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How to Make Your Product Feel Like a Game New
Over the past 10 years, some of the largest outcomes in consumer tech have involved companies whose products feel like games. From Chime to DuoLingo, startups that make tasks that were previously boring or hard, like online banking or learning a new language, feel less like work and more like play are winning. Best in... Read More
Consumer Technology in 2024
At Patron, we strive to back founders revolutionizing the games and consumer sectors. Our background spans across Riot Games and Discord, two companies that started out building for gamers, but expanded into broad consumer success stories. They now impact hundreds of millions of people around the world on a daily basis. Three key trends are... Read More
Why it’s no longer enough to have 1,000 true fans. New
Kevin Kelly’s seminal essay was written over 15 years ago, and for a long time it’s held true. There’s no doubt that it has helped many founders transform online communities into large scale businesses, and provided many creators with a reliable income stream. But everything has changed. Thanks to TikTok, you’re more likely to be sold... Read More
Personal fitness journey
One of Patron‘s core inspirations is the belief that video games can serve as a force for good in the world, catalyzing positive transformations in people’s lives. As for my personal journey — while I’ve always loved games, I was far from being healthy or fit. By my late 30s, seven years of weekly work... Read More
Finding the Magic Moment in Consumer Social Apps
One of the secrets I learned whilst leading growth at Discord, is how to turn more users into power users. It starts with finding the magic moment. But what is a magic moment? It’s the moment in your user’s journey where they understand the value of your product for the first time. For a company... Read More
The venture opportunity in Esports
The League of Legends Worlds 2023 tournament is currently underway in Korea. As evidenced by early viewership, with opening matches topping 1.5m CCU, LoL esports is as big as ever. That said, the business health surrounding many esports companies continues to remain shaky. It’s insightful to take a look at the China esports market given... Read More
Venture investing in games
The gaming industry has seen explosive growth in the past decade, attracting significant VC funding. However, only a select few startups have managed to achieve true venture-scale outcomes. Drawing from personal experience at Riot Games, a game studio that went on to be acquired by Tencent for nearly $10bn, I want to share some factors... Read More
We’re leading the seed round in Rascal Games
I’ve known Rick Ling and Jonathan Lin since the summer of 2015. We first crossed paths at Riot Games when they just graduated from Y Combinator and UC Berkeley. It was one of our best strategic investments at the time, where they developed the ever-popular Blitz app from scratch and eventually sold their business to Discord. Over the last four years, they’ve been busy building their... Read More
The real business opportunity in music
Music has been a huge part of my life since an early age, when I grew up learning to play the piano, violin, and percussion. Playing and listening to music became a daily habit. Music was such a strong passion that I managed to inject myself into the earliest music explorations at Riot Games, and... Read More
On Joining Patron
Welcoming our new Partner, Amber Atherton. Words By Amber Atherton From a kid building mini clip games to a teenager managing virtual communities, I’ve always felt at home online, on the cusp of sub-cultures. I’ve experienced first hand the evolution of the creator economy and been drawn to re-imagining relationships between consumers and brands, to... Read More