This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. Delighted to catch up it's been too long with our friend Vivek run A DVA. He is the CEO, founder, managing director of bo Capital Management, also the owner of a little basketball team called the Sacramento Kings, and this is very exciting. He's joining us from the bubble. Carol, this is the first time I've
talked to somebody in the bubble. Obviously, we're referring to Walt Disney World, where the NBA and number of NBA teams are playing that. How are you. What's it like down there? Well, it's great. You know, we get tested like once or twice a day. But kudos to Adam Silver and the NBA for creating the bubble. Everyone is buyers free, the games are going on. I wish my team was doing better, but it's been. It's fantastic here. Yeah, I wasn't going to bring that up. It's been a
tough run. But but listen, an amazing experience and hopefully we can talk a little basketball in a second. I do want to ask you, though, because you are in the midst of another boom of sorts, which is in these blank check companies, the spacks special purpose acquisition companies. Tell us about why you chose this way of going public. Tell us about bo X. Yeah, so I started boy X a few years ago. It stands for Better Our World. And there's just two investors in the venture capital part
of Bowl, which is the ten campus. You see, system is the largest research platform in the country, and myself and where the board, the entrepreneurs, the arrow, and it's really the mission is to fund companies that use technology to advance society. So I built this platform out and I was seeing companies stay private longer, and many of the entrepreneurs were coming to me. They called me the o G. I they say stands for original Gangster, Ready
to get me in, the old guy. And they were coming to me and asking me for help and saying, hey, can you invest? Can you help uh? And we're entering a really exciting era right now. I call it kind of civilization three old, where they're transitioning from the industrial age to the digital age, and it's going to create
the largest wealth creation opportunity in human history. So there's a trillion dollars plus that's gone into these private tech companies and they still remain private and they need to come out on the other end. So we have these rocket ships that are waiting to burst out, just get out of its it and reach of the stars. And what they need is rocket field. They need, they need money,
they need it quickly. They need coaching, they need mentorship, they need connections, uh, they need certainty, and they need to be able to execute on all of that. Now, one of the things about great entrepreneurs, and I was lucky to be friends with guys like Steve Jobs, is that they were also great storytellers. And the new generation of entrepreneurs is no different. They want all the same things. They want certainty, they want speed, they want execution, and
they too are great storytellers. Now, the beauty of this back is that you go out under a S four, which is a murger agreement as opposed to S one with an I P O. So with that you can actually tell the story, you can provide future projections, and so it's the absolute perfect fuel for these new rockets that we're seeing. It sounds like you already have some
entrepreneurs in mind, Is that fair to say? And if so, I'm just curious about the types of technologies, you know, the visions or the visionaries that are capturing your attention right now. Is that Yeah, So we have about companies that we've been tracking. You know, think of us as a reverse soft bank. SoftBank comes in at the end and gives you big checks and you know, with the one hour meeting. So on the other hand, we're working with these companies that many of them are in our portfolio.
We see the first deck, we see the second deck. We get to know them. We have data, we have history, we have a relationship, and so these are game changing companies. You know, these are companies that are using data to completely disrupt entire sectors. So we have a company called Farmers Business Network in our portfolio, uh, and you know, they are using data to disrupt our agriculture. They started as a uh Bloomberg for farmers and have now become
kind of a Amazon for farmers. Gigantic market, brilliant visionary entrepreneurs, already doing hundreds of millions in revenues doubling every year. So we have you're like a hundred and fifty companies that we think are stackable, and about fifty of them that are speccable in the not too distant future. I love the terms specable. That has become so interesting. I mean, it's also interesting to see who's getting into this spat
game as it were. I mean, we're not too far removed from having someone also well known in the sports world, Billy Bean, get involved in the sports side of this. The a special purpose acquisition company. How do you sort of differentiate at this point, VIVEC, when it does seem like the money is sort of pouring into and a lot of smart folks like you are seeing this as an opportunity, how do you tell the story a little differently. Yeah,
so I'm going for a different type of company. I'm not going for kind of what the New York private equity guys are going forward. I'm going for the growth company. I'm going for the rocket ships. Uh. And you know, the last thing that those guys want is to uh to have an activist uh work with them. Just like basketball, basketball become a players league, so the business of building companies has also become a players league, and entrepreneurs want
to work with other entrepreneurs. They want people who have been there, done that, who know what it's like to invest in growth, to build a salesforce, to invest in R and D, to build new products, to conquer new markets. Entrepreneurs want fellow entrepreneurs. Uh, And so we're very different. You know, we're looking at high growth days that could be and we're looking for venture type of returns on
these companies. So we're not looking for you know, if there was a twenty percent uptick and value, I would personally be disappointed. You know. I believe that this is an opportunity where the risk is lower because these are going businesses. They have a critical mass, they have customers, they have technology and uh. But at the same time, you could get a five ten x type venture like return on these companies. So that's what's really exciting out
where you sit right now. So all right, I gotta I'm gonna go to basketball before we uh we lose you or we run out of time. We can talk to you all afternoon. You know, you said something really interesting that that that we only have a minute to talk about. Player of empowerment, the Players League. This has been quite a moment for the NBA. What do you do in a minute or less as an owner to ensure that players have the voice that they need. Yeah.
So I've always been all about the players, and so uh, you know, we uh you know, in my mind, I was the first person to support Black Lives Matter, which was important to our players. You know, it's the first person to speak out against what happened at the Clippers. So we talked to our players. You know, we hold uh sessions where we get together players, kids from the inner city, you know, the police. So the players have
a huge voice in the NBA. Uh. You know. One of the things I love about basketball in the NBA is that, you know, we don't really care what all of your skin is, what your ethnicity, your religion, your sexual orientation. You know, we just got one question. You've got game. If you've got game, then come join us. And that's what I love about sports. Absolutely Well, best
of luck. I know it has not gone exactly the way you wanted there in Orlando, but what an amazing experience to be there in the bubble and see it all happen that that grandad diva. He is the CEO, founder, managing director Sacramento Kings and a Vogue Capital Management