Joe Montana

Montana played 16 seasons as a professional quarterback, mainly with the 49ers. Known as the “Comeback Kid,” the NFL Hall of Famer led his teams to 31 fourth-quarter come-from-behind wins, including a 92-yard drive in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XXIII. Today, he operates the San Francisco-based venture capital firm Liquid 2 Ventures and is reported to have an estimated net worth around $80 million. Liquid 2 Ventures invested in GitLab at about a $12 million valuation, after the software company came out of the Y Combinator accelerator program. GitLab is poised to hit the Nasdaq on Thursday October 14 2021 at a valuation that could top $10 billion, which would mark about a 420-fold return on Montana’s investment. Montana’s initial $100,000 investment in GitLab, along with some follow-on funding, is worth about $42 million at that price. Montana has three other partners in the firm: Mike Miller, who co-founded Cloudant and sold it to IBM; Michael Ma, who sold a start-up to Google and became a product manager there; and Nate Montana, Joe’s son, who previously worked at Twitter.