Iguodala goes from the hardwood to the boardroom
For nearly two decades, Andre Iguodala has built a reputation as one of the NBA’s most versatile players, an All-Star and Olympic gold medalist who won four championships with the Golden State Warriors.
Now, Iguodala exclusively told DealBook that he is retiring from professional basketball to focus on his next career: a startup investor. He will run Mosaic, the $200 million venture capital fund he just launched with his longtime business partner Rudy Cline-Thomas.
Iguodala’s revelation ends years of speculation. The 39-year-old hinted that last season would be his last, just to shoot down the rumours about it earlier this year. But now it’s time to hang up his sneakers. “It’s been a blessing to play for so long,” he told DealBook. (He still hasn’t quite come to terms with it: “I don’t know if it’s hit me yet,” he said.)
He accepts his next act. Although he and Cline-Thomas started buying tech stocks in 2010, both took a deep dive into startups when he joined the Warriors in 2013. off the court,” Iguodala said. “I was thinking about how to gain access.
That led to meetings with venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and then taking stakes in startups including Zoom and cybersecurity provider Cloudflare.
It is a model that many professional athletes now follow, from the NFL’s Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers to Iguodala’s longtime Warriors teammate Steph Curry. “Athletes are getting smarter and smarter,” Iguodala said, saying their competitiveness and ability to speak to audiences helps sell and scale products.
The mosaic is now his centerpiece. The firm will focus on seed and seed investments in enterprise software, healthcare fintech and sports companies. Iguodala and Cline-Thomas closed Mosaic’s first fund — whose investors included endowments, institutions and founders of companies they’ve already backed — in May.
Mosaic’s investments include Vessel, a builder of modular multifamily homes, and Athletes First, an NFL talent agency and management firm.
Another focus is owning a sports franchise. Iguodala is a co-owner of Leeds United, an English soccer club; Bay Area FC, a National Women’s Soccer League team; and, along with former teammates Curry and Klay Thompson, the San Francisco affiliate of TGL, the groundbreaking golf league co-founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.
Iguodala’s ultimate desire? Own an NBA team. “The timing has to be right,” he said, but “that’s definitely the end goal.”
“The disruption to an already difficult business model is real. … This is the post-social web.”
— Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. Media executives realized that traffic to their websites from tech giants like Google and Meta Facebook was plummeting and unlikely to recover.
New push for net neutrality
The Federal Communications Commission has revived a plan to restore so-called net neutrality rules, reigniting a battle over how Washington regulates Internet services and whether the Web should be considered a utility.
The Democratic-led agency voted along party lines. Commissioners voted 3-2 to revive Obama-era regulations that barred broadband providers like Comcast, Charter Communications and AT&T from blocking or slowing services like Google and Netflix that compete with them. The Trump administration rescinded the rules, saying they were an example of regulatory overreach.
The rules allow the FCC to treat the Internet as a toolas a water or electricity provider. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the importance of internet access was illustrated during the Covid pandemic. Broadband access has become a necessity for work and education, but the regulator has been unable to police providers to ensure quality service, she said.
The agency will be able to monitor companies for net neutrality violations, consumer harm and security lapses. This could include forcing ISPs to lower rates that the FCC deems unreasonable.
Republicans and cable companies have vowed to fight the move. Brendan Carr, the Republican commissioner of the FCC, said the rules are counterproductive and that Internet service improved for consumers when the rules were not in place.
USTelecom, a cable industry trade group, has warned of the FCC’s “mission to sneak in” on cybersecurity. Internet providers said they would challenge the policy change, including through lawsuits all the way to the Supreme Court.
READING SPEED
Offers
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Video game publishers sit back $45 billion in cash, which could fuel further consolidation in the industry after Microsoft closed its $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. (CNBC)
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Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm led by Josh Kushner, is said to be in talks buy OpenAI stock worth more than 80 billion dollars. (Information)
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American banking giants got rid of a a total of 20,000 jobs so far this year. (CNBC)
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Investors in the US and Europe do sold $5.1 billion worth of stock in major Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba and Tencent, over the past two months. (Bloomberg)
Policy
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The SEC will drop the lawsuits against two crypto executives for trading the digital token XRP. (WSJ)
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Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, is the latest author to sue tech companies including Meta and Microsoft for training AI tools on their published works without compensation. (The Verge)
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Was Peter Thiel a confidential FBI informant? (Inside Man)
The best of the rest
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