Stephen Curry in a huddle with his executives. Clockwise: Erick Peyton, Chris Helfrich, Suresh Singh, Tiffany Williams. Photography by Jessica Chou
In a mahogany and marble conference room downstairs from Stephen Curry’s apartment near San Francisco’s Financial District, 10 executives from a constellation of businesses belonging to the NBA superstar have gathered to coordinate their efforts on various projects. It’s just before lunchtime when Tiffany Williams, the COO of Thirty Ink, the parent company of Curry’s many endeavors, announces it’s time to discuss the logistics of a series of events they’re planning in New York City this fall.
Stephen Curry.Photography by Jessica Chou
There’s an event during Fashion Week with the Japanese tech conglomerate Rakuten, tied to a deal Curry struck to support Black designers. There’s a potential visit to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s suite at the U.S. Open. There’s a KPMG-sponsored golf tournament in New Jersey for Curry’s Underrated Golf business, which helps student athletes from underserved communities. And there’s a splashy media event that Curry’s PR maven wants to put on to “really shine a spotlight on every single business unit and everything that we do at Thirty Ink.”
That all needs to be accomplished ahead of a weeklong trip to China with Under Armour, after which Curry and his wife, Ayesha, need to be in Los Angeles for a four-day shoot of the HBO Max celebrity-couple reality TV show About Last Night, which they created together and co-host. Oh, and should they tack on a trip to Japan, someone asks?
For a person with so many demands on his time, it’s perhaps surprising that Curry himself isn’t present in the meeting meant to get a handle on it all. His executives have flown in from as far away as New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles, but Curry is in Salt Lake City for a game between his Golden State Warriors and the Utah Jazz, and his return has been delayed because assistant coach Dejan Milojević suffered a heart attack at a team dinner and died 24 hours later. That was yesterday. Curry, the Warriors’ captain and one of the most respected veterans in the league, stayed with his team to grieve and absorb the shock.
In fact, the Thirty Ink leaders gather every month for a similar session, and Curry rarely attends, preferring to focus on basketball during the NBA season and to lead his companies by trusting the people he’s assembled, weighing in on big-picture matters without getting too caught up in the smaller ones.
“He’s a point guard on and off the court,” says Erick Peyton, co-founder and co-CEO of Unanimous Media, Curry’s Hollywood production company. “A point guard is the captain on the floor, able to take the shots or give up the ball, and that’s exactly what Stephen’s ability is within the business.”
Professional athletes have been starting increasingly ambitious businesses for several decades, but Curry’s growing empire takes that trend to a level scarcely seen before. Time was, successful athletes would open a car wash upon retirement, accept a few endorsement deals, and watch the mostly passive income land in their accounts. In recent years, megastars such as Kevin Durant and Serena Williams have added venture capital firms to their portfolios, while Tom Brady and LeBron James have created production companies and consumer goods such as booze and wellness products.
Curry, 35, combines them all, with a dozen enterprises that span nearly as many industries. In addition to Unanimous and Underrated Golf, Thirty Ink (the name is a reference to his jersey number, and the spelling of Ink with a k is intentional, a reference to writing his own story) includes an Underrated Basketball tour and a bourbon brand called Gentleman’s Cut. His foundation with Ayesha, Eat. Learn. Play., aims to improve the diets, educational opportunities, and sports facilities for kids in Oakland. Two venture capital partnerships–one with the billionaire investor and former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, the other with a college buddy–have added stakes in various tech and sports companies. Curry is one of the founders of San Francisco’s professional golf team in the forthcoming TGL golf league created by Tiger Woods. (Set to launch in 2025, the TGL merges digital and physical golf to create a faster-paced game with more dazzle.)
And then there’s Under Armour’s Curry Brand. Curry’s relationship with the sportswear maker started with a typical shoe endorsement deal in 2013 and seven years later spun off into its own brand, with Curry as president. Last year, the two parties renegotiated their partnership and struck a potential lifetime deal in which Curry received $75 million worth of Under Armour stock, plus various other forms of compensation, including base pay, royalties, and incentive bonuses that could add up to as much as $1 billion.
“I don’t want to put a number to it, but there is so much upside potential for what we’re going to do with the Curry Brand in the years ahead,” says Under Armour CEO Stephanie Linnartz, who joined the company shortly after the new deal was reached. “I think the sky’s the limit.”
