Yahoo Finance Kevin Durant’s manager Rich Kleiman on buying a pickleball team: ‘I love the sport’
Pickleball, crazy as it sounds, has been hot. Now, the space has two new high-profile entrants — sports manager Rich Kleiman and NBA superstar Kevin Durant. The co-founders at Thirty Five Ventures, also called 35V, announced Thursday that they've bought a team in Major League Pickleball (MLP).
"I love the sport," Kleiman told Yahoo Finance. "I love the culture around the sport and the fact that we're at beginning of the development of a professional sports league, at a time when the sport itself is exploding in popularity."
While pickleball dates back to 1965, the racket sport exploded in popularity so much in the pandemic that now it's going pro. The MLP has become an unexpected hotbed of competition for some of the biggest names in sports. Former NFL quarterback Drew Brees and NBA superstar LeBron James — in a deal that included fellow NBA champions Draymond Green and Kevin Love — have both recently acquired teams. Just last week, seven-time Super Bowl Champion Tom Brady joined the pickleball rush. For Kleiman, getting into pickleball goes beyond the spirit of competition.
At its core, pickleball is an area where Kleiman — who previously helped launch the sports practice at Jay Z's Roc Nation — believes he and Durant can be hands-on, and have an impact quickly. The move, among other things, also aligns with the goals of Boardroom, the media network that Kleiman and Durant founded in 2019. The zeitgeist moment surrounding pickleball is exactly the type of access Boardroom wants to offer its audience.
“I want to create 'Vanity Fair' for ‘the culture’ right now, and for sports,” Kleiman said. “The platform covers the business and lifestyle around sports and entertainment, and it started from the idea that what I was seeing in other outlets wasn’t a real indication of what was going on.”
And, in case you've missed it, pickleball is definitely having a moment. The sport's grown rapidly, gaining popularity throughout the pandemic. In 2016, pickleball had 2.8 million U.S. players. In 2021, that number had become 4.8 million, according to a Sports & Fitness Industry Association report.
Ace and slim pic.twitter.com/PlBSvfkIGK
— Ace (@richkleiman) September 15, 2022
'The thesis was to get in the game'
If you ask someone to define pickleball, they'll probably say that it's like tennis or ping-pong, but not quite either. In some sense, like pickleball, Kleiman himself defies easy categorization. He's Durant's longtime business manager, the Kevin Durant Charity Foundation's executive director, and has worked on documentaries and fictional TV for both Netflix (NFLX) and Apple (AAPL). Kleiman's also been successful as a VC-style investor. 35V has, over the last few years, picked winners like Coinbase (COIN), Acorns, LimeBike, and Postmates, which is now owned by Uber (UBER).
However, Kleiman doesn’t identify as a VC — he's more inclined to think of himself as a businessperson or an entrepreneur. It does check out: Kleiman thinks across areas and disciplines, wrapping them in with his own experiences and networks. In person, he's some combination of deep ambition and off-the-cuff thoughtfulness, the kind of guy who remembers to keep up with people even over years and long distances. To understand Kleiman, and by extension his and Durant's ventures, it's worth looking back to 2016.
In 2016, Durant had just moved to the Golden State Warriors, an NBA team with deep ties to Silicon Valley. There, Kleiman started to come into his own as an investor — a process that started because he and Durant were just looking for something different.
“In 2015, brand deals and services were becoming antiquated for players and stars of [Kevin’s] caliber,” he said. “So, I understood that, with the exception of Nike, we were looking around. I was getting this incredible access that was leading to incredible people. And I kept getting asked, ‘Do I want to look at someone’s company to invest in?’”
Soon, Kleiman and Durant took meetings across Silicon Valley and began developing relationships with some of VC’s biggest names — from Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Lyons, to famed angel investor Ron Conway. It's through those relationships, Kleiman said, that he's learned how to invest.
“I'd ask 800 questions about investing,” he said. “It was truly from the beginning, from definitions of words to understanding the process."
From there, it was about taking shots, said Kleiman.
“The thesis was to get in the game,” he told Yahoo Finance. “Founders and VC firms started recommending Kevin and me more and more. We just kept growing and I think we both had an instinct, a great feeling. So, we started raising our check sizes and more and more deal flow.”
Today, Kleiman's increasingly invested in the future of media, bringing his time in sports, tech, and media full circle. He and Durant are also minority investors in the National Women's Soccer League's Gotham FC, and were part of a $30 million round of fundraising for Athletes Unlimited, a pro women's sports leagues operator.
"We’ve invested broadly in tech," said Kleiman. "I’ve never turned off our deal flow there and I never will, but I’ve really started to focus on sports as an asset class… It’s a clear benefit when I can have a flywheel into building Boardroom, where I can offer unique access to sports properties like Gotham FC or Athletes Unlimited.”
In the end, particularly when it comes to sports, Kleiman’s operating in an exclusive asset class, one that’s proven it can generate massive returns. Take the possibly imminent sale of the Phoenix Suns, which is expected to be record-setting and reportedly could top $2.5 billion, and get as high as $3 billion or even an astonishing $4 billion. Regardless, that's a heck of a jump, since just last year Forbes valued the franchise at $1.8 billion.
Kleiman seems to be taking a multi-faceted long view here. As he invests in emerging sports like pickleball, he's simultaneously building Boardroom as a media property uniquely positioned to cover that ascension.
“Let's build a brand and a platform that treated sports business a little bit more like entertainment and that was a little bit more representative of what a boardroom looks like to me," Kleiman said. "People in sweats, men, women, tech CEOs, business leaders, athletes, rappers — that’s the boardroom I see.”
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks.
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