Announcing our investment in Rainway
VCs are quite an interesting species. Deep in the palm-tree trodden foothills of Menlo Park, hidden away behind nests of Nest cameras in their rustic chic farmhouses, therein lie herds of investors grazing on bits of avocado toast. Through generations of searching for the exalted unicorns that promise a future of superior returns, VCs have over time discovered the secrets to understanding how the world works. Their first revelation? The Stanford founder.
“Nobody ever got fired for choosing Stanford.”
Elon Musk, Katrina Lake, Jerry Yang, David Filo, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Evan Spiegel, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman — What do these founders have in common? They all went to Stanford.
“This means we should back Stanford founders, right?!”
Enter Andrew Sampson, founder/ceo of Rainway.
Andrew had spent a few years attending endless pitches and tireless demo days. Andrew observed, in the wild, the behavior of these majestic fleece-coated VCs. The first observation was a daily reading of a scripture written by Ben Thompson. The second observation: they naturally flocked to Stanford founders — instinctively smelling that they were likely descendents of the same family tree.
How was Andrew ever going to beat out the Stanford founder for attention? By pre-empting them, of course. Instead of dropping out from Stanford, he would drop out of high school. Instead of meeting a co-founder in a Palo Alto dorm, Andrew would meet his co-founder Evan online through a coding puzzle.
As is common amongst many Bullpen founders, both Andrew and Evan were hackers that stumbled upon an early version of what would become their core product. While running a Remote Desktop service, they realized that a large percentage of their users used their service to play videogames. What did they learn? That gamers are crazy about their games. They want to access their beloved content at any time, from any device, with the least hassle as possible. This insight led its way into Rainway’s product: bringing all of a user’s PC games together to launch and play from one simple interface: “Press a Button. Play a Game.”
Sounds simple, right? Not quite.
The Rainway team built their own encoding engine and a networking protocol in order to make everything work. The result is a technology which allows gamers to play games from anywhere, without any hassle. Upon Opening Rainway, it scans for all of the user’s library of games, bringing them front & center in just a few milliseconds. One click streams the game, to be made accessible from any device with a browser. Unlike other models that ask users to pay a monthly subscription for access to the content or provide cloud servers to rent from, Rainway positions itself as a core streaming technology player that is simple to use. Peer-to-peer, accessing the content that you already own with a touch of a button.
While streaming is quite a feat of technological advancement, it will also have a huge impact on the value chain of the $150b gaming industry. By abstracting away the complexity of the hardware from the content, streaming has the power to change the distribution model for the entire gaming industry. As with most industries that are powered by technlogy, the marginal cost of distribution moves towards zero. Business models that in the past were not possible will now flourish. We believe Andrew’s approach of being a device-agnostic and cloud-agnostic technology layer that powers all of this new category is a smart way to play into this category.
So how are things going?
Andrew and his team are focused night and day on delivering the most simple, delightful gaming experience while being entirely device and content-agnostic. The Rainway team sprinted from idea to open beta in just 11 months. Within weeks of launching, Rainway amassed hundreds of thousands of users. Each active user spends 20+ hours per week using Rainway.
Since dropping out of high school, Andrew has brought on some of the most seasoned people around the table to help them in this journey including David Perry, Jon Kimmich, Bill Mooney – and a VC dumb enough to separate from the herd, yours truly.
Andrew embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley despite not having fallen from the right “Tree.”
That’s why he is a Bullpen founder.