Curry stands poised to become one of the only athletes ever to reach billionaire status while still actively playing. (Tiger Woods and LeBron James have done that, and perhaps no others, according to Forbes.) Curry’s NBA contracts alone total nearly half a billion dollars to date. As a private company, Thirty Ink doesn’t disclose its overall revenue, but as with the Under Armour deal, the numbers are large. Unanimous Media, to take just one example, struck a so-called first-look deal with Comcast NBCUniversal in 2021 that’s reportedly worth a high eight figures.
And yet Lasry, who knew Curry well before they teamed up on a sports-focused venture fund under Lasry’s Avenue Capital Group, believes his friend and partner is just getting started. “On the business side,” Lasry says, “I think he’s still trying to figure out what he wants to do.”
Stephen Curry leads his Golden State Warriors team on the court and his hand-picked executive team off the court.Photography by Jessica Chou
There’s a moment in the documentary Underrated (produced by Curry’s Unanimous Media for Apple TV+) where the 10th-seeded Davidson College Wildcats, led by Curry, are down 17 points to the second-seeded Georgetown Hoyas in round two of the 2008 NCAA Tournament. The Hoyas are big and strong and fast, and their roster includes the sons of Patrick Ewing and Doc Rivers, two NBA legends. The Davidson coach, Bob McKillop, calls a timeout and smiles with an eerie confidence to his overmatched players, who by any conventional basketball wisdom shouldn’t even be in the tournament.
McKillop coached the Wildcats to understand that their potential lay in working together as a team, not in any one individual. As Curry explains in the film, “Every piece has to work for us to be competitive at the highest level. We know we’re not the most athletic, we’re not the most talented, tallest, fastest. But if we can play like a team in unison, we can compete with anybody in the country.” In the huddle, the coach calmly reminds his players that they’re just fine, they know what they’re doing. And, right out of any number of classic sports movies, they go out and mount an epic comeback victory that shocks the basketball world–with Curry scoring 25 of his 30 points in the second half.
Reflecting on the moment today, Curry doesn’t look like a giant slayer. He has a narrow frame and a notably normal-person height (6’2″-ish) for a guy who gets banged around daily by some of the largest humans on earth. He speaks softly with an even keel, a trait that he credits largely to Coach McKillop. “He just had that innate confidence that we were prepared for the moment,” Curry says, “and when you’re prepared, you’re OK to accept whatever the results are.”
Seated in the back of a black van hurrying him home from basketball practice and business commitments before his three children’s bedtimes, Curry focuses his attention fully on the person sitting opposite him. He makes direct eye contact and takes time to formulate precise thoughts before speaking, and then edits himself further along the way. “You can’t foresee what challenges you’re going to face and what obstacles you have to go through,” he says. “But the ability to identify everybody’s value to the team, clearly understanding their roles, is, in my experience, the most important element. Without that clarity, nothing really good’s going to happen.” He pauses to think for a moment. “That’s a great lesson for any functioning team, and it helps in business, too.”
Lasry, who as owner of an NBA team got to know a lot of sports heroes, remembers being immediately impressed by Curry’s accessibility and modesty when they were introduced. “You get into a real conversation very quickly with Steph,” Lasry says. “And what’s interesting is that he knows what he doesn’t know. He says, ‘OK, for me to go and do this thing’ “–a new line of business, say–” ‘I need to have a team. I need to have somebody who understands this world, and I’m going to trust that person, and then that person is going to introduce me to more people.’ So, success is going to be dependent on the fact that you put together a really good team.”
Davidson College, it’s worth noting, is a tiny liberal arts school outside of Charlotte, North Carolina–not the kind of place you expect to produce a superstar athlete. Nor was Curry the type of player anyone would expect to become one. As a senior in high school, he was just six feet tall and baby-faced, with a wispy 160-pound frame (he’s now 185), and he didn’t attract interest from bigtime schools despite his impressive scoring history; Davidson was one of the only Division I colleges that cared to give him a shot–and then it watched him prove everyone wrong. The Wildcats went on to the Elite Eight after beating Georgetown in 2008, and a year later Curry left for the NBA draft, where he landed at Golden State and made an immediate impact on the team, winning the starting point guard position and averaging 17.5 points per game that first season. He has remained there ever since, the kind of franchise player most teams can only dream about.
For Curry, a sense of being consistently underrated has fueled countless successes–though his background is hardly a hard-luck story. He’s the oldest son of former NBA player Dell Curry, who notched 16 seasons with five teams, most of those years with young Stephen watching in person and running around the locker room. The family had money, connections, and a sprawling house with a full basketball court. While those considerable advantages appear to undercut his against-the-odds narrative, Curry manages to avoid looking phony by simply being a straight shooter on the subject. “I’m extremely grateful to have been blessed with those things,” he says, “but at some point in anybody’s life, I don’t care what demographic you come from, you’ve probably felt underrated. And changing that to make it a badge of honor is what inspires the work that comes behind it.”
