Gaming Lost Another VC. Don't Be Surprised

Sometimes the thing that pulls you away from a good path is simply a bigger one. These are my learnings from conversations with my friend, Joakim Achren , a successful gaming founder, who became an investor and is now a builder once again. If you ask me, Joakim Achren did the founder-turned-investor playbook perfectly.

Founded two game companies. Failed once, succeeded once. Next Games got acquired by Netflix .

He became a content creator with Elite Game Developers , built an angel syndicate, made ~50 investments, worked as a venture partner, then launched his own fund with another gaming founder. I watched it happen from the side and thought: unstoppable. Surely this is the Harry Stebbings path within gaming.

Content builds access, access builds deal flow, and deal flow builds a fund. Clean. Six years later, Joakim stepped away from the fund he had started.

Not because the model wasn't working. After six years of building LP relationships, sharpening his investment thesis, and developing his craft as a GP (general partner), things were starting to click. But then AI hit.

The same instinct that pulled him into Facebook gaming and then mobile fired again, harder than before. When a builder sees a platform shift this large, investing in it isn't enough. You have to be in it.

When we sat down for the podcast, Joakim laid it out with the kind of precision you only get from someone who's lived through it. 1. What the job of a VC actually looks like Joakim built world-class founder relationships and strong co-investor networks.

His authentic writing on Elite Game Developers resonated with founders around the world. He didn’t sugarcoat anything.   The piece he might have underestimated was how central LP (limited partner) relationships are to the whole machine.

The people and organizations who fund the fund are, in the end, your real customers.   A senior VC told him this at Slush in 2019. The advice was simple: think carefully about whether you're building for founders or for capital allocators, because in venture, you work for LPs.

The insight isn't that founder experience doesn't matter. It does. But it's table stakes.

The differentiator is whether LPs know you, trust you, and pick up when you call. That relationship ought to be built years before you raise your first fund. Not during.