A couple weeks ago while in NYC, a friend suggested I talk with Michael Sepso, the right-on founder of Major League Gaming. We did so at a bar along with some co-workers preparing for their 200th hugely important presentation to Pepsi taking place the next morning. Also the next day, 60 Minutes would be doing interviews in their offices. (I think we left the bar around 2:45am. I was poured into a cab.) Michael’s a smart guy that has closely watched interactive businesses grow for 10+ years now and was able to gleen much about our business - what took me a year to learn - in the time he spent surfing Dogster & Catster.

Major League Gaming - an idea born while playing video games - now includes $10,000 purse Halo competitions, a massively active website, and a weekly TV program called Cold Piza. They are signing some of the best Halo players in the world and plan to give away over $250,000 in prizes money this year. Michael funding model is also a fresh play. Instead of seeking some of the millions from NYC’s chest beating venture capitalists, he’s looking for some of the billions of NYC’s hedge fund managers …. but’s that a different story.

The average user session on the Major League Gaming website is over 6 hours, (yes, 6 farking hours!) but Michael is barely interested in it’s potential revenue. For him a community is wasted if just serviced via a website. He thinks far too many online entities don’t realize that they are in fact media companies, media companies with a whole line of entertainment possibilities. His goal is to make Major League Gaming a 360-degree (his nifty term) media company with presences on TV, magazines, satellite radio, podcasting, websites, books, physical goods, candy bars and anywhere else a gamer may be. The impressive part is that they are well on their way to achieving their goal of providing something for any type of gamer thus meaning they will have a much more efficient time finding formats that their sponsors are most keen on using to reach their audiences. Whoever gives their sponsors the greatest diversity of vehicles to spread their message likely succeeds, and now I know that.

So Dogster and Catster are going to be working on pushing our vision as wide as possible to see how we can be a media company (vs. an online community) and Major League Gaming will become a name you will hear more and more and more.

(Confidential to Noah Rosenkrantz, thanks for the introduction and it’s been a pleasure getting to meld minds again.)