As we all know we got some bad news and it hit the nation hard. If not the world because we lost the great Kobe Bryant. You know number eight the Black Mamba and it was a loss that I’m pretty sure nobody will ever forget including the families who also was lost with them. Kobe had many stories with different types of billionaires. One in particular conversation he had with Elon Musk. “He’ll always say the most important thing is imagination. You can study all these things that you have in a book, but if you don’t have imagination to take it to another level it doesn’t mean anything” now if that doesn’t hit you in a certain way I do not know what to tell you.
Kobe was a brilliant businessman. So, it’s kind of bittersweet when you are so good at something that it cast a shadow on something else that you are working on. It casted a shadow over how big of an entrepreneur he was. The same intensity and ferocity mindset that won him Championships and MVPs. Kobe carried that same mindset over into his business.
Let’s just name a few of his business ventures. You got one which was BodyArmor, now BodyArmor could be compared to vitamin water. It was in 2014 “Bryant made his first investment in the brand, for roughly 10 percent of the company, in March 2014, putting in roughly $6 million over time. Co-Founder of BodyArmor once said “I kept telling him how impossible it would be. I told him that it has 1% chance of succeeding” said Repole “He looked at me and said ‘I’ve won five NBA championships, an MVP a Finals MVP, and Olympic Gold medals. Your odds are the best I’ve ever had”. So, the amazing part is not only did he make an investment, Kobe put his foot in it.
This is where the entrepreneurial spirit comes in. ‘When I teamed up with Kobe, I thought I was getting an elite basketball player with great vision,’ Repole said. ‘I wound up with an Oscar winner who has his fingerprints all over our creative that we deeply benefited from. That is what it takes to be a real entrepreneur. Kobe made sure the job got done.” Based on the valuation of the Coca-Cola deal, his stake is now worth approximately $200 million.” Coca-Cola understood what was going on as well and that’s why they bought the company
Now his most impressive business move to me was the venture capital firm that he started with a man named Jeff Stiebel. “A few months after retiring, Bryant announced in 2016 that he was partnering with former Web.com president Jeff Stibel and starting a $100 million investment fund that was set to focus on media, technology, and data related companies.” The Portfolio included Epic Games, The makers of Fortnite, as well as Alibaba, Dell and LegalZoom. Kobe also invested into a company called RingDNA. RingDNA is basically an artificial intelligence calling service so its job is to collect the data through these calls and it would help build three times more in sales in revenue. When Kobe and Stiebel joined forces, they made a hundred-million-dollar venture capital firm.
I was very appreciative of the man that Kobe was. That he had all these businesses and he had the time to make them successful. Kobe is good for the up-and-coming generation and maybe the generation after that, because he showed that you can you can do more than what people think you should do. It is just all about the hard work the determination. Kobe wanted to show the world that he can do so much more.
