Featured Follow: Blake Robbins

Please tell us a little bit about yourself, what do you do, and how do you like to spend your free time?
I’m an Associate at Ludlow Ventures, an early stage venture firm based in Detroit, MI. When I’m not working, I’m often hanging with friends, reading, watching YouTube videos, or playing video games. Before joining Ludlow full-time, I worked at Google as an Associate Account Strategist, Nest as a Reverse Logistics Intern, and SpaceX as a Procurement Intern. I also interned for General Assembly and Zaarly throughout college. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit.
Finding a job in VC is often a difficult, ambiguous, and uncertain journey, especially for a young person. Can you tell us about how you managed to join the team at Ludlow less than a year out of undergrad? What advice do you have for others who might want to do something similar?
When I first learned about VC as a potential career path, I became obsessed. I reached out to hundreds of venture capitalists for advice and guidance on how to land a job in venture — almost everyone told me it would be impossible. In hindsight, it felt like the odds were certainly stacked against me. I didn’t go to an Ivy League school and had literally zero connections to the technology industry.
I’ve outlined my entire story of how I got into venture here, but I’ll summarize the big takeaways:
- Finding a mentor is incredibly important.
- When given opportunities to prove yourself, always give it 110%.
- View your resume like it is a venture portfolio. For example, I bet ‘early’ on a lot of companies (Nest, SpaceX, GA, etc.) and it paid off.
- Don’t forget those that took early bets on you.
The biggest takeaway is that you should forge your own path. There isn’t a clear path to landing a job in venture and many firms never publicly hire. It is important to target firms and individuals that you hope to work with, and understand how you can add significant value to them, their firm, or their portfolio companies.
An area that has been attracting more attention over the last 18+ months is esports. You’ve been one of the most vocal and early people discussing this space on Twitter. What excites you about the space? What do you think are the biggest challenges? What do you think allowed you to see what was happening before many others?
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been playing video games. When I was in high school, I discovered a grassroots esports community for Call of Duty. It required everyone to manually report scores, host their own matches, etc. but it was surprisingly successful. Around the same time, I discovered Major League Gaming and their broadcasts for the professional Halo scene. I would watch every tournament and eventually became a huge fan of the professional players and teams in Halo. Before all of the ‘esports hype’ in today’s environment, there was a very real and strong community around these players and games.
I remember telling my parents that I wanted to be a professional video game player one day, like any parent at the time, they laughed and told me to focus on school. From that point forward, I gave up on that dream and focused on school. I stopped playing video games while in college, but I still watched a ton of professional gamers and gaming personalities on both Twitch and YouTube. When I graduated college and first entered VC, I saw a lot of investors talking about esports. It caught me off-guard because esports was always a ‘thing’ in my mind. People have always been playing video games competitively. For example, I was playing in organized online tournaments 10 years ago.
Online multiplayer, YouTube and Twitch have all heavily contributed towards the growth and legitimacy of esports. We are still in the very early days of esports, but I am confident that 20 years from now esports as an industry will be bigger than at least one traditional sport.
There are a lot of challenges that esports, as an industry, will have to face; however, I am confident that the industry will learn and adapt where necessary. One of the biggest challenges in esports is the power dynamics between publishers and everyone else in the industry (startups, professional players, professional teams, etc.).
As it stands right now, the publishers hold all power (data, gameplay mechanics, IP, etc.). I’m a firm believer that the publisher who encourages and enables the community to build meaningful projects around their games will win in the long-run. Franchising is an important first step towards legitimizing esports and creating revenue share opportunities for players and esports organizations. I am excited to see how the franchise opportunities for League of Legends (NA LCS) and Overwatch (OWL) mature over time.
As a pretty active Twitter user, how do you think about the time you spend on the service, and how has your behavior evolved over time? How does Twitter help you do your job? Connect with others? Learn about new things?
