Jess Smith keeps a handwritten note on her desk. 

It arrived on an ordinary weeknight in Danville, in the middle of the Golden State Valkyries’ prelaunch frenzy in 2024, when every day for Smith felt like a sprint between partnership meetings and branding decisions. 

Smith had ducked into Pete’s Brass Rail & Car Wash, still wearing a suit at the casual brewery, trying to squeeze in 45 minutes with her husband, Scott, and two daughters before heading back into meetings. 

As she reached for the bill, the waitress stopped her. Someone had already covered the family’s dinner, and alongside the check was a scribbled note from a woman who had already purchased Valkyries season tickets six months before the expansion team ever took the court.  

“Thank you so much for what you’re doing in women’s sports,” it read. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life. I can’t wait to take flight with the Valkyries.” 

The Valkyries’ liftoff wouldn’t have been possible without Smith. 

In less than two years, Smith has helped transform the Valkyries from a blank-slate expansion franchise into a commercial juggernaut. The WNBA’s first new team in 17 years sold out every home game in its inaugural season, shattered league attendance highs, and defied on-court expectations by a long shot with 23 wins and a playoff appearance. The organization generated an estimated $78 million (opens in new tab) in revenue in Year 1 alone and became the first women’s pro sports franchise valued at $1 billion. 

For Smith — the Valkyries’ president and employee No. 1 — who had spent nearly two decades grinding through ticketing offices, sponsorship pitches, and a franchise launch across four professional sports leagues, the numbers tell only part of the story. Recalling that fan’s gesture at the dive bar still catches in her throat. 

“All I’m doing is my job, I do it emotionally and thoughtfully,” Smith told The Standard. “But to know that there are people out there that are connected to what we’re building, who feel a part of what we’re building …” 

She paused. 

“When you’re building a startup, you’re just moving. It just stopped me in my tracks for a minute and really made me understand what was happening.” 

What was happening, it turns out, was the construction of one of the most ambitious women’s sports businesses in the world. 

“I mean to be $1 billion, come on now,” head coach Natalie Nakase said. 

Behind that rise, Smith has been the architect. The president. Part operator, part brand strategist, part consumer psychologist. All heart.  

“It’s such a relief to actually have a woman leader,” said Maria Valdehueza, Valkyries senior vice president of ticketing and sales. “And to have somebody who has big goals and big visions, and can also understand, hey, I gotta go pick up my kid at 3 p.m. … and understand sort of this balance of what it means to be a working mom, and a working professional, and a woman in sport.”

…

Back at the State University of New York at Oswego, long before she was overseeing the most valuable women’s team in the world, Smith was bartending. Before that, the upstate New York native worked as a waitress. Those early days in the service industry shaped her knack for cultivating consumer experience. Coming up through the sports industry, she started in group sales roles in Minor League Baseball and collegiate summer ball before a seven-year career with the Oakland A’s in ticketing. 

“You have such a pulse on the business and fandom,” she said. “You can’t fake being genuine and building real relationships.” 

Smith said she has learned everything from her experience closest to the consumer — and ticketing, in particular, gave her direct insight into what people actually valued in her introduction to the Bay Area sports market. She wasn’t selling Coors Lights anymore, but rather an experience. 

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Her career took her from the A’s to the NHL (Columbus Blue Jackets) and MLS (San Jose Earthquakes). As she rose through the industry, she still couldn’t quite imagine what was possible in women’s sports business. 

Then, she was recruited via a cold message from Angel City FC co-founder and president Julie Uhrman. And in her first taste of the women’s game in 2020, Smith helped launch a franchise that aggressively challenged conventional sports business thinking in the women’s game. 

As Head of Corporate Partnerships, Smith helped develop the “Fan Fueled Player Fund,” which directed a percentage of ticket revenue back to the athletes, while also building out a sponsorship structure that invested directly into local community initiatives. As a brand new women’s soccer team in a crowded sports market, Angel City FC pumped millions of dollars back into Los Angeles with the contributions of 37 different partners before ever playing a single game. Entering the NWSL sphere right out of the pandemic, Angel City FC quickly became a revolutionary case study in modern women’s sports business.

“She created a culture of customer service that was on our ticketing side under her leadership, and still is – it set a standard,” said Angel City FC head of public relations Stephanie Rudnick, who worked closely with Smith. 

After four years in Los Angeles, even as she sat with Joe Lacob and Peter Guber interviewing for a place in the Valkyries’ launch, Smith wasn’t convinced that she could ever leave. 

But the openness and curiosity of the prominent duo caught her by surprise. 

