a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Andre Iguodala Knows Tech -- And Why the Warriors Won't Be Stopped

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

You know how talented Andre Iguodala is as a basketball player. You may not know that he signed with the Warriors in part to be near Silicon Valley and the tech scene. Iguodala knows tech, and in a conversation with a16z's Jeff Jordan at the 2015 Tech Summit he talks about his relationship with tech as a professional athlete and as a businessman. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. You already know how talented Andre Iguodala is as a basketball player. The Golden State Warrior was named, NBA finals MVP in the Warriors victory last season. What you may not know is that Iguodala signed with the Warriors, in part to be near Silicon Valley, and the tech scene. Turns out, Iguodala knows tech, and in a conversation with A16Z's Jeff Jordan, he talks about his relationship with tech as a professional athlete and also as a businessman. Jeff Jordan, a hardcore Warriors fan, starts things off. As some of you may notice, I've done a little wardrobe change, and I'm wearing my Warriors NBA championship shirt from last year.

Thank you. Thank you. I plan to buy the new one this year, too. So let us know how to go. So a lot of you may know, Andre. For me, it was probably the most interesting, compelling story in sports last year, where a star player subordinated his personal goals to the team goals. in a way that was incredibly helpful the team.

And then when the team needed him at the end, he stepped in and was finals MVP. So for me, that's the epitome of sports. So, I mean, I appreciate that and just love watching it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That said, I'd love to see you start this year.

Yeah. So you've talked a lot about this, but one of the factors for you coming to California was thinking about post-career and interest in technology. So you've really dived in and tried. to immerse yourself in technology. How do you decide what to get involved in? How did you work on your initial approach?

Well, I sit down with my financial advisor, my business manager, and we talk about, you know, first things that interest me because it has to be something I have a passion for or a liking to that's organic. You know, I don't want to do anything that doesn't fit who I am. And then we look at the benefits and do our homework. And as you've seen, you know, Rudy and myself have been doing a lot of work over the past couple of years. Just trying to get our feet wet. And now that, you know, we're kind of up to our ankles, we feel like we can dive in and take on some more responsibilities.

But it's been a lot of fun, just looking for that challenge and enjoying seeing how I can play a part in business development. And, I mean, you guys have been really systematic about how you've gone about it and really have immersed yourself. So, I mean, it has been a commitment to your time. Yes, but that's been the fun part. You know, when I first came into this league, we have a rookie transition program. It's called RTP, where all the rookies come in, and they give you all these scary statistics of, you know, the average career being big players, 5.4 years, I think it is. So you're not even guaranteed to make it out your rookie contract. And then the sad truth is most guys have spent other money after the rookie contract.

because I think there's another after. So they're trying to prepare you for life after basketball. And coming here was really something that I was thinking about life after basketball, and this would be the perfect place to kind of make that transition. So you learn at that program you're going to have a lot of time on your hands. And, you know, having a lot of time on your hands at 23, 24, it's easy to fill that time up. You know, there's plenty of bad things. But as you get older, you mature a little bit.

And then being in this space that I am now, I find myself having time to, you know, have an immense amount of information to take in, to learn, and then to try to incorporate my brain into. And so in what capacity do you feel you can help the companies most? Well, I think I want to do it differently than we've seen before. And as you've seen each generation, you've seen athletes. the way they do their marketing has kind of become the cookie cutter deals as of late, and I wanted to get away from that.

You know, everyone kind of wants to model themselves after how Michael Jordan did it. You know, Michael Jordan kind of changed the landscape of how athletes market themselves. You know, you get paid, you pitch a product, you get a commercial, and that's pretty much the extent of it. You know, you may get lucky, like Michael Jordan, to have your own shoe line with Nike,

which turns into, you know, $2 billion per year in sales, but that's just one guy. So for me, I wanted to do differently. I wanted to, how can I take my brand and implement that into the business system and vice versa? You know, their brand helping my brand, and their brand, you know,

how do I affect their group of consumers and vice versa? They bring their side to the basketball side, which is becoming a global sport, and I think it's number two in the world and it's moving up closer on on soccer globally. It's really, it's moving in on it.

