Tobias Harris is trying to keep his Detroit Pistons alive in the NBA playoffs, where they trail his former team, the Orlando Magic, three games to one, going into tonight’s game. 

But he also has found time to create a fund to help first-time homebuyers in Detroit come up with the down payments they need to get into their own houses and to start building wealth. 

Athletes have long been told to stick to sports. A new generation is turning to cap tables. Harris is expanding the Tobias Harris Homeownership Initiative with a small portion of his roughly $300 million in career earnings. 

“The thesis, truthfully, is to build a market for the city of Detroit through this program, and at the same time allow the hard-working people who live here to truly own their properties,” Harris told ImpactAlpha. 

Harris works with Homium, a New York-based provider of fair-shared appreciation notes, effectively a second-lien mortgage designed to make buying a home more accessible without increasing what owners pay each month. The shared appreciation note is repaid when the home sells or refinances. 

“During my first stint here in Detroit, I fell in love with the community, the people of this city,” says Harris, now two years into his second stint with the Pistons. Detroit is also where the 6’8” forward met wife, Jasmine Winton, on a blind date, and where they had their first child.

The model pathway to success for many athletes has long been to compete at the highest level, sign lucrative contracts and endorsement deals, and retire wealthy. The new generation of athletes rewriting that playbook are anchoring funds and backing companies that serve communities often overlooked by mainstream investors. 

Some are becoming venture capitalists themselves, acting as fund general partners as well as limited partner investors. At this week’s Mission Investors Exchange conference in Atlanta, tennis superstar Serena Williams discussed some of the 90 ventures she has backed as an angel investor and through Serena Ventures, the venture capital firm she has been quietly building for nearly a decade. She is raising a second fund after anchoring the firm’s $111 million inaugural fund with her own capital (see, “Serena Williams, Agent of Impact”). 

Building a successful business takes a “champion’s mindset,” Williams told the audience. “Because you understand the hard work and the dedication and the values and the sacrifice that you have to make. You understand exactly what it takes to get to the top.”

Williams retired from tennis in 2022 as a 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion and four-time Olympic gold medalist. Williams built Serena Ventures around a market inefficiency she learned at a conference: women and people of color receive less than 2% of venture capital. 

“When I was talking to my advisors and friends, we realized it’s really about the people writing checks,” she said. “I thought if we change who’s writing the checks, then we can also change that.”

Serena Ventures has backed 16 unicorns, with several exits already on the books. The majority of the firm’s portfolio companies were founded by women and people of color, including Mahmee, a Black woman-led maternal health startup for new mothers; HUED, another Black woman-led company that matches Black and Latino patients with providers of culturally-sensitive healthcare; and immigrant-led unicorn Esusu, which partners with US landlords to ensure the monthly payments of their renters are reported to financial institutions for building credit.  

“We’re going to continue to build on the strategy we’ve established. We want to double down on that,” Williams said. “We’re looking for founders who are trying to solve problems at scale.”

Net impact

Athletes have become so active as limited partners that they can fill up almost an entire fund. Teampact Ventures, a Paris-based firm that invests in early-stage climate and health tech startups, has raised over €20 million ($23.4 million) for its first fund from more than 60 French athletes, including former professional soccer player and World Cup champion Raphael Varane, French heavyweight fighter and former UFC champion Cyril Gane, and rugby player Antoine Dupont.

For many NBA athletes, roughly 70% of whom are Black, building social enterprises and investing for social impact isn’t just a financial strategy. It’s personal. 

Jaylen Brown declared a mission to bring “Black Wall Street to Boston” two years ago, shortly after he signed a five-year, $304 million contract, the NBA’s largest supermax deal at the time. The Celtics guard launched the XChange with Jason Kidd, a Hall of Famer former player and head coach of the Dallas Mavericks, to use their wealth and influence to bridge racial wealth gaps. 

The XChange aims to recruit other professional athletes, philanthropists and other business leaders to generate $5 billion in net wealth for historically marginalized US communities. In Boston, The XChange has set up an accelerator and incubator program for creative and social entrepreneurs in partnership with the JLH Social Impact Fund, a fund created by Brown’s former teammate Jrue Holiday (see, “Putting superstar power behind inclusive wealth”). 