If you’re underrated, that is, you have a special kind of motivation to show your doubters a middle finger and beat them. For Curry, the concept resonated on more than just a personal level. He saw the potential for a powerful brand as well as a social mission. There was no single light-bulb moment when he put it all together, but over the past few years a disparate assortment of business opportunities has coalesced into something greater.
Curry with his wife, Ayesha at an Eat. Learn. Play. event in Oakland.Photo: Getty Images
In August 2020, Curry took a trip to Toronto and sat down for a strategy session with a close family friend, Suresh Singh, a real estate developer who has provided financial and business advice to Dell Curry over the years and acted as something like an uncle to Stephen. The two sat at the dining table in a house Curry rented and spent hours mapping out the various arms of the business universe they hoped to create.
Singh, 58 years old with graying stubble and a flair for bold, black-and-white fashion ensembles, calls the resulting document a “blueprint” for the business. He and Curry both still have photos of it saved on their phones–two pages of dense, handwritten notes in blue ink, plus black-ink updates from follow-up sessions filling the margins.
Curry had been in the league more than a decade at that point, and his business dealings had begun to sprawl but lacked a clearly defined sense of purpose or organization. Back in 2015, after the Curry-led Warriors won the NBA championship, Curry teamed up with an old college teammate, Bryant Barr, to start building an organization that would manage the influx of endorsement offers and various duties related to them. Show up here. Hold this sandwich. Smile.
When the team won another title in 2017 and then a third with Curry in 2018 (a fourth would come in 2022), the number of corporate suitors swelled again, and Curry started looking for advice on building a more proactive organization–“a change of perspective from endorsement to enterprise,” he says now. He launched Unanimous Media in 2018 to create TV and film projects centered on the themes of faith, family, and sports (the most recent one is a documentary about literacy called Sentenced, produced by Stephen and Ayesha and narrated by Stephen). The couple decided to go big with their personal foundation in 2019, naming it Eat. Learn. Play. and distributing meals and books and building playgrounds and sports facilities. The Underrated Basketball tour, which spotlights overlooked players, started the same year. It all felt promising and vaguely connected, but it also quickly became apparent that the different pieces didn’t add up to a cohesive identity, and there weren’t systems in place for the organizations to work together and not fight for Curry’s attention.
Over the years, Singh had held periodic meetings with Curry to offer financial guidance, and eventually the talks intensified over rounds of golf, during family visits, and over phone calls and voice mails, until finally they met in Toronto to get it all down on paper. Out went a few of the brand partnerships that felt more transactional–what Singh calls “one-and-done” deals–and in came a greater emphasis on continuing to build out longer-term partnerships with the likes of Chase and Under Armour. Also in was a more tightly defined mission to tie Curry’s various projects together. “What are you trying to do, and why do you want to do it?” Singh had asked.
The answer they came up with boiled down to three words tied to the notion of being underrated: Curry was in business to foster equity, access, and opportunity. Now when he weighed new partnerships or activations, he aimed to ensure the brands would align with his message around those three words, rather than the other way around. Put another way, Curry wanted companies to not just pay him to endorse their priorities, but to also pay him for the opportunity for them to endorse his. And he had the star power to make it happen. “Rather than just me showing up and doing a commercial and getting paid,” he explains, “we wanted it to be a two-way street. That’s how I can integrate them into everything that I’m doing.”
After the Toronto meeting, Singh came on as chair of a new parent company, which would eventually become known as Thirty Ink, and Barr left to focus on Penny Jar, his venture capital firm at which Curry is a partner and special adviser. (Together they’ve invested in a dozen companies across several recently trendy tech categories including the metaverse, food delivery, and NFTs.)
The newly hired CEOs of Unanimous and Eat. Learn. Play., Erick Peyton and Chris Helfrich, respectively, became part of a core executive team for the larger Curry business universe–“a team that believes in what I stand for, believes in what my reach is, and can leverage their expertise to build this into something that I couldn’t even imagine at the time,” Curry explains. He hired Tiffany Williams to be Thirty Ink’s COO. A hyperorganized detail thinker, she’d started her career as a Warriors receptionist and came over to work for Curry in 2016 to oversee the scheduling and logistics of everything related to his then-ballooning number of endorsement deals. Now she’s in charge of the overall operational fabric of his non-basketball ventures, while Singh focuses on strategy and the CEOs build out their respective businesses.
