SPEEDRUN: What I learned building a world class startup program from scratch
The story of the founding team, the startup within a16z, and how we're creating a generational program to serve founders worldwide.
To Josh, Samira, Andrew, Petra, and the entire A16Z GAMES team for the tireless hours to put this together and the many laughs and learnings along the way. And my lovely girlfriend Anna Wang for putting up with many sleepless nights. Onwards and upwards.
During the Christmas holidays, people usually do a year-in-review or Spotify wrapped. But my journey with a16z is less year-by-year but instead two arcs: pre-SPEEDRUN and post-SPEEDRUN. So I thought this would be a good time to tell the story of how it all came about and the ups and downs in the journey so far: We’ve gotten more applications every class, with thousands of applications and a <1% acceptance rate. We’ve gotten talented founders who have created and scaled notable companies. And we’ve gone from a primarily gaming focused institution to one that supports many types of founders: from AI agents to gamified consumer apps to defense simulations to 3D modeling software to crypto Telegram games to sports betting.
This is the story of how one little idea spawned into a real institution with over a hundred companies and a hundred million dollars deployed in just a year and a half. In this essay I’ll cover the origin story, lessons and learnings along the way, and most importantly for aspiring founders, how we pick our class. And if you’re building a new pre-seed/seed startup please don’t hesitate to reach out.
So how’s it all start? Let’s rewind to the spring of 2023.
Small team, big dreams
It all began with a simple idea: there are many accelerators out there but none for the gaming industry. YC is the gold standard for accelerators, but it’s mostly focused on enterprise SaaS: in the last S24 class, only 16 are consumer of 254 companies. Gaming in particular is also a highly fragmented industry: infra vs. studios, LA vs. SF, mobile vs. PC, casual vs. hardcore, etc. There’s no program that unites all these disparate communities, and games are often related more to Hollywood than to Silicon Valley.
We wanted to change that. We wanted to unite the tribes, and we wanted to prove that the gaming industry reaches much further than just video games alone. We wanted to show that much of the cutting edge of tech - from graphics cards to AI agents/NPCs to social networks - comes from the gaming industry. We knew that just doing a few deals a year wasn’t going to make enough of a dent to prove our thesis, and so SPEEDRUN was the one way to do this at scale and build a real network effect of founders that would become close friends, help each other through their own journeys, give feedback on each other’s products, be the first customers, refer new founders, and pay it back when they’re successful through advice and angel investing.
We also knew that we were one of the few teams that could pull something like this off. This doesn’t come from a place of arrogance; we knew that there were a few core things when building an accelerator that played to our strengths: a brand that people desire, a scaled marketing operation to drive top of funnel, a strong network to tap referrals, and a broader team to handle the sheer amount of work that comes from planning several “weddings” (demo days) a year and partnering with so many companies in detail.
We broke it down into a few core tenants that I believe still hold true today:
Attract the best founders. If there was only one principle, it would be this. The quality of the founders in the program dictates the quality of the deals and the quality of the community. Everything flows from here. If you get the top 0.1% of people in the program, it will become desirable for others of high caliber to attend. If you attract B or C-tier folks, then you create adverse selection and you’ll never be able to get the S and A-tier folks to come.
In particular, SPEEDRUN has been useful for breaking into net new networks as we’re able to take more risk outside of our usual mandate: Stanford/MIT/Berkeley/etc. undergrads, Turkish mobile studios, East / Southeast Asia as a few examples. We’re always looking for new talent dense networks to tap!
Help those founders win. The more wins that come out of the program, the more it helps reinforce tenant #1. Founders will speak highly of our team and the program, and their wins will become aspirational for founders that are earlier on in their journey. Of course, creating those wins is easier said than done, which is why we have a kickass investing and operating team (25+ strong just on games, and many more in broader a16z) to go tackle these challenges. We’re happy to report that our NPS is always 80+ and often closer to 90. As a comparison point, top brands like Coke and Mercedes Benz often poll in the 60s to 70s.
Maximize the Demo Day / fundraising experience. Ultimately, SPEEDRUN will culminate in a Demo Day and we want to create the best environment for our founders and the Demo Day attendees. This is often a very field-oriented, hand-to-hand, account management style motion where we try to talk to some of the top attendees to understand their ideas, concerns, and approach. The most important thing is finding them a few companies that really pique their interest – oftentimes this is a company that’s games-adjacent! - and match them with those founders.
Have flawless operations. SPEEDRUN is hosting a wedding, every week, for 12 weeks straight, with one massive culmination at demo day at the end. We would not have been able to achieve this without Samira, Marigold, Karishma, and the rest of the marketing + operations team spearheading this entire effort. It truly takes a village, and the attention to detail is critically important (how large the demo stations are, what the lighting looks like, sound for videos, speaker timing / coordination, website flow, the list goes on and on).
