Our Sunday Long Read this week is ESPN's Wright Thompson and his profile of legendary NFL quarterback Joe Montana and the star athlete's turn to his life after football. Most NFL stars end up on the motivational speaker circuit, or selling cars at a constellation of dealerships that they own, but that was never going to be enough for Broadway Joe as he's gone from running San Francisco's greatest sports era to now helming of one of Silicon Valley's biggest tech venture capital firms.
MONTANA COMES INTO his San Francisco office waving around a box of doughnuts he picked up at a hole in the wall he loves. He's got on Chuck Taylors and a fly-fishing T-shirt.
"... so chocolate, regular and maple crumb," he says.
It's a big day for his venture capital firm and nothing spreads cheer like an open box of doughnuts. He looks inside and chooses.
"Maple."
It's a tiny office, stark, with mostly empty shelves, a place rigged for work. There's a signed John Candy photo a client sent him -- a nod to a famous moment in his old life -- leaning against the wall. Four Super Bowl rings buy him very little this morning on the last day of the Y Combinator -- a kind of blind date Silicon Valley prom that puts a highly curated group of 400 founders in front of a thousand or so top investors. Each founder gets about a minute and a half to two minutes to pitch investors like Joe. A company founder promises to, say, fully automate the packing process, reducing manual labor from days to hours, a market opportunity of $10 billion. You can hear the nerves in their voices as they talk into their webcam. Some clearly haven't slept in days. Without considering my audience -- 11 plays, 92 yards, 2 minutes, 46 seconds -- I marvel at the insanity of having your entire future determined in an instant.
"I know," Montana laughs.
His company, Liquid 2, consists of multiple funds. He's got two founding partners, Michael Ma and Mike Miller. Recently he brought in his son, Nate, along with a former Notre Dame teammate of Nate's named Matt Mulvey -- which makes three Fighting Irish quarterbacks. His daughter, Elizabeth, runs the office with a velvet fist. Their first fund is a big success and contains 21 "unicorns," which is slang for a billion-dollar company. They're headed toward 10 times the original investment. Montana, it turns out, is good at this.
"You just look at the teams and the relationship of the founders," he says. "How they get along? How long they've known each other?"
We take the doughnuts and his computer down the hall to a conference room. Nate and Matt are already there.
"So that guy hasn't responded to us," Matt tells him.
That guy, Amer Baroudi, is a Rhodes scholar and a founder of a company they love. It's always a dance. Much bigger investors than Liquid 2 are also after these ideas. The guys huddle and decide that No. 16 should write him directly, politely, and tell him they're interested and would love to connect. As he does that, the companies keep presenting new ideas. Microloans in Mexico. A digital bank for African truckers. They're all on their laptops and their phones while the presentations happen on a big screen at the end of the room. His partners keep in touch on a Slack channel. Joe's handle is JCM.
One founder developed weapons for the Department of Defense. Another worked for NASA. Every other one it seems went to MIT or Cal Tech. They worked for McKinsey and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. One idea after another, pitched by passionate, interesting people. I can feel Joe vibrating with energy and excitement. He leans over Nate's shoulder with his hand on his back. He rubs his nose, then his chin, then moves his hand over his mouth in concentration. His eyes narrow.
He checks his phone and smiles.
"Amer," he says.
The skills Montana excelled at in the NFL are what makes him a considerable force in the world of tech's Next Big Thing. If you can make your two-minute elevator pitch to the guy who perfected the two-minute drill, then maybe what you have is worth it, and Montana's apparently a hell of a judge of character after all these years.
Always has been.