This past August, I interviewed the new majority owner of the Sacramento Kings. This article published in the October 24, 2014 issue of India Abroad as the issue’s cover feature. To view it on the India Abroad platform, click here.
Vivek Ranadivé has never been afraid to dream big.
As a teenager freshly accepted to MIT, he flew from Mumbai to the United States with less than $100 and visions of the first-ever moon landing on his mind.
It was the 1970s, and the Indian government was not allowing students to exchange rupees for American dollars, which Ranadivé needed to attend school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But his tenacity was born early in life: Prior to his trip he had camped out overnight in front of the Reserve Bank of India and convinced the office to allow him to exchange just enough currency to pay first-semester tuition costs.
Ranadivé wanted to be a part of the population that did big things.
And now, as the first NBA franchise majority owner of Indian descent in history, Ranadivé’s universe is indeed quite big. In a reported $348 million deal on March 21, 2013, he anchored the Sacramento Kings basketball team to the California capital, trumping a deal that would have moved it Seattle—and broken the collective heart of Sacramento.
“It was clear that, without a sports team, the city would be decimated,” Ranadivé said. He cited ancient Rome, where coliseums historically centered cities. “Sacramento has no other sports team—it doesn’t have a football team, hockey team, basketball team, or college team.”
The 57-year-old entrepreneur’s affinity to the state is based in history and humility.
“I came to California with nothing. Everything I have, I owe to the state of California and of course to America,” Ranadivé said.
As a lover of the game of basketball, he eventually thought, “Maybe I’m meant to do this.”
And since salvaging the city’s purple and silver team, there has been no looking back. Ranadivé has set a high bar for himself and the Kings. “I’d like them to be a global brand—kind of like what Manchester United is for soccer, but even more so,” he said.
Ranadivé, who carries a black belt in Taekwando, has always loved athletic performance. He was primarily a cricket and soccer fan earlier in life, but there was something different about the sport endearingly known as “b-ball.”
His love affair with the game started when, as a single father, he “foolishly volunteered to coach [his] 12-year-old daughter’s basketball team.”
Coming to the game with zero previous experience but no shortage of fresh perspective, he applied his knowledge of numbers to his coaching strategy. He had his girls pressure the offensive team the entire length of the basketball court—instead of half of the court, as is generally played. Though this “full-court press” style was a non-traditional method, Ranadivé wanted to up the chances of his team having possession of the ball as much as possible.
It worked: The girls went on the national championship that year. The story is documented vividly in Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, a meditation on approaching and overcoming obstacles by thinking differently.
Thinking innovatively, after all, was what Ranadivé did for a living. As the man credited with digitizing Wall Street in the 1980s, he created the technology that, for the first time ever, integrated stock quotes, financial information, and finance news just as the information became available in real-time. Prior to that, Wall Street ran on batch-processing technology—where information was collected first over a period of time, and then financial decisions were made based on that potentially outdated data; it was a method hardly amenable to the continual changes that make Wall Street the volatile ecosystem that it is.
With that, the entrepreneur left an enormous imprint in the business arena, but he’s not stopping there. He now has a new arena to conquer.
“Basketball is going to be the global game of the 21st century,” Ranadivé predicts confidently.
And there’s good chance it will, if he has anything to do with it. Ranadivé already has big plans for putting Sacramento on the world map as a futuristic “City 3.0” of sorts, referring to a billion-dollar development effort to create a new basketball arena a few blocks from the capitol building that hopes to be “the world’s smartest building.”
“There will be a gigabyte of data built into every seat,” Ranadivé said.
Here’s the vision: Via your mobile phone, the arena will be able to communicate the best time you should leave home to minimize hitting traffic—and it will also help you find an open parking space once you’re there. The building will be a “ticketless, cashless experience” where you won’t need to take out your smartphone when you walk through the gates, as the arena will utilize facial-recognition technology instead.
“It’ll be the world’s securest arena, without question,” Ranadivé said. “And also the most green in terms of its energy ratings.”
The technology will tell you where the shortest restroom lines are—and which concession stands are selling your favorite food or beer.
The building will also use both indoor and outdoor space dynamically.
“We’ve got beautiful evenings here in Sacramento, so we’ll be able to invite the outside in,” he said, hoping to build a novel experience on all fronts for basketball fans. “They basically constructed arenas the same way for 2000 years, and this will be a quantum leap in arena design.”
Ranadivé cites that this project will create thousands of jobs and “revitalize” downtown Sacramento. He also anticipates the arena will help bring tourists to the city. “We had a design competition among the world’s best architects; the goal was that, when people make postcards of the city, this arena should be on it.”
Ranadivé says the current plan is to open doors 3 years from now on October 7—his 60th birthday.
“You’re going to be invited,” he said with a laugh. “And if you wear a purple saree, you get bonus points.”
Though Ranadivé has the optimism of someone who has achieved the American Dream, he has hardly forgotten where he came from. In fact, he’s got his sights set on India as the next big frontier for basketball.
