Alan Keating has spent years making seven-figure poker pots look oddly casual. His latest bet is different: the high-stakes cash-game regular has launched his first venture fund, Hero Call Ventures, and marked the occasion with a $100 founders poker tournament in San Francisco on Thursday night.
The buy-in was almost comically small by Keating standards, but the money on the table was not really the point. Founders were invited to submit their companies when registering, a selected group pitched Keating before cards went in the air, and the tournament itself became a route to more face time with one of poker’s best-known private investors.
It is an unusual crossover between two worlds that already share plenty of vocabulary. Founders pitch investors, poker players pitch stories, and both occasionally discover that confidence is much cheaper than being right.
Hero Call Ventures Launches at a Poker Table
The Founders Poker Tournament was held in San Francisco on September 24 as the launch event for Hero Call Ventures. Keating made the purpose explicit before the event, telling his followers on X: “I’m hosting a 100 dollar poker tournament in SF Thursday to celebrate the launch of my first venture fund, Hero Call Ventures.”
Entry cost $100 with rebuys available, while professional dealers, dinner and a room deliberately filled with founders, operators and investors made it closer to a networking event with chips than a conventional casino tournament.
Before play began, selected founders were given a few minutes to pitch Keating and the new fund live. Once the tournament started, every elimination earned a point. At 8:30 p.m., the five players with the most points on the bounty board earned seats at Keating’s featured table, creating a neat incentive to play aggressively rather than nurse a short stack and swap business cards.
That structure fits Keating rather well. He is known in poker for playing enormous televised cash games with a willingness to put stacks in spots where most players would need a long walk and a strong coffee first. The launch borrowed that reputation without pretending a $100 tournament was suddenly a nosebleed cash game.
Keating’s Investment Life Moves Into the Open
The more interesting part of the story is that Hero Call Ventures formalises something Keating has been doing away from poker for years. He has invested in startups privately, including appearing among the investors in Hubble Network’s $20 million Series A funding round in 2023, but this is the first venture fund he has launched for outside investors.
That helps explain why the event was built around access rather than prize money. A founder who busted a few opponents could end up sitting beside Keating and talking about a company. For an early-stage business, that conversation could ultimately be worth rather more than first prize in a $100 rebuy tournament.
Poker Type readers have seen the other side of Keating recently. He was among the poker names at Russell Westbrook’s charity poker night in Las Vegas, an event that raised $912,500 and mixed professional players with athletes, entertainers and business figures.
He also sits naturally among poker’s most recognisable high-stakes players. His public reputation has been built largely through streamed cash games, where the stakes and his appetite for unusual lines have made him one of the players viewers actually notice rather than merely recognise.
Poker Is Becoming a Business Networking Tool
Using poker to put investors and founders in the same room is not entirely new, but Keating’s version is unusually on-brand. The knockout leaderboard solved one of the duller problems with networking events by giving people something to do, while the featured-table reward meant the tournament mechanics directly controlled who received extra access to the host.
There is also a broader reason poker works in that setting. A tournament reveals how people handle incomplete information, losing, pressure and changing incentives, although nobody should confuse a few hours of cards with serious due diligence. At minimum, it gives two strangers something more interesting to discuss than another pitch deck.
Keating’s poker career provides the attention that a new fund normally has to buy through marketing. He has played some of the largest pots shown on American poker streams and has repeatedly appeared on shows including Hustler Casino Live and High Stakes Poker. In that environment, a fund called Hero Call Ventures barely needs its name explained.
The launch also continues a recent pattern of poker spilling into spaces beyond conventional tournament reporting. Celebrity and charity games increasingly use the table as a social hub, while business figures have long treated private games as places to build relationships. Keating has simply turned that overlap into the central idea of his fund’s launch night.
A Different Kind of Hero Call
Hero Call Ventures has not yet disclosed enough publicly to judge its eventual size, portfolio strategy or performance, so the launch should not be dressed up as more than it is. What is clear is that Keating is taking an investment activity previously associated with his life away from the cameras and putting a formal name around it.
For poker, that makes the story more interesting than a celebrity appearance at another small tournament. One of the game’s most visible high-stakes cash players is using the culture of poker itself to source founders and introduce a venture fund, with a bounty race deciding who gets the best seat in the room.
There are easier ways to launch an investment business. They just would not be very Alan Keating.