As Curry got deeper into the reorganization, he realized it wasn’t just a transition from endorsement to enterprise but also a way to put the emphasis on social good. He and Ayesha had spent a lot of time talking about the difference between legacy and impact. They had defined a mission. Now they needed to optimize for actually making a difference over simply burnishing their personal brands. And that required money. “Steph wanted to turn this into a profit center, knowing that profits can result in perpetuity of mission as opposed to everything having to be philanthropic,” Singh says. He wanted to create a “perpetual pipeline to be able to do good.”
It also meant having the confidence to take a long view and turn away certain lucrative opportunities that don’t align with the mission. A major beverage brand that works with the NBA offered Curry an individual endorsement deal worth “a number I’d never heard before,” he says. “But it was literally just a cash grab and had no other benefit to anything else that I was doing.” Even if he were to take the money and reinvest it in his causes, he says, “it would just look completely out of place for me to be in that space, no matter how much you tried to massage the marketing to make it somewhat feasible.” He chuckles to himself. “That was a big one to say no to.”
There’s a fuzzy gray line between doing it for the money and doing it for the mission, though. This past May, Curry announced he would be launching a bourbon brand called Gentleman’s Cut–a head-scratcher of a fit with the mission of equity, access, and opportunity. It’s hard to see the move as anything more than a play for the kind of money that George Clooney and nightlife impresario Rande Gerber got when they sold their Casamigos tequila brand to Diageo for $1 billion in 2017. Since then, celebrity spirits brands have become something of a cliché, and others including Bethenny Frankel and Ryan Reynolds have cashed in big. Ayesha Curry, a serial entrepreneur herself, with a panoply of lifestyle, beauty, and media offerings under the brand Sweet July, has a wine label, Domaine Curry. And while Stephen admits bourbon is “a bit of a stretch” in his brand portfolio, he sees it as a long-term opportunity compared with the sponsor he turned down. He’s a bona fide bourbon drinker, he says, and he sees chances to “build experiences around the brand that I can get excited about and hopefully create a bigtime win when it comes to valuation and exit down the road.”
Stephen Curry in the 5th grade, standing next to his Dad, NBA star Dell Curry. Photo: Courtesy subject
Stephen Curry with his Davidson College teammates in 2008. Photo: Getty Images
In the startup-filled SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, an unremarkable white two-story building houses the global headquarters of Thirty Ink. Here, Curry–four-time NBA champ, nine-time NBA All-Star, widely considered the greatest shooter in basketball history–shares a workstation in a 10-by-10 office with the head of HR. For anyone who’s seen him play, that won’t be surprising. It’s not that he goes to the office every day, but when he does, there’s no grand production involved–just a guy taking a meeting or powering through some emails.
“He’s very quiet in his leadership,” says Steve Kerr, Curry’s longtime Warriors head coach. “He’s not a guy who gives speeches to teams and talks a lot. He leads more by example in how much he cares and works, and how he carries himself.”
Outside the office, Curry’s Thirty Ink teammates see his level of engagement in the kind of detailed feedback he gives over email or the workflow app Asana–on everything from design reviews to deal points. For Unanimous–which has 45 screen projects in development along with a nascent books division, a possible video-game division, and a slate of podcasts–Curry reviews any pitch or script that’s on its way to a green light from Peyton and his team. When the company produced an American Gladiators-style mini golf competition show called Holey Moley for ABC (yes, you read that right; nobody said Curry didn’t have a sense of humor), he designed one of the holes on the course.
And yet, says Helfrich, the Eat. Learn. Play. CEO, who previously ran the U.N. Foundation’s Nothing but Nets anti-malaria campaign, Curry has the discipline to keep his feedback focused on where he can most add value. “He’s shown so much trust in me to do the everyday work and bring him well-researched ideas,” says Helfrich. “There’s not a lot of second-guessing.”
One way Curry does that is by holding a leadership meeting every September. “We look at the calendar, we look at all the projects, we look at the strategic plans, and Stephen is able to give feedback on where he would like to see things go, so that we can just march along through the year and then provide him updates,” says Williams. “I check in with the teams and make sure they’re staying on that course, and if something needs to go outside of that, then we’ll ask him to chime in again.”
Another way Curry scales his leadership is by being open about what he doesn’t understand. Instead of faking it, he asks questions–one in particular. “The question for everything is why?” says Singh. “Over and over, and if he finds that there’s something we can’t really answer, then we have to go back to the well on that one.”
