The Seattle Seahawks celebrated Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 20 years as team owner of the franchise earlier this week. As an innovator, Allen has had an influence on making the Seahawks one of the most cutting-edge teams.
“Paul is a person who doesn’t just accept the status quo,” Bert Kolde, vice chairman of the Seahawks and senior director of Allen’s Vulcan Inc., said on the team’s special landing page. “He tries to make it better. He tries to be the best, to make the organization be as successful and be the best it can be. And he will ask questions. He’ll challenge people to think out of the box, to not always just keep doing things the same way they’ve been done the last 20 years, but to look at doing things in more innovative ways.
“And he’s a synthesizer, he’s a person with interests in a lot of different areas; technology, medical research, computer technology, media and culture. And he tends to often connect the dots and do things that are multidisciplinary, come up with solutions that draw on some of the best ideas and best practices in those different areas.”
Vulcan is a company that pursues projects and investments inspired by the ideas of Allen.
In the fan engagement category, Vulcan led the test of mixed reality at a Seahawks game at CenturyLink Field last season.
And on the investment side, one focus for Allen has been esports.
Seattle-based Taunt, a social competition platform for esports fans that uses data and machine learning to create companion experiences for fans watching broadcasts, announced earlier this month it closed a $1.75 million seed financing round that saw Allen’s Vulcan Capital invest in the financing.
Matcherino, an esports crowdfunding platform and another Seattle-based startup, announced in 2015 that it had raised $1.25 million in seed funding with participation from Vulcan Capital.
“eSports is growing faster than any other sport in history,” Matcherino CEO Grant Farwell said in a statement at the time.” It took Football roughly 50 years to build out its infrastructure and eSports is poised to accomplish that in a fraction of the time.”