Harris Barton and Ronnie Lott started Champion Ventures in 1999 to give athletes and individual investors access to elite VC funds. They leveraged networks like Jerry Yang and John Chambers to secure $5 million allocations from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and others, raising $40 million and launching a $150 million fund-of-funds. Within a decade, Champion Ventures grew to $2 billion in assets under management serving 900 limited partners.
Chapters
It was the beginning of 1999. And at this point in time, the internet is absolutely white hot. Everything that had to do with the internet was being funded by the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. And the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road were impossible for individuals to get their money into. Sequoia, Draper, Greylock. Andreessen Horowitz. Yeah, Accel, Redpoint, Benchmark, all were great names, all were funding venture capital startups like many of the ones that you're gonna start, but they were all impossible to get their money into. Nobody had really been able to crack the code because most of the venture capitalists for many years had only taken money from institutions and endowments. And so the idea I had was, hey, I'm gonna go up there with my partner, his name was Ronnie Lott. Ronnie Lott was one of the great safeties for the San Francisco 49ers, one of the great safeties in American football. And we were going to go up there and we were going to present a business plan that we were going to try and crack the code. And what we did was we went back to the 5 guys I told you about, the Jerry Yangs and Andy Groves and the McNeelys and John Chambers, and said, hey, can you make a call into one of these venture capitalists and just get a meeting set up for us? And they said, no problem. You're a good corporate citizen. You've done great things. You've done a lot of work for charity. Hey, I have no problem sticking my neck out there for you. And what they did was they said, but you've got to go into the best guys. The best guys are the hardest ones to get into, but they're the ones who are going to have the outsized returns. So I went to Kinko's and I put together a PowerPoint presentation. I had no idea how to do that. I figured it out. And the idea was, hey, we're going to go into these venture capitalists, the top 10 or 12 guys, and I'm going to say, listen, I think we can help you drive sales. I think we can help your portfolio companies raise money. Right. I think we can help you recruit. I think we can help with motivation. And in return, rather than pay us a fee to do something like that, just give us an opportunity to invest in your fund. And sure enough, we went to Sequoia. Sequoia said, hey, this is a great idea. Nobody's ever done this before. We haven't had a new limited partner in 30 years. We're going to give you a $5 million allocation. Then we went to Kleiner Perkins, said the same thing, benchmark. Accel, Redpoint, NEA, Greylock, all up and down the line. And so sure enough, at the end of 2 weeks, we had $40 million worth of capacity in funds. And we went out and raised $40 million worth of commitments to go into these funds. And we went out working our business. And that was in 1999. We called it Champion Ventures. Most of our limited partners were a lot of athletes. A lot of athletes needed jobs. They needed to meet these technology companies. The technology companies wanted to use these athletes for forward-facing kind of internet exposure. And it was all working great. We worked in the year 2000. We raised a $150 million kind of fund of funds. The same kind of premise. The best venture capital names. The best guys out there funding it with institutional— with individual money. Because individuals had no way into these funds. Now, that's not a scalable model because athletes are very difficult to continue to raise capital for. And what we needed was we needed an institutional investor to come in and recognize what a great opportunity that they had to get into these venture capital firms. So in the year 2000, we had got a call from Cornell University who said, listen, we want to get into this. We have no way of getting into any of these of these firms, and you're giving us a great diversification. And so Cornell came in as a $20 million investor, and that really kind of set the seed for us to kind of move up the food chain. In the year 2001, we thought, hey, this is a great idea. We did it in venture capital. Why can't we do it in private equity? We know all the guys at KKR. We know all the guys at TPG. We know all the guys at Blackstone, Hellman Friedman. And we put together a $60 million fund of funds in private equity in the year 2001. In the year 2003, we did it in real estate. There's a bunch of tough real estate companies out here that are difficult to get into, difficult for individuals to get into. So we were in Shorenstein, we were in Westbrook, we were in RockPoint, we were in, you know, 10 or 12 different names in the real estate space. And you were investing in the real estate We did it in the hedge fund space. We raised a $300 million hedge fund of funds where we did Stevie Cohen, we did Lone Pine, we did Druckenmiller, we did all the big names that you hear. And so what we had established, what we had built was a giant, about $2 billion of assets under management, about 900 limited partners. Ronnie Lott and I had started this business ourselves. We had grown to 95 employees. And we were rolling. Things were going great. People were wanting to come in, buy our shop. They wanted to— it was a great component. Things were going terrific.
