Lemniscap, and joined by ParaFi Capital, Tioga Capital, White Star Capital, DeFiance Capital, True Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Genesis, Divergence Ventures, AngelDAO

Forte is building a platform for game developers to easily include blockchain into their games — allowing for players to tokenize their assets and participate in a two-side marketplace and true ownership that can be moved cross-platforms and cross-games.

In assessing payroll-connected APIs (as in all companies), we’re evaluating two things: the “wedge” and the “vision.” The wedge is a narrow product offering that solves an acute problem, allowing the startup to achieve momentum and benefit from increasing returns and preferential attachment. The vision represents the scaled, long term outlook for the product, and ideally shows maturation and expansion around the wedge. Because momentum is so incredibly important for startups — indeed, the only way to will them into existence is through a focused and compounding product strategy — these two areas are given equal weight

When you acquire some customers and they start yielding revenue that behavior sounds an awful lot like buying a fixed income instrument and there is a lot of sophistication around how to value those cash flows. In some sense, what we’ve seen over the last decade is that software enables a whole new business model – recurring revenue – which is both good for customers and is good for investors. It’s good for investors because it becomes more “predictable” in the sense that it starts to look more like a fixed income yielding asset and thus more amenable to traditional financial techniques and thus potentially “in scope” for a wider set of investors.