And for tech companies that intersect with games (like a next gen Twitch, Discord, Unity, or that kind of thing) you often found yourself educating investors, who might not have the relationships and network inside the industry.įrom the founders’ perspective, the above challenges presented major obstacles to building new startups. Venture capital isn’t as well understood or known, and founders often have a tough time connecting with angels and seed firms. And founders may not be as familiar either - although very valuable companies like Roblox, Supercell, Riot, etc have been started, the industry has mostly focused on game publishers doing revenue shares and minimum guarantees to finance development. There’s often fewer angel investors and seed funds to be the first dollar into the Games x Tech intersection. Raising money is hard, but particularly so folks building a new game.By doing an accelerator where there’s a larger batch of companies, you inevitably are able to build more. They have unique challenges - in particular quitting their job :) - and also finding cofounders, picking the idea, etc. Yet so much innovation comes from people trying for the first time. When we see 1000s of startup ideas each year (and yes, it really is that many), you inevitably end up trying to back the tried-and-true founders that are starting their second or third company. It’s great to support a large, diverse, set of first-time founders.So there’s an opportunity to bring people together. And if you are in a specific industry, like the intersection of games and tech, then the knowledge and relationships are often even more obscure - from picking game engines to launching on Twitch to Discord, to what’s cutting edge in AI - there’s just a lot. The reality is, most of the best new strategies and techniques aren’t written down. There’s a lot of unique knowledge, and founders have a lot to learn from each other.So it would be *amazing* to be able to create that, so that folks can learn from each other A lot of it is for very large game developers. I’ve been investing in the sector for the past few years, and although there are plenty of companies, and some big conferences (like the Game Developers Conference), there isn’t really a place focused on founders and new startups. There’s not really a startup community within Games x Tech.These are universal, but for our sector of Games x Tech, we noted a few concrete problems: They want to connect with each other, learn the latest, and they want to raise money. Although the sector is 100% software and fully digital, it had its own quirks as it was its own self-contained community.Īnd also, founders are founders. What are the biggest problems founders face?īack in 2020 when my colleague Jon Lai and I were starting to invest in the intersection of Games and Tech, we would often sit in a16z’s offices in Menlo Park and talk about some of the structural challenges of building a startup in the industry. If this sounds interesting to you, please join the program!īut before I get ahead of myself, let’s start with a little history. We target startups at the very earliest stages of development, often teams without products or metrics. I’ve learned a ton in our first year of investing, and I wanted to follow up on all of this to talk about a new effort we’ve launched called SPEEDRUN, the first startup accelerator focused on the intersection of Games x Tech - where we invest $500k in startups focused on everything from AI, AR/VR, web3, infra, game studios, and more. This past year, the primary focus has been to incubate and launch our new games fund ( I recently shared the pitch deck we used to raise $660M). It’s been fun to build in public and share the behind-the-scenes on my work at Andreessen Horowitz. Thanks to all my readers/colleagues/friends for your kind notes!īut before the honeymoon, I have some “behind the scenes” projects to write about at a16z :) First, the big personal news - I’m married! Emma and I had a very small ceremony in the desert town of Moab, Utah, where we enjoyed a week of hiking, UTVing, eating, and dancing with our immediate family, and we’re back for a few weeks before heading out to our honeymoon in Japan.
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