Mark Blandford was the Founder and Director of Sportingbet Plc, a London main board listed company operating an online global sportsbook and casino. Mark now works as a successful venture capital investor.

Born and educated in Hereford (U.K.).  Mark completed a Business degree specialising in international marketing at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and worked in industrial goods, local radio, and food marketing prior to venturing into the bookmaking industry.

Mark was the owner of a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ bookmaker’s chain for over 15 years, then recognised the potential of the Internet in the mid 90’s. Mark pursued this opportunity to its fullest. In October 1998 he launched Sportingbet.com from Alderney, which was an instantly successful listing on OFEX in April 1999. In January 2001 the company floated on the Alternative Investment Market, part of the London Stock Exchange raising £18m. Sportingbet operates online sports and horse race betting along with casino and virtual games together with Poker.

Mark’s entrepreneurial spirit has lead his company to go from strength to strength acquiring some of the biggest names in gaming – Betmaker.com (Costa Rica), Number One Betting Shop (Australia), Sportsbook (USA) and Sporting Odds (UK) to name a few – making Sportingbet the world’s largest internet gambling group. Sportingbet has revenues exceeding £1 billion and in excess of 1.1m customers from over 150 countries worldwide.

Sportingbet grew to report profits of £103m in year end July 2005.

Dylan Collins is Chairman of Fight My Monster, the fastest-growing online game for boys in Europe. He is one of the most experienced Internet entrepreneurs in Europe, building three companies with three successful exits over the last decade. He was recently named as the Irish government’s Startup Ambassador.

In 2007 Dylan founded Jolt Online Gaming, which became one of the pioneering social games publishers in Europe. Jolt successfully launched a range of free-to-play games on browser and Facebook including Championship Manager, Legends of Zork, Utopia Kingdoms and Playboy Party. The company was the first to attract major licenses into the social games space, signing deals with Eidos, Playboy and several others. Jolt was acquired by GameStop (NYSE: GME), the largest video games retailer in the world in 2009 to spearhead their digital media strategy.

As founder and CEO of DemonWare in 2003, he led the company to become the leading online games technology firm in the global console games market. DemonWare technology was used to connect millions of players on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles in some of the biggest games in the world such as Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, Guitar Hero and many others. In 2007, DemonWare was acquired by Activision Blizzard (NYSE: ATVI), the world’s biggest video games publisher.

Dylan’s first company, Phorest (launched in 2000), was one of Ireland’s leading mobile messaging (SMS) companies. Providing a range of SMS products and services to the small business sector, the company enjoyed rapid growth. In 2002, Phorest was acquired by MBO and is now the leading appointment management software company in the beauty sector across Ireland and UK.

Dylan blogs at www.founderware.co and can be found on Twitter as @MrDylanCollins.

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Tim began life as an entrepreneur when he opened his first juice bar in Canary Wharf in the late 90s following a successful career with Bain and Company in Moscow, Sydney and London.

Crussh now has 25 stores throughout London and Tim remains an active shareholder in the business. In 1999 he became the founding employee in London, of Flutter.com and later became Commercial Director in 2001 following the merger with Betfair.com. The combined entity revolutionised the gambling industry by building the world’s largest sports betting exchange. Betfair has become one of Europe’s most successful internet businesses and has; been richly rewarded by being the only company to have won the CBI Business of the Year twice. Tim led the internationalisation of the business, and laid the foundations across Asia, Europe and the rest of the world. He moved to Asia in 2004 to launch the business in Asia, and today remains an active shareholder and supporter of the business.

In 2009, Tim returned to London to embark on his next venture. He formed Augmentum Capital with the backing of RIT Capital and Lord Rothschild, and focuses relentlessly on finding entrepreneurs who have businesses that are disruptive technologically and reinvigorate markets that are lacking in fresh innovation.

Over the years, Tim has advised and personally invested in a number of exciting and innovative businesses, including Codilink, Borro.com, Crussh and Betfair.com.

John McCall MacBain, a Canadian citizen, is the Founder of the McCall MacBain Foundation and Pamoja Capital SA, its investment arm. Since its formation in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007, the McCall MacBain Foundation has made tens of millions of dollars of grants to fund projects relating to health, education and the environment in Canada, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, primarily in the West African country of Liberia.

Mr. McCall MacBain currently devotes a significant amount of his time to non-profit activities.  In addition to his role as a director of the McCall MacBain Foundation, Mr. McCall MacBain is a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust (Oxford).  Mr. McCall MacBain is also a founder and Chairman of the European Climate Foundation, a non-profit organization aiming to promote climate and energy policies that greatly reduce Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions and help Europe play an even stronger international leadership role in mitigating climate change.  

Mr. McCall MacBain is a member of the Yale Advisory Board of the Center for Environmental Law and Policy, a Foundation Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and a member of the Executive Committee of the McGill Campaign.