Arjun Sethi (entrepreneur)


Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital, and an investor in Muze. He previously was partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo! where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and he was CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair.

Career

Lolapps

In 2008, Sethi took the role as CEO of Lolapps, which developed social games on the Facebook platform. Lolapps developed Ravenwood Fair which had 10 million monthly active users. At its peak, Lolapps had 150 million monthly active users across its portfolio of games.
Lolapps merged with game publisher 6waves in 2011 which made the merged entity 6waves Lolapps the second largest game publisher on Facebook measured by monthly active users after Zynga. Sethi became Chief Product Officer in 6waves Lolapps, which went on to raise $35 million in funding from Korean gaming company Nexon.
In 2012, 6waves Lolapps laid off most of its development team and Sethi left to join venture capital firm Social Capital as an entrepreneur in residence.

Angel investments

Sethi began angel investing at Lolapps. He is now considered one of the top angel investors in Silicon Valley. His angel investments include Opendoor, Gusto and Long-Term Stock Exchange.

MessageMe and Yahoo

Later in 2012, Sethi became co-founder and CEO of mobile messaging app MessageMe. MessageMe reached 5 million users within 75 days of launch. The company raised close to $12 million across two rounds of funding led by Greylock Partners.
Yahoo acquired MessageMe in 2014 for a price between $30 million and $40 million, shut down the app MessageMe, and put Sethi and the ex-MessageMe team to work on a Yahoo messaging app meant to compete with Snapchat and WhatsApp. Yahoo's acquisition of MessageMe was part of CEO Marissa Mayer's larger strategy to bring in new talent via small startup acquisitions.
In 2015, Sethi and the former MessageMe team launched Yahoo! Livetext, an audio-free video messaging app. It never gained significant traction and Yahoo shut down the product in 2016.

Social Capital

In early 2016, Sethi left Yahoo to join Social Capital as an investing partner focused on consumer startups.
At Social Capital, Sethi backed the firm's investments in and served on the board of directors of Carta, Relativity Space, Cover, and CryptoMove.

Tribe Capital

In 2018, three former Social Capital investing partners, Sethi, Ted Maidenberg and Jonathan Hsu left to form Tribe Capital with $200 million targeted for its first fund. Tribe invests in early-stage startups and uses quantitative data to inform investment decisions.
At Tribe, Sethi made its first investment in cryptocurrency trading platform SFOX. He has also followed on to his investments in Carta, Relativity Space, and Cover.