1. Semyon Dukach Blackjack Science
2. Semyon Dukach Blackjack
3. Semyon Dukach Blackjack Science

Semyon Dukach is Managing Director of Techstars in Boston. He is also known as a top angel investor, the Chairman of SMTP (company) (NASDAQ: SMTP), and a former professional blackjack player with the MIT Blackjack Team. Dukach first joined the team Strategic Investments and later become the leader of The Amphibians when SI split up into two groups. Gambling Planet met up with Semyon Dukach to talk about how they managed to beat the casinos and stay out of trouble. This is how he looks at his old profession as a professional blackjack player. YouTubeSemyon DukachWhen Semyon Dukach was a student at MIT, he ran the best-performing Blackjack team the school has ever had. On a typical weekend, Dukach.

Semyon Dukach (born 25 October 1968) is the Founding Partner of One Way Ventures,^[1][2] a venture capital fund that backs immigrant entrepreneurs.^[3][4]

Contents

He is also known as the former Managing Director of Techstars in Boston,^[5] a top angel investor,^[6] the former Chairman of SMTP (company) (NASDAQ: SHSP),^[7] and a former professional blackjack player with the MIT Blackjack Team.^[8] He played with Strategic Investments and later was one of the founding members and team leaders on Amphibian Investments whose exploits were chronicled in Ben Mezrich's Busting Vegas and referred to in Mezrich's Bringing Down the House. Dukach was the main character in Busting Vegas and the only member of the MIT blackjack team to be referred to by his real name in either book.

Early life

Born on 25 October 1968 in Moscow, Dukach moved to the US in 1979 at the age of 11. He completed a BS in Computer Science at Columbia University in New York in 1990 and a MS in Computer Science at MIT in Cambridge, MA in 1993.^[9]

At a young age Semyon developed an interest in video games and specifically Pac-Man. Semyon became proficient at the game by reading Ken Uston's Mastering PAC-MAN. This led him to read Uston's other titles on blackjack, giving him an understanding of the basics of card counting before he was approached to play with the MIT Blackjack Team.^[10]

Blackjack career

While attending MIT, Dukach was trained as a player on the MIT Blackjack team whose exploits were loosely depicted in the Hollywood movie 21.

Starting out with Strategic Investments (SI) in 1992, Dukach was a major player on the team. At the end of 1993 SI dissolved and Semyon was involved in a team effort with the remaining players from SI for the next year. By 1995 Dukach and a few players split off from that team and formed a second, independent team. This new team was referred to as the Amphibians and the team that they left was referred to as the Reptiles.

Since stopping play in the late 1990s, Dukach's involvement in blackjack has been limited.

Angel Investing and Techstars

Xconomy lists Dukach as a top Angel Investor in New England.^[6] According to his website, he has invested in over 100 startup companies, and provides marketing and team building advice to companies he invests in. Some of his investments include Amino, Bellabeat, Boatbound, Bolt, Buttercoin, Camiolog, Cangrade, Krash, CoachUp, Codeship, CoEverywhere, Crunchbutton, Dashbell, Donde Esta, Double Robotics, Enertiv, Faraday Bikes, Fashion Project, Freight Farms, ImageSurge, Jebbit, HelmetHub, Mapkin, Meograph, OpenBay, Ovuline, Petcube, Petnet, Plowme, Preply, Quanergy, Rallyware, Regalii, Simpleprints, Socrative, Splashscore, Sproutel, Strongarm, Terrafugia, Trefis, Reactor Media, ViralGains, Wanderu, and Zagster.

In 2014, Dukach assumed the role of Managing Director of Techstars in Boston.^[11] He ran the program for three years before leaving in 2017 to found One Way Ventures, a venture capital fund for exceptional immigrant founders.^[12]

Venture Capital

Dukach co-founded One Way Ventures in 2017 and currently serves as the Managing Partner. One Way Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on investing in startups with at least one immigrant founder on the team. The fund is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and is actively investing out of its first fund of $28.3 million.^[13] The firm focuses on tech-enabled startups in the Pre-seed to Series A stages, and has made investments in startups including Brex, LovePop, and Chipper Cash.

Other ventures

He has also been involved in other notable ventures outside of his blackjack and angel investing career:

• Authored work on virtual reality at IBM Research in 1988^[14]
• Authored a 1992 e-commerce paper on SNPP: A Simple Network Payment Protocol^[15]
• Founded Fast Engines in 1997, sold to Adero in 2000^[16]
• Co-founded Vert in 1998
• Lead investor and interim CEO of AccuRev in 2001^[17]
• Chairman of SMTP, a Nasdaq listed provider of email delivery services.
• Co-founded PDFfiller
• Was a CEO mentor at the Cambridge Business Development Center^[18]
• Board director of Terrafugia^[19]
• Founded the Troublemaker Award, granted to Zack Kopplin in 2012, to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot in 2013, and to Mustang Wanted in 2014 for creative troublemaking that improves the world.
• Director, Boston TechStars, 2014-2017.^[5]

Family

Dukach is the brother of Inna Dukach the opera singer married to Sean Altman, former front man of Rockapella.^[20]

Related Research Articles

Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from the high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.

The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated successfully from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century. Many other blackjack teams have been formed around the world with the goal of beating the casinos.

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions is a book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. Though the book is classified as non-fiction, the Boston Globe alleges that the book contains significant fictional elements, that many of the key events propelling the drama did not occur in real life, and that others were exaggerated greatly. The book was adapted into the movies 21 and The Last Casino.

