Casspi’s story better illustrates the influence the Warriors’ locker room had on the players’ investment philosophies.

In the summer of 2017, Casspi joined the Warriors on a minimum contract. During the 2017-18 season, he played in only 53 games and averaged 5.7 points per game. In April 2018, he was waived because the team needed to clear a roster spot for the playoffs. Although the Warriors ultimately still gave him a championship ring, in terms of on-court performance, this was an unremarkable stop in his 10-year NBA career.

For Casspi, who played for seven teams over the course of his career, however, the 2017-18 season with the Warriors had the greatest impact on his post-retirement plans.

Within the team, he saw Curry, Durant, and Iguodala discussing their investment portfolios in the locker room and exchanging information about startups they were considering. At games, many of the people sitting courtside were Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VCs, and the players often met with them after games. Casspi gradually realized that, besides playing basketball, “picking winners and investing in entrepreneurs” might be the second-most interesting job in the world.

Influenced by this environment, Casspi began angel investing late in his career, gradually investing in companies including DocuSign and DayTwo. After retiring in 2021, he began entering Israel’s technology sector in a more systematic way. In 2022, he founded the early-stage fund Sheva and raised $50 million, primarily investing in pre-seed and seed-stage companies.

In 2024, he launched a new fund under the name Swish Ventures, which subsequently absorbed Sheva. That January, Casspi rented a suite at Chase Center, the Warriors’ home arena, to host Cognition AI co-founders Scott Wu and Steven Hao.

The Warriors-Lakers game that night was thrilling, with the teams battling through two overtimes and Curry scoring 46 points. Casspi, however, was paying more attention to another “pitch” taking place in the suite. Wu was introducing him to an AI programming agent that had not yet officially launched. The next day, Casspi had a lengthy conversation with Wu in Palo Alto and soon decided to participate in Cognition’s seed round.

At the time, Cognition’s valuation was only $150 million. Today, the valuation Cognition is seeking in its next financing round could rise to $47 billion.

Another example is Upwind, a cloud security company backed early by Swish. Its valuation was approximately $65 million in its 2022 seed round, but had reached $1.5 billion by its Series B in early 2026. Eon, a cloud backup company backed at an early stage, and the AI company Applied Compute have also entered the ranks of unicorns.

As of September this year, Swish’s portfolio contained only around 20 companies, eight of which had already reached billion-dollar valuations. The latest fund, which had just completed a $250 million raise, received commitments from institutions including Sequoia Capital, U.S. pension funds, and university endowments, bringing its assets under management to approximately $800 million.

When Casspi joined the Warriors, he was merely a journeyman role player who had bounced among multiple NBA teams. Nine years later, the capital he manages far exceeds the approximately $18 million in salary he earned over his entire NBA career. In a sense, he is the best example of the Warriors’ “investment culture” generating long-term returns.

Curry, the “Platform Investor,” Integrated Investing into His Business Empire

Compared with Durant, Casspi, and Iguodala, Curry’s investment path has been much more low-key.

That does not mean he entered late, however. Curry began engaging with technology startups quite early. He was involved in founding the marketing technology company Slyce and later gradually integrated his personal brand, media, philanthropic, and investment businesses into a single commercial system through SC30. By December 2018, SC30 had participated in the financing of the online travel platform SnapTravel. Around 2019, its publicly disclosed portfolio had expanded to eight companies, including esports organization TSM and smartphone company Palm.

Compared with Durant, Curry also appears to have a different investment philosophy. He does not seem eager to rapidly expand the number of investments. Instead, he tends to look for companies that can create synergies with his brand, interests, and resources.

His 2019 investment in the education platform Guild Education is a typical example. Guild primarily helps large companies such as Walmart, Disney, and Chipotle provide employees with continuing education and career training. At the time, Curry had just established the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, and education was already a long-term focus of his. As a result, when SC30 invested in Guild, it did not merely provide capital; it also joined as a strategic partner.

Three years later, Guild completed a $175 million financing round at a $4.4 billion valuation. Although Curry’s specific cost basis is unknown and his actual return cannot be calculated from this information, the subsequent change in valuation indicates that it was at least a highly successful growth investment.

Afterward, SC30’s investment business expanded further into Penny Jar Capital. Curry himself serves as a special adviser to the VC firm, while day-to-day investing is handled by a professional team led by longtime business partner Bryant Barr. Penny Jar’s investment scope now covers multiple areas, including enterprise software, healthcare, and AI.

In this respect, Curry may be the closest thing among this group of Warriors players to a “platform investor.”

He did not transform completely into a professional fund manager like Casspi, nor did he rapidly scale up a personal investment firm like Durant. Instead, he chose to embed investing into his broader business system: the brand provides influence, the business network provides resources, and a professional team screens and manages the investments.

From Klay and Draymond to Pachulia, the “Investor List” Keeps Growing

Aside from his endorsement deal with Anta, Klay Thompson, who formed the “Splash Brothers” with Curry, has consistently maintained a lower profile off the court than Curry, Durant, and Iguodala. This is even more true in venture capital. But in reality, he has not stayed away from the game.

Klay began investing more actively in startups after 2020. In 2020, he participated through the athlete investment platform PLUS Capital in a financing round for the mental-health company Lyra Health. He subsequently appeared on the investor lists of companies including Dapper Labs, sports media company Overtime, health technology company Carbon Health, sports social platform Sleepe, and AI voice company Wispr.

