Professional athletes represent an increasingly important class of startup investors, with a variety of factors driving their decisions about which projects to back, and which to pass on.
For veteran NFL wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald Jr, the decision to invest in chess.com goes back to his youth, when the centuries old board game had a formative influence in his life and helped him manage the challenges of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
“It really helped me through some difficult times, being diagnosed with ADHD, and helping me kind of slow down my thoughts and be more strategic,” Fitzgerald said on Monday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah.
Long before Fitzgerald was a football star who played 17 seasons with the Arizona Cardinals, he was an active and accomplished chess player, having learned the game from his father, who had played on the Indiana State University chess team and football team.
“We played chess every single day, my dad would beat up on us all the time,” Fitzgerald said during an on-stage discussion alongside chess.com co-founder and Internal Master Danny Rensch.
Both Rensch and Fitzgerald discussed the importance of continuing to bring younger generations into the game, even as video games, social media and other flashier forms of entertainment compete for kids’ attention.
“It’s not just for super smart people or whatever the stereotype would be,” said Rensch. “Because it is something that breaks down barriers of age, and gender. It brings people together in a way that other games don’t.”
While learning and understanding the strategy to elevate your chess game takes time and work, Fitzgerald believes the result is what can make it so rewarding to kids.
“It’s very easy to understand what the pieces do, but the strategy behind it is more complicated,” he said. “That’s something that’s a true unlock, that young kinds can learn and be something that they would really love to participate in.”
Fitzgerald, who was selected for the Pro Bowl ten times, unlocked his interest as an investor during an off-season internship at JP Morgan in 2011.
Chess.com is one of 200 investments, ranging from cybersecurity to real estate and restaurants, that Fitzgerald has made in recent years through Larry Fitzgerald Enterprises. He sits on the board of $20 billion Dick’s Sporting Goods, and says he looks for investments in “things that I actually enjoy, that I can add value to.”
