Mitch Lasky
General Partner, Benchmark. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutivefounderhost@mitchlasky ↗mitchlasky.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Mitch Lasky is a veteran technology investor best known for leading Benchmark's early-stage investments in Snapchat, Riot Games, and Discord. Prior to venture capital, he served as CEO of JAMDAT Mobile through its IPO and acquisition by Electronic Arts, and held executive roles at Activision.
2shows
2appearances
44statements
9resolved
3supported
2contradicted
33%fully supported
59said about them ↓ Everything Mitch Lasky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lasky: Traditional sports owners who bought franchised esports teams hold dead assets
“I spent five years talking those owners, like the existing sports owners who had terrible FOMO from like dumping money into these things, and some of them took my advice, and some of them didn't, and ended up in, you know, with some really dead assets. But tha…”
Lasky is short Magic Leap, favoring cell phones for AR
“I would say I'm quite short the approach of the magic leaps of the world that sort of require a visor and maybe for an industrial application, but are you really going to walk around the city looking like you're doing Star Trek cosplay, you know, just so that …”
Lasky: Nintendo engineered artificial Black Friday scarcity to create retail panic
“They were very clever about only releasing a limited amount of inventory for Black Friday, and then the parents would go because that was on the kids Christmas list, and they would go to buy the disc and it, and they would be sold out and panic would ensue. An…”
Lasky: Nintendo is about to meaningfully expand its app store business
“I think the next one to go is going to be Nintendo, right? I think they're, I think that's, if you're looking for a reason to invest in Nintendo as a company, it's, I think they're about to crack that nut, right? And enter the app store business in a meaningfu…”
Lasky: Microsoft's Activision deal mimics Netflix's exclusive content strategy
“And you look at the Activision deal, sixty-nine billion dollar acquisition of Activision. It's basically like, you know, Netflix or Apple or one of these other companies buying exclusive content.”
Lasky: Gaming VCs must back durable platforms, not sequential game studios
“I invest in businesses, not in studios. Right? And the, and those businesses have to have a strategy that transcends, I want to make a game and put it on Steam, or I want to make a mobile game and put it in the App Store, right? And I'm really interested in th…”
Lasky: Early Riot Games acquired DotA community websites to redirect player demand
“We bought the websites that we bought the Defense of the Ancients websites and just turned their editorial to-”
Lasky: Paid customer acquisition in gaming is a dangerous, addictive slippery slope
“I resist as long as possible going paid, although sometimes you're so profitable that you can with and not really mess your margins up too much, right? But I think once you start down the paid path for customer acquisition, it's kind of a slippery slope and it…”
Lasky: Annual LiveOps spending matches or exceeds original yearly game development costs
“Like, I think you can expect to spend as much or more on an annual basis than you were spending in development in LiveOps.”
Lasky: Web3 games must solve token-spending hesitation to succeed
“And so, when you're, when we're looking at web three related deals, like solving that problem, like incentivizing you so that you don't feel like an idiot for utilizing the token is a key, key factor in these games.”
Lasky: AI will not easily generate complete, satisfying video games from prompts
“There's a train of thought that, that has been advanced that, oh wow, this is really going to democratize the game industry in, in a way where now, kind of like you're seeing with mid journey, for example, where you can just describe a piece of art and it magi…”
Lasky: Venture Capital Has Become an Over-Hyped PR Machine Like Hollywood
“Even the pre-internet bubble days. VCs were kind of shadow warriors. They were in the background. They were enablers. They were not really the center of attention. And I think increasingly, firms have brought a kind of Hollywood-like public relations and hype …”
Lasky avoids VR application startups due to long market trough
“So I've stayed away from investing in, in the application space, primarily because the development teams are really expensive and you'd have to kind of keep them funded through what could be a fairly long trough, maybe three, you know, three to five years.”
Lasky: Esports will remain a niche until television narrative problems are solved
“I don't just for a lot of reasons, I mean, I think until they solve the television problem, it's going to be very, very difficult. You know, so much of our experience of, I don't want to call them real sports, but of traditional sports is, is mediated by 2030,…”
Lasky: Platform publishers dominate gaming by aggregating demand to leverage supply
“Where you aggregate demand On an online platform, and then you utilize that demand to leverage the supply side of the, of whatever industry that you're entering. And I think you look at steam and steam shares many of those attributes. And I think that move, wh…”
Lasky: Proprietary game launchers reduce customer acquisition costs to zero
“So you're, you've got this audience there that's pre-qualified where you've got their credit cards, hundreds of millions of users. And so you just use it as a way to lower your customer acquisition cost effectively to zero for the next products that you launch…”
Lasky: Sony's resistance to cross-play will hurt it over time
“I think it's going to come back to bite him in the ass over time.”
