1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepen Parikh of Courtside Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions. As you correctly laid out, a lot of the sports ventures are essentially media and entertainment ventures. It’s basically performance media that monetizes. What is the product for this company that people are subscribing to?

Deepen Parikh: It’s written content. As a sports fan of a team, you’re paying for in-depth access to content. It may not appeal to every single sports fan out there, but it appeals very heavily to anyone who is a hardcore fan.

I, for instance, am a big Ravens NFL fan, but I love all sports in Baltimore, DC area. By paying a monthly subscription, I get access to very unique and in-depth content that I couldn’t anywhere else.

Sramana Mitra: Enough people are willing to subscribe for that premium content. 

Deepen Parikh: Absolutely. Just appealing to hardcore fans is big enough to build a large business around subscription. You then start thinking about how you expand into other sports and geographies and where that TAM grows larger.

The founders, to their credit, just focused on executing rather than laying out the numbers. It is generally the way to do it early on. They really showcased in one or two cities. They’ve proved and grown into that TAM, which gave us significant confidence to keep investing more capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another example. We’ll do the same thing. We’ll try to understand how you found them, why you invested, and the implications of that investment.

Deepen Parikh: I’ll give you something that has moved far faster from our standpoint. We invested early on in Beam, which is an interactive live streaming platform for the video gaming industry.

This is probably our third or fourth investment out of the fund. We were still getting our feet wet in terms of understanding how our process was operating. I took a trip up to Seattle and we were meeting with a number of companies. It just so happened that one of the companies we were meeting with was Beam.

The founder was 18 years old, but he had built a product that was so remarkable and superior to anything else we have seen in the industry. More importantly, he had a very good grasp of how the actual gamers were functioning and operating. He, himself, came from this world.

Sramana Mitra: Targeting online gamers.

Deepen Parikh: Exactly. The interesting value he had was, he enabled the viewers of the stream to participate live with the streamer himself. It created this interactivity that we haven’t seen across any other platform. It was small scale, but he had built this technology in a fairly short period of time. The people who were using it were such rabid users.

This was a clear indication to us that, as an early-stage company, you can gain a high degree of validation from even a small subset of users and gamers. I literally went back to the hotel that night. My friend and I wrote up the term sheet and presented it the next day.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepen Parikh of Courtside Ventures
1 2 3 4 5 6