How 49ers like Steve Young and Brent Jones rode the dot-com boom to investing careers
- Greg Baumann
- Editor in Chief- Silicon Valley Business Journal
- Email | Twitter | Google+
In our cover story this week (published July 12), Young walks Silicon Valley Business Journal readers through his development as a dealmaker. Along the way, he’s established a who’s-who business network that was eager to tell tales.
I put together a collection of quotes from the players and investors who have worked with Young through the years. They’re fascinating first-person accounts of how a group of opportunistic, eager football players harnessed the 1990s tech boom to create long-lasting careers as investors.
ON THE 49ERS LOCKER ROOM DURING THE DOT-COM BOOM:
Brent Jones, managing director, Northgate Capital (ex-Pro Bowl 49er): “At the time, there’s a handful of guys in the locker room who followed the public markets and I, as the only born-and-raised Bay Area guy in the bunch, saw it go from orchards to Silicon Valley. Not that we were so sophisticated, but we had an interest in markets and investors.”
ON THE FOOTBALL-VENTURE CAPITAL CONNECTION
Brent Jones: “I did a lot of reading. I read Red Herring and Upside on plane trips. In 1994, when we won the Super Bowl, Mosaic, later called Netscape, was just going out and it was what the Internet was going to be. I read an article about Don Valentine at Sequoia and thought, ‘He could be a professional athlete — I want to meet these guys. I didn’t tell my team guys. I tried to do it myself. I spent six or eight months trying to do it, then Tommy (Vardell) came to the team and he knew there were Stanford connections with some parts of the firm. On the first day of training camp, I asked him, ‘Do you have a friend with Sequoia connections?’ and he knew a guy. We set up a meeting with Doug Leone and Mark Stevens, and invited them down to the 49ers facility. … We kept in touch and were kind of relentless in our approach of wanting to learn about VC investing. We had an opportunity thanks to those guys to participate in a few deals. It was super exciting. … We were learning, we went to meetings, we met the entrepreneurs. What it did was open our eyes; then each guy kind of ran with it.”
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