We have decided that the strategy for the U.S. is to enhance our horse racing offerings and to support our global product development initiatives and therefore, at this point, Betfair wants the U.S. horse racing and engineering teams to integrate more closely with [United Kingdom] operations. Given these changes, Gerard decided to leave the company to pursue alternative opportunities.

More info:

Stephen Burn will now run Betfair’s US horseracing business and Los Angeles office, reporting to Betfair’s UK-based managing director of exchange, Mathias Entenmann.

Ravi Keswani will continue to run the US engineering and product management teams and assume responsibility for the San Francisco office, reporting to Betfair’s London-based chief technology officer Tony McAlister.

If you wanna know what Stephen Burn looks like, here’s an old video:

-

MY VIEWS: Some years ago, I e-mailed Stephen Burn (2 or 3 times) for info on BetFair (not knowing that he was not in the PR department), and he graciously forwarded each e-mail to right person at BetFair (instead of killing them, wrong recipient), and my requests got always satisfied. So, to me, the chap sounds like a nice gentleman. As for Gerard Cunningham, I was told by one betting exchange industry insider that he was not very enlightened.

-

[*] Technically, David Yu is the upper boss at The Sporting Exchange USA, if I remember well. Go to http://corporate.betfair.com/ for more info. (Well, actually, you won’t find that info there. Their corporate site is quite elliptic.)

Wall Street Journal:

Gerard Cunningham, president of BetFair US, the world’s largest legal online gaming company, isn’t confident that the bills will get their proper hearing in Congress soon.

“The challenges those bills face is the amount of things going on in Washington,” Cunningham said. “They have other concerns now… maybe next year… maybe the year after.”

2010 … 2011

TechCrunch republishes BetFair’s PR material. No independent analysis in this TechCrunch story. Nothing about problem gambling, for instance. Nothing about InTrade, BetFair’s competitor.

TechCrunch = stenographers

The plan is to build a technical team that can combine that television property with a brawnier website, which can stream live horse races to viewers and add all the social media bells and whistles, including Twitter feeds, chat and blogging — to make the horse-racing experience more akin to watching an episode of “Lost” on Hulu. [...]

The technical team he is building in Silicon Valley is therefore taking a very modular approach to what its building online so that various components of online gambling can be turned on and off depending on the laws in individual states (or even countries). So that might mean poker and horseracing in one state, and sports betting in another. [...]