Companies Owned by Matt Higgins: Stakes, Investments & Exits

Matt Higgins built his career on the operating side of professional sports before becoming an owner of anything. He ran business operations for the New York Jets under Woody Johnson, then spent nearly a decade as Vice Chairman of the Miami Dolphins advising Stephen M. Ross, and it was that partnership with Ross that eventually turned into RSE Ventures, the firm he co-founded in 2012 and still runs as CEO today. We think RSE is the right lens for understanding almost everything else in his portfolio: it is less a single company than a merchant bank for consumer, sports and media brands, incubating and backing businesses like Drone Racing League, Momofuku, Milk Bar and Relevent Sports Group rather than running them day to day.

Where his ownership is cleanest and most direct is in Performance Drone Works, the military drone manufacturer he co-founded and has personally financed with roughly 50 million dollars, a real founder-level bet in a sector, defense technology, that is a sharp departure from his consumer and sports roots. He has also branched into media production with VaynerWatt, alongside Gary Vaynerchuk, and into blockchain risk management with Lockchain.ai, both launched since 2023.

Not every high-profile venture on his record worked out. His SPAC, Omnichannel Acquisition Corp., raised 200 million dollars in 2020 and struck a 1.03 billion dollar deal to take Kin Insurance public, only for that agreement to collapse in January 2022 and the SPAC itself to liquidate a few months later. We see that as a useful data point precisely because it is a rare disclosed failure in a record that otherwise reads as a steady accumulation of founder and co-founder positions.

What Higgins does not own is just as important to get right as what he does. He was never an equity holder in the Miami Dolphins, despite how often that gets assumed given his nearly decade-long Vice Chairman title, and the widely repeated claim that he was once COO of Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment under Sean Combs does not hold up; it is not part of his documented record. His path runs through Giuliani-era City Hall, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's post-9/11 rebuilding effort, the Jets, and the Dolphins, before RSE Ventures became his primary vehicle for ownership.

Active businesses in which Matt Higgins has a documented ownership or control relationship. Minority positions are shown separately.

Bubble size reflects a disclosed stake or value where available.

Control is where Higgins' record gets genuinely interesting, because his path to ownership ran backward from the usual founder story. He spent his twenties and thirties as a highly paid operator inside other people's organizations, City Hall, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the New York Jets, and the Miami Dolphins, before converting that operating credibility into an actual ownership position at RSE Ventures in 2012. We think that sequencing matters: by the time he became a co-founder, he had already run business operations at NFL scale, which is a very different foundation than the more common founder path of building a company from zero with no institutional experience behind it.

Inside RSE itself, control is genuinely shared. At least one press account describes Higgins as co-owner alongside Stephen M. Ross, a billionaire with far deeper capital reserves, and the precise equity split between them has never been made public. We read that ambiguity as a feature of the arrangement rather than a gap in reporting: Ross supplies much of the capital and the Miami Dolphins relationship that opened doors, while Higgins runs the firm day to day as CEO, and neither side has had reason to clarify the exact ownership math for outsiders.

Outside RSE, the picture is cleaner. Performance Drone Works, VaynerWatt and Lockchain.ai are all positions where Higgins is named directly as a co-founder, without Ross as a disclosed partner, which suggests he is increasingly willing to build things on his own account rather than exclusively through the RSE vehicle. Whether that reflects growing independent capital, growing confidence, or simply diversification across structures, we cannot say with certainty, but the trend line toward more standalone founder positions is visible in the timing: all three came after 2020.

The one place where formal control briefly slipped out of his hands entirely was Omnichannel Acquisition Corp., where as Chairman and CEO he negotiated a 1.03 billion dollar deal that his own board and counterparty ultimately walked away from. Control of a SPAC only goes as far as finding and closing a target, and that limit is exactly what played out in 2022.

Investments that are not counted as companies personally controlled by Matt Higgins.

Because so much of Higgins' activity is channeled through RSE Ventures, the line between controlled company and passive investment is genuinely blurry for several of his positions, and we think that ambiguity is worth naming rather than papering over. Drone Racing League, Momofuku, Milk Bar, Bluestone Lane, Magnolia Bakery and and pizza are all businesses RSE has backed since roughly the mid-2010s, but with Higgins' individual equity stake in each left undisclosed, we classify them as portfolio positions rather than personal holdings, even though he sits close to their governance through RSE.

Relevent Sports Group stands out from that group in scale, if not in disclosure. What began as an RSE-established soccer rights business built around the International Champions Cup has grown into a company that, as of March 2025, holds the global media and sponsorship representation mandate for the men's Champions League from 2027 through 2033, the first change in that competition's global agency representation in more than three decades. We think that single deal likely represents more enterprise value than the rest of the RSE consumer cluster combined, even without a disclosed number attached to it.

The consumer and hospitality names, by contrast, read as a coherent strategy rather than a random grab bag: RSE has repeatedly backed direct-to-consumer food and beverage brands with strong existing cultural cachet, David Chang's Momofuku, Christina Tosi's Milk Bar, rather than building new brands from scratch. That is a lower-risk, brand-partnership style of investing, and it fits a firm that prizes operating relationships over pure financial engineering.

What we would flag for anyone using this list to size up Higgins' influence is that the absence of disclosed equity percentages across most of this group is not a reporting gap we can fill in, it reflects genuine private-company opacity, and readers should weight his role in these businesses as closer to active board-level involvement than passive financial exposure.

Higgins' most consequential disclosed transaction is not a sale, it is a deal that fell apart, and we think that makes it more informative than a clean success story would be. Omnichannel Acquisition Corp., his 200 million dollar SPAC, announced a 1.03 billion dollar business combination with Kin Insurance in July 2021, at the height of the SPAC boom, only for both sides to mutually terminate the agreement in January 2022, citing unfavorable market conditions. The SPAC itself liquidated in June 2022, returning trust funds to shareholders rather than completing any acquisition.

We do not read this as a reflection of poor judgment on the underlying thesis so much as bad timing against a market that turned sharply against SPACs and insurtech valuations through late 2021 and into 2022. Plenty of larger, more established sponsors saw their announced combinations collapse in the same window. What is notable is that Higgins was willing to put his name and reputation behind a high-profile blank-check vehicle at all, and equally willing to walk away and return capital rather than force a deal through at a worse valuation once conditions shifted.

Beyond Omnichannel, there is no other disclosed sale, wind-down or exit in his record. His RSE Ventures positions and the companies incubated through it, Momofuku, Milk Bar, Drone Racing League, Relevent Sports Group and the rest, all appear to remain active as of this writing, with no reported divestitures. That absence of exits is itself a data point: unlike an entrepreneur who builds and sells companies on a repeated cycle, Higgins' model so far has been accumulation and long-term operating involvement rather than flipping positions for a return.

Taken together, we would characterize his transaction history as thin on completed exits but honest about failure where it occurred. A single, well-documented, unsuccessful SPAC combination is a far more useful data point for judging his risk tolerance than a portfolio page with no setbacks on it at all would be.