My next mission: supporting the next generation of Game Changers
It has been more than four years since I left IA Ventures in the capable hands of my friends and partners, Brad Gillespie and Jesse Beyroutey. More than four years ago? It doesn’t seem possible. This period has been a personal journey for me, and gave me the space to think about where and how I could have the greatest impact in areas that are exciting and meaningful. This has taken me to several different places: global sports team ownership; investing in and developing affordable, innovative housing in Detroit and Brooklyn; fostering entrepreneurship in hospitality, food & beverage and CPG; and seeding nascent businesses seeking to disrupt established players across the realms of sports, media, entertainment and technology. In short it has been — a lot! A really good feature of experimenting in so many different areas is that they stimulate different parts of the brain, and cross-activity relationships begin to form. It was from this mosh-pit process of exploration that the vision for IA Ventures emerged, and it is through a similar collision of ideas, people and investments that the motivation for starting an entirely new firm came together: Game Changers Ventures (GCV).
While we’re living in a market that is seemingly awash in liquidity, these resources are being concentrated across a small group of firms and themes. Friends and colleagues from the early days of “emerging managers” have written about the challenges facing seed stage investing today (see here and here), where I’d argue that most of the fear is centered around opportunities in what I’d characterize as the most heavily trafficked areas of venture (read: anything touching the realm of AI from foundation models to related infrastructure to applications disrupting the ways we work). Is there too much money flowing into these spaces to the detriment of other valuable parts of the startup ecosystem? I don’t know, and honestly I don’t care. If it is, we’ll find out soon enough and capital flows will rebalance themselves, albeit with a lag due to the timelines of business development and fund structures. That said, each investor needs to make the case that their pursuit is worth backing, and that the opportunities for value creation are differentiated, exciting and large.
It is my belief that GCV meets these criteria, and a select, sophisticated group of partners seem to agree: I am proud to say that we have raised $100m in capital commitments for our first early-stage fund, with 10% of the capital coming from me. The rational question some have asked is: are you crazy? You’ve played a really hard game, won it, and are now going back in to play some more? And at a really challenging time in the seed stage venture market? Well, yes and yes. If you’ve worked with me before (or lived with me for almost 40 years like my wife), you are well aware that once I get an idea in my head, roll it around a bit, test and and validate it, I am almost powerless to stop from pursuing it. It was the power and the promise of big data in 2009. Today it is the excitement and potential I feel around the centricity of fandom: how new businesses can be built to bring exciting, engaging IP to fans 24x7x365 on a global basis; how established businesses can leverage new technologies to deliver more valuable and sticky products to their customers; how organizations can best leverage data to understand their customers and fans and deliver them the opportunities and experiences that best fit their interests; and how new models of distribution are reaching fans wherever they are, across geographies, times of day and devices. And the list goes on.
It is the nearly four years of investing in these spaces on my own that has fueled my excitement for building a business to capture these opportunities. In the same way that I was investing on my own post-Wall Street from 2005–09 before founding IA, I have been doing the same thing 2021–25 before founding GCV. Investing in pre-seed and seed stage venture on your own is really hard. For me personally I have found that success in venture is a team sport, and I couldn’t be more excited for building a team to bridge the gap between crazy, passionate, mission-driven founders and the billions in downstream capital that have been raised in the past few years to make minority investments in professional sports teams, emerging sports teams and leagues and youth sports. The amount of true early stage risk capital at the intersection of sports, media, entertainment and technology (SMET) is shockingly small, and it is this opportunity that fuels my excitement for the next stage of my investing career.
And I couldn’t be happier or feel more fortunate for my colleagues in this pursuit, Simon Sokol and Ethan Ehrenberg. Simon joins us as a Partner from Relay Ventures, where we have worked with him over the past two years on our shared investment in Alt Sports Data. He helped stand up Relay’s SMET practice four years ago and has the experience, network, vision and energy to help us pursue our mission as the best partners to build a business in these areas. We are joined by my son Ethan as an Investor, having finished three years of post-University of Michigan Ross School of Business apprenticeship working with me as well as completing his Masters in Sports Management from Columbia University. Ethan in many ways is the voice of the customer, and is unusually well positioned to lend his perspective, network and insights to our investment process. I expect that we will add another team member in the next 12–18 months as we figure out the qualities of the partner that will best complement our skills, experiences and networks, just as we did with Jesse when he joined Brad and me at IA in late 2011. And that worked out really well!
We are all excited for the new firm and grateful for the trust and belief from our partners to build a business in areas we love, and which we believe represents a generational opportunity for venture scale returns. The perspectives I’ve gleaned as a pro sports team owner as well as a seed stage investor over the past four years has given me the conviction that while yes, this might seem like a crazy time to build this business focusing on this theme in a market rife with disbelief, it is this kind of crazy that I have looked for in my founders for the past 20 years. If you are building in this space and think we might be the right partners to build with, please do hit us up. You can reach us at roger@ simon@ and ethan@gamechangers.vc.
