India, Oct. 7 -- Joe Montana led the San Francisco 49ers to four Super Bowl wins. In 2015, he made a very different kind of play. According to CNBC, his firm, Liquid 2 Ventures, put $100,000 into a small coding start-up called GitLab. Six years later, Axios reported, GitLab began trading on the Nasdaq on October 14, 2021. The company was valued at about $11 billion and raised about $800 million.

Montana did not start out as a tech-focused venture investor. His earlier venture, HRJ Capital, had been a private-equity fund-of-funds rather than a direct startup investor. CNBC reports Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway introduced him to early-stage investing, mostly through Y Combinator. Montana said he wanted to learn what Conway's team look...