The former Rhodes scholar, professional basketball player and three-term Maryland Democratic representative (1987'93) has a new calling: private equity investing. Last month the 6-foot-11 McMillen, who played center and forward for 11 seasons in the NBA, signed on as vice chairman of Sky Venture Capital, an offshoot of New York and London-based merchant bank Sky Capital Holdings, where he serves as a director. “With valuations low and current providers of capital caught up in legacy problems, it’s propitious to look for opportunities now,” says McMillen, 50, adding that Sky Venture has raised between $15 million and $20 million of a planned $30 million fund, with most of the capital coming from outside the U.S. “It’s a hybrid buyout and VC fund,” he says. The focus: undervalued public firms and smaller companies. McMillen has also been making the rounds on Wall Street to raise a $60 million fund in connection with another outfit he chairs, Washington Capital Advisors, which plans to make mezzanine-level investments in government contractors. Despite his impressive résumé, which includes serving on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, McMillen’s record as an entrepreneur is spotty. As a professional ballplayer, he founded McMillen Communications, a cellular paging company that won a half-dozen cellular licenses. The business went bankrupt in 1992, however, five years after McMillen had left it to enter Congress. In 1994 McMillen founded Complete Wellness Centers, a nationally franchised chain of clinics that offered integrated health care from doctors, chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists. It went belly-up in 2001, four years after the government launched a probe into alleged fraudulent billing practices. “It was really much ado about nothing, but it ended up hurting the company,” says McMillen, who notes that he’s learned more from his failures than his successes. “When you’re a professional athlete, you learn that you have to try and sometimes you succeed, but if you don’t try, you never succeed.”
