Investor survey results: Upcoming trends in social startups

Death of the attention economy and a focus on the betterment of users. Platforms that focus on fostering meaningful connections and are founded on principles that champion our mental health, personal growth, and happiness.

I’ve seen many businesses trying to solve the problem of individuals getting together offline for activities. Existing solutions to this problem seem to be good enough; we can text easily to set up these plans.

VR is an interesting category but there are real hardware barriers to overcome. For the time being we still consider VR niche: let’s see when headset usage becomes more commonplace, and how that impacts the landscape upon which such companies are built.

We’ve been exploring tech-enabled IRL, both on the “online to offline” origination side and using tech to make IRL experiences more impactful. Pre-COVID, IRL was definitely experiencing a comeback, and we expect this to resume in the future. Localization is a big theme for us, as we believe that local relationships have far greater potential to dri... See more

We love AR, but new entrants need to be able to differentiate meaningfully from existing platforms who are able to simply add more AR features to an already captive audience. While the widening of access to AR technology via existing channels (e.g. extensive filters) has been helpful in driving mass market adoption and familiarization, it’s also be... See more

We’re already seeing this unbundling of consumer platforms starting within communities that have a deep affinity and sense of identity, and are not well served by general purpose social networks – for example, gaming communities assembling in virtual worlds such as Minecraft and Roblox and using Discord to communicate, communities that coalesce aro... See more

With more than 30% of the world’s population playing games today, gaming and social behaviors are beginning to blur.

Games also continue to be a de facto social network. They’re the only kinds of social networks that don’t have to overcome strong network effects to challenge incumbent social networks. If you can consider Fortnite a “social network,” Fortnite grew to 100 million MAU faster than any conventional social network because it was bootstrapped by the gam... See more

We’re excited about social networks that give creators the necessary infrastructure to make money in a seamless way. Because many of us are staying or working at home now, the audiences for consuming online content have never been bigger.