Blue Star's Dynasty Esports appoints senior executives ahead of ASX listing 

Dynasty Esports has announced the appointment of two new senior executives, including former Virgin Group co-CEO, David Baxby, as part of the company’s plans to achieve its near-term goals, which includes its upcoming listing on the Australian Securities Exchange. 

Singapore-based Dynasty Esports said Baxby, an investor with over 25 years of senior executive experience, and Daniel Horan, a senior executive who has held key executive positions for some of the world’s leading telecommunications companies, will help the business advance its corporate strategy as well as further enhance execution capacity. 

Effective from yesterday, Baxby has been appointed as Chairman while Horan has been appointed as Dynasty’s Chief Customer Officer which will be effective from 1 July 2021. 

After eight years with Goldman Sachs in both London and Sydney, Baxby went on to join Virgin Group in 2004 as the CEO of the Asia Pacific region where he was responsible for the Group’s investments in Virgin Mobile, Virgin Active, Virgin Money and Virgin Australia. 

In 2011, Baxby was named the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group - a $6 billion family office with responsibility for all of Virgin Group's global investments. 

Baxby was also chairman of online classifieds business Frontier Digital Ventures where he successfully led the IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange when it listed as a $100 million-odd company in 2016, a business which is now worth more than $400 million. 

In his new role as Chairman, David will work closely with Dynasty’s senior leadership team based in Southeast Asia in relation to corporate strategy and execution, and will lead near-term Australia-focussed objectives, including the company’s planned listing on the ASX. 

Pictured below: Former Virgin Group Executive, David Baxby.  

(Source: Trevor Collens) 

Meanwhile, Daniel Horan, who will become Dynasty’s COO, has previously held key executive positions for some of the world’s leading telecommunications (and related) companies, including, inter alia, CCO for Vodafone Qatar and CMO for Axis Indonesia.  

In the last ten years, Horan has brought a range of innovative platform-based commercial partnerships to life for the telcos he has represented, including Spotify, NBA, Disney, Netflix, Turner, Sports Illustrated, Astro, Hooq, Niantic, Supercell, Viber, and Google, Dynasty said. 

Given his knowledge of how large telecoms groups operate, Horan will assume responsibility for Dynasty’s customer relationships as COO, with an initial core focus on ensuring that the growing portfolio of Tier 1 telco partnerships fulfils its potential. 

Matt Lodge, Co-Founder and CEO of Dynasty said: “David and Daniel are vastly experienced and highly regarded leaders, with a long history of delivering outstanding commercial outcomes for some of the world’s best known and most respected businesses.” 

He added, “Being able to secure senior executives of this calibre is a strong endorsement that Dynasty is a company extremely well positioned for success.”  

Dynasty’s investors include London-listed Blue Star Capital. In April 2021, Dynasty completed its fundraising round, raising $5 m at a pre-money valuation of $45m. Investment firm Blue Star currently holds around 13% of the issued share capital of Dynasty.  

The proceeds of the fundraising are expected to be used to provide it with the ability to accelerate growth as well as to seek to convert a greater number of pipeline opportunities. 

Blue Star says the esports market is experiencing significant growth. In 2020 it was estimated at c.495m viewers and is projected to reach around 646m viewers by 2023.  This is expected to result in revenues growing over the same period from $950m to $1.60bn.