How do you set about keeping people in their seats?
SB: Leg room is a big issue. I want to give people leg room because if you don’t give people leg room, you’re losing their attention on the game, you’re driving them to stand up, walk around, whatever, but the more leg room people have, the further back people get pushed. So we had to sort of balance that. Same thing with headroom. I didn’t want people to struggle to see over the people in front of them.
Did you get involved in the discussions surrounding tech in the stadium?
SB: I told the guys all along the way, ‘I don’t want technology in here for technology’s sake.’ This is about being the greatest live entertainment experience, particularly for basketball, in the world. We decided to connect power to every seat so people can charge their phones, but that opened up other interesting options – we could also put lights in the seat, we built a mini video game controller into the seat so you can interact with the big board, because people like to do that. We can do a lot of different things and that all came for free once we had power in the seats. I had another design principle: we’re going to treat people who sit up top and pay less for their seats as well as we treat people down below. They have to have a good seat, they have to have legroom, they have to have good access.
One of the major features of the stadium is The Wall. To what extent have you seen that influencing games?
SB: If you look objectively at the statistics when it comes to free throw shooting percentages by the opposing team when facing The Wall, it’s the lowest in the NBA by an interesting margin. So that worked.
And technology plays a role in The Wall too, I believe…
SB: It does! How do you get people to make noise and be in their seats? We have proximity sensors in the seats. We can tell whether you’re in, out, how much time you’re in your seat during the game. We have something we call sound cameras. So we don’t hear what you’re saying, but we can tell how noisy you are, and can tailor a rewards system in order to try to use the infrastructure to get you to be noisy. We have a thing that we copied from airports where two people standing next to each other are looking at the same screen, but see different things. We have one of those at The Wall entrance and at the moment it says say ‘Hey, Joe, welcome’. Now that we have a reward system, we could say ‘You didn’t make much noise that last game! Get it up this game and you get a free hot dog’. We’re still playing with what the rewards infrastructure looks like, but everything’s about getting people into the experience.
What about players – how have they reacted to the new building?
SB: I knew I wanted to have the best player spaces in the NBA as a tool to help boost results, but also recruitment. We want to tell the players on our team – and for the word to get out around the league – that we invest in our players, this is a good place to go play. Obviously if players are getting paid a lot more money someplace else, they’ll go, but for those on the margin, the fact we care more is the message. For example, the guys want to have long coats even though it’s LA. That style drove part of the design of a locker we made. You need room for lots of shoes, because a lot of these guys have lots of them, so every one of our lockers holds 32 pairs.
Have you seen other teams taking note of what you’re doing and then starting to copy it?
SB: We certainly have had a lot of NBA owners come through and look at our place, particularly if they’re going to build a new arena. It’s my belief that you’ll see other stadiums built over the next five to 10 years that have “Walls” or that kind of intimacy and steepness in the bleachers.
You’ve said you want to create an experience of watching a game live that has the best elements of watching at home. What do you mean by that?
SB: You’ve got to have a great view. You have to have leg room, and the ability to run to the bathroom or grab a drink quickly. You want to be able to see some of the statistics that get overlaid on the broadcast. We don’t want people looking at their phones to get these because if people look at their phones, they’re distracted from the game. So that’s why we built the controller into the seats. That’s why we have a huge scoreboard. The goal is to not drive you away from the live game experience. What is it that people crave when they come? It’s the energy, it’s the excitement. And perhaps increasingly so, given that we spend so much of our time just buried in screens.
You’ve done some incredible things in your life. How does buying the Clippers and then creating this stadium compare?
SB: Will anything I ever achieve or do match the kind of importance and complexity of growing Microsoft from 30 people and $2.5 million in revenue to 88,000 people and $88 billion revenue? No, of course not. With that said, this [buying a basketball team and building a stadium] is a great opportunity to make a civic contribution. But it’s also, for me, just the joy of watching basketball. I love it and I love being involved. I don’t try to drive too many decisions about who’s on the team and who should play, that’s on the coaches, but I ask a lot of questions. In a sense, it’s a little bit like me managing engineers. I learned to ask a lot of good questions. For pure fun this blows Microsoft away for me.
How do the worlds of sport and business compare?
SB: Business people think they’re highly accountable, but compared to sports people? It’s not even close. Every 24 seconds, you either score or you don’t score. You’re getting your performance reviewed in real time. If the coach doesn’t think you’re doing a good job, he pulls you out of the game. That’s a performance review. So everything is more intense, more accountable.
Are there any similarities?
SB: One thing that’s like the software business, at least the software business of old, is we do major version upgrades once a year. Every summer we pivot the roster, change anything we’re going to do differently in the arena. That’s the major upgrade. We do minor upgrades at the trade deadline. That’s the next place where people redesign the product, if you will. And I guess in the world of agile development, the coach is continuously making upgrades and changes in the way we play. So yeah, it’s got that notion of rapid change that was so wonderful in the software business.
You were famous at Microsoft for being very focused on the numbers. What’s the metric in basketball that you track that might surprise people?
SB: There’s a lot of data on the basketball side, obviously, but what we’re doing now is what I call a user sum. We’ve got the old revenue sums – where the revenue comes from – but because you essentially log in when you come into our building we can chart that. How many times does that fan come back? Why are they coming back? Were they noisy? Did they bring a guest? What did it all look like? And what do we do to improve not just the fan experience, but the fan involvement? At Microsoft you’d have these Windows fans, and not only were they good customers, but they’d help spread the word to others. They would help Windows succeed. Clippers fans need to help our team succeed. And so we came to this notion of having a complete map of their behavior.
What has been your most memorable moment in the Intuit Dome so far?
SB: It’s funny, but on this stuff I have more of an emotional memory than I do specifics, but I’ll give you two. Our first victory, after four straight defeats, that’s a top memory for me, no question. The second is the game we lost in the 2025 playoffs [game four, against the Denver Nuggets]. We were tied with 13 seconds left and the Denver Nuggets’ best player, maybe the best player in the world, Nikola Jokic, goes to take a three-point shot. He air balls it, but one of his teammates catches it midflight, dunks it and with less than one second left and they win the game. There used to be a show in the US called Wide World of Sports and they always talked about the joy of victory and the agony of defeat. And I guess I have one of each of those moments etched in my head. I would say those two things, but also opening night. Just having my closest people with me and being able to say, ‘Yeah! We built this’
