a16z’s Andrew Chen on on Gaming and Online Dating

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When Andrew Chen very first started investing in Los Angeles startups as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he claims there were being two parts of opportunity that the Silicon Valley undertaking huge remaining unexplored: online dating and online video game titles.

Now, both equally of people industries have bloomed into some of the most rewarding in Southern California’s tech scene, if not the wider tech earth.

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“We’d in no way devote in on line courting, and we’d hardly ever invest in movie games,” Chen said Tuesday at the Upfront Summit enterprise funds convention in Downtown L.A. “In the upcoming couple yrs, if you’d invested in Tinder and Bumble, they would have been seriously good—but for a while those people were considered unattractive.”

On line dating has confirmed a massive organization for West Hollywood-based mostly Tinder’s guardian business, Match Group, which also owns and operates dating applications like Hinge, OKCupid and Match.com. Match Team went community in 2015 and now boasts a current market capitalization exceeding $31 billion. The gaming sector, in the meantime, has exploded due to the fact the pandemic and has now emerged as metaverse opportunity—factors that certain Microsoft to shell out a file $69 billion for Santa Monica-based mostly Activision Blizzard earlier this yr.

Andreessen Horowitz may well have missed the early boat on each industries, but now the firm is looking at a broader slate of investments led by partners like Chen, who moved to L.A. a short while ago to devote extra time to getting neighborhood startups. Chen mentioned he’s now shelling out “more than fifty percent my time” vetting gaming investments, in distinct. (Disclosure: Chen is an investor in dot.LA.)

A lot of the venture funds sector’s former apprehension close to gaming, Chen observed, was that the field is “hits-driven—it’s like investing in a movie.” Still that contemplating has progressed in latest many years, he added.

“What we have viewed in the previous decade is if you have invested in Riot or Unity or Discord or any of the several tech businesses [working] all over games… You conclude up getting it is an brilliant area to invest,” according to Chen.

With the pandemic accelerated the evolution of amusement in a far more virtual way, and investors are now functioning hard to preserve up.

“Our target is to make investments in what might be the subsequent key social networks,” Chen reported. “Kids and younger grownups are investing so much time in ‘Roblox,’ ‘Minecraft,’ ‘Fortnite’—these true-time environments the place they hold out with their pals. It has the possibility to be the upcoming social working experience that could generate a billion-month-to-month-lively-user product… The up coming Instagram or Snapchat will glance more like that.”