CEO Forum 2025 — Co-Elevation Through Introspection

An extraordinary gathering

Every year, the Game Developers Conference (“GDC”) brings the game development community together to exchange ideas, solve problems, and help shape the industry’s future across five days of education, inspiration, and networking. It’s also a whirlwind of VC-hosted dinners, mixers, and side events.

Now in its fifth year, the CEO Forum at GDC—co-hosted by Goldman Sachs and Lightspeed—brought together 150 CEOs & Presidents who collectively represented over 3/4 of the global gaming industry’s annual revenue.

In what has become an annual tradition at the conference, despite this reach, we opted to host a more introspective and intimate dinner.

Co-elevation among industry leaders

Modeled after “Touchy Feely” (formally, Interpersonal Dynamics)—the most popular elective at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for over 45 years—our goal was to provide a space for authentic community-building and co-elevation among those pushing the industry forward.

Attendees sat together on tightly packed round tables, invited to a candid and vulnerable discussion centered around one simple yet powerful prompt:

What’s your biggest professional challenge or opportunity?

Voices across studios, platforms, and technology

In the midst of this important week of announcements and transactions, we knew these participants would have many places to be.

To honor their choice to take the time to join us, we purposefully kept the event small and sought to bring together the best of two worlds, including some of:

1. Today’s most influential CEOs, CFOs, and C-level executives: Senior leadership of public and large-scale companies shaping the global gaming & interactive media landscape—including luminaries from our Lightspeed Advisory Council.
2. Today’s most promising entrepreneurs in AI & technology: Key innovators in artificial intelligence, 3D technology, and extended reality—as well as emerging game studios with founders that previously led the development of many of the highest-grossing franchises. This included startup representatives from companies like OpenAI, Inworld, k-ID, Decart, Pocket FM, and Volley to game studios like The Believer Company, 1047 Games, Methodical Games, and Gardens Interactive.

Depth, candor, and vulnerability

The idea for the night was to spend less time on never-ending introductions, small talk, and status signaling—and more time on letting guards down and diving into real, tough conversations. A format that would allow our guests to bring their whole selves and, as a result, build more meaningful, lasting relationships.

The “rules” of the evening were straightforward. Instead of long introductions or credentializing, and with the help of one participant moderator (pre-briefed CEOs) on each table, we dove right in.

Continuing the conversation

At a time when many have faced difficult organizational decisions and challenging market conditions, we believe that we built meaningful connections that will endure long after the keynotes, sessions, and parties of GDC 2025 are forgotten.

Thank you to our guests for spending the evening with us, opening up in ways rarely encountered in any normal business function, and engaging on a personal level. Some even told us they would take this exercise back to their family and companies.

Bringing this group together would not have been possible without the generous support of Goldman Sachs, Inworld, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft’s M12, and Sony Innovation Fund.

How Lightspeed works with founders

In 2023 and 2024, founders selected Lightspeed as the #1 lead investor in the gaming industry.

In many ways, the event was representative of the types of partnerships and relationships we seek to build when partnering with extraordinary founders in gaming & interactive media and across our investment sectors of enterprise, consumer, fintech, and healthcare.

At Lightspeed, depth is our center of gravity. It’s how we build and maintain unwavering conviction in the companies we back. We believe that true partnerships make for more repeated success, and that reputation is built from the inside out.

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.