Back in March 2014, SK Ventures (the vc funds run by myself and Paul Kedrosky) made our first investment in the broad…

Back in March 2014, SK Ventures (the vc funds run by myself and Paul Kedrosky) made our first investment in the broad fantasy sports/sports betting space -- that investment was numberFire, an early advanced data startup in the space, founded by Nik Bonnadio. I'd been a fantasy nut for years -- and my constant blathering on about it in conversations with Paul had us suddenly looking at the "space" as an investable theme. It's important to remember that this was 4 years before SCOTUS overturned PASPA (which made sports betting legal). Needless to say, venture firms weren't exactly chomping at the bit to write checks to sports betting/fantasy startups. That first investment led to a few more investments across our first, second and third funds. These included things like Alphadraft (think fantasy for esports), Statmuse (early NLP sports application), PrizePicks (recently acquired for $2.6 Billion) and Swish Analytics (ML-driven data for sports book operators). The investment in Swish occurred in 2016 -- still two years prior to PASPA going away. Of those investments, numberFire and Alphadraft were acquired by FanDuel, PrizePicks was acquired (as mentioned) and Statmuse and Swish are still (successfully) operating and growing. In 2018, I was standing in the Sarasota airport at 6:30am, when I saw on CNBC that SCOTUS had overturned PASPA. Yes, I made an embarrassingly loud noise. And no, no one around me (outside of my wife) understood why. The future was about to change. As we invested our fourth fund, PrizePicks began to go from startup to "holy shit" growth. Our 4th fund saw us invest in an early incarnation of Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life (which was acquired by BetSperts -- we're still investors there) and Underdog Fantasy. Interestingly, I'd been introduced to Matthew Berry by Adam Wexler (founder PrizePicks) at an FSGA conference in Tampa. By this point in time, Paul and I were openly talking with LPs about this strange idea that sports betting could be an uncorrelated asset class (we were, of course, talking about prediction markets without calling them that). Our fifth fund has seen us invest in FTN, Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life (the new/current incarnation) and Statrankings. As of today, PrizePicks and Underdog have both sold for north of $1 billion each. Our remaining sports betting/fantasy investments continue to perform and grow at an amazing pace. For over a decade, we've been investing in this space -- a space that I'd daresay very few VCs ever considered (especially back in 2014). It's been a wild ride -- and we look forward to what's still to come....which reminds me, it's time to get ready for the NFL season.