By Zen, PANews
Debates over the greatest NBA team usually start with familiar names: Michael Jordan’s Bulls, the three-peat Lakers built around Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and the Kevin Durant-Stephen Curry Warriors. PANews makes a different case. In venture investing, it says, the answer is far less disputed.
Its focus is the 2017-18 Golden State Warriors. On the court, that roster was already one of the most decorated in league history. Off it, looking back eight years later, PANews argues that the team may have housed the most investment-savvy locker room the NBA has seen.
Among the 17 regular-season players on that roster, nearly 10 later built visible records in angel investing, startup finance, or venture capital. The best-known names include Kevin Durant, whose bets have included Robinhood and Coinbase among more than 100 companies, and Andre Iguodala, whose investment in Zoom became one of the standout stories tied to that group. Even Omri Casspi, who averaged just 5.7 points that season and did not stay with the team through the playoffs, has since raised a $250 million third fund for Swish Ventures and now runs a firm with more than $800 million in assets under management.
Andre Iguodala and the role of locker-room mentor
If there was one player in that Warriors locker room who fit the role of an investment mentor, PANews points to Iguodala.
He had started thinking seriously about investing before the Warriors dynasty fully formed. Iguodala recalled that he first bought shares of Zynga through E-Trade. After seeing a quick return, he began asking a broader question: if buying a stock after a company goes public can make money, why not invest before the IPO, or even when the company is newly formed? That line of thinking became his entry point into early-stage investing.
One of the most important guides in that process was Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. According to PANews, Jordan helped introduce Iguodala to founders and investors and pushed him toward a more disciplined framework: rather than trying to invest in everything, focus on companies he truly understood and where his own network and experience could be useful.
By around 2018, Iguodala had invested in more than 40 companies through vehicles including F9 Strategies. The list included Zoom, PagerDuty, Allbirds, Casper, Carta, Lime, and Jumia, and he also joined Jumia’s board. In the years that followed, several of those bets began to mature. In 2019, when Zoom, PagerDuty, and Jumia all went public, PANews describes it as his IPO harvest season.
Zoom stands out as the signature example. Iguodala’s relationship with founder Eric Yuan grew in part through basketball. Yuan was a Warriors fan, and after the two connected at an event and talked about basketball and startups, Iguodala eventually became a pre-IPO investor in Zoom. The exact return has not been publicly disclosed. Even so, PANews says the growth in Zoom’s valuation and market capitalization makes it one of the most successful early investments of his career. Iguodala later said publicly that he wished he had invested more.
What made him different in that locker room was not only the size of his portfolio. As his network in venture capital expanded, he began introducing other athletes to VCs and founders, and he also helped organize opportunities so teammates could invest alongside him.
In 2017, Iguodala and business partner Rudy Cline-Thomas launched the Players Technology Summit, bringing athletes, venture capitalists, and tech executives into the same room. Over time, helping professional athletes enter the technology investment world became a more established commercial model. After retiring, he moved beyond personal angel investing and joined the investment team at Mosaic General Partnership.
PANews frames that arc as more than a career shift. Iguodala was still passing, just in a different form. This time, he was passing investment opportunities.
Kevin Durant turned his Warriors stint into a Silicon Valley education
For Durant, the brightest stretch of his playing career came in Golden State. He joined the Warriors in 2016, teamed up with Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green, won the only two NBA championships of his career, and took home Finals MVP in both title runs.
At the same time, a less visible shift was taking place away from basketball. PANews says Durant truly entered the world of venture investing during those Bay Area years. The article points to a much more recent example that brought renewed attention to his portfolio: Nvidia’s $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. Multiple media outlets later reported that Durant, as one of the company’s early investors, may have made as much as $60 million from the transaction.
He was also one of the earliest players on that Warriors team to systematize investing. In 2016, Durant and longtime business partner Rich Kleiman launched Thirty Five Ventures, now known as 35V. His investing life did not begin the moment he arrived in Golden State; PANews notes that he and Kleiman had already started building a broader business and investment structure toward the end of his Oklahoma City Thunder years.
Still, the three seasons in the Bay Area changed the trajectory. From 2016 to 2019, Durant and Kleiman moved deeper into Silicon Valley’s startup and venture network, meeting founders, investment firms, and technology executives at a high rate. Postmates, Acorns, Whoop, Overtime, Robinhood, and Coinbase all appeared in his portfolio during that period.
By the time ESPN interviewed Durant in 2018, his portfolio had grown to about 30 companies. His typical early check size was between $250,000 and $1 million, including bets on Coinbase, Acorns, Rubrik, LimeBike, and Postmates. Around him were people such as Ron Conway and Ben Horowitz, two of the most influential names in venture capital.
Durant later said that this was when he first understood how venture capital really works. Before moving to the Bay Area, his view of VC had been simple: find a great company, invest, and wait for it to break out. Once inside that ecosystem, he saw something more demanding. A venture firm might receive hundreds of opportunities in a day, while only a small share move forward. Investors screen continuously, research companies, talk with CEOs, engineers, and teams, and then decide what deserves a bet.
