Professional athletes represent an increasingly important class of startup investors, with a variety of factors driving their decisions about which projects to back, and which to pass on.

For veteran NFL wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald Jr, the decision to invest in chess.com goes back to his youth, when the centuries old board game had a formative influence in his life and helped him manage the challenges of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

“It really helped me through some difficult times, being diagnosed with ADHD, and helping me kind of slow down my thoughts and be more strategic,” Fitzgerald said on Monday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah.

Long before Fitzgerald was a football star who played 17 seasons with the Arizona Cardinals, he was an ac

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