Kevin Durant’s $250,000 Hugging Face bet is reportedly worth $60M

Kevin Durant and his business partner invested $250,000 in Hugging Face’s early rounds and his payout is reported at around $60M if Nvidia’s $12.9B acquisition completes. Employees at late-stage European startups own roughly 10% of their companies against 20% in the United States.

Kevin Durant put $250,000 into Hugging Face and may be about to collect roughly $60M. Front Office Sports reports the figure, which rests on Nvidia completing the acquisition it is said to have agreed.

The proportions are what make it a story anywhere. On his current contract, $250,000 is a little over two days of Durant’s basketball salary.

His record explains why nobody sounds surprised. Thirty Five Ventures, the firm he runs with Rich Kleiman, has been on the cap table of Postmates, Coinbase, Acorns, Robinhood, DraftKings and Whoop.

The company he happened to be right about is French in origin. Hugging Face was founded by three Frenchmen, and Nvidia is reported to have agreed $12.9B for it.

Which raises the question of who else gets paid. An exit at this size is the moment a company’s staff discover what their share options were actually worth.

In Europe the answer is usually less. Index Ventures found that employees at late-stage European startups own about 10% of the companies they build, against 20% in the United States, a gap it has spent years trying to close.

The pools start level and then diverge. Both regions open at roughly 10% at seed, but American companies push towards 15% by Series A and 20 to 25% by Series D while European ones tend to plateau.

The distribution is skewed as well. Two thirds of European option grants go to executives and a third to everyone else, which is the reverse of the American pattern.

Brussels has noticed. Last year’s Startup and Scaleup Strategy listed better employee stock options in its talent pillar, next to visas and cross-border hiring.

A strategy is not a tax code. Option treatment is still set nationally, which is why the same job at the same stage pays out differently in Paris, Berlin and Stockholm.

So the arithmetic is worth sitting with rather than laughing at. One cheque from a basketball player may return 240 times, while the people who wrote the software are governed by 27 different rulebooks.

None of which is Durant’s problem. He was early, he was right, and Europe has spent a decade agreeing that its own engineers should be too.