That changed how he thought about investing. PANews says Durant came to see venture capital not as a hunt for a single inspired pick, but as a long process of screening, learning, and allocating capital over time. Rather than trying to identify the next world-changing company from the start, he leaned toward repeatedly finding businesses he could understand and support, then letting time and portfolio construction do the rest.
Eight years later, that approach has produced a much larger platform. The 35V portfolio now includes more than 100 startups across fintech, AI, health, and media, according to the report. Beyond startups, Durant has also extended his holdings into sports, with stakes in teams including the Philadelphia Union and Gotham FC.
He only spent three seasons with Golden State. Even so, PANews argues that period may have been one of the most consequential stretches of his professional life, both in basketball and in investing.
Omri Casspi went from 5.7 points per game to roughly $800 million under management
Casspi’s case is different. Unlike Durant, who had already started preparing for a life as an investor, Casspi is presented as one of the clearest examples of how the Warriors environment itself shaped a player’s post-career plans.
He joined Golden State in the summer of 2017 on a minimum deal. During the 2017-18 season, he played 53 games, averaged 5.7 points, and was waived in April 2018 when the team needed to clear a roster spot for the playoffs. The Warriors still gave him a championship ring, but strictly in basketball terms, it was not a defining stop in his 10-year NBA career.
According to PANews, it was highly significant for what came next. Inside the team environment, Casspi watched Curry, Durant, and Iguodala discuss their portfolios and trade notes on startups they were tracking. Courtside, he saw founders and VCs. After games, those same people were often part of the social orbit. He came to feel that, beyond basketball, picking winners and backing founders might be one of the most interesting jobs in the world.
As his playing career moved toward its later stages, Casspi began with angel investing and backed companies including DocuSign and DayTwo. After retiring in 2021, he entered the Israeli technology scene more systematically. In 2022, he launched the early-stage fund Sheva with $50 million, focused mainly on pre-seed and seed deals.
In 2024, he launched a new fund under the Swish Ventures name and later folded Sheva into it. That same January, he rented a suite at Chase Center, the Warriors’ home arena, and hosted Cognition AI co-founders Scott Wu and Steven Hao.
The Warriors-Lakers game that night was dramatic and went to two overtimes, with Curry scoring 46 points. PANews says Casspi’s attention was drawn to a different pitch inside the suite, where Wu was introducing an AI coding agent that had not yet formally launched. The next day, Casspi met Wu again in Palo Alto and soon decided to join Cognition’s seed round.
At the time, Cognition was valued at $150 million. It is now seeking a new round that could value the company at $47 billion, according to the article.
PANews cites other examples from the Swish portfolio as well. Cloud security company Upwind was valued at about $65 million in its 2022 seed round, then reached a $1.5 billion valuation by its Series B in early 2026. Cloud backup company Eon and AI company Applied Compute, both early Swish investments, have also reached unicorn status.
As of September this year, Swish had invested in about 20 companies, with 8 of them already valued at $1 billion or more. Its newly closed $250 million fund includes capital from Sequoia Capital as well as US pension funds and university endowments, lifting total assets under management to about $800 million.
PANews notes the contrast directly: when Casspi joined the Warriors, he was still a role player moving from team to team. Nine years later, the capital he manages is far above the roughly $18 million he earned in salary during his NBA career.
Stephen Curry built investing into a larger business platform
Curry’s investment track is quieter than the paths taken by Durant, Casspi, or Iguodala. That does not mean he arrived late.
PANews says Curry began engaging with technology startups early, including involvement in founding the marketing technology company Slyce. He later used SC30 to bring his brand, media work, philanthropy, and investing under a single business umbrella. By December 2018, SC30 had already taken part in financing for online travel platform SnapTravel. Around 2019, its public portfolio had grown to eight companies, including esports organization TSM and smartphone company Palm.
His logic appears different from Durant’s. Rather than quickly maximizing the number of investments, Curry has leaned toward companies that fit with his brand, interests, and network.
PANews uses Guild Education as the clearest example. Curry invested in the enterprise education platform in 2019. Guild works with companies such as Walmart, Disney, and Chipotle to provide continuing education and career training to employees. At that time, Curry had recently launched the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, and education was already one of his long-term priorities. As a result, SC30 joined Guild not just as a capital provider, but also as a strategic partner.
Three years later, Guild raised $175 million at a $4.4 billion valuation. The exact cost basis of Curry’s stake is not public, and the article does not calculate a realized return. It does say, however, that judged by the valuation path alone, the investment looks like a strong growth-stage win.
SC30’s investment activity later expanded into Penny Jar Capital. Curry serves as a special adviser to the venture firm, while day-to-day investing is handled by professionals including longtime business partner Bryant Barr. Penny Jar’s mandate now spans enterprise software, healthcare, and AI.
From that angle, PANews describes Curry as perhaps the closest thing among that Warriors group to a platform investor. He did not fully remake himself into a career fund manager the way Casspi did, and he did not scale a personal investment vehicle as aggressively as Durant. Instead, he wove investing into a broader commercial system in which the brand creates influence, the network creates access, and the professional team handles diligence and portfolio management.
