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Joseph “Joe” Montana, co-founder of iMFL and retired National Football League (NFL) quarterback, speaks during an interview in San Francisco, California, U.S. on Tuesday, April 30, 2013.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Joe Montana won his first Super Bowl as an NFL quarterback in 1982. Almost four decades later, he’s about to get his first IPO as a venture capitalist.

Montana, who led the San Francisco 49ers to four Super Bowl victories and was inducted into the National Football League Hall of Fame in 2000, has spent the past six years investing in start-ups through his firm, Liquid 2 Ventures. He started with a $28 million fund, and is now closing his third fund that’s almost three times bigger.

One of Liquid 2’s first investments was announced in July 2015, when a code repository called GitLab raised a $1.5 million seed round after going through the Y Combinator incubator program. GitLab’s valuation at the time was around $12 million, and other participants in the financing included Khosla Ventures and Ashton Kutcher.

On Thursday, GitLab is set to debut on the Nasdaq with a market cap of almost $10 billion, based on a $69 share price, the high end of its range. Montana’s initial $100,000 investment, along with some follow-on funding, is worth about $42 million at that price.

“We’re all pretty pumped,” Montana, 65, said in an interview this week, while vacationing in Italy. “This is going to be a monster for us.”

Joe Montana #16 of the San Francisco 49ers celebrates after they scored against the Cincinnati Bengals during Super Bowl XVI on January 24, 1982 at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan. The Niners won the Super Bowl 26 -21.
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While famous athletes dabbling in start-ups has become a trend in Silicon Valley — from NBA stars Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala to tennis legend Serena Williams — Montana jumped into the game much earlier. Prior to Liquid 2, Montana was involved with a firm called HRJ, which was founded by ex-49ers stars Harris Barton and Ronnie Lott.

HRJ, which invested in other funds rather than directly into companies, collapsed in 2009 and was sued for allegedly failing to meet its financial commitments.

But rather than return to the sport that brought him fame in an executive role or as a broadcaster, like so many fellow all-star quarterbacks, Montana stuck with investing. This time he took much a different route.

Convinced by Ron Conway

Ron Conway, the Silicon Valley super angel known for lucrative bets on Google, Facebook and Airbnb, started showing Montana around the world of early-stage investing, primarily through Y Combinator. Montana, along with a growing crop of seed investors and celebrities, would attended Y Combinator Demo Days, where entrepreneurs show slides of their companies with growth that’s always up and to the right.

“We were trying to see what their secret sauce was and who they looked at and what they were really looking for in early-stage companies,” Montana said referring to Conway and his team. “He started taking us there, and we started doing a handful of investments here and there, and then he talked me into starting a fund.”

In 2015, Conway was speaking to the latest group of founders in the Y Combinator program, and he invited Montana to attend the event. That’s where Montana met GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij, a Dutch entrepreneur who had turned an open-source project for helping developers collaborate on code into a company that was packaging the software and selling it to businesses.

“We got together, and said, ‘hey this is a special guy,'” Montana said. “We committed that night.”

GitLab had just come out of Y Combinator. In his presentation at Demo Day that March, Sijbrandij told the audience that his company had 10 employees along with 800 contributors working on the open-source project. GitLab was on pace for annual sales of $1 million, he said, and paying customers included Apple, Cisco, Disney and Microsoft.

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij at company event in London
GitLab

GitLab now employs over 1,350 people in more than 65 countries, according to its prospectus. As it prepares to hit the public market on Thursday, GitLab’s annualized revenue is over $230 million. Sales in the second quarter jumped 69% to $58.1 million

However, because GitLab spends the equivalent of three-quarters of its revenue on sales and marketing, the company recorded a net loss of $40.2 million in the latest quarter. Much of the marketing budget is focused on expanding its DevOps (the combination of software development and IT operations) user base.

“To drive new customer growth, we intend to continue investing in sales and marketing, with a focus on replacing DIY DevOps within larger organizations,” the company said in the prospectus.

‘Still listening to pitches’

For Montana, GitLab marks his firm’s first IPO, though he said “we have 12 or 13 more unicorns in the portfolio,” referring to start-ups valued at $1 billion or more. They include Anduril, the defense technology company led by by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, and autonomous vehicle testing start-up Applied Intuition.

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.

