Guy Snowden

Guy B. Snowden is best known as a co-founder and long-time chief executive of GTECH Corporation, the company widely credited with building the modern computerized lottery industry. He began his technology career at IBM in 1966, and moved into the lottery field when he joined Mathematica, Inc., in 1976. In 1980–1981 he co-founded GTECH alongside Victor Markowicz and Robert Stern, backing the venture with $200,000 from the founders that was matched by the Bass Brothers of Fort Worth through their advisor Richard Rainwater, plus a $3 million bank guarantee. That founding stake grew to roughly $40 million within 15 years as GTECH came to operate the majority of U.S. state lotteries.

Snowden served as GTECH's CEO from its inception and as Chairman from 1987 until 1998. His tenure ended amid a high-profile legal battle in the United Kingdom: as chairman and chief executive of GTECH's UK operation and a shareholder in the Camelot Group (operator of the UK National Lottery), he became embroiled in a defamation case with Sir Richard Branson. Branson alleged on a BBC *Panorama* broadcast that Snowden had attempted to bribe him in 1993 to withdraw his rival "People's Lottery" bid. Snowden sued for libel; in 1998 the court found against him, and he subsequently resigned from GTECH and divested his Camelot shareholding.

After leaving GTECH, Snowden founded SnowMark Corporation in 1998, a Vero Beach, Florida–based venture capital and real estate investment firm. He runs the firm together with his original GTECH co-founder, Victor Markowicz. SnowMark deploys the partners' personal capital across early-stage technology and healthcare companies as well as real estate, effectively operating as an angel/private investment vehicle rather than an institutional fund with outside LPs.

• Invests as a founder-turned-principal / angel investor, primarily deploying personal capital through SnowMark rather than a large institutional fund.
• Stage-agnostic but active at seed: SnowMark lists stages from seed and first-round through later rounds, mezzanine, buyout/acquisition, and pre-IPO — flexible entry points rather than a single-stage mandate.
• Sector breadth with a healthcare/technology tilt: healthcare informatics, biotech, software, IT services, semiconductors, telecom, and real estate are all in scope; healthcare-IT and claims/workflow automation have drawn actual checks.
• Operator's lens: as the builder of a company that scaled from a $200K founding stake to a global lottery-systems leader, Snowden brings deep operating and systems-technology experience to the companies he backs.