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“I expected them to tell me what they wanted to build,” she remembered from the early meetings. “Instead, they were asking, ‘What do you think we should do?’” 

And in that, Smith found the rarest combination: ownership willing to invest aggressively, a region already primed for women’s sports, and the chance to build from scratch with the resources to think about the long-term future. 

And Smith was ready-made to take advantage of such a setup. 

“There is just this groundedness and humanity to the way that she operates that makes people trust her and want to build alongside her,” said LOVB SF president Stephanie Martin, who has known Smith since her early A’s days.

…

Smith’s first day on the job was Valentine’s Day 2024. She sat inside an Oakland office that once belonged to Steve Kerr. She sought to push back against one of the oldest habits in women’s sports: building women’s pro teams as extensions of men’s brands. 

One thing was clear — the Valkyries needed a visual identity that was quintessentially themselves. Smith remembers stakeholders pushing for a blue-and-gold color palette to mirror the Warriors and capitalize on Golden State’s established global brand. Smith, from Day 1, argued the opposite. 

“If you saw a Golden State jersey in blue and yellow, you would think of the Warriors,” she said. “If we want to build a brand that could become as culturally relevant and powerful as that one day, we have to build our own.” 

Departing from the Warriors’ legacy brand was risky. A gendered color palette could have been alienating. But the Valkyries’ violet has become a recognizable aesthetic across the league and in U.S. sports. 

The Valkyries were not supposed to feel like a companion brand. They needed to exist and look separate and permanent. 

“One of the things that’s important, and one of the reasons we created the Golden State umbrella is, prior to that, people were like, ‘This is the Warriors’ WNBA team,’” Golden State Group President and Chief Operating Officer Brandon Schneider said. “And that implies the Valkyries are subservient to the Warriors. And that just couldn’t be further from the case.”  

Smith and the Valkyries built their own operation, including a dedicated front office, creative studio, social team and marketing staff. The organization now employs 70 business-side staffers outside basketball operations. 

“She’s sharp, she’s funny, she’s collaborative, she’s deeply authentic, she’s accessible and available,” Martin said of Smith. “She has a way of making big things feel possible while also making people still feel seen individually and that’s a very rare leadership quality.”

Internally, Smith organized much of the team’s business approach around three definitive audiences — the distinct branches of fandom.  

The first was the existing women’s sports fan: the Bay Area consumer who had already shown up for U.S. women’s national team soccer matches in San Jose, but hadn’t yet been offered a permanent professional product at this scale until the Valkyries and Bay FC launched in back-to-back years. 

The second target demographic is what Smith calls the “bright believer,” a fan drawn to women’s sports as both entertainment and a cultural shift with a “perpetual curiosity.” These individuals care about the community aspect, player empowerment in a growing league, and local identity as much as wins and losses. 

The third is the traditional Bay Area sports fan who already supports the Warriors, Giants, and 49ers — a consumer who might arrive through the game itself. 

“For so long, people just assumed that the [traditional sports fan] was the only lens,” Smith said. “How do we convert a Giants fan into a Valkyries fan? The reality is, that it is still important.” 

Smith has said that just 8% of the more than 12,000 Valkyries season-ticket holders cross over with the Warriors (opens in new tab), data that confirms the distinction between the two franchises. 

“She’s totally fearless,” Rudnick said of her former colleague and close friend. “She’s always backed in data, she does the research, she knows what she’s talking about, she doesn’t lie, she does not bullshit. 

“She doesn’t take credit for it either, even though she’s the visionary and driving everything.” 

The three buckets of potential fans shaped everything on Smith’s track to launch, from merchandise and social media strategy to partnership philosophy. In all of it, the deeper goal is alignment — because a Valkyries fan, she believes, wants the team’s brand to mirror their values, and not simply advertise beside them. 

Smith believes partnerships are reflections of the brand itself, not just advertisements. Before taking any meetings with prospective sponsors, she said she spent months trying to define what being a Valkyries partner should actually mean. 

“You [also] have to package it and put it together as such that there is an emotional layer to it and there is a community layer to it,” Smith said.

“What we know about our fanbase in women’s sports and specifically around the Valkyries is they want us to be really good stewards. They want us to be powerful and unapologetic.”

Smith still returns to moments like the note in Danville. It’s a reminder that beneath the strategic business is something even more connective, even more emotional: generations of fans who waited on women’s sports for decades. 

Smith folded the note carefully that evening. She keeps it beside her every day. And routinely shares it with her entire team. 

“This isn’t about me, this isn’t about us,” she said. “It’s about them.”