Montana said he’s involved in the fund on a day-to-day basis and attends the partner meetings every Tuesday. He said his partners, who are more experienced in technology, handle much of the technical diligence and sourcing of deals, while he focuses on helping portfolios with connections in his network.

“Until the pandemic, I was still speaking around the country,” Montana said, adding that he didn’t start taking a salary until the third fund. “I was out speaking to companies like SAP, Amex, Visa and a lot of large corporations, like large insurance firms down to Burger King.”

Specific to GitLab, Montana said he connected Sijbrandij early on with a senior executive at Visa, when the company was looking to do a deal with the payment processor.

“I’m still listening to pitches, I go to pitches and do all that,” Montana said. “But my time is better spent now helping with connecting these companies as they mature.”

WATCH: GitLab co-founder and CEO on the future of work during and after the pandemic

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand ‘off the charts,’ says Altimeter’s Gerstner

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand 'off the charts,' says Altimeter's Gerstner

Altimeter CEO Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.

“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.

President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.

The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.

Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.

Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”

He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.

“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”

WATCH: Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

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YouTube announces Shorts editing features amid potential TikTok ban

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YouTube announces Shorts editing features amid potential TikTok ban

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images

YouTube on Thursday announced new video creation tools for Shorts, its short-form video feed that competes against TikTok. 

The features come at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is at risk of an effective ban in the U.S. if it’s not sold to an American owner by April 5.

Among the new tools is an updated video editor that allows creators to make precise adjustments and edits, a feature that automatically syncs video cuts to the beat of a song and AI stickers.

The creator tools will become available later this spring, said YouTube, which is owned by Google

Along with the new features, YouTube last week said it was changing the way view counts are tabulated on Shorts. Under the new guidelines, Shorts views will count the number of times the video is played or replayed with no minimum watch time requirement. 

Previously, views were only counted if a video was played for a certain number of seconds. This new tabulation method is similar to how views are counted on TikTok and Meta’s Reels, and will likely inflate view counts.

“We got this feedback from creators that this is what they wanted. It’s a way for them to better understand when their Shorts have been seen,” YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich said in a YouTube video. “It’s useful for creators who post across multiple platforms.”

WATCH: TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass

TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass

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Tech stocks sink after Trump tariff rollout — Apple heads for worst drop in 5 years

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Tech stocks sink after Trump tariff rollout — Apple heads for worst drop in 5 years

CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. president in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.

Saul Loeb | Via Reuters

Technology stocks plummeted Thursday after President Donald Trump’s new tariff policies sparked widespread market panic.

Apple led the declines among the so-called “Magnificent Seven” group, dropping nearly 9%. The iPhone maker makes its devices in China and other Asian countries. The stock is on pace for its steepest drop since 2020.

Other megacaps also felt the pressure. Meta Platforms and Amazon fell more than 7% each, while Nvidia and Tesla slumped more than 5%. Nvidia builds its new chips in Taiwan and relies on Mexico for assembling its artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft and Alphabet both fell about 2%.

Semiconductor stocks also felt the pain, with Marvell Technology, Arm Holdings and Micron Technology falling more than 8% each. Broadcom and Lam Research dropped 6%, while Advanced Micro Devices declined more than 4% Software stocks ServiceNow and Fortinet fell more than 5% each.

Read more CNBC tech news

The drop in technology stocks came amid a broader market selloff spurred by fears of a global trade war after Trump unveiled a blanket 10% tariff on all imported goods and a range of higher duties targeting specific countries after the bell Wednesday. He said the new tariffs would be a “declaration of economic independence” for the U.S.

Companies and countries worldwide have already begun responding to the wide-sweeping policy, which included a 34% tariff on China stacked on a previous 20% tax, a 46% duty on Vietnam and a 20% levy on imports from the European Union.

China’s Ministry of Commerce urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the unilateral tariff measures and said it would take “resolute counter-measures.”

The tariffs come on the heels of a rough quarter for the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the worst period for the index since 2022. Stocks across the board have come under pressure over concerns of a weakening U.S. economy. The Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 5% on Thursday, bringing its year-to-date loss to 13%.

Trump applauded some megacap technology companies for investing money into the U.S. during his speech, calling attention to Apple’s plan to spend $500 billion over the next four years.

Evercore ISI's Amit Daryanani on keeping Apple's outperform rating despite tariffs

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