Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, March 30th. Today on Forbes, How the Celtics

Buyer Got Rich. As we first told you last week, William Bill Chisholm just clinched the biggest

pro sports deal in history, leading a group of investors with an agreement to buy the NBA's

Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion.

Chisholm and his co-investors are buying the defending NBA champions from Boston's Grousebeck family,

who led the purchase of the Celtics for $360 million in 2002, and have overseen the team as its value has soared.

Forbes valued the Celtics at $6 billion in October, making Irvin Grousebeck and the family billionaires worth $2.2 billion. So how did this

little-known private equity executive pull it off? Mainly through decades of under-the-radar deal-making,

buying, improving, and selling enterprise software companies for sometimes outsized profits.

The Dartmouth and Wharton School grad had been running a small venture capital firm when,

in 2002, Silicon Valley billionaire Ramesh Wadwani brought him on as his senior investment partner

at a new software-focused private equity firm, Symphony Technology Group, that was initially

funded with Wadwani's money. Wadwani earned this money through the sale in 2000 of a software

firm he founded, Aspect Development, to I2 Technologies for $9.3 billion in stock.

Over the next 15 years, Wadwani tells Forbes,

Symphony invested $1.6 billion of capital and returned $10 billion to investors.

The firm bought middle market software companies,

improved their operations while shunning the use of excessive debt, and sold them for many multiples of what they paid.

Symphony started four companies and purchased 21 others.

A signature deal was when it picked up market research firm information resources, later named

IRA and now called Sarkana, for less than $120 million in 2003, and sold most

of it at a $1 billion valuation in 2011.

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