Announcing Matrix XII: An $800M fund to invest from concept to Series A Read more
I’m excited to announce that Matrix led the Series A in Guilded and I’ve joined the board of directors.
I’ve had an interest in the confluence of gaming and communication for as long as I can remember. I played a lot of PC games as a kid. But I spent even more time in the online communities adjacent to those games.
The platforms and formats were varied — Usenet, AOL, Westwood Online, IRC, web forums, etc. — but the magic was always the same: meeting people all over the world who shared my interests. It’s impossible to overstate how much I learned from those communities and how much it contributed to my love for computing and the internet at large.
Today’s gamers use a lot of great products. Discord is a heck of a lot better than IRC. And the same goes for Reddit versus my beloved vBulletin forums. But these are largely generic products used by all sorts of online communities.
Online gaming is bigger than ever and takes many different forms — intimate casual groups, professional esports teams, and everything in between. All those gamers deserve a ground up rethinking of what a gaming-focused communication platform could be in 2020.
Guilded is that platform. Eli and his team have built the world’s best chat product, fully integrated with tools for scheduling events, recruiting new members, and everything else that modern gaming communities need.
When I first met Eli, I was struck by his focus and his small team’s incredible productivity. And I loved the origin story — a personal passion project, first launched on the World of Warcraft subreddit and then built in tandem with the earliest adopter communities.
I encourage you to check out the product and hope to bump into you on there one day.
