Video Game Venture Capital – VGVC

At Casual Connect Amsterdam, Rebel Monkey CEO Margaret Wallace took the stage to briefly discuss Rebel Monkey’s just-closed $1M venture investment during Adeo’s Ressi’s VC 101 presentation (more on that later). Here’s what Margaret had to say:

• Elevator pitch: Rebel Monkey is a premiere casual game house founded by two veterans of the industry. Our goal is to enact the evolution of casual games beyond what we’ve seen to this point. Our focus is on providing connected casual games experiences. We’ll build a leading community-based platform for casual games to connect players around the world.
• Why Rebel Monkey sought funding: We’ve been around for about a year. We’d raised money for projects, no problem. We found when we wanted to build our big vision product (the connected community platform) nobody was really ready to establish a partnership for that, even though they all encouraged us to continue. We ended up going the private investment route because it was the way to see our vision for casual gaming and it allowed us to pursue our vision in an unmitigated fashion while retaining ownership of the platform and intellectual property.
• How Rebel Monkey found its investors: Redpoint Ventures funded us (to the tune of $1M). Redpoint also invests in Gaia Online. They found us. They were the first investors we spoke to. When Redpoint came around we really hit it off immediately… in terms of our vision for online gaming, social networking, and how it relates to the rest of the world.
• Lessons learned:  Raising venture capital is so different from doing a typical publishing deal or distribution relationship. The biggest lesson: how it works with the attorneys. Not only are you paying for your own attorney’s fees, but you’re also paying for your investor’s attorney’s fees. Ultimately of course it’s your investor paying those fees. When you’re a small fish … only raising a million dollars… you’re paying an attorney to negotiate against you! It’s full of conflict of interest and was the most frustrating part of the whole process.

Tags: Adeo Ressi, Casual Connect, Casual Connect Amsterdam, Margaret Wallace, Rebel Monkey, Redpoint Ventures, TheFunded.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 8.47 am and is filed under financing, investment, shows & events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.