KEVIN DURANT INITIALLY REGRETTED HIS MOVE TO GOLDEN STATE AND HAD A MENTAL BREAKDOWN

[Sccit]

KD and the VCs: How Kevin Durant Became a Made Man in Silicon Valley

Take this story about the days after Durant decided to sign with the Warriors, a time when he was feeling the full brunt of the Internet’s fury about his perceived betrayal of Oklahoma. He and Kleiman (Durant's agent) were in China for a weeklong tour of the country sponsored by Nike Basketball, and the flak he was taking from people in Oklahoma City who had once professed deep affection for him was overwhelming. “To have so many people just say, ‘fu*k you,’ that really does it to you,” Durant tells me, still clearly anguished. “Because I truly had invested everything I had into the people I played for…. And for those people that I know and love and trust to turn their back on me after I was fully invested in them, it was just…more than I could take. I was upset.”

“You were fukked up in China,” Kleiman, looking up from his phone, offers from his plane seat across the aisle from Durant and me.

“That was before I met anybody from the Warriors and dove into the culture. I was basically on my own,” Durant says.

“It was like you were in between two teams.”

“I’m telling you, I was fu*ked up for a while!”

“We were all messed up on jet lag,” Kleiman says, turning to me, “and I was up at 6 a.m. and he calls me and says, ‘Yo, are you up?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, what’s up?’ And he’s like [yelling], ‘Why the fukk did you let me do this to my life?’ And I’m like, ‘Ohh sh*t, I’m coming over to your room.’”

“That hotel was rock bottom,” says Durant.



LOLSMH

 

[Ruck]

“and I was up at 6 a.m. and he calls me and says, ‘Yo, are you up?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, what’s up?’ And he’s like [yelling], ‘Why the fukk did you let me do this to my life?’ And I’m like, ‘Ohh sh*t, I’m coming over to your room.’”

Spoiler

 

[Edub]

.....nikka lost a 3-1 lead in the WCF against the hated Warriors and he shocked OKC fans weren't happy with him.....GTFOH KD





He should've been apologetic to them and "bound and determined" to get back and win next year......instead he left and joined them........I'm done wit KD.

 

[Shogun]

This dude....

 

[Collateral]

bytch ass nikka

 

[livindajetlife]

Wtf going on with bruh?

 

[SCORCH]

Breh needs to stop talking about this shyt ASAP

Move on man

 

[Darth Nubian]

Kevin Durant and the fallout from his move to the warriors has resulted in some of most entertaining NBA story lines in my lifetime. People weren't this reactionary during any of the previous dynasties. Breh single handedly upped league wide fukkery to Roy Tarpley levels.

 

[MJ Truth]

LOL @ him saying the OKC fans "turned their back" on him as though they woke up one day and randomly decided to hate on him with no impetus from him.

 

[Batter Up]

 

[Dwight Howard]

With the seemingly inexhaustible Kleiman running point, Durant has, in just over a year, become a fixture in powerful Valley circles, breaking bread with, receiving intel from, and sometimes coinvesting beside such A-listers as venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Ron Conway, Apple’s Tim Cook and Eddy Cue, YouTube’s Neal Mohan, and a raft of partners and managers at top VC firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, and IVP. Through the 18-month-old umbrella corporation known as the Durant Company, Durant and Kleiman have acquired equity stakes in no fewer than 30 young companies, investing between $50,000 and $250,000 in seed rounds and between $250,000 and $2 million in later-stage rounds.

A short list of the Durant Company’s commitments reads like a catalog of the Valley’s current fixations: Durant and Kleiman have gone in on automated drones (Skydio), personalized medicine (Forward), food stamps by smartphone (Propel), big-data marketing (Zenreach), microlending (Acorns), on-demand delivery (Postmates), quantified health (Q.bio), and polling bots (Polly). They’ve invested in online media brands like the Players’ Tribune and in restaurant and hospitality businesses in New York (Landmark Rooms) and Los Angeles (Ken Friedman’s forthcoming Hearth & Hound). Copycatting LeBron James’s lucrative Blaze Pizza investment, they’ve bought a piece of a customized-pizza chain, Pieology. They’ve got a cold-pressed-juice brand, Wtrmln Wtr. They’ve got a dance-workout-party gym, 305 Fitness, with locations in New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston. And they’ve purchased equity in at least 15 other companies currently in stealth mode, their products too embryonic to shoulder the weight of a celebrity investment being publicized prematurely. Two-thirds of these investments, according to Kleiman, have been made in the 15 months since Durant became a Golden State Warrior.