Lasky: Startups should never launch games on consoles before finding product-market fit
“I would not counsel any of my portfolio companies to launch on the console because the hoops that you have to jump through for approvals, for manufacturing, et cetera, for just in general are dire, and they're not the kind of thing that I would sort of put in …”
Lasky: Pushing Discord to build a game store was my failure
“It's like we tried this at Discord. Right? And we tried to start a game store. This was obviously my failure, because I pushed them very hard toward becoming a platform-based publisher, because I thought, hey man, this is a great way to leverage this audience.”
Lasky: thatgamecompany rejected an Apple Arcade deal over strict exclusivity demands
“Apple wanted us in the arcade. We couldn't do it because we want it to be cross-platform, right? And they wanted exclusives.”
Lasky: A Chinese team winning Worlds created $150M revenue for Riot Games
“I mean, when the Chinese team won Worlds, the Riot guys were like throwing confetti because like when the Chinese win, it's like a hundred and fifty million dollar revenue opportunity in terms of increased, like, you know, unexpected sales of skins.”
Lasky: Roblox extracts a massive 60% aggregate gross tax on its developers
“I think the last time I calculated the total tax, the gross tax was somewhere close to 60%. It was like 57%.”
Lasky: Operator background and hubris are classic failure vectors in VC
“I think all of those are sort of classic failure vectors for coming to the venture business. I think, you know, all the people with that background a lot of times come in with a lot of hubris.”
Lasky: Small partnership model is essential for effective VC decision-making
“I think there's a sort of small is beautiful approach that really works. You know, we can have one conversation. There's an enormous amount of mutual respect and admiration, and so, you know, it allows, I think, for good decision-making. There's a lot of trust…”
The other half of the tape: Mitch Lasky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 54 times in 15 episodes across the shows. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Rosenthal 31Jason Citron 4Harry Stebbings 4Ben Gilbert 3Torsten Reil 2Sarah Tavel 1Miles Grimshaw 1Jeff Fagnan 1
Statements about Mitch Lasky, by other people (5)
Stebbings: VR is an isolating experience that detracts from social togetherness
“I joined Mitch Lasky at Benchmarks of the World in being very anti-VR. It's some of the very best innovations of the last decade have been those that fundamentally bring people together. And VR for me is an isolated experience that detracts from a feeling of s…”
Discord rejected a higher Series A valuation to partner with Benchmark's Mitch Lasky
“In fact, I got an offer I think our series A, I had one other offer for a little bit of a better valuation, but I really wanted to work with Mitch. So I chose to work with him.”
Robbins: 100 Thieves built esports primarily as marketing for content and apparel
“No, I think, I actually think if you like for a hundred thieves, you know, which is an e-sports organization that has three pillars of it, which is, you know, content and immediate side. It has an apparel side, which is also a thriving business and then the e-…”
Reaching profitability requires daily discipline and tight prioritization of key tasks
“And getting to profitability takes an incredible amount of discipline. My partner, Mitch Lasky, he describes it as his daily act of will, where, you know, every day it's making the decision to do three things instead of the 10, and that is a muscle that you ha…”
Peter Fenton is Benchmark's only remaining active 'Fab Four' GP
“2018, they do fun nine. Matt and Mitch step back at that point. Bill sticks around for one more fun cycle. And then of course, you know, probably everybody knows at this point, certainly if you're still listening at this point, Bill has stepped back now at thi…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Acquired 38
20VC 16
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 33 mentions in 2 episodes 17 per episode
2019 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: What Makes The Best Venture Firms Today So Special, The 3 Structural Impediments That Face Venture Today and Why The Debate on AR vs VR is BS with Anjney Midha, Founder & CEO @ Ubiquity6
- 20VC: Firstmark's Rick Heitzmann on The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, His Biggest Learnings From The Pinterest Board, 2 Things VCs Can Do To Prepare Their Companies For The Downturn and Why Now Is A Good Time to Be Contrarian and Invest In Consumer
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Investing Success Lies In Small Markets Adjacent To Very Large Ones, Why You Have To Be Judicious On When To Pay Up vs Be More Price Sensitive & Why Crypto Investing Is Like The Early Days of AdTech Investing
- 20VC: Why Partners Are There To Save Each Other From Themselves, Why Effective Reserve Allocation Is The Hardest Question In Venture & What Makes The Truly Special Board Members with Jeff Fagnan, Founding Partner @ Accomplice
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mitch's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACQUIREDLEDGER | General Partner, Benchmark | 1 | 32 | 43% 3/7 | full record on Acquired → |
| 20VCLEDGER | General Partner, Benchmark | 1 | 12 | 0% 0/2 | full record on 20VC → |