NBA Commissioner David Stern's Death: A Friend Recounts How Stern Shaped His Life
By: Vasu Kulkarni
Tags: Careers, Venture Capital, NBA, Sports, David Stern

David Stern Didn’t Hire Me — He Became My Friend and Mentor Instead

How late NBA Commissioner David Stern shaped the life of a basketball-loving VC

Photo: Jeff Golden/Getty Images

“As my mother would say: You’re going to pay your bills with this?”

This was one of the last things David Stern ever said to me when I was in his office pitching him a new business idea a few months ago. It seems unfathomable that I will no longer be able to text him about the latest NBA news and get a sarcastic response a minute later.

I first met David Stern in 2013 when I snuck into the NBA Tech Summit at the All-Star Weekend in Houston. He was in the buffet line ahead of me, talking to Pat Riley. I took a creepy covert photo and sent it to a bunch of my basketball buddies saying, “Holy shit, it’s David Stern!” Two years later, I would be sitting in his office telling him that I had written him a letter asking him to put me in charge of NBA India when I was a senior at Penn looking for a job. It made sense to me then, since I had grown up in India and also played college basketball. He never replied to that letter, and I went on to start my own basketball analytics company.

When I told Stern about this letter 10 years later, he simply looked at me and replied, “You’re welcome.” Then he asked his long-time assistant Linda to get us some food, and we sat in his office munching on a salad.

I was lucky enough to tell David the first time we met what an incredible impact he had on the trajectory of my life.

I had gone into the meeting assuming that I was going to meet the David Stern that I had read about. The David Stern who was booed every year at the NBA Draft. The David Stern with whom NBA employees dreaded to ride an elevator because he would pop quiz them on their business. The David Stern who during a meeting with ESPN a few days after the “Malice at the Palace” would point to the TV screen in the conference room every five minutes and go, “There it is again. There it is again.” You know what they say: Never meet your heroes because they will always disappoint you. I expected David Stern to be the second coming of Hitler.

Instead, I was introduced to one of the nicest, funniest, thoughtful, and incredibly respectful human beings I had ever met. It was as though the day he retired, he was able to turn off David the commissioner and go back to just being David the man. He understood that he had generations of stories that basketball junkies like me craved, and he was all but happy to share them. He was generous with his time, spending two hours with me talking about everything from technology to politics to, of course, basketball. His office was filled with the most amazing memorabilia. The Larry O’Brien trophy, a signed picture of Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and David from the Olympics; David and Muhammad Ali; and David and several presidents. I could have spent a week in his office hearing about each piece of sports history that adorned the walls.

We became fast friends after that, often exchanging emails and texts about all sorts of things. As he became more ingrained in the tech world, we would often trade startup deals. When I brought him a company that everyone else he talked to told him was a pass, he wrote a check just so that we could do a deal together. When he ended up investing in one of our fund’s portfolio companies that had another Indian CEO, he told me that the new Indian was now his favorite Indian, but that I was still his first Indian. David loved telling jokes that couldn’t be repeated in public, and I literally never left a conversation with him without having giggled like a schoolgirl, itching to tell my friends about my latest encounter with the Commissioner.

It’s not easy to say someone “went too soon” at the age of 77. You’d normally say they lived a full life. In David’s unique case, I think everyone will agree that while he most certainly lived a full life, he truly went too soon. There was still so much he had to offer. His curiosity about everything going on in the world was infectious. He was sharp as a nail, right up until the final minutes, and nothing got by him. He worked harder for his portfolio companies than any VC I have ever met. He would pick up the phone and call whomever you needed him to call, and you know there isn’t a person on Earth who isn’t going to answer when David Stern calls. Every few months I’d see the caller ID on my iPhone say “David Stern’s Office” and I knew what I was going to hear as soon as I picked up: “Hi Vasu, this is Linda calling from David Stern’s office. I have David for you.” No, “are you available?” because she and he both knew damn well that regardless of what I was doing at that moment, I was definitely available to take that call. I often wondered why this absolute legend cared to hang out with me. I had almost nothing to offer him — I would never be as smart as him, as hard working as him, not even as funny as him. Heck, it’s hard to even say that I was a bigger basketball fan than him. The only thing I had was my youth, and I think that’s what drew David to so many of us in the tech world. We were the kids building the future, just as he had done with the NBA three decades before, and he wanted to be a part of this story too.

By not replying to my letter, he allowed me to become an entrepreneur, instead of an NBA employee.

When news broke of David’s passing, I was overwhelmed with grief. I couldn’t quite figure out why, though. Yes, I considered him a friend, but in the grand scheme of things, I barely knew him. Frankly, I was shocked that he respected me enough to respond within minutes to every single email or text that I ever sent him. He also shaped the basketball world over the past 30 years, but that just makes him another public figure whose loss I would normally just mourn with a “RIP” tweet. It took awhile for me to figure out why I had broken down and wept for the first time in a decade (last time was at Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction in Springfield).

Whether or not he realized it, David Stern impacted my life in an indelible way. Without David Stern’s NBA and the global growth of the game under his tutelage, there’s a very real chance I’d be working some dead-end job. Instead, every single day of my career, I have been able to do something that I am truly passionate about. By not replying to my letter, he allowed me to become an entrepreneur, instead of an NBA employee. With every story he told me about the good old days, he fulfilled the fantasies of the biggest hoops fan in the world. With every R-rated joke he told me, I felt like I had the grandfather I always wanted. And with every conversation we had, I left with a lesson that even a Harvard MBA couldn’t get you. You usually only get to tell someone these things in a eulogy when they are dead. Whether he believed me or thought I was blowing smoke up his ass, I was lucky enough to tell David the first time we met what an incredible impact he had on the trajectory of my life.

On the afternoon of David’s brain hemorrhage, a friend of mine was walking down 5th Avenue after having met me for breakfast. He bumped into David, who was walking toward the restaurant where he would take his final steps. He stopped David to tell him that he had just had breakfast with me, and they chatted for a minute. When my friend told me he had just bumped into David, I immediately texted the Commissioner to poke fun at him about some NBA employees earlier in the week having told me that David was still calling them to get things done, long after he was in retirement.

David replied as succinctly as he normally did: “Only for my guys.”