The Loom Games Investment: Lessons on Luck

Loom Games became our 5th unicorn investment (we have 6 now)

Naturally, after the exit, the conversation internally became: how do we replicate this?

That conversation quickly turned into luck because the Loom investment itself started with pure luck: I bumped into Kübra in a parking lot.

But the more we unpacked the story, the less random it looked.

Naval has a framework on luck that I keep coming back to. He describes four kinds of luck. The original framework goes back to James Austin, but I first encountered it through Naval.

I describe the four slightly differently.

The first is blind luck.

You win the lottery. The roulette ball lands on your number. A card gets dealt to you. I actually don’t think this kind of luck exists in real life.

It exists inside orchestrated systems specifically designed to create random outcomes: lotteries, casinos, games. In real life, you don’t just randomly bump into a million dollars while walking down the street.

There is almost always some mechanism underneath the outcome: where you were, what you knew, who knew you, what you had done before, or whether you were in a position to recognize the opportunity.

The second is the traveling fox.

There is a Turkish saying: a traveling fox is better than a sitting lion.

You stir the water.

You attend the conference. You meet another person. You send another email. You travel. You show up. You leave fewer stones unturned.

Eventually something lucky happens simply because you have created enough opportunities for collisions.

The third is having the eye to see luck.

Imagine working in AI for twenty years before the generative AI inflection.

The inflection happens whether you are there or not. But you might recognize its significance before everyone else because you have spent twenty years preparing your mind to see it.

The opportunity can be visible to everyone. Very few have the eye to understand what they are looking at.

The fourth is gravitational force.

You build such a strong reputation, network or position in an ecosystem that luck starts coming to you.

Imagine a landowner whose land suddenly gets rezoned for construction. The landowner got lucky.

But if they immediately call the best developer in town to partner, that developer did not get lucky in the same way. They spent years building enough gravitational force that other people’s luck gets pulled toward them.

This is where the Loom investment gets interesting.

We have been organizing gaming community events every spring and fall for years. Kübra attended in October 2025. She already had a positive impression of us before we ever discussed an investment.

That was gravitational force.

Later, I was on a flight with Akin looking through Pixel Flow! and its metrics. They were incredible. That gave me the context to understand what I was looking at when I later saw Loom.

That was developing the eye.

Then I went to the Mobidictum conference and literally bumped into Kübra in the parking lot.

That was the traveling fox.

If I had stayed home that day, we would have missed it.

I immediately told her how good I thought the game was. We had breakfast soon after and I convinced her to take funding from us.

If we had not spent years building a presence in gaming, Kübra might not have wanted to meet.

If I had not studied Pixel Flow! beforehand, I might not have understood what I was seeing.

So was Loom investment lucky? Absolutely.

Could I have engineered that exact sequence? Of course not.

But could we engineer the conditions that made a sequence like this much more likely? Definitely.

Venture capital is mostly luck. But so is life. You cannot engineer luck. You can engineer the conditions that make you luckier.

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