Nick Edwards has been making some major moves recently. In January of 2023, the former professional MMA fighter and current physiologist for the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets founded BixonX, an evergreen nonprofit startup studio and venture capital ecosystem with the goal of supporting regional founders from idea to launch. Being a physiologist at the highest level and running a venture capital firm would be enough for most people, but NDSU graduate Nick Edwards is not one to sit still.
Now, he is teaming up with New Orleans Saints legend Marques Colston in his latest endeavor Champion Venture Partners, an investment management firm focused on building its portfolio around all things sports.
About Nick Edwards
Former NDSU athlete Nick Edwards is a nationally renowned physiologist and has built multiple medical programs for a wide range of populations that are currently running across the US. In his career, the former professional MMA fighter has also worked with organizations from NHL to NFL, Men’s and Women’s Division I NCAA Teams, podium Olympians, and World Champions, and he still currently serves as team physiologist for four professional teams.
Beyond athletics, Nick has worked in both the private sector and clinical settings, launching startups and fostering early-stage ventures. While his sweet spot is in health tech, Nick has been part of multiple startups, SPVs, has served as a general partner and limited partner, and worked in companies from launch, through fundraising, and on to exit. His philosophy lies in unlocking and harnessing each person’s unique motivation, and in turn, helping them find solutions and open doors for their successful ventures.
About Marques Colston
As a member of the New Orleans Saints, Marques Colston set franchise records for receptions, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns. He also reached the top of the mountain, winning a Super Bowl in 2009, and is a member of the New Orleans Saints Hall of Fame.
Even before finishing his playing days, Colston began dipping his toes into the business world. In 2012 he became the majority Owner of the Harrisburg Stampede, a team that at the time played in a league called American Indoor Football (AIF). After the 2014 season, Colston left that endeavor and purchased a stake in the Philadelphia Soul of the Arena Football League (AFL) which he maintained until 2019. He has also had minority ownership in the Albany Empire of the AFL and the Atlantic City Blackjacks of the AFL. In his post-playing days, he has also earned his MBA, worked as a professor, worked as an executive coach, and worked as a financial advisor.
Q&A with Nick Edwards & Marques Colston
Q: Is CVP your main focus right now?
Nick: I hired really great people who are kind of handling all of the dayto-day stuff with BisonX.
With my background of being an athlete and working in athletics with the Avalanche and the Nuggets here in Denver, it was kind of a natural fit to segue into sports. And so everything that I’ve done with BisonX has really revolved around three asset classes—real estate, medicine, and sports.
More and more of my time is going into CVP and eventually, I’m probably not going to be doing anything else. So, BisonX is running really smoothly because I hired the right people.
Q. What is the relationship between Champion Ventures Partners and Bisonx?
Nick: CVP came out of BisonX as one of its portfolio companies. We basically incubated the firm and then kind of helped get it going. We provided a lot of the initial structure and then launched it.
Q. How did the partnership between the two of you come to be?
Marques: Nick and I have been working together off and on for about five years now. I was working in a sports data and analytics company I founded and at the same time, Nick was working in a complementary company. We kind of came together around the idea of collaborating within those two businesses. From there we just kind of continued to connect and continued to push our partnership down the line. He and I started to connect offline a little bit and kind of realized that we had this shared vision. That realization led us down this path with CVP and what we’re building up today.
Q. What specifically is that vision?
Marques: It’s really one around access. We want to disrupt the typical pathway to wealth. With us both being former athletes, we see sports as universal connectors.
So, we have the ability to leverage our backgrounds, passions, and professional experiences through the world of sports and all the pieces that connect it. We saw this as a perfect platform to be able to offer access to folks to try and build wealth using sports. Because when you think about it, whether you’re an athlete at the youth level, high school level, collegiate level, or even professional level, you kind of have that throughline. That spirit and that mentality that it takes to play a sport connects us all. Sports is that one thing that everyone can come around the table and agree on.
Nick: We want to put athletes in the driver’s seat. There’s kind of a misinterpretation of athletes after sport. Athletes lack opportunities for meaningful investment in sports and you wouldn’t think that’s the case, but they’ve been left out of the room. After sports, athletes usually turn into mascots—that’s not meaningful. And what’s funny is the same thing that athletes are experiencing is the same thing that the retail investors are experiencing—there’s not meaningful access into sport. There’s access for things like the S&P 500, but people have a passion for sport.
For Marques and I, we both have been on this quest of education and bettering ourselves. If you’re an athlete, you know that it’s not going to last forever. So, one thing that’s really important as an athlete is to say, ‘This is what I did in the past, this is where I am, this is what I’m doing today, and this is where I’m going.’ We’ve both really worked to make that evolution and transition in our lives.
Q. Why do you think there is that lack of access?
Marques: There is a general lack of access. There is a huge inequity, and there’s a huge wealth gap. I think what we see is with our networks and with our experience through sports, and what we know about not just the surface level sport but also the things that underpin being an athlete and being involved in sports, we see an area where we can really impact the wealth gap.
