Crunch-time pro speaks at TechCrunch
Curry talks about Kaepernick, tech and charity work at Pier 48 gathering
Wearing a charcoal blazer, gray T-shirt and black sneakers, Stephen Curry looked more tech programmer Tuesday evening than two-time NBA MVP.
“You might be wondering what Steph is doing here,” Jordan Crook, moderator of Curry’s talk at TechCrunch Disrupt on Pier 48, told a room packed with aspiring entrepreneurs. “This is the tech world, and he’s an NBA player.”
Though best known for being perhaps the greatest shooter of all time, Curry refuses to be defined by his on-court heroics. The 28year-old father of two is a co-founder of a Bay-Area startup and a budding philanthropist.
The title of his 20-minute conversation Tuesday with Crook, which closed the sec-
ond day of the three-day tech event, was, “Social activism with Stephen Curry.” So it was no surprise that Crook asked him about Colin Kaepernick, the 49ers’ backup quarterback who has received national attention for sitting — and later, kneeling — during the national anthem in silent protest of social injustices.
Curry, who first voiced support in Kaepernick last week in an interview with CNBC, again commended Kaepernick for starting a valuable discussion about the mistreatment of African Americans in this country. However, Curry will not be among the athletes joining the movement Kaepernick started.
“I’ve been a part of certain conversations off the grid in finding different ways to make our community better, especially for African Americans,” Curry said. “That’s not the way that I’ll do it, but I support him and his attempt to start a conversation and continue a conversation to try to better a terrible situation.”
Though he didn’t detail his potential efforts to help African Americans, Curry talked at length about his work with “Nothing But Nets,” a grassroots campaign to prevent malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. He has donated three bed nets, designed to protect people from disease-carrying mosquitos, for each threepointer made the past four seasons.
Each of those seasons, Curry led the NBA in threes, setting an all-time record three times. There are 3,663 nets in at-risk communities that are the result of his long-range accuracy.
“That’s like how often a teenage girl checks her phone,” sportswriter Rick Reilly said in a more intimate Q&A after Curry spoke with Crook on the main stage.
Curry learned about “Nothing But Nets” seven years ago through former Davidson teammate Bryant Barr. A recent alum of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Barr is also responsible for getting Curry into tech.
The two longtime friends helped found Slyce, a Palo Alto startup that assists pro athletes in managing their social-media presences. The initial idea for the company came when Barr realized that Curry’s social-media activity had dwindled once he reached a certain number of followers.
Today, Slyce is used by everyone from Muscle Milk to NFL and NHL teams. Curry sits on the board, owns founding shares and remains actively involved in the direction of the company.
“I talk to him at least once a week about what we’re doing and how things are going,” Barr said. “He opens a lot of doors for us, makes a lot of connections and is kind of the perfect test case for everything we want to try.”
Slyce is only one segment of Curry’s tech endeavors. He is part-owner of the Bostonbased CoachUp, a venture-funded tech firm and app designed to help parents find private coaches for their kids. Then there is “StephMoji,” an app that allows users to access hundreds of emojis Curry personally curated.
“I don’t know exactly what got (NBA players) into tech,” Curry said, “but you go to games, and you see tech guys sitting in the front row.”