Looking back at the past decade, I’m awed at just how lucky I was especially on the career front. I’m writing this end-of-decade note to acknowledge some of the people who opened a door for me, to relive some stories, and to serve as a personal reminder to pay it forward.
2010: Troop Surge
I started this decade deployed in southern Afghanistan. President Barack Obama ordered a troop surge — starting with a Marine Expeditionary Brigade and an Army Stryker Brigade in 2009— to provide security for the country’s upcoming election in the fall. I was part of that Stryker Brigade.
The upcoming elections were vital to Afghanistan’s future. Following the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, twenty-five prominent Afghans met in the German city of Bonn to decide on a plan for governing the country. The group chose Hamid Karzai to lead the interim Afghan government and scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004.
Karzai was elected as President of Afghanistan with 55.3 percent of the vote during the national election in 2004. There was a 75 percent voter turnout as the Taliban only controlled 30 out of the 397 districts in Afghanistan. The security situation deteriorated considerably by 2009 as the United States and its allies focused war efforts on Iraq instead. A resurgent Taliban now controlled 164 districts and aimed to keep voters away from the polling booths.
That was the situation that faced my unit, the 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. We helped with election security during the first two months of our deployment and then we conducted many counter-insurgency and counter-guerrilla operations. 35 soldiers were killed due to hostile fire and 238 soldiers were wounded in theater while pursuing our brigade’s mission. By my count, our brigade has the grim distinction of losing more soldiers due to hostile fire during a deployment than any other brigade since September 11, 2001. I’m incredibly proud of the work our unit did as well as the work done by the hundreds of thousands of men and women who came before and after us.
On a topical note, I do not believe there was a systematic and widespread effort to deceive the American people on the war, as claimed by the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers. I do believe that Americans and our soldiers have been let down, but not lied to.
I was one of the lucky ones to have returned home in July, and with no injuries. By December, I left active duty and was driving across the country from Fort Lewis (near Seattle) to New York for my first “civilian” job at Ernst & Young. Driving across Montana and North Dakota in the winter was quite the experience. The winds were close to pushing my car off the road, meanwhile, there were few lights on the highway at night. I made it safely to New York by New Year’s Eve and celebrated with family.
2011–2012: Dodd–Frank
I was excited and a bit nervous to find out that my first project was in London. I just joined the firm two weeks ago and knew very little about consulting or financial services firms. I’m grateful that my first boss, Alan Paris, hired me and then took me under his wings so I could feel like a contributing member to our project immediately.
The bulk of the projects I worked on revolved around helping our clients comply with The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (commonly referred to as Dodd–Frank). I spent weeks reading the statute (848 pages long) and the subsequent regulations that agencies revised or created. I was proud of our work contributing to the increased resilience of financial services firms without unduly limiting credit availability or economic growth. It’s unfortunate that a rollback of the law was passed in 2018.
I’m also grateful that Ernst & Young hired so many veterans, many of whom didn’t have the exact skills and knowledge to do the job day one. The company spent considerable time and resources to train new employees. There was a big and very active Veterans Affinity group and we helped each other out a lot.
2012–2014: Business School
Fast forward two years and I started my MBA at NYU Stern. Many people, including myself, attend business school to network with a diverse group of people and to change careers. Some of my best friends today are people I met in business school and it’s a wonderful feeling to be able to travel to almost any major city in the world and have someone to call for some local tips, if you need help, or just want to catch up.
Getting there was a bit of a journey in itself. For those of you familiar with business school applications, applicants need to write many essays and request typically three letters of recommendations. People normally apply only to a few schools, I applied to the top sixteen schools at the time so that meant my former commanders in the Army, Patrick Gaydon and Harry Tunnell, each wrote a dozen customized letters for me. They didn’t have to do that as I was no longer in the Army by then, but a theme that you may have noticed here is that veterans take care of each other. Meanwhile, I leaned heavily into the Veterans Clubs at each school to “get some intel” on each school’s process and to hear unfiltered thoughts on what they really felt about the program. These were all complete strangers and I always got a call back, if not an in-person coffee chat.
During school, I became fascinated with Amazon. I literally did every project I could on Amazon. I even wrote a blog about Amazon, just for fun (we may have different definitions of fun). In 2012, I wrote a business plan on the “Amazon Concept Store.” Even though the Amazon team that reviewed my plan rejected the idea — the concept of an Amazon store was realized in 2018 with the launch of the Amazon 4-star and Amazon Go stores. With all my research and work on Amazon, I thought a summer internship would be a slam dunk, but I didn’t make the cut. The hiring manager consoled me by telling me to get “any other Product Management internship” during the summer and then apply full-time.
I typed in “Product Management internship” in Google and found out that a startup called Riot Games was hiring interns. It’s important to note that only one FAANG company, Amazon, was deliberately hiring non-technical PMs. At this point, I had never heard of Riot Games or League of Legends. I never seriously considered the video game industry as a career path because it was never talked about at Stern or any other MBA programs at the time. This all changed in a few years as many top video game companies actively recruited MBAs and the video game industry became a big topic in classrooms.
The Riot recruiter told me that if I was serious about an internship, I needed to get level 30 before we scheduled an official interview. I was a big gamer and I was intrigued. I reached level 30 (and played a lot more after that, don’t look me up) in a few months and then went for an onsite in Santa Monica.