Nick: I think that today, the average person basically has access to a few points of investments. I think everybody knows somebody who has a startup you can invest in— which can be extremely high risk. That’s an option or you can invest in the S&P, which is steady. However, I don’t know too many people who say things like, ‘I’m an investor in the Timberwolves.’
That just doesn’t happen—those opportunities are reserved for the quote unquote, elite or the institutional investor. We want to rewrite the script.
Q. So what types of things in sports will CVP be investing in?
Nick: We’re investing in sports as an asset class. That can be anything from direct consumer goods to teams, to sports tech, to sports— anything across the board.
Q. How far along are you with everything?
Nick: So we are continuing to raise capital to get up to $100 million. So, people can still invest in us. We also aren’t going to just stop at $100 million. We are already looking to enter an interval fund. We want this to be the largest retail investor asset for sports in the world. We want to grow this thing.
Q. Have you guys made any investments yet?
Nick: No, but we have $30 million in warehouse deals were deploying.
We officially just launched in January and our coming out party was with the Super Bowl this year. It’s wild how much attention we’ve gotten because there’s nobody doing this. There’s nobody doing it for the retail investor and nobody doing it for the athlete.
We’re investing in growth-stage sports companies. We’re not doing the high-risk startups. We’re not going after early-stage companies. We’re going after companies who, let’s say, are already profitable in hockey and they think their product should work in football, but they just don’t know how to get it there. That’s where we come in and provide influence and strategic capital to help them get there.
How do you guys go about finding those different potential investment options?
Marques: There aren’t a ton of firms that are sitting in the sweet spot that we sit in. A lot of these deals have been from relationships we have devloped or they’ve been inbound. Folks are seeing what we’re doing.
And, we’re filling a need for a very specific stage of a company. So we’ve been getting a lot of inbound interest.
Q. What are some of the biggest things you guys look for when you’re trying to make decisions on who to partner with?
Nick: We don’t want to just mindlessly put money into a company. We’re not just a passive investor. We truly have positioned ourselves to be a value-added type of firm. So what that means is when we go in, we want our investment dollars to make it one plus one equals three. We have a management company that sits sidecar to our entire fund. So, we can deploy things such as PR, executive leadership, operational excellence, and we can really help them scale into that new vertical.
How does North Dakota fit into all of this?
Nick: We’re going to be bringing capital availability and expanding sports ventures in the Upper Midwest.
Without professional athletics in parts of this region, it’s going to be very important to draw sports ventures into the Upper Midwest to be able to compete for NIL dollars. We’re going to do it.
Q. Have you solidified any partnerships with schools?
Nick: Nothing is solidified. I will tell you we’re on meeting number three with the University of Colorado Denver. I’m on meeting number two with NDSU Athletics. We will have a partnership at some point, it’s just a matter of with who and when.
The only partnership I can talk about for sure is the one we have with Pathway Ventures. They are the NDSU Student Fund and they’re going after very early stage companies because their check size is under $25,000. So, they can’t play with the big boys and growth stage companies who have a much higher minimum check size. So, we’re giving them access to come alongside us and invest with us in very stable, high return companies.
Q. Being so busy during your time as professional athletes, how did you manage your time to prepare yourself for your eventual career transition?
Marques: The thing that’s helped me the most was just being able to dive in and learn, learn on the fly. Diving in, in whatever capacity you have, is always going to be the best learning experience. When you do that, you’re going to figure out the things that work for you. You’re going to figure out the things that you need to work at.
A lot of people focus on the end result of athletics and the gameplay. To me, it’s really about the process of getting to game day because that’s the process that you recycle over and over again. You do it whether it’s week to week trying to figure out how to win a matchup or whether it’s year to year trying to figure out how to get to that next level. It’s about having that mentality towards the process of development and being vulnerable enough and being okay with not being good at something. That was the thing that really allowed me to keep going even when things got tough.
Q: Were there any specific resources that helped you? Any books?
Marques: There are a few books. There’s a book called Traction, if you’re really into operating a business.
There are a lot of books that can really help you take what you know about yourself and help you put it into a business context. But ultimately, what ends up happening is the more you read and don’t really execute ir get boots on the ground, the more you kind of start to analyze and overanalyze.
So, for me, the perfect mix is continuing to learn whether it’s by reading or through podcasts or however, and taking those insights and trying to figure out how to put them in into practice in my way. Because it’s always going to be slightly different for everyone. It was the same way when I was a wide receiver. I was 6′ 5” 230 lbs and I could watch the little guys run routes all day, but if I try to do exactly what they do, it’s not going to work.
Nick: A book I would recommend is one called “Blitzscaling” by Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman.
As far as finding time though, I think it really just comes down to drive. You have to have this drive to always evolve and change yourself. I’m in my late 30s and I’m always trying to evolve in business but also evolve to be more present for my kids.
Q: Is there anything else you want to say to our readers?
Nick: If someone want to partner with us, they should contact us.
Marques: People can invest with us, which is great. But they’ll also have an opportunity to watch us along the way. We’re going to be the largest sports asset firm in the US and that’s pretty cool.