Peter Rojas

This past Friday was my last day with Betaworks Ventures. It’s been just over six years since John Borthwick and Matt Hartman asked me to be the third partner in a new fund they were creating out of Betaworks, and saying yes to that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve loved… — read more

Despite my hesitation to commit to new projects at the moment, I’ve launched a new newsletter on social gaming called Metaplay. You can subscribe here if you’re interested. My goal with this newsletter is to share semi-regular updates offering a mix of commentary and analysis, links, suggestions of new games to check out, the occasional… — read more

I’ve been wondering if remote-first companies could use a video game that employees play together as a way to facilitate the kind of relationship building and culture development that can be tough to create when everyone’s not in an office together. A lot of businesses had to transition to remote work this past year and… — read more

Last week Nintendo published new usage guidelines for Animal Crossing that make it expressly clear that you cannot use the game for commercial purposes, including marketing your business, selling custom designs, or earning ad revenue with game content. I can understand why Nintendo wants to prevent the game from becoming spammy or overly commercialized, but… — read more

A version of this first was posted as a thread on Twitter. Social gaming has exploded this year, which isn’t surprising given how many people have been stuck at home due to the pandemic. I know for me it’s been a great way to stay in touch with friends. But why do games work so… — read more

This was originally posted as Twitter thread. Are there any good tools for groups that want to do world-building for fictional settings together? I mean stuff like lore, maps, timelines, etc for fantasy & sci-fi settings. Because if there isn’t I want to help get it built. I’ve been writing a D&D campaign with my… — read more

Some news: I have a new podcast. I love gadgets (you know this) and I love history podcasts (you may also know this), but it never occurred to me to combine the two. That is until I became friends with Christie Pitts. I first met Christie, who is a partner at Backstage Capital, at a… — read more

For the past couple of years we’ve been doing Betaworks Camps, a program for startups building in emerging categories. Founders work out of our offices in NYC for 3 months & @betaworksVC makes an investment. Each has a theme, next one we’re doing is around “Synthetic Reality”. Unlike Camps we’ve done in the past (which… — read more

I’ve been doing open office hours off and on for the past few years, both in person and over Skype, but last month I decided to try something different and experiment with holding office hours over Telegram. There is clearly lots of value to doing these kinds of meetings in person or via video chat,… — read more

Last week we opened up applications for Livecamp, our next themed pre-seed program. For each of these Camp programs we pick a specific emerging area that we’re really excited about and want to go deep on, and the focus for Livecamp, which kicks off in September in New York City, will be on startups building… — read more