Mr. Sam Kiki boasts a comprehensive skill set in corporate strategy, product development, capital markets, business development and operations that he has demonstrated across both Fortune 500 companies and innovative technology start-ups.
Sam’s background began in finance with a career at Fidelity Investments that started in Boston but eventually included time spent at offices in Australia and Singapore. After a distinguished career at Fidelity that included him being quantitatively ranked as one of their top analysts globally, he moved on to Platinum Asset Management, a Soros-seeded long/short global equities fund founded by Kerr Nielsen. Sam was the “point guy” there for all investments and deals related to the global gambling sector, both brick and mortar and online. Sam’s research, work and investments spanned the globe from Macau to Las Vegas to regional U.S. operators to online behemoths in Europe to even small start-up projects in Russia. Sam’s largest winners in the portfolio included Wynn Resorts and Wynn Macau, which more than doubled from Platinum’s entry. He also made an early call in McDonald’s which turned out to be one of the top performing mega caps globally and one that Platinum banked a large return for its shareholders.
Sam had a brief stint as a managing director of a boutique investment bank focused on capital raising and advisory for early stage technology start-ups where he co-led $250m+ of early-stage capital raises.
Sam’s operational career began at MGM Resorts, where he worked for both Aaron Fischer (Chief Strategy Officer) and Scott Butera (President, Sports & Online Gaming) across corporate strategy, sports, online gaming, and investor relations. He left that role during COVID to consult for a publicly listed slot focused group in the U.S. and its associated partner in private equity to diligence and vet opportunities in the online gaming space. From there, Sam was selected as head of product and strategy and was one of the first 4 executives recruited to build Caesars Interactive. Sam’s responsibilities at Caesars included diligencing the eventual William Hill acquisition and serving as one of the leaders on the product/strat side. He, along with a small team, also helped to architect various strategies and products related to our ESPN and NFL deals. Sam was one of a small list of leaders that led the brokering of market access agreements or “skins” to other third party operators and co-led diligence on a list of M&A, JV and investment opportunities for Caesars. Sam co-led the investment into Superdraft and served on the board of Superdraft during his tenure at Caesars.
Sam left Caesars to co-found an innovative crypto start-up focused on quantitative, high frequency trading and arbitrage that still exists to this day, called Manifold Trading. He also worked with that founding team to spin off a piece of technical infrastructure from Manifold that later evolved into Ather Technologies, a business focused on providing direct market access, smart order routing, and other custody and portfolio management focused pieces of software to family offices, hedge funds and other institutional end users.
Sam stayed involved in gaming over those 2 years, serving as Chief Commercial Officer to Game Play Network, an innovative class 2 slot technology with multiple patents in the online gaming space. Sam helped GPN grow from a $50m val to a $400m+ val, raising approximately $60m along the way and signing major commercial deals with a number of tier 1 b2b partners. Sam also subsequently advised on diligence for M&A of a large online poker asset, advised one family office in the space and selectively advised a couple of start-ups on capital raising and strategy.