“There are already 1 million boys and girls bouncing basketballs in India,” Ranadivé said. “It’s going to explode [there]. Indians love a great show; Indians love numbers; Indians love celebration; Indians love athletic performance—and basketball is the greatest show on earth.”
“I’m hoping to talk to the new prime minister [Narendra Modi] about how we can help support his efforts to create 50 modern, 21st century cities in India—and how sports and arenas can be a basic part of that,” Ranadivé said.
The goal to vitalize basketball in a country of 1.2 billion is lofty, and it will involve collaborating with the government, industrialists, and schools, but don’t doubt Ranadivé—he’s not one to throw in the towel in the face of a challenge.
“To me, life is beautiful—but I also hate to lose at anything,” Ranadivé admits with a chuckle. “I think my dislike for losing is potentially greater than my love for winning.”
The massive effort has already begun. “We’ve helped fund courts [in India]; we’ve had clinics over there; we’ll keep sending players over there; we’ve sent our dancers over there,” Ranadivé said.
The Kings broadcasted 20 games in India last season, and they have a team website completely in Hindi.
He’s also banking on the game’s natural appeal and accessibility. “It’s a game that can be played indoors and outdoors, by one person or a few people, by girls and by boys, in rich countries and in poor countries, in cities and in villages—you don’t need a lot of space.”
“I love cricket, but it kind of belongs to a past era where time moved slower, and you could spend six days playing a match and there were big fields everywhere,” Ranadivé said. On the other hand, “Basketball is two hours of extreme action packed into it. If you play 20 minutes of basketball, you get a huge amount of exercise. You play two hours of cricket and you could still get no exercise.”
The efforts to globalize the game aren’t all taking place abroad, though. This past April, the Sleep Train Arena hosted an event dubbed “Bollywood Night,” where the half-time show, dance routines, music, and jerseys were all desi-inspired. Fans could even buy Indian food at the concession stands. That night, Indian executives and celebrities were invited to the game, which was broadcasted live on the Asian subcontinent.
“You know Indians love to dance; they love to party,” Ranadivé laughed. “It was all of that with the high octane of basketball combined.”
“It’s a two-way street,” he said. “We get to share the beauty and joy of basketball with the Indian community both here and in India, and we get to share the richness and fun of Indian culture with America and the rest of the world.”
He said the night was extra special to him because his daughter, Anjali, now a UC Berkeley graduate and aspiring singer at 21, performed.
The entrepreneur who graduated from MIT and got his MBA from Harvard stresses he isn’t going it alone in this massive effort. He continually mentions that in this business as in life, “it’s all about the people.”
“I’m not the smartest guy, so I’ve always believed in surrounding myself with people who are smarter than me,” he said. He cites other members of the Kings ownership group, who include Steve Chen, the cofounder of YouTube; retired NBA star Shaquille O’Neal; and QUALCOMM founder Paul Jacobs. His advisors, executives, engineers, and sales and marketing team all play their part in mapping out the future of the Kings.
He plans to take new NBA commissioner Adam Silver to India in the coming year to see what other things can be done in the name of basketball overseas. He also cited 21-year-old Sim Bhullar—who became the first NBA player of Indian descent when the Kings signed him this summer—as someone with whom the Indian people could identify when watching the game.
“He’s got a very high IQ for the game,” Ranadivé said. “We’re getting him NBA-ready. And with his upbringing, his background, and his work ethic, we know that he’ll get there very quickly. I think he’s going be a great representative of the game for India and the Indian diaspora.”
It seems there’s a lot on Ranadivé’s plate, but he remains tenacious that that’s how it’s supposed to be: “There isn’t anything out there that can’t be improved on; there’s a ton of opportunity—and this is a fantastic time to be entrepreneur.”
And so the future is full for the Kings, but Ranadivé wouldn’t have it any other way.
Just as at his software company TIBCO, where he is CEO, he promotes a culture of setting the bar higher and higher to bring out the best in people and their ideas.
“I’m always challenging people—and always annoying them,” Ranadivé admitted. “I’m asking them why something can’t be done better.”
Ranadivé’s clout as a successful entrepreneur of Indian origin will do him favors in his endeavors to globalize basketball in Asia. But did he ever find that his heritage brought up challenges for him in this country before he made it big?
“You know, I didn’t really face challenges because I was Indian,” he said. “I feel that, if anything, I was always given the benefit of a doubt. It’s almost gotten absurd now in Silicon Valley, where people assume that you’re smarter than other people because you’re Indian.”
He continued, “I think I faced the challenges that any entrepreneur would face: How do you get people to follow you? How do you convince people to invest in you and buy your products?”
His humble optimism spills over into his reflections of being owner of an NBA team.
“I don’t think of myself as an owner; none of us are really owners. We’re simply custodians, and the team actually belongs to the city and the fans. My job is to make the city proud.”
All that said, it does look like our big dreamer is finally “living the dream,” as he will be quick to say. He cites watching practices with players like Shaquille and Chris Mullan as unforgettable experiences.
“There’s nothing like being able to learn the game through the eyes of the legends,” he said.
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