Why we invested in Sochat

By Hadley Harris, Founding General Partner

Last month it was announced that we led a seed round in Sochat followed by a number of other great investors — Greylock, NEA, Slow, Betaworks, Foundation, and Allen Zhang. Of course, investment decisions are complex, often with many factors, but I’ve tried to boil things down to the main factors that drove us to lead the round.

Unique founder market fit

The number one factor in any investment decision we make is the quality of the team. Our investment in Sochat was no different. Prior to founding Sochat, Luke spent two years leading WeChat’s growth team in China. For those that don’t know, WeChat is the world’s largest and arguably most advanced chat platform, boasting an astonishing 650M users. It completely dominates the Chinese marketing in a way no platform dominates the US (more on that later). As the leader of the growth team, Luke has experience that almost no one else in the world has — at most, it’s an experience shared by a handful of people at Facebook, Snapchat, Kik, Line, and Kakao. In addition, Luke had pulled together a kick-ass team of engineers and product people (Luke himself a full stack engineer build most of the original version).