a16z’s Andrew Chen on on Gaming and Online Dating

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When Andrew Chen first commenced investing in Los Angeles startups as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he claims there have been two regions of option that the Silicon Valley undertaking large left unexplored: on line dating and video online games.

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

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“We’d by no means spend in on line dating, and we’d hardly ever devote in video games,” Chen stated Tuesday at the Upfront Summit enterprise cash conference in Downtown L.A. “In the subsequent few decades, if you’d invested in Tinder and Bumble, they would have been definitely good—but for a even though people have been viewed as unattractive.”

On line dating has established a massive enterprise for West Hollywood-dependent Tinder’s parent company, Match Team, which also owns and operates relationship applications like Hinge, OKCupid and Match.com. Match Team went community in 2015 and now offers a industry capitalization exceeding $31 billion. The gaming sector, in the meantime, has exploded considering that the pandemic and has now emerged as metaverse opportunity—factors that confident Microsoft to shell out a history $69 billion for Santa Monica-centered Activision Blizzard earlier this 12 months.

Andreessen Horowitz may have skipped the early boat on equally industries, but now the firm is considering a broader slate of investments led by companions like Chen, who moved to L.A. a short while ago to dedicate additional time to discovering community startups. Chen reported he’s now spending “more than 50 % my time” vetting gaming investments, in particular. (Disclosure: Chen is an investor in dot.LA.)

Considerably of the venture funds sector’s preceding apprehension around gaming, Chen noted, was that the marketplace is “hits-driven—it’s like investing in a film.” However that wondering has progressed in modern many years, he added.

“What we have viewed in the previous 10 years is if you’ve invested in Riot or Unity or Discord or any of the quite a few tech firms [working] all around games… You close up getting it is an magnificent location to make investments,” in accordance to Chen.

With the pandemic accelerated the evolution of enjoyment in a far more virtual path, and buyers are now functioning really hard to maintain up.

“Our target is to devote in what may be the upcoming big social networks,” Chen explained. “Kids and youthful grownups are paying out so significantly time in ‘Roblox,’ ‘Minecraft,’ ‘Fortnite’—these actual-time environments where by they hold out with their friends. It has the likelihood to be the subsequent social experience that could build a billion-regular-active-consumer product… The next Instagram or Snapchat will glance far more like that.”