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What started out as a simple game of shooting a ball through a hoop has turned into a high-tech juggernaut. The NBA, more than any other professional sports league, has attracted owners from the tech world, built super high-tech stadiums, and adopted big-data analytics and other tech tools to run the business. No team is more representative of this trend than the Sacramento Kings - who built a state-of-the-art stadium that won Best Elite Sports Facility in the world by the Sports Technology Awards in 2017. Our July What’s Now: San Francisco will feature Chris Kelly, one of the major owners who bought the Kings in 2013 and who now sits on the Executive Board. Chris also was Facebook’s first Chief Privacy Officer, first General Counsel, and Head of Global Public Policy who helped take the startup from its college roots to one of the most successful companies in the world.
Ishveen Anand is the founder and CEO OpenSponsorship, a two-sided marketplace connecting brands to the worlds’ largest network of sponsorship opportunities in professional sports. Ishveen, a graduate of Oxford University, is of Indian-British origin and now lives in New York. She was included in the Forbes 30under30 sports list in 2015 and OpenSponsorship was named a finalist in the 2015 Sports Technology Awards.