How I Got My MBA From the NBA

• Baron Davis is a former NBA player who’s making a name for himself off the court in the business world.
• His latest venture, Business In the Game, is a platform for athletes and talent looking to become entrepreneurs.
• Davis spoke with Insider reporter Yoonji Han about his transition from the NBA to entrepreneurship.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with former NBA player and entrepreneur Baron Davis. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was 3 years old, my grandfather built a basketball court for me for Christmas. That initiated my love for basketball. When I saw the court he’d built in his backyard, it was just like, “I’m going to do this every day.” It was the one thing he knew I needed.

From there, it was every day, all day, basketball, basketball, basketball. I started learning to shoot the ball at nine or 10 feet because my older cousins would come and raise the hoop up. But my grandmother would water around the basket at night, and the court, which was built on dirt, would sink back down so I could make shots as a little kid.

Basketball has been the instrument to the story of my life. It was the one thing that kept me grounded through the ups and down. It also allowed me to move across the city: I got a scholarship to a private school, which formed my perspective of what the real world is.

Going to Santa Monica every day and then coming home to South Central, there was always this reality check of, “Hey, there’s this world out there that exists, but also this world does not exist for people like you.” I was in survival mode all the time, looking for mentors and guides.

My NBA journey on and off the court

I wound up at UCLA, and my mission was always to figure out how to build that bridge where kids in my neighborhood can wake up and have the same experience as the kids going to private school.

Throughout my NBA career, it’s always been about, “How can I become a beacon of light?” And hopefully someone’s watching like, “Yo, if Baron Davis did it, I can do it as well.”

I didn’t have the career I thought I would have. Once I turned pro, I was injured a lot, and because basketball was the only thing I really had, I played injured a lot. I never got to play for a championship.

But some of my best friends and mentors I made were in the NBA, and all the cities I played in — New York, New Orleans, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Cleveland — were all instrumental in helping mold me into the person I was ultimately going to be once I got off the court.

Venturing out

When I was traded to San Francisco, I found myself surrounded by all these tech people. I started hanging around a lot of developers. People were building tech companies all the time, and I was like, “Hey, I got great ideas. I know I can’t build the tech, but I have great ideas.”

I started meeting with people, sharing my ideas, problems I wanted to solve, and the solutions, because I understood that technology solves problems. 

When I was in Golden State, I founded my first tech company. It was called ibeatyou.com, and we were one of the first platforms that was based on challenging your friends and building community. It was eventually acquired by Shutterstock.

I continued to hang around venture people, listening and learning as a fly on the wall. Being an athlete, it gets you in a lot of rooms that a lot of people can’t get in. At the same time, I realized there’s an order and a process, and that’s why I decided to learn as much as I could.

Getting my MBA from the NBA

Being the only athlete for a long time at these venture conferences, I heard people speak negatively about athletes — about their money, their investments, what they’re doing. The overall zeitgeist was this narrative that athletes are dumb and are going to go broke, and they need people like us to help them figure out what to do with their money.

That’s when I realized I needed to go and find great athletes doing dope stuff, that are doing great investments, creating incredible businesses, and branding themselves as entrepreneurs.

I ended up with Business Inside the Game when I realized that it’s time to start showing people that we exist in this space. And it can’t just be athletes and entertainers. It has to be the investors, the C-suites, the connectors, the media, because we all play a part in the trajectory of a company becoming a unicorn or having an exit.

That’s something I learned in the NBA: team-building, because that’s how you build success. That’s how I got my MBA from the NBA.

Creating a win for everyone

Business Inside the Game, or BIG, is a collective membership for people to invest, communicate, and share ideas through dinners, events, and content. We want to help athletes and other talent become hyphenates, based on whatever their interests are.

I was inspired to create BIG because it allows us to curate through trust. I noticed that athletes, musicians, and people like that are taken advantage of, because that’s how the industry has traditionally been built. 

But BIG is weeding out the bad business managers, the bad agents, the bad friends you think you want to invest with.

As an athlete or somebody with fame, you have to make sure that you know what your business is. You have to make sure that you know what your stake and your ownership is. A lot of times, people come around not only to take advantage of that, but also to take advantage of being around you for their own benefit. 

So for me, it was: Let’s put the right people in the right rooms with the right ecosystem of talent, and let’s explore what a win looks like for everyone.

Photography assistance provided by Alec Castillo.