At some point between Steph Curry’s arrival in the NBA and his emergence as league MVP, his Davidson teammate and college roommate Bryant Barr noticed a change in him.
Curry stopped interacting with fans on Twitter.
“What I started seeing was that second or third year in the NBA when he was having an injury-prone year he started making an effort to connect with fans and go above and beyond and not just post things or reply once in awhile but go deep with fans and you know his audience skyrocketed. It was from 100K users on Twitter to a million in about 18 months,” Barr said.
“And then in the last couple of years, I started to see his activity go down and we started having conversations about it and I asked why it was and his response was ‘it’s just too much of a hassle, it’s too much noise, there’s too much friction to make it worthwhile to spend time doing this.”
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Barr, a Nike alum who is now attending Stanford Business School, said the complaint sparked an idea to team up with fellow Nike alum Jason Mayden to create a new type of communication platform for his old roommate to be able to connect with fans again.
Slyce, which debuted last month, is a social platform that allows “influencers” (like Curry) to sift through questions and topics to find ones that they’d like to engage about. For example, for Curry’s first Q&A with fans, the Slyce team used a filter to find questions about things he’d like to talk about like the Carolina Panthers. Currently, the filter is 10% automated and 90% manual.
Barr and Mayden’s hope is that eventually the filter will become advanced enough to find the types of questions and the people he — and other influencers would want to engage with. But first, they need a “robust data set”, which is unrealistic for their platform to have after less than month live. Curry, in a sense, is a human guinea pig for the new platform.
“(Traditional) communication channels have become extremely one sided,” Barr said. “And then you have a guy like Steph who has millions of followers the only way he can really interact with them is posting a picture and then walking away from the platform.”
David Carter, the executive director of the USC Marshall Sports Business Institute said that he thinks the idea is interesting as not only a platform but also as an investment for Curry.
“From an athlete’s standpoint anytime you have a chance to be viewed as credible and authentic by your fan base, that helps you in a variety of ways,” he said. “Obviously in terms of building your own brand but also the companies that you endorse and in this case in a company in which you have equity I think it really helps … I think these athletes that are now in the position of (being) high-profile both on and off the court in Curry’s case, they have opportunity to get involved in these companies, take some equity, diversify their future business earnings and interests by getting involved and I think that makes great sense.”
Having to switch social platforms is just a minor way that Curry’s life has dramatically changed since he took over the NBA in the past two seasons. He’s still essentially the same polite guy who tries hard to answer reporters’ questions, signs endless memorabilia for fans and seems only angry when funneling motivation onto the basketball court.
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
But the entourage surrounding him at all times is bigger, the crowds are feistier and the critics are much louder. In Toronto, while waiting in the hallway as he walked through to the court for the NBA All-Star Game, one bystander commented loudly that the Warriors guard “isn’t even that good anyways.” Curry, with a focused look on his face, couldn’t have possibly not heard – but he continued on, staring straight ahead. The negative comments from former NBA players have even grown bad enough that his coach has to shoot them down in press conferences.
Slyce, of which he is an investor and co-founder, gives him a chance to finally talk about what he wants to talk about: the Panthers, golf, charitable stuff that he does and topics other than basketball.
It’s also a way, Curry said, to take back just a bit of control of his own voice in the chaos that’s surrounding the team this year. Sure, he’s helping out his college roommate. But, in an interview, it really did seem like he was just striving to talk about something other than basketball again.
“It’s just kind of having control of your own voice,” he said. “Like you said, after games when you’re in front of the media they’re just asking questions that will just filter into stories that they’ve already written – they just need a quote or maybe stirring the pot in a direction that you don’t want to go – so I think the Q&As, it’s a release to talk about normal stuff and do it more efficiently, that became necessary too.”
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