CEO at Cooldown
Christopher Paretti
Previously: Design Director of Horizon Worlds @ Meta CEO and co-founder of VRB (exited to Samsung) VP of Design at GREE
Questions & Answers
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
I had a great run in XR, from founding and selling a super early (2015) VR company to Samsung, to leading the Design org for Horizon Worlds and shipping the first public version of the product.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
I think games can be incredibly healthy and rewarding places to make deep and long lasting connections. Coming from Facebook, whose die-hard mission is to ‘connect everyone, I don't believe social media brings out the best in us. Games foster collaboration, mutual achievement, and can be safe spaces for millions of players looking to fit in. Having a great group of friends is core to a fulfilling life, and I want to leverage play as a catalyst to deliver that to everyone.
What's the story behind your company?
Jakob and I have been friends and colleagues for over 15 years. I was at another startup that wound down and Jakob was at Unity after the Parsec acquisition. We've talked about starting a company many times since we met, and the stars aligned this summer as we were both available and looking for our next thing. I was personally feeling the pain of matchmaking in online games, seeing it only get worse over my lifetime of gaming, and feeling like I was wasting time looking for a decent teammate versus actually enjoying the game. Jakob had almost stopped playing online gaming completely due to similar issues. We knew this was a very hard problem, but one we both feel deeply passionate about solving for both the gamers and the devs.