So with those four principles as our guiding light, let me tell you how we got to where we are.
The Beginning
We started with a prototype in SF and LA. Andrew Lee was brought on originally to set up this crazy idea, and I joined him soon after as we realized this was a mountain of work that needed more bodies. We worked together to put forward the first six week program, and it was definitely… a startup. We ran the first application system out of Typeform + Airtable, we had over a thousand applications, put together a quick branding for the class and program, drafted the week-by-week schedule / content, and brought together a very solid first class. At that point, we were still just trying to find the best founders from the games industry, and the content was more tailored towards starting games-centric startups (studios, infra, mobile apps, etc.).
A few things became immediately apparent to me as we were putting this together. First was simply how operationally intense something like this is. There’s a thousand little decisions that most people take for granted that must be made by someone, and are often taken for granted. For instance, someone has to think about the venue, AV equipment, timing/logistics, run of show, food and beverage… even how many chairs are in the room, how the chairs are arranged, how many breaks we have, the list goes on and on. But it’s important to get all of these right since the culmination of these decisions lead to a great experience and getting any one thing wrong can cause problems: too many breaks and you lose people mid-way, AV issues and you’ll waste time and look unprofessional.
The second is how powerful the community and network effects are. Founding a company is often a lonely journey, and you’re so heads down in things that it’s easy to just focus on your immediate next milestone or your competitors or the customer. Sometimes you need some friends and companions along the way, and those can often be hard to come by as the signal to noise ratio can be high at events, and it’s often difficult to set aside the time to create real trust and intimacy amongst founders.
The sheer act of us selecting and pulling a bunch of great humans in one room that are working together towards shared but different goals is very powerful. A lot of the startup journey is trying to get the data and intuition to make sense of a very non-deterministic world, and unlike corporate jobs or school it’s not laid in front of you in a structured fashion. Bringing people from different domains together is the best way to learn, especially if they have a high trust, high performance environment. There’s a lot of domain-specific knowledge that can only be gained through conversation. That’s where the alpha is.
As we iterated on the formula for SPEEDRUN we made a few important strategy changes to bring it to where it is today. Here are a few of the most important changes and learnings we had from SR001:
We expanded the team. This project was way too large for just two people to run it, and we needed specialists in each field. We still structure it such that all the investing partners run their own cohort of founders that they’re directly responsible for. But for day-to-day operations, Josh came in to GM the program, having led large teams at both Meta and Blizzard before. Samira was hired to run marketing/ops, having an extensive career at 100T, Riot, and Zedd (yes that Zedd). Andrew focuses on the investor / demo day experience, and I focus on the investing side of the equation (applications, strategy, picking frameworks, etc.).
We’ve also expanded the broader games team as a result to handle all the new portfolio companies we support too. Remember that SPEEDRUN is literally 10x the number of deals we normally do a year, and so each vertical scaled up their support, with the games team now numbering 28 strong across talent, marketing, creators, content, people, and more.
But yes the core SPEEDRUN team is still run by… six people. Crazy huh?
We focused on pre-seed / seed companies.
We realized that doing a program for companies at all different stages didn’t make sense. The help that a Series A/B company needs vs. a pre-seed company is very different: the former is concerned with scaling up product-market fit and getting to unit profitability, while the latter is still deep in the idea maze and hiring their first engineers.
Given the amount of effort we were putting in the program, it made sense for us to have a standardized deal that allowed us to buy meaningful ownership in each of the startups that we support, that way we’re incentive aligned to make sure they succeed.
We also wanted to separate our SPEEDRUN motion from our normal venture Series A motion, where we’re betting post-PMF on companies that we believe can become category leaders.
We broadened our mandate.
We started this as a way to connect the game industry and teach a somewhat arcane art of making, evaluating, producing, and distributing games. That has become so much more as we now invest in the broader creative and entertainment industry. For instance, some of the companies I work with encompass everything from crypto games (Primodium, Astronomica, Matchday) to AI creative apps (Hedra, Manifest, Sekai) to AI agents (Co-human, Altera) to gamified consumer platforms (SweatPals, Favorited).
We even have companies that work in defense (wargaming, drone simulations), in sports betting and sweepstakes, in dating / sharing, in animation / vfx / creative tools, and more.
The reason for this is we believe that games are the forefront of innovation for the future, and encompass all things digitally interactive. Metaverse is a loaded term, but we already live digital-physical lives that involve interacting regularly through digital media like Zoom or Hinge or Discord. Twitter you can see as the global public forum, or you can see it as one massive PvP MMO where you do actions to gain status and recognition.
We refined our processes.
