Kevin Durant

Overview

Kevin Durant is a professional basketball player who won two NBA championships with the Golden State Warriors, is the only men’s basketball player with four Olympic gold medals, and built a parallel investing career through Thirty Five Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Rich Kleiman that was an initial investor in the collectibles platform Alt (Team USA; Crunchbase News).

Durant made history as the first freshman to win the Naismith College Player of the Year award before being selected second overall in the 2007 NBA Draft by the Seattle SuperSonics, now the Oklahoma City Thunder (Team USA). He was raised by his mother, Wanda, and off the court he is involved in philanthropic work through the Durant Family Foundation, which focuses on education, social justice and community development (Team USA).

One season at Texas, then nine years with one franchise

Durant attended Montrose Christian School in Rockville, Maryland, for his senior year after stints at National Christian Academy and Oak Hill Academy, and was named a McDonald’s All-American (Team USA). He played a single season at the University of Texas in 2006-2007, leading the Longhorns in scoring at 25.8 points per game and rebounding at 11.1 per game, and winning multiple national Player of the Year awards including the Naismith and Wooden awards (Team USA). Drafted second overall in 2007, he earned Rookie of the Year in his first season, and after the franchise relocated and rebranded as the Oklahoma City Thunder he won four scoring titles and an MVP award (Team USA).

In 2016 Durant joined the Golden State Warriors, where he won back-to-back NBA championships in 2017 and 2018, earning Finals MVP honours in both years (Team USA). After a stint with the Brooklyn Nets from 2019 to 2023, he was traded to the Phoenix Suns in 2023 (Team USA). His fifth franchise came in June 2025, when the Suns traded him to the Houston Rockets for Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the No. 10 pick in the 2025 draft and five second-round picks, as first reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania (Sports Illustrated). He then signed a two-year extension that could keep him with the Rockets through the 2027-28 season, announced in October 2025, with the second year at his option (Associated Press). ESPN, which first reported the agreement, cited his business partner Rich Kleiman and put the deal’s possible value at $90 million — less than the $122 million extension he was eligible for, a discount that gave Houston flexibility to build around him (Associated Press). If he plays both seasons, that $90 million would push his on-court earnings to nearly $600 million, which the Associated Press noted could be an NBA record depending on how long LeBron James continues to play (Associated Press). As of October 2025 he was eighth on the NBA’s all-time scoring list at 30,571 points, a 15-time All-Star — one of only seven players with that many selections — and a career 27.2-point-per-game scorer (Associated Press).

Four Olympic golds, and the only man to do it

Durant’s Olympic record stands apart from his NBA career. He won gold with Team USA at London 2012, Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024, becoming the first and only four-time gold medalist in men’s basketball (Team USA). His London debut broke Team USA’s scoring record with 156 total points, passing Spencer Haywood’s 1968 mark of 145, and set a US record with 34 three-pointers (Team USA). At Rio he averaged 19.4 points, 5.0 rebounds and 3.5 assists and shared USA Basketball Male Athlete of the Year honours with Carmelo Anthony; at Tokyo he set a US Olympic record by averaging 20.7 points per game and was named the 2021 USA Basketball Male Athlete of the Year outright (Team USA). In Paris he played six games, averaging 13.8 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.3 assists, as the United States won gold in the final (Team USA).

Team	Years	Defining outcome
Seattle SuperSonics / Oklahoma City Thunder	2007–2016	Rookie of the Year; four scoring titles; MVP
Golden State Warriors	2016–2019	Championships and Finals MVPs, 2017 and 2018
Brooklyn Nets	2019–2023	—
Phoenix Suns	2023–2025	—
Houston Rockets	2025–	Two-year, $90 million extension, October 2025

Thirty Five Ventures and the Alt bet

Durant’s investing career is built on a partnership that predates it by years. He and Rich Kleiman first synced at a Jay-Z concert at Madison Square Garden when Durant was 19 and playing for Seattle, and Kleiman became his agent and manager in 2013 (Boardroom). In 2016, the year Durant joined Golden State, the pair co-founded Thirty Five Ventures (35V), a company wrapping together his personal brand and on-court contracts, venture-capital investments and Boardroom, the media network they co-founded in 2019 (Boardroom). Its portfolio spans more than 100 early-stage investments across sports, technology, finance, media and more, and the duo hold ownership stakes in Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union, the National Women’s Soccer League’s Gotham FC and Major League Pickleball’s Brooklyn Aces (Boardroom).

Alt was an early example of that thesis. Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures was named among Alt’s investors when the collectibles platform raised its $31 million in seed and Series A funding (Crunchbase News), and Front Office Sports later described Durant and Larry Fitzgerald as initial investors in Alt, with Tom Brady, Alex Morgan, Candace Parker and Giannis Antetokounmpo joining its Series B round (Front Office Sports). The pattern — a star athlete investing early in a platform for an asset class he personally collected and understood — is the same one that defined 35V’s wider portfolio.

What this profile does not claim

• The career-earnings record is not stated as fact: the Associated Press reported only that the $90 million extension would push Durant’s on-court earnings to nearly $600 million, “which could be an NBA record, depending on how long LeBron James continues to play.”
• The scoring-list position (eighth, 30,571 points) is dated October 2025 and will have changed since.
• Durant’s birth date and birthplace are not given, because the fully-read sources in this pass do not state them.
• The widely repeated claim about returns on an early Hugging Face investment is excluded: it rests on social-media-sourced reporting that was not verified in a fully-read source.
• Thirty Five Ventures’ portfolio size (over 100 investments) comes from Boardroom, Durant’s own media brand, and is used only for that uncontested company fact.