MOST INVESTORS WATCH
FROM THE VIP BOX.
WE CHOOSE
THE LOCKER ROOM.

At pre-seed and seed, there is no clean data and no reliable benchmark. Decisions still get made from the outside, off a deck and a thirty minute meeting. That is where most investors get it wrong. In the VIP box you get secondhand information and you only back the obvious once everyone else already sees it. In the locker room you get direct signal. You see how a founder thinks under pressure, how they take feedback, how they execute and how they treat their team. Those are the things that predict outcomes long before any spreadsheet does. That proximity is not a nice to have. It is the entire edge.

We focus on early-stage Sports and Sports Tech, where the gap between friends and family money and institutional capital is widest. This is where companies either find momentum or stall. We are not chasing trends. We are backing founders who know the space and can execute inside it.

The power dynamic in venture is broken. VCs say you need to know someone to get on their radar, like access to capital is a private club with a velvet rope. Founders fly across the country, work every conference, and spend their energy chasing thirty second conversations with people who already decided before the pitch started. It is exhausting and it is backwards.

I'm not going to fix the whole industry. But I know what I can do. I spent over a decade in recruitment and talent assessment before I sold my company in 2021 and started investing in early-stage Sports and Sports Tech. That background is how I read founders, how I spot the ones who execute when things get hard, and how I get close enough to see what a deck never shows.

This is personal. I have built companies. I have raised money. I know what it feels like to have something real and spend most of your energy convincing people who are not ready to believe yet. Gate34 exists because that experience should not be as hard as it is, and because the founders building in Sports and Sports Tech deserve something better and something that was actually built for them. Now they have it.