In 2016, Teppei Tsutsui wrote a check for VRChat. The platform had one thousand active users. No revenue. No roadmap anyone else recognized as serious. He didn't wait for the metaverse trend to arrive - he built a fund around the conviction that digital social spaces would define a generation, then invested before the concept had a name anyone would repeat at a cocktail party.

That is how he operates. As General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, the Burlingame-based venture firm backed by Square Enix, Bandai Namco, and DeNA, Tsutsui looks for founder-market fit before he looks at anything else. The team has to know the territory - not from a press release, but from being the user, the builder, or the obsessive. The market insight comes after. The deck comes last.

"I look for founder-market fit above all else. The team must have relevant industry experience and existing networks to iterate faster than anyone else."

- Teppei Tsutsui, GFR Fund

His path to running a fund wasn't the straight line the LinkedIn headline suggests. Tsutsui grew up in Tokyo, left for Iowa in high school - a cultural relocation that would shape his comfort with between-ness, with being neither entirely local nor entirely foreign. He earned a law degree from Hitotsubashi University, then an MBA from the University of Chicago. He joined Mitsubishi Corporation, then Morgan Stanley's M&A division, where he advised on Asian-market transactions. Eight years of that before gaming changed everything.

At GREE, the Tokyo-based mobile gaming company, he ran corporate planning and strategic finance from 2011 to 2014. He was there for the acquisitions of OpenFeint and Funzio - two deals that shaped GREE's global expansion. Then in 2014, he moved to San Francisco to build GREE's seed investment program. Two years in, he and Yasushi Komori decided to build something of their own.

"During the earthquake, I was so focused on closing a deal I worked 48 hours straight. Then I asked myself - is this really how I want to live?"

- Teppei Tsutsui, on the 2011 Japan earthquake as a career inflection point

GFR Fund launched in 2016 with a $20M fund and a thesis that most people found too narrow: early-stage companies at the intersection of gaming, digital media, and emerging consumer behavior. From that first fund, the firm has grown to three vehicles. Fund III closed in November 2023 at $53.5M. The portfolio now spans 101 companies across North America, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, with three unicorns in it: VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis.

The geography is intentional and unusual for a firm of GFR's size. Tsutsui tracks deal flow in markets that larger firms treat as optionality - Africa, South Asia, South America. His LP base, anchored in Japanese gaming giants, gives him access to distribution networks and strategic partnerships that pure-financial VCs can't replicate. When a portfolio company needs a publishing deal in Japan, GFR can make calls that others can't.

The investment thesis has evolved but stayed rooted. Gaming was always the core - he estimates roughly a third of Fund III is gaming-focused. Around it grew rings of adjacent conviction: creator economy platforms, social VR, generative AI applied to content creation, community-focused consumer apps. The common thread is digital culture - the spaces and tools through which a generation constructs identity, community, and entertainment.