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Comment by meagher | Hacker News Reader

> Martin and Mike both advised strategic angels instead of friends and family to fill out the round, so that’s what we did.

How is Kevin Durant (pro basketball player) a strategic angel for a monitoring/observability company?

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He's a retired pro basketball player. He's since made early investments in companies like Hugging Face[1], Coinbase, and Robinhood.[2] If you earn millions in your 20s, didn't spend it, and have a killer work ethic, you can flip careers to professional investor.

Idk why nobody's done a good feature on him.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kevin-durant-investment-portf...

[2] https://parlemag.com/2025/04/kevin-durant-business-ventures/

I'm not questioning his investment abilities, just curious what he offers that is strategic (advice, dealmaking, etc).

Aside: Saquon Barkley's (pro football player) portfolio is insane https://www.readtheprofile.com/p/saquon-barkley-investment-p...

The ability of your enterprise sales team to invite a $50M deal prospect to a luxury box with Kevin Durant is not to be underestimated.

This 100%

KD is trying to be steve young and leverage his bay area fame to get a seat at the table

Not retired (plays for Houston) but doesn’t lessen your point one bit.

lol that's egg on my face. I just assumed he wouldn't be working two full time jobs at once.

That's wild.

He's an hall of fame basketball player who has made a shit-ton of money, drafted after one year of collge with a team of bankers investing his money, he's definitely not "hustling two jobs" simultaneously. The semi-remarkable thing is he hasn't blown his wealth on gambling or pet sharks.

If it were that easy, the norm wouldn't be blowing the wealth on gambling or pet sharks lol.

If he has successfully assembled a team of bankers that has been as successful as his portfolio suggests, while allowing him to be completely hands off, the man clearly has talents beyond the basketball court.

A good feature wouldn't call KD a retired NBA player yet :)

Later on it looks like he classifies him as a "vanity angel" rather than a "strategic angel." It sounds like it can be useful to have someone with name recognition as an investor when you're talking to people who aren't very familiar with the space.

if you are trying to convince people to invest on name recognition vs. knowledge of your space, or ability to move the company forward it doesn't seem like a great guide for getting angels: "be lucky and get someone famous with lots of money".

Low time burden, low emotional burden, unlikely to interfere or micromanage?

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