Sports Investment – Ben Godfrey, Founder & General Partner of SportVEST – How Blockchain and Tokenization Are Breathing New Life Into Sports-related Businesses
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2018
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Godfrey, founder, and general partner of SportVEST (sportvest.io) delivers an overview of sports investing in a digital blockchain world. Godfrey manages the vision and direction of SportVEST with a focus on accelerating the company's market share and SVE token valuation. He is an innovation expert and has a track record of strong customer relationships, partnership building, and smart staff development and hiring practices for the sports and blockchain communities. Godfrey is especially interested in promoting the investment pipeline for the best visionary opportunities within the sports sector. He brings over 20 years of solid experience in global finance and investments to SportVEST and has worked for some of the top financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, and others.
Godfrey's company, SportVEST, is a blockchain-based venture capital fund that invests in the future of sports with the goal of creating a novel asset class. Godfrey discusses how he was curious as to why there were seemingly so many great sports business and technology concepts that were having trouble raising funds, and how he set out to create improved fundraising protocols through an innovative venture investment platform. The SportVEST venture fund uses tokenization. SVE is an asset-backed ERC20 digital token built on blockchain technology with token holders forming limited partners in the fund. The SportVEST mission, at its core, is to provide improved VC measurement tools while also bringing better liquidity to investments in the sports sector such that the SVE token holders can decide on the optimal time to acquire profits. And as Godfrey states, the sports economy is valued at approximately $600 to $700 Billion, thus the need for capitalization for sports-oriented startups within the sports economy is immense.
Godfrey discusses the benefits and advantages of utilizing blockchain and tokenization for investment as opposed to traditional investment platforms. Godfrey explains that when you sell the token to an investor, the token represents a share in your fund, but liquidity is a big difference, as investors can get in and out in about one year. This is a significant upside for investors who don't want their funds tied up in investments for three to five years as is required by many traditional investment platforms.
The blockchain investment expert provides an analysis of the various areas of the sports economy such as clubs, teams, athletes, merchandise, memorabilia, fan content, wearables, media, IP, data, gaming, AI, VR, fantasy sports, ticketing, events, and gambling, etc. And he discusses how some companies in the sports industry and economy are able to move more efficiently by working through this future-forward platform. And as Godfrey explains, the ease of their investment strategy is another advantage for interested investors. Godfrey details how his company not only helps these sports-focused companies with the investment side, but they also provide hands-on support for growth revenue streams, development, scalability, and more.
The investment expert explains the process for registering, from thoroughly vetting the white papers they provide to contacting the general partners for investment contracts. He explains the importance of transparency in the process and how they take special care to ensure that each investor fully understands all the details every step of the way.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:07.0 | Future Technologies is to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used. |
| 0:17.0 | Or just around the corner, for Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, |
| 0:21.0 | 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more. |
| 0:25.0 | Good morning, good afternoon or good evening depending on where you are in the |
| 0:30.9 | world. This is Tracy Murdoch with the Future Tech Podcast and today I'm very |
| 0:35.6 | excited to have a special guest, Ben Godfrey, founder of Sport Vests, a blockchain-based venture capital fund |
| 0:42.2 | exclusively investing in the future of |
| 0:44.4 | sports and creating a new asset class. Ben, thank you so much for joining me today. It's |
| 0:49.2 | the pleasure to have you here. |
| 0:50.2 | Thanks a lot, Tracy. I'm pleased to be here. |
| 0:53.0 | So then let's start out talking about, first I want to know a little bit about yourself and your |
| 0:58.8 | beginnings and kind of what geared you toward getting involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency world? |
| 1:05.0 | Yes, so basically, you know, I got into blockchain, I would say around, it would have been towards the end of 2016 to part of 2017. |
| 1:18.3 | I mean the reason why I got into to to blockchain and and tokens was you know just basically through the research |
| 1:27.7 | that I've been doing through 2015 and obviously you know looking at ways that we could improve capital deployment into the sports sector. |
| 1:38.8 | So that's kind of like why I was drawn to blockchain obviously looking at the technology and you know the |
| 1:45.4 | advantages of using blockchain versus the traditional method of obviously investing in |
| 1:51.9 | you know companies or or certain types of |
| 1:55.6 | investment. So tell me about the idea for Sport Vest where was that born? Okay so |
| 2:01.7 | basically it kind of goes back to like the end of 2015 start 2016. |
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