Montana
NFL legend Joe Montana lived around top VC execs as a 49er, then leveraged those ties to launch his second career as an investor | Fortune
Four-time Super Bowl champion Joe Montana wasn’t looking to be an investor after his NFL career, but his San Francisco 49ers teammates convinced him to give it a shot.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, the legendary quarterback recalled how former offensive tackle Harris Barton and former safety Ronnie Lott approached him with an idea to start a “fund of funds.”
“And because we lived around all the guys who were running Sequoia, Kleiner, Excel, all the top-tier funds, we’re going to leverage our friendships into access,” Montana said.
Silicon Valley and the NFL are converging again on Sunday as the Super Bowl will be played in San Jose, where the 49ers now play their home games.
Back when Montana first got into investing, he and his associates initially raised $15 million, and the fund grew from there, helping them get into leveraged buyout funds, hedge funds, and real estate funds, he said.
But Montana later moved two hours away from San Francisco to the Napa wine country, forcing him to step back from investing.
Then he connected with angel investor Ron Conway because their kids attended the same school. The cofounder of SV Angel introduced Montana to tech incubator Y Combinator and encouraged him to start his own fund, Liquid 2, in 2015.
Conway advised Montana, who shared a key lesson he learned from the legendary Silicon Valley investor.
“Everybody thinks it’s always about product,” he told CNBC. “But as early as we invest, most of the time it’s about people, and what you’re betting on are the founders.”
Montana also said his Liquid 2 work is more interesting than the fund of funds as his current job requires deeper involvement in his portfolio companies, especially in the early stages.
For his part, Conway told Worth magazine that Liquid 2 is now as big as SV Angel, adding that he and Montana invest together a lot.
“Because of his affable personality and his brand, he is able to get into really good syndicates and have lasting relationships,” he said.
Liquid 2 has invested in over 800 companies and was an early backer of GitLab, Rappi, Anduril, and Pipe, among others, according to Worth.
While Montana didn’t want his athletic fame to define his fund, he still draws on his experience in pro sports to help him invest. He said NFL coaching icon Bill Walsh showed him how to assemble a good team. Montana also learned to see parallels between great founders and elite athletes.
“It all stems from what’s inside them and their drive to succeed,” Montana told Worth.
Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) is facing yet another lawsuit over allegations of unlicensed sampling — only this time, it’s centered on a video clip of the rapper’s infamous 2013 fight with paparazzi.
In a case filed Wednesday (July 15) in Los Angeles federal court, the celebrity news agency Bauer-Griffin claims that Ye, French Montana (Karim Kharbouch) and others used audio from the headline-grabbing incident in “Where They At,” released in 2024 off French’s Mac & Cheese 5.
The May 2013 video, which also features a pregnant Kim Kardashian, shows West charging at a photographer outside a Los Angeles restaurant and shouting “don’t take no photos” and a string of profanities: “All of you m*therf*ckers stop it, man!”
The clip appears prominently in the intro to Montana’s song — a use that the lawsuit calls “blatant and willful” copyright infringement.
“Given Mr. Ye’s history of numerous confrontations with paparazzi, the video was highly newsworthy,” the agency’s lawyers write in legal documents obtained and first reported by Billboard. “Listeners immediately recognized the audio sample that begins the infringing record as being copied from the video.”
Ye has been sued over a dozen times for allegedly using unlicensed samples and interpolations in his music, including a high-profile battle with Donna Summer. In May, he lost a jury trial over using an uncleared sample in an early version of the Grammy-winning “Hurricane” from Donda. He had testified at trial that he’s “very generous” about giving credit and compensation when it’s due, but that “a lot of people try to take advantage of me.”
In Wednesday’s complaint, Bauer-Griffin says the creators of “Where They At” showed no such respect to its rights in the video of the paparazzi incident, using it despite being well aware that sound recordings must be licensed when any amount is directly sampled into a song.
“In the music industry, copyrights are prevalent and well understood,” lawyers for the agency write. “Every defendant knew that they needed to have but did not have permission to use the audio sample.”
Reps for both stars did not immediately return requests for comment. The lawsuit also names as defendants producers Dem Jointz (Dwayne Abernathy Jr.) and BoogzDaBeast (Jahmal Gwin), as well Gamma, the label that released the song, and its distribution unit Vydia.
The confrontation at issue in Wednesday’s lawsuit was one of two high-profile scuffles with paparazzi that year for the rapper, who was then still known as Kanye West. Two months later, he clashed with photographer Daniel Ramos outside of LAX, resulting in a civil assault lawsuit that the star eventually settled two years later on the eve of trial.
As many celebrities have learned over the years, simply appearing in a photo or video does not give someone any legal rights to it. Ownership of such material is always retained by the creator — an inconvenient fact that has sparked lawsuits against Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa.
It’s unclear who filmed the May 2013 incident, which happened outside a Beverly Hills restaurant minutes after the star had also been filmed accidentally banging his head into a signpost while trying to avoid other photographers. But the rights to the footage have been owned by Bauer-Griffin from the beginning: When TMZ first posted it at the time, it came with a watermark crediting the agency.
“The infringing record has been widely distributed on various streaming platforms, in flagrant violation of plaintiff’s exclusive rights under copyright laws,” Bauer-Griffin’s attorneys write. “Plaintiff brings these claims to vindicate those rights.”
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