His collaborators marvel at the depths of his curiosity, but to Curry, it just makes sense to ask. “I want to grow and evolve,” he says, “and for anybody I’m partnering with, I have a fascination with their industry expertise. For me to become a more polished investor, a polished CEO, all the different roles that I’m playing now and will continue throughout my life, that’s how you get better at it. Those are the conversations that I want be in.”
Curry prods Lasry, his partner in Avenue Sports Fund, with questions about investment strategy: Why is Lasry investing in a certain company? Why not another one? How did he draw that conclusion?
To be sure, sometimes Curry’s questions don’t go deep enough and the learning happens on the job. It was 2021 when Curry and his team decided to get involved with the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried had hung his pitch to Curry on the concept of effective altruism, a movement that espouses making as much money as possible to give away as much as possible to improve the world as much as possible. Curry launched an NFT collection with FTX and sent all of the proceeds to Eat. Learn. Play. He also collected a reported $35 million for being an FTX spokesperson–alongside Tom Brady and Larry David, among others–and recorded a commercial in which he touted the exchange’s user-friendliness precisely because he wasn’t a crypto expert. He’s now being sued by crypto investors who lost heaps of money and blame him for leading them astray.
Curry and his deputies won’t talk about the FTX debacle, but they’re also not letting that very public face plant stop them from pushing forward to new business horizons. They’re planning to launch a line of children’s products later this year. They’re talking about building affordable housing in the Bay Area one day. This past fall, with Under Armour’s blessing, Curry signed Sacramento Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox to an endorsement deal with Curry Brand, the first time an active player has worn a competing active player’s shoe–a testament to the big bet the gear maker is placing on Curry as it tries to revive its flagging stock price in the wake of several controversies related to founder Kevin Plank, including an SEC probe. And Team Curry is increasingly investing in Black-owned businesses that he sees having big potential, such as the streetwear line Trophy Hunting. “We all know capital hasn’t been allocated fairly and equally,” he says. “So how do we change the game for these men and women who deserve the opportunity based on their amazing ideas and ability to influence the culture?”
The list of new initiatives goes on. “He has that quintessential goldfish memory when it comes to failures,” says Singh. “Missed that shot, missed the past 50 shots–he has no idea. In his head, it’s the next one that matters. And he lives his life that way, knowing that he can’t dwell on those things, that he can learn from them in the moment, but then has to keep moving forward.”
Curry relies on his executives to set him up for entrepreneurial success; they’re happy to have an ace on the team.Photography by Jessica Chou
Back on the van home from his day in the city, Curry pulls the hood of his black sweatshirt over his head and recedes into his phone for a minute of precious personal space where he doesn’t have to perform for anybody. He’ll be lucky to get 45 minutes with his kids this evening, he says, before they go to sleep. Then he and Ayesha will compare notes about their days.
His wife is his most unfiltered teammate, Curry says, and he admires her ability to toss out ideas as they come to her. “She has a way of being unapologetic about any idea that comes to mind, just spitting it out–I see that so much from her in meetings and calls. Nine of the 10 ideas don’t go anywhere, but the 10th one is just right. That’s how good ideas happen.” He makes eye contact and offers a self-aware smile. “I’m more on the reserved, calculated side, and I’m trying to adopt a little bit more of her way myself, so we meet in the middle–in our marriage, in family time, in business, all of it. It wouldn’t work otherwise.”
Ayesha also sees herself as the resident BS detector. “It’s always fun when you respect what the other person is doing and can bounce ideas off each other,” she says. “As his best friend and wife, it’s great because I can see through the cracks in an idea and say, ‘What about this and what about that?’ I like that I can burst the bubble a little bit.”
Before Curry goes to bed, he has another round of physical recovery work to do, including a cold plunge–“just my routine to get ready for tomorrow,” he says. He had a trainer come to the house this morning before getting the kids off to school and then heading to the Chase Center for five hours of team practice, and tomorrow and the day after are game days. “That’s the one change being this deep into a playing career,” he says. “You can’t wait until tomorrow to get ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow preparation starts tonight.”
A new batch of emails and Asana comments from Thirty Ink teammates are accumulating in the meantime. Curry will work through some of those on the ride back to the city tomorrow. For now, the van pulls up to his house, he gathers his bags of daily supplies and walks in just in time to help Ayesha with one of the kids putting up heavy resistance about bedtime. Tonight is going to be a team effort.
