FTX Past Was No Obstacle to Joining Menlo Ventures: Amy Wu

Your thesis where you're looking for founders, what kind of companies, where you want them to be based.

Yeah, I recently started at Menlo Ventures. Very excited. And I'm going to be covering consumer and gaming investments over here. It's actually, you know, Menlo doubling down on consumer investments, interestingly, at a time when a lot of funds for the last few years have been rotating out of the category and, and, and so, you know, whether blockchain or non blockchain, AR VR, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's constantly an area with new platforms and in innovation, new customer and user experiences. So I'm really excited to be focused.

On the space, I guess. Amy, it takes me to the why be the GP for consumer and gaming? I'm assuming there will be crossover in your previous work looking at blockchain. You know, when I think about video games, as we know on this program, video games is life. I think about collectibles in games, tokens, things that you buy security around that and blockchain technology. Is that kind of how you're thinking?

It's one of the areas. So I would say that, you know, if you look at the history of consumer and gaming investing, particularly consumer investing, it's been driven, new experiences have been driven by platform shifts. And I would say that, you know, mobile was the last very large one. A lot of the, you know, most interesting companies of like the last 10 years. So if you look at Uber and an Airbnb, etc. Really were created with technology innovations. And mobile blockchain is a promising platform shift, I would say, and still early. There's been companies experimenting on, you know, on chain, but I think, you know, it's set to be seen in terms of mainstream adoption. And of course, you know, everyone is very excited about the promises of Jenny I right now as well.

I think about your background because Menlo is a different firm, a new firm. You know, reflecting on what's happened in, in recent years, how much of the conversation with Menlo was about what happened to RTX Ventures? Was it sort of any kind of barrier to moving forward, working with them?

The short answer is is no. I think that, you know, they, they know that, you know, myself and to be honest, like most employees, you know, unfortunately were misled by the founder and, and so most of our conversation frankly was in terms of what I will be covering and in my thesis area.

For the future, you are actually only there for 10 months. What do you feel you've learned from the experience, an emotional one I'm sure and one of great hurt. But how ultimately do you feel you will do business differently post FTX Ventures?

You know, I've been a, I've been a venture investor for a long time. You know, I previously spent a few years at Lightspeed and before that at Insight. And so in terms of being an investor, you know, I haven't lost any passion for that and, and you know, excited to continue working with great founders and, and I think, you know, there's been a lot of learnings from ftx. I mean first and foremost, I mean it was a very fast growing company that did real revenues and, and you know, profits in the years that it was in operation. But I think, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty and in tech and you know, none of us really expected that to happen.

What's interesting is we find ourselves in a new AI hype cycle. It feels like crypto was the hype cycle previously. AI is the new one and you of course were there within some of the savvy investments being made with RTX inventions was Yuga Labs, I think a bored Ape Yacht club and just how that sort of became the number one NFT anyone could really think of. Sober Studios, the Web3 platform to build your own games. Are you thinking this feels like a hype cycle again? How do you make sure you have long term investments in the world of artificial intelligence and where that value rises right now?

It's a really great question. I mean AI has been a technology in development for decades at this point and it certainly had its iPhone moment I would say in the last fall with the, with the launch of Chat cbt and so you know, when I was at Lightspeed, Lightspeed had long time been investing, investing in AI and Melo has also been as well. And so I would say that really the investment cycle continues, you know, with, with Jenny I think there is sort of new surface area, I would say in terms of both increasing productivity of workers, for example artists in gaming, but then also in terms of defining a, a new way that people interact with computers and also, you know, converse with computers, which is really interesting, has a lot of ramifications in consumer experiences. So those are all areas, those are all areas that will be really, really interesting to track.

Amy, within video games. Are you interested in, in startups and companies that they want to use generative AI? Progress on the content side? Where's the opportunity in gaming?

So a lot of tech actually I think originates from gaming as a use case and the concepts Of I would say like two areas of a lot of intense interest, which is procedural generation of content and games and Also you know, NPCs or interactions with bot players in the game has actually been, you know, in development for, for a couple of decades with the first Diablo game, you know, with MMOs. And, and so it's a concept that I would say gaming founders and gamers know quite well. And, and as such, you know, they're both sort of wary about the hype cycle right now and Gen AI investing and the promises of that. But, but also very, very keen to, I would say experiment with the technology and at a higher level. I think that you know, indie gaming studios have always been disadvantaged compared to incumbent large gaming companies when it comes to budget in, in sort of game design, marketing, etc. And so if Jenny tooling is able to help, I would say like, you know, augment what they are able to create from a content perspective at cheaper costs, then it levels a. I think it allows a lot more games to be released of a really high quality and that's, that's a net plus for players.

I love that your, your mind went to non player characters. There's a lot of discussion around how let's just make games better and more challenging and dream up worlds to play in. Got to go to, I got to get too involved in this video game chat. Got to get your take on consumer. You kind of start this conversation saying you're kind of pivoting into something that others have pulled back on. Is there a risk there?

So there's two things that are simultaneously housing what the first is if you look at, you know, just the NASDAQ and S and P, you know, some of the largest market cap companies are consumer tech companies. On the other hand, you know, if you look at the last, I would say six, seven years or there hasn't been a lot of, I would say very large consumer tech companies that were newly founded that has reached the scale of Facebook and Amazon and others. And I think one of the reasons is because, you know, incumbents were founded with pretty deep network effects that are very difficult and they have massive distribution and it's difficult for a new company to compete. And so it remains to be seen whether you know, Gen AI as a platform and new technology is going to actually benefit incumbents more or new startups. And I generally believe that for a new consumer tech company you really need to dream about a very new surface of consumer experience to compete against incumbents. Otherwise it's, it's pretty difficult even today.