basketball
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Mat Ishbia and the education of the last player on the bench
At Michigan State, Mat Ishbia learned to contribute without being the star. He carried that lesson into mortgage lending, then bought the Phoenix Suns and Mercury - where money has proved easier to spend than certainty is to buy.
Bill Duffy and the $3 million promise
A missed deadline cost Anthony Carter millions. Bill Duffy spent 17 years making it right - one revealing chapter in a basketball career built on relationships that outlast the deal.
Gail Boudreaux and the art of the second possession
Before she ran Elevance Health, Gail Boudreaux collected 1,635 rebounds at Dartmouth. Her story turns on what happens after the first shot - and who gets the next chance.
Jeff White and the art of leaving room for the team
A former varsity basketball captain became a finance executive, then an early-stage investor. At NBIF, Jeff White is learning how to help New Brunswick companies grow without making himself the centre of every play.
Peter Casey and the value of a seat at the game
A basketball blog brought Peter Robert Casey onto press row. His path through the Knicks, Nike and JDS Sports keeps returning to the same question: what makes people feel they belong?
Jordan Fliegel and the advantage of having a coach
A private basketball coach changed Jordan Fliegel’s path. From CoachUp to Acquisition Lab, he has been building ways for other people to get that same kind of help.
Daniel Shichman and the second life of a game
A basketball fan with an engineering degree, Daniel Shichman helped turn the search for a decent highlight into WSC Sports. His next challenge is making the moments after the whistle work as hard as the game itself.
Tolu Alabi
Tolu Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva (YC W24), a USD banking platform that lets freelancers and businesses across Africa get paid in dollars and shield their earnings from local currency swings. Born and raised in Nigeria, she played competitive basketball before earning degrees at Grinnell College and Stanford GSB and building products at Stripe and Amazon. She also runs Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that teaches life skills to young athletes.
Itzik Cohen
Itzik Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of PayZen, a San Francisco-based healthcare fintech that has raised $452M to eliminate financial barriers to medical care. A former professional basketball player for Maccabi Tel Aviv, Israeli Air Force veteran, and three-time founding CEO, Cohen channeled two decades of fintech expertise from WebEx, Prosper Marketplace, and Beyond Finance into building an AI-powered platform that gives patients interest-free payment plans while boosting hospital collection rates by 30-35%. PayZen's $232M Series B in 2024, led by NEA, validated his conviction that the fastest-growing category of American consumer debt - medical bills - is also the most solvable.
Reggie Chan
Reggie Chan is a Hong Kong-based serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Nex (nex.inc), the motion-gaming company behind the Nex Playground console - a $249 camera-based gaming device that outsold Xbox in the US during Black Friday 2025 and hit $150M+ in annual revenue. Before Nex, Chan co-founded EditGrid, an online spreadsheet startup acquired by Apple in 2008, then spent nearly a decade at Apple as a Software Engineering Manager before betting everything on body-motion entertainment. At Nex, his team has built technology that tracks 18 body points per player, enabling real physical movement as the controller - no wires, no wearables, just your body and a TV.
Megan Holston-Alexander
Megan Holston-Alexander is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the Head of the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) - Silicon Valley's first venture capital fund composed exclusively of Black cultural leaders and organizations committed to Black wealth generation. A Montgomery, Alabama native who grew up in the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, she studied sociology at Clark Atlanta University, earned an MA from University of Houston, and an MBA from Stanford (where she relaunched the Black Business Conference after a decade-long absence). Before joining a16z in 2020, she was a founding team member at Unusual Ventures. At CLF, she has helped deploy capital into 300+ startups across consumer, crypto, fintech, healthcare, and enterprise while connecting athletes, entertainers, and executives to technology's early cap tables - all while donating 100% of CLF's management fees and carry to nonprofits that build the next generation of Black technologists.
Kevin Durant
Kevin Durant is a 14-time NBA All-Star, 2x champion, 4x Olympic gold medalist, and one of the greatest scorers in basketball history. Standing 6'11" with guard-like skills, he redefined the power forward position. Off the court, he co-founded 35 Ventures with manager Rich Kleiman, building a 100+ company investment portfolio spanning AI, fintech, media, and sports. One of only three NBA players to hold a lifetime Nike deal, Durant is as formidable a business operator as he is a basketball player.
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and media personality who turned a $6 million software company sale into a dot-com-era $5.7 billion windfall, bought the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million and won an NBA championship, became a household name on Shark Tank, and now wages a one-man war on America's pharmaceutical industrial complex through his Cost Plus Drugs company.
Desmond Lim
Desmond Lim is the co-founder and CEO of Workstream, an HR, payroll, and hiring platform built for the 70 million hourly and deskless workers in the US. Born in Singapore to a delivery driver father and part-time cleaner mother, he became the first in his family to attend university, went on to Harvard and MIT, and built a company that now serves 46 of the top 50 quick-service restaurant brands — including McDonald's, Burger King, and Dunkin' — while raising over $120M in venture funding.
Laela Sturdy
Laela Sturdy is the Managing Partner and CEO of CapitalG, Alphabet's $7 billion independent growth equity fund. A first-generation American born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida, she played Division I basketball at Harvard, earned an MBA from Stanford, and built a track record at CapitalG where every one of her early investments became a unicorn — including Stripe, Duolingo, UiPath, and Webflow. She became sole leader of CapitalG in March 2023, making her one of a tiny handful of women running an established multibillion-dollar venture firm.
Phin Barnes
Phin Barnes is a co-founder and Managing Partner of The General Partnership (TheGP), a $300M seed-stage VC firm built on a 'sweat equity' model that pairs capital with embedded operational talent. Before TheGP, he spent 13 years at First Round Capital rising from unpaid intern to General Partner, co-created the Dorm Room Fund, and backed companies like Notion. His pre-VC career included scaling AND1 sneakers from $15M to $225M and founding one of the first fitness video games for Xbox and PlayStation 2 - making him one of the few investors who can say they've run a shoe brand, shipped a console game, and written the check.