Today we are making it official; I am joining up with London Venture Partners (LVP) as a venture partner, based in Vancouver.
I have known David Gardner for a thousand years, and have been super impressed with the whole LVP team, as they created a new investment firm category (in 2005!) to support founders entering the interactive entertainment industry. Now LVP is no longer alone in focusing on games investments and that just shows how incredibly powerful our sector is. That said, I still feel LVP has something special to offer to early stage founders, and I am very excited about the journey to help cultivate the next generation of companies in the business.
So a little about LVP and a little about me:
For LVP, early investments in companies such as Supercell and Playfish proved to be hugely successful, and helped establish LVP as a leading venture capital firm in the games industry.
In fact, some of LVPs founders have been repeat entrepreneurs and have built multiple impactful companies.
This is due to one of LVP’s keen abilities, to identify talent and of course support them. Being game industry veterans and experts themselves, LVP have always been much more than a fund; they have been a support system to help early stage companies flourish with their development roadmap and also attracting later series investors to take them to the next level. A recent example is Singularity 6, which has been showing amazing momentum building a community for a very ambitious game in a new genre.
My background has been in games through my life; I have met young studios and I have helped guide some of the biggest game teams, publishers, operations, eSports organizations, and platform groups over the last 30 years. As I watched the industry grow past all other entertainment forms combined, I was inspired by constant change, new ventures that re-write the rules, and the meteoric rise in the cultural impact of games.
Now I am looking forward to meeting founders who want to make a mark, to help invest in the future of the most promising companies and to work closely with LVP’s existing portfolio to help them achieve their growth potential. Between the gamification of the entire digital media world to AI and incredible new IP living worlds that cross media and more, I believe we are nowhere near what our amazing industry will do in the long run.
I’ll see you out there. Say hi.
