Amber Atherton
Venture Partner at Patron
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Partner
2023 - Current
Patron is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in a future shaped by games.
Venture Partner
2022
Board Observer
2023
Board Member
2022
Author
2022
Author of ‘The Rise of Virtual Communities’ Published by Apress. Through a series of interviews with the founders of Discord, Reddit, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel and more, join Atherton and she dives into the evolution of online communities. Experience more atcommunitiesbook.com
Founder & Trustee
2020
Non-profit encouraging entrepreneurial spirit in young women across the UK & US https://athertonaward.com/
Board Chair
2021 - 2024
GBx is a private community for Brits in Tech in the Bay Area.
Board Member
2019 - 2021
GBx is a non-profit organization that specializes in the fields of information technology and services.
Head of Growth (Communities)
2021 - 2022
I joined Discord via the acquisition of my startup Zyper. Here I led a talented global team, responsible for the growth of new communities on Discord across initiatives like the App Store, creators, developers, international, businesses and brands.
Discord is an online voice, video, and text communication platform designed for creating communities.
Raised $995,408,718.00 from IPOSharks, Arcane Group and Flat Capital.
Angel Investor
2019 - 2022
I like to invest in founders who understand and prioritize community building, as that's where I can be most helpful! mindsdb.com, plymouthstreet.com, looni.co, shibuya.xyz, raincards.xyz, stemplayer.com, zellerfeld.com, nodal.com, kalecard.com, ongoody.com, july.ac, theexpert.com, italic.com, contact.xyz, vacationoil.com, askdiem.com, cashmereapp.co.uk, goss.media, thisoutfitdoesnotexist.com, wifidabba.com, p00ls.io
CEO & Founder (acquired)
2017 - 2021
• I founded Zyper (originally called Brand Fan Girl) in 2017 in London after seeing the business impact of bringing everyday customers into a private community together at my e-commerce company My Flash Trash (see below) • We raised a seed round in London before joining Y Combinator (W18) and relocating to San Francisco. • Forerunner Ventures led our next round and we rapidly grew to a team of 30 connecting over 45 brands from Sephora to Kelloggs to Toms shoes to their fans and fans to each other. • We built a customer facing analytics dashboard (like a community mission control) and a consumer facing app, spearheading a movement that shifted the industry focus away from paying influencers to seeing the power of connecting with your true fans no matter how many 'followers' they had. •There were highs and lows on a crazy 3 year journey, helping brands recognize their everyday customers through our patented ML technology to co-create marketing campaigns, new products and just hang out! • In 2021 Discord acquired Zyper and our team is continuing on this great mission to help brands centralize their community of customers and fans in a new digital third place.
Zyper is a machine learning-led community marketing software that helps brands connect with their fans, and fans connect with each other.
Raised $8,620,000.00 from Talis Capital, Forerunner and Y Combinator.
Founder
2017 - 2018
• I've always been curious about computer vision, so in between startups I played around making a caption app that would solve the millennial epidemic of what to caption your instagram photo. • Rubric was built on react and plugged into clarifai and google's tensor flow for object recognition. From there I used a super simple thesaurus hack that would change standard recognition words like 'man' to 'homie' or 'landscape' to 'scenes' • I then plugged into rap genius and goodreads to match the recognized words with popular lyrics and quotes along with the day of the week and location . • The app garnered a lot of media attention and reached the #no 2 spot for most downloaded app in the UK app store for several days. • It was a super fun ride and fun toy product to put out into the world- but ultimately i needed to focus on my new venture zyper and starting Y Combinator so I closed the app down in 2018.