During his NFL career, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick set rushing records and led his team to the Super Bowl. Since then, he has carved out a very different path as a tech entrepreneur, but he still takes lessons from his playing days—including when it comes to raising money as a startup founder.
Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco, Kaepernick described his startup Lumi, which provides low-cost AI tools for content creators, and what it was like to make the rounds of venture capital firms—a process that for many founders is marked by repeated rejection and frustration.
“What you realize is you aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea,” said Kaepernick. “In football, when I was being drafted, and even when I was going to college, you always looked at it as, ‘It only takes one.’ You only need one person to believe in you, and then that gets the ball rolling, and ultimately you just want a chance to be in the game.”
The former quarterback also advised would-be founders that they will hear “no” frequently, but to persevere, and keep looking for the one individual who will believe in them and offer true support.
Kaepernick, who is also famous for his on-field civil rights activism that many believe cost him his NFL career, told the audience that, as with football, mentors are important for an entrepreneur. In the case of his own second career, he expressed special gratitude to venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian for being particularly helpful in showing him the ropes.
As for his startup, Kaepernick explained that Lumi makes it easy for those with a creative vision to accelerate their projects with low-cost AI tools. The service is available as a monthly subscription priced at $20 to $70 a month, and promises to help creators realize projects like comics or graphic novels, and also to develop merchandising lines.
Kaepernick said that Lumi has already launched some projects with schools to assist with project-based learning. He added that the platform enables creators to maintain full control of their intellectual property, even if their project becomes big enough to attract interest from the likes of Netflix.
“We want to be the space where creators own the content, because that gives them longevity,” said Kaepernick.