Highland Capital Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco. Highland has raised over $4 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 280 companies, with 47 IPOs and 134 Acquisitions.

Techstars is an American seed accelerator founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of 2019, the company had accepted over 1,600 companies into its programs with a combined market capitalization of $18.2bn USD. Fewer than 1% of applicants are accepted.

Matrix Partners is a US-based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconductors, data storage, Internet or wireless sectors.

General Catalyst is an American venture capital firm focused on early stage and growth investments. The firm was founded in 2000 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto and New York City.

SMTP, Inc. is a provider of transactional email relay services.

Semyon Dukach Blackjack Science

AngelPad is an American seed-stage startup incubator, launched in September 2010 by Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas with six other former Google employees as mentors. AngelPad provides mentorship, seed money, and networking at two 10-week courses per year.

Atlas Venture is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in life sciences startup companies in the U.S. Atlas is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the majority of its investments are located. Atlas rolled out its eleventh biotech fund totaling $350 million in June 2017, after closing its tenth fund in April 2015, with $280 million in commitments.

Semyon Dukach Blackjack

Benedict T. Casnocha is an American author, entrepreneur, and investor, based in San Francisco, California.

AngelList is a U.S. website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups. Created in 2010, the platform has a mission to democratize the investment process and to help startups with their challenges in fundraising and talent. It started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startups to raise money from angel investors free of charge.

Brad Feld is an American entrepreneur, author, blogger, and venture capitalist at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado, a firm he started with partners Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.

Aileen Lee is a U.S. seed investor. A venture capital investor, she is the founder of Cowboy Ventures.

Semyon Dukach Blackjack Science

Version One Ventures is a Vancouver-based, early-stage investment fund company founded by Boris Wertz and managed by his investing partner Angela Tran Kingyens. The company provides investments to startups, primarily in SaaS, marketplace, cryptocurrency, financial tech, and healthcare industries.

Hugo Van Vuuren is a South African entrepreneur and investor. An expert-in-residence at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he is the co-founder of Work-Bench, an early stage enterprise technology venture fund.

Plated was an American ingredient-and-recipe meal kit service that has been acquired by Albertsons. The company was founded in 2012 and became well known through its participation in Techstars in 2013, Shark Tank in 2014 and Beyond the Tank in 2015. Plated's founders, Nick Taranto and Josh Hix, earned a deal on Shark Tank that fell through, but negotiated a deal with another investor after the show was filmed. The company accepted several rounds of venture capital investments and remained private until it was acquired by Albertsons in September 2017.

Venture equity is an investment strategy that includes a hybrid of venture capital and private equity approaches. Firms or individuals involved in venture equity acquire struggling startups, make improvements to the companies to help spur growth, and resell them for a profit.

Venture capital in Poland is a segment of the private equity market that finances early-stage high-risk companies based in Poland, with the potential for fast growth. As of March 2019, there is a total of 130 active VC firms in Poland, including local offices of international VC firms, and VC firms with mainly Polish management teams. Between 2009–2019, these entities have invested locally in over 750 companies, which gives an average of around 9 companies per portfolio. The Polish venture market accounts for 3% of the entire European ecosystem of VC investments, mainly in the digital space.

References

1. ↑ 'WBUR: Meet The Immigrant Who's Creating A Venture Capital Fund For Fellow Immigrants'. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
2. ↑ 'Forbes Tech Money: Betting on Immigrant Grit'. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
3. ↑ 'New Boston VC Firm for Immigrant Founders Aims to Raise $50M Fund'. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
4. ↑ 'WSJ Venture Capital: New VC Funds Aim to Help Immigrant Founders'. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
5. 'Xconomy: Semyon Dukach Goes From VC Outsider to Techstars Boston Head'. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
6. 'Xconomy: Top Angel Investors of New England'. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
7. ↑ 'Xconomy: Semyon Dukach Takes SMTP Public'. Retrieved 4 May 2011.
8. ↑ Kahn, Joseph P. (10 May 2006). 'Boston Globe Semyon Dukach Profile'. The Boston Globe. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
9. ↑ Blackjack Science
10. ↑ 'ThePOGG Interviews - Semyon Dukach - MIT Card Counting Team Captain'. Retrieved 10 November 2012.
11. ↑ 'Xconomy: Semyon Dukach Goes From VC Outsider to Techstars Boston Head'. Xconomy. 21 March 2014. Retrieved 18 February 2020.
12. ↑ 'Former Techstars Leaders Launch VC Firm to Back Immigrant Founders'. BostInno. 14 July 2017.
13. ↑ 'One Way Ventures'. Crunchbase.
14. ↑ Design for Interactive Performance in A Virtual Laboratory – Wang, Koved, Dukach (ResearchIndex)
15. ↑ SNPP: A Simple Network Payment Protocol – Dukach
16. ↑ Network WorldArchived 22 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine
17. ↑ 'AccuRev, Inc. Releases Version 2.5 of AccuRev/CM With an Integrated Issue Tracking System June 18, 2001'. Business Wire. 2001.
18. ↑ 'Blackjack Experts Article'. Archived from the original on 20 November 2008. Retrieved 2 January 2009.
19. ↑ Regan, Keith (28 January 2011). 'Future poised for takeoff for maker of flying cars'. Boston Business Journal.
20. ↑ semyon.com

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