You know, 92, the Dream Team has brought basketball a long way. Which are funny stories, by the way. As celebrities and athletes get words in technology, how should tech companies think about working with them? You're trying to evolve the way you work with tech companies. How should tech companies work with you or other companies?

Well, I think that's very tricky. It's tricky because, because athletes and entertainers want to work with tech companies has become a vanity play where it's the cool thing to do. And a lot of people don't understand what goes into that. They just say, oh, it's cool, so I'm going to get into it. Well, next year, you may not know. It may not be cool anymore.

So I think for tech companies, they have to know who they're involving themselves with. And I also think, just like they vet VCs on who they take money from, you got to do the same thing with who you involve yourself with, you know, from entertainment or athlete's standpoint. And those same things flow in both worlds. I agree with that completely. So one of the companies you're involved with is one that I'm involved with, too, which is Walker & Company. Do you want to describe a little bit what Tristan's trying to build there? Yeah, well, Tristan is very unique. and the world he's come from, and he's done it before.

He's been successful before, so he knows how it works. But his story was very compelling to me, and I've seen it firsthand. You know, we travel a lot, and sometimes you forget your toiletry bag. So whenever we go to Walgreens of CVS, we need the things we need, you know, for grooming. And we're going down, it's always the same aisle, and it's always the same bottom shelf, and there's always this much space of our products and you've got to filter through what you need or you've got to concoct some things together to make it work.

So I've seen firsthand his pain. So he came up with this idea of products for people of color because our skin is just naturally different. And his first product was the razor. And it's funny because he's like, you know, do you use a razor? He knew my answer. No, I don't use a razor.

you know I use clippers because we don't use razors because the way our hair grows and our skin is curly and more coarse. So the way our hair grows when we do shave, we get razor bumps because our hair grows back into our skin and it causes bumps. So we don't use

razors. So we came up with this genius razor the way is weighted and the way you shave your face and pre and after shave and the lotion and it's gotten some tremendous feedback as far as men of color are actually using razors now and how that's going to transform it to more products

for us. And he's a genius because he's done his homework and he's found out the actual numbers of how much money people of color spend on cosmetics, which I think we're the biggest spender in that. So the market is just amazing. And just hearing a story, not just from the financial side or, you know, the upside of, you know, being an investor and how much you can make out of, but just the difference in people's lives that he's making. No, it's funny. The personal care for people of color aisle that Andre's mentioned, one of the reasons that we invested is one of the leading selling SKUs is a box that has Clyde Frazier on it.

Some of you may remember when I was in high school was an all-star in the NBA. So there's a picture of a now retired 40-year career that's coming. So I remember pitching Walker and Cody at first, and I said it's a shaving system for people of color, and you recoiled and just went, no, shaving, no. And it was so funny. So here's a guy you'll take a charge on Shaquille O'Neal. But the concept of shaving was there.

What do you personally get out of the interactions with the tech companies? Well, I really enjoy the business development side of it and a data trending. You kind of, you get into something, you see a business grow, you learn a lot from it, you learn from a lot of people that you deal with, the lives are changing. It's just a fun process. It's similar to basketball, you know, being a GM. You come in from scratch, you put a team together, you put all the right pieces in the right place and you just watch it grow you know you learn each and every day about yourself and

when I'm working with the product or people that I really enjoy working with uh it's just awesome things seeing to come together from scratch I think it's a lot of the same satisfactions that I get out of athletics it's it's pretty interesting yeah right so you know it's like winning the championship is like the greatest thing and you learn so much about yourself doing that and then when you're working with other companies you take you know some of those situations it may not be exactly the same. You know, it may not be like you're taking the last second shot, but you got, you know, you got to get your information in or you got to get your work done within a day and you're overflowed and you might have to work 14, 15 straight hours, but I've been through

that situation on the court of having a sacrifice for my team and doing whatever it took to win and just transferring that to, you know, the tech world or whoever I may be working with. And when you see the results, you know, you get the satisfaction of, you know, winning. Have you taken anything from the tech community that's useful to you as an athlete? Definitely, every day. The tech world uses a lot of data analysis, and you definitely transferred into the basketball world. We have a system where every shot and every movement is tracked for every team. So you know where a guy shot from on the court, you know its percentage from that exact spot or issue.