I didn’t think I’d get the gig. After all, I knew little about being a product manager and little about the video game industry. That’s why I was surprised and grateful that Riot gave me a shot, especially Hermann Peterscheck who hired me for the internship and for a full-time PM position. This was my first step into the video game industry and I haven’t looked back since. The theme of others giving me opportunities strikes again. This is why I always strive to pay it forward, especially for veterans and high-potential folks who may not have direct experience in a given field.
2013–2015: Riot Games
Working at Riot during this period was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because working at a profitable, hypergrowth startup was essentially a risk-free endeavor. The game was already wildly successful and the biggest challenge was scaling people and technology. Only a few startups ever reach this stage.
The curse was that I took working there for granted. At this point, I didn’t know the pain, effort, and luck it took to get to this stage. I also didn’t know what it was like to work on many failed games before reaching a commercially successful hit (for any entertainment product). That’s why I believe that long-term veterans of the game industry tend to do well at Riot, because they know how hard it is to get to where that company is today. My main regret is not staying longer to work on some of the unique problems that only Riot Games faced.
In exchange, I went on a two-year startup journey into esports. ESPN just ranked the 2013 League of Legends season and world championship as one of the best esports moments of the decade. For me, it was the 2014 world championship in Seoul. Attending that event was like looking into the future of sports, media, livestreaming, etc. I knew right then and there that I had to do a startup in this space.
I had many mentors at Riot. One mentor was Dylan Jadeja, who was the CFO at the time. Dylan told me there was never a good time to do a startup. He was right. I took the plunge and left without a concrete plan or specific esports idea. Eventually, I decided to raise capital for an esports team.
Starting an esports team sounded like a fun and, at the time, a relatively “inexpensive” endeavor. A pre-franchise LCS team was valued around $1 million for a lower end team in late 2015 / early 2016. The last LCS sale was estimated to be around $30 million, according to ESPN (September 2019).
2015–2017: Esports Startups
In hindsight, trying to raise capital with just an idea, no team, and for a non-software startup was frankly, pretty dumb. The one thing I had going for me was the explosive interest from investors in esports that started in 2015. Investors from top VC firms like Sequoia, Upfront, and USV started following me on Twitter and they wanted to talk to me. It was a thrilling time.
I ended up talking with a lot of smart people, but didn’t get a term sheet. After months of hearing no, I was on the verge of giving up. But I’m glad I didn’t because a few weeks later, I received two offers.
The first offer was to work for Jens Hilgers. He just started an esports fund called Bitkraft and an esports data startup called DOJO Madness. On a side note, I have to acknowledge that Jens is a visionary as many people doubted what he was trying to do back in 2015 and since then, Bitkraft and some of its portfolio companies have done extremely well and I’m very happy for their success and what they are doing for the esports industry overall.
The second offer was getting a seed round to fund an esports team. I wanted to do both, I did, and that was essentially the beginning of the end. It was impossible to try to work full-time for essentially three startups and to do even one job well. A few months into these jobs, I decided to focus completely on the esports team (Ember).
Ember was a wild ride. We lost the first game in the season and won every other game until we lost in the playoffs, to two teams that cheated. Then our investors pulled out. I don’t blame anything on the cheating teams or our investors. The fact was 1) we were given the opportunity to pursue our passions, 2) we tried to do something big and different, 3) we were equipped with everything we needed to win. But we still fell short and I have a whole blog post about that here. I’m really proud of our players, many of whom are starting players in the LCS today.
Startup porn rarely talks about what it’s like to wind down a startup. How do you break the news to the team (and in our case, to parents of our younger players)? Who stays on to shut things down? What do we do with the two-year lease we just signed? How do we deal with healthcare for people we let go? In the midst of all this, two of my MBA classmates who read my esports newsletter, Nina Pablo and Eli Daquioag, reached out about a month-long consulting gig at Brave Ventures, a strategic advisory and investment firm.
That month-long gig turned into a full-time Entrepreneur in Residence position. I got the opportunity to do a tour in strategy with people like David Beck, Shelly Kellner, and Alison Farber. I’ll admit that I didn’t pay too much attention to the strategy class during business school and I’m really grateful to learn how to do this function really well from some pros. I also learned a bit about the media business in the process, which was very helpful in trying to figure out how esports could fit into a traditional media business and vice versa. One of our main clients, Turner, eventually acquired us.
Then I received an unexpected email from a recruiter at Amazon, my dream company since I was a business school student. They wanted to talk about a Head of Esports role for an upcoming title they were developing. I didn’t get an onsite interview but I was happy to get some feedback from Ilja Rotelli, the hiring manager and my future boss (more on this in a future post). Normally, companies want to play it safe with feedback but I was very appreciative that Ilja took the time to provide feedback to me and we stayed in touch. Four months later, I found myself interviewing for the same role and getting it.
Two weeks before I started my new position at Amazon, I went to deliver a TEDx talk in Den Helder, a city in the Netherlands. I met many interesting people in Den Helder and that city has a fascinating history. For the military history buffs out there, Den Helder was the scene of one of the rare encounters between a cavalry and a navy. It is believed that the French cavalry defeated and captured a significant portion of the Dutch fleet in 1794–5.
I was invited to participate in this event by Michael Alderwegen, an officer in the Royal Dutch Navy I met in Afghanistan in 2010. The Dutch were one of many NATO allies that were with us in Afghanistan. I prepared four months for that talk and it was very rewarding and educational experience. From this point on, I started my journey at Amazon.
2017-Now: Amazon
I’ve learned and accomplished more at Amazon than any other company I’ve worked at so that deserves it’s own story, which I’ll publish in February when I hit my three-year mark here. If you read this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you are inspired to open a door for someone.