She Couldn't Find a Jersey. So She Built a League.
It's July 2015. The United States just won the Women's World Cup in the most-watched soccer match in American television history. Kara Nortman, Stanford MBA, Upfront Ventures partner, IAC dealmaker, wants to buy her daughter a jersey. She can't find one. No jersey. No content pipeline. No fanbase infrastructure to convert a billion eyeballs into a billion dollars.
A normal person gets annoyed and moves on. Nortman filed it as a thesis.
She had spent a decade watching deals at IAC - including being in the room at Hatch Labs when a young founder named Sean Rad pitched what he called Cardify, a restaurant reservation app built on the Facebook API. Nortman and the team helped him see the pivot. Cardify became Tinder. If you've ever swiped right, her fingerprints are somewhere in the origin story.
If you're looking at past data to think about what's possible, you're never going to get there.- Kara Nortman
That same instinct - see the infrastructure gap, build the bridge before anyone else believes it exists - is what drove her to co-found Angel City FC in 2020. The expansion fee was $2 to $5 million. The co-founders were Julie Uhrman, a tech operator Nortman met at a women-in-tech basketball club, and Natalie Portman, recruited after they attended a USWNT friendly together. Skeptics saw a niche league with a small footprint. Nortman saw a demographic arbitrage: young fans, 50/50 gender split, ages 17 to 34, deeply underserved by every existing sports product.
By the debut season in 2022: 16,000 season tickets. Average attendance of 19,000. Eleven million dollars in corporate partnerships. Thirty-five million in total sponsorship revenue, surpassing seven Major League Soccer clubs. They sold a $10 million jersey deal before a single ticket.
By July 2024, Bob Iger and his wife Willow Bay invested $50 million at a $250 million valuation - the highest ever recorded for a women's sports team. Anywhere. In history.
Nortman recruited Natalie Portman to co-found Angel City FC after they attended a US Women's National Team friendly together. The initial conversation was less pitch deck, more: "this seems wrong in the world - should we make it right?"
When Angel City was stable enough to outlive her active presence, Nortman handed it to the institution she had built. A dear friend had once told her: if you want something to last forever, at a certain point, you have to hand it over. She became a board member. And she went bigger.
In March 2023, Nortman launched Monarch Collective with Jasmine Robinson - the first investment platform dedicated exclusively to women's sports. The name nods to the butterfly effect: small, networked actions building something structurally new. Billie Jean King backed it. Laela Sturdy from GV. Cindy Holland, former Netflix programming president.
By March 2025, the fund had raised $250 million - the largest women's sports investment fund in the world. Portfolio: Angel City FC, San Diego Wave FC, Boston Legacy FC, FC Viktoria Berlin (38% - Monarch's first European investment), and a stake in the Cleveland WNBA expansion team. That last one required approval from the league itself. Monarch Collective became the first private equity firm ever approved to invest in WNBA teams.