Another Warriors core player, Draymond Green, took a path closer to that of a traditional angel investor. He began investing in startups as early as the mid-2010s, backing projects including orthodontics company SmileDirectClub, restaurant technology platform Snackpass, and tequila brand Lobos 1707.

Unlike Durant, Green never intended to build his own VC firm. He believed that professional investors such as Bill Gurley were already in his circle, so he preferred to become a fund LP or participate in specific deals alongside investors he knew well.

The Warriors’ “investor list” does not end there.

Center JaVale McGee’s investments carry a strong personal-lifestyle element. After switching to a plant-based diet, he invested in Beyond Meat, plant-based snack brand Outstanding Foods, and restaurant brand Tocaya Organica. Beyond Meat subsequently went public in 2019, with its stock price rising 163% above the offering price on its first day of trading. In 2020, McGee co-invested in Dapper Labs with Iguodala and other NBA players, and later continued participating in its financing rounds. In 2022, McGee also participated in the financing of Rye, a Web3 e-commerce infrastructure project.

Another Warriors center, Zaza Pachulia, consciously studied business while he was still a player. During his early years with the Atlanta Hawks, he took business courses at Emory University and later attended related programs at Harvard. After ending his playing career in 2019, he joined the Warriors’ front office while continuing to engage with startups and investing.

His technology investment activity began to form a consistent record around 2023. That year, Pachulia participated in the seed round of the healthcare AI company Tennr at a valuation of approximately $22.8 million. When Tennr completed a new financing round a year later, Pachulia continued to follow on. By 2025, Tennr had raised $101 million in financing and reached a valuation of $605 million, with leading firms including a16z and Lightspeed among its investors.

Beyond Tennr, Pachulia is also an investor in AI chip company Cerebras. After Cerebras completed a $1 billion financing round this year, its valuation reached approximately $23 billion, and it had already signed a large-scale AI inference infrastructure partnership with OpenAI. In July this year, he also became an angel investor in the AI security company Neo, which has raised a cumulative $100 million, with investors including a16z, Bessemer, and Craft Ventures.

From this perspective, Pachulia has gone even further than many of his former teammates in the locker room. He has not founded his own VC firm, but has gradually expanded from familiar areas such as hotels and basketball training into healthcare AI, AI chips, and AI security.

Power forward David West’s investments were more industry-focused. In 2016, he invested $250,000 in the clean-energy company Zoetic Global. He did more than simply hold equity: he also joined the company as an adviser and remained involved in energy projects over the long term. After retiring, he continued to engage in entrepreneurship- and investment-related activities.

Reserve guard Shaun Livingston took a path different from all of the players mentioned above. He had already tried investing in film and television before joining the Warriors, but it was only after being influenced by teammates such as Iguodala in the Bay Area that he began engaging with VC systematically. He once sat in on investment meetings at Kleiner Perkins, observing how startups pitched to a fund. He later became an LP in some projects at the venture capital firm Eonxi and continued to remain active in the Bay Area’s startup and investment network.

Looking back at the Warriors’ 2017-18 team photo, the result is fascinating: of the 17 players, at least 10 later accumulated clear experience in startup investing, angel investing, or VC. It is not an exaggeration to say that “half the locker room” became investors.

Why the Warriors? The Silicon Valley Network Behind the Locker Room

Why did the 2017-18 Warriors bring together so many investors in one locker room? Perhaps what truly made this team unique was an environment that would be difficult for other NBA teams to replicate.

The first factor was geography. At the time, the Warriors were located deep in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the players’ training, homes, and social lives effectively embedded in the region with the world’s highest concentration of venture capital. VCs on Sand Hill Road, startup founders in San Francisco, technology executives, and billionaires were not distant names in financial news. They might be sitting courtside at a game or having dinner together after it.

The second factor was the team’s owner. Joe Lacob was not a traditional sports owner. He joined Kleiner Perkins in 1987 and worked in venture capital for more than 20 years, leading investments in more than 50 startups across life sciences, healthcare technology, the internet, and energy. It was only after buying the Warriors that he gradually stepped away from the fund’s day-to-day management.

In other words, this team carried strong Silicon Valley genes from the very top. The Warriors’ later emphasis on data analytics, sports science, and technology in team management also had something in common with that background.

More important than geography and ownership, however, was likely the network effect.

It is not unusual for an NBA player to know a few investors. But when Iguodala had entered the network of Silicon Valley VCs such as a16z, Durant was frequently meeting with Ron Conway and Ben Horowitz, and Curry had his own network of entrepreneurs and brand connections—and all of these people happened to sit in the same locker room every day—individual networks began to connect with one another, forming an interconnected athlete-capital network.

Casspi could rent out a suite at a Warriors game and arrange for startup founders, potential customers, corporate executives, and investors to occupy the same space. Watching a basketball game itself became a setting for building business relationships and facilitating deals. In a sense, they possessed another type of scarce asset: relationships with corporate executives, media reach, and access to social networks that ordinary investors would have difficulty entering.

For startups, these resources can sometimes be more valuable than a check. The 2017-18 Warriors happened to concentrate all of them in one place.

Thus, the Warriors were not only the “Death Lineup” that outsiders saw—a team that had nearly maximized its basketball resources, with four All-Stars, two MVPs, and a group of highly compatible, experienced role players. Off the court, they also achieved a rare concentration of resources.

Team basketball was the clearest hallmark of those Warriors: sharing the ball, creating space, and finding the teammate in the best position. Off the court, they seemed to bring the same logic into the investment world. The “Death Lineup” shared more than basketball. In a sense, they also shared a ticket into Silicon Valley.