Lacob, 2016 (Getty)
When Joe Lacob was young, growing up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he, like a lot of young kids in the Boston area, was a big Boston Celtics’ fan. Lacob would walk by the old Boston Garden, where inside, legendary Celtics Bill Russell, K.C. Jones and Sam Jones were rattling off one of the most impressive runs of championships ever recorded. Lacob’s dream wasn’t to be a player on the team, though. Lacob wanted to own the team.
Lacob’s dream came true in 2010 when he was part of group that purchased the Golden State Warriors. On his third attempt to make that dream a reality, Lacob was able to do what we had wanted to do since those days in the sixties, walking past the Garden and rooting for the Celtics. Lacob was able to have a team he could call his own.
Since purchasing the team, Lacob has had his fair share of highs and lows, whether it’s winning the NBA Finals in 2015 or subsequently losing them in 2016. He’s had to deal with unpopular personnel moves and ill-advised quotes. Yet now in 2017, with a third straight Finals between his Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers set, Lacob and his squad have the chance to right the wrong of 2016 and regain their winning ways.
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Here’s what you need to know about Lacob.
1. Lacob Grew Up in Massachusetts Before Moving to California
(Getty)
Lacob was born on January 10, 1956 in New Bedford, a coastal city in southern Massachusetts. His father Sid worked for a paper products company while his mother Marlene worked at a supermarket. Money was tight for the family, so growing up, Lacob didn’t see much of his parents. When he was 14, Sid Lacob’s company abruptly fired all of it’s employees except for him and asked him to relocate to California. The Lacobs went from the harsh winters of the New Bedford to the abundant sun of Anaheim, California.
Lacob called the move “one of the great breaks in my life” due in large part to the opportunities he’d find on the West Coast that might not have been there back in New Bedford. Lacob went on to graduate from University of California Irvine with a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences and followed that up with a Master’s in Public Health from University of California Los Angeles and a Master’s in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“I was a very poor kid,” Lacob has said. “Had nothing. I paid every dime of my education through college. Every single dime. I was the first person to graduate from college in the history of my family. Ever. I came from nothing.”
Lacob and Curran (and a sad Kanye West) in 2015 (Getty)
Lacob’s fiance, Nicole Curran, heads up the Warriors Community Formation, an organization that focuses on early childhood development, elementary literacy and access to college for members of the Bay Area community. Lacob has two sons (Kirk and Kent) and two daughters (Kelly and Kayci) from his first marriage. Kirk Lacob has been the Warriors Assistant General Manager since 2012.
2. Lacob Made His Fortune as a Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley
Lacob with Magic Johnson, 2015 (Getty)
After his second master’s, Lacob got to work. He worked for the management-consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton, the health maintenance organization FHP International, and Cetus Corporation (formerly known as Chiron.)
Lacob then went to work for Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB,) a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. The firm was founded in 1972 and has specialized in backing companies and organizations in their early stages. Some of those companies include AOL, Amazon, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google and more.
Lacob became a partner at KPCB in 1987 and has personally been involved in helping build Autotraders.com, Invisalign, and NuVasive. His net worth is reportedly $400 million.
3. Lacob Was a Part-Owner of a Women’s Professional Basketball League and a Minority Owner of the Celtics
(Getty)
Lacob has loved basketball since he was young, first as a Celtics’ fan and then as a Lakers’ fan, the team he adopted after his family moved to California. He harbored dreams of owning both teams, something he even admits was far-fetched at the time, one time saying that he knows “It sounds crazy, because I was very poor. I didn’t have anything. I had no right to think that, but I always did.”
Owning a team wouldn’t happen right away for Lacob, though. First, he elected to own a league, which he did when he became the primary investor in the American Basketball Association, an all-women’s professional basketball league. The league was founded in 1996, but folded only two seasons later. Two main factors contributed to it’s sudden demise. The first was the NBA-backed WNBA, a rival all-women’s professional league, and the second was mis-management and financial restraints.
