Why a16z’s ‘speedrun’ accelerator is playing a new game

The term "speedrun" is usually reserved for Super Mario.

"In games, a speedrun is a runthrough where you try to beat the game as fast as you possibly can," said Josh Lu, principal at Andreessen Horowitz. "A canonical example is Super Mario Brothers, where there's a set number of levels and you have to beat them all as fast as you can. You don’t get extra credit for getting more coins, larger Marios, flower Marios. You just get credit for how quickly you beat the game."  

And, in startups, certain principles of this can apply. 

"Speed really matters in early-stage startups, the speed by which teams execute, the speed by which they answer the important questions," said Lu. "Can you get to product-market fit? Do you know your audience? Are you able to hire great people to fill out your team? Speed matters."

Lu helps run a16z speedrun, an accelerator the firm started in 2023 in San Francisco and Los Angeles to focus on games. Since its founding, speedrun has backed more than 120 companies and, this week, the accelerator opened applications for its 5th LA cohort, bumping up investment per company to $1 million from $750,000. For the last cohort, more than 6,000 companies applied, but only around 40 were accepted, marking an acceptance rate of slightly less than 1%. 

I’d been seeing a16z speedrun all over social media over the last year, so when they offered Fortune an exclusive look at the accelerator at a key moment, we said yes—this March, speedrun expanded its mission to focus more broadly on "the intersection of tech and sort of entertainment," said Lu.

"We think games are at the heart of a lot of entertainment, and what makes games special are the same things at the heart of entertainment experiences," he told Fortune. "These are all things that cause people to feel, to play with each other, to evoke emotion. We consistently saw that the best game-makers were just really great storytellers."

So far, a16z has deployed more than $100 million in capital towards speedrun—to be sure, that’s small by a16z standards: Per its latest SEC filing, a16z has about $74.74 billion in assets under management. Still, $100 million over a short time has been used to back a striking variety of companies, including online child safety startup k-ID, content creation platform Hedra, Echo Chess maker Echo Chunk, and AI consumer company Dream Voyage. The accelerator also has previously backed various blockchain-based companies, like Voldex and Mythical Games, and now’s a time when crypto is very "in" in Washington, as is a16z itself. 

"When we select a company, that’s our belief in the ability of the team to build something really great," said Lu. "If we tried to over-rotate towards where we think policy is going, we have less visibility on that and it’s not part of our process."

Coco Chen, cofounder and CEO at Dream Voyage, was part of the second speedrun cohort, and said she wanted to be around other people specifically building in consumer. 

"I haven’t done any other accelerator so it’s hard to say, but as I’ve talked to friends who’ve been through others, I think the programming seems similar—other programs have, say, a weekly speaker session," said Chen. "But I do think the network is different. When I hang out with my friends who work in B2B SaaS they care about different things, like long sale cycles and finding key decision makers. When people build games for consumers, they ask different questions."

Sami Ramly, founder and CEO at Echo Chess, was in the third speedrun cohort, and says that he still uses key things he learned, in a way that actually all ties back to the accelerator’s name. 

"I had this preconception that when you speedrun through something, there are fundamental prerequisites, like facing the exact same challenge 1,000 times before you finally speed through it," said Ramly. "That’s speedruns in the game world. And I think it’s a great metaphor, but doesn’t fully do the program justice. What I've learned is that speedrunning isn't just about improvement, practice, or repetition, that you can learn to separate good insights from a pattern of success, without having to go through them 1,000 times."

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com