Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming

**Mitch Lasky** (0:00)
I will say, I want to give you guys just a pre-recording compliment. I forget what it's called, there's a name for it. But basically, it's where you're reading something in the newspaper about something that you were a part of, right? And you go, people don't know anything, right? This is so damn stupid. And then you turn the page, and there's something about foreign affairs, and you're like, wow, super interesting. Like the thing you know about, you don't apply that same logic to the second thing. And I have to say, I have so much trust in your podcast because the stuff that you do that I was a part of, and there are many things you've done that you don't know that I was a part of, that I was a part of. You guys are so good. Like it's so accurate. It is really remarkable. Somehow, you're able to tell a story that is actually as close to true as true exists.

**David Rosenthal** (0:46)
Well, the secret is we don't have people on the show, so this is not going to be that.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (1:17)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:19)
And we are your hosts. After our deep dives into Nintendo and SEGA, we wanted to do something special to cap off our gaming extravaganza. And we wanted that something to be special with guests who are actually in the belly of the beast of the gaming industry. Fortunately, we knew just the people. So today, our conversation is with Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins. Mitch is perhaps the best games investor of all time, generating literally billions of dollars of returns from early investments in Riot Games, Discord and that game company, not to mention Snapchat. Mitch was also an executive vice president at both EA and Activision, and took his own gaming company Jamdat public in 2004 Mitch, of course, was a partner at Benchmark in the Fab 5 era that we chronicled on our Benchmark episode.

**David Rosenthal** (2:11)
Which, actually, we stole that line from Mitch when we were talking to him in the research, and that's how he referred to it.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:17)
So we are joined by Mitch and Blake Robbins, Benchmark's current principal, who has also come up on previous episodes. Blake is one of the best thinkers in the world on the gaming landscape today, and Mitch and Blake just launched an incredible podcast called Gamecraft that chronicles the history of the gaming industry from the business perspective.

**David Rosenthal** (2:37)
And one other thing, if you are listening to this on the audio feed, we did a full video on this. It's up on YouTube. You can find it on our website or there. We did it at Benchmark's Woodside office at, it turns out, they have another triangle table. So we have now recorded Acquired episodes at both of the famous Benchmark dinner tables.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:00)
Well, listeners, as you know, we have an interview show called ACQ2. We've had back to back killer discussions with the CEOs of Retool and AngelList. AngelList, in particular, was very mind-expanding for me on how to leverage AI to get huge, huge leverage in your business, specifically on the operations side of the house. I think Avlach is one of the best thinkers about how to apply AI to turn something that looked more like a services business historically into a true tech venture scale opportunity. So you can find ACQ2 in any podcasting app.
Join the Slack, there's an incredible discussion of gaming history going on right there, right now, including a bunch of episode follow ups where David and I are learning from you all in real time, Acquired.fm slash Slack. And without further ado, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have positions in the companies we discuss.

**David Rosenthal** (3:55)
As may our guests and of course their firm Benchmark Capital today.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:59)
Yes. And this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

**David Rosenthal** (4:05)
Well, I think an appropriate place to start might be what inspired the two of you to go talk about this and create Gamecraft and create this podcast.

**Mitch Lasky** (4:15)
Well, I think after I retired from Benchmark a couple of years ago, retired from active investing, obviously the glide path out of venture is kind of a long glide path so I'm still involved to this day. But after I retired from frontline investing, I really started to think about ways that I could be useful and helpful in the video game business and whether that was doing boards without compensation or whether it was helping young entrepreneurs or mentoring younger venture capitalists. And I thought maybe I should just write a book. So I was very much inspired by a book that I think you know as well, right? The Genius of the System by Thomas Schaff. And that book is a remarkable book in my opinion because it really takes the business side of the film business back from the 20s to say the 50s and really elevates the business side of the business and shows how a lot of what we understood to be the creative part of the business really was a collaboration between creative people and business people. And I've always had that same sense of the video game business and so I thought it might be fun to do something in that vein where we showed what was happening on the business side and how it was informing what was happening on the creative side.