The investor list also includes Thompson, Green, McGee, Pachulia, West, and Livingston
The roster of player-investors does not stop with the four biggest names.
Klay Thompson has kept a lower profile off the court than Curry, Durant, or Iguodala, and he is discussed even less in venture circles. PANews says his startup investing became more active after 2020. That year, through athlete investment platform PLUS Capital, he joined a financing round for mental health company Lyra Health. He later appeared among investors in Dapper Labs, sports media company Overtime, healthcare technology company Carbon Health, sports social platform Sleepe, and AI voice company Wispr.
Draymond Green’s path looks more like that of a traditional angel investor. He began backing startups in the mid-2010s, with investments that included teeth-straightening company SmileDirectClub, restaurant technology platform Snackpass, and tequila brand Lobos 1707. Unlike Durant, Green has not sought to build his own venture firm. PANews says he prefers acting as an LP or joining deals alongside professional investors he already knows, including Bill Gurley.
Center JaVale McGee brought a lifestyle angle to his investing. After shifting toward plant-based eating, he invested in Beyond Meat, plant-based snack brand Outstanding Foods, and restaurant brand Tocaya Organica. Beyond Meat later went public in 2019, and its shares rose 163% above the offering price on the first trading day. In 2020, McGee joined Iguodala and other NBA players in investing in Dapper Labs and later continued to participate in its financings. In 2022, he also joined the financing of Web3 e-commerce infrastructure project Rye.
Zaza Pachulia had been intentionally studying business while still a player. During his Atlanta Hawks years, he took business courses at Emory University and later attended related programs at Harvard. After ending his playing career in 2019, he moved into the Warriors front office while staying close to startups and investing.
His investing record became easier to trace from around 2023. That year, he joined the seed round of healthcare AI company Tennr at a valuation of about $22.8 million. A year later, he followed on in its next round. By 2025, Tennr had raised $101 million at a $605 million valuation, with firms such as a16z and Lightspeed on the cap table.
Pachulia is also an investor in AI chip company Cerebras. PANews says Cerebras reached a valuation of about $23 billion after raising $1 billion this year and has already signed a large-scale AI inference infrastructure partnership with OpenAI. In July this year, Pachulia also became an angel investor in AI safety company Neo, which has raised a cumulative $100 million from backers including a16z, Bessemer, and Craft Ventures.
Power forward David West took a more industry-focused route. In 2016, he invested $250,000 in clean energy company Zoetic Global. He later joined the company as an adviser and remained involved in energy projects over a long period. After retirement, he continued to work in startup and investment-related activity.
Reserve guard Shaun Livingston followed another path. He had tried film investing before arriving in Golden State, but his more systematic exposure to venture capital came after being influenced by Bay Area teammates including Iguodala. PANews says he once sat in on investment meetings at Kleiner Perkins to watch startups pitch funds. He later became an LP in some projects linked to venture firm Eonxi and stayed active in the Bay Area startup-investment network.
Put together, the pattern becomes hard to miss. Looking back at the 2017-18 Warriors team photo, at least 10 of the 17 players later had clear records in venture investing, angel investing, or VC-related activity. PANews says that calling the locker room half full of investors is not much of an exaggeration.
Why the Warriors, and why that locker room
PANews closes by asking why this happened in Golden State. Its answer is that the Warriors offered an environment that few NBA teams could replicate.
First was geography. The team was based in the San Francisco Bay Area, placing players’ training, living, and social lives inside the world’s densest venture capital network. VCs on Sand Hill Road, startup founders in San Francisco, tech executives, and billionaires were not distant figures from business news. They were often the people sitting courtside or sharing a meal after the game.
Second was ownership. Joe Lacob was not a conventional sports owner. He joined Kleiner Perkins in 1987, spent more than two decades in venture capital, and led investments in more than 50 startups across life sciences, medical technology, the internet, and energy before gradually stepping back from day-to-day fund work after buying the Warriors. In PANews’ telling, Silicon Valley was embedded in the franchise from the top down.
The article says the bigger force may have been network effects. It is not unusual for an NBA player to know a few investors. What made the Warriors different was that Iguodala had already entered networks tied to firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Durant was spending time with people like Ron Conway and Ben Horowitz, and Curry had his own founder and brand relationships. Because those people shared the same locker room every day, what started as separate personal networks began to connect.
Casspi, for example, could rent a suite at a Warriors game and bring founders, potential customers, executives, and investors into one space. Watching basketball could also become a setting for relationship-building and dealmaking. For startups, PANews says, access to those relationships can matter as much as the check itself.
That is how the 2017-18 Warriors came to represent more than a roster loaded with basketball talent. The team had four All-Stars, two MVPs, and an unusually strong group of role players. Off the court, it also concentrated a rare set of networks and forms of access.
Team basketball was the defining identity of those Warriors: share the ball, create space, and find the teammate in the best position. PANews argues that the same logic appeared in their investing lives. What they shared was not just basketball. In a sense, they were also sharing a way into Silicon Valley.