Any Given Start-Up

In years past, only a Super Bowl ring could light up the eyes of a burly football player. Now he's just as likely to perk up over a new dot-com. Pro athletes are getting into the Internet game with a venture fund of their own.

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In years past, only a Super Bowl ring could light up the eyes of a burly football player. But now he's just as likely to perk up over a hot new dot-com

On a cool, wet evening in mid-February the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., played host to a summit of venture-capital luminaries. Star deal makers from the Bay Area's best firms were there swilling cocktails and schmoozing, as they often do. What made the event remarkable, however, was that Joe Montana and his wife, Jennifer, were also present -- along with NFL stars Keyshawn Johnson, Warren Moon, and Drew Bledsoe; and a bevy of Montana's former teammates, including Bill Romanowski, Brent Jones, and Jerry Rice. "You don't often get that kind of crowd in the same room together," says attendee Mark Griege, a financial adviser whose client list reads like a Pro Bowl roster. "It was like a highly placed corporate event at a Super Bowl."

Surprisingly, the company that drew that eclectic crowd was not a big conglomerate like Nike or Coca-Cola. Rather, it was a start-up named Champion Ventures, a year-old VC firm that aims to create the perfect nexus between sports and business. The fact that Champion is succeeding in making that connection reveals the pervasiveness of the new-economy ethos -- it extends from the boardroom to the locker room, from the computer nerd to the home-run slugger.

The event at the Fairmont was a coming out of sorts for Champion. At a series of meetings the next day, athletes and venture capitalists got together to chart the rookie firm's future. Several well-known VCs presented their investment strategies to three dozen attentive pro athletes, most of them football players. Then, select CEOs introduced themselves and their business models. Finally, a bigwig from Goldman Sachs presented a keynote address. (For his honorarium, he passed around a football, which all the athletes autographed with a felt-tip marker.) "It was a phenomenal meeting," says Romanowski, the Denver Broncos' six-foot-four, 245-pound linebacker. "A lot of times when we go to an event, everyone wants to talk to us. But in this situation I wanted to talk to the people we've invested money in. They are some of the best in the country as far as venture capital goes."

Likewise, the Champion fund's organizers are some of the best in the country as far as football goes. Harris Barton and Ronnie Lott are two beefy veterans of the San Francisco 49ers. Barton has three Super Bowl rings; Lott owns four. As they have designed it, Champion raises money almost exclusively from athletes like the guys who attended the conference -- their former teammates and peers. In its first outing, for example, Champion pooled more than $36 million from about 80 athletes and about $4 million from other individuals. But rather than investing directly in companies itself, Champion gives its money to more experienced VC firms -- making it a so-called fund of funds -- at which point it relinquishes any control over how the money is invested. The professional VCs decide which companies receive money, although Barton and Lott have met with some fund-raising CEOs.

The VCs that Barton and Lott have brought under the Champion umbrella are stellar, and gaining access to them "took a lot of legwork," Barton says. There's so much capital -- and so much capital targeting the tech space right now -- that the top-tier venture firms can pick and choose investors. A lot of people have tried in vain to organize funds of funds in Silicon Valley, including some who could have raised much more than $40 million. For Barton and Lott the key was to package their fund as adding value that transcended mere dollars. For Champion that value was celebrity.

"When a venture capitalist is deciding between this deal or that deal, he may believe that added marketing value comes automatically with having an athlete tacked on," explains Kenneth Shropshire, a Wharton professor who studies the sports industry. "Plus, it's not a bad thing for a venture capitalist to have to go to basketball games as opposed to a conference of CEOs."

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Mike Hofman

Mike Hofman was previously editor of Inc.com and a deputy editor at Inc. magazine, which he joined in 1996. The site was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Digital Media in 2010, and was named the best business website by Folio Magazine. In 2006, Hofman was part of a team of writers nominated for a Webby Award for best business blog. He lives in New York City.

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