Twitter has undoubtedly changed my life. I first started using Twitter in 2010, but mainly as a way to interact with high school friends. In early 2011, I realized that there were extremely strong communities within Twitter. My friends thought I was crazy because I just started to tweet out thoughts surrounding business and technology. These tweets weren’t relevant to my friends (or any of my followers at the time). I started to reply to a bunch of people’s tweets and engage regularly. Over time, I started to realize how powerful Twitter was.
Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, I rarely had exposure to founders and venture capitalists. Twitter enabled me to interact with that community regularly. I got five of my internships through Twitter. I also got my job at Ludlow by tweeting to them asking to talk.
Nowadays, I use Twitter to find and engage with interesting people. If I didn’t have Twitter, I’m not sure how I would stay connected and engaged with the technology community. I’ve met some incredible friends through Twitter. Twitter also helps me to stay up to date with everything happening inside and outside of the technology community.
Online video, and streaming are a crucial part of the esports industry, how do you think about YouTube and online video more broadly? What do you think cable companies should be doing to remain relevant? What should Facebook and Amazon be doing to become more serious destinations for top content creators?
I easily spend 1–2 hours a night watching specific entertainers on YouTube or Twitch. These entertainers have managed to build huge audiences by being genuine and allowing their viewers to come along for the ride. It’s amazing to watch these entertainers become wildly successful over short periods of time; however, it’s important to remember they can become irrelevant just as fast.
Cable companies are at risk of losing their younger audience (Gen Z and Millennials), if they don’t tweak their strategy. I wouldn’t be surprised if these cable companies approach large influencers to create or act in their shows; however, it’s important that these companies allow them to still post their content onto YouTube, Twitch, etc. I’m not entirely sure what I would do if I was a cable company executive today, but I would absolutely prioritize internet entertainers and understand why they are succeeding.
Facebook and Amazon (Twitch/Prime Video) are fascinating to me. Facebook is unique because they are attempting to challenge both Twitch and YouTube at the same time. Twitch is very heads-down focused on gaming right now, but I hope to see them explore and invest towards other verticals.
In my opinion, I think Facebook is one of the few platforms that can actually challenge YouTube. If and when Facebook does pre-roll ads for individual creators, I expect a lot of creators to start cross posting between YouTube and Facebook. For emerging and new creators, I expect Facebook to be a better platform for them to get noticed. However, I really hope that Facebook leverages Instagram as their main route to compete with YouTube and Twitch. The biggest issue with Facebook trying to compete with Twitch is that they lack the necessary streaming tools to build an exciting stream.
It’s no secret that YouTube is the clear winner here, but I do think they can be challenged.
What are 2–3 things you are currently thinking through, and that you’d enjoy having a conversation with others about?
I spend a lot of my free time thinking, researching, and talking about the future of esports, media, and crypto. I love to jam out about any of those topics for hours.
What idea would you like someone to be working on, that given a lack of time/energy, you cannot commit to work on yourself right now? #WhatWouldYouLikeToSeeInTheWorld
My mind is always racing with new ideas or thoughts on the future, but recently I’ve been stuck on one idea. I am a firm believer that there is a big opportunity to build a platform for aspiring musicians to create royalty free music that can be used on YouTube, Twitch, etc.
I was speaking with a former executive at a record label recently and he described internet entertainers as the new radio hosts. They have the ability to ‘blow up’ new musicians, and I think there is a huge untapped opportunity here. Especially because most royalty free music is sub-par right now.
In the past month, what is an article, book, or video that’s made your mind go whoa?
This is a tough one. I might have two give two answers.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of media, and Bill Simmons’ podcast with Jason Stein from Cycle Media left me thinking about a lot of different things. If you’re interested in hearing thoughts on the future of media, I highly recommend listening.
The second one isn’t necessarily an article, book, or specific video, but I’ve been spending a lot of time on YouTube lately and I’m continually fascinated by David Dobrik, Liza Koshy, and their entire crew. I watch all of their videos and I’m always impressed with their ability to create exciting and original content. I’m convinced that this ‘crew’ will become some of the biggest stars of my generation.
You can learn more about Blake on his blog, and by following him on Twitter.