This investing spree began unofficially a year ago at a now-legendary barbecue and birthday party for Durant held at the Atherton home of Ben and Felicia Horowitz. The entire Warriors team showed up in support of their new teammate, as did team owner Joe Lacob and a who’s who of fellow tech eminences who came to welcome the long-limbed kid from Prince George’s County, Maryland, into the fold. It all started with Kleiman mentioning to longtime friend Steve Stoute, the former music industry heavyweight turned ad agency CEO, that Durant would love some intros in the Valley. Stoute called his pal Horowitz, cofounder of the influential VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, to ask him to throw the soon-to-be 28-year-old a coming-out party. “I didn’t know Kevin that well,” Horowitz tells me, “but Steve’s family. And if family asks for that, we’re barbecuing.”

Not that it took much arm-twisting. The Warriors, as Kleiman notes, have become the de facto “biggest company in Silicon Valley.” They are the home team of the digerati, with a bandwagon big enough to carry the imperial ambitions and mountainous egos of the triple-comma crowd. To them, Durant was the killer app atop the unbeatable operating system. He was also a kindred spirit, capable of making what Stoute calls a “critical, CEO-level, bet-it-all” decision: sacrificing millions of dollars in short-term free-agency money (not to mention complicating his nice-guy brand and infuriating millions of NBA fans) in favor of playing the long game in Northern California. Coming to Golden State was “a businessman’s bet,” Stoute says admiringly, “not an athlete’s bet.”








I know yall wanna beat a dead horse, but this was the most interesting part of the article to me. young black dude getting his hands on everything. that warriors connects seems LEGIT, and it makes his move look alot better from a pure financial standpoint.

 

[Jesus Is Lord]

And THIS is the dude some are saying surpassed Lebron?

He can never be the face of the league. Sorry Russ had to go through with this dude. Most faulted Russ, but we see more and more that it was KD who was the one. Kobe and Shaq part deux.

 

[Inertia Creeps]

With the seemingly inexhaustible Kleiman running point, Durant has, in just over a year, become a fixture in powerful Valley circles, breaking bread with, receiving intel from, and sometimes coinvesting beside such A-listers as venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Ron Conway, Apple’s Tim Cook and Eddy Cue, YouTube’s Neal Mohan, and a raft of partners and managers at top VC firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, and IVP. Through the 18-month-old umbrella corporation known as the Durant Company, Durant and Kleiman have acquired equity stakes in no fewer than 30 young companies, investing between $50,000 and $250,000 in seed rounds and between $250,000 and $2 million in later-stage rounds.





I know yall wanna beat a dead horse, but this was the most interesting part of the article to me. young black dude getting his hands on everything. that warriors connects seems LEGIT, and it makes his move look alot better from a pure financial standpoint.

This is why I laugh at guys railing on him for taking a pay cut; what he did is no different than Bill Gates $1 "Salary" with Microsoft. The official salary listed on tax filings and reported in the media is just a formality; all the real money these people earn comes through their investment avenues. The money KD sacrificed on the NBA's salary cap sheet looks like a lot as a gross sum, but year by year that amount he lost is pennies compared to the investments and connections Lacob is hooking him up with. And this is all in addition to those multi-million endorsement deals he has too; I could definitely see him owning a team down the line later in life if he continues to invest wisely and not blow everything he earns on private jets and shyt.

OKC might've been the team that could offer him the most "salary" in FA, but there's no team in the NBA that can get a player more money in their lifetime than the Warriors with how deeply in bed their whole organization is with all these Silicon Valley tyc00ns.

 

[G.O.A.T Squad Spokesman]

Breh needs to stop talking about this shyt ASAP

Move on man

The haters won...he can't even take solace in victory.

 

[ajnapoleon]

Damn and the hate was not 1/4 of what Lebron got



Damn KD




I hate it had to him