More than ten years To invest in startups, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian has only offered one time to fund founders on the spot. That founder was Josh Fabian, CEO of Metafy, a video game training platform.
“We were able to engage and talk as people, and Josh told his story in a different way,” says Katelyn Holloway, founding partner at 776, where Ohanian is a general partner. “It was not only incredibly compelling from a business perspective, but incredibly interesting from a human perspective.”
As Fabian explained at TechCrunch Disrupt, Metafy has a very interesting founding story. Once a competitive U-G-O player as a child, Fabian was working as a lead designer in a group when he became obsessed with mobile games.
“I spend my toilet breaks playing a game called Clash Royale,” Fabian said. He eventually became one of the top 20 players in the world and had up to 4,000 viewers a day, but wasn’t making much money — that is, until fans asked him to pay him for personal training. He earned $40,000 in six months.
When Fabian’s kids want to get better at the Pokemon trading card game, he hires one of the best players in the world.
“He offered to teach them for $20 an hour, which is less than what we pay our tutors,” Fabian said. He said he asked the player if Pokemon worked full-time, but the player said he worked a low-wage job in a warehouse. That got Fabian thinking about building a business to help people in a similar situation continue to make a living from their gaming expertise.
Last February, Metafi raised a $25 million Series A round co-led by 776 and Tiger Global.