There’s a million small decisions that add up to the overall experience from start to finish. Here’s just a few of the things that we had to think through and refine over each iteration:
Pre-sourcing: How do we build the SPEEDRUN brand? What does it stand for? What channels do we market on and how do we want to express ourselves? What does our off-cycle marketing beats look like? Are there particular interest areas / markets we want to go source more startups? What about talent networks?
Application: What fields do we need to cover? What do we want the completion rate to look like? How do we maximize signal and minimize drop out rates? What platform should we run the application on? What’s the turnaround time and how quickly can we get back to people? What proportion of startups do we want to interview and what are the most important signals we want to look for?
Program: How much of a time commitment do we want the program to be? How do we want to introduce founders to each other and give some structure to the relationships? What speakers do we want to bring in? What content do we want to cover? How do we want to lead the discussion for each section?
Demo day: How many attendees do we want? What kind of attendees do we want? How do we get the decision makers in the room? What’s the best venue to accomplish our goal? How long is each presentation? Do we have a break? What’s the food / beverage set up look like? Do we have a demo room / demo stations? How long do we want to run the social program for? How do we increase collisions and info gain?
Post-program: What does support look like after the program? How do we manage hundreds of companies while having a limited team? How do we manage the alumni program? How do we continue to engage the network and introduce new companies into it? What are the scalable ways that we can continue to help our companies?
We built the infrastructure.
There’s quite a bit of digital and physical infrastructure we needed to build to handle the volume and scale of SPEEDRUN: a website, an application portal, a solid and repeatable AV team, a brand, a process, etc. These are the things that scale over time but are super manual to set up in the beginning
What we look for in SPEEDRUN companies
Many founders who are reading this post might be wondering how we select SPEEDRUN founders and how to better position themselves for success. I wanted to spend a bit of time going through our picking criteria because we also want every applicant to be as successful as they can and put their best foot forward.
Here are the things we’ll be evaluating, in rough order of importance:
Traction: As they say, traction is king. Early signs of product market fit are the best thing you can do to improve your startup’s odds of being accepted into SPEEDRUN. In particular, we care a lot about growth & retention. If you can focus on two things, it would be growing your user base (for apps) or your revenue (for tools) and improving your retention. Great traction will trump all other things, and it’s ok if the signs are super early (few hundred/thousand users for an app or design partners for a tool).
Team: Are you truly the best team to tackle this opportunity? And it’s better if you’re honest with yourself about where you’re at, both strengths and weaknesses. We look for several important traits and self-awareness is one of them. Others include ambition, leadership, insight, hustle, conviction, and intelligence. We’ll ask you a lot of different types of questions to get at your core motivations, why you believe something that many others don’t, why you’ll win, and how you’ll lead your team and build a company and a cult. As founders, you must shape the world into what you believe in. If I could boil it down to one formula it’s: Agency = Will x Capability.
Thesis: Following the last point, what is your unique view of the world that you alone hold? The best pitches I hear are the ones that really tech me something, and we’re able to have an intellectual debate about the market, product, and subject at hand. As VCs, we’re going to be three or four levels deep in each market we cover, but as the founder, you need to have the PhD level expertise in this area. After all, you’re spending 24/7 studying this particular market.
There are other variables that we consider such as market and product of course, but since a lot of these things are so early we trust that things will improve and change in the product. What we’re really looking for is proof points on whether we believe that this is on its way to becoming a generational company.
And don’t forget! We get things wrong since there’s so much uncertainty at the earliest stages of the company building journey. We’ve taken several companies that have applied before and made more progress that gave us more conviction in the potential. Two points make a trend, and we want to be betting on high second derivative founders.
The future of SPEEDRUN
So you might be wondering at this point, where do we take it from here? What I love about our team is that we’re always pushing the boundaries, always innovating. I can’t share all of it, but what I can say is that we’re looking to scale, and become the institution that helps a16z support founders across their entire life cycle: from idea to product market fit to unit profitability to IPO and beyond. We want to become one of the best ways to work with a16z early, and hopefully the partnership continues through every phase too. There’s a few tactical things we’re implementing such as a visiting partner program for experienced entrepreneurs to pass on their lessons, a consolidated website that handles both application and investor flows, a revamped social/video strategy, and processes to continue to scale our help to hundreds and eventually thousands of companies.
And remember, if you’re a founder interested in SPEEDRUN, our doors are always open. And if you’re not a current founder but interested in speaking, dropping by, or working with us, feel free to reach out too!
I’ll paint a picture for what success looks like to me. If we can become one of the default go-to programs for any founder to work with a16z, if we can become the ubiquitous aspiration for every founder (“why not try speedrun?”), if we can build one of the best networks in games x technology, if we can provide real value back to the community, and if we can help build generational companies, that will be work I look fondly upon and feel deeply grateful for.
Onwards and upwards.
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz is available at https://a16z.com/investment-list/.