How A16Z is Making Money from AR/VR in Venture Capital

We hope the sun is shining and your metaverse is loading. We’ll be releasing a video interview with Jack Soslow, Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z Games), on Wednesday. If you’re a paid member, you can watch now.

Guests Today:

🔥 Jack Soslow Ξ Sharing the Andreessen Horowitz mindset for investing in AR/VR

🕹️ Andrew Steinwold Ξ Writing $1M checks into Crypto (even now! oh my!)

🤖 Neville Spiteri Ξ Newest Founding Member of the Metaverse Monday community

Want to line your company up for an interview? Become a founding member today

It’s quite the impressive resume to have a football career at Penn (and nearly the NFL), plus a tech career at Meta. Jack grew up in Philly, but describes his life as a ’tale of two cities.’ His competitive side from Philly; grown out of playing soccer and football.

Over the years, he grew a love for sports statistics, which led to a mathmatical understanding at large, and eventually a grasp of Machine Learning, Coding, and Artificial Intelligence.

It wasn’t until he got to SF when he established the tale of the second city - a ‘religious fascination with the technological sphere.’

“I felt that Philly was great at preparing me for going hard, trying, having drive, those sorts of things, but the config file of the city didn't really align with what I thought was valuable.Which was just like merit, ambition,and making the world a better place. Which is what San Francisco is all about. So I got to SF, I was like, all right, I'm changing my entire career,” says Jack over Zoom.

He quickly started teaching himself how to code, diving into the deep technicals of data science. He changed his input diet to enhance his belief in the idea that tech abundance is a force for good, it’s one of the largest levers to improve humanity at large.

After college, he built up coding skills doing side projects and eventually interned at Oculus. Where he put on a VR headset for the first time, an 'iPhone moment’ for him.

“It was right after the Quest release, I put on a VR headset for the first time, and it was immediately clear to me that this was the future. It was like iPhone moment.Walk through first steps like, this is it.I will do whatever it takes to like what I did wasI worked at Meta as an intern and then got a full time offer and then I got to Oculus and I got to Meta and they recruit for teams while you're there. But Oculus was not recruiting for the team when I joined. Like Meta just launched and despite its product success, was not selling as much. And they hadn't figured out the internal logistics on hiring people, so they didn't have space for me. But I just sat at the desks until they gave me a small job to do, and then I did that well enough to get like a full time job. Started off doing crash reporting and analytics, that sort of stuff. Eventually did a good enough job to continually move up, get more responsibility doing a lot of the performance and hardware software release data work to automate a lot of our releases.”

As he kept doing crash reporting analytics on the side for the Oculus team, he gained their trust, until eventually they brought him on to help with the the performance of hardware and software releases.

After learning enough at Meta, it was time for his next adventure; and that’s how he wound up at a16z.

TRENDY QUESTIONS

How can Generative A.I. overlap with AR/VR technology?

Generative A.I. is really useful at helping create things faster. So how does it help our industry? A.I. will enable faster development of AR/VR avatars, virtual worlds, and other 3D assets. But for now, the two best examples lie in the 2D world; the AI produced Coco-Cola ad, and Lupe Fiasco writing an entire song with the aid of an A.I. songwriter.

A.I. is having this same impact on the AR/VR development process. Enabling companies and individuals to create who otherwise couldn’t before.

In our interview with Jack, he dives into why it’s incredibly complicated to make 3D. In any given major studio, there’s 100’s of 3D artists creating the assets. But now we can abstract the creation process; 2D examples include Midjourney (create any art), ElevenLabs.io (sound like Drake - become any voice).

We’re releasing the full video episode this Wednesday, subscribe to our Youtube to check it out and hear more about Jacks thoughts on generative A.I. enhancing AR/VR.

How should Apple Vision Pro impact your investment thesis?

The answer depends on how much of a bull you’ve been for AR/VR in the past few years. The Apple news doesn’t impact Jack’s thesis very much since he’s suspected it coming, but what it does do is open up the developer ecosystem for more productive apps, and holographic apps. More investment opportunities for all of you reading.

In a thoughtful manner, Jack says, '“I’d say almost my job is a little bit of like Games X Something. Some investments include Prism's VR which is VR X EdTech, something like Ready Player Me which is like Games X Infra, that's an avatars as a service solution for the Metaverse.”

He also highlights two other key investments; Gym Class VR. This is like basketball in VR, and with 30K+ ratings on the Quest store, this game is thriving. Another deal Jack fundrd, Alta VR, which we did together. Alta is pioneering virtual worlds with titles like Township Tale. Andreessen Horowitz has been in the game for awhile, so when someone teaches themselves to code, works at Meta doing Machine Learning + AI, and then joins A16Z.. you can bet that’s a smart thinker. And Jack is just that.

Some of his a16z investments; Prisms, Alta VR A Township Tale, GymClass VR, Ready Player Me

Andrew Steinwold;

A dedicated crypto believer putting his own money, and more, on the line

Need $1M of investment for a Crypto startup? Ask Andrew. As if being apart of Sam Parr’s new Hampton Community isn’t cool enough, Andrew is one of the few remaining Crypto believers putting money where his mouth is in 2023. With 10K’s of followers across Linkedin and Twitter he’s built an intelligent and fun online reputation for himself. He also has his own podcast covering all things Metaverse. He calls himself, ‘The Metaverse Guy,’ while I’m not sure if I’m yet ready to give up that title, :), I am positive he’s a great person to have on your cap table.

I was curious about his perspective around Crypto, and was lucky enough to ask him;

What was the crypto industry like in 2013?
Was it just you and Dan in the early days of your hedge fund, who funded everything?
How is Crypto investing comparable to ‘liquid venture capital investing?’
What are the Token fundamentals you pay attention to?
How do you see the Metaverse unfolding in the USA vs abroad?

We’ll be releasing this episode in a few weeks, but I can tell you one of his crazy crypto deals involves Anime. He explains how this startup is going after that $25B market with billions of fans globally.

Neville Spiteri;

An AR/VR OG, and recent new Founding Member of Metaverse Monday.

We’ve recently had an honorary guest join our founding members page, Neville Spiteri. WeVR became a household name for The Blu VR, and after years of work and millions raised, this is a company I’ve been watching since 2016.

We’ve talked about Neville before, and he was featured at the top of my XR Founder Guide, but now I have the privilege to sit down with him for a full video interview later this month.

If you know any XR developers, make sure to share them on our newsletter so they can learn about WVS - a cloud platform for interactive creators to develop and ship virtual worlds and applications on real-time game engines

Want to line your company up for an interview? Become a founding member today

Have a Marvellous Monday!

-Don Stein & The Metaverse Monday Team

P.s. One of our very own Founding Members, Alan Smithson, is running a crowdfund; Metavrse. We <3 to support members.

Don Stein