growing @playground_ai venture partner @hartmanncap
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Joined January 2018
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- best ai consumer app since ChatGPT
- frontier on smart glasses
- 80% reduction in weight on a VR headset
- aesthetic entrance into ai wearable/charms
Don’t bet against Zuck
Muse is a masterclass in UX:
- chat UI straight from DMs (with reactions)
- “main” chat as default, not branching
- uses connections when needed, not on signup
- one click meta login
- near zero technical language
- no model picking
- deep Instagram enrichment
gg
Production costs across enterprises for creative is down 90-99%, at 10x speeds.
The real story here is startups can build enterprise grade systems.
The bottleneck is no longer (human) capital, but how efficient of a system you can build.
What a time to build.
End game for 90% of white collar jobs will be approving agent task and signing their reputation as the stamp of approval.
Think it. Say it. Done.
The average person spends 3 hours typing + switches 1,000 tabs per day.
That ends today.
Meet Lemon: The first voice-to-action AI agent that turns your voice commands into finished tasks.
RT + Comment "Lemon" to get free access for 30 days.
(must be following so I can DM you)
Using OpenClaw is the first time, since the launch of ChatGPT, where I feel a gut-level intuition that my understanding of the world is about to change.
Jordan and Throwback are a perfect case study to build a top decile VR IP.
> Daily YT/TT videos by Jordan for core audience (main UA driver)
> linking the brand to the game
> getting viewers invested in the game, and players invested in the channel
> 18m+ lifetime views, 22nd highest rated VR game on the store.
The Game Awards are symbolic of a dying world of top down insider curation on "taste". If the awards were based in reality:
Biggest Breakout: Steal a Brainrot/Grow a garden(Roblox)
Best in VR: Animal Company/Ug/Gorilla Tag
Best Multiplayer: Peak/Repo
I have to say, TGA’s Best VR award is kinda frustrating.
From 2020 to 2025, the winners were:
2020 Half Life Alyx
2021 Resident Evil 4
2022 Moss Book II
2023 Resident Evil Village VR Mode
2024 Batman Arkham Shadow
2025 The Midnight Walk
Put these six titles together and it’s pretty obvious TGA is judging VR with the same mainstream, traditional gaming criteria, instead of what the core VR community actually values.
Meanwhile, truly breakout VR phenomena like Gorilla Tag, Blade & Sorcery, VRChat, Golf+, and Bonelab have never made the list.
Even within gaming industry, there’s a huge gap between what mainstream media considers great VR and what the real VR scene actually recognizes.
VR probably needs its own TGA.
Valve’s next VR headset release is imminent and will likely be revealed in a few hours. It’s going to become the 2nd most popular headset (behind Meta Quest) for 2 core reasons:
- Valve is a gaming company and gaming is the killer (and only super retentive) use case for VR. Steam is the largest vendor of games (and PCVR)
- wireless, local compute headsets are the only ones that matter in 2025.
There’s obviously countless more variables (Half life release, Valve consumer sentiment, form factor) but games first and wireless are what matter for VR.
Friendslop game of the month:
- 2-4 player coop exploration game about driving and fixing an RV to escape the map
- 72K concurrents on Steam
- Beatable in 2-3 sessions, 6ish hours, has jank
- Built by a gamejam team
- cleared over $1m after market fees on first weekend ($7.19)
Why this game (and general friendslop) will/sells well:
> easily understandable core loop (viewer understands in seconds)
> some light pvp and memetics that are clippable
> will sell for $5-$15 on steam
> One guy in the friend group of 2-10 will send a clip and say "lets play friday", converts a few of them
> sub 5GB file, no clearing storage/long downloads
> will play all weekend, will be a hot game for a few weeks
> retention will fall off but frontloaded revenue compensates
Huge opportunity in cloud-level software/hardware that runs locally for people who don’t even know what open source is.
Despite a (relatively) low production count, Valve releasing a new VR headset is great for the industry:
- Steam has ~180mm MAU
- Valve is beloved by consumers, will be new cohorts who buy due to it being a Valve product
- VR killer use case is games, Valve is the only games-first hmd manufacturer
- likely a new IP released alongside. Half life Alyx, Valve’s VR title for the Steam deck, is considered the gold standard for single player VR IP
- The dev kit is very impressive, I’ve heard from friends who have one
- will generate 10s of millions of views in video interest on the headset
- Valve’s last hardware release, the mobile gaming Steam Deck, was a success.
Valve's next headset has entered mass production and will ship this year, a Chinese analyst group claims, with an estimated run of 500,000 units in the first year:
uploadvr.com/valves-next-hea…
Economies are a symptom of retentive worlds. World of Warcraft, CS, Runescape etc get the privilege of real money economies by being great.
The failure of GameFi/crypto games were that they were economies first with slop gameplay wrapped around them.
Nobody cares about the rarest item when there is nobody to care about it.
Makes complete sense:
- Vision Pro premium market is small (tech evangelicals, apple purist, people willing to negate comfort for immersion)
- VR is largely adopted by <25 crowd, little overlap with AVP
- VR's killer usecase is gaming + social
- Apple has crushed human augmentation accessories in the past (Airpods, smartwatches), glasses are a natural extension
Smartglasses are a distinct market from VR, which both Apple and Google have stronger positioning in.
NEWS: Apple has reportedly paused development of its cheaper, lighter “Vision Air” headset — previously targeted for a 2027 launch — in order to prioritize work on smart glasses designed to compete with Meta, according to @markgurman
The company is said to be developing at least two versions of the smart glasses: one that connects to an iPhone without a display, and another equipped with its own built-in display