from, you know how many dribbles he takes. So the data from the outside world or from the tech world that's always been used for years has finally got to the basketball world and it's helped us on the basketball court. But the thing is, you have to find the right data. You have to find the right thing, the right analytic for your team. And we found that last year, interesting enough, our number was the amount of passes we had per game. When we had 300, and 25 more, 325 passes or more, we were like 50 and 1. It was something crazy. And then when we had less than 300 passes, we were like, I don't know, you know, 20 and 10.

It was just crazy. So when it got to those clutch moments or those clutch games, when we got to the finals, we knew exactly what we needed to do to give ourselves the best possible chance of winning. and that was huge for us last year. So the systems you're describing, I think I've seen a couple companies do it. They literally track the movement of every athlete on the court in every game. Yes.

And then it's a big data capture. You can then analyze, okay, if you got LeBron on the right wing, if you make them go right, right, right, it's right, right, yeah, the right left, shoot, you know, what's the best outcome? So you're literally at that level of scientific precision and preparing. Yes, but there's got to take a grain of salt with everything. And sometimes too much information can be bad information. And what was important for us was finding the right information. You know, you got a million things you're looking at. You got to find exactly which is

the right for your talent group, for your IQ group, all those things play into that part. And I think it's the same for businesses. You know, they get all this data and they're not even You have to figure out exactly what to do with it in order for your company to be successful. And for us, it was the past. It was turnover. We found like three or four things out of thousands of things that we knew would get us over the top. Signal from the noise. So in Moneyball, they showed the war between the old seat of the pants, scouts, and the new quants.

Is that happening in the NBA? It does. Because you have certain teams like the Houston Rockets, for example. their whole front office is basically analytics people, you know, and not too many of their front office people actually had experience playing basketball. You know, they watched it, or they might have played it, you know, in the rec league or something like that. But they didn't have any NBA experience.

So when you see front offices like that, they tend to just throw numbers on the court. You know, they forget about characteristics. They forget about, you know, basketball IQ with players, and they forget about, you know, just because it works where one guy doesn't mean he's going to mesh well with another guy while they're playing together. And that's what I mean by too much information. It can be bad information. But for us, we found the right information and putting the right pieces in to fulfill each

role on the court because you're still playing with five guys and they've got to play us one. So you see money ball a lot more in the NBA. you got to have the proper balance of, you know, human behavior and analytics. Yeah, no, it's funny. The challenge of the big data guys is that the companies don't really know the game. And so they're trying to map into it and figure it out. Do you use data and technology as an individual to help your fitness, your performance, your game readiness? Yes, well, you have to. And then we spoke briefly about this about LeBron, knowing which way to send them, you know, knowing how to make the game. difficult for the best player in the world, but also, you know, I track my sleep every day.

And it's funny because I did a small thing with jawbone where they would track how many hours of sleep I was getting and then how that correlated to my performance on a basketball course. So it showed when I got six hours of sleep or less, this is my shooting percentage. When I had seven hours of sleep, this is my shooting percentage. When I had eight hours, it showed. It was amazing because I didn't know that they were. were, they were had all this data until afterwards. So I'm not going into the game like, I slept eight hours a night, so I'm going to play well. I didn't know this until two months after

