Arjun Sethi, who was the CEO of early social game developer Lolapps, has landed at Chamath Palihapitiya’s venture fund The Social+Capital Partnership as an entrepreneur in residence. It’s a soft landing after his company’s merger with social games publisher 6Waves didn’t go quite as planned.
Lolapps, the Facebook game developer behind Ravenwood Fair, was merged with publisher 6waves last July. They then took about $35 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners and South Korean gaming giant Nexon.
The idea was to have a company that could both publish and make games — not unlike what many Japanese freemium gaming companies do. But the newly merged company abruptly cut down first-party game development and laid off many of the former Lolapps employees under pressure from the board earlier this spring. The whole decision essentially undid the merger in many ways, although the 6Waves side of the company picked up some platform technology that could help with predicting and tracking game revenues.
Luckily, six Lolapps employees banded together to ensure that their very last game, Ravenshire Castle, got out the door. Sethi and Lolapps’ co-founders Kavin Stewart and Brian Rue put up the money for a new game studio called Silver Lake that essentially existed to put out this one game.
We’re not sure what Sethi is working on next but it’s likely something mobile-related. (Not really surprising there.)
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