Matt Erley wedged his way into the golf world from a young age.
“I grew up on Eagle Trace and played a lot,” the Broomfield native said. “I’d sneak out on the course and hit balls in the evening.”
Now a member of Cherry Hills Country Club, Erley heads up Old Tom Capital, an investment firm he co-founded that is exclusively focused on the gentleman’s game. Since 2022, he and partner Evan Roosevelt have invested “tens of millions” with smaller, angel-like checks across 20 deals.
Now, however, the firm named after “founder of the modern game” Tom Morris is shifting to focus on buying majority stakes of companies. Erley said the private equity model will allow the firm to capitalize on what he thinks is a half-trillion-dollar industry when factoring in peripheral categories like golf-focused travel, food and hospitality.
“We’re doing really well and thinking about whatap next, and thatap finding capital that believes in the golf industry and the resilience of the golfer,” he said. “In good times and bad times, people are going to keep playing golf.”
Erley and Roosevelt met through mutual friends in 2021. Erley had just left a post as vice president of growth at local interior design startup Havenly. Before that, he was the head of marketing at Drizly, an alcohol delivery company acquired by Uber.
When they met, Roosevelt was building Random Golf Club, a golf media company that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and followers across its social channels. He founded the company in 2018 and sold his stake in 2022.
The pair started talking about next steps. Both had done some angel investing personally and saw golf as an area in need of a focused firm with capital. The sport had exploded amid the pandemic, and most other sports-specific investors were focused on professional teams and leagues.
“In sports like baseball or basketball, professional teams are where most of the value is created, but in golf itap so unique because most of the value is created in the recreational side of the game,” Erley said.
“In other categories you play the youth version and then become a professional watcher,” he added. “But with golf you start playing and don’t stop. Itap such an addictive sport.”
There was also a proliferation of tech entrepreneurs getting into golf and founding their own golf-focused companies, like Colin Reed and his club management software Woosh. Before starting the business in 2020, he co-founded an electric vehicle charging company and worked at several other Bay Area startups.
Now, Erley said, the Old Tom portfolio company has become “one of the most popular” means to plan tee times and member services.
“When COVID happened, a lot of people picked up a golf club for the first time and a lot of founders and entrepreneurs became golf curious or golf sickos and started looking around at the golf world and how things are managed in a really archaic way,” Erley said.
“So you had a lot of sophisticated entrepreneurs coming into this industry and starting to build things, and we felt like there wasn’t a lot of capital or firms thinking about this space.”
He and Roosevelt started cutting $500,000 checks as co-investors, but as their group grew, they rose to write seven-figure lead checks. Along with Woosh, Old Tom’s other portfolio companies include apparel firms and Birdie Houses, an Airbnb-type site focused on group golf travel.
Old Tom is also an investor in the Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy-backed TGL (Tomorrow’s Golf League) and the par-3 Grass League.
Though there are no local companies in Old Tom’s portfolio, Erley said Denver is a ripe place to grow the business.
“Itap not big from a business (of golf) perspective, but itap one of the biggest markets in the U.S. as far as interest in golf and courses and rounds played,” Erley said of Denver. “Golftec was founded here, and itap a great entrepreneurial ecosystem with good people to hire.”
Erley and two other employees reside in Colorado, including Inspirato and Exclusive Resorts founder Brent Handler, who is responsible for Old Tom’s real estate and hospitality arm. Roosevelt lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and the couple other Old Tom employees are spread elsewhere in the country.
In all of its previous deals, Old Tom raised funds individually through entities called “special purpose vehicles.” Erley said they will still do those smaller deals to have a pulse on early-stage companies, and he noted the larger, majority purchases will have a similar structure too. But in those cases, which could involve hundreds of millions of dollars, the two plan to solicit funds from family offices and institutional investors.
The network and name they’ve built for themselves in the past several years is a key reason they’re able to operate that way. Many of the deals they hope to make aren’t currently advertised, so Erley also said thatap a competitive advantage.
He said that strategy can make Old Tom the “LVMH for golf,” referencing the Parisian luxury goods titan Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
“We know more about whatap happening in the golf industry than any other investment firm in the world,” Erley said. “All we do is invest in golf, and the more deeply embedded through ownership we can be, the more we can create lifetime value for the golfer.”
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