and that was strong. I'm like, Jesus Christ, like, my fritos were so much better when I got sleep. Yeah. Now it's like, I'm going to sleep tonight. So we're going to send you home to go to sleep. Yeah. So, um, that's it for Andre. Yeah. But it's definitely helped me out. And human behavior, you know, as humans, we are, you know, we're trained to be creatures of habit, and we have these certain habits about ourselves. And when you use certain analytics and you use certain platforms that we use in NBA and different teams use, that's when you learn certain habits about guys. And when I'm on a court, I know I can force some of the top players out of their habits and make the game harder for them, which in turn gives my team a better chance

to win. In the sleep thing, there was a study done at Stanford a number of years back that took the men's basketball team, had them do a proficiency shooting, you know, free throw percentage under their normal sleep. And then they begged them to get eight hours. And the shooting went up 20, 30 percent. I mean, and I was talking to Coach Dawkins about it. So can't you get him to sleep?

He goes, no. Yeah, college students, that's probably the hardest place to get kids to try to sleep. Yeah, no. college period virtual reality do you think it's going to come into the sports world anytime soon or do you see it at all that's a tough one um the one thing that you can't simulate is live action and i think that's why you see some some of the crazy evaluations in sports now because it's the only thing left sports and concerts are the only things left that you can you can only experience them live. They don't have the same effect, you know, tape delayed or seeing it later. So

virtual reality I saw at the NBA Tech Conference, you kind of put on the headset, and then you can subscribe to like a, you have a seat, like you're a season ticket holder, and you can subscribe to VR seat, and you can be on the court and spike leaves next to you at the garden, and it's like you're at the game. I don't know how that's going to translate to live. Like, I just can't see it. Is this something about, like, especially if your court side, like, there's a possibility of someone diving into you, you know, like, I don't know if you could simulate that, but who knows?

You know, the technology's there. I think it could be great for the game if it's done right, but we'll have to see. Yeah, no, that's spectating. Actually, there's a company that's working with football players, particularly quarterbacks on virtual reality for rapid-fire decision-making. I mean, you know, there might not be a basketball analogy, but it's an interesting. No, I think that could work. Yeah.

When you put, you can put guys in game-like situations to practice in, because that's the hardest thing to, you can't simulate games either. Like, when we're in practice, coach says go through a game-like, but there's nothing like being an actual game. So I think VR will help for training, but you see that in technology today. Like, I'm a huge golfer, and I have just about every golf training device. advice there is out there. From technology standpoint, that's a test in my iPhone, knowing hands playing, clubs playing, you know, am I going in and out and I'm out to end on my swing? So those things have helped me become a better golfer, how to not have them. As good as Curry? No, not even close. He's, something's wrong with him. He just, I don't know,

I don't know, it's something there that makes him good at everything. Yeah, which essentially is there. What impact is technology having on the business of sports? I mean, so it's, you know, typically it used to be broadcast television. You'd have one, you know, the game of the week or whatever it is. Now it seems like every game's televised. You get all the, you know, you're getting the fusion of content. You're getting time shifting, you know.

Does that change the sport? I think it does. It's helped. I think it's helped the sport because there's more engagement. owners are setting up arenas to be fan-friendly to where the owners know exactly who's buying what, who's purchasing what,

who's in their seat at what time, at what point of the game, do fans go get concessions? It's kind of taking the life of its own as far as just bringing the fans and the business closer together because it used to be kind of, what do our fans want?

Now you can kind of get to feel exactly what they're into, you know, what jersey is selling them most, what color uniforms, you know, do the fans, do it attract the fans to buying more. And then even with players, when we're on the road, when we're on the planes, we're keeping up with every single game. So that's a big thing for us. If we're flying out to Indiana, but Indiana has a game that night as well, and we can't see the game, we keep an updates, we know our scouting, we know who's doing what,

and we know on what to prepare for the next day. Um, uh, social media being a celebrity and an athlete. How do you, you need, how do you think of Twitter? You know, what's the purpose of it for you? Um, there's a lot. And you, you have to, you have to be, uh, more politically correct than never now. Um, but you have to be smart with it. I think it's just a way to, uh, give the fans a small piece of who you are, not everything, but just giving bits and pieces, keep the, uh, engagement, the interaction. because it's always going to be good for the game when the fans were, like, they're closest to the players. But it can get dangerous at times. You know, they say all press is good press,

but when it comes to Twitter, not all press is good press. There have been a few notable examples of that of late. There's been a lot. But I think it's just all about branding. It's good and bad for the game because I'm seeing high school kids and I'm seeing elementary kids with Twitters and Instagram and it's like they're branding themselves already.

