a16z’s Andrew Chen on on Gaming and Online Dating

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When Andrew Chen 1st started investing in Los Angeles startups as a common spouse at Andreessen Horowitz, he states there ended up two regions of prospect that the Silicon Valley undertaking huge still left unexplored: on the web dating and online video game titles.

Now, both of these industries have bloomed into some of the most valuable in Southern California’s tech scene, if not the broader tech world.

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“We’d never ever spend in on the net relationship, and we’d never make investments in video clip game titles,” Chen reported Tuesday at the Upfront Summit venture cash convention in Downtown L.A. “In the following pair years, if you’d invested in Tinder and Bumble, they would have been truly good—but for a even though people were being regarded as unattractive.”

On line relationship has tested a large business enterprise for West Hollywood-primarily based Tinder’s mother or father company, Match Team, which also owns and operates relationship applications like Hinge, OKCupid and Match.com. Match Group went general public in 2015 and now offers a industry capitalization exceeding $31 billion. The gaming sector, meanwhile, has exploded due to the fact the pandemic and has now emerged as metaverse opportunity—factors that certain Microsoft to shell out a report $69 billion for Santa Monica-based Activision Blizzard previously this 12 months.

Andreessen Horowitz may have skipped the early boat on each industries, but now the business is contemplating a broader slate of investments led by associates like Chen, who moved to L.A. not too long ago to dedicate much more time to discovering area startups. Chen mentioned he’s now spending “more than half my time” vetting gaming investments, in particular. (Disclosure: Chen is an investor in dot.LA.)

Much of the enterprise funds sector’s former apprehension around gaming, Chen famous, was that the industry is “hits-driven—it’s like investing in a film.” Yet that considering has developed in latest several years, he extra.

“What we have noticed in the past 10 years is if you have invested in Riot or Unity or Discord or any of the lots of tech corporations [working] about games… You close up getting it is an amazing spot to commit,” in accordance to Chen.

With the pandemic accelerated the evolution of amusement in a much more virtual direction, and traders are now operating really hard to preserve up.

“Our purpose is to devote in what may be the upcoming main social networks,” Chen mentioned. “Kids and youthful grown ups are paying so considerably time in ‘Roblox,’ ‘Minecraft,’ ‘Fortnite’—these genuine-time environments where by they hang out with their buddies. It has the probability to be the up coming social expertise that could develop a billion-regular monthly-active-person product… The next Instagram or Snapchat will appear more like that.”