Chris Paul, an NBA All-Star who retired in February, is an ambassador and investor in Turner Impact Capital’s Multifamily Impact Funds, which invest in affordable housing for teachers, police officers, healthcare and other working professionals who don’t qualify for subsidized housing but struggle to pay rent. Andre Agassi, a former Grand Slam tennis champion and Olympic gold medalist, has also partnered with Turner Impact on an education facilities fund that invests in charter school facilities. 

An early demonstrator of how professional athletes could activate their capital for impact in the communities they care about was Magic Johnson, another retired Hall of Famer from the NBA and one of the four billionaires to have played in the league. The sports team owner has invested in infrastructure, job creation and minority-owned small businesses in overlooked urban communities. 

And Lebron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, the only billionaire among active NBA players, has built a portfolio that spans media and storytelling, education, and health and wellness. SpringHill Company, a media company he launched with his long-time friend and business partner Maverick Carter, produces mission-driven content focused on empowering athletes and social justice. 

In the National Football League, Pro Bowl linebacker Jaylon Smith stands out among his peers for his focus on impact. The investor and entrepreneur is a founder of the Minority Entrepreneurship Institute, a seed-stage impact investing fund that aims to close wealth gaps by investing in Black, Latinx and female founders. The firm has invested in ShearShare, which matches independent stylists with salons and barbershops, and AfroLand TV, a streaming  platform for pan-African TV shows and movies.

Fair share 

The Piston’s Harris learned about Homium through a partner of his who knew the company’s CEO, Marcus Martin. 

“When I got connected with Homium I spent hours just going back and forth to really learn the model,” Harris says. “I really thought this was innovative enough to be a win-win for both sides involved, and more of a win for the homeowner.”

The Detroit fund has raised $4 million to provide up to 40% of a home’s purchase price in down-payment assistance to some 50 first-time home buyers in Detroit. Other early backers include the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, Harris’s former teammate Jon Leuer, and Pistons owner and private equity investor Tom Gores. 

A dozen first-time home buyers in Detroit have already closed on their new homes with shared appreciation notes from the fund. Among them: a truck driver, an emergency medical technician and a community health worker who earn an average $52,000 a year.  

“What we’re seeing in Detroit is real demand from families who are ready for homeownership but need a structure that works,” says Homium’s Martin. “This program demonstrates that when capital is aligned with a mission-first focus, you can expand access in a way that is fair, sustainable, and supports families in building equity and staying rooted in their communities.”

Harris and Homium are looking for additional funding partners to create more than 100 first-time homeowners across Michigan. In Utah, Homium has created a similar fund called the Utah Dream Fund with $5 million from the state’s Department of Workforce Services, and the Mark and Kathie Miller, Garbett Family and Sorenson Impact foundations (disclosure: Sorenson Impact Foundation also is an investor in ImpactAlpha and supports our coverage of the Ownership Economy).

The Tobias Harris Homeownership Initiative demonstrates a replicable model for Homium, says Martin. “There are other athletes, in other sports, in other parts of the country, who want to not only give back, but build in the communities they care about through impact investment strategies.”

Homium isn’t Harris’ first investment in affordable homeownership. During his time in Philadelphia, he partnered with Habitat for Humanity to provide mortgage assistance to families in North and West Philly. 

“He’s a full-time impact guy,” Martin says. “The reality of the challenge to build affordable housing for sale was always front and center in Tobias’ mind. It was really quite fast and easy for him to appreciate what a fair-shared appreciation mortgage could do.”

Harris says the opportunity to partner with Homium, and change the wealth trajectory of families, has been one of the highlights of his career. “I’ve met with one of the families, and I tell them, ‘We’re in this together. My goal is for you to be living in this home, and for you to never have to give up this home, unless you want to move on.’”

Harris is looking to build broader support in Detroit to establish the model. For now, though, his focus is on the court. “The most beautiful thing about our team is the support that we have for one another combined with the competitive nature that each guy has,” he says. “We’re a team that’s going to play as hard as we can.”