Biography Of Sam Kiki
Sam Kiki’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 itsassociated 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.