- Andre Iguodala, the former Golden State Warrior and three-time NBA champion, joined Comcast Ventures' Catalyst Fund as a venture partner in February.
- Together with Fatima Husain, Iguodala is helping lead Comcast's initiative to invest in diverse founders that are commonly overlooked by traditional VCs.
- Iguodala previously invested in Zoom and Allbirds as an angel investor, but told Business Insider he felt ready to begin investing full-time from Miami, where he is still playing with the Heat.
- Although he also thinks there's a lot of opportunity for consumer-facing startups, Iguodala said he is most excited about backing enterprise and subscription-based companies, a strategy that other VCs are just now catching up to.
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Andre Iguodala is the latest NBA champion to join the growing roster of athletes turned venture investors.
The former Golden State Warrior - and current Miami Heat star - officially joined Comcast Ventures as a venture partner in February after dabbling in angel investing for several years. He is helping lead Catalyst Fund, the corporate venture firm's diversity-focused initiative, with former Airbnb manager and All Raise member Fatima Husain.
Iguodala has joined the growing all-star team of current and former athletes who are using game-day payouts to invest in startups, the likes of which include Serena Williams, Kevin Durant, and LeBron James. Sports tech firm SeventySix Capital recently launched Athlete Venture Group, one of the first athlete-led funds around. Instead of storing their millions away, these athletes want to affect change in an industry that has historically been homogenous in its partners and the kinds of companies they back.
"I think it was a great opportunity, and it's something that really fits what I'm trying to do long term in terms of our goal and investing in underrepresented entrepreneurs," Iguodala told Business Insider. "We are investing in entrepreneurs that are from backgrounds that normally don't get the type of funding we are providing."
That includes all types of underrepresented groups, Iguodala explained, including African American and female founders. He doesn't use a specific rubric for evaluating potential investments, because that's what has pushed these groups of founders out of traditional VC funding that sources deals from within traditional networks.
"You are looking for people with ambition, people whose companies fit what I look for when I'm trying to invest," Iguodala said.
Going pro
Prior to joining Comcast Ventures, Iguodala invested in roughly 40 startups as an angel investor. He backed Zoom, the video conferencing startup, just days before its blockbuster IPO, and has written checks to sneaker startup Allbirds and developer management tool PagerDuty.
"I wanted to make sure I was ready myself," Iguodala said of going from angel investing to a more formal role. "You don't want to step your foot into any arena where you haven't had a chance to make the mistakes myself. I had to prove to myself that I could do the job. I was building myself a track record."
His track record is part of what made going pro so appealing, he said. With Comcast's seemingly unending resources, he can help young companies make it to the big times. Although Comcast Ventures has a varied portfolio, the corporate venture firm tends to look at media and communications infrastructure startups, as a matter of expertise. Iguodala wants to expand by adding more subscription-based enterprise startups to that list, a born-again strategy that has traditional VCs obsessed after a slate of less-than-stellar consumer tech company IPOs.
"You are seeing a lot of the recent enterprise companies having a lot of success in helping move the S&P over the last couple years in the tech space," Iguodala said. "Look at their multiples, with the subscriber economy and how important that space is."
That includes everything from Zoom, of which Iguodala is a heavy user now that he's playing in Miami and remotely joining board meetings in California, to data security and artificial intelligence startups. He's looking in some of the hottest cities outside Silicon Valley, like Chicago and Atlanta, other investors have deemed "flyover country" but still have wells of talent. He is checking Slack and Microsoft Outlook between practice, and is making hustle his full-time gig.
"I can do everything on my phone," Iguodala said. "You don't realize how powerful the phone is until you see how impactful it is."