Chapel Hill's other dream team.

• Position: Franklin Street Partners

Put Paul Rizzo, Michael Weaver, Walter Davis Jr., Robert Eubanks Jr. and William Moore on the same team and you might expect them to have the same problem as Dean Smith's Tar Heels: too much talent.

But three years after they and other financial heavyweights set up a money-management firm in Chapel Hill, Franklin Street Partners is growing steadily with a nice assist from state government. About $100 million of the $225 million raised by the group has come from the state treasurer's office.

"All these gentlemen are knowledgeable and strong in their opinions, but when you have a common goal, it's easy to overcome the day-to-day idiosyncracies in running a company," says M. Rex Teaney II, a former Wachovia senior vice president who is president of Franklin Street Trust Co. The trust operation was started last fall, one of three in the state unaffiliated with a bank. (North Carolina Trust in Greensboro and Trust Company of the South in Burlington are the others.)

Teaney won't say much about his firm's 100 clients, most of them wealthy individuals and institutions. But its ability to raise money from the state isn't surprising, given the partners' political clout.

After all, Rizzo is former dean of the UNC Chapel Hill business school and currently vice chairman of IBM Corp. Davis, an oil man...