Joe Montana was the first to win his inaugural Super BowlHe was an NFL football quarterback in 1982. He’s almost four decades later and about to obtain his first IPO.

Montana led the San Francisco 49ers four Super Bowl wins and was inducted into National Football League Hall of FameIn 2000, he started his own firm and has invested in six start-ups over the last six years. Liquid 2 VenturesHe is a. His first fund was $28 million. He is closing his third, almost three-fold larger fund.

Liquid 2 was one of the first to invest in this company. announced in July 2015After going through the Y Combinator incubator, a GitLab code repository raised a seed round of $1.5 million. GitLab had a valuation of around $12million at that time. Ashton Kutcher was also part in financing.

GitLab opens Thursday set to debutThe Nasdaq has a market capital of nearly $10 billion based upon a share price of $69, which is the highest end of its range. At that price, Montana’s $100,000 initial investment and some follow-on financing are worth approximately $42 million.

Montana, 65, has said that they are all “pretty pumped” while she was on holiday in Italy. We are going to have a lot of fun with this.”

While famous athletes dabbling in start-ups has become a trend in Silicon Valley — from NBA stars Stephen Curry and Andre IguodalaTennis legend Serena Williams — Montana jumped into the game much earlier. Montana had been involved in a business called HRJ before Liquid 2. It was started by Ronnie Lott (ex-49ers star) and Harris Barton (ex-49ers star).

HRJ invested in different funds than companies directly. collapsed in 2009The company was sued over allegedly not meeting its financial obligations.

Montana chose to invest instead of returning to the game that made him famous as an executive or broadcaster. He chose a completely different path this time.

Ron Conway is a Silicon Valley Super Angel, well-known for his lucrative bets Google FacebookAnd AirbnbY Combinator started introducing Montana to early-stage investments. Along with a rising crop of celebrities and seed investors, Montana attended Y Combinator Demo Days where entrepreneurs showed slides of companies that have grown to the right.

Montana referred to Conway’s team as Conway. We started investing here and there until Conway convinced us to open a fund.

Conway, who was speaking with the newest group founders of the Y Combinator program in 2015, invited Montana for the event. Montana then met Sid Sijbrandij from GitLab, the CEO of GitLab. Sid Sijbrandij is a Dutch entrepreneur that had transformed an open source project to help developers work together on code into software packaging and sold it to companies.

Montana replied, “We got together and said, ‘hey, this guy is special,’” That night was ours.

GitLab just emerged from Y Combinator. He was a renowned author. presentationSijbrandij shared with the audience at Demo Day in March that his company employed 10 people and had 800 contributing members to the open source project. GitLab is on track for $1 million in annual sales, he stated. He also mentioned that paying customers were included. Apple Cisco DisneyAnd Microsoft

GitLab currently employs approximately 1,350 people across more than 65 different countries. According to the company, prospectusThis is a. GitLab has an annualized revenue of over $230 Million as it gets ready to go public on Thursday. The second quarter sales jumped 69%, to $58.1million

GitLab’s marketing and sales spends approximately three quarters of the company’s revenue. This resulted in a loss of $40.2million for the last quarter. A large portion of GitLab’s marketing budget goes to expanding its DevOps users (which combines software development with IT operations).

In the prospectus, the company stated, “To foster new customer growth, I intend to continue investing sales and marketing with an emphasis on replacing DIY DevOps inside larger organizations.”

GitLab represents Montana’s first IPO. But he indicated that he had “12 or 13 more unicorns” in his portfolio, referring to start ups worth $1 billion or greater. The list includes AndurilOculus founder Palmer Luckey founded Oculus, a defense technology company, as well as an autonomous vehicle testing startup. Applied Intuition

Three other Montana partners are part of the firm, including Mike Miller who founded Cloudant and then sold it to. IBMMichael Ma sold a start up to Google, and was later promoted as a product manager. Joe Montana is Joe’s younger brother, and he previously worked at Twitter

Montana stated that he is involved with the fund every day and participates in partner meetings on Tuesdays. His partners are better at technology and handle the technical diligence. He focuses his efforts on connecting portfolios to his connections.

Montana stated that “until the pandemic I was still speaking all over the country”, and added that he hadn’t started taking a salary since the third fund. I was speaking with companies such as SAP, Amex and Visa, along with a number of large corporations like large insurance agencies down to Burger King.

Montana stated that he first connected Sijbrandij with a top executive at GitLab. VisaIt was when the company sought to enter into a contract with the payment processor.

Montana explained, “I listen to pitches. But I also go to pitches. Montana said, “But I think my time should be spent now connecting these companies as the mature.”

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