Notes of interest from NESTA games-funding event

This (“NESTA: Investing in Video Games”) was last month, but I’ve been too busy to write it up till now.

The most interesting things that I noticed at the event:

• Index is interested in spending SEED money on games companies [Ben Holmes]
• Index can now “write cheques” up to $1m in the UK “in 1.5 weeks”; typically they’re writing them for $200k-$500k – they’ve done 20 of those in past 18 months [Ben Holmes]
• Tony Pearce won-over Turner as an investor by saying he’d be bringing them detailed analytics on the social gaming industry [Tony Pearce]
• None of the panel mentioned VentureHacks, even when it was the obvious answer to some of the questions from the audience. I had to grab the microphone and do it myself.

I felt a bit mean, hijacking their Q&A session. But, really … startups *need to know* about VH. It’s wrong for investment/government events to ignore it, or pretend it doesn’t exist; in the long run, everyone benefits from the existence and spread of VentureHacks.