Lacob and Curran with Rihanna at the 2015 NBA Finals (Getty)
Lacob’s next foray into ownership was in 2006, when he became a minority owner of his first love, the Boston Celtics. Lacob then became part of a NBA Championship when the team beat the Lakers in the 2008 NBA Finals. Yet at the same time Lacob was also becoming a fan of a third team, the Golden State Warriors. He had been a season ticket holder for the past few seasons.
4. Lacob’s Group Bought the Warriors for a Record $450 Million
Warriors’ owners Lacob and Gruber, 2015 (Getty)
In 2010 Lacob found himself needing to sell both his stake in the Celtics and his Warriors’ season tickets. The opportunity to buy his own NBA team and Lacob wasn’t going to let it slip through his fingers. When Chris Cohan, the Warriors’ former owner, put the team up for sale, Lacob jumped at the chance, and with the help of a small team of investors, headlined by Peter Gruber, the CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, submitted a bid of $450 million to buy the team. Other notable figures submitting bids were the former CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison, the founder of 24-Hour Fitness Mark Mastrov, and Texas billionaire David Bonderman.
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When the winning bid was announced, it was met with shock and disbelief, as it was the most ever paid for a NBA franchise. The Warriors were far from the premier team they are today, having not won a title since the 1970’s and having barely 7,000 season ticket holders. Yet it was a chance for Lacob to fulfill his childhood dream, as well as help revitalize a key part of his adopted home town.
Lacob, Gruber and the Warriors raise the 2015 NBA Championship Banner (Getty)
In their first year owning the team, Lacob and company lost roughly $25 million. However, a few years later, the team is estimated to be worth $2.6 billion and has 14,500 season ticket holders. Lacob has assumed over-seeing the day-to-day operations of the team with the hope of running the organization in the same way he ran various Silicon Valley start-ups and by employing methods and practices that were behind success stories in the area.
5. Lacob Once Claimed His Team Was ‘Light Years Ahead’ of the Rest of the League
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Since taking over the Warriors, Lacob has made his fair share of mis-steps. The first was in 2012 when he decided to trade Monta Ellis, the team’s most popular player at the time. Ellis was the team’s lone all-star and one of the few bright spots for the team. However the drafting of Steph Curry had made Ellis expendable and Ellis’ presence on the team was proving to be a road block for Curry, a promising prospect with unlimited potential. Despite getting a quality player in return (Center Andrew Bogut) and the backing of all five members of the team’s advisory board, which included NBA legend Jerry West, fans were upset, most notably Lacob’s fiancee Curran. The emergence of Curry softened the blow over time, but it was still a rough and harsh response to his first move as owner of the team.
A little over a year later, Lacob made another dicey move, firing head coach Mark Jackson. Following a first round exit from the 2014 NBA Playoffs, the Warriors fired their head coach, who had gone 121-109 in his three seasons with the team. The team was 51-31 in the 2013-14 season. But despite the success, Jackson had reportedly clashed with team management and had a questionable coaching style. Lacob in particular pointed to Jackson’s contentious relationship with various members of the organization as a reason for his termination.
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Two seasons later, under Steve Kerr, Jackson’s replacement, the Warriors won a NBA record 73 games and looked to be on their way to winning a second straight NBA Championship. They were viewed as a model franchise and were the toast of the league. Yet Lacob might have messed with their mojo a bit when he was interviewed for a glowing New York Times story about him and his organization. One part of the story in particular seemed to rub people the wrong way.
“We’ve crushed them on the basketball court, and we’re going to for years because of the way we’ve built this team,” he said. But what really set the franchise apart, he said, was the way it operated as a business. “We’re light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we’re going to go about things,” he said. “We’re going to be a handful for the rest of the N.B.A. to deal with for a long time.”
Naturally the rest of the league took issue with the idea that the Warriors were “light-years ahead” of them and to make matters worst, the quote looked particularly short-sighted when the Warriors lost to the Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Lacob has been able to move on and all could be forgotten if the Warriors win this year, but hopefully he learned not to get ahead of himself. Karma is rough that way.
Ryan O’Connell is a contributor to Heavy. He also maintains his own blog, Giddy Up America, as well as co-hosts the podcast Differing Opinions on Drake. Ryan is on Twitter: @ryanoconnell79June 1, 2017 8:30 pm
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