And it's like, you're not quite there yet. You know, so it's putting a little bit too much pressure on our kids to try to be a certain type of person instead of just developing, you know, like most of you have developed. You didn't have all that stuff. You just were a kid, and then you just grew up. Well, now they're trying to grow up at a younger age. Anyone have any questions for Andre?

I am not afraid of any questions. If you can imagine any technology that you would like, to see introduced either to the game of basketball or in your life, what would that be? And if you could just imagine it to be, what would it be? Because you've got some of the smartest people on the planet sitting in a room that might be able to do it for you. That is a very good question. From a basketball standpoint, I just saw something recently.

I don't know if I can share, but he has a device, basically, where you can kind of slide it on your body and you actually shoot a shot. and it gives you your metrics on your motions in your shot. I don't know how accurate it is, but it can train you to get the exact same motion every single shot. And we hear this a lot when we're in practice, shoot game shots, shoot game shots. It's hard to simulate that, you know,

because adrenaline is flowing, someone's in your face. You know, the crowd's there. There's an intensity there. So if you can know exactly what your metrics were shooting a game shot, you can simulate that over and over and over again. Because like playing golf, you can do that. You can get everything together. But basketball is a little different. You've got movements in all different types of ways, angles, you know, somebody's in your face.

But if you can simulate that, that would be amazing. Technology for recovery. So is it the same as it was when you entered the league? Totally different. There's so much technology used now. It used to be when we came in the league, it was just a stem and ice. So you get a stem unit, you slap it on, you turn it up, and you get the pulse. And basically all it does is teaches a body to block out pain.

But the pain's still there. I didn't know this. That's what they had. And now there's different technologies. So where we use a system called catapult. It tracks our heart rate, tracks our every movement on the court, pounding on our knees. It tracks everything. So it knows. Is it a wearable? Is it a wearable? So you kind of slide it in your back and it goes to this computer and it basically tracks your loading. So how fast

are you stopping and how fast do you start? That's all that's tracking. And it knows how well we play after having a hard practice versus a life practice versus our load throughout the rest of the week. Back to back. Back to back. Back. Back. Back. So. So coach knows by looking at the catapult system, hey, we need to have a light practice. Okay, it's been light the last couple of days. We need to ramp it up to get these guys ready for a long road trip in a week or so. So we use a lot of different technologies. Like I said, I use technologies for my knees now because I'm getting a little older,

I have a lot of miles. I have two different. One's an ice machine and then one are boots that basically flush out old blood to get new blood in to speed up their recovery. all these little devices and systems that you can write off through the team. Are these training room things or do you sleep at night things? They used to be in the training room, but now it's like everyone has them at home. So it's one called Game Ready.

It's basically a sleeve, put it on, put ice and water in it. And then it puts pressure with ice on your knees. So you're flushing out old blood and you're getting ice, which reduces swelling. And then I have these boots that come from like the foot all the way up. up here. Stylish. Yeah, and I put these, I wear these before, after every shoot-around on game days, and I'm going in for about 40 minutes, fall asleep, pressure flush out all the old blood, and then just

be ready to go and be fresh for the game. So pretty good start to the season? Pretty good. Don't expect that every game. Yeah. Not 50 against the playoff team? You made it look like it's, it made it look easy, but it's very hard to do that. Well, I thought Kerr was a pretty good coach, but now I think it's Luke Walton.

Or it might be the players. With that, we'd like to thank Andre for coming and sharing time with us. Thank you, guys. Appreciate.