In October 2023, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber paid a $50 million expansion fee — spread over ten years — for a WNBA team that did not yet exist. Two and a half years later the Golden State Valkyries are the first women's pro sports franchise independently valued at a billion dollars. That is not a success story so much as an arbitrage story: Lacob bought at $50 million what the league now charges $250 million for, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole history of where women's basketball suddenly went. The Bay Area, of all places — the region that just watched the A's, the Raiders, and the Warriors themselves walk out the door — is where the richest new bet in American sports came in.

Joe Lacob did not get rich by being right. He got rich by being early, which is a different and more interesting thing. Venture capital — Kleiner Perkins, the firm where he spent his prime years — is not a business of conviction so much as a business of timing, of writing a check into a thing that doesn't make sense yet and waiting for the world to catch up to the price you already paid. Most of those checks die. The ones that don't pay for all the ones that do, and then some.

In October 2023, Lacob and his Warriors co-chairman Peter Guber wrote one of those checks. Fifty million dollars, structured over ten years, for a WNBA expansion franchise that did not have a name, a roster, a coach, or a single ticket sold. Call it the Golden State Valkyries. At the time, fifty million for a women's basketball team struck a lot of people as either generous or reckless, depending on how much they'd thought about women's basketball, which for most people was not very much.

Two and a half years later, CNBC put a number on what Lacob actually bought: one billion dollars. The first women's professional sports franchise in history to cross that line. Sportico, which is stingier and counts things differently, says $850 million. Pick your outlet; the multiple is somewhere between seventeen and twenty times what he paid to get in. There are venture funds that would kill for that return over a decade. Lacob got it in thirty months, on a basketball team, in a sport people kept telling him didn't draw.

The number that moved

Here is the part that should make every other owner in the league a little nauseous. When Lacob bought in at $50 million, that was roughly the going rate — Toronto's Tempo paid the same fifty for an expansion slot announced a few months later. Portland nudged it to seventy-five. And then, in June 2025, the league sold three more franchises — Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia — for $250 million apiece. A quarter of a billion, each, for the right to start playing in 2028 or later. Sportico called it the largest sum ever paid for a new team in any American women's sports league, and it wasn't close.

So inside of eighteen months the price of admission to the WNBA went up five times over. That is the real story here, and it's a bigger one than any single franchise's billboard valuation. Lacob didn't just buy a team that appreciated. He bought a team at the exact moment before the market repriced the entire asset class. Dan Gilbert, Tom Gores, Josh Harris — serious basketball money, NBA owners all — looked at the same league two years later and agreed to pay five times what the Bay Area guys did. The thing Lacob saw, they eventually saw too. He just saw it first, and the gap between first and eventually is where the billion dollars lives.

What changed underneath all of it was television. The WNBA signed a new media-rights deal — eleven years, Disney and Amazon and NBC, north of two billion dollars total, something like a six-and-a-half-times jump over the pittance the league made before. Franchise values are, at bottom, a bet on future cash flows, and the day the league locked in that money, every team in it was worth multiples more than it had been the day before. Lacob bought the lottery ticket. The TV deal read out the numbers.

Why Golden State, specifically

Plenty of teams ride a rising tide and stay average. The Valkyries did not stay average. In their inaugural season — 2025, the first time the franchise had ever played a game — they pulled in roughly $78 million in revenue. The next-closest team in the league, the Indiana Fever, the team with Caitlin Clark on it, made about $50 million. The expansion newcomers outgrossed the sport's biggest star by forty-four percent. They sold out all twenty-two home games at Chase Center, averaged better than eighteen thousand a night, and parked twelve thousand season-ticket holders on the books before anyone knew if the team would be any good. (It was fine. Year two, pump the brakes on the title talk — but that's a different column, and Riley's already written most of it.)

None of that is an accident, and it's the part of the Lacob bet that wasn't really a gamble at all. The Valkyries share an owner, an arena, and a sales infrastructure with the Golden State Warriors — one of the three or four most valuable operations in the NBA. The same people who sell Chase Center suites and sponsorships for the Warriors turned around and sold them for the Valkyries, to the same corporate Rolodex, in the same building. CNBC's valuation methodology says this out loud: WNBA teams that share an NBA owner and arena command a premium, because the cross-selling is basically free money the standalone franchises can't touch. The Valkyries are the purest expression of that advantage that exists. Lacob didn't build a women's basketball team from scratch. He bolted one onto a machine that was already running.

The cruel geography of it

And now the part that sits funny in the stomach if you grew up here.

This billion-dollar franchise — the richest new thing in American team sports, the one everybody's writing valuation pieces about — got built in San Francisco, at Chase Center, in the years when the rest of the Bay was being stripped for parts. The A's are decamping to Las Vegas. The Raiders already went. The Warriors themselves crossed the bridge out of Oakland to build the very arena the Valkyries now sell out. Oakland, a city that supported three pro franchises in living memory, is down to the Roots and the Ballers and a lot of empty parking lots and a grief you can hear in any bar on Telegraph.

So the same regional economy produced both of these things at once: the most spectacular abandonment of working-class sports fans in modern memory, and the most spectacular new bet in the business. Both true. Both Bay Area. The billion dollars went where the suites and the corporate accounts and the season-ticket money already were — across the water, into the new building, attached to the team owned by the richest people in the room. That's not a moral failing on the Valkyries' part. They're a genuinely great story, a sellout every night, a thing women and girls in this region desperately wanted and now have. It's just worth naming that the machine which made them a billion-dollar enterprise is the same machine that left Oakland holding nothing.

What he actually proved

The Valkyries' president, Jess Smith, has said the quiet part with a straight face: they're the first to a billion, and they'd love company. Meaning the league wants more billion-dollar franchises, more Dan Gilberts writing $250 million checks, more proof that a women's team can be a serious financial asset and not a charity line on a rich man's tax return. On that count, Lacob has already won the argument. The thing he was early on isn't a secret anymore. Everyone's paying full price now.

But don't let the inevitability narrative sand off what this was. In October 2023, paying fifty million dollars for a women's basketball team that didn't exist was a contrarian act. The smart, sober, evidence-respecting position was that women's pro sports were a slow-growth proposition that would get there eventually, maybe, with patience. Lacob looked at the attendance trends and the demographics and the coming TV money and decided eventually was now, and he was willing to put real money behind a number nobody else had the nerve to name yet.

That's the bet. Not the basketball — the timing. He bought the floor. The league spent the next eighteen months building the ceiling on top of him, and the gap between the two is the most lopsided trade in the recent history of American sports ownership. You don't get rich being right. You get rich being early, and then living long enough to watch everyone else pay quintuple to stand where you were already standing.

Fifty million dollars. Over ten years. The bargain of the decade, and it wasn't even close.