Silicon Valley Straps on Pads

Led by team president and co-owner Gideon Yu—a former Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo executive—the San Francisco 49ers have been quietly plucking from the neighboring tech world to fill their top jobs.

Rather than pursuing the normal Silicon Valley routine of bouncing between startups and hoarding stock options, the nucleus of tech veterans in the team's executive offices focuses on everything from streamlining the draft scouting process to finding out how fans in different parts of the stadium can organize chants with their smartphones. They are, as Yu puts it, "fundamentally trying to rethink everything about live sports." Asked why football is attractive to some of the tech world's brightest lights, 49ers CEO Jed York put it this way: "Because they made a lot of money, they did a lot of cool things before they turned 40 years old and they don't want to go play golf six days a week."